Time Sanctified and the Eighth Day

Time is a creature, and like every creature it is capable of being sanctified. The Church does not escape time by rising above it but redeems it from within, ordering the hours, the week, and the year around the Resurrection — which is why the Christian week has an eighth day that is also its first. This file sets out what the Church claims about time itself, before any question of which calendar measures it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Time Is Created, and Therefore Good

The first thing Scripture says about time is that God made it. “And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven… and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years” (Genesis 1:14 LXX). The heavenly bodies are not divinities whose motions bind human affairs; they are instruments given for measurement. That single verse does more work than is usually noticed: it makes astronomy a servant of the calendar rather than its master, and it removes any pagan sacrality from the solstices and equinoxes themselves.

It also means that the Christian attitude to time is neither the Hellenic one — time as the moving image of eternity, a declension from the changeless — nor the modern one, in which time is a neutral container. Time is a creature with a beginning, a direction, and an end. St Basil argues the point at the opening of the Hexaemeron: “In the beginning” marks the origin not only of things in time but of time itself, so that the world and time began together (Basil, Hexaemeron 1.6; trans. NPNF II/8). What has a beginning can be healed.

The healing is the Incarnation. “When the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son” (Galatians 4:4). The eternal Word entered the sequence of days and was subject to it — conceived, born, circumcised on the eighth day, presented in the temple on the fortieth, baptized in the fifteenth year of Tiberius. Christian worship’s stubborn attachment to dates and intervals follows from this and is not antiquarian fussiness: a religion whose God entered chronology will keep a calendar.

Chronos and Kairos — With a Caution

Orthodox writing often distinguishes chronos, time as duration and measure, from kairos, the decisive moment, the appointed time, the opportunity. The distinction is genuinely useful, and it has a liturgical anchor: the deacon’s word to the priest before the Liturgy begins is Kairos tou poiēsai tō Kyriō — “It is time for the Lord to act” (Psalm 118/119:126 LXX), which announces that what is about to happen belongs to a different order from the clock on the wall.

An honest caution belongs here, because the distinction is regularly over-sold. James Barr’s Biblical Words for Time (London: SCM, 1962) demonstrated at length that the New Testament does not use chronos and kairos as a fixed technical pair, that the words overlap in usage, and that a theology of time cannot be extracted from lexicography. His critique landed, and it should be conceded. The theological distinction between measured duration and the moment of grace is real and is taught by the liturgy; the claim that Greek vocabulary encodes it is not. This library keeps the distinction and drops the philological argument for it.

The Day That Is First and Eighth

The Christian week is the oldest and most stable of the Church’s temporal structures, older than any of the calendars this collection will discuss, and it turns on one day.

The earliest evidence is dense. St Paul takes for granted a gathering “on the first day of the week” (Acts 20:7; 1 Corinthians 16:2). The Apocalypse calls it “the Lord’s day” (hē kyriakē hēmera, Revelation 1:10). St Ignatius contrasts sabbath-keeping with “living according to the Lord’s day” (Magnesians 9.1; trans. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed., Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007 — the Greek reads kata kyriakēn zōntes, with “day” understood, a construction the manuscripts and translators handle variously). The Didache directs that “on the Lord’s day of the Lord” the community gather, break bread, and give thanks after confessing sins (Didache 14.1; trans. Holmes). St Justin describes the Sunday synaxis at length and gives two reasons for the day: it is the first day, on which God made the world out of darkness and matter, and it is the day on which Jesus Christ our Saviour rose from the dead (Justin, First Apology 67; trans. ANF 1).

Justin’s two reasons are the seed of everything else. Sunday is the first day, the day of the creation of light, and it is the eighth day, the day after the sabbath, the day of a creation that the old week could not contain. The Epistle of Barnabas already draws the second conclusion: God will “make a beginning of an eighth day, that is, a beginning of another world,” which is why “we keep the eighth day with gladness, the day on which Jesus rose from the dead” (Barnabas 15.8–9; trans. Holmes).

St Basil gathers the tradition and gives it its classic liturgical form. Explaining why the Church stands rather than kneels for prayer on Sundays and through Pentecost, he says that the practice reminds us of the resurrection and of the age to come, and that “the one and the eighth” day — the day beyond the sevenfold cycle — images the age that has no evening and no succession (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 27.66; trans. NPNF II/8). The eighth day is not a ninth item in a series. It is the week’s own end standing inside the week.

This is the structural claim on which the whole of liturgical time rests. The Church’s year is not a wheel of returning seasons, and its cycles are not the eternal return of the philosophers. They are repetitions ordered toward a term. Every Sunday is a small Pascha; Pascha is the great Sunday; and the age to come is the Pascha of which every Pascha is the pledge (see Orthodox Eschatology: Inaugurated Eschatology and the Kingdom; Orthodox Eschatology: The Paschal Frame).

The Day Begins at Evening

A practical consequence, and one that surprises newcomers: the liturgical day begins at sunset, on the pattern of Genesis 1 — “and there was evening and there was morning, one day” (Genesis 1:5). Saturday evening Vespers is already Sunday; the Vigil served on the eve of a feast is the feast’s own first service (see The Daily Cycle of Services; The Evening and Night Services).

The theological point is not merely inherited convention. To begin the day in darkness and move toward morning is to rehearse the movement from the fall to the resurrection every twenty-four hours. Vespers opens with Psalm 103/104, the psalm of creation, and closes the royal doors on Paradise; Matins ends in the full light of the Great Doxology. The office does not describe this movement; it performs it (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1966, chs. 2–3).

The Church Does Not Have a Calendar; She Has a Life

It is worth stating plainly, at the head of a collection much of which is about dates, that the calendar is an instrument. Fr Alexander Schmemann put the underlying claim as sharply as anyone: the Church’s worship is not a “cult” laid alongside ordinary time but the sanctification of time itself, the taking-up of the day, the week and the year into the Kingdom that has already come and is still to come (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 2nd ed., Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973, ch. 3, “The Time of Mission”). His historical arguments about the origins of the office have been contested by later liturgiology, and Robert Taft’s work in particular revised much of the picture Schmemann inherited (Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, 2nd rev. ed., Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993, pp. 31–56). The theological thesis about time has worn better than the historical reconstruction, and this collection uses it with that distinction in view.

Two consequences follow, and both matter for the arguments later in this collection.

First, a calendar can be better or worse at its job, and it is legitimate to argue about which one serves the Church’s life. That argument is made in The Case for the Old Calendar and answered in The Case on the Other Side.

Second, an instrument is not a dogma. The Church has defined the Trinity, the two natures of Christ, the veneration of the icons, and the uncreated energies. She has never defined a solar calendar, and the eighth day is kept on every calendar there is. That is the burden of Why the Calendar Is Not a Dogma, and it is stated here at the outset so that nothing in the intervening sections can be read as though the reverse were true.

See Also

References

  • Barr, James. Biblical Words for Time. Studies in Biblical Theology 33. London: SCM Press, 1962.
  • Basil the Great. Hexaemeron; On the Holy Spirit. Trans. NPNF II/8.
  • Holmes, Michael W., ed. and trans. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. (Didache, Barnabas, Ignatius, Magnesians.)
  • Justin Martyr. First Apology 67. Trans. ANF 1.
  • Schmemann, Alexander. Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1966.
  • Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World. 2nd ed. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973.
  • Taft, Robert F. The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: The Origins of the Divine Office and Its Meaning for Today. 2nd rev. ed. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993.