When, after Nicaea, the 40 days of Lent became attached to pre-paschal preparation throughout the churches of the ancient world, different manners of calculating the actual duration of this season were employed. This resulted in both the differing lengths of Lent and the different fasting practices during Lent within the various churches which caused Socrates to express his surprise that all of them, nonetheless, used the terminology of ‘40 days’ to refer to this period. In Rome, for example, the 40 days began on the sixth Sunday before Easter (called Quadragesima) and thus, including the traditional pre-paschal two-day fast on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, lasted for a total of 42 days. But, since Roman practice did not know fasting on Sundays, the total number of fast days was actually 36. Only much later, with the addition of four fast days beginning on the Wednesday before Quadragesima (later called Ash Wednesday because of the penitential practices which came to be associated with it), does Roman practice come to know an actual 40-day Lenten fast before Easter.1
Like Rome, Alexandria (as witnessed to by Athanasius’ Festal Letters of 330 and 3402) also originally adopted a six-week Lenten period before Easter (including Holy Week). But, with no fasting on either Saturdays or Sundays in this tradition, there was a total of only 30 fast days before the fast of Holy Saturday. As indicated above, a week was added to the beginning of this period bringing the total to 35 days of fasting and, ultimately, even another week was added so that an actual 40-day fast, an eight-week inclusive Lent before Easter, became the result.3
While other liturgical sources for Jerusalem, Antioch and Constantinople suggest a six-week Lent with five fast days in each week concluding on the Friday before Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday, the pilgrim Egeria claims that Jerusalem knew a total eight-week pattern – a seven-week Lent and the six-day fast of Great Week – in the late fourth century.4 Although her statement has often been dismissed as misinformation,5 as ‘an experiment that did not last’,6 or as reflecting the practice of an ascetical community in Jerusalem which began the Lenten fast one or two weeks before others did,7 some comparative evidence has been provided by Frans van de Paverd, who in his study of John Chrysostom’s Homilies on the Statues argues that fourth-century Antioch also knew a similar eight-week Lenten pattern.8
However Lent came to be calculated and organized in these various Christian traditions after Nicaea, it is clear that this ‘40 days’ was understood eventually as a time for the final preparation of catechumens for Easter baptism, for the preparation of those undergoing public penance for reconciliation on or before Easter (on the morning of Holy Thursday in Roman practice), and for the pre-paschal preparation of the whole Christian community in general. Basing his comments primarily upon the mid-fifth-century Lenten sermons of Leo I, Patrick Regan summarizes this focus in the following manner:
The purpose and character of Lent are entirely derived from the great festival for which it prepares. The Pasch is not only an annual celebration of the passion and passage of Christ, but it is for Christians of the fourth and fifth centuries the yearly reminder of their own incorporation into the paschal event through baptism. Consequently the approach of the Pasch renews in the memory of all the faithful their commitment to live the new life of him who for their sake was crucified, buried, and raised. But it also accuses them of their failure to do so …9
Only in the late fifth century and beyond, when infant initiation comes to replace that of adult, thus effectively bringing about the extinction of the catechumenate, and when the system of public penance is replaced by the form of repeatable individual confession and absolution, do the 40 days then take on the sole character of preparation of the faithful for the events of Holy Week and the celebration of Easter. Such a focus, extremely penitential and ‘Passion of Jesus’ orientated in character and piety with little attention given to its baptismal origins, has tended to shape the interpretation and practice of the ‘40 days’ of Lent until the present day.10
The season of Lent as it developed into a pre-paschal preparation period of ‘40 days’ in length for catechumens, penitents and Christian faithful within the fourth-century post-Nicene context has multiple and complicated origins. While the development of the six-day pre-paschal fast may have played some role in its initial formation, what evidence there is suggests that this particular fast, although important for the origins of Holy Week, is separate and distinguished from that which came to be understood, properly speaking, as Lent. In other words, the traditional theory that the 40 days of Lent merely reflect the historically orientated backwards extension of the six-day pre-paschal fast in an attempt to assimilate those preparing for Easter baptism to Jesus’ post-baptismal 40-day desert fast is highly questionable, if not clearly wrong. As we have seen, current scholarship argues that such historical assimilation of the 40 days to the fast of Jesus was already present before Nicaea within, at least, the Alexandrian liturgical tradition, although originally there it had no relationship either to Pascha or, possibly, to baptism at all. But as a fasting period already in place in this tradition it suitably became pre-baptismal in orientation because baptismal preparation necessarily included fasting as one of its major components.11 Then when paschal baptism, interpreted in the light of a Romans 6 baptismal theology, became the normative ideal after Nicaea, an ideal which does not seem to have been adopted even at Jerusalem before 335,12 this Alexandrian post-Epiphany pattern could become eventually the pre-paschal Lenten pattern. It may be said, therefore, that the sudden emergence of the 40-day Lenten season after Nicaea represents a harmonizing and standardizing combination of different, primarily initiatory, practices in early, pre-Nicene Christianity. These practices may have consisted of:
• an original 40-day post-Epiphany fast in the Alexandrian tradition already associated with Jesus’ own post-baptismal fast in the desert, which, as a fasting period already in place, became the suitable time for the pre-baptismal preparation of catechumens;
• the three-week preparation of catechumens for Easter baptism in the Roman and North African traditions; and
• the three-week preparation of catechumens for baptism elsewhere either on a different liturgical feast or on no specified occasion whatsoever.
