08 — East and West
The Synod of Whitby (664) was a dispute over the computus — which Easter table to follow — settled within one undivided Church, not a confessional split between communions that did not yet exist. This section reads what that seventh-century quarrel over a divided Pascha can and cannot teach about the much later, twentieth-century Orthodox calendar question, drawn strictly as an analogy; and it sets St. Colmán within the Orthodox Church’s recovery of the pre-Schism saints of the West, asking how a man who lost a synod is nonetheless honored as a saint. The aim throughout is precision against anachronism: Whitby is emphatically not “Rome versus Orthodoxy,” and the irony, properly stated, cuts in a surprising direction.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; defender of the Celtic Pascha)
The two files in this section turn from narrative to reflection, but they hold to the same discipline as the rest of the compendium: every parallel between St. Colmán’s age and our own is named as a parallel, and never allowed to collapse the six centuries and the Great Schism that lie between them. The seventh-century Insular and Roman parties disputing the date of Easter at Whitby were members of a single, undivided communion; the Alexandrian-Roman reckoning that prevailed there is, in calendrical terms, the same family of computation — the 19-year cycle on a Julian basis — that the Orthodox Church still uses to fix Pascha today (Bede, HE III.25; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969; Corning 2006, 7–17). To read the “Roman” victors of 664 as the ancestors of the modern Gregorian West, or the defeated Irish as proto-Orthodox, is to misread the calendar history at both ends. The first file works out, carefully, what the episode does and does not prefigure; the second considers the veneration of a defeated saint and the principle that sanctity is not the same as being right on a disciplinary question.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Paschal Question and the Orthodox Calendar | Whitby as a computus dispute within one Church, read by analogy against the modern Julian / Revised-Julian / Gregorian calendar question; the Gregorian reform of 1582 and the 1923 Pan-Orthodox Congress; the fact that Orthodox Pascha is still computed on the Julian 19-year cycle, so that the “Roman” side at Whitby stands, in calendar terms, nearer to present Orthodox practice than to the modern Gregorian; the pastoral scandal of a divided Pascha, and the value and limits of uniformity. |
| Colmán the Saint | St. Colmán’s veneration as a pre-Schism saint of the common patrimony of East and West; his feast on 18 February and the thin liturgical and martyrological record of his cult; the Mayo connection; the distinction between his commemoration in Irish and Western martyrologies and the modern Orthodox recovery of pre-Schism Western saints; and how the Church can honor the holiness of one who was overruled in a synod. |
See Also
- The Two Easters — the technical computus underlying the whole controversy
- What Was Really at Stake — that Whitby turned on discipline and authority, not on doctrine
- Honor for the Defeated — Bede’s respect for the man he believed was in error
- The Church Calendar — the Julian, Revised Julian, and Paschalion systems of modern Orthodoxy
- Pre-Schism Church — the undivided communion to which Whitby belongs
References
- Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum). Edited and translated by Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Book III.25–26; Book V.21.)
- Corning, Caitlin. The Celtic and Roman Traditions: Conflict and Consensus in the Early Medieval Church. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
- Mosshammer, Alden A. The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
- Declercq, Georges. Anno Domini: The Origins of the Christian Era. Turnhout: Brepols, 2000.