Commontide
Red-Letter Day
also known as Ascension Thursday
Ascension Day falls on the fortieth day of Eastertide, the Thursday on which the Church keeps Christ's being taken up into heaven from the Mount of Olives. The date comes from the Acts of the Apostles, which counts forty days of appearances between the Resurrection and the ascending. It is a red-letter feast, carrying its own collect, epistle and gospel from the first English prayer book onward. In the West three days of Rogation prayer run up to it; ten days of waiting for Pentecost follow.
For forty days after the Resurrection, by the reckoning of the Acts of the Apostles, the risen Christ was among his disciples. On the fortieth day he led them out toward Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, and there, in their sight, he was taken up, and a cloud received him. Angels stood by them and asked why they gazed up into heaven, saying that he would come again in the manner they had seen him go. The disciples walked back to Jerusalem, a Sabbath day's journey, to wait for what he had promised them, which would come, he said, not many days hence.
Set down plainly, this is a departure, and the Church has never pretended otherwise. The One they could touch and eat with went away. Leo the Great, preaching at Rome in the middle of the fifth century, put the loss at the centre of his sermon rather than around its edge: what had been visible of the Redeemer was changed, and "sight gave way to doctrine." The disciples were not given a substitute for his presence. They were given a different order of it, and were told to wait for the Spirit before they were told to do anything else.
What the day celebrates, then, is not the going but where he went. He ascended in the body he had risen in. The whole weight of the feast rests there. Leo said that the nature of mankind went up, to pass above the angels' ranks, and a late-medieval preacher's handbook, the Golden Legend, listed nine fruits of the day for parish clergy to teach, of which the fifth was our dignity: "a great dignity have we gotten when our nature is lift up unto the right side of the Father." Christ does not leave humanity behind at the cloud. He carries it through.
This is why the earliest surviving accounts of the day describe not mourning but its opposite. Leo says the apostles at the parting "were even filled with great joy." Augustine, expounding the psalm verse that gave the day its offertory chant, asked what jubilation is, and answered: "admiration of joy which cannot be expressed in words." The disciples had seen a man die, and had watched him go up. There was nothing left to say and everything left to sing.
Christians did not fix a separate day for this at once. For a long time the ascending was kept inside the single fifty-day stretch from Easter to Pentecost, and only in the fourth century does a distinct fortieth-day observance come clearly into view, in Palestine, in Syria, in Cappadocia, near Constantinople, all within about a generation. It has no founder. No bishop and no council can be named as having instituted it. It seems rather to have surfaced in several places at once, as though the count in Acts had been waiting in the text all along for someone to keep it.
By around the year 400 Augustine could name it among the things "observed throughout the whole world," and no one afterward has had to argue for it. The prayer that the English Church has said on this day since 1549 asks for the only thing the feast finally offers: that as we believe him to have ascended, "so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell." Leo said it more shortly, and the clause has been carried in devotion ever since: Christ's Ascension is our uplifting, and the hope of the Body is raised, whither the glory of the Head has gone before.
You have almost certainly wanted a presence you could verify. Not a conviction about someone, but the person in the room, where doubt has nothing to work on. The Ascension is the day the Church says that what you want was withdrawn on purpose, and withdrawn upward, and that testimony was given in its place. The disciples were not consoled for this; they were told to wait, and they waited ten days without knowing what was coming. Waiting like that is not a lesser form of faith, and it is not a failure of yours. It is the shape the first Christians were put into on the fortieth day, and Pentecost found them still in it. Where in your own life are you being asked to keep waiting on a promise you cannot yet see kept?
Almost everything solid about this feast comes from the fourth century and later, and almost nothing about the event it commemorates comes from outside Scripture. The ascending is narrated at Luke 24:50-51 and Acts 1:3-11, and at Mark 16:19 in the longer ending of that Gospel; no source outside the New Testament describes or dates it, so any civil year attached to it is an inference from Gospel chronology rather than evidence. The feast's own history is a separate question with separate sources, and the two should never be run together.
The earliest relevant witness is a silence. Origen, who died about 253, does not appear to know a festival of the Ascension, a point that nineteenth-century scholarship pinned to a passage of his Contra Celsum. Silence is weak evidence and may mean only that his own region did not keep one. A stronger-looking piece, canon 43 of the Council of Elvira in Spain, is read by some as suppressing a fortieth-day observance in favour of a unified fiftieth day; the council is variously dated to 300-303 or 305-306, but the canon survives only in later compilations, and the textual critic Meigne argued that the canons beyond roughly the first twenty-one were not promulgated at Elvira at all. Its wording should not be quoted from any popular source.