But after Nicaea – and probably as the result of Nicaea – these practices all became ‘paschalized’ as the pre-Easter Lenten Quadragesima, although in Alexandria this process, as we have seen, was only partially successful and left the celebration of baptism itself separate from the celebration of Easter.
If current scholarship on Lent, represented primarily now by Russo, is correct, the origins of what becomes ‘Lent’ have very little to do with Easter at all. Rather, those origins have to do both with early fasting practices in general and with the final preparation of baptismal candidates for whenever their baptisms might be celebrated. Greater awareness of these origins, therefore, may serve today as a necessary corrective to the orientation, noted above, that frequently still tends to characterize and shape contemporary Christian Lenten observance.
–––––––––––––––––––––
1 See Patrick Regan, ‘The Three Days and the Forty Days’ in Maxwell E. Johnson (ed.), Between Memory and Hope: Readings on the Liturgical Year (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press 2000), pp. 136–8.
2 The Festal Epistles of S. Athanasius, pp. 21, 100.
3 See Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year (New York: Pueblo 1986; 2nd edn, Collegeville: The Liturgical Press 1991), p. 219.
4 Egeria, Itinerarium 46.1–4.
5 A. A. Stephenson, ‘The Lenten Catechetical Syllabus in Fourth Century Jerusalem’, Theological Studies 15 (1954), p. 116.
6 John Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Worship, OCA 228 (Rome: Pontifical Oriental Institute 1987) p. 92, n. 37.
7 See Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year, p. 174.
8 Frans van de Paverd, St. John Chrysostom, The Homilies on the Statues, OCA 239 (Rome: Pontifical Oriental Institute 1991), pp. XXIII, 210–16, 250–4, 358, 361.
9 Regan, ‘The Three Days and the Forty Days’, p. 129.
10 Among contemporary Roman Catholics and some Anglicans, for example, the devotional exercise of the Stations of the Cross is frequently held on the Fridays during Lent. And among Lutherans, in our experience, the Lenten tradition of mid-week worship often focuses on the medieval devotion of the so-called Seven Last Words of Jesus from the cross or includes each week a partial reading of the Passion narrative, often from sources that harmonize the four Gospel accounts. Both practices can tend to turn Lent into a 40-day Passion Sunday or Good Friday.
11 That those preparing for baptism, as well as the whole community, were expected to fast as part of the immediate preparation for baptism is documented as early as Didache 7.4.
12 See Abraham Terian, Macarius of Jerusalem, Letter to the Armenians, A.D. 335, AVANT: Treasures of the Armenian Christian Tradition 4 (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press 2008), pp. 82–7, 121–6. According to the fifth-century historian Sozomen (Historia ecclesiastica 2.26), ‘initiation by baptism’ was administered at Jerusalem on the eight-day anniversary of the dedication of the holy places, which took place on 13 September, 335. This appears to have left some trace in various Armenian hymns of the cross. See M. Daniel Findikyan, ‘Armenian Hymns of the Church and the Cross’, St Nersess Theological Review 11 (2006), pp. 63–105.