I recently found what is to me a very interesting article from 2007, “The Early Development of the Liturgical Eight-Mode System in Jerusalem” by Stig Simeon Frøyshov.1 Its subject is the early history of the Octoechos, both as an eight-week liturgical cycle and an eight-tone musical system, which I’ve written about recently a couple times. Frøyshov’s sources are “mostly Palestinian liturgical books, preserved either in the Greek original, or in ancient versions, that is, Georgian (which is the richest), as well as Armenian, Syriac, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, and Arabic” (142). It seems to me he’s doing all the historical research necessary in order to tell the story of how the eight-week liturgical cycle is a logical extension of eighth-day symbolism as rooted in the Judean practice of Jubilees and the Feast of Weeks.
The Feast of Weeks is the fiftieth day after Passover, or Pentecost. Fifty is seven weeks of seven — plus the mystical “one”. The fiftieth day is the eighth day, but symbolically it might as well be an eighth week that symbolizes the eighth day, fulfilling the jubilee. Hence the year-round Octoechos is developed, as well as the musical system that accompanies it. The Feast of Weeks counting from Pascha to Pentecost then is the archetype, the Holy of Holies. And the Sundays in the Pentecostarion from Thomas Sunday to All Saints form an octave that I will be writing about when the season arrives. Leading up to this inner chamber, though, is first of all the year-round Octoechos, functioning as the courtyard of the Tabernacle. And then Lent is the Holy Place, where bread and incense are offered, and a seven-branched candle stand is lit. This is still the pattern of heavenly worship — Moses saw something eternal. There are three liturgical books in the Orthodox Church, then, that chart this triadic ascent throughout the year:
This present article is specifically on the Sundays of Lent. They form an octave that carries us through Holy Week, Pascha, and Bright Week.
Lent starts on a Monday, so the first Sunday of Lent arrives after a week of fasting has been completed already. This inaugurates a pattern whereby symbolically each Sunday is associated with the week that precedes it. The chiastically central Sunday of the Cross is unique in the way that it also spreads out like an afterfeast through the following week, with the Cross remaining in the center of the nave and the hymn “Before Thy Cross” being added to prayers. Hence there is ambiguity whether the third Sunday or the Fourth Week constitute the middle of the Great Fast. Physically we fast for seven weeks, but there is a real spiritual sense in which Passion Week, the seventh week of fasting, exists as something beyond Lent.
The Lord of Spirits podcast touched on this issue recently in their excellent and highly relevant Lent-themed episode “The Season of Virtue” (February 22, 2024), explaining that a “forty-day” fast symbolically means the same thing as a six-week fast (forty-two days, same difference). Six is the amount of days that we work before the sabbath. The sixth day is the day of preparation, and all forty-day time spans in the Bible are in preparation for something, some kind of sabbath. In relation to the first six weeks of Lent, the seventh week — Passion Week — is that sabbath. It stands to reason that Bright Week is the octave. Hence the “forty-day” fast is also part of an octave structure mirroring the fifty-day Paschal period taking us through Pentecost. An octave structure has as the center of its cosmic chiasmus its third element, which in Lent is the Sunday of the Cross. But if you count the seven weeks of fasting, the fourth week is central. Liturgically the Cross has us covered in both regards.
But without further ado, here is the outline of the Lenten octave, as marked by the Sundays:
Α. Sunday of Orthodoxy
I just did a long, two-part post on how the Sunday of Orthodoxy, first celebrated in 843, is the octave of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, so I welcome you to read those if you haven’t already, starting here. As such an octave, an eighth day, the Triumph of Orthodoxy also makes for a fitting first day of a new week of weeks. It places all the repentance of Lent in the context of an Orthodox confession of faith, anathematizing the full gamut of heresies from Arianism to iconoclasm. The dogmas and anathemas set the boundaries for the spiritual mindset (phronema) in which repentance (metanoia) can be safely and fruitfully pursued. As the capstone of Clean Week, the very strict First Week of Lent — featuring the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete at Compline in the evenings — the Sunday of Orthodoxy offers an experience of the triumph and spiritual joy to be had from repentance, and conversely also indicates the extremity of repentance necessary to achieve orthodoxy.
