Is There a Sacred Significance to the Old Calendar?

 

In the pages of Orthodox Tradition, we have often reminded our readers that the Old Calendar movements in the Church of Greece and the Church of Romania were not undertaken to worship a calendar or to preserve the "thirteen days" that separate the Orthodox festal calendar from the Papal calendar (that of Pope Gregory) which is used universally today among Western Christians. They began as sober reactions against the uncanonical adoption of the Roman Catholic festal calendar by several national Churches, plans to adopt the Western date for Pascha (Easter) —in direct violation of the dictates of the First Oecumenical Synod in Nicea—, and against the political ecumenism which prompted this rupture in the unity of the liturgical life of the Orthodox Church.

It is utterly amazing to see that many New Calendarists today are unaware that they, not the Old Calendarists, are part of an uncanonical movement and that they, not the traditionalists, have made a fetish out of something so mundane as the accuracy of a calendar. It is the New Calendarists who justify their innovation in the name of astronomical accuracy. Even some of the more traditional-minded Hierarchs in Greece, such as the much-respected Metropolitan Augustinos of Florina, still fail to understand that the Old Calendar movement is not a resistance based on the calendar as such, but is primarily a resistance against the anti-Orthodox spirit of the modernist Hierarchs whom they too oppose.

On the other hand, while the Old Calendar resistance movement is primarily focused on the issue of Holy Tradition and the primacy of the Orthodox Church, this does not mean that the Church calendar is without significance. It is, after all, part of the traditions which we strive to protect and to preserve. Moreover, the celebration of Pascha, upon which the whole liturgical year is based, is calculated by the Julian Calendar and determines the course of the Church's festal year. Attached to the Feast of Feasts, that event in time when eternity comes down to transform and glorify time itself, the Julian Calendar takes on a significance which is of no small import.

Our Church is not a Church that denies time and history. It is a Church in which time and history come to serve the eternal. The Church year infuses time with a certain holiness and brings to earth an image of timeless Heaven. The time of the timeless realm gives new meaning to our hours, our days, and our years. A link is made between time and the timeless that is mysterious and holy, and those who would tamper with this link court spiritual harm.

Let us look at an example of the link between the Church calendar and the heavenly realm in the life of a recent Greek Saint, St. Savvas the New. When St. Savvas reposed, one of the nuns present at his deathbed saw his soul rise to Heaven. As he ascended in a "golden cloud," the nun heard him singing "with a most sweet voice," "Announce, O earth, great joy." Though with the New Calendar this hymn might have had no significance, by the Old Calendar it did. He reposed on the Eve of the Feast of the Annunciation of the Theotokos —to whom he was deeply dedicated— according to the Old Calendar. Thus, though he belonged to the State Church of Greece, St. Savvas entered into the Divine realm singing the hymn of the Annunciation with the Old Calendarists. Heaven and earth, his repose avers, are joined in an ineffable way, in time, according to the calendar established by the Church and defended by repeated Church Synods and Councils. (See Constantine Cavarnos, Modern Orthodox Saints, Vol. VIII, St. Savvas the New, Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1985, pp. 77- 78.)

Those who condemn the Old Calendarists as silly fanatics who have split the Church over the issue of thirteen days wholly misunderstand, as we have said, the nature of the Old Calendarist resistance. Our struggle for Church tradition is not an argument over days as such, but over the foreign elements which have entered into the Church through political ecumenism. At the same time, however, there is a reality to our struggle which stems from the internal, mystical significance of the Old Calendar, too. The very power of our resistance movement is drawn from the timeless power of the Faith, which is manifested in time and space in a mysterious way and partly through the Church calendar itself. No one should ignore this fact!

 

Source: Orthodox Tradition, Vol. VII (1990), No. 1, p. 10.