Welcome back. On the first part of this episode, on the spiritual transformation of the world, I discussed the pilgrimage of Egeria in the late fourth century to Jerusalem where, at the Church of the Resurrection or Anastasis, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, she experienced the transformation of the cosmos, both its time and its space, in the worship of the resurrectional vigil. In this part, I would like to discuss the spiritual transformation of time specifically, and I’ll begin by looking at the way in which traditional Christianity began to transform chronology, or the understanding of the measuring of time. As we’ll see, chronology became an extension of the Church’s very cosmology.

To begin, it’s worth thinking about how time was measured in the ancient world, among both Jews and pagans. The Jewish calendar, of course, was well known well before the rise of traditional Christianity. The Jews had developed the seven-day week, the last day of which was the sabbath, the day of rest. God had created, according to the book of Genesis, the world in six days, beginning on the first day of the week, which would be our Sunday, and concluding on the seventh day of the week, which would be our current Saturday. The Jews also measured time cyclically, with a series of feasts, such as the Passover, throughout the year, as well as occasional fasting periods.

The Jewish calendar, of course, had very little impact on the pagan Roman Empire. It was the pagan calendar, or rather calendars, that most shaped the environment, the cultural atmosphere, in which the early Church arose. Pagan culture gave a great deal of attention to the measure of time, especially in a linear way. Before even the time of Christ, some in the Roman Republic had begun to measure time from what they considered to be the year in which the city of Rome itself was founded, which for a Christian would be 753 years before Christ. Others, after the rise of the Empire, measured time in a linear direction in relationship to a given emperor, such as Diocletian. In fact, many Christians early in the history of the Church, after the Great Persecution even, measured time in this way.

There was a real fluidity in measuring time, and the calendar was frequently altered by rulers of the Roman Republic and Empire. Julius Caesar, for instance, introduced in the year 45 BC, exactly one year before his assassination, the Julian calendar, named after him, borrowing it from Egypt which he of course had largely conquered and annexed during his reign. Julius Caesar also named one of the months of the calendar after himself, July, so that even today every time we in the modern world sign a check, let’s say, or otherwise commemorate the month of July, we do homage to the man after whom that month is named, Julius Caesar. After Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, his successor, likewise named a month after him, which month will be obvious to anyone who thinks about it on the calendar.

Well, this was the way things stood in the pagan Roman Empire when the Church found herself in a position of influence under the patronage of the Christian state and its emperors who ruled—who sought to rule—in a relationship of symphony with the Church leadership, her bishops. So the Church began to reflect on time and to develop her own chronology, her own way of measuring time. This chronology, as I said earlier, was shaped by traditional Christian cosmology. We can get a sense of what the traditional Christian cosmology said about time, about chronology, by reflecting a little bit on some of the passages from the Scriptures.

Time itself was part of the creation, part of the cosmos; not just the space, the places, the physical universe, but time itself was part of the creation of God at the beginning of time. It was created. And, of course, along with the creation, time fell. One could speak of the fall of time along with the fall of the entire cosmos. As a result, time was often spent by human beings wickedly, and many examples from the Old Testament, and not a few from the New Testament, describe examples of people living their lives and spending time in a wicked way. One example might be the behavior of the queen Jezebel in the Old Testament. So time was often misspent, spent wickedly, or it was simply wasted, and in fact I remember my professor at seminary warning us never, enjoining us never to use the expression “killing time,” at least in a positive sense—“I’m just killing time”—because, as he pointed out, time is part of God’s creation; to kill it is a great sin. One should not kill time; one should spend it properly.

And, in fact, that’s exactly what the Church sought to do. The Church sought to recreate time, and this is the point made by the Apostle Paul in his epistle to the Ephesians 5:16, when he calls upon Christians to “redeem the time, for the days are evil.” “Redeem the time, for the days are evil”: an Orthodox Christian will recognize the passage as a passage read just as Great Lent is beginning every year, the period of repentance and purification that occurs in the life of the Church every year, the beginning of Great Lent. So Paul spoke about “redeeming the time.” This is part of the Church’s effort to recreate time through the action of the Holy Spirit in our midst.

Here we can see a distinction made in the Scriptures, brought out both in the Old and the New Testament, at least the Greek version of the Old Testament called the Septuagint, a distinction between two kinds of time, which is often commented on by Orthodox scholars. One form of time is called chronos; that’s a Greek word, and it’s the word from which we get words like “chronology” and “chronograph.” It’s the measure of time as a basis for marking dates: the sequence of dates, chronos, time as it exists in the natural world might be the way this is described. This word, “chronos,” is used, for instance, by the Apostle Paul in Galatians 4:4, when Paul makes the statement, “in the fullness of time.” “In the fullness of time, Christ was born of a woman.” In the fullness of time. In other words, in this sense, chronos, time is something that unfolds in a linear direction and as a kind of goal.