The Sunday Gospel reading, meanwhile, relates the call of the Apostle Nathanael in the first chapter of John. Relevant to the restoration of icons, the invitation “Come and see” (John 1:46), as well as Jesus telling Nathanael, “When thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee” (1:48) centers our attention on the primacy of perception in the spiritual life — Nathanael is able to see Jesus, and see Him for who He is, because Jesus first sees him. This aesthetic, i.e., sensory form of knowing is rightly the basis of the human encounter with God and Him incarnate. This is the beginning of discipleship with God, and the start of the Great Fast.
Β. Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas
The second Sunday of Lent continues on an historical trajectory. After the Triumph of Orthodoxy and the end of iconoclasm, there occurred, still in the ninth century, the so-called Photian Schism initiating a cycle of conflicts driving a wedge in the Church between Constantinople in the East and Rome in the West. I haven’t thought before to draw a structural outline of this era, but as a rough sketch off the top of my head, this ksiasmus will do: (α.) the Photian Schism, beginning in 863 and not resolving until 880; (β.) the Great Schism of 1054; then (ξ.) the Fourth Crusade, creating the Latin Empire of Constantinople from 1204 to 1261; followed by (o.) the hesychast triumph over humanism at a series of councils collectively called the Fifth Council of Constantinople, 1341–1351; and finally (ω.) the false union of Florence in 1439, from which precipitates the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453.
St. Gregory Palamas was the central figure in that list’s fourth landmark event, the only one the see of Rome was not involved in. The Church’s enemies at this point were rather certain Greeks who opposed the Latin church but did so in a way that did not overcome the very reasons the Latins were worth opposing. The humanist approach to theology cultivated in the Scholastic West gave a pride of place to rational speculation that was not worthy of the Christian life. Those faithful to the hesychastic tradition of the Church knew theology to be based rather in the noetic experience of God. When in the Gospel reading the previous Sunday Philip tells Nathanael of Jesus of Nazareth, that He is the one spoken of by Moses and the prophets, Nathanael retorts, “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46). Philip’s response isn’t to engage in a speculative dialogue arguing from reason why it is the promised one would be called a Nazarene. He says that which Jesus had said to Philip’s fellow Bethsaidan Andrew the First-Called, “Come and see” (1:39). Discipleship is based in empiricism. St. Gregory Palamas, as an Athonite priestmonk, and eventually archbishop of Thessaloniki, used copious arguments from Scripture, reason, and the Fathers to defend those who believed and practiced this discipleship against the Scholastics who would determine the question of God’s knowability by their own rational methods.
The life of the Church was thus differentiated from the apostate humanism of this world which had been burgeoning in the West ever since the Great Schism. This separation from the world, this calling of God’s people to the way of hesychasm and a church life based on its principles, merits commemoration on the beta-Sunday of Lent. The spiritual utility of celebrating the victor of the hesychast controversy, moreover, is that the thymic repulsion isn’t against any of the Latin Christians, those who have now been “othered”, but against the Scholastic humanism that causes the apostasy, that to which the Greek Orthodox are no less susceptible than any Roman Catholics. Barlaam, the instigating heretic of the controversy, may have been a monk from Italy, but he was ethnically Greek and nominally a Greek Orthodox opponent of the Roman Catholics. It was a tract he wrote against Rome’s use of the filioque that caught St. Gregory’s attention because its learned Scholastic methods and conclusions undermined the very foundations of Orthodox theology. Opposing Roman Catholicism does not make one Orthodox! This would be clear as the centuries churned and the imbalance of Catholic Scholasticism instigated dialectical revolutions against it, of the Protestant and scientific varieties both. Before Luther and Copernicus, though, the Greek Orthodox could have gone the route of Barlaam in dialectically opposing Roman Catholicism, but it chose resoundingly to stick to its own traditions instead. The scientific revolution is of particular interest in this context because the sensory empiricism of science, arrived at by negating a faith propped up by philosophical speculation of the ratio, tracks in many ways with the noetic empiricism of hesychasm. It’s just that where the scientists should have returned to the nous in humility, they advanced the rebellion of humanism by resorting to the senses for authority instead.
