Deciding the date to celebrate Easter caused dissent in the early church, but even nowadays some believers have to wait longer than others to open their eggs, writes Fiona McCann.
Never before has the nadir that is the 40 days of Lenten deprivation come so alarmingly soon after the long, grim weeks of the January blues. Well, not since 1913 anyway, the year in which Ash Wednesday fell even earlier, on February 5th. Although, with 2008 being a leap year, Easter will still fall on the same date as it did 95 years ago, despite the head start.
Confused? You're not the only one. Christmas is celebrated on the same date every year, as a birthday should be, but Easter has always been a moveable feast, its dates predicated on the movements of the sun, the phases of the moon and other such nebulous concepts.
It all kicked off at the First Council of Nicaea back in 325, when emperor Constantine called the leaders of the early Christian church together to end some internal quibbling. While they were at it, they decided to fix a day for celebrating the resurrection of Jesus, hitting on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox.
A simple enough edict, it might appear, but interpretations of this have been causing divisions ever since, with the church in Rome falling out with the church in Alexandria over which mathematical tables should be used to calculate the astronomical dates involved. Then along came the Irish, as Prof Dáibhí Ó Cróinín of NUI Galway's history department explains.
"When St Columbanus arrived on the continent in 590 or 595, he noticed that our Easter - the Irish Easter - was not the same as the Roman one. He was so confident that the Irish calculations were the correct ones that he wrote to pope Gregory the Great in 600 and roundly reprimanded him for advocating an Easter table that everyone in Ireland knew was wrong," says Prof Ó Cróinín.
Whatever the pope's reply, it seems the Irish were summarily ignored, and Rome continued with its Easter, while the Irish and British continued with theirs. By this time, Iona Abbey in Scotland, which was founded and run by Irish monks, was becoming deeply influential in Britain, and "wherever the Ionan monks went, they brought the Irish Easter with them". The problematic Irish had their knuckles roundly rapped by the Roman pope Honorius around the end of the 620s for their wayward Easter, and so convened the Synod of Mag Lene in 632 to tackle the Easter issue.
Failing to reach agreement, they sent a delegation to Rome. On their return, it was agreed that, of the 10 different tables on offer for Easter calculations, one of which was claimed to have been brought by St Patrick himself, the easiest thing was to fall into step with Rome and follow their table.
Their Ionan brethren were unimpressed, however, and continued to date Easter as they saw fit, though the notion of disunity over the most important festival of the Christian calendar did not sit well with Rome. It all came to a head at the Synod of Whitby, where the Irish were at the forefront of both sides of the debate.
With the new abbot of Iona, Colman, arguing to retain the Irish Easter, a fellow Irishman named Ronan was one of the key voices arguing for the renegades to come into the Roman fold.
In the end, there was a general agreement to follow the Roman Easter in Britain, but a number of feisty Celts were not appeased and Colman marched off with a number of his cohorts, refusing to capitulate.
They held out until around 716, when they finally gave in, though a few maverick Welsh continued to do their own thing for several decades more.
Typically, once all was finally resolved, the Romans went with the Alexandrian tables anyway. "The Alexandrian one is the one we all follow now," says Prof Ó Cróinín.
So now we all have the same Easter, and it's chocolate eggs all round. Except not quite. To this day, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Western Christian Church interpret the original Nicaean rule so differently that they often celebrate Easter on different dates. For starters, in the West, calculations are based on the Gregorian calendar, with the Eastern Orthodox Church using the Julian calendar.
ON TOP OF this, the Eastern Orthodox Church uses its particular formula to ensure that Easter always falls after Passover, the theory being that this follows the chronology outlined in the Bible, with Christ's crucifixion and resurrection taking place after he arrived in Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. Not so hung up on the timeline, Easter for the Western Church has been known to precede Passover by several weeks.
This historical hoopla means that Easter remains a moveable feast, and the complex liturgical date-jiggery means St Patrick's Day falls in Easter week this year, with St Patrick's Day Masses moved to the preceding Saturday to avoid clashing with Easter services. Thankfully, it's business as usual for the St Patrick's Day Festival organisers and the parade will take place as usual on March 17th, Easter week or no Easter week.
Full moons may come and go, vernal equinoxes may be up for debate, but in this crazy year of premature fasting and leap year tomfoolery, it's good to know that some things never change.