From the 380s the evidence thickens quickly. The pilgrim Egeria, writing about 381-384, describes Jerusalem practice in which the commemoration attaches to a Pentecost-afternoon procession to the Mount of Olives, and in chapter forty-two describes a fortieth-day vigil and dismissal kept at Bethlehem, in the church over the cave of the Nativity. That Bethlehem passage is the earliest candidate for a distinct fortieth-day observance, and modern scholarship, notably the critical edition and commentary of Anne McGowan and Paul Bradshaw, disputes whether it commemorates the Ascension at all; one proposal is the dedication anniversary of the Church of the Nativity. Egeria's text survives in a single incomplete medieval manuscript, the Codex Aretinus, rediscovered by Gamurrini only in 1884. Within the same generation John Chrysostom preached an Ascension homily at Antioch in 386 or 397, outside the walls, at a cemetery with martyr shrines, remarking that the feast was again being kept outside the city; Gregory of Nyssa preached on the day in Cappadocia in the 380s and called it a great celebration; the Syrian church order known as the Apostolic Constitutions, late fourth or early fifth century and pseudepigraphic despite its name, gave the first written rule, directing the faithful to count forty days and "celebrate the feast of the ascension of the Lord"; and Socrates Scholasticus, writing about 439, records that in 390 the people of a suburb of Constantinople kept it as established custom.
What the pattern shows is crystallization in several places at nearly the same time, roughly 380 to 410, across Palestine, Syria, Cappadocia and Constantinople. No institution decree has been found in either East or West, and the geography argues against there having been one. Around 400 Augustine, answering a correspondent's anxiety about local variation, listed among the things "observed throughout the whole world" the annual commemoration, by special solemnities, of the Lord's passion, resurrection, and ascension. He is a witness to fifth-century universal acceptance and to a belief in apostolic origin, not to the feast's beginning. By Leo's sermons at Rome in the 440s and 450s the day's antiquity needs no defence at all, and representations of the mystery appear in diptychs and frescoes from the fifth century, corroborating the written record from outside it.
For most of the Latin Middle Ages the visible life of Ascensiontide belonged less to the Thursday than to the three days in front of it. Mamertus of Vienne is said to have instituted a penitential triduum of fasting, litanies and processions around 470, in the middle of an emergency; his correspondent Sidonius Apollinaris, who watched the change, wrote that public prayer before it had been "lukewarm, irregular, perfunctory." The Council of Orleans ordered the observance in 511 and Leo III approved it for Rome. Rogationtide reached England in 747 and became, in the Anglo-Saxon year, second in importance only to Easter. Parishes walked their own boundaries, banners at the head of the procession, children bumped or switched at the boundary marks so that the line would live in their memory. The Elizabethan Injunctions of 1559 stripped the banners and crosses but kept the walk, and had the curate charge his people at the marks: "Cursed be he which translateth the bounds and doles of his neighbour." Six of eight surviving Tudor and Stuart Norwich accounts record the breakfast afterward, in which wealthier parishioners fed poorer ones, a practice no injunction ever authorised.
The day itself was taught by spectacle. In many churches a figure of Christ was hauled up through an opening in the roof, the Holy Ghost hole, found chiefly in France, southern Germany and Austria; in the West the paschal candle, lit at the Easter Vigil, was quenched after the Gospel and carried out, its forty days of burning read as the visible presence now withdrawn. That gesture is not simply dead: current Roman law keeps the candle lit through Pentecost, but the older practice continues in the traditional form of the rite. Beating the bounds survives too, self-consciously and in scattered places, most conspicuously at All Hallows by the Tower, which still walks its Ascension Day bounds, partly by boat because the parish reaches to mid-Thames. In Derbyshire the wells at Tissington are dressed for Ascension morning. And in Germany the day is also Vatertag, which the traffic statistics register every year.
Quotations from the Fathers are given here in the standard Victorian translations of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers and Ante-Nicene Fathers series, which remain the versions in general devotional circulation.
Leo the Great, Sermon 73, section IV, supplies both the apostles who "were even filled with great joy," the phrase "the Nature of mankind went up, to pass above the angels' ranks," and the closing clause "Christ's Ascension is our uplifting, and the hope of the Body is raised, whither the glory of the Head has gone before"; Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 12, translated under Philip Schaff, at https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/360373.htm. That last clause is the phrase most often excerpted from the sermon in modern Ascension devotion, its vehicle the 1895 translation and the patristic anthologies that followed; no single popularizer has been identified. Sermon 74, section II, in the same volume, gives "sight gave way to doctrine," at https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/360374.htm.