Anyways, the differentiation made between Orthodoxy and Western humanism is what merits the beta-position for the Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas. Also at Sunday Matins, a canon on the theme of the Prodigal Son is added to a canon to St. Gregory. So there’s also the inverse beta-theme present, not just a positive exodus but a negative exile. I’m not knowledgeable of the liturgical history here; use of this other canon may predate the celebration of St. Gregory. The awareness of (and remorse for) prodigality is indeed a very salient theme in the Second Week of Lent!
More in tune with the positive Palamite exodus, however, is the Gospel reading for this Sunday, which paints for us a precise illustration of the spiritual life of the Church that calls us apart from this world. Motivated by faith, the paralytic borne of four is lowered through a roof to be healed by Jesus and is forgiven his sins. Hesychastic prayer traces the same pattern. By faith, in an act of humbling, the soul paralyzed by sin is lowered through the roof of the mind, the tiles of earthly cares having been removed, and the soul being carried by the four Evangelists — or, as St. Gregory Palamas himself says in his anagogical reading, by the four virtues of “[1] self-condemnation, [2] confession of former sins, [3] promising to renounce evil ways from now on, and [4] prayer to God.”2 Such a penitent, prayerful soul descends into the heart, and there it meets Jesus, is healed and forgiven. Jesus says, “Arise, and take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine house” (Mark 2:11), and the soul, empowered now to fulfill the commandments, arises, takes up the bed of its body, and with it enters into its heavenly abode.
This Gospel reading has been used by the Orthodox Church for the second Sunday of Lent from the time of the sixth century.3 Placing a celebration of the hesychastic champion St. Gregory Palamas on this day has, since the fourteenth century, only presented a more vivid image of the original theme.
Χ. Sunday of the Cross
Of course the Cross is in the center. That’s how the cosmic chiasmus works! It’s the same reason why in the Octoechos Wednesday (the day called “Middle” in Slavic languages) takes for a theme the Cross, despite Friday also making that claim on account of the Crucifixion (see my article on the Christian week).
And the text of the Lenten services is aware of the Cross’s centrality to the Fast. As I explained above when introducing the general outline, the Sunday of the Cross, though capping the Third Week of Lent, enjoys something of an afterfeast throughout the Fourth Week by means of a cross remaining in the front of the nave, making sure we understand its centrality regardless of how we reckon the time. On Wednesday and Friday of the Fourth Week, at Matins, a special canon to the Cross replaces the saint of the day from the Menaion; and on those days, and Monday as well, at First Hour “Before Thy Cross” is sung and prostrations are made in place of usual psalm verses. The veneration is repeated one last time Friday evening before Vespers, when the cross is at last taken back into the altar. Then, on the Monday of the Fifth Week, a prayer at Matins looks back at the Cross, the afterfeast of which is now passed, and calls it a “turning post”, saying, “With God’s help we have rounded the turning post of the Fast. Let us run the remainder of the course with all our strength, and win a victor’s crown.”4
Accordingly, we’ll see the two Sundays following that of the Cross are chiastic reflections of the two before it. But the Gospel reading for this the third Sunday — Mark 8:34–9:1 — is free from the symmetry of chiasmus and can plainly tell us the meaning of the Fast. It’s also free from any narrative context, which in this case is not necessary:
And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he said unto them, “Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” And he said unto them, “Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power.”
Ο. Sunday of St. John Climacus
The Ladder of Divine Ascent written by St. John Climacus of Mount Sinai in the seventh century (he was a contemporary of St. Maximus the Confessor, though their paths never crossed) is a manual of ascetical wisdom so cherished by the Church, in monasteries it is read during the weekday services of Lent as though a liturgical book. (I covered the book’s own fractal triadic/chiastic structure in a post last year, which I welcome you to peruse.)5 That’s reason enough to set aside a Sunday in Lent to celebrate the author, and it’s the fourth Sunday, the omicron-Sunday, because it’s all about doing all we can to be fruitful in the virtues in the wake of Christ’s victory on the Cross and before the day of judgment. Here’s our opportunity to join our will to the Lord’s, as we’ve been commanded, so that the Spirit may lead us into battle against the passions and carry us into the greatest depths of humility, stillness, and love. Having been separated from the humanism of this world by the energies of God in the beta-week, here, chiastically, is where we participate in that sanctity by adding our own God-given energies in obedience to God’s will.
