+ In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
The circumstances under which the Christian calendar came to include September 1st as the Church’s New Year are not perfectly respectable, at least by modern standards. Of all that is unclear about the history of what happened at Nicaea, we do possess epistolary edicts from Constantine in connection with the council that make two fairly concrete decisions about the Christian liturgy. The first was that, contra the Quartodecimans who had celebrated Pascha on 14 Nisan since the feast was first instituted as a habitual practice among Christians, it would now be celebrated on the Roman calendar on the first Sunday to follow the first full moon following the Vernal Equinox. Constantine’s logic was explicitly anti-Jewish: he did not wish to be dependent on the Jewish calendar. (We cannot exactly call it the “rabbinic” calendar, not yet, since the rabbis were hardly normative of Hellenistic Judaism in the Mediterranean Diaspora generally speaking.) His logic in the second decision is the same: aware that Jews celebrate the New Year in the Fall, typically in or around September, Constantine decreed that September 1st would be the fixed date of the New Year, again, to allude to the biblical observances followed by Jews without being dependent on them directly.
It is admittedly a mixed state of affairs to inherit. On the one hand, every Christian should repudiate anti-Judaism and antisemitism—betwixt which is the thinnest sliver of negligible difference—outright and forever, and the task of reworking Christian theology to reflect the new relationship between Christians and Jews since the Shoah (itself a fragile friendship at times) remains for most Christian communions, including those who feel they have arrived on this point (Catholics, especially, have yet to fully work out some of the implications of Nostra aetate and magisterial teaching of the last sixty years alike; Orthodox have hardly begun, if they can even be said to have). And so it is natural, or at least it should be, to feel some revulsion for this Roman imposition on the last lingering threads of Christianity’s ritual relations to Judaism in late antiquity, and on the basis of so explicitly anti-Jewish a premise. No matter how one feels about Christendom taken as a whole, there is something tragic about a movement that began as a sect of apocalyptic, messianic Judaism, trained on the imminent parousia of the risen Jesus as Israel’s king installed by God as the eschatological judge and Lord of the world, in open rejection of Roman pretense to an eternal and universal kingdom, coming to a juncture at which a Roman emperor would presume to instruct Christians on how to keep time (which should be long since ended or transfigured) and especially at the cost of Christianity’s Jewish roots.
On the other hand, the Christian calendar that was first hatched at Nicaea and gradually developed over the centuries has by now been the normative way of keeping time for Christians, especially Eastern Christians who still keep the Ecclesiastical New Year on September 1, for the better part of 2,000 years. There is something nostalgic about a world that scholars open to us—a world where Jesus and his apostles went to the Temple for the Fall Festivals, where Early Christians, even those of gentile origin, went to the local synagogue to keep them many centuries after the Temple’s destruction—but it is difficult, and awkward from many angles, to try and reopen that world by force. Christianity and Judaism may not have begun separately or separated entirely even within the first several centuries of the former’s existence, but they certainly are now, and have been for well more than a millennium; the liturgical overlap they once shared now alienates both, not just the former, even as theological dialogue and recovery of mutual principles and divergent interests can continue apace in academic circles. If one wants the autumnal breeze of the World to Come to waft into one’s lungs, for the dream of a day where all the nations stream to Jerusalem to worship the God of Israel, BaYom HaHu, BaYom HaHu, yihiyeh Adonai echad—and on that Day, the Lord will be one, ush’mo echad, and his Name will be one—one does better to attend the local synagogue and enjoy the festivities than to try and force the Church into a previous pattern of living that most of her children, even the educated ones, do not remember and that would not, in any effect, be likely to convince most Jews that Christianity is any more or less Jewish than it already is. The mystery of the Church is that it is in some sense a Judaism for the gentiles—ethical monotheism in the cult of Israel’s God and obedience to Israel’s messiah, Jesus—whose very existence requires as long as this age endures that it exist apart from the covenant nation itself. The Church, like the prodigal son, takes its inheritance in Father Abraham and squanders it among the nations in riotous living, trading its birthright for an empire like Esau for red-bean stew, while Israel remains the faithful son, devoted to the Law of God unwaveringly and keeping vigil over the fields and herds; one hopes, one prays that God will gather up the scattered Church like the broken bread of the Eucharistic banquet in the midst of the homecoming of the exiles of Israel, and that the nations assembled before the Son of Man on the Day of Judgment may enter the Kingdom prepared for them by remembering their brother Israel, and that our elder brother will forfeit the grudge of that ring, robe, and revelry he rightly holds for our licentiousness at the urging of the Father, and that we may be one family again.
