Ember in September

The equinox has just arrived, bringing with it the beautiful days of Autumn (and Spring in the Southern
Hemisphere). The Roman Church once again reminds us of the cycle of the seasons in these Ember
Days in September.
We re-post, for those who are not aware of it, this article frst posted by us in 2008. May you all have
fruitful days.
___________________________________________________________
THE GLOW
OF THE EMBER DAYS
By Michael P. Foley
A potential danger of traditionalism is the stubborn defense of something about which one knows little.
I once asked a priest who had just fnished beautifully celebrating an Ember Saturday Mass about the
meaning of the Ember days. He replied (with an impish twinkle in his eye) that he hadnt a clue, but he
was furious they had been suppressed.
Traditionalists, however, are not entirely to blame for their unfamiliarity with this important part of their
patrimony. Most only have the privilege of assisting at a Sunday Tridentine Mass, and hence the
Ember dayswhich occur on a weekday or Saturdayslip by unnoticed. And long before the opening
session of the Second Vatican Council, the popularity of these observances had atrophied.
So why care about them now? To answer this question, we must frst determine what they are.
The Four Seasons
The Ember days, which fall on a Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday of the same week, occur in
conjunction with the four natural seasons of the year. Autumn brings the September Embertide, also
called the Michaelmas Embertide because of their proximity to the Feast of St. Michael on September
29.
1
Winter, on the other hand, brings the December Embertide during the third week of Advent, and
spring brings the Lenten Embertide after the frst Sunday of Lent. Finally, summer heralds the Whitsun
Embertide, which takes place within the Octave of Pentecost.
In the 1962 Missal the Ember days are ranked as ferias of the second class, weekdays of special
importance that even supersede certain saints feasts. Each day has its own proper Mass, all of which
are quite old. One proof of their antiquity is that they are one of the few days in the Gregorian rite (as
the 62 Missal is now being called) which has as many as fve lessons from the Old Testament in
addition to the Epistle reading, an ancient arrangement indeed.
Fasting and partial abstinence during the Ember days were also enjoined on the faithful from time
immemorial until the 1960s. It is the association of fasting and penance with the Embertides that led
some to think that their peculiar name has something to do with smoldering ash, or embers. But the
English name is probably derived from their Latin title, the Quatuor Tempora or Four Seasons.
2
Apostolic and Universal
The history of the Ember days brings us to the very origins of Christianity. The Old Testament
prescribes a fourfold fast as part of its ongoing consecration of the year to God (Zech. 8:19). In
addition to these seasonal observances, pious Jews in Palestine at the time of Jesus fasted every
Monday and Thursdayhence the Pharisees boast about fasting twice weekly in the parable involving
him and the publican (Lk. 18:12).
Early Christians amended both of these customs. The Didache, a work so old that it may actually
predate some books of the New Testament, tells us that Palestinian Christians in the frst century A.D.
fasted every Wednesday and Friday: Wednesday because it is the day that Christ was betrayed and
Friday because it is the day He was crucifed.
3
The Wednesday and Friday fast were so much a part of
Christian life that in Gaelic one word for Thursday, Didaoirn, literally means the day between the
fasts.
In the third century, Christians in Rome began to designate some of these days for seasonal prayer,
partly in imitation of the Hebrew custom and partly in response to pagan festivals occurring around the
same time.
4
Thus, the Ember days were born. And after the weekly fast became less prevalent, it was
the Ember days which remained as a conspicuous testimony to a custom stretching back to
the Apostles themselves.
5
Moreover, by modifying the two Jewish fasts, the Ember days embody
Christs statement that He came not to abolish the Law but fulfll it (Mt. 5:17).
6

Usefully Natural
This fulfllment of the Law is crucial because it teaches us something fundamental about God, His
redemptive plan for us, and the nature of the universe. In the case of both the Hebrew seasonal fasts
and the Christian Ember days, we are invited to consider the wonder of the natural seasons and their
relation to their Creator. The four seasons, for example, can be said to intimate individually the bliss of
Heaven, where there is the beauty of spring, the brightness of summer, the plenty of autumn, the rest
of winter.
