Perennialists and Digressers All,
I still owe you promised goods, but on the subject of liturgical calendars, I thought that this remark from Ronald Hutton in Stations of the Sun: The Ritual Year in Britain1 was apt for reflection. At length:
In Rome itself, and among wealthy Romans living elsewhere, the Saturnalia was by far the more popular and lavishly celebrated feast. The religious rites were confined to 17 December, but the revelry continued for a minimum of two and a maximum of seven days afterwards. Shops, schools, and lawcourts were closed, gambling in public was allowed, and there was general noisy rejoicing. Presents—especially candles, symbols of light—were exchanged between friends, and masters or mistresses waited at mealtimes upon their servants. Sociable men who shared a common age-group would throw lots to choose one of them as a ‘king’, who would organize party pranks. Lucian wrote of the fun of becoming ‘sole king of all with a win at the knucklebones, so that you not only escape silly orders but can give them yourself, telling one man to shout out something disgraceful about himself, another to dance naked, pick up the flute-girl, and carry her three times around the room.’ The Kalendae, sacred to Janus, were marked by more feasting and merrymaking, but distinctively by the exchange of gifts to bring luck during the ocming year, traditionally of figs, honey, and pastry, but more often (by the time of the empire) coins.
The new Christian feast of the Nativity extinguished or absorbed both of them, and a string of other holy days sprang up in its wake. From the second century the eastern churches had celebrated the baptism of Christ, by John the Baptist, on 6 January. This feast, under the Greek name of the Epiphany, was known in Gaul by the fourth century. During the next few hundred years it was generally adopted in the western Christian world and associated with various other incidents in the career of Jesus, such as the miracle of Cana and the feeding of the five thousand. One of these, however, came to eclipse all others, including the baptism, in the popular imagination, and drew its appeal from the proximity of the festival to Christmas; the adoration of the infant Christ by the Magi. In the original gospel story (of St Matthew), they are described only as an unspecified number of wise men from the east, bringing gold, frankincense, and myrrh. By the sixth century, however, they had been combined with the figures of the three kings whom the Book of Psalms had predicted would come to honour the Messiah. Around the year 400, also, feasts were being established on the days immediately following the Nativity: on the 26th for the first Christian martyr, Stephen, on the 27th for John the Evangelist, reputedly Christ’s favourite disciple, and on the 28th for the Holy Innocents slaughtered by Herod’s soldiers at Bethlehem (another link with the Nativity stories). In 567 the council of Tours declared that the whole period of twelve days between the Nativity and the Epiphany formed one festal cycle. It also confirmed that three of those days, representing the old Kalendae, would be kept as fasts between the two blocs of rejoicing. The old festive tradition of the New Year, however, gradually reasserted itself, and by the eighth century the western Church had honourably surrendered by declaring 1 January to be the feast of Christ’s Circumcision. The medieval system of twelve days of celebration following the winter solstice, with peaks at 25 December, 1 January and 6 January, was now in place. In the eastern Christian lands, and across much of the Mediterranean, Easter remained the principal annual festival. In most of northern and central Europe, where the cold and darkness of midwinter were much greater, it was the cycle of merry-making anchored by the Nativity which was emerging as the more considerable. As it developed there would have run into local patterns of pre-Christian seasonal celebration, and it is now necessary to see what is known of those in the British Isles.2
Hutton puts into print here what I have long felt but never seen remarked upon in so intelligent a way. Pascha is the Feast of the Eastern Church, preeminently: it began, of course, as a festal celebration of Pesach by Christ-followers in Asia Minor before its adoption at Rome and elsewhere, and all of its most sensuous and captivating liturgical celebrations are those of the Eastern Churches. The Byzantine Paschal cycle that takes place, for example, each year in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the night transitioning from Holy Saturday to Pascha Sunday is full of the drama of the Jerusalemite and Antiochian traditions that shaped the Constantinopolitan rite.
But Christmas is the Feast of the West. In Western and Northern Europe—the British Isles, the wilds of what the Romans knew as Germania, and Scandinavia beyond it—where winter is long, biting, and sovereign, midwinter feasting is an important means of enduring through the darkness of the sun’s diminution. The Mediterranean warmth, light, joy, and ease of Pascha is contrasted with the Nordic, Germanic, Celtic radiance of Christmas.
Of course, Christmas was a Roman Christian holiday, and so late antique Christians in Byzantium were keeping the feast long before European barbaroi (as the Romans thought of them) were. And yet, it is part of the unique character of Christian liturgical culture that distinct rites are capable of specializing in the celebration of different feasts. Christmas was made for those cultures that have a strong sense of winter in a way that it was never going to function for more vernal, aestival, and autumnal climes, just as there is something to the fecundity and fierce festivity of a Greek Easter that is lost on the comparatively banal celebrations of British and American Westerners.
Perhaps this is a strange fixation to have on the second of Lammastide, but this inconsistently frequent epistle is, after all, nothing more than a digression.
Anyway, look to my next interview Wednesday!
Εἰρήνη πᾶσι,
David
Ronald Hutton, Stations of the Sun: The Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Hutton, Stations of the Sun, 2-4.