Calendar

JOHN A. MCGUCKIN

The calendar, in Orthodox usage, signifies the manner in which the yearly cycle of liturgical feasts is arranged in the church. From the very beginnings of the Christian Church there was a marked desire among believers to celebrate liturgically that central moment of salvation history: the monu­mental events surrounding the Lord’s death and resurrection, the great Paschal Mystery which included his cross and his glory as one. Liturgically separated out, so as to provide pause and meditative space for the faithful to “ponder these things” (Lk. 2.19), the Paschal Mystery itself refuses to be divided up by aspect or human chro­nology. It is one living reality, not a series of disparate events. So, to that extent, it is impossible to set apart the Lord’s minis­try from his sufferings, for they make a seamless weave. It is impossible to sepa­rate Great Friday from Pascha Sunday, or to divide out the mystery of Ascension and Pentecost. It is only a time-bounded chronological mindset that sets them in different chronological sequences. In God’s work of salvation it is not Chronos (time sequence) that matters but Kairos (the timeless moment of the opportunity of Grace). Pentecost and Pascha are not just things of the past, they are things of the present moment of God’s glory, and of the church’s future hope – its eschatolog­ical reality. The calendar, therefore, is a meditative aid to realize the complexity of the eschatological Kairos which the church senses as profound Mystery of Christ. It is not meant to be a ground plan, objectively real and definitive, as much as a cycle of recurring and elliptical reflections on the central mystery of the Word’s redemption of his people.

Liturgically, the calendar revolves around Pascha. The Paschal cycle begins four weeks before Lent opens, with the Sunday of the Prodigal Son (announcing the overarching theme of repentance). Prior to Pascha come the Sundays of Great Lent, each with their own theme and motif, announced in the gospel of the day as well as in certain “saints of repentance” who are commemorated (Mary of Egypt, for example, or John of the Ladder), and also the Entry to Jerusalem. Following after it come the great feasts of that cycle, Ascension day and Pentecost. This is called the movable cycle, in the sense that it revolves around Pascha, which is itself a variable feast: not the same each year but following after a lunar calendar according to rules (the Paschalion) laid down at the Council of Nicea. Because of the canon that states the last days of Great Lent should not precede or fall on the same day as the Jewish Passover, Orthodox Pascha is often later than the western date which follows the lead of Rome. In the Renaissance era, Rome also moved to reform the civic calen­dar (the Julian calendar, so named from its ancient reformation by Julius Caesar) and repaired the 13 days’ dissonance that had crept in over the centuries (caused by the fact that 365 days is not a completely accu­rate measurement of the earth’s rotation) by omitting them, so as to bring into effect the so-called Gregorian calendar. This papally inspired “Gregorian reform” was at first resisted by Anglican England (until the time of George II) and by much of Protestant Europe, and at first by all the Orthodox, but gradually it gained accep­tance throughout Western Europe, and increasingly in parts of the Orthodox world. Mount Athos, and many of the Slavic Churches (following Russia’s lead), however, refused to accept the Gregorian calendar. They now appear (at least in regard to church usage) to celebrate feasts on “different days.” In Russia the nativity of Christ seems to fall on January 7, 13 days after other churches have observed it on December 25. What many fail to realize, of course, it that for the Slavs, this festival does not fall in January at all, but on December 25, as they reckon it, observed under the Julian system. The patriarchate of Constantinople, after a consultative synod at Constantinople in 1923 (a time during which the Russian Church was under great duress), led the way for several Orthodox Churches to partly adopt the Gregorian cal­endar, but because this was not a common consensus, and in order to ensure that all Eastern Orthodox observed Pascha on the same day (that is, on the same calendar) those churches wanting to follow the Gregorian calendar for everything else reverted to the Julian calendar for things relating to the Paschal cycle. In this way all the Orthodox observe Pascha together and all things related to that cycle, while the rest of the calendar can diverge between the Old Calendarists, more properly called the Julian Calendarists (or “Old Style”), and the New Calendarists following the system which has gone under the nomenclature of “New Style” or “Revised Julian.”

Apart from the Paschal cycle, the rest of the liturgical year is the fixed cycle, based upon the solar calendar. The church year begins in September, following Jewish and Byzantine precedent. The necessary space for adjustment in calendrical terms (sev­eral different cycles interweaving with one another) is provided by a varied number of Sundays “intercalated” after Pentecost to make up the varying shortfall of the way Pascha comes earlier or later in the course of a given year. These intercalated Sundays typically are placed in the interval before Lent begins the Paschal cycle all over again. The whole calendrical move­ment is balanced, like parts of a watch, between five revolving parts in a given year: the daily cycle of commemorations, the weekly cycle (Sundays after Pentecost, or of Lent, or after Nativity, for example), the cycle of the Eight Tones (provided by the relevant “tone” of the week as stated for the given Sunday), the Paschal cycle, and the cycle of the fixed feasts. The latter includes the Twelve Great Feasts (Nativity of the Theotokos, Exaltation of the Cross, Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, Nativity of Christ, Theophany or Baptism of the Lord, Presentation of Christ in the Temple, Annunciation, Entry to Jerusalem, Ascension, Pentecost, Transfiguration, and Dormition. Three of these (Entry to Jeru­salem, Ascension, and Pentecost) vary in the year according the Paschal cycle, while the rest are fixed.

