K. A. Heinrich Kellner

“ In this work he recalls to his sister’s memory what the Pope had said: “When thou sealedst thy vow of virginity in St Peter’s by changing thy habit on the birth-day of the Redeemer—on what more fitting day could it have taken place than that on which the Virgin (Mary) brought forth her child—and in the presence of many of God’s hand-maidens who strove for thy companionship, he (Liberius) said, ‘Thou hast desired excellent espousals, my daughter. Thou seest what a crowd of people have come together to celebrate the birth-day of thy Bridegroom, and that no one goes away from hence unnourished. ”

“ But if we make the Church’s year in itself the object of our studies, especially if we deal with it historically, we are bound to commence with Easter, because, in order of time, it existed from the first and formed the natural starting-point for all the rest. It did not, as other festivals, come into existence gradually, but formed a connecting link with the Old Testament, and was, in the strictest sense of the words, the appointment of a Higher Power, providentially ordering all things according to Its good pleasure. ”

“ The first church dedicated to the Archangel in Rome, or rather in its neighbourhood, seems to have enjoyed great veneration. The oldest Roman sacramentary, which goes by the name of Leo the Great, gives no less than five masses for the anniversary of its dedication; in three of them St Michael is mentioned by name in the prayers or prefaces. From the fact that in the other masses the angels in general are spoken of without special mention of St Michael, we must not conclude, as many liturgical writers have done, that they deal with the cultus of the angels in general. ”

“ It would not be impossible, and certainly would not be surprising, if Gregory’s expulsion also imperilled his new institution, and that the festival of Christ’s Nativity would have to be re-introduced. At any rate, a late and not very reliable writer, though one not to be passed over in this connection, speaks of the emperor Honorius as having been the means of introducing the feast of Christmas at Constantinople. On the occasion of a visit to Constantinople he persuaded his mother and his brother Arcadius to celebrate the feast of Christmas, and in the Roman manner. ”

“ Epiphany is a feast of our Lord and not the feast of the Three Holy Kings, although it is popularly called so, and, in the liturgy for the day, they are referred to. In a small number of dioceses, and only at a late date, they have been the object of a cultus, but in the calendars and menologies of the principal Churches they find no place; ancient ecclesiastical literature and tradition has also nothing to relate of them. ”

“ The day of our Lord’s Passion was universally regarded as a day of mourning—“dies amaritudinis,” St Ambrose calls it, “on which we fast.” [153] A fast day, on liturgical principles, can never be a festival, though, vice versâ, a festival can fall on a fixed day of fasting or abstinence, as, for example, the Annunciation.
When, at an early date, the Roman emperor made [74] a law forbidding the Courts to sit on Good Friday, this did not make it a festival. ”

“ Just as the Church marked the anniversary of the dedication of a church and of ordination by a special festival, so was the anniversary of their baptism a day of joy and thanksgiving for the baptised. It was also a day for renewing their baptismal vows, and for serious self-examination. The Church provided for this inasmuch as she was accustomed to celebrate this anniversary, and appointed a special Mass for it. It was called the pascha annotina. [175] A festival of this nature had a raison d’être only so long as it was customary to baptise people when they were grown up. ”

“ The festival of the dedication of a Church has indeed no connection with the ecclesiastical year, and the festival of the patron saint belongs to the same category as the ordinary saints’ days, but formerly, and even to some extent at the present time, both have such a marked position among the festivals that they deserve some special mention. ”

“ The division of the year into weeks is not specifically Jewish, but rather Semitic, since we find it in existence in ancient Babylon, though there a new week began with the first day of every month, and the first, seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth days of the month were always days of rest. [2] This system of dividing time into weeks received a religious consecration among the Jews, inasmuch as the Sabbath rest was enjoined by the Law under the severest sanctions. All servile work of whatsoever kind must be laid aside on the Sabbath, according to the Jewish law. ”

“ Christmas, or the feast of our Lord’s birth (Nativitas Domini, τὰ γένεθλια, γέννησις Χριστοῦ) , has this in common with Easter that it also is the centre of other festivals which group themselves around it, but it differs from Easter inasmuch as it is an immovable feast, and so falls on a fixed day of the month. The whole Church, and all the sects, agree in observing the 25th December as this date. As it has cost us already some trouble to show how the determination of Easter was arrived at, so the questions which arise in regard to the date of Christmas are by no means few. ”

