Red-Letter Day
also known as Caput Jejunii, Day of Ashes
Ash Wednesday opens Lent: forty days of fasting, penitence, and prayer, counted apart from the Sundays, in preparation for Easter. Where ashes are imposed, they are given as a sign of mortality and repentance, with the sentence spoken over Adam spoken again over each worshipper. The day commemorates no event. It begins a season.
The church keeps most of its days in memory of something that happened. This one it keeps in order to begin. Ash Wednesday is the door into Lent, and everything about the day, including its odd position in the week, exists to serve the season it opens.
The oddity is worth stating plainly, because it is the day's own explanation of itself. Lent is forty days of fasting, and Sunday is never a fast day: every Sunday is a feast of the Resurrection, and the church will not mourn on it. Six weeks of Lent, with the six Sundays taken out, leaves thirty-six days of fasting. So four days were set before the first Sunday of Lent, Wednesday through Saturday, to make the number forty. Ælfric of Eynsham, writing in English for English congregations around the year 1000, gives exactly that reason: the forty days are not fulfilled "unless we fast before that for these four days, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday." The Wednesday is not a symbol. It is arithmetic in the service of a fast.
The ashes came to the day from a harder place. At first the mark belonged to other people. Those enrolled in the order of penitents for grave and public sin were marked with ashes at the start of Lent, put out of the church, and received back on Maundy Thursday; for the ordinary worshipper in the pew the day was a sentence passed on somebody else. What happened next is the largest change in what this day does. The sign was extended from the punished few to the whole body, and in being extended it changed its meaning. Ashes had said, to those who received them, you are excluded. Now they said something true of the bishop as well as of the congregation: you are mortal. Ælfric describes it as already ordinary custom in England: on the Wednesday, "throughout the whole world," the priests bless clean ashes in church and lay them on men's heads, "that they may have in mind that they came from earth, and shall again return to dust." The Synod of Benevento made the imposition general law for the whole Western church, clergy and lay, men and women, in 1091, close to a century after Ælfric was already assuming it.
The words spoken with the ashes are older than the rite, and they are not a devotional sentiment. They are the sentence of God on Adam in Genesis: dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. The rite takes that sentence and turns it around, from a judgment pronounced once on the race into a second-person address spoken over one particular person, by name, on one particular morning. It is not a comfortable thing to have said to you. It is meant not to be.
What keeps the day from being merely grim is the order of its own texts. The mercy comes first. The oldest Introit of the day is drawn from the book of Wisdom and announces God's pity before any penance is asked; our own collect opens by addressing the God "who hatest nothing that thou hast made and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent," and only then asks him to "create and make in us new and contrite hearts." The prayer over the ashes in our book carries the same order all the way through: that the ashes may be a symbol of our mortality and a sign of our penitence, "that we may remember that it is by thy grace alone that we receive the gift of eternal life in Jesus Christ our Savior." The dust is told the truth about itself and then told what has been done for it. That is the whole shape of the day, and it is why the church can begin a fast with something like relief.
You may find the sentence hard to hear said over you, and it is meant to be hard. Everything you are anxious about this week belongs to a body that is going back to the ground, and the day says so out loud rather than letting you keep the thought at the edge of your mind. But notice what the church puts around that sentence: mercy announced first, grace named as the only source of the life that outlasts the dust, and forty days set aside, not to punish you, but to give you room. The season is long enough to change something. So: what is the one thing you have been meaning to put right, and have been telling yourself you would deal with when there was time?
The documentary base for this day divides into two unequal parts. The liturgical texts of the fast are well attested from the early Middle Ages onward, in sacramentaries, in vernacular preaching, and (for the Anglican line) in printed prayer books that can be read directly. The origin of the practices, by contrast, is thin, and several of the confident stories in circulation do not survive a look at the sources.
Lent is presupposed as a fixed point in the year by 325: the fifth canon of the Council of Nicaea, legislating the scheduling of provincial synods, dates one of them "before Lent." The canon proves the season, not the day, and nothing about ashes. A forty-day preparatory fast is attested in the Festal Letters of Athanasius in the 330s; the precise year within that decade is disputed in the reference literature, and no one in the preparation of this page read the letters themselves. The Wednesday start first appears in the Old Gelasian Sacramentary, about the year 700, whose rubric opens the fast on the feria iv. The name comes a little later: dies cinerum, "day of ashes," is found in the earliest surviving copies of the Gregorian Sacramentary and probably dates from at least the eighth century. A second Latin name, in capite jejunii, "at the head of the fast," names the day by its structural position rather than by its sign; Ælfric glosses it into Old English as heafod lenctenes fæstenes.