But the other word that the Scriptures use for time in Greek is kairos. This is a rather different conception of time. Kairos is a kind of time that provides a basis for the intersection of creation with heaven, with divine intervention. Kairos is a conception of time where God enters into the creation and meets human beings, establishes a presence among men. In the Old Testament, this word, “kairos,” is used significantly in Psalm 118:126, and in this passage is encountered the statement: “It is time for the Lord to act.” It is time for the Lord to act (Psalm 118:26). It’s time for the Lord to act: here, God acts, and that kind of action takes place in a time different [from] chronos; this kind of time, kairos, is a time that brings God into contact with his creation.

Now, the Church, in understanding the resurrection of Christ, also brought attention to the timing of this. So the very act of Christ’s resurrection recorded in the gospels also had a dimension that was chronological. Of course, that timing was that Christ rose very early in the morning on the first day of the week. The first day of the week: the significance of that, reflected in the cosmology and the theology generally of the Church, is that Christ, having rested in the tomb on the seventh day, having been buried, died and buried and rested on the seventh day, just as God had rested after the creation of the world on the seventh day—now God, having recreated the world through his passion and resurrection, he establishes the first day of the week as the day of his resurrection.

So the Church always saw the first day of the week in this kind of eschatological light, calling it often the eighth day of the week. Of course, in a seven-day cycle and a seven-day weekly cycle, there cannot be an eighth day of the week, and this brings attention to the understanding of a complete recreation of the world. No longer does the old creation prevail.

So these are some passages from the Scriptures that give us a sense of how traditional Christian cosmology related to the measure of time. One final point to raise, before we look at some actual examples of the measure of time in Byzantine Christendom—one final point would be that the liturgy, something I described in a previous episode, especially around the eucharistic rites of the Church, the liturgy itself had a big impact on the measure of time, on the experience of time.

This can be found perhaps most powerfully in the statement or proclamation made by a deacon in the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. Just before the opening proclamation, “Blessed is the kingdom…,” is made by the priest, the deacon says to the priest, “It is time for the Lord to act.” He quotes, in fact, Psalm 118 which I mentioned earlier, using the word kairos in Greek, and here we see the emphasis, here we see the conviction in the Church that God is acting, that God is making his place in this world, that he is acting; he is bringing his very presence, the kingdom of heaven, his rule, his majesty, into this world through the Divine Liturgy, through this liturgification of time.

Having said that, having reviewed some of the points in the cosmology of the Church and how that impacted her understanding of time, let’s take a look at specific ways that the calendars of Christendom were developed, calendars which in certain places will seem very familiar to us because, even though we live in a post-Christian society, we still live in Christendom.

So the first calendar we can consider is the daily calendar, the daily cycle. The daily cycle was developed by the Church, especially in monastic practice, in the centuries when monasticism arose—and I’ll talk about that in the next episode—the daily cycle measured the time throughout the day and the night, on a daily 24-hour basis, repeating itself over and over again throughout the week and the year and beyond. The daily cycle included a nighttime series of services that began with vespers, the setting of the sun. It’s significant that traditional Christianity measures the beginning of each day just as the book of Genesis and the Jews generally measured time, and that is with the setting of the sun. The setting of the sun, that’s the beginning of a new day.

And the nighttime services of the Church concluded with matins, which was timed to come to an end, more or less, at sunrise. In fact, there’s a beautiful moment in the Eastern Christian rite of matins, or orthros in Greek, when the priest raises his hands in the air and says, “Glory to thee who has shown us the light,” and that signals the end of the nighttime vigil at the end of matins, and the sunrise, as everyone faces east, is oriented toward the kingdom of heaven. The conviction that the light that has been shown to man, symbolized by that sunrise in the east, is ultimately the light of Christ himself.

The daytime hours all have their own character, but one interesting detail among them is something called the prayer of the hours, which prayer reads: “Thou (speaking to God) who at every season and every hour, in heaven and on earth, art worshiped and glorified…” and goes on from there to praise God. Note the reference to both heaven and earth, that God is at every season and every hour, both in heaven and on earth, is worshiped. So the daily cycle, then, brings attention to the importance of time in bringing man into communion with God.

