#christian-feasts { ranking the feasts on the tradition's own arguments }

~christian-feasts { The days the Christian churches set apart. Rank by theological weight — how much of the faith collapses if the day is removed — judged by the tradition's own reasoning rather than by cultural prominence. The aspects below carry the two formal precedence tables and the scriptural-warrant question on which the Reformed rejected the calendar entirely. }

~/christian-feasts/pascha { Easter and the Paschal Triduum. Called Feast of Feasts in the East and deliberately excluded from the Twelve Great Feasts because it stands above the category; rank 1 in the Roman Table of Liturgical Days; the summit of the year in Sacrosanctum Concilium. 1 Cor 15:14-17. }

~/christian-feasts/the-lords-day { Sunday. Universal Norms no. 4 call it the primordial feast day, and the Sundays of Advent, Lent and Easter outrank every solemnity, which is transferred on collision. The weekly Pascha, and the only holy day the Westminster Directory kept. }

~/christian-feasts/good-friday { The Crucifixion. Liturgically one day with Holy Saturday and Easter, since the Triduum is a single celebration rather than three. Principal Holy Day in Common Worship; a fast, not a feast. }

~/christian-feasts/nativity { Christmas. First firmly attested as December 25 in the Chronography of 354. Roman Table Band One, rank 2. Origin contested between the Calculation hypothesis (Talley, Roll) and the Sol Invictus hypothesis (Usener), and still unresolved. }

~/christian-feasts/pentecost { Acts 2. With Pascha, one of the two original annual feasts. Fulfils Shavuot and completes the revelation of the Trinity. The birthday-of-the-Church framing is Western and the East never accepted it. }

~/christian-feasts/theophany { January 6. In the East the Baptism in the Jordan and the first Trinitarian theophany, called the Lights; in the West narrowed largely to the Magi. The sharpest East-West divergence in the calendar. }

~/christian-feasts/ascension { Forty days after Pascha. Chrysostom: our nature is enthroned today above the Cherubim. The hinge between Resurrection and Pentecost. }

~/christian-feasts/annunciation { March 25. Some argue the Incarnation begins here rather than at the Nativity, the Word made flesh at conception per the Creed. Never transferred in the East, even in Holy Week; yields to Holy Week in the West. }

~/christian-feasts/transfiguration { August 6. A Great Feast in the East, bound through Palamas to the Uncreated Light of Tabor and to theosis. Minor in the West until John Paul II made it a Luminous Mystery in 2002. }

~/christian-feasts/dormition { August 15. The pre-eminent Marian feast. Preceded in the East by a fast second in severity only to Great Lent; defined as bodily Assumption in the West by Munificentissimus Deus (1950), which the East has never dogmatised. }

~/christian-feasts/trinity-sunday { The Sunday after Pentecost in the West. Unusual in being a feast of a doctrine rather than of a saving event, which is both its interest and the case against it. }

~/christian-feasts/holy-cross { September 14. A Great Feast in the East that keeps a strict fast even when it falls on a Sunday — a deliberate paradox, since the thing exalted is an instrument of execution. }

~/christian-feasts/corpus-christi { Instituted by Urban IV in Transiturus de hoc mundo (1264), the first papally mandated universal feast of the Latin Church, office by Aquinas. Absent from the East, which keeps eucharistic devotion inside the Liturgy rather than in a feast of its own. }

{ The Norms call Sunday the primordial feast day and rank the Sundays of Advent, Lent and Easter above every solemnity. A weekly day belongs in a ranking of feasts because the tradition put it there first. }
~the-lords-day <: ~christian-feasts

{ Paul makes the Resurrection load-bearing: if Christ is not raised the preaching is empty. Good Friday is inseparable — one Triduum, one day — but the tradition named the feast after the rising, not the dying. }
~pascha 3:2 ~good-friday

{ Sunday has been kept since Acts 20:7, longer than anything else in the calendar. Still derivative: it is the weekly echo of the annual thing, and Good Friday is half of what it echoes. }
~good-friday 3:2 ~the-lords-day

{ The primordial feast day outranks the culturally dominant one. Sunday is the Resurrection kept fifty-two times a year; Christmas is kept once and was not kept at all for three centuries. }
~the-lords-day 3:2 ~nativity

{ The Incarnation is the premise the Resurrection needs; Pentecost is its application. Premise before application, though this is the closest call in the upper half. }
~nativity > ~pentecost