One widespread account should be set aside. Gregory the Great is often credited with adding the four days. He did not: his sixteenth homily on the Gospels counts thirty-six fast days, explains them as a tithe of the year, and claims no change of his own, and the Wednesday start does not appear in the record until about a century after his death in 604. The attribution has been traced to Alban Butler in 1774. Nor did the Council of Agde in 506 coin the phrase caput jejunii: the clause usually quoted for that belongs to Benevento in 1091, five and a half centuries later. Ratramnus of Corbie, writing in the middle of the ninth century, is the earliest writer located here who actually explains the arithmetic of thirty-six and forty, and he is describing settled practice rather than reporting a decision.
The best-evidenced witness in the whole record is Ælfric, whose homily for this day survives with a facing modern translation in W. W. Skeat's edition, and whose testimony is the more valuable because it is pastoral rather than legislative: he is telling English congregations what they already do. He also shows how the fast was enforced, which was by fear. His homily carries three cautionary tales of men who despised the discipline and died violently, one of them on his own spear with hounds at him, "because he had refused those few ashes." Four centuries later John Mirk's Festial, the most widely used vernacular sermon collection in later medieval England, gives the same instruction in a gentler key, along with a list of who is excused (children, pregnant women, the old, pilgrims, the sick, the poor, and those who labour hard for their living) and a shrewd note that some who fast all day sit up half the night filling themselves with drink.
In the Roman rite the ashes are burned from the palms blessed the previous Palm Sunday, a closed one-year loop of the same matter, and are blessed with holy water and incense before distribution. Nobody imposes them on himself: a bishop, and the Pope, receive them from another. The gesture itself varies by region, and more than most people realise. A cross traced on the forehead is the English-speaking custom; in Italy, Poland, Spain and much of Latin America the ashes are sprinkled over the crown of the head, where the sign is largely invisible in public. The 1969 Roman Missal added a second formula alongside the words from Genesis, "Repent, and believe in the Gospel," which quietly gave the rite a second message: mortality, or conversion, at the minister's choice. Rome's own station for the day is Santa Sabina on the Aventine, held by the Dominicans since the thirteenth century; a twelfth-century ordinal describes the pope walking there barefoot in procession, a custom dropped during the Avignon papacy and never revived.
The Sarum use in England had its own answer to the Wednesday question: Ash Wednesday was not reckoned as part of Lent at all, Lent beginning on the following Sunday when the veils went up, which is why the celebrant wore a ferial red cope at the blessing of the ashes rather than Lenten white. Its blessing carried proper chants, Immutemur habitu and Juxta vestibulum, with Psalm 51 at the centre; that psalm is the one element that survived on both sides of the later Anglican quarrel, since the Commination keeps it too. William Byrd set the day's responsory Emendemus in melius in his Cantiones Sacrae of 1575, in Latin, as a recusant, in a church that had abolished the rite the words belong to.
The Eastern churches keep no Ash Wednesday and use no ashes to open the fast. Great Lent in the Byzantine tradition begins on Clean Monday, entered by Forgiveness Vespers the evening before, a corporate act of mutual reconciliation rather than a mark set on the body; Coptic, Armenian, and Syriac Lents likewise begin on a Monday, by their own reckonings. The contrast is not merely an absence, and Clean Monday should not be called an Orthodox Ash Wednesday.
Around the edges of the day, custom has attached itself. In Spain the Burial of the Sardine is still kept, a mock funeral processing an effigy to burning or burial, painted by Goya around 1812 and so established well before that. In Ireland the national No Smoking Day is fixed to Ash Wednesday. And since roughly 2007 (the origin year is disputed), Episcopal and other clergy in North America have taken ashes out to sidewalks and rail platforms as Ashes to Go, an innovation defended as meeting people where they are and criticised as unbundling the sign from the liturgy that gives it meaning.