The omicron-theme is otherwise expressed in an additional canon at Sunday Matins, one on the parable of the Good Samaritan. It features many verses along the lines of “Thieves have robbed my mind and left me half dead, wounded by my sins: but heal me, O Lord”6 — typical thoughts this deep in Lent, if you’re doing it right. Jesus, then, is looked to as the Good Samaritan figure, an unnatural mixture of foreign and familiar, even as Jesus hypostatically unites divinity (the foreign) and humanity (the familiar) by means beyond nature. Samaritans, moreover, being an abortive attempt at grafting Gentiles onto Israel, are nonetheless used by Christ in parable as a prefiguration of the authentic grafting of Gentiles onto Israel, that is, in the Body of Christ. Hence the question “Who is my neighbor?” receives the answer: all humanity, everyone being gathered together in the humanity of Christ. This is all very on point for omicron-imagery, which is why I mention it. The way the canon brings us into that imagery through repentance, identifying us with the robbed and beaten traveler lying in a ditch, is very effective.
And for the Sunday Gospel reading, the healing of the demoniac son (at the base of Mt. Tabor) is recounted. The disciples aren’t able to heal him, but Christ does. They ask Him privately why this is, and they are told, “This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer and fasting” (Mark 9:29). This story brings us back to the purpose of celebrating The Ladder of Divine Ascent as a chiastic development of Palamite theology. We of our own power, our own energies, cannot heal ourselves, especially in the face of superior demonic foes. Christ’s divine energies can save us, and if we go to Him, He’ll tell us to pray and fast. That is, if we actively make our own energies passive to divine energies, those divine energies will be joined to ours in Christ such that we can then by grace do that which is beyond our nature. This energetic union to which Christ is calling us requires active, practiced participation in our passive self-negation. Our activity and our passivity then are joined together in a hierarchical unity. Holy Fathers like St. John Climacus are here to teach us how to do that.
Ω. Sunday of St. Mary of Egypt
Back during the First Week of Lent, also called Clean Week, the lengthy Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete — the Church’s greatest hymnographical expression of repentance outside the Psalms — is broken up and read over four nights. Even then, though, there are verses included to our Holy Mother Mary of Egypt. This makes more sense in the chiastically corresponding Fifth Week when on Thursday night the entire Great Canon is read in one go, with two breaks during which are read the entire Life of St. Mary of Egypt by St. Sophronius of Jerusalem. She is then celebrated a couple days later, the fifth Sunday of Great Lent.
Everything about The Life of St. Mary of Egypt is apocalyptic. The whole dramatic effect of the story — exceedingly powerful — is created through revelations (apocalypses). We follow the perspective of a Palestinian priestmonk, St. Zosimas, who for Great Lent journeys out into the desert. He discovers a figure in the wilderness, he discovers it’s a naked old woman, he discovers her story. He discovers her depravity, he discovers her conversion. He discovers her repentance. Thus, having at first discovered her sanctity, he then discovers its unexpected source. Each layer to the story represents a shocking new revelation. The depravity of her youth is profound. The most depraved artists and storytellers of our own end times could scarcely imagine anything more scandalous. And we read about these perversions in church! Well, we can do so because of where the story goes after St. Mary travels from Alexandria to Jerusalem.
