The Case on the Other Side

The case for the Revised Julian calendar is a serious one and is set out here in its own terms and at its strongest: nothing dogmatic attaches to Julian reckoning, the astronomical drift is real and unbounded, the reform was more conservative than it is usually credited with being, pastoral unity with the surrounding society is a genuine good, and the churches that made the change are ancient patriarchates whose Orthodoxy has never been in question. The reply to the Apostles’ Fast argument is given in full.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Why This File Exists

This collection favours the old calendar and says so (see The Case for the Old Calendar). A partisan account of the opposing position would make that preference worthless, because a preference formed against a caricature is not a judgment. The methodology of this repository requires that opposing positions be reported accurately, in their own terms, from their own sources, and at their strongest (METHODOLOGY §4.1). That requirement is not a courtesy here; it is the only thing that makes section 06 an argument rather than an assertion.

Nothing in this file is hedged, softened, or set up to be knocked down. Readers who find it persuasive are reading it correctly.

1. Nothing Dogmatic Attaches to the Julian Reckoning

This is the foundation of the whole case and it is not seriously contestable. No Ecumenical Council defined a solar calendar. Nicaea settled that Pascha is kept on a Sunday, in common, and independently of the Jewish reckoning; it did not promulgate a computus and did not legislate the Julian calendar, which was simply the civil instrument everyone used (see Nicaea and the Independence of the Christian Reckoning).

A calendar is therefore a matter of order, not of faith. And matters of order are precisely the matters a church may adjust for good reason. The burden of proof, on this view, lies on the party claiming that a Roman civil convention of 45 BC has acquired a status that no council ever gave it.

2. The Drift Is Real, Unbounded, and Getting Worse

The Julian year is about eleven minutes too long. That error does not oscillate and does not self-correct: it accumulates at one day per 128 years, for ever.

The present offset is thirteen days. It becomes fourteen in 2100, fifteen in 2200, and so on without limit. Continue the trend and the Nativity, kept in the depth of winter with hymns that assume it, migrates through spring and into summer. That outcome is centuries away and it is also inevitable, and a church that regards itself as responsible for the liturgical life of future generations cannot dismiss it as somebody else’s problem.

Several fixed feasts carry an explicit relation to the solar year that this drift dissolves. The Nativity stands near the winter solstice and the Nativity of the Forerunner near the summer solstice — the pairing that St Augustine and the Latin tradition read through John 3:30, “He must increase, but I must decrease,” and which the Eastern tradition also reflects in the six-month interval of the Annunciation narrative (Luke 1:26, 36). The Annunciation stands near the vernal equinox. These are not decorations; they are part of what the feasts say. Talley’s study of the origins of the liturgical year documents how deeply the early calendar’s solar reckonings shaped the placement of the feasts (Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year, 2nd ed., Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991, pp. 79–103).

And the Revised Julian scheme is not a capitulation to Rome. Its leap rule gives a mean year of 365.242222 days, closer to the tropical year than the Gregorian 365.2425. It is, on the merits, the most accurate calendar in ecclesiastical use anywhere.

3. The Church Has Corrected Her Reckoning Before

The claim that the Church’s calendar is an untouchable deposit does not survive contact with the history of the computus.

The Alexandrian nineteen-year reckoning did not descend from the apostles; it displaced earlier and cruder cycles in the fourth century. Rome used an eighty-four-year cycle for generations after Nicaea; Victorius of Aquitaine produced a rival table in 457; Dionysius Exiguus recast the Alexandrian tables in 525 and it took a century and more for his reckoning to prevail; the Churches of Britain and Ireland kept a different Easter until Whitby in 664 and later (Mosshammer, The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008; Declercq, Anno Domini, Turnhout: Brepols, 2000). The ecclesiastical calendar has been revised, harmonized, and argued over throughout the Church’s life. A twentieth-century correction of the fixed calendar stands in that line, not outside it.

4. The Reform Was Conservative, Not Radical

This point is regularly lost and it is one of the strongest available.

The 1923 Congress had before it a genuinely radical option: computing Pascha astronomically at the meridian of Jerusalem, which would have moved Orthodox Pascha and probably aligned it with the West. It declined. The Revised Julian scheme touches only the fixed calendar and leaves the Paschalion exactly as received (see The Revised Julian Calendar and Its Reception).

The result is that every Orthodox Church on earth save Finland keeps Pascha, Holy Week, Pentecost and the whole movable cycle on the same days. The one thing that could genuinely have split the Orthodox year was deliberately protected. Judged by what its authors chose not to do, the reform was an act of restraint.

5. Pastoral Unity Is a Genuine Good

This is the argument that actually moves people, and it deserves to be stated as more than convenience.

An Orthodox minority in a Western country lives inside a civil year it did not make. When the Church’s Nativity coincides with the country’s, the feast falls on a day when families are together and no one must choose between the Liturgy and their employer. When it does not, the children of Orthodox families keep a secular Christmas in December with their schoolmates and a religious one in January, and the two are experienced as different holidays; converts must explain to their parents why they are not at the family table; and the great feast of the Incarnation arrives on an ordinary working Tuesday.

