Pascha: The Feast of Feasts

Pascha — the Resurrection of Christ — is not reckoned among the Twelve Great Feasts because it stands above all counting, “the Feast of Feasts and the Triumph of Triumphs.” This file sets out the Paschal mystery as the ground and summit of the whole liturgical year, and shows why the Twelve Great Feasts are, in Orthodox understanding, so many refractions of the single light of Pascha.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Above the Twelve

The Orthodox liturgical books do not list Pascha among the Great Feasts. It is set apart, in a class of its own, hymned as “the Feast of Feasts and the Festival of Festivals” (heortē heortōn kai panēgyris panēgyreōn) — the phrase of the Paschal Canon of St John of Damascus, sung at Matins of Pascha (Canon of Pascha, Ode 8; The Pentecostarion, trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, 1990, pp. 24–34). The essay this collection expands states the principle plainly: “Pascha, being in a class above all other feasts, is not counted among the Twelve” (Orthodoxy: The Great Feasts). To understand the Twelve, one must therefore begin outside them, with the feast they all serve.

Alexander Schmemann made this the axis of his liturgical theology: the whole Christian year, he argued, is not a neutral wheel of commemorations but a movement whose center and source is the Resurrection, so that “the liturgical year in its entirety” is “the manifestation and the actualization” of the one Pascha, extended and unfolded in time (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, SVS Press, 1966, ch. 4, “The Liturgy of Time”). Every Sunday is already a “little Pascha,” a weekly Resurrection, and it was around this weekly Paschal core that the annual feasts crystallized (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, ch. 2–4; cf. For the Life of the World, SVS Press, 1973, ch. 3, on time and the Kingdom).

The Paschal Mystery

Pascha celebrates the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead on the third day — but the Orthodox feast never isolates the Resurrection from the death it overturns. The very word carries this: Pascha is the Greek and Latin form of the Hebrew Pesaḥ, “Passover,” and the Fathers read it, by a long-standing (if etymologically inexact) association, as passage — Christ’s passover “from death to life, and from earth to heaven,” in the words of the Paschal Canon (Canon of Pascha, Ode 1; Pentecostarion, p. 25). The feast is the Christian Passover: as Israel passed through the Red Sea from bondage to freedom, so Christ, the true Paschal Lamb, passes through death and draws humanity with him (1 Corinthians 5:7, “Christ our Pascha is sacrificed for us”; the reading of Exodus at the Paschal Vigil).

This is why the paschal proclamation is inseparably one of death-and-rising. The most frequently sung hymn of the entire Orthodox Church, the Paschal troparion, holds the two together in a single breath: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life” (troparion of Pascha, Tone 5; Pentecostarion, p. 5). Death is not merely escaped but used — “trampling down death by death”: it is precisely through his own death that Christ destroys death, so that the Cross and the empty tomb are two moments of one victory. The great catechetical sermon read at Paschal Matins, attributed to St John Chrysostom, presses the paradox to its height: “Hell was embittered when it met Thee below… it took a body and encountered God” (the Paschal Catechetical Homily, read at Matins of Pascha; Pentecostarion, p. 32).

The Orthodox icon of Pascha renders the same theology. It does not depict the moment of Christ stepping from the tomb — a Western artistic convention — but the Descent into Hades (Anastasis): Christ, standing on the shattered gates of hell, seizes Adam and Eve by the wrist and hauls them from their graves, the whole race raised in its forefather (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, rev. ed., SVS Press, 1982, on the Anastasis icon; and see The Icon of the Feast). The Resurrection, so pictured, is not one man’s private triumph but the cosmic defeat of death and the liberation of all who were held by it — which is exactly what the paschal hymns confess (Kontakion of Pascha; Pentecostarion, p. 30).

The Ground of the Twelve

If Pascha is the sun, the Twelve Great Feasts are its light broken into colors across the year. This is not a modern metaphor imposed on the feasts; it is how the tradition orders them. The two feasts that are themselves movable and cluster nearest to Pascha — the Entry into Jerusalem the Sunday before, and the Ascension and Pentecost in the fifty days after — belong so tightly to the Paschal event that their propers are printed not in the Menaion with the fixed feasts but in the Triodion and the Pentecostarion, the very books of the Paschal cycle (The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Ware, Faber, 1978, for Palm Sunday; Pentecostarion, for Ascension and Pentecost). The Passion and Resurrection are the gravitational center around which these feasts orbit.

But the dependence runs deeper than the calendar. Each of the Twelve is, in the end, ordered to Pascha. The feasts of the Incarnation — Nativity, Annunciation — celebrate the God who takes flesh precisely in order to die and rise: “He was born that we might be reborn” is the logic of the Nativity hymns, and the Nativity icon already shows the Child bound in swaddling bands like a corpse and laid in a cave like a tomb (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, on the Nativity icon; see The Nativity of Christ). Theophany sanctifies the waters that will become the waters of baptism, through which the faithful die and rise with Christ (Romans 6:3–4; the Great Blessing of Waters; see Theophany). The Transfiguration shows in advance the glory of the risen body (see The Transfiguration). Even the Marian feasts point to Pascha: the Dormition is the Theotokos’s own passover, her personal participation in her Son’s victory over the tomb, and its hymns deliberately echo the paschal note that “neither the tomb nor death had power over the Theotokos” (Kontakion of the Dormition; The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Ware, Faber, 1969, p. 528; see The Dormition). Schmemann’s judgment is exact: the feasts are the “unfolding” of the paschal mystery across the categories of time (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, ch. 4).

The Summit as Well as the Ground

Pascha is not only the source of the feasts but their goal — not only the ground beneath them but the summit toward which they climb. The entire structure of Great Lent is a forty-day ascent to it, and the Paschal season of fifty days that follows is the extended dwelling in its light, so that for nearly a quarter of the year the whole worshiping life of the Church is explicitly Paschal (Schmemann, Great Lent, SVS Press, 1969, on Lent as journey to Pascha; Pentecostarion, on the fifty days). Ware’s introduction to the Festal Menaion accordingly treats the fixed feasts as the “framework” of the year, but a framework whose keystone lies outside it, in the movable Paschal cycle (Ware, “The Meaning of the Great Feasts,” in The Festal Menaion, Introduction).

There is a dogmatic reason for this primacy, and St Paul states it: “if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). The Resurrection is not one saving event among others but the event that validates and completes them all; without it the Incarnation would be a tragedy and the Cross a defeat. That is why the Church, in ordering her feasts, refuses to number Pascha among the Twelve. To count it as one of them would be to reduce it to their level; instead it is left standing above them, the “Feast of Feasts,” so that the Twelve may be understood for what they are — not twelve independent commemorations but twelve windows onto the one mystery of Christ crucified and risen (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, ch. 4; For the Life of the World, ch. 3).

References

The Pentecostarion. Trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery. Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1990. (The Canon of Pascha; the Paschal troparion and kontakion; the Catechetical Homily attributed to St John Chrysostom.)
The Festal Menaion. Trans. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. (Ware’s introduction, “The Meaning of the Great Feasts”; the Dormition kontakion.)
The Lenten Triodion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1978.
Schmemann, Alexander. Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1966. (The liturgy of time; the year as the unfolding of Pascha.)
Schmemann, Alexander. Great Lent. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1969.
Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973.
Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1982.
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 5:7; 15:14; Romans 6:3–4.