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
The martyrologies aimed at completeness in other directions. First, it
was attempted to unite together the names of all the martyrs who had
ever suffered throughout the whole Church, along with the day of their
death, and secondly, an attempt was made, but only in later times, to
fill up the calendar by allotting every day in the year to at least one
saint. This latter attempt was made in the West only in the seventh and
eighth centuries, and achieved considerable success. While the first
efforts in this direction attained to only relative completeness, since
they took into consideration only a part, and not the whole, of the
universal Church, as the Arian and Carthaginian martyrologies had done,
yet the tendency towards universality appears unmistakably at a later
date, especially in the so-called _Martyrologium Hieronymianum_.
With regard to the Greek service-books, menology means the same thing
as martyrology—a catalogue of saints arranged in the form of a calendar
according to the days of the month, and merely giving the name of the
saint against the particular day set apart by the Church in his honour.
The lives of the saints arranged according to months and days are
called Menæa or Meniæa, and the shorter abstracts from it are called
Synaxaria.[749]
The list of calendars opens with two documents, the most ancient of
their kind possessed by the Roman Church, _i.e._ the lists of popes and
martyrs with the days of their death, which have often been referred to
already—the _Depositio Episcoporum_ from Lucius to Julius I., and the
_Depositio Martyrum_, a catalogue of the martyrs of the city of Rome,
extending only to 304, three martyrs not belonging to Rome being included
in this list, Cyprian, Perpetua, and Felicitas. The connection of these
two lists to one another is shown in their titles (_item_), and also by
the fact that Sixtus, who is placed among the martyrs, is omitted from
the list of popes. This latter list comprises the period from Lucius
(† 255) to Julius († 352) only; either the compiler had no material at
hand for the earlier period, or he set it aside as not bearing upon the
point he had in view. The list of martyrs contains the names of popes
who were also martyrs, such as St Peter, St Clement, St Calixtus, St
Pontianus, St Fabian, and St Sixtus; of martyrs, not bishops, we have
here the most famous saints of the city of Rome, St Agnes and St Lawrence
(but not St Cecilia), as well as many other quite obscure names. In
reply to the inquiry what principle was followed in drawing up this
list, Mommsen,[750] relying on the title which connects the document
with Carthage, replies that it contains “the names of those martyrs and
bishops whose commemoration was celebrated annually in the Church.” Both
these lists were first published by Ægidius Bucherius (Gilles Boucher),
and form a portion of the work on the Calendar of Dionysius Philocalus
(see above, p. 136 _seqq._).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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