The dominant influence of the Roman Church in Europe carried eventually the main features of the Roman Kalendar into all regions of the West. In early times at Rome the anniversary of a martyr was ordinarily kept, not in the various churches of the city and suburbs, but at the particular cemetery or catacomb where he was buried, or at the tomb within some church which had been erected over the place where his remains rested. Outside the walls, and at various distances along the great roads that led from the city, most of these commemorations were celebrated. As M. Batiffol has put it, with substantial correctness, ‘the old Roman Sanctorale is the Sanctorale of the cemeteries[40].’ It is a striking and impressive illustration of the looking of the Western peoples to Rome for guidance in matters of religion that even obscure saints buried in the cemeteries of the neighbourhood of the Apostolic See now have places in the religious commemorations of all the remotest Churches of the Roman obedience.
The study of the origins of the Kalendar of the city of Rome illustrates the general proposition that the martyrdoms of a particular city or district form the main feature of each local Kalendar. To enter into detail in respect to the early Kalendars of the other provinces and dioceses of Europe, even when the scanty evidence surviving makes the enquiry possible, is too large a task to be attempted here.
The account of the commemorations of the early martyrs may be brought to a close by calling attention to a festival of general and perhaps universal observance before the fifth century—the festival of the pre-Christian martyrs, the seven Maccabees, on Aug. 1. It was not unnatural in the age of persecution, or when the memories of the great persecutions were still fresh, to fasten upon the Old Testament story of heroic constancy. After the Feast of St Peter’s Chains in the West, and the Procession of the Holy Cross in the East had displaced it from a position of primary importance, it was not wholly forgotten; and even now in both East and West in a subsidiary manner the memory of the Maccabees is still preserved in the services of the Church on Aug. 1. Chrysostom speaks of the celebration being attended in his day by a great concourse of the faithful, and we possess three homilies of his for the festival. Augustine shows us that the festival was observed in Africa in his time, and mentions that there was a church called after the Maccabees at Antioch, a city named, he makes a point to inform us, after their persecutor, Antiochus Epiphanes. There are still extant sermons for the festival preached by Gregory Nazianzen, and, at a later date, by Pope Leo the Great.
CHAPTER III
THE LORD’S NATIVITY: THE EPIPHANY: THE FESTIVALS WHICH IN EARLY TIMES FOLLOWED IMMEDIATELY ON THE NATIVITY
It is certain that the assigning of the birth of the Lord to Dec. 25 appears first in the West; and it is not till the last quarter of the fourth century that we find it becoming established in some parts of the East. St Chrysostom in a homily delivered in A.D. 386 distinctly relates that it was about ten years earlier the festival of Dec. 25 came to be observed at Antioch, and that the festival had been observed in the West from early times (ἄνωθεν)[41]. At Constantinople the festival was kept on Dec. 25, apparently for the first time, in A.D. 379 or 380; and about the same time it appears in Cappadocia, as we learn from the funeral oration on Basil the Great pronounced by his brother, Gregory of Nyssa. At Alexandria this date was adopted before A.D. 432. At Jerusalem, however, the Nativity was observed on Jan. 6 not only in the time of the Pilgrimage of ‘Silvia,’ but, if we may credit the Egyptian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes, even as late as at the middle of the sixth century. This writer relates that the people of Jerusalem, arguing from Luke iii. 23 (where, as he interprets the passage, Jesus is said to be beginning to be thirty years of age at His baptism) celebrated the Nativity together with the Baptism on Jan. 6[42].
But when did the observance of Dec. 25 make its appearance in the West? It must have been a well-marked festival at Rome when it appeared in the Bucherian Kalendar in A.D. 336 (see p. 15). And about one hundred years earlier (as we learn from his commentaries on Daniel) Hippolytus was led to infer, partly from a belief (however it originated) that the Incarnation took place at the Passover, and partly by a process of calculation with the help of his cycle, that the actual Incarnation took place on March 25 in the year of the world 5500 (or B.C. 3), and consequently the Nativity on Dec. 25[43].
The Bishop of Salisbury (J. Wordsworth) offers an ingenious conjecture which may possibly point to the early Eastern practice of commemorating the Nativity on Jan. 6 having originated in a similar way. Sozomen, the historian, writing in the fifth century, states that the Montanists always celebrated the pascha on the eighth day before the Ides of April (i.e. April 6), if it fell on a Sunday, otherwise on the following Sunday (H.E. vii. 18). The Bishop thinks that the belief that April 6 was the proper day of the pascha ‘may probably have been an opinion quite unconnected with their [the Montanists’] sect.’ But he rightly admits that ‘actual facts are not yet forthcoming[44].’
Conjectures of this kind, though at present unsupported, are well worth remembering, if for no other reason, because students of early Christian literature are thus put on the alert to note any testimonies which make for, or else go to invalidate, the suggestion offered. I may add that the Montanist notion, as recorded by Sozomen, that the creation of the sun in the heavens took place on April 6, is of a kind that would well fall in, among fanciful speculators, with the notion that the Incarnation also took place on the same day[45].