The reader might well have expected this book to be titled The Origins of the Liturgical Year or something similar, just as was Thomas Talley’s work,1 to which ours is intended to be a successor. But it was not until relatively modern times that the concept of a ‘liturgical year’ began to be recognized, and the term itself only came into use from the late sixteenth century onwards.2 Christians in antiquity did not view the various festivals, fasts and seasons that they experienced through each year as forming a unity, a single entity, and indeed those events themselves did not emerge in any planned or co-ordinated fashion but instead as a number of entirely unrelated cycles, with the result that they tended to overlap or conflict with one another.
The fundamental cycle was that of the seven-day week, which was taken over from Judaism by the first Christians but came to be centred on ‘the Lord’s day’ rather than the Sabbath and with different days of the week designated for fasting from those customary among Jews, as the early Church sought to establish its own independent identity. As we shall show, however, the transition from Sabbath keeping to Sunday worship may have been slower than most scholars have previously supposed and to have left some remnants of Sabbath observance in later Christianity, even if the notion of resting on the Sabbath was firmly repudiated.
Alongside this weekly pattern, the oldest annual cycle was that related to Easter, or Pascha as it was called – both the name and the feast being adopted from the Jewish Passover. As we shall see, while some early Christians also retained the Jewish date for the observance, although increasingly trying to distinguish it from its Jewish antecedent, others who began to celebrate it later in the second century chose to locate it on a Sunday, a practice that later became normative as part of a continuing desire to separate Christianity from its Jewish roots. In the course of time this single occasion was extended both backwards and forwards – forwards with a week or a whole 50 days of continued rejoicing, and backwards with first a day or two, and then a whole week, and finally a 40-day season of preparation. However, whether that 40-day period emerged simply as the final extension of the preparation for Easter or had an older and originally independent existence as a season in its own right has become the subject of some debate, which we shall explore in this book and, drawing upon the latest research, will argue for the latter as the true source of Lent.
From the fourth century onwards the final week of preparation for Easter, known as Holy Week in the West and Great Week in the East, attracted to itself services and ceremonies recalling significant occasions in the final days leading up to the death of Christ. While in certain respects this evolution enriched the paschal season for Christians, it also resulted in a diminution of the sense of Easter as the heart and centre of the liturgical year, as the unitive celebration of the totality of the paschal mystery – the Incarnation, Passion, resurrection and glorification of Christ, and the sending of his Spirit. Instead it became just one feast, though an important one, among others; and as a result of later Western Christianity’s narrow focus on the death of Christ as that which brought salvation, it ceased to occupy such a central position in popular piety. The Easter vigil rite, the original core of the liturgical year, declined in importance until it became virtually unknown to ordinary churchgoers in the West, although maintaining a greater hold among Eastern Christians. In the popular mind, Christmas replaced Easter as the central festival of the year, and it was only in the movements of liturgical renewal in the second half of the twentieth century that attempts began to be made to redress the balance.
Christmas and Epiphany, and various feasts that emerge in connection with those celebrations, formed a quite separate cycle in early Christianity, and one that appeared on the scene somewhat later than Easter. This resulted in both the overlapping of the two cycles and also a constantly shifting relationship between the two, because this later cycle was rooted in fixed dates in the Julian calendar while the date of Passover/Easter changed annually through its dependence on the date of the emergence of the first full moon after the spring equinox each year. There has long been a scholarly debate as to why Christmas and Epiphany came to be celebrated and why 25 December and 6 January were chosen for their observance. In particular, did they emerge as attempts to supplant pagan festivals previously observed on those dates – the so-called ‘History of Religions’ hypothesis – or were they the results of attempts to calculate the exact date on which Jesus must have been born – known as the Computation or Calculation hypothesis – or perhaps a combination of the two? We shall examine this question in some detail and attempt to bring some clarity to the debate. Perhaps more importantly still, we shall show that the celebration of 6 January appears to be considerably older than that of 25 December and to have been practised widely in the ancient Church, whereas Christmas began later as merely a local Roman equivalent and only relatively slowly gained acceptance in other churches to become in the end the almost universal feature of the Christian year that we experience today.
The last cycle, again independent of the other two and so potentially liable to conflict with particular observances in them, was that of martyrs and saints. Its roots were as ancient as the celebration of Easter in most communities and the celebration of their local heroes generally appealed much more strongly to Christian congregations than some of the newer feasts that ecclesiastical authorities later attempted to introduce, so that in a very real sense saints’ days rather than festivals of Christ tended to form the heart of the annual calendar for most ordinary worshippers and to excite their devotion and attendance at church. Recent scholarship, in fact, has argued that it is the martyrs and saints, especially the cult of the martyrs, which not only shaped the piety and practice of Christian believers in the first three centuries, but even contributed to their overall understanding of the person and work of Christ. In other words, we simply cannot understand early Christianity without paying significant attention to the cult of the saints, which was, undoubtedly, much more formative of Christian identity than has often been acknowledged. Of ‘other saints’ in early Christianity certainly the Virgin Mary begins to play a significant role both in regard to piety and liturgical celebration. While this comes to the fore primarily from the fourth century on, and especially after the Theotokos decree of the Council of Ephesus (431), there is evidence that attention was being paid to her both liturgically and devotionally rather early in the Church’s history, especially in places like Syria and Egypt. With regard both to the saints and Mary, then, what we see developing later is clearly as much evolution as it is revolution or contrast with what went before.
Diverse though their roots were, these various cycles together made up the kaleidoscope of changing feasts, fasts and seasons that marked the worship life of the fourth-century Church and formed the foundation of the liturgical year that evolved in later generations.
We are grateful to those who have assisted us in the work that led up to the production of this book, and especially to past and present doctoral students in liturgical studies at the University of Notre Dame, not least Katharine Harmon, Nathaniel Marx, Nicholas Russo and Cody Unterscher.
Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson
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1 Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year (New York: Pueblo 1986; 2nd edn, Collegeville: The Liturgical Press 1991).
2 See Willy Evenepoel, ‘La délimitation de “l’année liturgique” dans les premiers siècles de la chrétienté occidentale. Caput anni liturgici’, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 83 (1988), pp. 601–16; Ambroos Verheul, ‘L’année liturgique: de l’histoire à la théologie’, QL 74 (1993), pp. 5–16, esp. pp. 5–6.