But until that day comes, September 1 is our New Year. On this day, since 1989 when Patriarch Dimitrios invested it with this significance, it has functioned as a kind of Orthodox “Earth Day,” a meaning it has continued to hold with his successor, “Green Patriarch” Bartholomew I. Prior to this it was the feast of numerous and varied saints (including, ironically, or perhaps purposively, Dionysius Exiguus who came up with the Anno Domini calendrical system itself). The idea here is that the Ecclesiastical New Year, not unlike Rosh Hashana, commemorates the creation of the world, which we are now responsible for maintaining and protecting; perhaps an ominous point of relevance exists in the rabbinic connection between this feast and the Fast of Yom Kippur, during which Days of Awe Jews traditionally believe they are judged worthy or unworthy of maintenance in the Book of Life for another year: just as the weight of our merits or wounds in the fabric of moral relationships might sway God that we might still repent in this life or require purgation for our rehabilitation, so our wounds in the fabric of creation or our attempts to make tikkun for them surely factor into how we stand before the face of God which is beheld in every created being and in creation itself. The New Year is a chance to resolve to start again, to try a little harder to have compassion for all our fellow beings in the Being of God who is Beyond Being, to be mindful that the Creator of the universe is also its Judge who comes not out of hatred but passionate love for that which he creates (and therefore also that which he judges).
But the wheel of the year turns on this point, at least for us, year in and year out, age after age passing away into the abyss of time like the water of the Ganges falling off the Himalayan crags. Each year we are called to appear before the Creator and account for our deeds in judgment, even each week; but shall there ever be a Judgment final, forever (even if the punishments it decrees are not)? Shall at last the Church’s pilgrimage through time as well as through the foreign lands of the nations ever reach its conclusion, bringing the kings of the nations, together with their glory and honor, with them back to Zion? Shall the wheel of the year finally resolve into the white light of eternity ascending into God forever from that Jerusalem which is below to that which is above, in the festal assembly of angels and gods beyond the woes of time, the sanctuary where Christ our high priest already has gone in and purified, the kingdom where he already sits enthroned? Shall the aeons themselves ever come to hymn the Christ born before them forever?
Scripture and Tradition speak with two voices of this and see the problem of time with two eyes. With one voice they cry out in the apocalyptic voice of hope for an imminent Kingdom, that not one more second will pass in this world where children cry or animals are struck and killed by automobiles or empires drink the blood of the saints; but with the other, the Church cries, like Augustine, “Not yet, Lord.” With one eye the Church sees the Kingdom delayed, the Kingdom denied, and asks like Vergil Tantaene animis caelestibus irae?—Is there such anger for celestial minds? Could there ever be? But with the other, the Church sees the Kingdom already now realized, in the ascended and enthroned Christ, in the glory of the saints, heaven as the already completed World to Come, this earth as the place of trial and tribulation (but also mystically already suffused with the God that is all in all). We keep time and lament time, gazing upon it with the eyes of both deep compassion and of piercing judgment which Christ wears in the icon of the Pantokrator. We acknowledge that the wheel of the year continues to spin because God’s act of creating, and so his act of saving, are never complete in this world; Israel and the Church both endure, their entangled calendars, their interwoven and antiphonal liturgies, as sacraments of creation and salvation, witnessing in their very life that these are but one divine oikonomia, one act of the God who is sovereign over time without imposing upon it, or needing to, on eternity’s behalf, for the time is merely the sensible of eternity and eternity the intelligible of time. Xuangzhi knew it, after all, and beat his wedding drum even after his spouse had died: for they always, even now, and forever are being married.
It is some great mystery, beloved, that will allow for the tragedies of time to elapse into the nothingness of evil without obliterating time itself, just as the transfiguration of space and matter in the Kingdom of God shall take place in some way now only known to God, by which that which now divides may unite, that which now is opaque to the divine glory may shine with it like translucent glass. This world is in some sense the shadow not only of the eternal world of God’s eternal mind and final consummation but even of its own true character: we all instinctively know it, or we would not feel so animated to fight darkness with light, evil with good, blight with beauty, as though the proper nature of the world belonged to the latter term of each binary and not to the former, as though we can feel more deeply than we could ever know that our senses are lying to us in proclaiming the tyranny of the former. But we do know, at least a bit; the cosmologists and physicists, at least, assure us that the world as we experience it is in no small degree an illusion, even if they do not always conclude from this that much of what we fear we lose is in fact never truly lost. We mark time not to disobey the apostle but to mock the evil one who would mar time; we proclaim the creation in the autumn of the year, the new day at vesperal evensong, because we know that Death is but the specter of Change, the cloak our capacity to move “from glory to glory,” wears in the kosmos enthralled to darkness. Joy is a virtue, a defiant choice to revel in the eternity of meaning in the face of seeming oblivion; and if I may be so bold, I might say that God even deigns, delights, to create that meaning which is always resident within his Mind from nothing in the universe through our joy, through us. Happy New Year.
Amen! Beautiful! I'm back visiting family in Oklahoma. I do not miss this heat!