This is about astronomy, etymology, history, Passover, Easter, and a bunch of other stuff.
A couple of days ago, on Passover, I got to wondering if there was a connection between the Hebrew word "Pesach," meaning Passover, and the word "Paschal" referring to Easter in Church Latin and various Romance languages. Thanks to the mighty OED, I was able to determine that, yes, there is. Paschal is derived from Pesach. In the Romance languages, Easter is Passover. Indeed, in nearly every language spoken by Christians, the name for Easter is derived from Pesach. Only in our mongrel hybrid English did the feast somehow pick up the name of a minor Anglo-Saxon fertility goddess with a thing for rabbits.
This is a shame, really. The difference in names obscures the fundamental identity of the two feasts. The central event of the people of Israel gave birth to the central event of the people of Christ. When Christ and his disciples gathered for the Last Supper, they were of course having a seder, in celebration of Pesach. After his death, Christians moved the feast to commemorate the Resurrection.
That, in turn, had interesting consequences for astronomy. In the early days, Easter was linked to Passover, and the Church simply used the Jewish calendar. Even after the majority of Christians were born to the faith or converts from paganism, one could always find a convenient local rabbi to ask "When's Passover?" Of course, in the slowly collapsing Roman empire, after the Jewish priesthood all got wiped out in the Judean revolt, the answer might vary from place to place, and your local rabbi might be just guessing.
Finally, at the Council of Nicaea, the Church decided to come up with its own formula for computing the date of Easter, decoupling it from Passover -- though the two always remain close in the calendar. Of course, "the Church" is kind of a misnomer here, because different Christian groups adopted different formulas, and there were the usual heresies, anathemas, and counter-anathemas over how to figure out the date of Easter.
What does all this have to do with astronomy? It got the Church interested in calendars, which in turn meant that astronomy remained an important science even within the theology-drenched medieval curriculum. You need to know astronomy to know when Easter is -- therefore Christian universities all over Europe taught astronomy. The list of priests and monks among the ranks of astronomers is a long one, and even today the Vatican maintains its own observatory.
One can imagine a very different outcome if some frustrated Christian ruler -- say, the Emperor Justinian in a bad mood -- had just declared "Fine! From now on Easter is . . . April 7! Every year, April 7! Now quit bothering me and go convert some heathens." In that case astronomy would have been a "lost science" for centuries, known only to seafarers and astrologers. Nobody would have bothered to make accurate observations of the movements of the planets, nobody would have bothered to notice inconsistencies with the Aristotelian geocentric model, and nobody would have bothered coming up with a Law of Universal Gravitation to explain the motions of the heavens.
So -- Happy Easter, which is really Passover, except that it isn't, which is why we have modern science.
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