Page 28 - AECA.org.uk ¦ Koinonia 68

the 25 March. It is this date—25 March—that becomes the key date in
Christian aligning of creation and redemption. It is likely for this reason, I
9
think (following Louis Duchesne’s conjecture ), that 25 March was chosen to
celebrate the Annunciation, the feast of the Lord’s conception, and 25
December depended on it, rather than vice versa. In the East it was generally
held that the day of the Resurrection was 25 March (in the West it was Good
Friday that was allotted that date). The 25 March becomes the axis of creation
and redemption: the date of the creation of man and the two crucial days of his
redemption—the conception and the resurrection of Christ. Cosmic time
enshrines the time of redemption, and the microcosm lies at the heart of the
cosmos of the heavens. Very serious attempts were made to effect this
alignment; but its meaning is symbolic—the same symbolism that David Jones
invokes in the last lines of The Anathemata, which also allude to the notion of
anamnesis we have already discussed:
He does what is done in many places
what he does other
he does after the mode
of what has always been done.
What did he do other
recumbent at the garnished supper?
What did he do yet other
riding the Axile Tree?

9 See L. Duchesne, Christian Worship: its Origin and Evolution (ET, fifth edition, London: SPCK,
1919), 263–4. Duchesne’s conjecture (as he recognized, there was no literary evidence to support
him) has since been confirmed by a discovered literary text: see Thomas J. Tallis, The Origins of the
Liturgical Year (New York: Pueblo Publishing Company, 1986), 91–9.

26