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and Leofranc Holford-Strevens). Unlike the Jews or the Muslims, for instance,
no attempt was made to create a thoroughly religious calendar. There may lie
behind this a theological intuition, that the calendar belongs first and foremost
to the order of creation; it has to do with time, which was created by God
along with creation, and the revolution of the heavenly bodies. Creation may
be in need of redemption, but that is a transformation of what is, not its
destruction. So it is appropriate that whatever ways Christians have of
celebrating the redemption of the world through the Incarnation, Death and
Resurrection of Christ, should be fitted into a calendar based primarily on the
movements of the created order. If an Orthodox may be permitted to quote
Thomas Aquinas: gratia non tolit naturam, sed perficit—grace does not destroy
nature, but perfects it.
We shall have to come back to calendars, but I want first to take you on
a long digression. I have already said that we tend to take calendars for granted,
but we might go a step further and say that we tend to treat calendars as just a
way of measuring time—like clocks and watches, or even a vibrating quartz
crystal—only on a larger scale. I want to suggest that the Christian Calendar is
about more than measuring time, it is about shaping time, and experiencing time,
and it may be that the Orthodox Calendar preserves this sense more robustly
than the Western Calendar does, or rather, the way the Calendar is used in the
West nowadays.
If we are going to understand this, as a way towards appreciating what
the Christians of late antiquity were doing when they fashioned the calendar,
we need to consider how they understood time (and also space, though that it
less immediately relevant for our purposes). This not just a matter of dusty
history, for—I repeat—the calendar fashioned in late antiquity is the basis of
the calendars used by all Christians, not least the Orthodox.
Modern notions of space and time are predominantly quantitative: they
are ways of measuring, and the modern use of calendars is much the same. The
theories of relativity, both special and general, complicate what we might mean
by measurement, but I don’t think they fundamentally alter that aspect of
space and time in the classical physics of Newton and Leibniz. In contrast,
notions of space and time in classical and late antiquity are more to do with
ways of being, or more precisely, of becoming. Notions of space and time in

4 For more detail on the introduction of the Julian Calendar and the Roman Calendar in general,
and as a first resource for all matters calendrical, see Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc
Holford-Strevens, The Oxford Companion to the Year (Oxford University Press, 1999), 669–76.

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