The Feast and the Fast

The Apostle Philip is commemorated across the Orthodox world on November 14, and his feast holds a place in the Church’s year out of all proportion to the thinness of his record: it is the last day before the forty-day Nativity Fast begins, the fast the Slavic churches call the “Philip’s Fast” (Filippov post) precisely because it opens on the morrow of his commemoration. This file sets out the fixed feast and its hymnography, and the Nativity Fast that his memory ushers in.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Feast of November 14

The commemoration of the Holy and All-Praised Apostle Philip is fixed in the Orthodox calendar on November 14 (Old Style; November 27 on the New Style / civil calendar for churches following the Julian reckoning). The feast is observed across all the canonical Orthodox Churches — a Pan-Orthodox commemoration of one of the Twelve — and it is one of the principal apostolic feasts of the late-autumn calendar (see The Church Calendar). The propers of the day, in the Menaion for November, praise Philip as the disciple called early by the Lord, who brought Nathanael to Christ, who said “Show us the Father,” who preached the gospel among the nations, and who suffered for Christ at Hierapolis — gathering the Gospel scenes and the mission-and-martyrdom tradition into the liturgical memory of the apostle (Menaion for November, November 14; The Great Synaxaristes: November).

It is on this day that the Church venerates the Apostle Philip — one of the Twelve, the apostle of Hierapolis — as distinct from Philip the Deacon and Evangelist, who is commemorated separately among the Seven (traditionally October 11) (see The Two Philips). The November 14 feast belongs to the apostle.

The Eve of the Nativity Fast

The feast’s special prominence comes from its position in the calendar. The Nativity Fast — the forty-day fast preparing for the feast of the Nativity of Christ (December 25 OS / January 7 NS) — begins on November 15, the day immediately after Philip’s commemoration. Because it opens on the morrow of the apostle’s feast, the fast is popularly known in the Slavic churches as the “Philip’s Fast” (Russian Filippov post; also Filippovka), and the eve, November 14, as zagovenie — the last day of full eating before the fast (zagovenie na Filippov post). The repository’s treatment of the fasting periods states the connection plainly: the Nativity Fast “is also called the ‘Philip’s Fast’ (Filippov Post) because it begins on the day after the feast of the Apostle Philip (November 14 OS / November 27 NS)” (see The Fasting Periods). Thus the apostle whose Gospel voice is brief gives his name, in the popular piety of the Slavic Orthodox world, to one of the four great fasts of the year.

The Shape of the Nativity Fast

The Nativity Fast runs forty days, from November 15 to December 24 (OS) — November 28 to January 6 (NS) — mirroring the forty days of Great Lent in length, though it is observed with a generally milder rule. It is a period of preparation, prayer, and almsgiving leading to the Nativity, with abstinence from meat and dairy throughout and a graded permitting of fish, wine, and oil on appointed days; the strictness intensifies in the final days, the Forefeast of the Nativity (December 20–24 OS), when fish is no longer permitted and the fast tightens toward the Eve (Sochelnik), kept as a strict fast until the first star (see The Fasting Periods). The fast culminates in the great feast of the Nativity of Christ, one of the Twelve Great Feasts of the Church (see The Great Feasts).

The pastoral character of the fast — its coincidence with the Western Christmas season for Julian-calendar churches, and the discretion exercised with one’s spiritual father over its measure — belongs to the treatment of the fasting periods proper (see The Fasting Periods). For the present purpose the point is the apostle’s place in the rhythm of the year: Philip stands at the threshold of the Nativity Fast, the last commemoration before the Church turns, for forty days, toward Bethlehem.

Why the Apostle at the Threshold

There is a fitness, often noted in Orthodox devotion, in the apostle of “Lord, show us the Father” standing at the door of the fast that prepares for the coming of the Son in the flesh. Philip’s great question — the longing to see God — receives in the Gospel the answer “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9; see Show Us the Father); and the Nativity, toward which his feast opens the fast, is the very event in which the invisible God is made visible, the Word made flesh and dwelling among men (John 1:14), so that the world might at last see the Father in the Son. The placement is calendrical accident in its origin — the fast simply begins after his fixed feast — but the Church has felt and voiced the deeper congruity: the apostle who asked to see the Father ushers in the season of God made visible. So Philip, brief of voice in the Gospel, is kept long in the Church’s year, the herald at the threshold of the fast of the Incarnation.

See Also

References

  • The Menaion for November. (The propers of the feast of the Apostle Philip, November 14.)
  • The Great Synaxaristes of the Orthodox Church: November. Buena Vista, CO: Holy Apostles Convent. (The synaxarion for November 14.)
  • The Fasting Periods (this repository), orthodoxy/06-liturgical-life/fasting/fasting-periods.md. (The Nativity Fast / “Philip’s Fast,” its forty-day shape, and its beginning on November 15.)
  • The Holy Bible, Authorized (King James) Version. (John 1:14; 14:9.)