Origins of Feasts, Fasts and Seasons, The

Paul F. Bradshaw, Paul Bradshaw

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780281060542
• eBook ISBN: 9780281065974
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

The liturgical year is a relatively modern invention. The term itself only came into use in the late sixteenth century. In antiquity, Christians did not view the various festivals and fasts that they experienced as a unified whole. Instead, the different seasons formed a number of completely unrelated cycles and tended to overlap and conflict with one another. Drawing upon the latest research, the authors track the development of the Church's feasts, fasts and seasons, including the Sabbath and Sunday, Holy Week and Easter, Christmas and Epiphany, and the feasts of the Virgin Mary, the martyrs and other saints.

Martyrs and other saints

Chapter 19

The first martyrs and saints

No study of the origins of feasts, fasts and seasons in early Christianity would be complete without attention to one of the most significant early developments in Christian liturgical celebration, namely, the cult of martyrs and, later, of other saints, combining to make up eventually a sanctorale, or sanctoral cycle, in the liturgical calendars, a cycle of saints’ feasts to be distinguished from the temporal cycle, to which this book has been dedicated up until now. It has often been the case among liturgical scholars, with some notable exceptions,1 that the sanctorale was treated as but an appendage or extended footnote to what was perceived to be the more important focus of the major feasts and seasons. For example, Talley in The Origins of the Liturgical Year did not deal with the origins and development of the sanctorale at all. Indeed, part of the reason the sanctoral cycle has not always received the attention that it should, we suspect, is that theologians, historians and, perhaps especially, liturgiologists have tended to denigrate or even dismiss, albeit unconsciously, what is often (even pejoratively) called ‘popular religion’ as but ‘superstition’, vestiges of ‘paganism’, or as reflecting somehow a ‘lower’ form of belief and practice among the ‘unenlightened’ than the ‘official religion’ of the elite, and it is certainly the case that the cult of martyrs and saints, on one level at least, is part and parcel of what may be called ‘popular religion’.

More recent scholarship, however, has been willing to embrace a much broader view of the whole, including the religious lives and practices of the poor, women and others as theological and liturgical ‘sources’. For our purposes here, Peter Brown’s important 1981 work, The Cult of the Saints, represents a significant scholarly shift in this context. Here, in particular, Brown argues convincingly that the real history of the early Church is to be read, precisely, in the development of the ‘popular’ practices and beliefs associated with the cult of the martyrs and later saints at their shrines in the overall shaping of late antique culture, religion and society, practices shared by both the intellectually elite and others in the Church, in spite of their differing intellectual facilities. That is, such practices must be seen as a basic, rather than peripheral, expression of Christian faith and piety in general within this period.2

On a similar note, Robert Taft has written of the turn in this direction that his own work has taken, saying:

In so doing I have, in a sense, been responding to my own appeal, made years ago, that we ‘integrate into our work the methods of the relatively recent pietà popolare or annales schools of Christian history in Europe’ and study liturgy not just from the top down, i.e., in its official or semi-official texts, but also from the bottom up, ‘as something real people did’.3

And Ramsay MacMullen has argued in his 2009 study, The Second Church, based largely on archaeological evidence, that of the Christian populations in ancient urban centres, perhaps 5 per cent of that population (the elite) participated regularly in the Church’s official worship, while the other 95 per cent constituted the ‘second church’, whose Christian identity and practice was shaped by and focused on the cult of the martyrs in cemeteries and tombs.4 So important and formative was this martyr cult in antiquity, according to Candida Moss, that, based on various written Acts of the martyrs,5 which present the martyr(s) as another Christ in his Passion, the Acts themselves functioned, along with canonical sources, in the development of popular Christology, even to the point at times with the martyrs threatening to replace Christ, an issue with which certainly Augustine will deal in North Africa. Moss argues further that, in the first three centuries at least, Christian discipleship, especially as a literal ‘imitation of Christ’, was conceived of primarily as martyrdom.6 Robin Darling Young, too, offers an excellent overview of the early role of the cult of the martyrs:

Of all early Christian practices, the veneration of the martyr-saints was the most popular and accessible. With a unanimity that eluded them in other matters of belief, Christians repeatedly gave three reasons for honouring these men and women as the most admirable and intensely exemplary of believers. First, the imitation of Christ enjoined on all believers appeared most visibly in their triumphant deaths. Second, in reward for their faithfulness, the martyrs now in heaven possessed special powers. And third, when Christians praised and supplicated them, the martyrs would return the favor of visible assistance. This complex rationale appears either implicitly or explicitly in numerous forms of literature attesting to early Christian martyrdom.7

Given the importance that the cult of the saints was to have in the development of Christianity in both East and West, it is disappointing to find minimal written documentary evidence from within the time frame of the first three centuries. What evidence we do have, however, underscores that the cult of the martyrs was local and associated directly with t...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• About the Alcuin Club
• Title page
• Imprint
• Memorial
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Sabbath and Sunday
• Easter and Pentecost
• Lent and Holy Week
• Christmas and Epiphany
• Martyrs and other saints
• Search items for modern authors
• Search items for ancient authors and subjects