{ Pentecost completes the Trinitarian revelation and founds the Church's whole subsequent existence. Theophany reveals the Trinity first, but reveals it to bystanders rather than pouring it out. }
~pentecost 3:2 ~theophany

{ Both Band One solemnities in Rome and Great Feasts in the East, and both manifestations rather than transactions. Neither tradition's own logic separates them. }
~theophany = ~ascension

{ The Ascension enthrones human nature in heaven, a change in what humanity is. The Annunciation is where that nature is assumed, but it is narrated as promise and consent, not yet accomplishment. }
~ascension > ~annunciation

{ If the Incarnation begins at conception then the Annunciation is Christmas's actual content, nine months early. The Transfiguration only discloses what is already true. }
~annunciation 3:2 ~transfiguration

{ Tabor shows the deified humanity that the Dormition then delivers to one person. Disclosure of the principle over its first instance. }
~transfiguration 3:2 ~dormition

{ The Dormition is the first fruits of the general resurrection in a particular body. Trinity Sunday commemorates no event at all. }
~dormition > ~trinity-sunday

{ A feast of the doctrine that organises every other feast beats a feast of the instrument, though the Cross has the better paradox. }
~trinity-sunday 3:2 ~holy-cross

{ The Cross is apostolic and universal; Corpus Christi is a thirteenth-century Latin institution answering a thirteenth-century Latin controversy. Age and reach both favour the Cross. }
~holy-cross > ~corpus-christi

{ The headline claim and the inversion the scholarship keeps warning about. Augustine's distinction in Letter 55 is that the Nativity is commemorative while Pascha is sacramental, a transitus the believer actually enters. Cultural weight runs the other way, which is the problem and not the evidence. }
~pascha 3:1 ~nativity

{ Widest gap in the scope. One is the event the faith stands or falls on; the other is a devotional feast of the mode of presence at that event's memorial. }
~pascha 3:1 ~corpus-christi

{ The departure exists to make the sending possible and Acts frames it that way. }
~pentecost 3:2 ~ascension

{ Theophany is a manifestation of the whole Trinity at once. The Annunciation is an announcement to one person, however consequential. }
~theophany > ~annunciation

{ Both are disclosures of divinity through a body, but the Jordan discloses it to the world and inaugurates the ministry; Tabor discloses it to three men and is not repeated. }
~theophany 3:2 ~transfiguration

{ A universal feast attested in every ancient calendar against a dated Latin institution. }
~theophany 3:1 ~corpus-christi

{ Enthronement accomplished over enthronement foreshown. }
~ascension > ~transfiguration

{ The Ascension is an event with consequences for what human nature now is. Trinity Sunday is a rubric for thinking about the rest. }
~ascension 3:1 ~trinity-sunday

{ An event in the economy of salvation over a commemoration of doctrine, even a foundational one. }
~annunciation > ~trinity-sunday

{ Conception over instrument. The Cross matters because of who was on it, which is settled at the Annunciation. }
~annunciation 3:2 ~holy-cross

{ The birth of Christ against the death of his mother. Not close on any tradition's reckoning, whatever the Dormition fast implies about devotional intensity. }
~nativity 3:1 ~dormition

{ The Spirit poured out on the Church against the veneration of the instrument of one death. }
~pentecost 3:1 ~holy-cross

{ The event that grounds the doctrine outranks the day set aside to state the doctrine. }
~pascha 3:1 ~trinity-sunday

{ The death itself against a feast of the mode of its memorial. }
~good-friday 3:1 ~corpus-christi

{ Fifty-two Resurrections a year against one mountaintop. Frequency is not usually an argument, but constancy of witness is. }
~the-lords-day 3:1 ~transfiguration

{ Both are feasts of manifestation, and the Nativity is the manifestation the other one interprets. Narrow, and in the East it would go the other way. }
~nativity 3:2 ~theophany

{ Neither is scripturally dated, but one is ancient and universal tradition and the other has a papal bull with a date on it. }
~dormition 3:2 ~corpus-christi

{ Even a feast of pure doctrine outranks a feast of a devotional practice, since the doctrine is the reason the practice exists. }
~trinity-sunday > ~corpus-christi

:scriptural-warrant { how directly the New Testament attests or commands the day — the axis on which the Westminster Directory kept one holy day and struck all the rest }

{ Acts 20:7, 1 Cor 16:2 and Rev 1:10 give apostolic practice for the first day of the week. No annual feast has anything comparable, which is precisely why Westminster kept this and nothing else. }
~the-lords-day 3:1 ~pascha