The calendar controversy (moving from Julian to “Reformed Julian,” since none of the Orthodox ever adopted the Gregorian fully) was often a bitter one in the early and mid-20th century, and some tradi­tionalist Orthodox hierarchs looked upon it as a “faithless” reform, seeing in it a sign of lamentable “Modernism” (a term borrowed from Roman Catholic contro­versies of the opening of the 20th cen­tury). it was soon connected with issues of the patriarchate of Constantinople call­ing for a “dialogue of love” with other churches. “Ecumenism” was denounced by this minority as a wholesale “Pan­ Heresy” and a secessionist movement began, notable in parts of Greece, Cyprus, and Romania, which has increasingly been called the Old Calendarists.

SEE ALSO: Cross; Dormition; Ecumenism, Orthodoxy and; Feasts; Greece, Orthodox Church of; Liturgical Books; Oktoechos; Paraklitike; Romania, Patriarchal Orthodox Church of

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Monk of the Eastern Church (1980) The Year of Grace of the Lord: A Scriptural and Liturgical Commentary on the Calendar of the Orthodox Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Seabury, S. (1872) The Theory and Use of the Church Calendar in the Measurement and Distribution of Time: Being An Account of the Origin and Use of the Calendar, of Its Reformation from the Old to the New Style, and of Its Adaptation to the Use of the English Church by the British Parliament under George the Second. New York: Pott, Young.

Canon (Liturgical)

DIMITRI CONOMOS

The third major form of Byzantine hymnody

after the troparion and kontakion. In its fully developed arrangement (8th century), this is a hymn cycle of nine odes (the second was usually omitted) sung after the reading of the Psalter at Matins. The canon replaced the singing of the nine scriptural canticles that were normally sung, with a short refrain inserted between their verses, in the Byzantine Morning Office. The canon there­fore constitutes a highly sophisticated poetic genre. It is essentially a hymnodic complex of considerable length with a variety of themes (the feast of the day), which paraphrase in verse specific sub-themes (the ancient canticle) and musical diversity (a different melody for each ode). In some canons the initial letters of each stanza form an acrostic relevant to the day on which the hymn was to be sung. unlike the kontakion, the music for canons was slightly more ornamented, making use of two or three notes set to a single syllable of the text.

The term heirmos (Gk. “link”) is applied to the opening model stanza for each ode of the canon. As such, the heirmoi act as “link” verses joining together the theme of suppressed biblical canticles, which the odes of the canon were originally designed to accompany, and the theme of the feast or commemoration of the day, which is developed in the stanzas that followed.

For the heirmoi, the classical chants in syllabic style are collected in a book called the Heirmologion, which may contain as many as 2,000 model stanzas. Like the Western Tonary, the Heirmologion is divided into one section per mode.

The nine canticles are:

1 The song of Moses (Exodus 15.1–19)

2 The song of Moses (Deuteronomy 32.1–43)

3 The prayer of Hannah (I Kings 2.1–10)

4 The prayer of Habbakuk (Habbakuk 3.1–19)

5 The prayer of Isaiah (Isaiah 26.9–20)

6 The prayer of Jonah (Jonah 2.3–10)

The prayer of the Three Children (the Benedicite, Apoc. Daniel 3.26–56)

7 The prayer of the Three Children (Apoc. Daniel 3.57–88)

8 The Magnificat and the Benedictus (Luke 1.46–55 and 68–79)

Whatever the object of a canon may be (the celebration of a feast of the Lord or of the Virgin, or the commemoration of a saint or martyr), the hymn writer had to allude in each of the nine odes to its scriptural model.

Church traditions (wrongly) attribute the invention of the canon to St. Andrew of Crete (ca. 660–740) and his famous Great Kanon of mid-Lent contains the excep­tional number of 250 stanzas. But canon composition reached its peak in the 8th and 9th centuries, first in Palestine with examples by St. John Damascene (ca. 675-ca. 749) and St. Kosmas of Jerusalem (also known as St. Kosmas the Melodist or Kosmas of Maiuma; first half of the 8th century), then in Constantinople with St. Theodore, abbot of the Studion Monastery (759–826), and his brother Joseph (d. 833), the two Sicilians Methodios (d. 846) and Joseph the Hymnographer (d. 883), and the nun Cassia (ca. 810–65).

SEE ALSO: Kontakion; Liturgical Books; Music (Sacred); Orthros (Matins)

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Grosdidier de Matons, J. (1980–1) “Liturgie et hymnographie: Kontakion et Canon,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 34–5: 31–43.

Hannick, C. (1990) “The Performance of the Kanon in Thessaloniki in the 14th Century,” in D. Conomos (ed.) Studies in Eastern Chant, vol. 5. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, pp. 137–52.

Harris, S. (2004) “The Kanon and the Heir- mologion,” Music and Letters 85: 175–97.

Velimirovic, M. (1973) “The Byzantine Heirmos and Heirmologion,” in W. Arlt et al. (eds.)

Gattungen der Musik in Einzeldarstellungen: Gedenkschrift Leo Schrade. Berne: Francke, pp. 192–244.