There is also a weekly cycle of significance in understanding the Church’s measure of time, the Church’s calendar. The weekly calendar, of course, as I mentioned earlier, begins on Sunday, as we call it in the English language, although most European languages that have been Christianized speak of this day as simply the Lord’s day, an interesting testament to the Christianization of the European and other languages. It’s known in Greek as Kyriaki and in Latin, Dominicus, the Lord’s day. You can hear the roots there: Kyrios and Dominus; you can hear the roots for each respective language, Greek and Latin, referring to the Lord. This is the day of the Lord, as it was known in the early Church: the day of the Lord.

It’s the first day of the week, despite modern calendars which often place the first day of the week on Monday, when people go back to work. As a matter of fact, for traditional Christianity, it is Sunday, the Lord’s day, that is the first day of the week, not Monday, and it is therefore not the sabbath, either. Traditional Christianity preserves the sabbath as it was commemorated by the Jews, as what we in the English language would call Saturday. We can hear the reference even to “sabbath” in, again, so many of the languages of Europe that were Christianized by the Church in the history of Christendom. For instance, in Greek it’s Sabbato—you can hear “sabbath” in that—and in Latin, Sabbatum.

This is the day, Saturday, that is traditionally and properly understood as the day of rest, despite modern English misconceptions, often in American culture and such, that Sunday is the sabbath. That’s not to say Sunday is not a day of rest; in a certain sense, Sunday is the ultimate day of rest insofar as Christians gather together, assemble together to worship God at the Liturgy or Mass or whatever eucharistic rite they follow on that day and spend the day spiritually focused on those kinds of questions. So it is a day of rest for sure, but it is not the sabbath day of rest, as that day was conceived by the early Church, and, before her, even in a kind of primitive and typological way, the Jewish calendar.

One final point in talking about the Lord’s day is to bring attention to the really remarkable case of the Russian language—the modern Russian language, not Slavonic, which is the early kind of Church language of Russians and other Slavs such as Ukrainians and others, but to the modern Russian word for the Lord’s day. It is not the Lord’s day as such; it is even more expressive of the Church’s understanding of what that day represents. In modern Russian, the word in English we call Sunday is called Voskresen’ye, from voskresheniye, which means “resurrection.” In modern Russian, when one speaks of the day we in English call “Sunday,” sadly, a pagan name for the day, in modern Russian, they call it “day of the resurrection.” It’s that explicit; it’s that beautiful: day of the resurrection! Throughout the whole history of the Soviet Union, for instance, as atheistic as the regime, the Communist regime might have been and tried to shape an atheistic culture, was compelled nevertheless every time one spoke about that day of the week, atheist or not, one had to call it the day of the resurrection.

It’s interesting. This is only the case with modern Russian, which is, as many will know, very closely related to modern Ukrainian or modern Belarusian. It’s related a little bit more distantly but nevertheless very vitally, closely, to Serbian or Croatian or Slovenian. None of the other Slavic languages use Voskresen’ye or some variant of it for their word for Sundays; only the Russians who do this. Only the Russians who do this: it’s a very interesting thing. And to my knowledge, no other language on earth even speaks of Sunday literally, explicitly, as the day of the resurrection. It’s a very interesting detail, coming from the Christianization of Russian culture, which, like so many cultures of Europe, took place in Christendom over the centuries.

Now the third and final cycle of time that can be discussed in describing the Christianization of time, the spiritual transformation of time in Christendom, would be the annual cycle. Here, well, not only another episode but in fact an entire podcast could be presented on the complexity of the annual cycle of services and feasts that make up the Church year. This is… I have no intention of going into this in any detail here. It just might be mentioned that there are a couple dominant cycles for the year. One is the Paschal cycle, which in a sense begins even before Great Lent starts and goes throughout the period of Lent, of the Great Fast, culminating in Passion Week, and then with the resurrection of Christ there’s the whole cycle that follows: the Paschal cycle that follows, 40 days before Passion Week of Lent, then there’s Passion Week and Pascha, then there’s another 40 days of Pascha, Ascension, ten more days and then Pentecost. In fact, we just, in the Orthodox Church in America, recently celebrated the kind of terminus or completion of this Paschal sequence, a week after All Saints’ Sunday, which itself follows Pentecost by one week. We commemorated the Saints of North America, as Russians commemorated the Saints of Russia. There’s just a long sequence of celebrations that take place within the life of the Orthodox Church, bringing attention to the experience of Pascha.

The other of the two dominant annual cycles is that known as the Menaion, which encompasses all twelve months of the calendar year. It begins in the East at Indiction, which is September 1, which was the Eastern and Byzantine way of marking the beginning of a calendar year. In the West, by the ninth century, the popes of Rome marked the beginning of the year on December 25, which is, of course, Christmas. So that’s when the Western calendar renews itself and begins a new cycle. Advent, in the Western calendar, is kind of the beginning of the new liturgical year. In the East it’s Indiction, September 1.