“ In Rome, Saturday was always kept as a fast. His statement cannot be accepted against the clear evidence of Leo I. concerning Lent, even although Valesius and Baillet wish to defend it.
That the fast of forty days was not originally observed in all parts of the Church, and only gradually came into force, can probably be explained by the fact that there were already fast days enough. There are, for instance, many indications that the custom of fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays all the year through—the period between Easter and Pentecost excepted—was fairly generally observed. ”

“ At an early date, the Fathers mention Easter as the most important of the festivals, as, for example, St Leo the Great, [79] on the grounds that the incarnation and birth of the Son of God served as a prelude to the mystery of the Resurrection, and that Christ had no other purpose in being born of a woman than that He should be nailed to the Cross for us. [80] Other Fathers and the Roman martyrology call it the feast of feasts (festum festorum) . ”

“ All Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays were fasted as in Lent. Such was the preparation observed in Gaul since the appointment of the festival by Bishop Perpetuus of Tours († 491) . The same observance existed in other parts of Gaul, for the first Council of Maçon (581) prescribes exactly the same order, and also that from St Martin’s Day to Christmas the Mass shall be the same as during Lent—the first sign of the liturgy for Advent. In the province of Tours there was a similar enactment, although affecting the monks alone, ordering them to fast through the whole of December. ”

“ L., Altenburg, and Lippe, Good Friday is one of the days of penitence and prayer, but, on the other hand, wherever Calvinism is in the ascendent, the dogmatic significant of the day, as the day of our redemption has been partially changed. There it ranks as a Church festival, and in other respects is given up to excursions and entertainments, just as if someone would pass the day of his father’s death in rejoicings, because a rich inheritance had fallen to him. ”

“ When we turn to the authentic evidence for the practice of the Roman Church on this point, our attention is at once arrested by one document which is quoted under very different names—Anonymus Cuspiniani, Catalogus Bucherianus, the Calendar of Furius Philocalus, or the Chronographer of 354. These different ways of quoting the same document are apt to lead to confusion. They are due to the fact that from time to time different scholars have published larger or smaller portions of the document, without ever placing it before the public in its entirety. ”

“ They form an organic whole, constituted in accordance with one definite idea, consisting of the three great festivals Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, each in itself the centre of a special season. The foundations and heart of the whole festal system of the Church were given by a higher Hand, and only the development—the much less important part of the whole—is to be attributed to the thoughts and contrivances of men.
It now remains for us to consider the second division of the Christian festival system—the Saints’ Days. ”

“ Evidence shows that the feast of our Lady’s Conception arose in the Eastern Church, and had gained [242] civil recognition in the Byzantine Empire at a time, when in the West, ecclesiastical circles were still debating whether or not its celebration ought to be permitted. In a constitution entitled, “Concerning the days of the year which are whole holidays and half holidays,” the Emperor Manuel Comnenus in 1166 recognised it as a public festival on which servile work was forbidden. ”

“ Luther wished to retain all feasts of our Lord, and even Epiphany, Candlemas, the Annunciation found favour with him as such. Saints days and the two festivals of the Holy Cross were alone to be abolished. Certain secular governments tolerated even more festivals, such as St Michael and St John the Baptist. The Church Order of Brandenburg retained the feasts of Apostles, and even Corpus Christi, but without a procession, and the Assumption—this last for the sake of the peasants. ”

“ A remarkable variation is observable with respect to the date, for the most ancient Calendars and also the Roman give it invariably as the 26th December, while the Eastern Calendars give it sometimes on the 27th, e.g. the two menologies of Constantinople and the Syrian lectionary. It cannot now be ascertained whether one of these days was the day of his martyrdom or not; it is not impossible, but it must be observed that the Coptic Calendar given in Mai notices only a discovery of his relics on the 27th December, with which agrees a later tradition of the Egyptian Church. ”

“ This occupies [103] the mind during Holy Week. The aim of Lent is not to move the faithful to dwell upon the passion of Christ, but only to prepare them for keeping Easter worthily through fasting, penance, and abstinence. The liturgical prayers in Lent contain no reference to the Redeemer’s sufferings, but speak of fasting and mortification alone. It is the same with the Epistles and Gospels. On Palm Sunday for the first time, our thoughts are directed to the Passion in the collect for the day, while in the prayers for the so-called Passion Sunday it is not mentioned. ”

