on or near the full moons before and after the equinox). Constantine’s
argument was that if Christians followed the Jews for determining the date
of Easter, instead of using a standard, universal rule, they would inevitably
observe Easter on different dates, since Jewish communities in this period
reckoned the calendar in very different ways.^111 His concern—besides an
expressed aversion for the Jews^112 —was thus not the rule of the equinox, but
rather unity of practice among the Christians. In this respect, the Council’s
second resolution (not to follow the Jews for the date of Easter) was intimately
connected to thefirst (to observe Easter on the same date) and formed with it a
single, continuous argument.
At Arles, and more decisively at Nicaea, the observance of Easter on the
same date was thus conceived, for thefirst time in the history of Christianity,
as a necessary condition for the cohesion of the universal,‘catholic’Church;
calendar unity was now conceived as a social necessity, even as a social virtue.
The innovativeness of this concept must be emphasized. Largely provoked by
Constantine’s intervention in Church affairs, it had implications that stretched
far beyond Christianity or Church history. Constantine was unwittingly
laying the grounds of a tradition that was soon to become dominant in
Western culture, and that eventually led to the formation of modern scholarly
assumptions—which I have already criticized above—about the role of calen-
dars in either holding society together or, on the contrary, generating heresies
and schisms.
Rome and Alexandria: the post-Nicene compromise
and the rise of an orthodox Easter computationUnity of the Christian calendar was not achieved, however, at Nicaea, chiefly
because of the irreconcilable differences that existed between the Easter
reckoning of the churches of Rome and Alexandria, and because of the
tremendous influence that these churches exerted in theWest and the East
respectively. Evidence of Roman and Alexandrian reckoning in this period is
unfortunately sporadic and unclear, but it is evident that they operated on very
different principles.
It is generally believed that in this period, the Alexandrian 19-year cycle that
was to become normative in Orthodox Christianity was already established
and in use; but the evidence, the Festal Letters of Athanasius, is not entirely
(^111) Stern loc. cit.; but this interpretation is also briefly suggested by Cameron and Hall (1999)
270.
(^112) Lejbowicz (2006) 38–9 argues that the anti-Judaic tone of the letter, which contradicts the
generally moderate attitude of Constantine toward the Jews, was only a pretext for creating an
artificial common cause among the Council’s participants with regard to the date of Easter. See
further next section below.
402 Calendars in Antiquity