02 — The Paschal Controversy

The dispute that defined St. Colmán’s episcopate and his place in history was not a quarrel over the faith but over the reckoning of time: how to calculate the date of Pascha, and how the clergy should be tonsured. The Insular churches of Iona and Lindisfarne kept an older 84-year Easter cycle (the latercus) and an older tonsure; the party advancing the Alexandrian-Roman 19-year cycle and the coronal tonsure pressed for conformity. This section sets out the technical substance of that disagreement — the computus, the lunar limits, the tonsure, and the points of custom at issue — and insists, with the sources, on what was not at stake: the Creed, the sacraments, and the faith of the one undivided Church.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; defender of the Celtic Pascha)

When Colmán came south from Iona to govern Lindisfarne in 661, he inherited not only the see of Aidan but a paschal practice that the Columban familia had carried since the sixth century and that an increasingly confident “Roman” party in Northumbria — led by men such as Wilfrid and supported by the Kentish and Frankish churches — regarded as obsolete and even schismatic. The collision came to a head at the Synod of Whitby in 664, treated in its own section; here the task is to understand precisely what was being argued about. Two technical questions dominate. The first is the computus: the body of astronomical and calendrical rules by which the date of Easter is fixed each year, where the Insular 84-year cycle and the Alexandrian 19-year cycle diverged in their equinox, their lunar limits, and their cycle-length, so that in certain years the two traditions kept Pascha — and ended Lent — on different Sundays. The second is the tonsure, the shape of a monk’s or cleric’s shaven head, which each side invested with symbolic and polemical meaning. Our principal narrator throughout is Bede, writing two generations later as a convinced partisan of the Roman reckoning, whose testimony must be read for its evidence and weighed for its bias (Bede, HE III.25, V.21; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The doctrinal even-handedness the sources themselves permit — and which our methodology requires (METHODOLOGY §4) — is the controlling note of the whole section.

Files in This Section

File Description
The Two Easters The technical heart: the Insular 84-year latercus against the Alexandrian/Roman 19-year (Dionysiac) cycle; the components of the computus (equinox, lunar limits luna 14–20 vs 15–21, the rule against keeping Pascha with the Jews); and how these could place Easter, and the end of Lent, on different Sundays in one year — Bede’s notice of Oswiu feasting while Queen Eanflæd still fasted (HE III.25).
The Tonsure and Other Customs The Celtic ear-to-ear tonsure (“of Simon Magus” in Roman polemic) against the Roman coronal tonsure (“of St. Peter”); the symbolic weight each side gave it; the further points of difference (baptism, episcopal consecration); and, crucially, what was not at stake — no difference in Creed, sacraments, Christology, or the faith.

See Also

References

  • Bede. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum). Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Cited by book.chapter; the paschal controversy and the Eanflæd notice at III.25; Ceolfrith’s letter to Nechtan on computus and tonsure at V.21.)
  • Corning, Caitlin. The Celtic and Roman Traditions: Conflict and Consensus in the Early Medieval Church. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
  • Charles-Edwards, T. M. Early Christian Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
  • Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991.