Ælfric of Eynsham, In Caput Ieiunii, is quoted from W. W. Skeat's edition, Ælfric's Lives of Saints, volume I, Early English Text Society Original Series 76 (1881), homily XII, pages 261 to 267; Skeat prints a facing modern translation, and the phrases used here ("throughout the whole world," "because he had refused those few ashes," and the four-days arithmetic) are his. John Mirk's dispensation list and his note on drink come from sermon 19 of the Festial, edited by Theodor Erbe, Early English Text Society Extra Series 96 (1905), pages 82 to 84.
The liturgical texts quoted are those of the Book of Common Prayer 2019 of the Anglican Church in North America: the collect at page 545, and the blessing of the ashes and the imposition formula at page 546, in the traditional-language rite. The Commination is quoted from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer; the 1549 text was not consulted. Latimer's Sermon of the Plough, preached at the Shrouds at Paul's on 18 January 1548, and Andrewes's Ash Wednesday sermon of 6 March 1622, are quoted from the editions at Project Canterbury (anglicanhistory.org). The Purchas judgment is quoted at page 19 of Church Association Tract 259, citing Law Reports Ecclesiastical III.1 (1869 to 1870), pages 97 to 99.
For the sacramentaries, the name dies cinerum, the previous year's palms, the four blessing prayers, and the Synod of Benevento with its citation to Mansi XX, 739, see Herbert Thurston's article "Ash Wednesday" in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907); its companion article "Lent" supplies the Athanasius dating and the agent-less sentence about the later move to the Wednesday. Gregory's thirty-six-day count is in his sixteenth homily on the Gospels; the trail from that count to the modern misattribution, and the Old Gelasian rubric, are set out by Roger Pearse in two posts on his weblog. Steven Wedgeworth's essay on the Anglican history of Ash Wednesday, at Ad Fontes, is the fullest secondary narrative of the suppression and return and stands behind the sequence given above.
The English Reformation broke the rite, and this is the sharpest documented loss in our calendar. Ashes were among the ceremonies approved in Henry VIII's Ten Articles (the year is given variously as 1536 and 1538 in the literature consulted, and the Articles themselves were not opened here). In 1548 the Privy Council forbade them, along with palms on Palm Sunday and candles at Candlemas, before any prayer book existed; the order went out in February, which Old Style sources, reckoning the year from 25 March, date 1547. Hugh Latimer, preaching at Paul's on 18 January 1548, put the objection at full strength: where the devil prevails, up with "candles, palms, ashes, holy water, and new service of men's inventing," because "every one hath taken away some part of Christ's sanctification; every one hath robbed some part of Christ's passion and cross." The charge was not that ashes were trivial but that they competed with the atonement. In their place the prayer book set the Commination, a service of curses from Deuteronomy answered by the people, prefaced by a candid admission that it is a stopgap: in the primitive church there was a godly discipline, and "until the said discipline may be restored again, (which is much to be wished,)" the general sentences of God's cursing shall be read instead. The layman no longer received a mark; he heard a curse and answered Amen. (The 1549 text could not be consulted directly in the preparation of this page; the Commination is quoted here from 1662, which retained it.)
What followed was a gap of roughly four centuries. Lancelot Andrewes preached eight Ash Wednesday sermons at court between 1598 and 1624, and reported in 1622 that "fasting is laid aside, in a manner clean gone; few or none keep it." The first American Prayer Book of 1789 dropped the Commination but kept the day, its name and its collect; the 1928 book has the collect and the propers and no rubric for ashes. When John Purchas began blessing and giving ashes at St James's, Brighton, the Arches Court found in 1870 that he had acted illegally and admonished him to stop. The recovery, when it came, was not the work of the Oxford Movement, as is often assumed: ashes are still absent from the American Prayer Book Studies as late as 1957 and present by 1976, and the mechanism is the mid-twentieth-century ecumenical liturgical movement. The 1979 American book restored the imposition as an option, with a Litany of Penitence newly composed for it; the Church of England followed through Lent, Holy Week, Easter in the 1980s and Common Worship after 2000. Our own book of 2019 carries the rite conditionally, with the rubric "If ashes are to be imposed" (no drafting rationale for that conditional wording has been located).
Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made, and you forgive the sins of all who are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of you, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Joel 2:1–2, 12–17 or Isaiah 58:1–12Psalm 103 or Psalm 103:8–142 Corinthians 5:20–6:10Matthew 6:1–6, 16–21