{ One Triduum, one warrant. Whatever 1 Cor 5:7-8 licenses, it licenses for the whole transitus and not for the third day alone. }
~pascha = ~good-friday

{ 1 Cor 5:7-8 comes closest to a paschal command; Acts 2 narrates Pentecost as an observed day that already had a name. Neither is an institution and both are equally thin. }
~pascha = ~pentecost

{ Acts 1 and Acts 2 both narrate their events with a stated interval from the Resurrection, which is more than any other feast can say. }
~pentecost = ~ascension

{ Nothing in the New Testament dates or commands the Nativity, and the narratives that found it do not mention a day. Pentecost at least names itself. }
~pentecost 3:1 ~nativity

{ Acts 1:3 supplies an actual count — forty days — which is the strongest dating warrant any feast in this scope can claim from the text. }
~ascension > ~nativity

{ All four gospels narrate the Baptism. Two narrate the birth, and neither dates it. }
~theophany 3:2 ~nativity

{ There is at least a birth narrative to read at Christmas. There is no scriptural account of Mary's death at all — the Dormition rests entirely on later tradition. }
~nativity 3:2 ~dormition

{ Dormition is at least ancient and anonymous tradition. Corpus Christi is a dated institution with a named author, which on this axis is the weakest possible provenance. }
~dormition 3:2 ~corpus-christi

:byzantine-precedence { how the Typikon and the Twelve Great Feasts rank them, not how Rome does }

{ Pascha is not counted among the Twelve at all, because it stands above the category. The gap is definitional rather than a matter of degree. }
~pascha 3:1 ~theophany

{ Both Great Feasts with full vigils. The East treats the Baptism as the greater manifestation where the West treats it as an afterthought to the Magi, and the parity here is itself the finding. }
~theophany = ~nativity

{ Great Feasts of the Lord, ranked alike by the Typikon's signs. }
~theophany = ~pentecost

{ Great Feasts of the Lord, ranked alike by the Typikon's signs. }
~pentecost = ~ascension

{ The Dormition fast runs fourteen days and is second in severity only to Great Lent, a liturgical measure of rank the West has no equivalent for. Still below the Nativity. }
~nativity 3:2 ~dormition

{ Both Great Feasts, but the Dormition carries the fast and Tabor does not. Palamite theology raises the Transfiguration's stock without raising its rank. }
~dormition 3:2 ~transfiguration

{ The Annunciation is never transferred, not even when it falls on Great Friday or on Pascha itself, and combined services exist for exactly that collision. No other feast in the calendar is defended that way. }
~annunciation > ~transfiguration

{ Also a Great Feast, and the only one keeping a strict fast on a Sunday. Severe, but narrower in scope than Tabor. }
~transfiguration 3:2 ~holy-cross

{ Corpus Christi does not exist in the Byzantine calendar. Placing it last here reports a boundary rather than passing judgement on the feast. }
~holy-cross 3:1 ~corpus-christi

:roman-precedence { placement in the Table of Liturgical Days, Universal Norms no. 59 }

{ Both inside rank 1. The Table treats the Triduum as one liturgical day and does not rank its parts against each other. }
~pascha = ~good-friday

{ Rank 1 against rank 2, the only two entries in the top band that are neither Sundays nor Holy Week weekdays. }
~pascha 3:1 ~nativity

{ Both Band One rank 2, listed in the same breath with the Epiphany and Pentecost. }
~nativity = ~ascension

{ Band One rank 2 against a rank 3 solemnity of the Lord. Close by the Table's own spacing. }
~nativity 3:2 ~corpus-christi

{ Where Rome and Byzantium invert. A rank 3 solemnity outranks a rank 5 Feast of the Lord, so the thirteenth-century Latin feast beats Tabor outright — the exact reverse of the Typikon. }
~corpus-christi > ~transfiguration

{ Both Feasts of the Lord in the General Calendar at rank 5, and neither displaces a Sunday. }
~transfiguration = ~holy-cross

{ The uncomfortable one. Sundays in Ordinary Time sit at rank 6, below the Feasts of the Lord at rank 5, so by the Table's own arithmetic Tabor outranks an ordinary Sunday. This directly contradicts my canonical vote, which is what the aspect is for. }
~transfiguration > ~the-lords-day

{ A rank 3 solemnity against a rank 6 Ordinary Time Sunday. The Table really does place Corpus Christi above the ordinary Lord's Day, whatever no. 4 says about the primordial feast. }
~corpus-christi 3:2 ~the-lords-day