INTRODUCTION
The Church’s Year, as it has been known for many centuries throughout Christendom, is characterised, first, by the weekly festival of the Lord’s Day (a feature which dates from the dawn of the Church’s life and the age of the Apostles) and, secondly, by the annual recurrence of fasts and festivals, of certain days and certain seasons of religious observance. These latter emerged, and came to find places in the Kalendar at various periods.
In order of time the season of the Pascha, the commemoration of the death, and, subsequently, of the resurrection of the Saviour, is the first of the annual observances to appear in history. Again, at an early date local commemorations of the deaths of victims of the great persecutions under the pagan Emperors were observed yearly. And some of these (notably those who suffered at Rome) gradually gained positions in the Church’s Year in regions remote from the places of their origin. Speaking generally, little as it might be thought probable beforehand, it is a fact that martyrs of local celebrity emerge in the history of the Kalendar at an earlier date than any but the most eminent of the Apostles (who were also martyrs), and earlier than some of the festivals of the Lord Himself. The Kalendar had its origin in the historical events of the martyrdoms.
So far the growth of the Kalendar was the outcome of natural and spontaneous feeling. But at a later time we have manifest indications of artificial constructiveness, the laboured studies of the cloister, and the work of professional martyrologists and Kalendar-makers. To take, for the purpose of illustration, an extreme case, it is obvious that the assignment of days in the Kalendar of the Eastern Church to Trophimus, Sosipater and Erastus, Philemon and Archippus, Onesimus, Agabus, Rufus, Asyncretus, Phlegon, Hermas, the woman of Samaria (to whom the name Photina was given), and other persons whose names occur in the New Testament, is the outcome of deliberate and elaborate constructiveness. The same is true of the days of Old Testament Patriarchs and Prophets, once, in a measure, a feature of Western, as they are still of Eastern Kalendars. But even all the festivals of our Lord, save the Pascha, though doubtless suggested by a spontaneous feeling of reverence, could be assigned to particular days of the year only after some processes of investigation and inference, or of conjecture. Whether the birthday of the Founder of the Christian religion should be placed on January 6 or on December 25 was a matter of debate and argument. Commentators on the history of the Gospels, the conjectures of interpreters of Old Testament prophecy, and such information as might be fancied to be derivable from ancient annals, had of necessity to be considered. The assignment of the feast of the Nativity to a particular day was a product of the reflective and constructive spirit.
It is not absolutely impossible that ancient tradition, if not actual record, may be the source of June 29 being assigned for the martyrdom of St Peter and St Paul; but a more probable origin of the date is that it marks the translation of relics. Certainly the days of most of the Apostles (considered as the days of their martyrdoms) have little or no support from sources that have any claim to be regarded as historical. They find their places but gradually, and, it would seem, as the result of a resolve that none of them should be forgotten.
Commemorations which mark the definition of a dogma, or which originated in the special emphasis given at some particular epoch to certain aspects of popular belief and sentiment, have all appeared at times well within the ken of the historical student. Thus, ‘Orthodoxy Sunday’ (the first Sunday in Lent) in the Kalendar of the Greek Church is but little concerned with the controversies on the right faith which occupied the great Councils of the fourth and fifth centuries. It commemorates the triumph of the party that secured the use of images over the iconoclasts; this was the ‘orthodoxy’ which was chiefly celebrated; and we can fix the date of the establishment of the festival as A.D. 842. Again, the commemoration of All Souls in the West was the outcome of a growing sense of the need of prayers and masses on behalf of the faithful departed. The ninth century shows traces of the observance of some such day; but it was not till the close of the tenth century, under the special impetus supplied by the reported visions of a pilgrim from Jerusalem, who declared that he had seen the tortures of the souls suffering purgatorial fire, that the observance made headway. We then find Nov. 2 assigned for the festival, which came to be gradually and slowly adopted. The feast of Corpus Christi, which now figures so largely in the popular devotions of several countries of Europe, and is marked as a ‘double of the first class’ in the service-books of the Church of Rome, emerges for the first time in the thirteenth century, and was not formally enjoined till the fourteenth. The feast of the Conception of St Mary the Virgin seems to have originated in the East, and to have been simply a historical commemoration, even as the Greeks commemorate the conception of St John the Baptist. The Eastern tradition represents Anna as barren and well stricken in years, when, in answer to her prayers and those of Joachim her spouse, God revealed to them by an angel that they should have a child. This conception was according to the Greek Menology ‘contrary to the laws of nature,’ like that of the Baptist. In the West the festival of the Conception appears at the end of the eleventh or beginning of the twelfth century. The controversies as to its doctrinal significance form part of the history of dogma, and are full of instruction: but they cannot be considered here. Up to the year 1854 the name of the festival in the Kalendars of the authorised service-books of the Roman Church was simply Conceptio B. Mariae Virginis. It was as recently as Dec. 8, 1854, by an ordinance of Pope Pius IX, that the name was changed into Immaculata Conceptio B. Mariae Virginis. It will thus be seen how changes in the Kalendar illustrate the changes and accretions of dogma, facts which are further exhibited by the changes in the rank and dignity of festivals of this kind, at first only tolerated perhaps, and of local usage, but eventually enjoined as of universal obligation, and elevated in the order and grade of festal classification. Again, the considerable number of festivals of the Greek and Russian Churches connected with relics and wonder-working icons throws a light on the intellectual standpoint and the current beliefs in these ancient branches of the Catholic Church.
Not less instructive in exhibiting the extraordinary growth in the cultus of the Blessed Virgin in the West are the inferences which may be gathered from a knowledge of the fact that no festival of the Virgin was celebrated in the Church of Rome before the seventh century, when we compare the crowd of festivals, major and minor, devoted to the Virgin in the Roman Kalendar of to-day. But considerations of this kind are only incidentally touched on in the following pages; and they are referred to here simply with a view to show that the study of the Kalendar is not an enquiry interesting merely to dry-as-dust antiquaries, but one which is intimately connected with the study of the history of belief, and is inwoven with far-reaching issues.
In the enquiry into the origins of ecclesiastical observances the discovery within recent years of early documents, hitherto unknown in modern days, enforces the obvious thought that our conceptions on such subjects must be liable to re-adjustment from time to time in the light of new evidence. Until the day comes, if it ever comes, when it can be said with truth that the materials supplied by the early manuscripts of the East and West have been exhausted, there can be no finality. The document discovered some ten or twelve years ago, in which a lady from Gaul or Spain, who had gone on pilgrimage to the East, records her impressions of religious observances which she had witnessed at Jerusalem towards the close of the fourth century, has furnished some important light on the subject before us, as well as on the history of ceremonial. In the following pages this document is referred to as the Pilgrimage of Silvia (‘Peregrinatio Silviae’), without prejudice to the question relating to the true name of the writer. The period when the work was written is the important question for our purposes; and those who are most competent to express an opinion consider that it belongs to the time of Theodosius the Great, and to a date between the years 383 and 394.