Orthodoxy and Heresy in Byzantium the Definition and the Notion of Orthodoxy and Some Other Studies on the Heresies and the Non-Christian Religions
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ESTRATTO Quaderni di Να Ρµη,4 ORTHODOXY AND HERESY IN BYZANTIUM THE DEFINITION AND THE NOTION OF ORTHODOXY AND SOME OTHER STUDIES ON THE HERESIES AND THE NON-CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS Edited by ANTONIO RIGO - PAVEL ERMILOV Università degli Studi di Roma «Tor Vergata» 2010 147 CORRECTION OF THE EASTER COMPUTUS : HERESY OR NECESSITY? FOURTEENTH CENTURY BYZANTINE FORERUNNERS OF THE GREGORIAN REFORM INTRODUCTION : C ALENDAR PROBLEM IN CHRISTIAN WORLD The difference between the Catholic and the Orthodox (Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox as well) calculations of the main Christian feast, Easter, is nowadays one of the most obvious points of dis - agreement between the Christian Churches. In Russia, where the Church continues to use the old Julian calendar, this peculiarity is often interpreted as an important part of the Orthodox tradition and its alter - ation is considered a deviation and heresy. This attitude goes back to the reaction of the Greek Orthodox world to the famous calendar reform introduced in 1582 by the bull Inter gravissimas of Pope Gregory XIII. That year, three Orthodox Patriarchs issued in Constantinople a synodal sigillion that severely concluded: «Whoever does not follow the customs of the Church as the Seven Holy Ecumenical Councils decreed, and Holy Easter, and the Calendar with which they did well in making it a law that we should follow it, and wishes to follow the newly-invented Paschalion and the New Calendar of the godless astronomers of the Pope, and opposes all those things and wishes to overthrow and destroy the dogmas and customs of the Church which have been handed down by our fathers, let him suffer anathema and be put out of the Church of Christ and out of the Congregation of the Faithful » 1. Indeed, the Calendar and Easter question is one of the oldest prob - lems of the Christian world. Already in the second century it was at the centre of the polemic between Roman and Asian Churches, which claimed to be observing the genuine apostolic tradition. A great number of calendars coexisted in Hellenistic and early Roman times in different 1 The English translation published electronically at www.orthodoxinfo.com/ ecumenism/prot_rc_heresy.aspx, accessed 27 December 2009 . 148 PAVEL KUZENKOV regions of the Mediterranean, and in the Greek Orient nearly every large city had its own system of time reckoning. During the first centuries of Christianity the Christian computus (as Easter tables are usually called), deriving from the Hebrew lunisolar calendar, was being accommodated to the calendar of the Roman World, introduced by Julius Caesar, which had no connection with the Moon at all. The additional difficulty was the need to coordinate the Easter date with the first day of the week, Sunday. After a rather long period of discordance, when many regional calen - dars and computus traditions coexisted in different Churches, the First Ecu - menical Council at Nicaea ( 325 ) took measures to coordinate the cele - bration of the main Christian feast. The task was appointed by the Emperor Constantine the Great himself, who had been displeased by the absence of unity among Christians in his Empire. Nevertheless the deci - sions of the Council of Nicaea were far from definitive. In the 4th and 5th centuries Christians in the East and the West celebrated Easter at dif - ferent dates in several instances. It does not, however, look like a burning problem in our sources. The real difficulties began only when the differ - ence concerned the main sees, such as Rome and Alexandria, as was the case in A.D. 444 and 455 . The Roman Church faced the necessity to leave behind the old Roman computus , the 84 -year cycle. It was not an easy decision for Pope Leo the Great, who was very concerned about the authority of the see of St Peter. The attempt was undertaken to con - struct a new western computus where the accuracy of the 19 -year cycle was compatible with the old Roman Easter tradition. But the task, which was commissioned to the Gaul computist Victorius of Aquitania, was too complicated to be resolved successfully, and already in the next century the Roman Church accepted the classical type of the 19 -year cycle – the Alexandrian one, which was known in the West as the com - putus of St Cyril. It was translated into Latin and continued till A.D. 626 by Dionysius Exiguus, and the account of the years from the Incarnatio Domini in his Easter table, which Dionysius for some reason began from the year which we call now A.D. 1 – is nowadays the most common dating system the world ove r 2. The success of the Dionysian era was the result of the slow but inevitable process of calendar unification, which started in the time of 2 For the so called Dionysian problem see: A.A. MOSSHAMMER , The Easter Com - putus and the Origins of the Christian Era , Oxford 2008 (Oxford Early Christian Stud - ies). Cf. also my review in Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гумани - тарного университета. Серия: Богословие. Философия 4 (28 ) ( 2009 ), pp. 66 -74 . CORRECTION OF THE EASTER COMPUTUS : HERESY OR NECESSITY? 