7
This is signifcant, for the Ember days are the only time in the Church calendar where nature qua
nature is singled out and acknowledged. Certainly the liturgical year as a whole presupposes natures
annual rhythm (Easter coincides with the vernal equinox, Christmas with the winter solstice, etc.), yet
here we celebrate not the natural phenomena per se but the supernatural mysteries which they evoke.
The Rogation days commemorate nature, but mostly in light of its agricultural signifcance (that is, vis-
-vis its cultivation by man), not on its own terms, so to speak.
8

The Ember days, then, stand out as the only days in the supernatural seasons of the Church
that commemorate the natural seasons of the earth. This is appropriate, for since the liturgical year
annually renews our initiation into the mystery of redemption, it should have some special mention of
the very thing which grace perfects.
Uniquely Roman
But what about Saturday? The Roman appropriation of the weekly fast involved adding Saturday as an
extension of the Friday fast. And during Embertide, a special Mass and procession to St. Peters was
held, with the congregation being invited to keep vigil with Peter. Saturday is an appropriate day not
only for a vigil, but as a day of penance, when our Lord lay in the sepulchre, and the Apostles were
sore of heart and in great sorrow.
9
It is this Roman custom, incidentally, which gave rise to the
proverb, When in Rome, do as the Romans do. According to the story, when Sts. Augustine and
Monica asked St. Ambrose of Milan whether they should follow the weekly fasts of either Rome or of
Milan (which did not include Saturdays), Ambrose replied: When I am here, I do not fast on Saturday;
when I am in Rome, I do.
10
Solidarity of Laity and Clergy
Another Roman custom, instituted by Pope Gelasius I in 494, is to use Ember Saturdays as the day to
confer Holy Orders. Apostolic tradition prescribed that ordinations be preceded by fast and prayer (see
Acts 13:3), and so it was quite reasonable to place ordinations at the end of this fast period. This
allows the entire community to join the candidates in fasting and in praying for Gods blessing upon
their vocation, and not just the community in this or that diocese, but all over the world.
Personally Prayerful
In addition to commemorating the seasons of nature, each of the four Embertides takes on the
character of the liturgical season in which it is located. The Advent Ember days, for example, celebrate
the Annunciation and the Visitation, the only times during Advent in the 1962 Missal when this is
explicitly done. The Lenten Embertide allows us to link the season of spring, when the seed must die
to produce new life, to the Lenten mortifcation of our fesh. The Whitsun Embertides, curiously, have
us fasting within the octave of Pentecost, teaching us that there is such a thing as a joyful fast.
11
The
Fall Embertide is the only time that the Roman calendar echoes the Jewish Feast of the Tabernacles
and the Day of Atonement, the two holidays that teach us so much about our earthly pilgrimage and
about Christs high priesthood.
12
The Ember days also aford the occasion for a quarterly check-up of the soul. Blessed Jacopo de
Voragine (d. 1298) lists eight reasons why we should fast during the Ember days, most of them
concerning our personal war against vice. Summer, for example, which is hot and dry, is analogous to
the burning and ardour of avarice, while autumn is cold and dry, like pride. Jacopo also does a
delightful job coordinating the Embertides with the four temperaments: springtime is sanguine,
summer is choleric, autumn is melancholic, and winter is phlegmatic.
13
It is little wonder that the Ember
days became times of spiritual exercises (not unlike our modern retreats), and that folklore in Europe
grew up around them afrming their special character.
14

Even the Far East was afected by the Ember days. In the sixteenth century, when Spanish and
Portuguese missionaries settled in Nagasaki, Japan, they sought ways of making tasty meatless
meals for Embertide and started deep-frying shrimp. The idea caught on with the Japanese, who
applied the process to a number of diferent sea foods and vegetables. They called this delicious food
have you guessed it yet?tempura, again from Quatuor Tempora.
Dying Embers
While the Ember days remained fxed in the universal calendar as obligatory (along with the injunction
to fast), their radiating infuence on other areas of life eventually waned. By the twentieth century,
ordinations were no longer exclusively scheduled on Ember Saturdays and their role as spiritual
checkups was gradually forgotten. The writings of Vatican II could have done much to rejuvenate the
Ember days. The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy decrees that liturgical elements which have
sufered injury through accidents of history are now to be restored to the vigor which they had in the
days of the holy Fathers (50).
