6. The world's first day
THE RECKONING OF TIME
be asked why the people of Israel who, following the tradition of Moses always preserved the order of the day from dawn to dawn, should have begun all their feast days, as we do today, at sundown, and ¢nished them at sundown; as their Lawgiver says, From even to even you shall celebrate your sabbath.28
6. THE WORLD'S FIRST DAY
Some have claimed that the ¢rst day of the world was the 8th kalends of April [25 March], and others that it was the 12th [21 March]. In both cases they adduce the same argument, namely, the equinox. For it seems reasonable that because God in the beginning divided light and darkness into two equal parts, we should believe that the beginning of the world took place speci¢cally at the point of the equinox.29 They conduct their inquiry well; /291/ but they do not think through their statement consistently. They would act much more knowledgeably were they to assign to the equinox not the ¢rst day, in which light was created, but the fourth, in which the luminaries were made. For He decreed the beginning of time at that point when, upon creating the luminaries, He said, Let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and for years.30 During the preceding three days, as everyone can see, light and darkness weighed equally in the balance, for since the stars were not yet made, there was no measurement of hours. Not until the fourth morning did the Sun, rising from the midpoint of the east, with the hours running through their lines by the shadow,31 inaugurate the equinox, which has been maintained every christiana; this is probably his immediate source for this notion that the triduum paschale is a synecdoche.
28 Leviticus 23.32.
29 I.e. the time of year when the day is divided into equal portions of light and darkness. See ps.-Anatolius 1 (317).
30 Genesis 1.14.
31 There could be no equinox before the fourth dayof Creation, because beforethe
Sun and stars were made, there was no way to determine whether the length of the day was or was not equal to the length of the night, since there were no celestial markers of the passage of time in either. Bede imagines that on the day the Sun was made, God also made a natural sundial, since the shadows cast by the Sun (by striking what obstacle, we may wonder!) marked the passage of the hours. This is an interesting indication of how deeply
Bede's concept of time was bound up with the notion of the measurable; cf.the etymology at the beginning of ch. 2. Time without the reckoning of time was inconceivable.
TRANSLATION
year. That is, [the Sun], when it ¢rst rose above the Earth, was positioned in that part of the sky which philosophers call the fourth degree of Aries.32 It was destined to return there when a year had passed by, after 365 days and six hours. This addition amounts to a quarter of a day, so that the vernal equinox itself sometimes occurs at dawn, sometimes at noon, sometimes at sunset and sometimes at midnight.33
The Moon, on the other hand, was full at sunset, for the Creator, Who is justice itself, would never make something in an imperfect state.
It appeared, together with the glittering stars, in the mid-point of the east, and stood in the fourth degree of Libra where the autumn equinox is ¢xed,34 and by its rising, it sancti¢ed the beginning of Easter.35 For the only Paschal rule to observe is that the spring equinox be completed, with a full Moon following.36 But if the full Moon precedes the equinox by a single day, it is considered to be the Moon of the last month, and not of the ¢rst. For it is ¢tting that just as /292/ the Sun at that point in time ¢rst assumed power over the day, and then the Moon and stars power over the night, so now, to connote the joy of our redemption, day should ¢rst equal night in length, and then the full Moon should su¡use
[the night] with light. This is for the sake of a certain symbolism, because the created Sun which lights up all the stars signi¢es the true and eternal light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world,37 while the Moon and stars, which shine, not with their own light (as they say), but with an adventitious light borrowed from the Sun,38 suggest the body of the Church as a whole, and each individual saint. These, capable of being illumined but not of illuminating, know how to accept the gift of heavenly grace but not how to give it. And in the celebration of the supreme solemnity, it was necessary that Christ precede the 32 Bede may have drawn this idea from the authentic text of Anatolius 2, as cited in Ru¢nus' trans. of Eusebius, HE 7.32.14 (723.15), which says that the Sun at equinox has reached quartam . . . diem. However, Bede interprets this text in a very di¡erent sense in Letter to Wicthed 7. The MS used by Bede apparently read quadram . . . in ea die.
33 Cf. Letter to Wicthed; On Times 10 (592.4^7).
34 Cf. Letter to Wicthed 5.
35 Cf. Anatolius 2, as cited in Ru¢nus' trans. of Eusebius, HE 7.32.18 (725.14).
36 Cf. Prologus Theophili 2^3 (ed. Krusch, Studien I, 223^224); Proterius, Ep. ad
Leonem 8 (ed. Krusch, Studien I, 276^277).
37 John 1.9.
38 Following Isidore, DNR 22 (255) and Etym. 3.43^49, Bede seems to have thought that the stars, like the Moon and planets, shone with re£ected light from the Sun; cf. The Nature of Things 11, 18. But see ch. 7, n. 54 below.
