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 EASTER

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EASTER

was the main difficulty which was decided by the Council of Nicsea. Even among the Christians who calculated Easter for themselves there had been con- siderable variations (partly due to the difference of the lunar cycle adopted, partly to a divergent reckon- ing of the date of the equinox), and as recently as 314, in the Council of Aries, it had been laid down that in future Easter should be kept uno die el uno tempore per omnem orhem, and that to secure this uniformity the pope should send out letters to all the Churches. The Council of Nicaea seems to have extended further the principle here laid down. As already stated, we have not its exact words, but we may safely infer from scat- tered notices that the council ruled: (1) that Easter must be celebrated by all tliroughout the world on the same Sunday; (2) that this Sunday must follow the fourteenth day of the paschal moon; (3) that that moon was to be accounted the paschal moon whose fourteenth day followed the spring equinox; (4) that some provision should be made, probably by the Church of Alexanilria as best skilled in astronomical calculations, for determining the proper date of Easter and communicating it to the rest of the world (.see St. Leo to the Emperor Marcian in Migne, P. L., LIV, 1055). This ruling of the Council of Nica-a did not remove all difficulties nor at once win universal ac- ceptance amongst the SjTians. But to judge from the strongly worded canon i of the Council of Antioch (a. d. 341; see Hefele-Leclercq, "Conciles", I, 714), as also from the language of the Apostolic Constitutions and Canons (see Schmid, Osterfestfrage, p. 63), the Syrian bishops loyally co-operated in carrying into effect the decision of the Council of Xiecea. In Rome and Alexandria the lunar cycles by which tlie occur- rence of Easter was determined were not uniform. Rome, after the hundred-and-twelve-year cycle of Hippolytus, adopted an eighty-four-year cycle, but neither gave satisfactory results. Alexandria ad- hered to the more accurate nineteen-year cycle of Melon. But it seems to be clearly established by the most recent researches (see Schwartz, op. cit., pp. 28-29) that the lunar cj'cles were never understood to be more than aids towards ascertaining the correct date of Easter, also that where the calculations of Rome and Alexandria led to divergent results, com- promises vvere made upon both sides and that the final decision always lay with accepted ecclesiastical au- thority.

Third Phase. — It was to the divergent cycles which Rome had successively adopted and rejected in its at- tempt to determine Easter more accurately that the third stage in the paschal controversy was mainly due. The Roman missionaries coming to England in the time of St. Gregory the Great found the British Chri.s- tians, the representatives of that Christianity which had been introduced into Britain during the period of the Roman occupation, still adhering to an ancient system of Easter-computation which Rome itself had laid aside. The British and Irish Christians were not Quartodecimans, as some unwarrantably accused them of being, for they kept the Easter festival upon a Simday. They are supposed (e. g. by Krusch) to have obseri'ed an eighty-four-year cycle and not the five- hundred-and-thirty-two-year cycle of Victorius which was adopted in Gaul, but the most recent inves- tigator of the f|Ucstion (Schwartz, p. 103) declares it to be impssil)lc to determine what system they fol- lowed and himself inclines to the opinion that they derived their rvile for the determining of Easter direct from Asia Minor, (."^ee, however, the very opposite con- clusions of Joseph Schmid, "Die Osterfestberechnung auf den britischen Iiiscln", 1004.) The story of this controversy, which, together with the difference in the shape of tonsure, seems to have prevented all fraterni- zation between the British Cliristians and the Roman missionaries, is told at length in the pages of Bede. The British appealed to the tradition of St. John, the

Romans to that of St. Peter, both sides with little reason, and neither without the suspicion of forgery. It was not until the Si.'nod of Whitby in 664 that the Christians of Northern Britain, who had derived their instruction in the Faith from the Scottish (i. e. Irish) missionaries, at last at the instance of Bishop Wilfrid and through the example of King Oswj- accepted the Roman system and came into friendly relations with the bishops of the South. Even then in Ireland and in parts of the North some years passed before the adop- tion of the Roman Easter became general (Moran, Essaj-s on the Origin, Doctrines and Discipline of the Early Irish Church, Dublin. 1864).

P01NT.S OP Obscurity. — These are the facts regard- ing the Easter controversy which are now generally admitted. Many other subsidiary details have an important bearing on the case but are more matters of conjecture. There is, for example, the perplexing doubt whether the Crucifixion of Christ took place on the fourteenth or fifteenth of Nisan. The Synoptists seem to fa\-our the latter, St. John the former date. Clearly we should expect to find that according to the answer given to this question, the position of the earliest possible Easter Sunday in the lunar month would also change. Again, thereis the problem, much debated by modern scholars, whether the Pasch which the early Christians desired to commemorate was primarily the Passion or the Resurrection of Christ. Upon this point also our data do not admit of a very positive answer. It has been very strongly urged that the writers of the first two centuries who speak of the Pasch have always in view the Trdcrxa (rTavpucrt/jtov, the Crucifixion Day, when Jesus Christ Himself was offered as the Victim, the antitype of the Jewish paschal lamb. Supporters of this opinion often contend that the Resurrection w-as held to be sufficiently commemorated by the weekly Sundaj', on the vigil of which the night-watch was kept, the Liturgy being celebrated in the morning. In any case it must be admitted that w-hile in the New Testament we have definite mention of the observance of the Sunday, or "Lord'sday", there is no conclusive evidence in the first century or more of the keeping of the Pasch as a festival. Some are inclined to think that the Christian Easter first appears as setting a term to the great paschal fast which, as we learn from Irenajus, was very variously kept in the sub-Apostolic Age. Ajiother class of obscure and rather intricate questions, about which it isdifficult to speak positively, regards the limits of the paschal period as laid down by the computation of Rome before the tables of Dionysius Exiguus and the Metonic cycle were finally adopted there in 525. According to one system Eas- ter Day might fall between the fourteenth and twen- tieth day inclusive of the paschal moon ; and although this implies that when Ea.ster fell on the fourteenth it coincided with the Jewish Pasch, the Roman Church, observing its eighty-four-year cycle, at one time per- mitted this (so at least Krusch contends; see " Der 84- jahrige Ostercyclus imd seine Quellen", pp. 20 and 65). Certain it is that the data of the supputatio Romnna did not always agree with tho.se of Alexandria, and in particular it seems that Rome, rejecting 22 March as the earliest possible date of Easter, only allowed the 23rd, while, on the other hand, the latest possible date according to the Roman .system was 21 April. This .sometimes brought about an impasse which was re- lieved only by accepting the Alexandrian solution. Other computations allowed Easter to fall between the fifteenth and twenty-first day of the paschal moon and others between the sixteenth and the tw-enty-.second.

What is perhaps most important to remember, both in the .solution adopted in 52.'j and in that officially put forward at the time of the reform of the calendar by Gregory XIII, is this, that the Church throughout held that the determination of Easter was primarily a matter of ecclesiastical di.scipline and not of astronom- ical science. As Professor Dc Morgan long ago clearly