The condescension of the Mother of God, troubling first of all to rebuke this vicious woman, let alone to hear her prayer of contrition, represents a love beyond human imagination or belief. Even to hear of it moves the soul indescribably. Yet St. Mary describes her own repentance in the desert — a desert she has entered with no provisions but two and half loaves of bread — while being attacked by memories of her prior life: the food, the music, the lust. Seventeen years she suffers these attacks, the same amount of time she lived in wantonness; what we hear is a description of hell. Repentance is hell. At this stage in Lent, at the end of the omega-week, this is what we need to hear. Keep thy mind in hell, yes, but also despair not. After she lives thirty more years in the desert alone, the peaceful, eucharistic denouement of St. Mary’s story lifts the soul up with a hope and a courage that come as if from another world. Joy? Sorrow? A sorrowful joy? A joyful sorrow? The ascetics of the Church combine these words because they don’t know how else to explain a deified emotion that is beyond human expression. Everything good about joy and everything good about sorrow are contained at once in an eschatological oneness of feeling. Once tasted, the Christian ascetic lives his or her entire life to attain this grace forever.
Once again this positive rendition of the contextual theme is balanced with a negative version in a canon at Sunday Matins. This time the parable riffed on in the prayers is that of the rich man and Lazarus — the story of one man enduring the hell of repentance after death instead of before, and another man whose life of deprivation is inverted once he’s dead. The warning of judgment and the proper fear of it serve as a useful buttress to what should be one’s undying attraction to the repentance and redemption of St. Mary. This fear indeed comprises an essential ingredient of St. Mary’s own experience, she who began her life as the rich man and ended it as Lazarus. She began her life, that is, destroying the image of God within herself (and others) and ended her life restoring that image and cherishing it — this is a reminder that the Sunday of St. Mary of Egypt chiastically corresponds to the Triumph of Orthodoxy and the restoration of the icons. The troparion to St. Mary makes it explicit: “In thee, O Mother, was carefully preserved from harm that which is according to the image (τὸ κατ' εἰκόνα)....”7
And keeping with the omega-theme, the Sunday Gospel reading helps the soul be properly oriented towards life in the kingdom and the road that takes us there. Continuing in Mark, skipping ahead a little from last Sunday, we hear Christ foretell His upcoming Passion, Death, and Resurrection. The sons of Zebedee James and John then come to Him and ask to be seated on His right and left hands when He comes in His glory. When Christ asks if they are willing to drink the cup He will drink from and be baptized with the baptism that He is baptized with, He is asking if they are willing to suffer and die. This is the path to eschatological glory — Christ’s glory is His death. This is the end (the purpose) of Lenten repentance, “For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). This pericope serves both as a typological ending to the chiasmus, and a foreshadowing of where the octave is leading.
Ϛ. Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday
All during the Sixth Week of Great Lent, the church services are looking forward to the raising of Lazarus on Saturday and the triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Sunday. From day to day we track the condition of Lazarus, as related in the Gospel of John, as if in real time. Jesus is first told of Lazarus’s sickness on Monday, and He responds, “This sickness is not unto death” (John 11:4); on Tuesday Lazarus prepares for the grave; on Wednesday he dies and is buried. Still, Jesus presses on to Bethany.
With the passing of Lazarus passes also our time for repentance; we perish also. Recall that a forty-day fast symbolically corresponds to a six-week fast. Well, this is the end of the Sixth Week. Six weeks is forty-two days, but subtract Forgiveness Sunday from the First Week and Lazarus Saturday from the Sixth Week. Behold, by evening on Friday of the Sixth Week, the forty days of Lent are over. The first sticheron at Vespers for Lazarus Saturday says, “Having completed the forty days that bring profit to our soul....”8 This the sixth weekend of Lent represents the culmination of our preparation. Lazarus’s four days in the tomb symbolize our forty days of ascetic effort. And what can come of them? Nothing without Jesus arriving at Bethany on the sabbath and raising our repentance from the dead.
But this resurrection of course is just a foretaste of what is to come on the Great Sabbath a week from now. And Jesus arriving humbly in Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, cheered on by children who have heard of His miracle, is symbolically, as through a glass darkly, the risen Christ entering with glory into His kingdom, adored by angels. Though these festivals are in truth the Sabbath and the Lord’s Day, they also are still enigmas, preparation for the unveiled reality to come. The Entry into Jerusalem is still the stigma-Sunday. The heavenly pattern of the sabbath still needs to be fulfilled — and would still need to be fulfilled even in a world that never fell into a sinful mode of existence. Christ dies for our sins, no doubt, but it’s the manner, the mode, of Christ’s death that matches our sins and absolves them. Even in a sinless mode, in order for love to be consummated, there would still need to be a sabbath where the limits of creation are found and the blessing of the uncreated Creator enters the world. That’s what the logos of Palm Sunday is in preparation for.
