Author Description

For more than three hundred years following the Gregorian reform of the calendar in A.D. 1582, the Eastern Orthodox Church had adopted a unified and unwaveringly negative stance toward the changes in the reckoning of the Paschal date introduced in the West. Coming as it did barely a century after the tragedy of the alosis of the Vassilevousa Polis, i.e., the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, the publication of the Papal Bull Inter Gravissimas had found the Orthodox in a mental state of siege. Obeying a deep-seated instinct, they reacted in a manner that became characteristic of their 400-year long captivity. They dusted off from their shelves respected tomes representing the Orthodox tradition, and repeated verbatim the writings of the Fathers of the past, trusting that in this manner they were fulfilling their obligation to retain unaltered their spiritual inheritance, so as to pass it on to future generations. Prominent among the works employed by the Byzantines in their response to the Papal legates arriving in Constantinople was the treatise by Matthew Vlastares About the Holy Pascha, which had been included in his monumental Syntagma. The text, translated here into English for the first time, has been quoted repeatedly since then by generations of Byzantine hierarchs, theologians and even lay-folk, in countless debates about the reform of the calendar. * * * "Anastasios Ioannides has brought back into print the only modern critical edition of the Greek text of this tract, with the first translation of this important text into a modern language. The English translation is excellent, both literally faithful to the Greek and idiomatically modern. The extensive explanatory notes will be useful to scholars, as well as to readers unfamilar with the subject matter. Dr. Ioannides introduces readers to the mathematical intricacies of Paschal calculations based on the phases of the moon and to the construction of the Byzantine calendar with a base-date of 1