But what came instead was the Sacred Congregation of Divine Worships 1969 General Norms for the
Liturgical Year and the Calendar, where we read:
On rogation and ember days the practice of the Church is to ofer prayers to the Lord for the needs of
all people, especially for the productivity of the earth and for human labor, and to give him public
thanks (45).
In order to adapt the rogation and ember days to various regions...the conferences of bishops should
arrange the time and plan for their celebration (46).
Happily, the Ember days were not to be removed from the calendar but tweaked by national bishops
conferences. There were, however, several shortcomings with this arrangement. First, the SCDW
treats Rogation and Ember days as synonymous, whichas we saw in a previous article
15
they are
not. The Ember days do not, for example, pray for the productivity of the earth and for human labor in
the dead of winter.
Second, by calling for an adaptation to various regions, the SCDW allowed the Ember days to take on
an indeterminate number of meanings that have nothing to do with nature, such as peace, the unity of
the Church, the spread of the faith, etc.
16
Unlike the organic development of the Ember days, which
preserved its basic meaning while taking on others, the 1969 directive has no safeguards to keep
newly assigned meanings from displacing the Embertides more fundamental purpose.
Third, the national bishops conferences were supposed to fx the dates of the Ember days, but none,
as far as I can tell, ever did.
Dead Embers & Lively Debates
In the wake of this ambiguity and indirection, the Ember days disappeared from the celebration of the
Novus Ordo, and at one of the worst possible times. For just as the Church was letting its liturgical
celebration of the natural slip into oblivion, the West was going berserk over nature.
Ever since the publication of Machiavellis Prince in the sixteenth century, modern society has been
predicated on a technological war against nature in order to increase mans dominion and power.
Nature was no longer a lady to be wooed (as she had been for the Greeks, Romans, and medieval
Christians); she was now to be raped, beaten into submission through evermore impressive
technological advances
17
that would render mankind, in Freuds chilling words, a prosthetic god.
While there were some strong reactions against this new attitude, the modern hostility to the God-
given only expanded as time went on, growing from a war on nature to a war on human nature. Our
current preoccupations with genetic engineering, sex changes, and same-sex marriageall of
which are attempts to redefne or reconfgure the naturalare examples of this ongoing escalation.
The environmental movement that began in the 1960s has helped bring to light the wages of ruthlessly
exploiting nature, and thus today we have a renewed appreciation for the virtues of responsible
stewardship and for the marvels of Gods green but fragile earth. Yet this same movement, which has
served in many ways as a healthy reawakening, is peppered with absurdities. Often the same activists
who defend endangered tadpoles go on to champion the annihilation of unborn babies. Recently, after
liberalizing their abortion laws, Spains socialist government introduced legislation to grant
chimpanzees legal rights in order to preserve the species from extinctionthis in a land with no
native ape population.
18
Contemporary environmentalism is also sometimes pantheistic in its assumptions, the result being that
for many it has become a religion unto itself. This new religion comes complete with its own priests
(climatologists), its own gospels (sacrosanct data about rising temperatures and shrinking glaciers), its
own prophets (Al Gore, who unfortunately remains welcome in his own country), and, most of all, its
own apocalypticism, with the four horsemen of deforestation, global warming, ozone depletion, and
fossil fuels all leading us to an ecological Doomsday more terrifying to the secular mind than the Four
Last Things.
19
Conclusion
My point is not to deny the validity of these anxieties, but to lament the neo-pagan framework into
which they are more often than not put. Modern man is such a mess that when he fnally recovers
a love of nature, he does so in a most unnatural manner. Both the early modern antipathy to
nature and the late modern idolatry of it stand in dire need of correction, a correction that the Church is
well poised to provide. As Chesterton quipped, Christians can truly love nature because they will not
worship her. The Church proclaims natures goodness because it was created by a good and loving
God and because it sacramentally refects the grandeur of Gods goodness and love.
The Church does this liturgically with its observance of the Four Seasons, the Embertides.
Celebrating the Ember days does not, of course, provide ready solutions to the worlds complicated
ecological difculties, but it is a good refresher course in basic frst principles. The Ember days ofer an
intelligent alternative to pantheist environmentalism, and they do so without being contrived or
pandering, as a new Catholic Earth Day or some such thing would undoubtedly be.
