ON THE EPIPHANY OF THE LORD.
A.D. 1.
CommentaryEpiphany of the Lord
[1] The feast of the Epiphany has always been most celebrated in the Catholic Church, inasmuch as it sets before us the beginnings of the calling of the Gentiles, which are to be perpetually recalled with most grateful memory. The ancient celebration of this day: Very many Homilies delivered on this day by the holy Fathers survive, which Galesinius reviews in his Notes on the Martyrology. The interpreters of Sacred Scripture comment at length on the mystery of this day and on the Magi themselves, which we deliberately pass over here, intending perhaps to pursue these matters in another Work hereafter. Nor did it seem worthwhile to cite the Martyrologies themselves, since all of them, even the most ancient one of St. Jerome, celebrate the Epiphany of the Lord. More explicitly than most, Molanus writes in his Additions to Usuard: "The Epiphany of the Lord, when He began to be manifested to the Gentiles, the threefold mystery, when the Magi adored Him — Melchior, Balthasar, and Gaspar. At the same time on this day, the Church celebrates the grateful memory of His sacred Baptism and of the first of all the miracles of Christ, and under that heading of all the others by which His divinity was illustriously manifested." More fully still Blessed Notker, Francis Maurolycus, and Peter Galesinius; and the last gathers in his Notes much material about the Magi and this entire solemnity, including among other things the fact that at Milan, according to the Ambrosian rite, as on the Lord's birthday, the Matins office is celebrated at night with the greatest concourse of the people, with very many lights lit in the Greek manner.
[2] The bodies of the Three Kings translated to Cologne. The sacred bodies of the three holy Magi, as the same Galesinius writes, having long ago been translated from Persia to Constantinople and placed with most august ceremony in the Basilica of St. Sophia, were thence brought to Milan by Bishop Eustorgius I, and there reverently preserved for six hundred and seventy years in the Eustorgian basilica; finally, under Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, they were carried off to Cologne by Archbishop Reinald, where they are kept. We shall treat of this Translation more fully on July 23, and of St. Eustorgius on September 18. From the era of Eustorgius the elder, praised by St. Ambrose, it is clear that there is an error in Galesinius's reckoning, since between Eustorgius the elder and Emperor Frederick I — in whose twelfth year, A.D. 1163, that Translation occurred — more than eight hundred years intervened. But it seems he attributes it to Eustorgius the second, of whom we shall speak on June 6.
[3] The Nativity observed elsewhere on this day. The modern Greeks celebrate only the Baptism of Christ on this day of the Theophanies, as they call it; but on December 25, together with Christ's Nativity, they celebrate the Adoration of the Magi. The Egyptians, however, as Baronius states here in his Notes on the Martyrology, observe the birthday and the Baptism of Christ on one and the same day. For, as Cassian writes in Collation 10, chapter 2, the priests of that province define the day of the Epiphanies as belonging either to the Lord's baptism or to His birth according to the flesh; and therefore they celebrate the solemnity of both mysteries not separately, as in the Western provinces, but under a single festivity of this day. St. Epiphanius in the Panarion, heresy 51, writes that Christ was born on this day, the 7th of the Ides of January; and that He was baptized on the 6th of the Ides of November. Both claims are refuted by other Fathers and Interpreters.
[4] The solemn veneration of the Epiphany. "Most celebrated," says Baronius, "was this solemnity always among Christians, as the presence of the Emperors declares; so much so that not even impious Princes were absent from this celebration. Indeed Julian the Apostate, who strove to conceal his lurking impiety beneath the cloak of a feigned Christian religion, when he was in Gaul wished on that day to be present at the sacred mysteries with the other Christians, as Ammianus Marcellinus writes, book 21. The same was done by the Emperor Valens, an Arian, as St. Gregory Nazianzen writes of him in his Oration in Praise of Basil. For he would have seemed utterly estranged from the Christian faith who would not attend such great solemnities. The Emperor Theodosius ordered the celebration of this day to be so honored that for the seven days preceding and as many following, he commanded judicial proceedings to fall silent, as in Law 2, Code, On Holidays."