Red-Letter Day
Pentecost
also known as Whitsunday, Whit Sunday
The fiftieth day of Easter, when the Holy Spirit came upon the apostles in wind and fire and they spoke in the languages of the nations. It is the last and greatest day of the Great Fifty Days, and it always falls on a Sunday. In the West the church vests in red; in the East, in green.
Fifty days after the Passover at which Christ was crucified, on a festival the Jewish people were already keeping, the apostles were gathered together in one place. Acts tells what happened: a sound like a rushing mighty wind, tongues as of fire resting on each of them, and speech in languages they had never learned, so that pilgrims from Parthia and Media and Elam and Crete and Arabia each heard their own tongue. This is the day the church has kept ever since, and it is the only account of the event that exists; nothing outside the text corroborates it.
The day was not chosen. It was already occupied. The Feast of Weeks, fifty days counted from Passover, was fixed in the Torah as a harvest feast, and Acts assumes its reader knows the date without being told. What the church did was not to displace a rival feast but to read a new meaning into an old one. Leo the Great, preaching at Rome in the middle of the fifth century, drew out the pairing that has governed the day ever since: as the Law was given on Sinai on the fiftieth day after the lamb was sacrificed in Egypt, so on the fiftieth day from the Resurrection the Holy Spirit came down upon the apostles, "that the diligent Christian may recognize how the beginnings of the Old Testament were preparatory to the beginnings of the Gospel, and how the second giving was effected by the same Spirit as had instituted the first." The translation is Charles Lett Feltoe's. The pairing is not in the Torah's own wording; it is a reading that Jewish and Christian interpreters arrived at independently, and it is the reading the church has kept.
What the day did to the men who received it is what the church has always found most worth saying about it. Augustine, expounding the Gospel of John at Hippo, set the fire against the tower: "If pride caused diversities of tongues, Christ's humility has united these diversities in one. The Church is now bringing together what that tower had sundered." The Byzantine church sings the same figure on the day itself: "When the Most High came down and confused the tongues, He divided the nations; but when He distributed the tongues of fire, He called all to unity."
The feast is old enough that no one instituted it. It is simply there, assumed and unremarkable, in the earliest witnesses we have. Tertullian at Carthage around the year 200 calls it "a most joyous space for conferring baptisms." Irenaeus at Lyons, a little earlier, records that Christians do not kneel on this day, "because it is of equal significance with the Lord's day." Nicaea in 325 made that standing posture a rule for the whole fifty days. Fifty days in which the body is forbidden to take the penitential posture: that is the earliest evidence we have of what this season asked of ordinary worshippers, and it asked joy.
Leo, who called the day one of the chief feasts, also thought its joy a hazard, and appointed a fast in the days immediately after it, and directed that fast outward: "Whatever is spent in feeding the poor, in healing the sick, in ransoming prisoners." Nine centuries later an English parish priest was preaching the same shape. John Mirk's sermons for Whitsun Eve and Whitsunday, copied and printed across England from the 1380s into the sixteenth century, told parishioners to fast on the eve and come to the church, and offered a confession window in the priest's own voice: "yf any of you ys fallen into any greues synne, þat he come to me and clanse hym þerof, er þen Sondays com; and I wyll be redy forto helpe." His subject on the day itself was not doctrine but speech and neighbourly quarrels. The tongue, he said, is "þe best membyr of a man whyll hit ys rewlet, and þe worst when hyt ys out of rewle," and when brands are cast apart by discord the fire of love goes out and the smoke of malice rises between the parties. The gift of tongues, preached to an English village, became the governing of tongues.
The day has been legislated over more than any other in the calendar. Parliament abolished Whitsuntide by name in 1647, and had to legislate a substitute holiday for scholars, apprentices and servants in its place, which is the plainest testimony anyone ever gave to what the feast was doing for working people. It was restored in 1660. Rome suppressed its octave in 1969. Britain detached its bank holiday from it in 1971. France made its Monday a working day in 2004 to fund care for the elderly.
And still it comes back on its own count, fifty days after Easter, unable to fall on any day but a Sunday, unable to be transferred or set aside. The Spirit given at the beginning was not given for a generation. The collect the English church has prayed since Cranmer asks for nothing more elaborate than that: to have a right judgment in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort.
The oldest discipline attached to this day is not a fast but a posture: for fifty days you do not kneel, because the season is one of joy and your body is to say so. It is a strange rule to be legislated by a council, and it suggests that Christians have always needed to be told when to stop mourning. Leo thought the opposite danger real too, and appointed a fast after the feast so that what was given on the day would abide past it, and directed the money saved to the poor and the sick and the imprisoned. Mirk, preaching to a parish, made the day about the tongue: whether you can govern what you say, and whether you are at peace with the people you will sit beside. Between the posture and the tongue there is a whole rule of life. Which of the two would be harder for you this year, to rejoice on purpose, or to say nothing you would have to take back?
The evidence for this feast divides sharply. The event is attested by one text and no other: Acts 2 is the only account, and the year, somewhere around AD 30 to 33, depends entirely on the chronology of the Passion. The observance has a documentary trail of its own, and it begins early and thinly.
