Dionysius Exiguus
Dionysius Exiguus was a monk and translator born in Scythia, likely in the late fifth century, who became known for his significant contributions to the early Christian church, particularly in Rome. His most notable achievements include the first compilation of church canon law and the introduction of a systematic method for calculating the date of Easter. Dionysius's work aimed to resolve ongoing disputes between the Western and Eastern churches regarding the Easter celebration, which had been contentious since the second century. He is also credited with popularizing the concept of the Christian era, which designated years based on the birth of Jesus Christ, though his calculations and the resulting calendar system have been subject to historical scrutiny.
Dionysius’s Paschal Tables, which included a method for determining Easter dates, gained wide acceptance in Europe, although some of his mathematical assumptions were later revised. His influence extended beyond his lifetime, as his works were utilized by subsequent church leaders and scholars. Despite his efforts towards unity, theological and cultural differences between the Western and Eastern churches persisted, eventually leading to the Great Schism of 1054. Today, Dionysius Exiguus is recognized as a pivotal figure in the history of Christian chronology and ecclesiastical law.
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Dionysius Exiguus
Scythian monk and scholar
- Born: Second half of the fifth century
- Birthplace: Scythia
- Died: First half of the sixth century
- Place of death: Rome (now in Italy)
Dionysius Exiguus provided a more accurate means to ascertain the date of Easter and initiated the convention of the Christian era by basing the calendar on the year of the birth of Christ.
Early Life
Very little is known about the life of Dionysius Exiguus (di-uh-NISH-ee-uhs eh-ZIGH-yuh-wuhs). The only contemporary account of his life is a paragraph in the Institutiones divinarum et humanarum lectionum (562; An Introduction to Divine and Human Readings, 1946, better known as Institutiones) of Cassiodorus, who gives few details. Dionysius Exiguus was born in Scythia in central Asia, became a monk, and was summoned to Rome, where he died. By analyzing his writings, modern scholars have attempted to fix various events in his life, but no consensus exists. Because it is likely that Dionysius was a mature adult when he arrived in Rome, probably around 500, it is also likely that he died before 550, although it seems that he disappeared around 527. Dionysius assumed the appellation Exiguus, which translates as “short,” “small,” “lowly,” or “less,” probably not to describe his physical stature but rather to suggest his unimportance in relation to God.
Dionysius knew Latin and, because of his Eastern origin, Greek. His proficiency in translating material from one of these languages into the other attracted the attention of Pope Saint Gelasius I, who summoned him to Rome to organize the papal archives. Dionysius arrived in Rome after the pope died in 496.
Above all, Dionysius Exiguus was known as a translator. He translated several biographies of saints, a philosophical work on the creation of the human being, and texts on the heresies, including various writings on this topic by officials of the Eastern, or Greek, church.
In terms of church history, Dionysius Exiguus is best known as a canonist. His translating and compiling abilities produced the first collection of canon, or church, law. His collections included the canons of the apostles; the decrees of the councils of Nicaea, Ancyra, Neocaesarea, Gangra, Antioch, Laodicea, Constantinople, Chalcedon and Sardica, and Carthage; dedicatory epistles; and the decretals of the popes from Saint Siricius (384-399) to Anastasius II (496-498).
Life’s Work
As a translator, Dionysius developed an interest in computation, or the determination of the calendar. The churches of Rome and Asia Minor had engaged in a dispute concerning the date of Easter since the second century. Based on the account of the Crucifixion of Christ in the Gospel of Saint John, the church in Asia Minor celebrated Easter on the day of the sacrifice of the lamb in the Jewish Passover, regardless of the day of the week. Passover occurred on the fourteenth day of Nisan, the first month of the Jewish year. The Roman church followed the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which identified the Last Supper with the Passover meal and placed the Crucifixion on the day after Passover. In the Western church, Easter became a memorial of the Resurrection and was celebrated on the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox.
At the end of the second century, Victor, the bishop of Rome, threatened excommunication for anyone not observing Easter from the first Friday to Sunday after the fourteenth day of Nisan. As they adhered to a more ancient tradition, the churches in Asia Minor refused to submit. The controversy blew over, though the dispute continued. In the Western church in particular, a growing number of believers came to hold the opinion that Easter should be independent of Passover, and several means to determine Easter appeared during the third century.
The Nicene Council in 325 produced a unanimous decision that the Western and Eastern churches should hold Easter on the same day and that the date should have nothing in common with the Jewish tradition. However, no method of calculation was established at the Nicene Council; the Western church continued to use an old eighty-four-year cycle, while the Eastern churches used the more accurate nineteen-year (or Metonic lunar) cycle, known since antiquity.
The disputes and discrepancies continued. In the middle of the fifth century, Victorius of Aquitaine was charged with the recalculation of the dates of Easter, but he believed that his task was only to show the differences resulting from the employment of two sets of criteria, the pope having the final authority. Victorius did computations according to the Eastern nineteen-year cycles, but he made at least three mistakes, which caused repeated inaccuracies in the calculation of the Easter date. In some years, the Western and Eastern dates for Easter were separated by a week or even a month. For example, in 501, the Roman church held Easter on March 25, and the Eastern church celebrated it on April 22. The difference resulted from the Eastern church’s practice of dating the spring equinox on March 21, while the Roman church placed the equinox on March 18.
