Red-Letter Day
The Presentation
February 2
also known as Candlemas, The Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Hypapante
On the fortieth day after Christmas the Church remembers the bringing of the infant Christ to the Temple at Jerusalem, where Simeon took him in his arms and Anna proclaimed him. In the East the day is called the Meeting; in the West it was long titled the Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin, and known by the candles carried at it as Candlemas.
Forty days after a birth, the Law of Moses required a mother to come to the Temple with an offering, and Luke records that Mary and Joseph came, bringing with them the child. They were poor, and the offering they made was the poor person's offering, two young pigeons in place of a lamb. Nothing about the day was arranged to be noticed.
Two people noticed. Simeon, an old man to whom it had been promised that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ, took the child in his arms and said that he could now depart in peace, for his eyes had seen a salvation prepared before the face of all people, a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of Israel. Then he turned to Mary and told her that a sword would pierce through her own soul also. Anna, a widow of great age who did not depart from the Temple, came in at that hour and spoke of the child to all those who looked for redemption in Jerusalem.
That is the whole event, and it is unlike most of what the Church commemorates: no star, no angels, no crowd. Two elderly strangers recognise an infant, and say so. What the Church has heard in it, from its earliest keeping of the day, is that the promise had been waited for by people who died before its fulfilment and by people who lived just long enough to see it, and that when it arrived it arrived in arms, in the ordinary way, under the ordinary Law.
The day itself has an unusually plain origin. It has no birthday of its own: it is simply forty days counted forward from whatever day a church keeps the Nativity. The pilgrim Egeria, at Jerusalem between 381 and 384, is the earliest witness we have, and she describes a feast already fully grown. The fortieth day after the Epiphany, she writes, is kept there with the very highest honour, with a procession in which all take part at the Anastasis, and everything done "with the greatest joy, just as at Easter." All the priests preach on it, and then the bishop, always on the passage where Joseph and Mary brought the Lord into the Temple. Then the Eucharist. She mentions no candles, no penitence, and no theme of Mary's purification: the three things later readers most associate with the day are all absent from its earliest description of it.
Jerusalem counted from a Nativity kept on 6 January, so the fortieth day fell on 14 February. As the Roman keeping of 25 December spread in the last quarter of the fourth century, the same arithmetic moved the feast to 2 February, where the West has kept it since. The Armenian Church never adopted 25 December and keeps the feast on 14 February still, on Egeria's own date.
Almost everything else the day carries came later, and can be dated. The standard reference works hold that Justinian extended the feast through the Eastern Empire in 542, in thanksgiving for the ending of a pestilence at Constantinople. Candles carried in the hand are attested well after Egeria, and a rite for blessing them did not enter common use before the eleventh century, six hundred years after the feast itself. In England by the 990s Ælfric was telling a congregation that everyone should bear a light to church that day, and adding, for those who could not join the singing, that "though some men cannot sing, they can, nevertheless, bear the light in their hands; for on this day was Christ, the true Light, borne to the temple, who redeemed us from darkness and bringeth us to the Eternal Light." Five and a half centuries later the candles were gone: an Order of Council reached Cranmer in January 1548, and Stow records that on 2 February following "the bearing of candles in the Church was left off throughout the whole citie of London." The day stayed. The Prayer Book kept it as a red-letter day, with its collect and its propers, and keeps it still.
What has never gone is the canticle. Simeon's words became the Church's evening song, sung at the close of the day across East and West, set at Evening Prayer by Cranmer in 1549 and said or sung nightly in the English tradition since. Its Gospel text is prayed every night of the year: the aged man's "now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace" put into the mouth of anyone who has come to the end of a day, and of anyone coming to the end of a life. The promise was kept, and it was kept in the arms of someone who had waited long enough to think it might not be.
You may find that the hardest thing this day asks of you is not belief but patience: Simeon and Anna are given nothing to do except wait, faithfully and for years, in a place where nothing much was happening, and their whole vocation turns out to have been recognising something when it finally came. Most of what you wait for arrives, if it arrives, as quietly as an ordinary couple bringing a child and the cheaper offering. The feast puts the light in your hands rather than in the sky, and Ælfric's provision for those who could not sing is worth keeping: the day was built so that everyone had a full share in it, whatever they could or could not do. Where in your own long waiting have you stopped expecting to be met, and what would it take for you to recognise the answer if it came in an ordinary form?
