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November 1, 2006
All Saints Day - cutting the head off a Zombie Error.
Someone offered me a platform and I'm gonna say something!
The Colleges' organist runs a monthly event at the Chapel called "Music, Meditation and Munchies." She usually plays a selection of seasonally appropriate organ music (occasionally there are other musicians), someone (usually a faculty member) offers a brief reflection, and there are treats. Today is All Saints Day and here's what she's playing (subject to last minute timing revisions):
Jean Langlais--Prelude for a Saints Day
Clarence Dickinson--Joy of the Redeemed (based on O Quanta Qualia)
John Weaver--Sine Nomine (which intertwines the hymn For all the Saints with "When the Saints Go Marching In")
I'm giving the meditation. Mainly I'm showing resurrection, judgment, and entry into Heaven scenes from the tympanum sculpture at Autun, France, and the van der Weyden's Beaune Altarpiece.
However - since someone asked me to say something about All Saints I'm not going to resist explaining that Halloween is not in its origins a pagan festival. Yes, I'm going to play the old "Mediterranean Popes didn't give a damn about local Celtic festivals" card. It won't work, it never does, but there's no honor in letting people believe that medieval people believed the world was flat.
Yes, there were catch-all festivals for otherwise uncelebrated martyrs as early as the 4th Century in the eastern Mediterranean (I think that most of our sources are Syrian Greek or Syriac). That holiday was celebrated in mid-May, as it was in Rome in the 7th century. In 609, the Emperor Phocas gave the Pantheon to the popes as a church (I need to go read whatever the document is for that one!) and Boniface IV dedicated it as St. Mary and All Martyrs on May 13th of that year. By the way, it's a commonplace of people in my end of the Middle Ages, I don't know how well-supported, that this was the first temple building just flat turned into a Church. Oh, well - that shows that a feast of All Martyrs or All Saints was being celebrated by a bunch of non-Celts in the Mediterranean quite early.
Gregory III (who died in 741) dedicated a new chapel in Old St. Peter's to All Saints on November 1 - transferring (at least by implication) the date of celebration in the diocese of Rome (and perhaps Italy) to that day. Gregory IV around 840 extended the feast to the Church in the West, what we nowadays think of as making a revision to the Universal Calendar. Still no sign of Celts or hollow turnips.
So the juxtaposition of Samhain and All Saints Day is just that - a juxtaposition, not an adoption or adaptation by the Church of a pre-existing Celtic holiday, unless you want to think that there were Celtic pagans living in central Italy in the early 8th century celebrating Samhain.
Oh - here's another stake in the heart - the origins of the Christian festival of All Saints is not a metaphorical harvest festival or seasonal transition - especially the harvest of the dead - since the festival was in origins a May festival. Though the 9th century Pope might conceivably have had such an idea (though to believe so you have to also bear in mind the difference between November in Italy and in northern Europe in terms of Labors of the Months), the 4th century Syrians certainly didn't. It's not a bad metaphor (there are plenty of vintage=judgment metaphors in the New Testament), but that's not behind this date.
We'll see how it goes. As anyone who has been watching television lately knows, it's hard to stop a zombie - and even if you do, there are more coming up the street.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at November 1, 2006 7:58 AM