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6.2.3.1.1.5
The Council of Nicaea |
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The Council of Nicaea was convened by the Emperor Constantine in A.D. 325 to render authoritative decisions regarding a number of issues facing the early Christian church. Constantine was less interested in the particular details of the decisions, than in obtaining consensus, as noted in the discussion of Christmas. |
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Thus, one of the chief functions of the Council was the establishment of a body of orthodox doctrine and the rejection of other opinions as heresy. At the time of the Council, one of the principal challenges to what later became orthodoxy was posed by Arius, a presbyter in Alexandria. Arius claimed that Christ was mortal, not divine, and effectively cast Christianity into a Judaic mold. In its efforts to combat the heresy of Arianism, the Council took further steps to distance Christianity from its Jewish roots. The Council produced a rule for determining the date of Easter, concluding that Easter should occur on the Sunday following the 14th day of the moon, which occurs on or after 21 March. |
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The intended effect of this rule was very specifically designed to separate Christian Easter from Jewish Passover. By designating the Sunday following the 14th day, the rule attempts to ensure that Easter will occur later than 14 Nisan. So important was this distinction to early Christian authorities that schismatics were excommunicated and even sentenced to death for celebrating Easter on, or before, Passover. |
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What the Council did not decide was how the 14th day was to be found. They committed the task of determining Easter date to the Bishop of Alexandria, who was to communicate his decision to the Bishop of Rome. Thus, the decisions of the Council still left scope for further argument concerning the real, or reputed, occurrence of the vernal equinox and the full moon. |
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6.2.3.1.1.6
An Artificial Moon |
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Not surprisingly, the Council's decisions did not produce the desired uniformity. Alexandria and Rome accepted each other's date on occasion, but different cycles continued to prevail. Pope Leo I (A.D. 440461) attempted repeatedly to achieve uniformity between the two major cycles of Rome (84 years) and Alexandria (19 years). According to Burnaby (Elements of the Jewish and Muhammadan Calendars, p. 516), the Holy See in Rome chafed under this arrangement. Hilary, who was then Archdeacon of Rome, made an effort to obtain his own calendar, and become independent of Alexandria, by employing Victorius of Aquitaine to produce what Knuth claims in Fundamental Algorithms (p. 155) to be "the first systematic algorithm" for calculating Easter date the canon paschalis. Knuth gives the date of the algorithm as A.D. 457, whereas Burnaby cites A.D. 437 in a probable misprint. |
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The algorithm of Victorius solved a very critical problem, which was the prediction of Easter. The algorithm abandons any attempt to predict the occurrence of the actual astronomical new moon, and instead, assumes a uniformly moving artificial moon. This assumption introduces a necessary simplification into the mathematics, |
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