But there’s a sequence of Great Feasts, as they’re known, throughout the year: Christmas, of course, very well known, developed in the early Church, and still, in our post-Christian society today, one of the most important days of the year, holidays of the year—the word “holiday” of course coming from “holy day”—and other important feasts as well. Transfiguration in the summer is kind of the last Great Feast, commemorating the incarnate God’s transformation of the world in the Person of Christ himself when he was transfigured in glory and his very physical body assumed a new form, a radiant and brilliant and glorious form, before his disciples as a sign of the coming transformation and transfiguration of the entire cosmos in Christ at the end of time in paradise. So we have a series of Great Feasts that keep the Church focused on the kingdom of heaven and man’s communion with God throughout the year, which is regularly, every year, being renewed and started over again, just like the Paschal cycle.

And now the final measure of time that I’ll mention would be not a cyclical one but the linear measure of time in Christendom, beginning in the period of Byzantium. This linear time expressed the Church’s interest in marking not only the radial and renewing experience of communion with God, but the movement toward the ultimate consummation of man’s relationship with God. Early on, the Church used a linear time from the creation of the world as it was understood, what was known as anno mundi, the year of the world’s creation. This was used widely, especially in the East; it was used everywhere, actually. There were a variety—as I mentioned earlier, the pagan Roman Empire did use different kinds of measures of time, and the Church was not very strict at first in what she followed.

But by the sixth century, the 500s, in the West, there was an effort to begin establishing a more regular measure of linear time, and this initiative came from the pope, from the papacy, and in the year 525, a commission was given to a monk named Dionysius Exiguus, and he was given the commission by the pope to develop a way of measuring linear time to replace what had been used in past times, especially relating, as I mentioned earlier, to emperors such as Diocletian. So what Dionysius did is he used the Incarnation as the point of reference for all linear time. He established as best as he could the year when Christ was born, with the Incarnation took place, and he measured time from that year forward in what was known as, in Latin, anno domini, AD, anno domini.

Now, this measure of time, this system of measuring linear time, expressed a deep cosmological conviction of the early Church, and that was that world history, the passage of world history in a linear direction, was fundamentally altered by the act of God in becoming incarnate. The Incarnation became the turning point in world history, a great corollary to Paul’s statement in Galatians quoted earlier: “In the fullness of time, Christ was born of a woman.” In the fullness of time. And this became the dominant way of measuring time, first in the West and then throughout so much of Christendom. It didn’t catch on immediately, but we do notice that within a century Church leaders such as the Venerable Bede in England, in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, is using this measure of time from the Incarnation of Christ, anno domini, to measure the dates. Soon after Bede, a council or synod of bishops in the year 816 established it as the rule, the norm, for measuring linear time in England. And it spread throughout especially western Europe from there.

It’s interesting that it did take a while to reach some countries. Portugal, for instance, only adopted the system of anno domini in the 15th century, and in Russia it was not adopted until the Westernization of Peter the Great in the 18th century. Now, another part of the anno domini system, of course, is what took place before the Incarnation, and that is simply known as “Before Christ,” in English anyway, BC, before Christ. So this system, anno domini and BC, came to dominate Christendom over the centuries as a way of measuring time, and it’s of course what we still use today. I’m speaking at the moment in the year 2013 anno domini, the year of our Lord 2013.

But we can’t help to reflect also that we live in a post-Christian society today, which follows increasingly a post-Christian standard of measuring time, and that standard is known as the “Common Era” system, abbreviated as CE. Before coming to St. Katherine College with its Orthodox identity, I taught at a number of other colleges, some of them even Christian, where CE had become the new measure of time, eliminating anno domini, measuring time from the Incarnation explicitly. And I’ve published with certain publishers who insist that only the CE, or if it’s before the so-called Common Era, BCE is what it’s called, that system, CE/BCE, be used instead of and at the exclusion of the AD/BC system. What this obviously is in our academic life, our colleges and universities in the country, and certain presses—I know that even some Christian churches in the United States have even prescribed this for their official publications. For instance, one Episcopalian diocese in the United States does this now.

Well, what this is is obviously an effort to prevent alienating non-Christians in our society, but it does represent a very significant and noteworthy step in the direction of the de-Christianization of our culture and our civilization, but that really is a story for a later episode. And this episode is now complete.

Join me next time as I complete this account of the spiritual transformation of the world by looking at ways in which the Church sought to sanctify space by building some of Christendom’s most famous churches.