01 — What Liturgical Time Is
Before any question of which calendar to keep, there is a prior question: what the Church thinks time is, and what she claims to be doing with it. Time is a creature and can be sanctified; the week has an eighth day; and the feasts are sung in the present tense. This section sets out those claims, and states at the outset the limit that governs the whole collection — that a calendar is an instrument and not a dogma.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox
Contents
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| time-sanctified-and-the-eighth-day.md | Time as created and therefore redeemable; the caution owed on chronos and kairos; Sunday as first and eighth day from Justin and Barnabas to St Basil; the day beginning at sunset; the calendar as instrument |
| the-today-of-the-feast.md | The sēmeron of the festal hymns; what the present tense claims and the four things it does not claim; anamnesis that remembers the Second Coming; Casel’s mystery-presence thesis reported and qualified; the feast as a season, not a day |
Why This Section Comes First
Because the argument of sections 04 to 07 is unintelligible without it, and dangerous without it.
Unintelligible, because the reasons for preferring one calendar to another are reasons about how well an instrument serves a liturgical life — and one has to know what that life is before the reasons can be weighed.
Dangerous, because a reader who arrives at the calendar question without a theology of the feast will be tempted to think that a date has power in itself. It does not. The Church keeps the same “today” on every calendar there is, and the same Christ is present at both altars.
Reading Order
Read time-sanctified-and-the-eighth-day.md first for the structure of Christian time, then the-today-of-the-feast.md for what the Church claims to be doing when she keeps a feast.
What Is Deferred
The feasts themselves belong to The Twelve Great Feasts; the services of the day to The Psalter and the Daily Office; the Eucharistic rite to The Divine Liturgy. This collection is about the time in which those things are done.
See Also
- Master README — collection overview and standpoint
- 02 — The Cycles — the theology of this section worked out as structure
- 07 — The Limits of the Question — the limit stated here, argued in full
- Orthodoxy: The Church Calendar — the hub this collection expands