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Easter, Calendar, and Cosmos: an Orthodox View 1

ANDREW LOUTH

AT THE first Œcumenical Council, held at Nicaea in 325, it was decreed that
Easter, or Pascha, should be observed on the first Sunday after the full moon
after the vernal equinox. I say that confidently, but in fact no canon from the
first Œcumenical Council survives concerning the date of Easter; the canons
we have are all disciplinary canons, the only liturgical one, the last, forbidding
kneeling on Sundays and during Pentecost, a ruling largely forgotten nowadays,
though still observed by many (though not all) Orthodox. The only
documentary reference to the decision about the date of Easter comes in
letters—one from the Council itself to the Egyptian Church, the other a long
encyclical letter from the Emperor Constantine—which simply say that
Christians are not to keep the feast of Easter with the Jews, which presumably
means that they are not to derive the date of Easter from the date on which

1 Delivered as the Constantinople Lecture 2016 at Southwark Cathedral.

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