The event itself is known from one source only, Luke 2:22-40, and it is undated in any absolute sense: its place in the calendar is derived entirely from whatever date a church assigns the Nativity, which is itself a fourth-century liturgical settlement rather than a transmitted fact. The feast, by contrast, has a documented history, and its earliest witness is unusually good. Egeria, a pilgrim at Jerusalem between 381 and 384, describes the observance in her Itinerarium as an established practice kept on 14 February with procession, preaching and Eucharist. She does not say how long it had been kept. An independent liturgical witness follows within a century in the Armenian Lectionary of Jerusalem, whose underlying typicon is dated to roughly 417 to 439; its rubric wording could not be consulted for this account, so nothing is attributed to it beyond its existence and date.
Most of what follows in the standard accounts descends from a single article, the 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia entry on Candlemas, and it should be read as one witness rather than many. It supplies the mechanism of the date change (the feast migrating from 14 to 2 February in the last quarter of the fourth century as the 25 December Nativity spread), the attestation at Antioch in 526 through the late Byzantine chronicler Cedrenus, Justinian's extension of the feast through the Eastern Empire in 542 after the Constantinople pestilence, the procession introduced by Pope Sergius I between 687 and 701, and the observation that candle-blessing did not enter common use before the eleventh century. No primary Byzantine chronicle for the Justinian act was located in preparing this page, and the same article explicitly declines to say when the feast reached Rome, noting that definite information is wanting. It also contains at least one outright error, calling Egeria the pilgrim of Bordeaux and dating her to the first half of the fourth century; she is a different author from the Bordeaux Pilgrim of 333, and she writes in the second half.
Western adoption was slow and uneven. The feast is absent from the Lectionary of Silos in Spain around 650 and from the Calendar of Sainte-Geneviève at Paris between 731 and 741, three centuries after Justinian. When it does appear in the Western books, from the seventh and eighth centuries, it appears under the Marian title In purificatione sanctae Mariae, which is how the West named it for roughly twelve hundred years. The claim, still widely repeated, that Pope Gelasius created the feast in 494 to displace the Lupercalia is a historiographical myth traceable to Baronius in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and the Catholic Encyclopedia itself rejects it twice, both for the feast and for the candles.
In England the Regularis Concordia of the Synod of Winchester, between 970 and 973, directs that candles be blessed, aspersed, censed and processed, and offered afterwards to the priest; Ælfric of Eynsham's homily for the day, from around 989, shows what a congregation was actually told. The ceremony in England ended abruptly. An Order of Council of 18 January 1548 (the date is reported by secondary sources only) directed Cranmer that candles were no longer to be borne at Candlemas, and Stow records the effect a fortnight later across the whole city of London. The 1549 Prayer Book nevertheless retained the day as a red-letter day under the title The Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin, and 1662 retained it with the same title and with Malachi 3:1-5 and Luke 2:22-40 as its propers, which remains the Church of England's text. The Reformed rejection went further elsewhere: the First Book of Discipline of 1560 names Purification among the feasts to be "utterly abolished from this realm," on the ground that such days have in Scripture neither commandment nor assurance, with the civil magistrate's punishment threatened for those who maintained them.
The candle is the day's inherited object, and its uses have run from the sanctuary into the house. Blessed candles were kept for storms and sickrooms: a sixteenth-century English dialogue answers the question of what holy candles serve for by saying, to light up in thunder, and to bless men when they lie dying. The Church of England's Common Worship provision carries a candle procession again as the distinctive feature of the Candlemas Eucharist. On the following day the blessing of throats at St Blaise's uses candles blessed at Candlemas.