The apostolic principle of accommodation is not nothing: “I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22). It is not a licence to change doctrine, but it has always governed the Church’s handling of order and custom, and the missionary history of Orthodoxy — Cyril and Methodius translating the services, the Alaskan and Japanese missions adapting practice to local life — is a history of exactly such accommodation.

One text should be handled honestly, because the New Calendar side often cites it and it proves less than it is asked to: “One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind” (Romans 14:5). St Paul is addressing Jewish observances in a mixed congregation, not the liturgical calendars of local churches, and the passage does not license private calendrical choice. What it does establish, and this is not trivial, is that in the apostolic mind the observance of days is the sort of question over which brethren are not to condemn one another (Romans 14:3–4, 10).

6. The Churches That Changed Are the Ancient Churches

The Revised Julian calendar is kept by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, by the Patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch, and by the Churches of Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Albania, the Czech Lands and Slovakia, and — for most of its parishes — the Orthodox Church in America.

These are not marginal bodies. Alexandria is the see of Athanasius and Cyril; Antioch is where the disciples were first called Christians. Their Orthodoxy has never been questioned by any canonical church, and no Orthodox synod anywhere has ever suggested that adopting the Revised Julian calendar affected a church’s standing. Any argument whose logic implies otherwise has proved too much and refuted itself (see Why the Calendar Is Not a Dogma).

7. The Reply on the Apostles’ Fast

The Apostles’ Fast anomaly is the sharpest argument against the mixed calendar, and this file does not pretend it away. The reply has three parts and it is a real reply.

The fast is the most variable and the least fixed of the four. Even on the Julian calendar its length swings from about a week to six weeks, purely as a function of where Pascha falls; the tradition has always tolerated an enormous elasticity here that it tolerates in none of the other fasts (see Orthodoxy: Fasting Periods). Its origins are also the latest and the most regionally varied of the four. A structure that the received tradition itself allows to shrink to a week is not the load-bearing wall of the liturgical year.

The severity is the mildest. The Apostles’ Fast is, in common practice, the most lenient of the four; the repository’s own account notes that outside monasteries fish is often permitted on all days but Wednesday and Friday. The loss, where it occurs, is of the least demanding of the seasons.

And the churches concerned have not simply shrugged. New Calendar jurisdictions publish their own fasting guidance for the Apostles’ Fast, including in years when the calculated period is very short or absent, and the faithful in them fast. Where the calculated fast vanishes, pastors direct the observance in other ways; where it is short, it is kept.

What the reply concedes, and any honest version of it must concede, is that a season which in some years does not occur is in those years not a season. The New Calendar defender’s answer is that this is a real but minor cost, incurred for the sake of a real and continuing benefit, and that liturgical arrangements are always trade-offs. That is a coherent position and it is not obviously wrong.

8. The Fruits of Calendar Zeal

The last argument on this side is empirical and uncomfortable. The most visible historical consequence of treating the calendar as a matter worth contending for has been schism: the Greek separations after 1924, their repeated fragmentation into rival synods, the parallel bodies in Romania and Bulgaria, and the network of small jurisdictions that define themselves by the question (see The Old Calendarist Separations).

A New Calendar bishop may fairly ask what a practice is worth that has produced this, and whether a church that keeps the old calendar can prevent its people from drawing the conclusion the separatists drew.

The answer this collection gives is in section 07: the separations followed not from the calendar but from making the calendar a boundary of the Church, and a jurisdiction that keeps the Julian calendar while remaining in communion with those who do not — as ROCOR does — refutes the inference in practice. But the question is a fair one and it is put here at full force.

Where the Disagreement Actually Lies

Not in dogma; both sides agree there is none at stake. Not in the Paschalion; both sides keep the same one. Not in the boundaries of the Church; no canonical body has made the calendar a test.

The disagreement is about the relative weight of two goods: the integrity of a received liturgical structure whose parts are calibrated to one another, and the fitness of the calendar to the sun and to the life of the surrounding society. Reasonable Orthodox Christians weigh those differently. This library weighs them as The Case for the Old Calendar sets out, and does not suppose that those who weigh them otherwise are thereby less Orthodox.

See Also

References

  • Declercq, Georges. Anno Domini: The Origins of the Christian Era. Turnhout: Brepols, 2000.
  • Mosshammer, Alden A. The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
  • Patsavos, Lewis J. “Dating Pascha in the Orthodox Church”; “The Calendar of the Orthodox Church.” Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, goarch.org.
  • Talley, Thomas J. The Origins of the Liturgical Year. 2nd ed. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991.
  • Viscuso, Patrick, ed. and trans. A Quest for Reform of the Orthodox Church: The 1923 Pan-Orthodox Congress. Berkeley: InterOrthodox Press, 2006.
  • Ware, Timothy (Kallistos). The Orthodox Church. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1993.
  • World Council of Churches / Middle East Council of Churches. Towards a Common Date for Easter. Aleppo, 1997. oikoumene.org.