Heortology

by K. A. Heinrich Kellner

The ecclesiastical calendars and martyrologies come next under consideration. As regards the former, the service-books of which we have been speaking were on the whole drawn up in accordance with the local calendar and added both the movable and immovable feasts as best they could. In proportion as the number of feasts increased the calendars were regarded as independent catalogues of festivals, and are found both as separate documents, or bound up with the other liturgical books; in the latter case, they are usually placed at the beginning of the volume.

While the calendars give merely the names of the saints or the date of their feasts, the martyrologies or Synaxaria contain more detailed notices, giving the place, time, and circumstances of the saints’ death, rank, etc., according as the compiler had more or less material at his disposal; in many instances these notices have grown into considerable historical narratives, and on this account, the character of the different martyrologies varies greatly. As to their employment for historical purposes, the shorter the contents the higher the value and trustworthiness of a calendar. The martyrologies were usually compiled by private individuals, even when intended for ecclesiastical use, but the calendars shared in the official character of the liturgical books of which they formed part, since alterations could not be made in them without the knowledge and consent of the authorities of the church or corporation to which they belonged.[743]

Manuscript calendars belonging to earlier centuries exist in large numbers, for all missals and breviaries were provided with them. Their value for historical research depends upon their age, and also upon our knowledge of the locality for which they were drawn up, the best data for discovering this latter point being afforded by the names of local saints contained in the calendar itself. No calendar can be set aside as altogether useless, for in case of need all can throw light upon the history of at least their own locality. For this reason, and for others as well, an increasing amount of attention has been given to them in recent times, and a large number of them have been printed (see sect. 10 of this part). The days marked in the calendars are those of the saints’ deaths (vid. ante, [p. 213]); but the days on which their relics were translated to some particular church are also marked as festivals in the calendar of the church in question. When in different calendars different days are given to the same saint, the date in the calendar belonging to the church where he died is usually to be regarded as the day of his death; the others are days on which his relics were translated.[744]

Another class of documents consists of the ordos drawn up for divine service belonging to particular countries, dioceses, or the more important ecclesiastical foundations (ordines, ordinaria; in Greek, typica). These were not originally drawn up for the course of merely one year, like our present ordos, but contained the list of recurring festivals and fasts observed from year to year in some monastery or cathedral, along with detailed directions for the performance of divine service. The most important of these are the thirteen oldest ordos of the Roman Church, collected and published by Mabillon, but other dioceses and monasteries as well as the Church of Rome had similar ordos, some of which have been already printed,[745] while others still await publication.[746]

2. The Earliest Christian Calendars

The worship of the saints, especially of the martyrs, asserted itself in various ways in the liturgy of the Church. Among the Latins, it appeared even in the liturgy of the mass, since special masses in honour of the saints were composed at an early date for the commemorations of the most celebrated saints. These were included in the sacramentaries, and, finally, as their number continued to increase, they were placed together in a separate division of the book (proprium sanctorum), instead of being distributed, as formerly, over the whole year. Among the Greeks, this was not possible, since they repeat the same mass daily, and employ only two or three mass formularies throughout the entire year.

In the second place, the cultus of the saints gained a footing in the Canonical Hours, the Psalter, both among Latins and Greeks. It was customary among the Latins as early as the sixth century to read a portion of the account of the martyrdom (passiones martyrum), as Aurelian of Arles tells us;[747] this was the commencement of the existing lections of the breviary. Then collections of lives of the saints for the whole year were drawn up on the lines of the calendar, which came to be called martyrologies on account of the character of the larger part of their contents. In course of time, two kinds of martyrologies came into existence, those containing legends of greater length more suited for private reading, and those distinguished by the brevity of their notices intended for employment in the services of the Church. Even these have no immediate connection with the liturgy, although the names of the saints for the day were read at Prime, a custom which possibly the Council of Aix-la-Chapelle of 817 had in view in its sixty-ninth canon.[748] These martyrologies developed out of the diptychs and calendars of particular churches, by way of compilation and expansion; like the calendars, they contain simply the names of the saints, but with the mention of the locality to which the saint belonged, and, in many cases, with an indication of the date at which he lived.

The martyrologies aimed at completeness in other directions. First, it was attempted to unite together the names of all the martyrs who had ever suffered throughout the whole Church, along with the day of their death, and secondly, an attempt was made, but only in later times, to fill up the calendar by allotting every day in the year to at least one saint. This latter attempt was made in the West only in the seventh and eighth centuries, and achieved considerable success. While the first efforts in this direction attained to only relative completeness, since they took into consideration only a part, and not the whole, of the universal Church, as the Arian and Carthaginian martyrologies had done, yet the tendency towards universality appears unmistakably at a later date, especially in the so-called Martyrologium Hieronymianum.

With regard to the Greek service-books, menology means the same thing as martyrology—a catalogue of saints arranged in the form of a calendar according to the days of the month, and merely giving the name of the saint against the particular day set apart by the Church in his honour. The lives of the saints arranged according to months and days are called Menæa or Meniæa, and the shorter abstracts from it are called Synaxaria.[749]

The list of calendars opens with two documents, the most ancient of their kind possessed by the Roman Church, i.e. the lists of popes and martyrs with the days of their death, which have often been referred to already—the Depositio Episcoporum from Lucius to Julius I., and the Depositio Martyrum, a catalogue of the martyrs of the city of Rome, extending only to 304, three martyrs not belonging to Rome being included in this list, Cyprian, Perpetua, and Felicitas. The connection of these two lists to one another is shown in their titles (item), and also by the fact that Sixtus, who is placed among the martyrs, is omitted from the list of popes. This latter list comprises the period from Lucius († 255) to Julius († 352) only; either the compiler had no material at hand for the earlier period, or he set it aside as not bearing upon the point he had in view. The list of martyrs contains the names of popes who were also martyrs, such as St Peter, St Clement, St Calixtus, St Pontianus, St Fabian, and St Sixtus; of martyrs, not bishops, we have here the most famous saints of the city of Rome, St Agnes and St Lawrence (but not St Cecilia), as well as many other quite obscure names. In reply to the inquiry what principle was followed in drawing up this list, Mommsen,[750] relying on the title which connects the document with Carthage, replies that it contains “the names of those martyrs and bishops whose commemoration was celebrated annually in the Church.” Both these lists were first published by Ægidius Bucherius (Gilles Boucher), and form a portion of the work on the Calendar of Dionysius Philocalus (see above, [p. 136 seqq.]).