The earliest reference is a fragment. Irenaeus of Lyons, writing in the 180s, is quoted by a later and unnamed compiler as saying that Christians do not kneel at Pentecost "because it is of equal significance with the Lord's day"; the collection the fragment survives in is described by its own modern editors as interpolated, and that word should travel with the citation. Tertullian at Carthage, writing around 198 to 207, treats the feast as established and unremarkable. Two regions, Gaul or Asia Minor and North Africa, within a few decades of each other: that is better evidence of genuine early spread than either witness alone. A standing caution governs all of it. In sources earlier than the late fourth century "Pentecost" almost always means the fifty-day season, not the fiftieth day. The Catholic Encyclopedia's line that the feast "dates back to the first century" must never be quoted without its own next clause: "although there is no evidence that it was observed, as there is in the case of Easter."
The fourth century is where the record thickens. Nicaea's twentieth canon in 325 requires prayer standing "on the Lord's Day and in the days of Pentecost," which also means people were kneeling and were being told to stop. The Synod of Elvira, dated variously between 300 and 313, corrects a local practice of keeping the day at the wrong point; a primary Latin text of that canon was not consulted for this account, and the commonly quoted phrase "the fortieth day" is a translator's bracketed gloss, not the canon's own words. In 385 Pope Siricius, in the earliest surviving papal decretal, confined solemn baptism to Easter and Pentecost except in danger of death. The Syrian church order known as the Apostolic Constitutions, compiled around 375 to 380, prescribes a festal week. In 381 Gregory of Nazianzus preached at Constantinople the earliest surviving sermon composed for the day as a discrete day. And within a year or two of that, the pilgrim Egeria described the Jerusalem observance in detail: vigil at the Anastasis from first cockcrow, procession to the Martyrium, then to Sion, then up to Eleona and the Imbomon, where the Ascension readings were read, home at midnight. Ascension and Pentecost are still fused on one day in her account, caught mid-separation. Her text survives in a single eleventh-century manuscript.
The feast's Western history is a history of its edges rather than its institution. No bishop or council founded it in the West; it was simply inherited. What was argued over was the octave, still an open question in the eleventh century according to a 1912 encyclopedia's reading of Berno of Reichenau, whose own treatise was not consulted here; the work prohibition attached to the following days, reportedly narrowed by a synod at Constance in 1094, for which no conciliar act has been seen; and finally the octave's abolition altogether by Paul VI's motu proprio Mysterii Paschalis of 14 February 1969, in force from 1 January 1970. In 2018 the Monday after Pentecost was partly recovered in the Roman calendar as the Memorial of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church.
In the West the vestments are red for fire, and the sequence Veni Sancte Spiritus, the Golden Sequence, is sung before the Gospel, as it has been since it was among the small number of sequences retained at the Tridentine reform of 1570. Its authorship is genuinely disputed between Innocent III and Stephen Langton, with modern scholarship inclining to Langton. Veni Creator Spiritus, older still and traditionally ascribed to Rabanus Maurus, passed from the Sarum rites into the Anglican Ordinal and is required before the laying-on of hands; John Cosin's English version of it, first printed in 1627, is the one still sung. At Rome, red rose petals are released through the oculus of the Pantheon, timed to the singing of Veni Creator; the custom is currently practised, revived in its present form in 1995, and gave the day its old Italian names, Pascha rosatum and Pasqua rossa.
In the East the colour is green, the churches are dressed with birch and fresh grass, and the day itself is called Trinity Sunday, with no separate Trinity feast a week later. At Kneeling Vespers the faithful kneel for the first time since Pascha, in three sets of prayers that include remembrance of the departed, even those in Hades. The Nicene prohibition is not abolished but formally ended, in the liturgy, at a stated moment.
Much of the day's folk keeping has lapsed. Whitsun ales funded parish repair and poor relief until the seventeenth century; curd tarts and Whitsun cakes belonged to the height of English spring cheese-making; new clothes for children at Whitsun persisted among the poorest families into the twentieth century. The Whit Walks of north-west England, first held in 1801 out of the Sunday School movement, still process, and the Whit Friday brass band contests in Saddleworth and Tameside are still competed.
