The Case for the Old Calendar

This library reckons by the Julian calendar, and this file gives the reasons rather than asserting the preference. The argument is that the received Typikon is a single interlocking structure; that the mixed calendar demonstrably damages it at the Apostles’ Fast; that the warrant for the change was thin; that it was made unilaterally and fractured a common practice; and that continuity with the calendar in which the whole liturgical corpus was composed is a real good. It also states, at the end, what the argument does not establish.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / ROCOR

What Is Being Argued

Not that the Julian calendar is holy. Not that it was prescribed by a council — it was not, and Nicaea and the Independence of the Christian Reckoning says so in detail. Not that those who keep another calendar are outside the Church — they are not, and Why the Calendar Is Not a Dogma says so plainly.

What is argued is narrower and, being narrower, defensible: that the Julian calendar is the better instrument for the liturgical life the Church actually has, that the reasons given for changing it in the 1920s were weaker than the reasons for keeping it, and that a church which retains it is doing something intelligible and right rather than merely conservative.

1. The Integrity of the Received Typikon

The Orthodox liturgical corpus is not a set of texts with dates attached. It is a system of interlocking prescriptions: the Menaion for the fixed days, the Triodion and Pentecostarion for the movable, the Octoechos for the week, and above all the Typikon, whose Markan chapters exist precisely to specify what happens where the systems intersect (see The Fixed and the Movable Year; Skaballanovich, Tolkovyi Tipikon, 3 vols., Kiev, 1910–1915).

That whole apparatus was composed, edited, harmonized, and tested across more than a millennium on one date grid. Its rubrics for concurrence — when the Annunciation falls in Holy Week, when a Great Feast falls on a Friday, when the Meeting of the Lord meets the Triodion, when the leave-taking of one feast collides with the forefeast of another — are calibrated to the relations those grids produce.

Change one of the two grids and every one of those relations is silently re-set. Nothing is edited; the book still says what it said; but the situations the book was written to govern are no longer the situations that arise. Most of the time the difference is small. Sometimes, as at the Apostles’ Fast, it is not small at all.

The argument here is not that novelty is bad. It is that a working system of this complexity is not improved by adjusting one of its two axes without adjusting the other, and that a church may reasonably decline to do so.

2. The Apostles’ Fast — The Strongest Technical Argument

This is the argument that does not depend on temperament, and it should carry the weight.

The Apostles’ Fast is the one structure in the liturgical year anchored in both cycles: it begins fifty-seven days after Pascha, a movable date given by the Paschalion, and ends on 28 June, a fixed date in the Menaion (see Orthodoxy: Fasting Periods).

The Revised Julian arrangement moves the Menaion thirteen days earlier and leaves the Paschalion where it is. The consequences follow by arithmetic:

The fast is thirteen days shorter every year, without exception.
Whenever Pascha falls after 2 May in civil dating, the fast’s end has already passed before its beginning arrives, and there is no fast at all.

That is not a projection. In 2013 and again in 2024 Orthodox Pascha fell on 5 May; the Monday after All Saints was 1 July; and on the Revised Julian calendar the feast of Ss Peter and Paul had been celebrated on 29 June, two days earlier. A fast prescribed by the Typikon, attested from antiquity and kept by the whole Orthodox world, simply did not occur. On the Julian calendar in the same years it ran eleven days (see The Revised Julian Calendar and Its Reception for the full worked table; and “Can the Apostles Fast Ever Be Skipped by Those Using the New Calendar or Old Calendar?”, Sretensky Monastery Q&A, Pravoslavie.ru / OrthoChristian.com).

Two features make this argument strong.

It is checkable. Anyone with a Paschal table and a calendar can verify it, this year and any year. It does not rest on the interpretation of a document or the character of a hierarch.

It is structural, not incidental. The anomaly is not a mistake that could be patched. It follows necessarily from pairing a Gregorian-aligned fixed calendar with the Julian Paschalion, and it will recur for as long as that pairing continues — with the gap widening to fourteen days after 2100.

An honest weighing of it requires two concessions, made here rather than left to the other file.

The Apostles’ Fast is already the most variable of the four fasts, ranging on the Julian calendar from about a week to six weeks, and the mildest in its prescriptions (see Orthodoxy: Fasting Periods). A defender of the new calendar can say that a structure the tradition itself allows to shrink to a week is not obviously violated by allowing it to shrink further. That is a real reply. It is not, however, a reply to the difference between a week and nothing: a fast that some years does not exist has ceased to be a season of the year.

And New Calendar jurisdictions have not simply ignored the problem; they issue their own guidance, and the faithful in them fast. The defect is in the arrangement, not in the piety of those who live under it.

3. The Warrant for the Change Was Thin

The recommendation came from the Pan-Orthodox Congress of 1923: a body that called itself a congress, met without Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, and met while the Russian Church was under arrest (see The Congress of 1923 and What It Proposed).

The point must be made at the right strength, and overstating it is the commonest failure of old-calendar argument. The Congress never claimed to be an Ecumenical Council; announcing that it was not one refutes nobody. And the churches that changed did so by their own synodal acts, not by the Congress’s authority, so discrediting the Congress does not by itself discredit their decisions.