THE RECKONING OF TIME
Church, which cannot shine save through Him. For if anyone were to argue that the full Moon can come before the equinox, he would be stating either that Holy Church existed in its perfection before the Saviour came in the £esh, or that one of the faithful, before the bestowing of His grace, can have something of the supernal light.39
Observing the Paschal season is not meaningless, for it is ¢tting that through it the world's salvation both be symbolized, and actually come to pass. Thus it was arranged by the divine plan that its beginning was
¢xed not on the ¢rst day, in which light was created, nor the second, in which the ¢rmament was made, nor the third, in which the dry land appeared, nor even on the beginning of the fourth, when the equinoctial
Sun went forth like a bridegroom from his chamber,40 but /293/ only at sunset when the Moon rose. That hour was awaited which would mark the illumination of the Church which was to come once and for all in Christ. In the rite of the heavenly sacri¢ce neither water nor wine alone should be o¡ered, lest the oblation correspond only to God or only to man. Rather, we mingle the blood of the grape, squeezed from the winepress of the Cross, with the water of our fragility, and likewise mix the grain of the wheat, ground on the millstone of the Passion, with water, so that cleaving to the Lord, as the Apostle says, we may be able to be one with Him in spirit.41 Even so, in observing the season of this same sacri¢ce, let us not pay attention exclusively to the course of the Sun, as if we believed indeed in God, but that He is far above our care (like those who say Thick clouds are a covering to him, that he seeth not; and he walketh in the circuit of heaven);42 nor let us seek only to locate the full rising of the Moon, as if, like the Pelagians, we sought to be blessed without supernatural grace. Rather, following him who said God shall prevent me with his mercy,43 let us in our Paschal celebration dedicate
39 I.e. he would be guilty of Pelagianism, that is, the heretical belief that man, by nature, has the capacity tolive without sin, and does not require divine grace to do so.This is the computistical heresy of Victorius; cf. The Reckoning of Time, ch. 51. For the analogy of the Moon and the Church, see Isidore, DNR 78.6 (243^245) and Ambrose, Hexaemeron
4.8.32 (137.27^138.22).
40 Psalm 19.5 (18.6).
41 I Corinthians 6.16^17. This classic interpretation of the meaning of the mingling of wine and water at the Eucharist comes from Cyprian, Ep. 63 ad Caecilium, ed. W.
Hartel,CSEL 3.2 (1871):701^717; cf. Joseph-Andre¤ Jungmann, Missarum Sollemnia (Paris:
Aubier, 1952):2.312.
42 Job 22.14.
43 Psalm 59.10 (58.11).
TRANSLATION
the equinoctial rising of the Sun (that is, of Him who overcomes the barriers of darkness), with the full Moon of our devotion following in His footsteps.44 On the day of His own Resurrection, He who came not to do away with the Law but to ful¢l it45 ful¢lled this requirement of the Mosaic Passover. As God gives us means, we shall explain each of these matters in its own place in what follows.
Here it su⁄ces to point out that the equinox is to be observed on the 12th kalends of April [21 March] /294/ and the ¢rst day of the world three days before, that is, on the 15th kalends of April [18 March], and I suppose the ancients wished to place the beginning of the zodiacal circle here to indicate the pre-eminence of this day. Yet neither the month nor the year (whose starting-point [the equinox] came to be) of the Greeks, Romans or Egyptians began on this day. For astronomy
[astrologia] arose, not with these nations ^ although the Greeks make this boast ^ but rather with the ancient Chaldeans, from whom the Patriarch Abraham learned to know God in the revolution of the ¢rmament and stars, as Josephus relates. Later, as he understood this science more accurately, [Abraham] introduced it to the Egyptian people when he was exiled amongst them.46 For in the book of holy Job, who lived not long after Abraham, we ¢nd the word ''Mazaroth'',47 that is, the signs of the zodiac. Therefore, according to the division of the zodiac, the Sun enters the sign of Aries on the 15th kalends of April [18
March], [the day] when light was created. But according to the sequence of its initial creation, the beginning of [the Sun's] orbit, and simultaneously the beginning of all time, is the 12th kalends of April [21
March]. Bishop Anatolius of Laodicea plainly teaches this when writing about the equinox: In that day, /295/ he says, the Sun is found not only to have entered the ¢rst part [i.e. sign], but also to have
44 Cf. ps.-Anatolius 1 (317).
45 Matthew 5.17.
46 Isidore, Etym. 3.25 or De computo dialogus (650A): Josephus is named as source in both these works. The notion that Abraham was the father of astronomy is also found in the ps.-Clementine Recognitiones 1.32 (1226A) (a text certainly known to Bede), and became a commonplace of anonymous computus treatises (see examples cited by Jones,
BOT 339).
47 Job 38.32; cf. Augustine, Adnotationes in Iob, ed. I. Zycha, CSEL 28.2
(1895):610.22^611.12 (who, however, does not identify ''Mazaroth'' with the signs of the zodiac); and Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, Epitoma 4, ed. J. Huemer (Leipzig: Teubner,
1886):22.8^13.