Augustine's Letter 54 to Januarius, chapter 1, gives "the annual commemoration, by special solemnities, of the Lord's passion, resurrection, and ascension"; Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, volume 1, at https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1102054.htm. His Expositions on the Psalms, on Psalm 47 (Vulgate 46), section 6, gives "What is jubilation, but admiration of joy which cannot be expressed in words?"; first series, volume 8, at https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1801047.htm. The passage glosses the same verse that supplies the day's offertory chant, Ascendit Deus.
The Apostolic Constitutions, book 5, chapter 19, gives the direction to "celebrate the feast of the ascension of the Lord"; Ante-Nicene Fathers translation, at https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/07155.htm.
The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, in Caxton's English of 1483, supplies the "nine fruits profitable" and the fifth of them, "a great dignity have we gotten when our nature is lift up unto the right side of the Father"; volume 1 at https://ccel.org/ccel/v/voragine/goldleg1/cache/goldleg1.pdf.
Sidonius Apollinaris, Letters 5.14, describes public prayer as "lukewarm, irregular, perfunctory" before Mamertus reformed it; at https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/sidonius_letters_05book5.htm.
The Royal Injunctions of 1559, article 19, carry "Cursed be he which translateth the bounds and doles of his neighbour," at https://history.hanover.edu/texts/engref/er78.html. The Directory for the Publick Worship of God (1645), appendix, carries the sentence on festival days, at https://thewestminsterstandard.org/directory-for-the-publick-worship-of-god/. The collect clause "so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell" descends from Cranmer's 1549 translation of the Latin Concede, quaesumus; the traditional form is at https://www.bcponline.org/Collects/seasonst.html.
For the parish evidence behind the Traditions section, see Matthew Woodcock, "Perambulation and Performance in Early Modern Festive Culture," Early Theatre 23.2 (2021), at https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/79509/1/Accepted_Manuscript.pdf. For Egeria and the Bethlehem dispute, see Anne McGowan and Paul F. Bradshaw, The Pilgrimage of Egeria (Liturgical Press), with the text at https://users.ox.ac.uk/~mikef/durham/egetra.html.
Later divergence is mostly downstream of other quarrels. Because Ascension is always the fortieth day after Pascha, the Eastern and Western dates part company entirely through the Easter calculation: Rome adopted the Gregorian calendar and a revised computus in 1582-83, while most Orthodox churches retained the Alexandrian tables and the older 21 March equinox convention, so an Eastern Ascension falls nought, one, four or five weeks later than the Western, between 13 May and 16 June. At the Reformation the feast survived where the calendar itself was not the point of dispute: the Augsburg Confession of 1530 kept such days as profitable to good order. Reformed practice was not uniform, and the common claim that the Reformed abolished holy days is too broad. Geneva outlawed them in 1536, before Calvin's arrival and at Farel's instance, and Scotland did likewise, while Zurich, Bern, the Palatinate, the Netherlands and the French Reformed churches went on keeping Christmas, Easter, Ascension and Pentecost; Calvin himself did not condemn the five evangelical festivals. In England the Westminster Directory of 1645 laid down that "Festival days, vulgarly called Holy-days, having no warrant in the word of God, are not to be continued," and ordinances of 1644 and 1647 abolished Christmas, Easter and Whitsun by name and all other festival days by a blanket clause; Ascension is nowhere named, and its suppression is an inference. The 1662 book restored it with proper collect, epistle, gospel, proper psalms and a proper preface, and it remains a red-letter day in the 2019 ACNA calendar. Among Roman Catholics many bishops' conferences from the 1990s obtained leave to transfer the solemnity to the following Sunday, England and Wales doing so from 2007 before reverting to the Thursday in 2018.
Three modern objections deserve naming. Since the nineteenth century the longer ending of Mark, 16:9-20, has been bracketed in critical editions as textually secondary, absent from the earliest Greek manuscripts, so that a narrated Ascension is left to Luke and Acts alone, and Paul, the earliest Christian writer, never describes it as an event distinct from resurrection and exaltation. Modern critics also press the apparent tension between Luke 24, which reads as a single Easter-day sequence, and Acts 1:3, which allows forty days; the proposed resolutions, including the suggestion that the forty-days phrase is a later addition, are debated and unsettled. A third objection holds that the story presumes an ancient three-tier cosmos, though the extent to which a first-century audience held that picture is itself contested. These are modern departures from the Church's reading, and the Church has gone on keeping the fortieth day.
Acts 1:1–11Psalm 47 or Psalm 110:1–5Ephesians 1:15–23Luke 24:44–53 or Mark 16:9–20
British (Received Pronunciation): Imbomon /ˈɪm.boʊ.mɒn/; Augustine /ɔːˈɡʌstɪn/
Almighty God, whose only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ ascended into heaven: May our hearts and minds also there ascend, and with him continually dwell; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.