What the record does establish is more modest and still substantial:

The proposal originated in a contested assembly whose authority was denied by Alexandria and by the Russian Church Abroad within weeks.
The same assembly recommended the remarriage of widowed clergy and marriage after ordination, which no Orthodox church received, and which the canonical tradition excludes. Its judgment was therefore demonstrably capable of error in matters of order.
No pan-Orthodox synod has ever ratified the change. The pre-conciliar process of 1976, 1977, and 1982 examined the question and declined to legislate; the 2016 Council in Crete did not take it up (Ecumenical Patriarchate, “Preparation of a Council: A History,” orthodoxcouncil.org, locator).

A practice common to the whole Orthodox world for sixteen centuries was altered on that warrant. It is fair to ask whether the warrant was proportionate to the change, and to answer that it was not.

4. The Manner of the Change

Before 1923 there was one thing on which every Orthodox Church agreed without discussion: the days on which the feasts fell. It was, in the strict sense, catholic practice — kept everywhere by everyone.

It was changed by some churches and not others, at different dates over four decades, and against the express objection of the three ancient patriarchates that had not been present when it was proposed. The result is the situation any Orthodox Christian in a Western city can observe: two canonical parishes a mile apart, in communion with each other, keeping the Nativity thirteen days apart, with the Nativity Fast of one falling inside the Nativity feast of the other.

The Nicene principle invoked at Nicaea and the Independence of the Christian Reckoning — that the churches should keep the feast together, with one accord and on the same day — was a principle about common observance. Whatever else may be said for the Revised Julian calendar, it broke a common observance without producing a new one, and it did so unilaterally. A church that declines to participate in that breach, and keeps what everyone kept, is not the party that fractured the practice.

This argument cuts against a certain kind of old calendarism as well, and the collection means it to. If common observance is the good being defended, then breaking communion over the calendar destroys the very thing the argument is for (see The Old Calendarist Separations).

5. Continuity With the Calendar of the Corpus

The hymns, the rubrics, the lives, and the local traditions of the Orthodox year were written by people counting Julian days. The Russian Church’s Typikon, its Nastolnaya Kniga, its Paschal tables, and the whole body of nineteenth- and twentieth-century liturgical scholarship that this repository cites are Julian documents. Reading them against a Julian calendar is reading them in their own terms.

Here a concession is owed, and it is one that old-calendar writing often gets wrong. The internal intervals of the fixed calendar are preserved on either calendar: the Circumcision remains the eighth day from the Nativity; the Meeting remains the fortieth; the Annunciation remains nine months before the Nativity; the conception of the Forerunner on 23 September remains six months before the Annunciation. Those are relations within the Menaion and they survive a uniform shift of the whole grid. Arguments that the New Calendar destroys them are simply mistaken.

What is not preserved is the relation of the fixed grid to the movable cycle — which is the Apostles’ Fast problem, argument 2 — and the relation of the fixed grid to the natural year, which is where the argument runs the other way (below).

6. A Pastoral Consideration, Named as Such

For Orthodox Christians in the West, the Julian Nativity Fast runs through the secular Christmas season and the Nativity itself falls after it. Many find this an advantage: the feast is kept as a feast rather than as the religious annex of a public holiday, and the fast is kept when fasting is hardest and therefore means most.

This is a consideration, not an argument. It is the mirror image of the pastoral case on the other side (see The Case on the Other Side), and neither version settles anything. It is recorded because it is a real part of why the practice is loved, and because the collection would be less than honest if it presented only the technical case.

What This Argument Does Not Establish

The position is stronger for stating its limits, and several claims common in old-calendar literature are not made here because they cannot be sustained.

Nicaea did not prescribe the Julian calendar. There is no such canon and no such synodal act. The claim is false and should not be repeated (see Nicaea and the Independence of the Christian Reckoning).

The “Sigillion of 1583” will not bear weight. The synods of 1583, 1587, and 1593 under Jeremias II did reject the Gregorian reform, and that is enough; the anathemas of the circulated Sigillion text are of contested authenticity and this library does not rely on them (see What the Julian Calendar Is).

The astronomical drift is real and this argument does not answer it. The fixed calendar will continue to slide, a day every 128 years, indefinitely. Nothing above denies that or offers a remedy for it. The old-calendar position is that the liturgical cost of the mixed calendar is greater than the cost of the drift, not that there is no cost.

Appeals to the beauty or the mystical fitness of the Julian reckoning are aesthetic, not theological, and appeals to signs and miracles as proof of a calendar are not arguments this collection uses.

And nothing here is a reason to break communion. The whole of section 07 exists to say so, and it is not an appendix to this file but its necessary companion.

References

“Can the Apostles Fast Ever Be Skipped by Those Using the New Calendar or Old Calendar?” Sretensky Monastery Q&A. Pravoslavie.ru / OrthoChristian.com.
Ecumenical Patriarchate. “Preparation of a Council: A History.” orthodoxcouncil.org (locator for the pre-conciliar process).
Rose, Hieromonk Seraphim. “The Rule of Fasting in the Orthodox Church.” The Orthodox Word; widely reprinted.
Schmemann, Alexander. Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1966.
Skaballanovich, Mikhail. Tolkovyi Tipikon [The Explanatory Typikon]. 3 vols. Kiev, 1910–1915.
Viscuso, Patrick, ed. and trans. A Quest for Reform of the Orthodox Church: The 1923 Pan-Orthodox Congress. Berkeley: InterOrthodox Press, 2006.
Typikon (Ustav), the Markan chapters and the chapters on the fasts.