Ζ. Holy Week and Pascha
Holy Week is the sabbath week — Passion Week it is also called. This is when the Lord turns passive and lets His human creations have their way with Him. In turn this is where we must turn passive and let the activity of the Lord’s Passion lift us up out of the ditch. Our asceticism will no longer avail us anything anymore; the time for our sixfold preparation is gone.
As I said, the forty days of fasting ended when Lazarus Saturday arrived. Even if you count the forty days so as to exclude the intervening six Sundays, that still only makes Holy Thursday the fortieth day. Then the saving work of Christ on the triad of Holy Friday, Holy Saturday, and Pascha still falls outside of Lent — symbolically the meaning is the same, but it’s a symbolism lost in the Western practice. Counting from Ash Wednesday, the West excludes Sundays and so identifies the fortieth and last day of Lent as Holy Saturday. The Great Sabbath is thus included as part of our own sixfold preparation, directly after which comes Easter, the eighth day. There’s actually no intervening sabbath.
There may be some circumstances in which skipping the sabbath makes sense, as in the structure of the Gospel of Mark, which I wrote about last month, or during Bright Week, which we’ll see shortly. But here I fail to see the spiritual utility of it. In the Orthodox tradition of Lent, Holy Week, and Pascha, there’s a sabbath intervening between the six-week fast and the eighth-day celebration. The whole of Passion Week starting on Lazarus Saturday (or at the very least Holy Friday and Holy Saturday), exists on the far side of Lent as a separate moment. Lent is a time for introspection and repentance and work. Attention is paid to oneself and one’s habits. By the time you get to Passion Week, though you are present, the focus is off you, and you are a bystander to the saving work of Christ, who is accomplishing something you can’t by means of your repentance. But this active passivity of His fulfills your repentance. Hence it makes sense that there is space for this whole theurgical drama on the other side of Lent and before Pascha Sunday; it doesn’t just go right up to Easter, and bam, done. Lent is a tunnel; there should be something on the other side other than “...Ta da! You did it!” You didn’t do it. Repentance is not enough. It would be an occasion for pride if it was.
This is what this Seventh Week is for: to witness as God rests in His creation and we in our own activity find rest in His Passion. The results are already Paschal. Even as on the morning of Holy Saturday we begin the Vesperal Liturgy for Pascha, already perceiving the eighth-day Resurrection through the transparency of the Great Sabbath, so we celebrate Pascha already at the end of the Sabbath Week. God resting in His creation is nothing less than God resting in His creation. The results are a foregone conclusion. Pascha is here, already in the Seventh Week. What else would the eighth day of the Seventh Week be but Pascha?
Η. Bright Week and Anti-Pascha
Pascha is the dawn of the eighth day, the day with no evening. Time is sevenfold, so the day labeled eighth is eternal. Eternity contains all of time within it, even as time is the order of eternity. In Bright Week, the Eighth Week, time gives order to eternity by cycling through all eight tones of the resurrectional services from the Octoechos. All but the seventh tone. Friday the sixth day is in tone six, and Bright Saturday skips to tone eight. Here it makes sense to skip the grave tone, the heavy tone, the week after the Great Sabbath. That which is seventh symbolizes the limitation of time, and here in Bright Week, though time is present as the servant of eternity, providing it order, any sense of its limitation is nowhere to be found. The limit has been passed through, and now all of time abides in eternity, acquiring its limitless quality. Death is no more. Death is swallowed up. Death has been put to death.
