Heortology : $b A history of the Christian festivals from their origin to the present dayKellner, K. A. Heinrich (Karl Adam Heinrich)
Religion
Heortology : $b A history of the Christian festivals from their origin to the present day
Kellner, K. A. Heinrich (Karl Adam Heinrich)
Church year; Fasts and feasts
Another class of documents consists of the ordos drawn up for divine
service belonging to particular countries, dioceses, or the more
important ecclesiastical foundations (ordines, ordinaria; in Greek,
typica). These were not originally drawn up for the course of merely
one year, like our present ordos, but contained the list of recurring
festivals and fasts observed from year to year in some monastery or
cathedral, along with detailed directions for the performance of divine
service. The most important of these are the thirteen oldest ordos
of the Roman Church, collected and published by Mabillon, but other
dioceses and monasteries as well as the Church of Rome had similar ordos,
some of which have been already printed,[745] while others still await
publication.[746]
2. _The Earliest Christian Calendars_
The worship of the saints, especially of the martyrs, asserted itself in
various ways in the liturgy of the Church. Among the Latins, it appeared
even in the liturgy of the mass, since special masses in honour of the
saints were composed at an early date for the commemorations of the
most celebrated saints. These were included in the sacramentaries, and,
finally, as their number continued to increase, they were placed together
in a separate division of the book (_proprium sanctorum_), instead of
being distributed, as formerly, over the whole year. Among the Greeks,
this was not possible, since they repeat the same mass daily, and employ
only two or three mass formularies throughout the entire year.
In the second place, the cultus of the saints gained a footing in the
Canonical Hours, the Psalter, both among Latins and Greeks. It was
customary among the Latins as early as the sixth century to read a
portion of the account of the martyrdom (passiones martyrum), as Aurelian
of Arles tells us;[747] this was the commencement of the existing
lections of the breviary. Then collections of lives of the saints for the
whole year were drawn up on the lines of the calendar, which came to be
called martyrologies on account of the character of the larger part of
their contents. In course of time, two kinds of martyrologies came into
existence, those containing legends of greater length more suited for
private reading, and those distinguished by the brevity of their notices
intended for employment in the services of the Church. Even these have no
immediate connection with the liturgy, although the names of the saints
for the day were read at Prime, a custom which possibly the Council of
Aix-la-Chapelle of 817 had in view in its sixty-ninth canon.[748] These
martyrologies developed out of the diptychs and calendars of particular
churches, by way of compilation and expansion; like the calendars,
they contain simply the names of the saints, but with the mention of
the locality to which the saint belonged, and, in many cases, with an
indication of the date at which he lived.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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