Tertullian, On Baptism, chapter 19. Translated by Sydney Thelwall, Ante-Nicene Fathers volume 3. https://ccel.org/ccel/tertullian/baptism/anf03.vi.iii.xix.html
Irenaeus, Fragments of the Lost Writings, Fragment VII (from the lost treatise On Easter, preserved by a later compiler; the collection is described by its editors as interpolated). Translated by Roberts and Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers volume 1. https://ccel.org/ccel/irenaeus/fragments_of_the_lost_writings_of_irenaeus/anf01.ix.viii.vii.html
Council of Nicaea (325), canon 20. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3801.htm
Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 41, On Pentecost, sections I, II and V. Translated by Browne and Swallow, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 7. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/310241.htm
Leo the Great, Sermon 75, On Whitsuntide I, sections I and V. Translated by Charles Lett Feltoe, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 12. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/360375.htm
Leo the Great, Sermon 78, On the Whitsuntide Fast I, sections III and IV. Same translator and volume. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/360378.htm
Augustine, Tractate VI on the Gospel of John, section 10 (a verse-by-verse commentary, not a sermon for the day). Translated by John Gibb, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, volume 7. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1701006.htm
Egeria, Itinerarium, chapter 43. Translated by Louis Duchesne, Christian Worship (London, 1923), as hosted. https://users.ox.ac.uk/~mikef/durham/egetra.html
John Mirk, Festial, sermons 38 and 39 (composed c. 1382–1400), edited by Theodor Erbe, Early English Text Society, Extra Series 96 (1905); quotations at pages 155, 156, 159, 161 and 162. https://archive.org/stream/mirksfestialcoll01mirkuoft/mirksfestialcoll01mirkuoft_djvu.txt
Troparion and Kontakion of Holy Pentecost, Tone 8, in the contemporary English of the Orthodox Church in America. The kontakion is traditionally ascribed to Romanos the Melodist, though which short liturgical kontakia are genuinely his is unsettled. https://www.oca.org/saints/troparia/2015/05/31/45-holy-pentecost
The Book of Common Prayer (1928), Whitsunday propers, giving the collect verbatim with the rubric appointing it daily throughout Whitsun Week. http://www.episcopalnet.org/1928bcp/propers/whitsunday.html
Ordinance for Abolishing of Festivals, 8 June 1647, in Firth and Rait, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum. https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/acts-ordinances-interregnum/p954
Charles I, Declaration of Sports (18 October 1633, reissuing James I's declaration of 24 May 1618). https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Sports_(1633)
Catholic Encyclopedia (1912), Pentecost (Whitsunday): the "first century… no evidence it was observed" pair, the disputed octave, Berno of Reichenau, Pascha rosatum. Tertiary; every claim taken from it inherits that status. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15614b.htm
Catholic Encyclopedia (1912), Pentecost (Jewish Feast): the Feast of Weeks and the post-biblical character of the Sinai identification. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11661a.htm
McClintock and Strong, Whitsunday: the six competing etymologies. https://www.biblicalcyclopedia.com/W/whitsunday.html
The propers have their own line. A Latin collect, "Deus, qui hodierna die corda fidelium Sancti Spiritus illustratione docuisti," stands in the Gregorian Sacramentary as the collect of the Pentecost morning Mass at St Peter's; it is the text Cranmer translated. Its English form, with the Epistle at Acts 2:1 and the Gospel at John 14:15, ran unchanged from the Sarum use through the prayer books into the 1928 American edition, which also directs that the collect be said daily throughout Whitsun Week. That is a four-hundred-year stability. The 1979 American book introduced a wholly new Pentecost collect and demoted the Cranmerian one to an alternative, an arrangement the 2019 Anglican book inherits; the label misleads, because the alternative is by centuries the senior of the two.
Two English episodes are unusually well documented, and both are about the day's claim on public time. Charles I's Declaration of Sports, issued at Westminster on 18 October 1633 and reissuing his father's declaration of 24 May 1618, expressly permitted "May-Games, Whitson Ales, and Morris-dances" after divine service, on the stated ground that the labouring poor would otherwise have no recreation at all. Parliament ordered the Declaration burnt in 1643, and the Ordinance for Abolishing of Festivals of 8 June 1647 abolished "the said Feast of the Nativity of Christ, Easter and Whitsuntide, and all other Festival dayes" by name, while legislating in the same breath that scholars, apprentices and servants should have recreation on every second Tuesday in the month instead. Both sides understood exactly what the feast was doing.
What has never been settled is the English name. At least six derivations of "Whitsunday" have been proposed: the white robes of the newly baptized; wit and wisdom; a corruption of Pentecost through the German Pfingsten; the French huit; the white-meat, that is milk, given to the poor; and a wite or fine on unpaid tithes. Modern reference works usually print only the first. But Mirk preached the second to English parishioners as plain fact for generations, telling them the day is so called "for bycause þat þe Holy Gost as þys day broȝt wyt and wysdome ynto all Cristes dyscyples." Whatever philology concludes, that is what English lay people were told the name meant.
A modern line of criticism should be reported rather than answered. Philo of Alexandria, writing in the first century, already described the giving of the Law at Sinai as a voice from heaven, with fire, made intelligible to its hearers; later rabbinic tradition has the voice dividing into tongues for the nations. Since Shavuot was already associated by many Jews with Sinai, critical readers since the modern period have argued that the specific shape of Luke's narrative, voice and fire and universal comprehension, is the shape of an exegetical tradition already in circulation, and that Acts, written a generation after the events by an author who was not present, is doing theology through narrative in the manner of ancient historiography. The observation does not touch the church's confession, and it is not new information about the day; it is a reading of the genre.
Almighty God, on this day, through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, you revealed the way of eternal life to every race and nation: Pour out this gift anew, that by the preaching of the Gospel your salvation may reach to the ends of the earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Constantini /ˌkɒnstənˈtiːniː/; Pâques /pɑːk/