Springtime, Love, Beauty, Poetry ... and Easter

The Paschal joys of heaven and earth in medieval culture

Haec dies, quam fecit Dominus: exsultemus et laetemur in ea.

The Church sings this simple sentence every day of Easter Week, from Sunday to Saturday, and there is a captivating perfection in its poetry. “This is the day, which the Lord has made: let us exult and rejoice in it.” A rationalistic analysis, however, would find fault. How can seven separate days all be this day? And in any case, “which the Lord has made” doesn’t tell us much—is not every day made by God?

We know that the true meaning is found below the surface of the words, which though biblical and Hebrew in origin—the source is Psalm 117—have acquired an independent existence as a liturgical and Latin utterance. The key is dies, “day.” Latin does not have an equivalent of “the” or “a,” those little determiners, called the definite and indefinite article, that pop up everywhere in English. A book about Latin grammar might tell you that you need to use context to fill in the appropriate article, but the truer idea is that Latin’s relationship with reality simply does not require the distinction. The difference between “the day” and “a day” is important when you’re thinking in English (or Spanish, or French, or German), but the two meanings can coexist in a statement like haec dies, quam fecit Dominus: “this is Day, which the Lord has made.” It is the day, on which a Man who was tortured to death walked out of His own tomb; it is a day, any day, every day, because there never has been and never will be a day that does not somehow draw hope and power and meaning from the rising sun of the Resurrection; it is Day, perfect “dayness,” the Platonic form (so to speak) of that thing we call “day” and the ultimate summation of its goodness and symbolism; and finally, since haec can be an adjective as well as a pronoun, it is this day, this Easter, this specific liturgical feast that is the magnificence of the present moment, and a wondrous event in history, and the mystical fulfillment of the first day of Creation, and a thread of pure Light that weaves eternity into the Christian year, into the Paschal season, into the Paschal week—into time itself.

When you have a day like that, it’s hard to argue with the Church’s suggestion: exsultemus et laetemur in ea.

Medieval Easter is one of those topics where the written records are disappointing. The problem is that most of the people celebrating Easter in the Middle Ages, especially the Early Middle Ages, knew how to sing and dance and feast and decorate eggs and relax in the shade, but not how to write. Furthermore, those who did know how to write were scholars and had much to say about computus. That’s the name given to the field of study whose central concern was computing, based on lunar and solar cycles, the date of Easter. Computus would be pretty high on the list of medieval discussions that for modern readers would quickly induce sleep, or perhaps a coma. The details were quite complex (as the manuscript leaves below suggest), and we’re in a stage of Christian history where arguing about the date of Easter does not at all feel like a good use of time.

This is from an early-twelfth-century English manuscript. The diagram on the left “is a visual meditation on the cosmic and religious resonances of computus.” On the right are some tables and diagrams that look mighty complicated to me.