It is a shame that the Church unwittingly let the glow of Embertide die at the precise moment in history
when their witness was needed the most, but it is a great boon that Summorum Pontifcum makes their
celebration universally accessible once again. What remains is for a new generation to take up their
practice with a reinvigorated appreciation of what they mean. At least then well know why we are so
furious.
Call to Prayer and Fasting
This year, the Autumn Ember days are on September 24, 26, and 27. They follow the Feast of the Holy
Cross (Sept. 14), the frst anniversary since the motu proprio took efect. Let all traditional Catholics
unite to observe the traditional Ember fast on these three days: 1) to pray for the Holy Fathers welfare,
2) to thank Almighty God for the motu proprio Summorum Pontifcum, and 3) to pray for its full
implementation in every parish around the world.[*]
Michael P. Foley is an associate professor of patristics at Baylor University. He is the author of Wedding Rites: A
Complete Guide to Traditional Music, Vows, Ceremonies, Blessings, and Interfaith Services (Eerdmans) and Why Do
Catholics Eat Fish on Friday? The Catholic Origin to Just About Everything (Palgrave Macmillan).
_______________________________
NOTES: This article appears in the Fall 2008 issue of The Latin Mass Magazine, vol. 17:4; web publication at RORATE
CLI authorized by author and periodical. Images related to the First and Second Lessons and to the Gospel of
Ember Saturday in September: in the frst image, Aaron and Moses ofer a holocaust to the Lord.
1.Ofcially, they fall on the frst [full] week after the Feast of the Holy Cross (September 14).
2. Another theory is that Ember comes from the Old English, ymbren, meaning time or season.
3. The one reason stated by the Didache is more polemical: Christians fast on diferent days in order to be diferent from the
hypocrites, i.e., the Pharisees (8.1).
4.Cf. Francis X. Weiser, Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs (New York: Harcourt, 1958), 31-32.
5.Weiser does claim, however, that voluntarily fasting or abstaining on Wednesdays was still alive in some areas when he was
writing (1958). Of course, the other remnant of the weekly fast is Friday abstinence from fesh meat.
6.Technically, neither Jewish fast was part of the Mosaic Law, though both were, I would argue, part of the Mosaic way of life.
7.From a prayer by St. Thomas Aquinas.
8.Cf. my article, The Rogationtide, TLM 17:2 (Spring 2008), pp. 36-39.
9.Jacopo de Voragine, The Ember days, in The Golden Legend.
10.Cf. Michael P. Foley, Why Do Catholics Eat Fish on Friday? The Catholic Origin to Just About Everything (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005), 148-49.
11.The medievals called this the jejunium exultationisthe fast of exultation.
12.There are relevant readings from the Old Testament and from the Letter to the Hebrews that are used throughout the year in
both the 1962 and 1970 lectionaries, but the September Embertide is the only time that these readings are used in order to
coincide with the autumn festivals of Sukkot and Yom Kippur. Again we see the principle of fulfllment rather than abolition
liturgically enacted.
13.Cf. The Golden Legend, Volume 1, The Ember Days.
14.In the Middle Ages, the Ember days were kept as holydays of obligation, with rest from work and special acts of charity for
the poor, such as feeding and bathing them. There was also an old superstition that the souls in Purgatory were temporarily
released from their plight in order to thank their relatives for their prayers and beg for more.
15.Cf. my article, The Rogationtide, TLM 17:2 (Spring 2008), pp. 36-39.
16.Response to the query How should rogation days and ember days be celebrated?
(http://www.catholicculture.org/library/view.cfm?recnum=5932, retrieved 2/20/08).
17.Cf. The Prince, ch. 25.
18.Spain to Recognize Rights of Apes? Catholic World News, 6/27/08, http://www.cwnews.com/news/viewstory.cfm?
recnum=59360.
19.This is not a parody. Cf. Peter Montague, The Four HorsemenPart 1, Rachels Environment & Health Weekly, #471,
12/7/95 (http://www.ejnet.org/rachel/rehw471.htm).
[*] [You will notice that the days in 2008 were the same as those of 2014.]