Heortology

by K. A. Heinrich Kellner

It is just this insertion of the saints’ days in the course of the Church’s year which proves that the names of the martyrs and the days of the commemoration were subject to the control of authority; that is to say, the compilations in question have all the weight attaching to public official documents and to reliable sources of information, and, for this reason, they may be used as material in historical works. Valuable information can be gained from a judicious employment of these compositions.

The restriction of festivals to those commemorating saints of a specific locality disappeared only slowly, and at a late date in the West. It disappeared still later, and only to a limited extent, among the Easterns, who showed a tendency to fill up their calendars with other things rather than with the feasts of foreign martyrs and saints, as, for example, the commemorations of Councils, Old Testament personages, and even the four beasts of the Apocalypse were pressed into the service. In the West the entrance of the Franks and Anglo-Saxons into the Roman Church gave the first impulse to an extension of the martyrologies and calendars in the direction of universalism or universal Catholicity. Both these nations, having no Christian antiquity of their own, adopted along with the ritual of the Roman Church her calendar of saints as well. Soon, however, they added to this the names of their own particular saints, and so prepared the way for more universal ideas; while, on the contrary, the Roman Church did not include in her calendar the saints and martyrs of the Franks and Anglo-Saxons. Only at the revision of the service-books in the sixteenth century did she so far yield as to act in some degree upon the principle of Catholicity in this matter. The subsequent increase and development of the festivals of the saints in the Calendar of the Catholic Church had a disturbing effect upon the ecclesiastical year and daily office. Ordinary Sundays have lost their position and have given place to the commemoration of saints, and green vestments only rarely make their appearance. The first step towards the general observance of the cultus of particular saints throughout the Church, and the admission of other than merely local saints to a place in the devotions of each community, may have been effected by the Litanies which came into use in France. The oldest form of a Litany of the Saints is contained in the prayer-book of Charles the Bald.[469]

The saintly personages of the Old Testament have really the same right to veneration as those of the New, being justified through faith in the future Messias, many of them were martyrs, and all attained to the Beatific Vision after our Lord’s resurrection. They are on this account called blessed by St Paul in Heb. xi. 4-39. The synagogue paid no worship to saints, but honoured the memory of the prophets so far as to erect monuments over their graves (St Matt. xxiii. 29). Accordingly there was nothing to prevent the same cultus being paid to them as to the saints of the New Testament, yet nevertheless it remained exceptional. Eastern calendars contain the names of many Old Testament worthies, Western calendars only a few, and the Roman Church commemorates none with the exception of the Machabees. But even the Eastern Churches have appointed no days in their honour, and so this part of the worship of the saints lies without the scope of this work.[470]

2. The Festivals of St John the Baptist and St Stephen the Proto-Martyr

In saying that in antiquity the worship of the martyrs was confined to the localities to which they belonged, it must be borne in mind that this rule admitted of two exceptions from the first. St John the Baptist and St Stephen the Proto-martyr, were honoured throughout the whole Christian Church from the beginning; their commemoration was universally celebrated, and even the former was regarded as a martyr in the ecclesiastical sense of the word.

The Baptist had at once been designated by his father in a moment of prophetic inspiration as a prophet and the Forerunner of the Lord, and later on he received from our Lord Himself the recognition of his remarkable sanctity (St Matt. xi. 11). Accordingly it causes no surprise to find proof of his worship and his festivals at a very early date. The latter already appear in the sermons of St Augustine as solemnitates, and as fixed on definite dates. Indeed, in course of time a regular little cycle of festivals of the Baptist came into existence. The date of his birth, for instance, was fixed by that of our Lord, as falling six months before Christmas; nine months earlier came the date of his conception,[471] and, in addition to these, the day of his death was celebrated on the 29th August, under the title of Passio or Decollatio.

The festival of St John’s birth does not appear indeed in the Calendars of Philocalus and Polemius Silvius, although it is found in the most ancient calendar of the African Church, and in the list of festivals drawn up by Perpetuus of Tours. Among the sermons of St Peter Chrysologus and Maximus of Turin there are also to be found many allusions to it. It was numbered, by the Council of Agde in 506, among the chief feasts on which all the faithful must attend divine service in their parish churches and not in private oratories.[472] In the Middle Ages servile work was proscribed on it,[473] and until our own times it continued universally to rank as a high festival, but at the present time it is kept as such in only a few countries, as we have observed on page 35.

The festival of the Baptist’s conception was celebrated, especially in the East, and appears in the Calendars of Calcasendi and of the Syrians, also in the Neapolitan Calendars, and in that of Silos as well as in the Mozarabic Calendar, in the Calendar of Bede, in the Greek calendars, and in both menologies, i.e. that of Constantinople and that of Basil. Its introduction[474] at an early date is due to the circumstance that St John’s conception was announced by the angel, and also to the supposition, which appears as early as St Augustine, that by the meeting of his mother with Mary he was already purified from original sin before his birth.

The 29th August was kept as the commemoration of his death at an early date, both in Africa and in the East. The collection of St Augustine’s sermons contains two sermons for this festival (307 and 308), and it has its place among the festivals in the list of Perpetuus. The same date is given in the Coptic Calendar in Selden, in the Syrian, Neapolitan, and Mozarabic. As regards Rome, it had not yet made its way into the Leonine sacramentary, though it is found in the Gelasianum.