Paper moons and a moveable feast

11:27am Thursday 20th March 2008

Comments (0)   Have your say »

Apart from being the first day of spring, this coming Friday is also Good Friday which is the start of the first major holiday break of the year.

That holiday is Easter which is also the most important festival in the Christian calendar because the events that occurred during that weekend are central to the faith. For that reason, churchgoers claim that Easter is more important than Christmas.

This year, Easter is remarkably early. The earliest and rarest date upon which Easter Sunday can fall is March 22 and this year, we miss that unique event by just a single day. The latest date that Easter Sunday can occur is April 25 which means it may be celebrated within a span of 35 days. As a moveable feast, therefore, it is certainly one that can cause problems within businesses, schools, universities and the travel industry as they struggle with complex holiday arrangements.

The practice of turning religious festivals into holidays is not new. Indeed, the word holiday stems from the term holy day which was when the people took time off work primarily to attend Mass, but sometimes to enjoy a break from their labours. I very much doubt whether the early church fathers foresaw such a massive swing away from religion in favour of the new style holy days. Today, there is nothing very holy about a holiday.

Not surprisingly, there has long been a desire to fix the date of Easter but the problems appear insurmountable. Although much of our seasonal timing is based on the sun, the date of Easter relies upon the moon, but not the real moon. It is a hypothetical moon based on tables calculated by a Greek astronomer in 423BC. That fictitious "paper" moon has phases based on months which alternate between 29 and 30 days.

When Pope Gregory made his radical but necessary changes to the calendar in 1582, he adopted those moon tables. That decision established that Easter Day is the Sunday after the first full moon that falls on or afterMarch 21. If that full moon happens to fall on a Sunday, then Easter Day will be the Sunday following. Modifications are built into these calculations to ensure the so-called paper moon is as near as possible to the actual full moon.

The reason a hypothetical moon was used in these calculations was to ensure that nations in the northern and southern hemispheres celebrated Easter at the same time. That would not have been possible if they had used the genuine moon and its phases - there would have been a gap of one month between some celebrations.

Despite this, the Orthodox churches used their own system with the result that the Easter date in places like Greece differs from that celebrated in the west, and indeed the early Christian churches in the west were prone to using a different system of calculation. They used a complex formula based on a Jewish Christian system that involved a cycle of 84 years.

In England, similar problems were being experienced as long ago as the sixth century because we had two systems for calculating the date of Easter. One was used by southerners, the other by northerners. People in the south followed the teaching of St Augustine who had been sent to Canterbury by Pope Gregory I. Northerners followed the practices of St Columba who followed the Celtic tradition.

Things came to a head when King Oswy of Northumbria married Queen Eanflaed of Kent - it meant the royal household celebrated Easter on two different dates. Oswy decided to settle the matter and so he called the famous Synod of Whitby where St Hilda was abbess. There were two items on the agenda - one was the style of tonsure adopted by the monks, and the other was the method that should be used to determine the date of Easter.

There were weighty discussions about the various systems used to calculate Easter throughout the world, including one cycle of 532 years, and a smaller one of only 19 years. One of the key members of the Synod was the famous Wilfred of Ripon, a highly articulate man of great learning but something of a rebel. He listened to the arguments but his knowledge and skilled oratory swung the decision towards Pope Gregory's system. Wilfred, later to be St Wilfred, reminded the assembly that Christ had given the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven to St Peter who had moved to Rome to administer Christ's fledgling Church. He therefore argued that the Synod should adopt the Roman method for calculating the date of Easter in England. The Synod agreed and that system is still in use.

The English did attempt to fix the date of Easter through their Easter Act of 1928 but it has never been brought into effect. If it had become law, England would have been celebrating Easter on a date that was different from the rest of the world. And that would have been confusing.