At the request of a Bishop Petronius in 525, Dionysius Exiguus took up the Easter question in Liber de Paschate (Paschal Tables), which includes Epistola prima scripta anno Christi 525 (“first letter written in the year of Christ 525”). In the letter, Dionysius committed a “pious” lie: He claimed that the Nicene fathers directed Christendom to accept the fourteenth day of the Paschal moon as the basis of the Easter calculation. These directives do not appear in the actual council decisions, which decreed only the universal celebration of Easter on the same day. Preserving the Nicene Council’s goal of a single Easter date, Dionysius accepted the calculations of Athanas (c. 297-373), archbishop of Alexandria, and his successors, Theophil (fl. early fifth century) and Cyril (d. 444), which placed Easter on the fourteenth day of the Paschal lunation occurring during the first Hebrew month, Nisan. Based on God’s commands to Moses concerning the celebration of Passover and on the Historia ecclesiastica (c. 300, 324 c.e.; Ancient Ecclesiastical Histories, 1576-1577; better known as Eusebius’s Church History) of Eusebius of Caesarea, Dionysius noted that Nisan commenced on the day a new crescent moon appeared on or between March 8 and April 5. It was further stipulated that Easter must occur after the spring equinox.
The Alexandrians had preserved the nineteen-year cycle, in which the Easter date repeats every nineteen years, and Cyril designed a ninety-five-year cycle composed of five nineteen-year cycles. Dionysius included a Latin translation of the Easter cycle of Cyril. With his understanding of the Alexandrian method of calculation, and noting that in 525, six years of the ninety-five-year cycle remained, Dionysius provided Easter dates for the years 532 to 627, the next ninety-five-year cycle. Certain deviations from modern calculations are explained by the fact that Dionysius considered the day to begin at sunrise and not at midnight, the modern convention. Thus, while Dionysius did not invent the method of the determination of Easter, he is responsible for its introduction into use in Western Christendom.
History also credits Dionysius with the introduction of the idea of the Christian era. Actually, others before him had conceived of a calendar based on the date of Christ’s birth, though at the time of Dionysius, there were several competing ways to number the years. In his calculation of the Easter date, Dionysius chose “to designate time from the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ,” and not from the 153d year after the Diocletian era, as Cyril did.
Dionysius took the year in which he wrote his Paschal tables to be 1278 a.u.c. (ab urbe condita, from the founding of the city of Rome), 783 a.u.c. to be the year of Christ’s Crucifixion, and thirty to be the age at which Christ died. Thus he arrived at 525 for the year in which he was writing. History judges that he made a mistake in his calculations, for most scholars agree that Jesus was born not in 1 c.e. but rather, perhaps, in 4 or 7 b.c.e. The revised figure is based on a calculation from the year of Christ’s birth, which can be more accurately determined than the year of his death.
One final issue concerning Dionysius’s introduction of the Christian era deserves note. He began the Christian era not with the year 0 but rather with the year 1. This omission cannot really be considered an error; at the time, the concept of the zero did not exist in the West. Although the ancient Egyptians did have such a conception, they did not employ it regularly. The idea of the number zero appeared in Arab and Hindu thought toward the end of the eighth or the beginning of the ninth century and was introduced into Europe somewhat later.
Significance
Although Dionysius invented neither the manner of the calculation of the Easter date nor the conception of the Christian era, his works popularized both. Petronius circulated the tables Dionysius had prepared. Pope John I (523-526) learned of Dionysius’s calculations and was interested in adopting them. He died in 526, however, and the next two popes were not impressed by the tables. Moreover, there is some evidence that Dionysius fell out of favor with them. During this period, Victorius’s tables sufficed, but over time, the errors inherent in them became troubling.
Knowledge of the Dionysiac tables, however, spread. By 562, Cassiodorus was using them in his school. They were received and accepted as canonical in Spain before 627. The Dionysiac tables circulated widely throughout Europe in the seventh century. The majority of English churches accepted the tables in 729. Under the leadership of Charlemagne, the nineteen-year cycle was universally accepted in the Christian church.
All Dionysius’s works, including his translations and his computation and canonical tables, had a single aim: to reconcile the Western and Eastern churches. Although the universal acceptance of his Easter tables provided unity on one point, there were many other political, cultural, and doctrinal differences between the Western and Eastern churches, and by the 800’, a schism between the two had begun. In 1054, Christianity divided permanently into two churches, the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox. When the Roman Catholic Church replaced the old, inaccurate Julian calendar with the Gregorian calendar in 1582, the agreement over the Easter date vanished. As a consequence, the Eastern Orthodox Easter and the Roman Catholic Easter are now sometimes celebrated on different days.
Bibliography
Borst, Arno. The Order of Time from the Ancient Computus to the Modern Computer. Translated by Andrew Winnard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. A 168-page history of the calendar from ancient Greece to the twentieth century. Contains a chapter on the Easter cycle and includes other references to Dionysius Exiguus.
Declercq, Georges. Anno Domini: The Origins of the Christian Era. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000. An examination of Dionysius’s role in establishing the Christian era. Bibliography.
Frend, W. H. C. The Rise of Christianity. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984. A 1,022-page history of the early Christian church. Useful for an understanding of the development of the Eastern (Greek) and Western (Latin) Christian churches and their differences, including short sections on Easter dating.
Gould, Stephen J. Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist’s Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown. New York: Harmony Books, 1997. A 190-page book with a short discussion of Dionysius in the context of the dispute over when the third millennium begins. Places calendar issues within a social context.
Harvey, O. L. Time Shaper, Day Counter: Dionysius and Scaliger. Silver Spring, Md.: Harvey, 1976. An examination of the history of the calendar that looks at the part played by Dionysius.
Percival, Henry R., ed. The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Undivided Church. New York: Edwin S. Gorham, 1901. Contains documents from the Council of Nicaea relating to the determination of Easter and comments concerning the following history and later role of Dionysius.