Anti-Pascha as the octave of the octave fulfills a similar function. Anti-Pascha is fractally pure Pascha — a recapitulation of everything Paschal. Every Sunday is the eighth day relative to its week, for like the eucharistic Lamb, Pascha is divided and distributed, “divided but not disunited”. And so every Sunday is Pascha. Anti-Pascha signals this to us by liturgically returning us to the same historical moment of Pascha, just as musically we return to tone one after all week cycling through the rainbow of other tones. The Apostles experienced this eternal return through Thomas, who first discovers the Resurrection on the eighth day of the ultimate Eighth Day. Anti-Pascha — which uses the Greek prefix anti- without any hint of contrariety, denoting merely that it occupies the same place — is the revelation of that eternity of Pascha, containing every weekly Pascha within it so that we may know that every Sunday, we return to the same feast.
Of course, Anti-Pascha is also called Thomas Sunday, but I reserve that appellation for the next cycle of eight Sundays. For as the eighth day is also the first day, so the eighth week of the Lenten octave is also the first week of the Pentecostal octave. In the evening of Pascha, “being the first day of the week” (John 20:19), the resurrected Jesus appeared to His disciples and breathed the Holy Spirit upon them. Hence they were being ushered already (if mutably at this time) into the Pentecost to come, the giving of the Holy Spirit, for which cause Christ died and rose again. I’ll get around to describing that octave when the season is right. For now, I’ll just tease the outline of the double octave of Sundays, which, relative to the Octoechos’s year-round preparation, serve the roles of sabbath octave and eighth-day octave:
Stig Simeon Frøyshov, “The Early Development of the Liturgical Eight-Mode System in Jerusalem,” in St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, Volume 51, Number 2–3 (2007), pp. 139–78. Here is a quotation that particularly catches my attention (p. 157):
That the theology of the ogdoad, as well as the seven+one structure, were vital in Jerusalem in the later 4th century is confirmed by a homily attributed to John II, bishop of the Holy City for thirty years, from 387 to 417. This homily, preserved in Armenian, was given at the dedication of the Holy Sion Church, probably in 394, in any case before 415. John II, who knew Syriac (probably Christian Palestinian Aramaic) and had a good knowledge of the Judeo-Christian tradition of Palestine, gave his sermon an eightfold structure. He first presents an Old Testament typology in seven “circles,” and then adds an eighth circle, which is the habitation of the Holy Spirit in the heart as the divine spouse.
Frøyshov cites an edition of the Armenian text with Latin translation by Michel Van Esbroeck in 1973, as well as a French translation by the same scholar in 1984.
See Saint Gregory Palamas, The Homilies 10.12–14, tr. Christopher Veniamin (Mount Thabor Publishing, 2009), pp. 70–71. For interpretation here I also have drawn from Blessed Theophylact, The Explanation by Blessed Theophylact of the Holy Gospel according to St. Mark, tr. Fr. Christopher Stade (Chrysostom Press, 2000), pp. 24–26.
See the note by Christopher Veniamin in Saint Gregory Palamas, op. cit., p. 586, n. 432.
Monday of the Fifth Week, Matins Canon, Ode Eight, in The Lenten Triodion: Supplementary Texts, tr. Mother Mary and Metropolitan Kallistos Ware (St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 2007), p. 238.
When I wrote my post on The Ladder of Divine Ascent I completely forgot, and so neglected to mention, that Fr. John Breck devotes two pages to this book towards the back of his tome The Shape of Biblical Language (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994, pp. 298–99). He’s not doing any original work but merely reporting the outline proposed by Richard T. Lawrence (“The Three-fold Structure of the Ladder of Divine Ascent,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, Volume 32, Number 2, 1998, pp. 101–18), building on the work of Guerric Couilleau. I’m not impressed by the outline to look at it, but I haven’t read the SVTQ article explaining it. It’s a different arrangement than the one I went with, adapting the linear outline by Kallistos Ware (whom I did cite). Anyways, I thought I’d mention it here, since I recently realized I forgot all about it.
Fourth Sunday in Lent, Matins, First Canon, Ode Three, in The Lenten Triodion, tr. Mother Mary and Metropolitan Kallistos Ware (St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 2002), p. 358.
See the apolytikion (ἀπολυτίκιον) at glt.goarch.org/texts/Tri/t14.html.
Vespers for Lazarus Saturday, “Lord I Have Cried,” first sticheron, in ibid., p. 464.