Year: 2022
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: The First-Created DayAmong medieval chronographies, the Chronographia project is uniquely theoretical.It not only contains explicit discussion of its method of synchronizing multiple records but also articulates an argument for the very nature of time itself.This argument is encapsulated in the phrase, the First-Created Day.As we will see, the Holy First-Created Day (ἡ ἁγία πρωτόκτιστος ἡμέρα) is, from a linear chronological perspective, inherently paradoxical.Its definition holds that the days of the Creation, of Noah's Exit from the Ark, of Christ's Incarnation, and of Christ's Resurrection are all dated 1 Nisan, 29 Phamenoth, and 25 March on (respectively) AM 1, AM 2243, AM 5500, and AM 5534.And it holds that these are also "one and the same day."This was no supplemental thesis to the Chronographia: the beginning of the Chronography (from AM 1) and the beginning of the Chronicle (from AM 5434) stated that the First-Created Day was the thesis or goal of the entire work.The aim of this chapter is to explain the thesis and its significance for how we read the Chronographia.This chapter begins by formulating what the new idea of the First-Created Day would have meant to its original ninth-century readers.Though we will find the First-Created Day to be a truly ninth-century Byzantine idea-and as such not easy to conceptually translate-the Chronographia seems to anticipate that its contemporary audience would have been unfamiliar with the phrase, if not the idea itself.According to searches performed through the corpus of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae the First-Created Day is indeed a neologism that was almost certainly invented by George the Synkellos for the Chronographia itself.1 To understand this concept we will work slowly and carefully through the Chronographia's explicit statements about this thesis.The concepts signaled by the Chronographia's explanations of the First-Created Day also signal an indigenous literary context in which to read and interpret this new account of past time, for the work uses intertextual references to explain the argument of the First-Created Day.These references not only define the idea of the past contained in the thesis, but for our purposes can indicate what kind of a work we are reading, for the Chronographia uses terms 1 www.tlg.uci.edu.George Monachos, George the Synkellos' successor in universal chronicling who wrote around the 840s, used the phrase, though it did not play a central role in his conception of time.
Source: BRILL eBooks
Author: Jesse W. Torgerson
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4318010448