Beyond the church door the day has kept its own customs. In Poland blessed candles, the gromnice, are lit during storms; in Luxembourg children carry lit sticks door to door singing. In France the day is La Chandeleur and is kept with crêpes. Herrick's Hesperides of 1648 shows Candlemas Eve as the day the Christmas greenery came down in English houses, an end-of-Christmas marker that is domestic long before it is liturgical. In Scotland, in a country that had abolished the feast by name in 1560, the day survived for three centuries as a school holiday and the day the schoolmaster's gratuity was paid, with a Candlemas King and Queen and a bonfire called the Bleeze; it is reported as dying out around 1887. Candlemas also became a Scottish term day for leases, hiring and rents, and is still fixed in statute at 28 February. The weather rhyme attached to the day ("If Candlemas Day be fair and bright, / Winter will have another flight") travelled with Pennsylvania German settlers, who substituted the groundhog for a European animal forecaster, and produced Groundhog Day.
In the East the feast is the Meeting, Hypapante, one of the Twelve Great Feasts, and the forty-day churching of mother and child, modelled on this Gospel, remains an ordinary parish rite. The Armenian Church keeps it on 14 February with an eve service, the blessing of newlyweds, and Trndez bonfires. The Copts keep it on 8 Amshir as the Feast of Presenting the Lord Christ in the Temple.
Almighty and everliving God, we humbly pray that, as your only-begotten Son was this day presented in the temple in the substance of our flesh, so we may be presented to you with pure and clean hearts by Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Egeria, Itinerarium, section III.4 in the translation of M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe (1919), supplies the earliest description of the feast, quoted here for the procession at the Anastasis and the joy kept "just as at Easter." The neighbouring section III.3 belongs to the Epiphany octave and is not evidence for this day.
Ælfric of Eynsham, Catholic Homilies I.9, "In Purificatione S. Mariae," is quoted from Benjamin Thorpe's edition, The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church, volume I (1844), pages 134 to 151; the passage on those who cannot sing stands in the closing rubric at page 151.
The 1662 collect and the propers Malachi 3:1-5 and Luke 2:22-40 are taken from the Church of England's own hosted text of the Book of Common Prayer; the ACNA 2019 collect is given from the published collects of that book.
John Stow's Chronicle (1631 edition) on the ending of candle-bearing in London in 1548, the surviving sentence of Henry VIII's proclamation of 1539, the Regularis Concordia rubric, the sixteenth-century dialogue of Woodde on what holy candles serve for, and the Candlemas weather rhyme are all quoted from John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities, edited by W. C. Hazlitt (1905), volume I, pages 85 to 87.
The First Book of Discipline (1560) is quoted from the "Explication of the First Head."
For the institutional history, the article "Candlemas" in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1908) is the single source behind the Justinian, Sergius, eleventh-century candle-blessing, Silos and Sainte-Geneviève statements above, and behind the rejection of the Gelasius and Lupercalia claim; Roger Pearse traces that myth to Baronius. Robert Herrick's "Ceremony upon Candlemas Eve" appears in Hesperides (1648).
The modern documents are cited from their own texts: Paul VI, Mysterii Paschalis (14 February 1969) and Marialis Cultus (2 February 1974), section 7; John Paul II, Message for the First World Day for Consecrated Life (6 January 1997), section 5; and The Promise of His Glory (1991) for the Candlemas Eucharist. The Term and Quarter Days (Scotland) Act 1990, section 1, fixes Candlemas at 28 February.
The twentieth century re-centred the day. Paul VI's Mysterii Paschalis of 14 February 1969 renamed it the Presentation of the Lord and treated it principally as a feast of the Lord; Marialis Cultus of 1974 described it as given back its ancient name and as a joint commemoration of Son and Mother. The Episcopal Church's 1979 Prayer Book adopted the title used here, retiring the 1928 Purification, and the ACNA 2019 book keeps it with "(Candlemas)" appended. In England, The Promise of His Glory of 1991 restored a candle procession, making the extinguishing of the candles the rite's climax and the day an explicit pivot from crib to cross; that framing is thirty-five years old, and the procession it restored had been absent from England for over four centuries. In 1997 John Paul II attached the World Day for Consecrated Life to 2 February, calling the Presentation an eloquent icon of the total offering of one's life, a pastoral function younger still.
Malachi 3:1–4Psalm 84Hebrews 2:14–18Luke 2:22–40
British (Received Pronunciation): Sergius /ˈsɜːr.dʒi.əs/; Constantinople /ˌkɒnstæntɪˈnoʊpəl/