“ Easter and the Easter Octave
If one wishes to form a correct idea of the festival of Easter, one must always bear in mind its close connection with the solemn administration of baptism. The preliminary ceremonies began on Saturday afternoon and lasted throughout the night. When the number [85] to be baptised was very large, the administration of baptism and the Easter festival could be combined. This connection was lost at only quite a late date, in days when all remembrance of the grounds for it had died out, and people had no longer any idea of the catechumenate. ”

“ As at Rome, so too in Latin North Africa, the Nativity of the Baptist must have been celebrated with special honour, for we possess no fewer than seven sermons of St Augustine on it, and he distinctly speaks of it as a festival which had come down from his predecessors. ”

“ From the moment of His baptism, His divinity was evident to all, and consequently the festival instituted in honour of the baptism of Jesus bears the name of Epiphany. Moreover, there is yet another and a fuller appearance of the Lord which will take place at the end of the world. Hence the necessity, according to St Chrysostom, of celebrating in addition to the Epiphany a special festival in honour of Christ’s birth. [384]
Epiphany first appears with an octave in the Calendars of the eighth century. In the Gregorian sacramentary it is without an octave, but has a vigil. ”

“ At the same time, it is also quite credible, because resting on clear proof, that in Syria and Asia Minor, the Apostles fixed the date of Easter on Quartodeciman principles, while at Rome and Alexandria another method obtained from the beginning. Granted that the Roman Church, during the Apostle’s lifetime, consisted only of converts from Judaism, still the Jews as a whole were such a small minority in Rome that they must have conformed to the Roman method of reckoning time, and were probably, most of them, unfamiliar with the Jewish Calendar. ”

“ The pseudo-Clementines make use of St Peter’s activity in the See of Antioch for their own ends, [663] and to them must be traced back the statements of Origen, Jerome, and others, for in antiquity, as well as in the Middle Ages, they enjoyed more consideration, and were more widely read, than at the present day. In the ninth century it was regarded as an inviolable principle of canon law—as we know from the case of Pope Formosus—that a bishop must not be translated from one See to another. How could this principle have been maintained in the face of so striking an instance of translation? ”

“ Thus both in Jerusalem and in Bethlehem the feast lasted eight days—a kind of octave.
In the Eastern Churches the day is further distinguished [172] by the solemn blessing of the water, mentioned by Chrysostom and intended to recall the miracle at Cana. This is a very popular festival, but in many places has been stripped of its religious character; it is performed by the clergy going in procession to the sea or to a river, reciting a prayer, and then throwing a crucifix into the water which is fetched out again by swimmers and takes place on the 18th January (old style) . ”

“ As regards the liturgical celebration of the feast, the oldest sermons on the Nativitas Domini which have come down to us, are those of Zeno of Verona († 380) . [348] They are purely moral exhortations, and throw no light upon the date of the feast. He has no sermon for the Epiphany, and it may be inferred he did not observe it or that it was identified with the Nativity.
The representation of the crib on a side-altar or some other conspicuous place in the church is a special feature of the Christmas festival at the present day. ”

“ It is well known that the custom of the ancient Church was not to celebrate the festivals of martyrs and other saints during Lent, which rule the Spanish Church followed even with regard to this feast. But in Constantinople an exception was made in its favour, which [232] was expressly approved by the fifty-second canon of the Trullan Council. The feast is absent from the ancient Gallican Missal and the Lectionary of Luxeuil, but in Rome, according to the evidence afforded by the Gelasianum and Gregorianum, the feast was observed on the same date as in the East. ”

“ When Rome became a great city, agriculture and its festivals fell unto the back ground, and both in the Calendar of the fourth century and in that of Polemius Silvius the Robigalia is no longer mentioned on this day. There was another great procession in heathen Rome, the Argea, which took place on the 16th and 17th March, and Bishop Vigilius of Trent, speaks of a rural festival of the same character. ”

“ He ordered the priests and deacons of Carthage not only to interest themselves in every way on behalf of the faith of those in prison, but also to take thought for the bodies of those who died in bonds, even when they died without having undergone torture, and also to keep a record of the name and date of death of each one, in order that his memory might be celebrated along with the memorials of the martyrs. ”