Heortology

by K. A. Heinrich Kellner

12. The Commemoration of All Souls

The pious duty of prayer for the departed (2 Machabees xii. 46) finds expression in private and public devotions. The public prayers usually take place on stated days, i.e. the day of the death, the seventh and thirtieth days after death, and the anniversary; the observance of these devotions is left in the hands of the relatives and friends of the deceased. The religious Orders began at an early date to observe these pious customs with regard to their own departed members.[693] Besides this, for the last thousand years a particular day in the year has been set apart for the commemoration of all the departed in general; this was the 2nd November, or, if the 2nd fell on a Sunday, the 3rd. The impulse which led to its introduction into the ritual of the Church came from Cluny, for in 998 the Abbot Odilo issued an ordinance to this effect (the so-called Statutum S. Odilonis pro Defunctis)[694] to all the monasteries of his congregation. In this it was directed that in all monasteries of the Order on the 1st November, after vespers, the bell should be tolled and the office of the dead recited, and on the next day all the priests of the congregation were to say mass for the repose of the faithful departed.

This example found imitators without there being any legislation on the point. Other Orders speedily took it up, such as the Benedictines and Carthusians, etc.;[695] but it was longer before the secular clergy adopted this practice in each diocese. The date of its introduction varies greatly in different countries; it will be sufficient for us to give a few dates for which we have certain information, which have a special interest for us.

The first diocese to adopt All Souls’ Day seems to have been Liège, where it was introduced by Bishop Notker († 1008).[696] It appears in the martyrology of Besançon, called after Bishop Protadius, and compiled between 1053 and 1066; it is mentioned in the fourteenth of the Roman Ordos, which belongs to the thirteenth century; it is not found in the Cologne Calendar of the same century, nor in the more ancient one published by Binterim; it is also absent from a calendar put out in 1382.[697]

We have more detailed information respecting the Church of Milan. Bishop Otricus (1120-1125) had already introduced the observance of All Souls’ Day, but placed it on the day following the dedication of the cathedral, i.e. the 15th October. This arrangement continued to the time of St Charles Borromeo, who in 1582 adopted the Roman, or rather the original date.[698] In the Greek and Russian Churches the commemoration of the departed is kept on the Saturday before the Sunday “Apoecros,” which corresponds to our Septuagesima Sunday. The Armenians keep it on Easter Monday.

13. The Festivals of the Angels

The existence of higher and purely spiritual beings formed part of the religious belief of the Jews; they are mentioned in countless passages of the Old Testament, but no worship was paid directly to them by the Synagogue. In the Christian Church the cultus of the angels, especially of St Michael, can be traced back to remote antiquity. In more recent times special days have been set apart in honour of the other two angels named in the Holy Scriptures, and also of the Guardian Angels; St Gabriel is honoured on the 18th March, St Raphael on the 24th October.

The first Christian emperor built a church in honour of St Michael on the headland called Hestiæ on the Bosphorus. It was built on the spot called Anaplus, distant from Constantinople seventy stadia by land and thirty-five by water. The place afterwards took the name of Michaelion, after the church. On the opposite headland on the Asiatic shore Justinian also erected a church of St Michael. Nicephorus makes Constantine the founder of both churches, but Theophanes speaks only of one built by him.[699] According to Du Cange, there is said to have been no fewer than fifteen churches and chapels of St Michael in Constantinople and the neighbourhood in the Middle Ages. Other towns also erected, at an early date, churches dedicated to St Michael, as, for example, Ravenna in 545. St Michael enjoyed special veneration at the same period at Chonæ in Phrygia,[700] an ancient and celebrated place of pilgrimage, and the chief centre in the Byzantine Empire of the cultus of the angels.

Chonæ, the present Khonas on the Lycus, situated on a tributary of the Mæander in the ecclesiastical province of Laodicea, is the name given since the ninth century to the ancient Colossæ, to the Christian community of which city St Paul addressed one of his epistles, wherein he already speaks of the worship of angels. Even in the time of the apostles there existed a half-Jewish, half-Gnostic sect which disturbed the peace of the local church by teaching that Christ was inferior to the angels, who must be worshipped and invoked in preference to Him; St Paul (Colossians ii. 18) rejects this teaching as heretical, nevertheless, it did not die out, for in the fourth century the Council of Laodicea was compelled to censure this false worship of the angels in its thirty-fifth canon.[701] This was not a prohibition of the cultus of the angels in general, for at the same period St Ambrose and St Hilary in other parts of the Church exhorted the faithful to invoke them.[702] The true worship of the angels existed also in Colossæ, for Metaphrastes tells us that an apparition of the Archangel Michael himself took place there, in honour of which Manual Comnenus later on prescribed that the Festival of the Apparition of St Michael should be kept as a festival of the second class on the 6th September (Apparitio S. Michælis in Chonis).