126. The Week in Christianity, Islam, and Eastern Asia
Christianity however felt and long resisted the essential paganism of the week. The Roman Catholic church in its calendar recognizes the Lord’s day, the second to sixth days, and the Sabbath, but none named after a heathen god. In Greece the influence of the Orthodox church has been strong enough to establish a similar numbering in civil life; and the Slavic nations, also mostly Orthodox, follow the same system except that our Monday is their “first” day and they close the week with Sunday.
Sunday, instead of Sabbath-Saturday, became the religious day of the week in Christianity because of the early tradition that it was on this day that Jesus rose from the dead. An unconscious motive of perhaps greater influence was the desire to differentiate the new religion from its Sabbath-observing mother religion, both in the minds of converts from Judaism and in the opinion of the pagans. The Romans for about a century confused Jews and Christians, no doubt to the irritation of both.
Meanwhile, the pagans themselves, perhaps under the influence of the popular sun-worshiping Mithraic religion of the second and third centuries, had come to look upon the Sun’s day instead of Saturn’s as the first of the week. At any rate, in 321 A.D. Constantine ordained “the venerable day of the Sun” as a legal holiday from governmental, civic, and industrial activity. Constantine perhaps issued this decree as high priest of the state religion of the Roman empire, but he was also the first Christian emperor, and his action must have been wholly acceptable to the church. Before long, church and state were in accord to discountenance work on Sunday; and thus Christianity had adopted the heathen planetary week in all respects but the names of its days. Protestantism finally withdrew even this barrier and accepted the planet-god names that had so long been popularly and civilly established.
The Mohammedan week is that of Judaism and Eastern Christianity, and was taken over bodily from one or the other of these religions. Sunday is the “first” day, and so in order to Thursday. Friday is “the meeting,” when one prays at the mosque, but labors before and after, if one wishes. And Saturday is “the Sabbath,” though of course without its Jewish prescriptions and restrictions. The Arabs have spread this form of the week far into Africa.
But the planetary week of Babylonian-Greek-Egyptian-Syrian origin spread east as well as west and north and south. It never became so charged with religious meaning nor so definitely established as a civil and economic institution in Asia as in Europe, but it was used astronomically, calendrically, and in divination. By the fifth century, it had been introduced into India. For a time after the tenth century, it was more used in dating than among European nations. Again “translations” of the god names of the planets were made: Brihaspati was Jupiter, and Brihaspati-vara Thursday.
From India, the week spread north into Tibet, east to the Indo-Chinese countries, and southeast to the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, and Java. In the former lands, it was employed calendrically; among the Malaysians, rather astrologically, and has been largely superseded by the Mohammedan form. Even China acquired some slight acquaintance with the week as a period of seven days allotted to the planetary bodies and initiated by the day of Mit, that is, Mithra, the Persian sun god, although the average Chinaman knows nothing of the days of the week nor any periodic rest from labor.