149 Caesar. The first step in this way was the Julian calendar that became the common dating system in the Late Antique world. This calendar, with some regional variations, was for many centuries common to all Christian communities even after the schisms of the fifth and the sixth centuries and the collapse of the Eastern Roma Empire in the seventh century. The next step in the unification was the Alexandrian computus – a luniso - lar calendar system, constructed in the third century by the famous Alexandrian scientist Anatolius, bishop of Laodicaea, on the basis of the Julian calendar and the classical 19 -year cycle of Methon the Athenian. The main idea of this important invention consists in the fact, that the combination of the 19 -year cycle with the Julian year generates a cycle with 19 solar years = 235 lunar months = 6939 ,75 days. This equation is the same as in the 76 -year cycle of Callippus – one of the most accurate lunisolar cycles of Antiquity. Its accuracy is rather high: one day in 312 years for lunar phases (instead of one day in 62 years in Methon’s cycle) and for the tropical year – one day in 128 years (just as in the Julian cal - endar; in Methon one day in 48 years already ) 3. The Alexandrian cycle was not the sole type of the Julian enneadekaë - teris , but the most respected one. All other variants, invented from the fourth to the seventh centuries ( e.g. the cyclus lunaris of Dionysius’ table, the cycle of Heron in the sixth century, the cycle of Chronicon Paschale ), had to accept the Alexandrian set of Passover full moons. The only exception was the Armenian computus (mid-sixth century), but its pecu - liarity comes to nothing more than a sole date – April 6 instead of Alexandrian April 5. This discrepancy is relevant for the Easter date four times in 532 years (with periods of 95 , 95 , 95 , 247 years). Such occurrence became invariably a subject of fierce polemics between Armenians and other Christians, from A.D. 570 onward. The most important feature of this polemics is that Armenians were obliged to defend their date not only against «the curved Easter» ( tsra zatik‘ ) of Orthodox Greeks and Georgians, traditionally treated by them as «Chalcedonian Nestorians», but against their brothers-in-confession Copts and Ethiopians, firm adherents of the Alexandrian traditio n 4. 3 E. SCHWARTZ , Christliche und jüdische Ostertafeln , Berlin 1905 ; Д.А. Л ЕБЕДЕВ , Из истории древних пасхальных циклов , in Византийский временник 18 (1911 ) [ 1913 ], pp. 148 -389 ; B. KRUSCH , Studien zur christlich-mittelalterlichen Chronologie: Die Entstehung unserer heutige Zeitrechnung , Berlin 1938 . 4 П.В. К УЗЕНКОВ - К.А. П АНЧЕНКО , «Кривые Пасхи» и Благодатный Огонь в исторической ретроспективе , in Вестник Московского университета, серия 13 , 4 (2006 ), pp. 3-29 . 150 PAVEL KUZENKOV At the opposite part of the Christian world Britain and Ireland were another camp of «calendar dissidents». The Irish were the last to give up the old Roman 84 -year Easter computus in the eighth century, while the rest of the Christian world from Gaul to Mesopotamia was already employing the much more accurate 19 -year cycle. Thereby, the Calendar controversy was in no way a new matter for Christian communities. Nor was it strictly tied with any confessional, ethnic, or cultural rivalry. SCIENTIFIC AND RELIGIOUS PROBLEMS The Alexandrian computus , based on the 19 -year lunisolar cycle, was the most accurate among the practically oriented calendar systems of Antiquity. More punctual astronomical periods, such as the 304 year cycle of Hipparchus, could not be applied to calendar tasks. The full Easter com - putus has to take into account not only the dates of full moons, but also weekdays, and so it forms a combination of the lunisolar, the week, and the Julian bissextus periods. For the 19 -year cycle it means the full period of 532 years – a rather long table to be written and copied for practical use. The more convenient variant was a matrix with two cycles – 19 -year «lunar» and 28 -year «solar» (in fact the weekday cycle). The use of such a tool was not very complicated, and any educated cleric was able to deter - min the date of Easter – even having no idea of the real astronomical and mathematical structure of the system as a whole. With all its accuracy and convenience, the Christian enneadekaëteris was far from being perfect. Every 128 years the real date of the vernal equinox moved one day off from March 21 – the equinoctial limit of the Alexandrian computus .