§ 79. THE TIME OF THE EASTER FESTIVAL, 40,'T
\]aj may fall on any Sunday between the 22d day of March and the 25th of April.
The council of Aries in 314 had already decreed, in its first canon, that the Cliristian Passover be celebrated " uno die et lino tempore per omnem orbem," and that the bishops of Rome should fix the time. Bnt as this order was not universally obeyed, the fathers of Nicaea proposed to settle the matter, and this was the second main object of tlie first ecumenical council in 325. The result of the transactions on this point, the particulars «. I which are not known to us, does not appear in the canons (probably out of consideration for the numerous Quartodecimanians), but is doubtless preserved in the two circular letters of the council itself and the emperor Constantine.' The feast of the resurrection was thenceforth required to be celebrated everywhere on a Sunday, and never on the day of the Jewish passover, but always after the fourteenth of Nisan, on the Sunday after the first vernal full moon. The leading motive for this regulation was opposition to Judaism, which had dishonored the passover by the crucifixion of the Lord. " We would," says the circular letter of Constantino in reference to the council of Nice, " we would have nothing in common with that most hostile people, the Jews ; for W3 have received from the Redeemer another way of honoring God [the order of th days of the week], and harmoniously adopting this method, w( would withdraw ourselves from the evil fellowship of the Jews. For what they pompously assert, is really utterly absurd : that we cannot keep this feast at all without their instruction. . . . It is our duty to have nothing in common with the murderers of our Lord." This bitter tone against Judaism runs through the whole letter.
At Niesea, therefore, the Roman and Alexandrian usage with respect to Easter triumphed, and the Judaizing practice of the Quartodecimanians, who always celebrated Easter on the fourteenth of Nisan, became thenceforth a heresy. Yet that practice continued in many parts of the East, and in the time of Epiphanius, about a. d. 400, there were many Quarl v>-
' Socrates : IlisV,. Eccl. i. 9 ; Thcodoret : H. E. i. 10 ; Eusebius : Vita Const, ii 17. Comp. Hefele, 1. c. i. p. 309 sqq.
406 THffiD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590.
decimauians, who, as lie says, were ortliodox, indeed, in doctrine, but in ritual were addicted to Jewish fables, and built upon the principle : " Cuijeed is every one who does not keep nis passover on the fourteenth of Nisan." ' They kept the day with the Communion and with fasting till three o'clock. Yet they were divided into several parties among themselves. A peculiar offshoot of the Quartodecimanians was the rigidly ascetic Andians, who likewise held that the passover must be kept at the very same time (not after the same manner) with the Jews, on the fourteenth of Nisan, and for their authority appealed to their edition of the Apostolic Constitutions.
And even in the orthodox church these measures did not secure entire uniformity. For the council of IS^icaea, probably from prudence, passed by the question of the Roman and Alexandrian computation of Easter. At least the Acts contain no reference to it.' At all events this difference remained : that Rome, afterward as before, fixed the vernal equinox, the terminus a quo of the Easter full moon, on the 18th of March, while Alexandria placed it correctly on the 21st. It thus occurred, that the Latins, the very year after the Nicene council, and again in the years 330, 333, 340, 341, 343, varied from the Alexandrians in the time of keeping Easter. On this account the council of Sardica, as we learn from the recently discovered Paschal Epistles of Athanasius, took the Easter question again in hand, and brought about, by mutual concessions, a compromise for the ensuing fifty years, but without permanent result. In 387 the difference of the Egyptian and the Roman Easter amounted to fully five weeks. Later attempts also to adjust the matter were in vain, until the monk Dionysius Exiguus, the author of our Christian calendar, succeeded in harmonizing the computation of Easter on the basis of the true Alexandrian reckoning ; except that the Gallican and British Christians adhered still longer to the
^ Epiphanius, Ilser. 1. c. 1. Comp. Ex. xii. 15.
' Hefele thinks, howevnr (i. p. 318 f.), from an expression of Cyril of Alexandria »nd Leo I., that the Nicaenum (1) gave the Alexandrian reckoning the prefercnet •ver the Roman ; (2) committed to Alexandria the rcckonmg, to Rome the a.-inoun cing, of the Easter term ; but that this order was not duly observed.