Tonight, September 29, there is a Harvest Moon. That name is applied to the first full moon after the autumnal equinox, which happened September 23. (By the way, October 28 will be the Hunter’s Moon, the name given to the second full moon of autumn.)
The Harvest Moon derives its name from the fact that the full moon rises almost as the sun sets. Because the two celestial lights seem to “tag-team” each other in the autumn, it extended the evening working hours so that farmers had extra time to bring in their harvests. Likewise, the Hunter’s Moon comes from the fact that its rapid rise with the sun’s setting allowed hunters extra time in the woods and forests to catch food for the long winter ahead.
So what does this have to do with Catholicism?
As Catholics, we hold it to be an article of faith that people can come to a certain knowledge of God from the book of the universe. It may not be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but the order, beauty, finitude, and contingency of the created world points to its Creator. And sometimes it helps, in our technology-driven world, to recognize the order in God’s creation.
For much of human history, work synchronized with the day: when the sun went down, work stopped. In part, that was because of the means of illumination: you get only so much light from a candle, a fire, or even a kerosene lamp. Likewise, work synchronized with the year: the lengthening days of spring and the long days of summer fostered work, whereas the coming of autumn meant that, each day, daylight would now grow shorter, nights longer.
Much of human history was also not consumer-oriented. A bountiful harvest promised survival through winter. A paltry one threatened it.
Now, in that natural world, God so arranged the cycles of the celestial bodies that, in autumn, the almost-simultaneous sunset and moonrise provided for human welfare. Man had extra time to glean the fields or forage in the woods. An earlier humanity, dependent on that light, would have thanked God for the Providence it demonstrated.
That’s evident from the first pages of the Bible. In Genesis 1, God creates light on the first day, the sun and moon on the fourth. The Clarence Darrows of the world might scoff, but as one biblical exegete noted, Genesis is not a scientific treatise. It takes the world as human beings experienced it. And human beings experienced light independently of the sun and moon: how else to explain that there was a difference between daytime and nighttime on a cloudy or overcast day? And in a world against whose darkness man had an oil lamp or torch, light was a gift. It’s not by accident that the pagan Greeks celebrated Prometheus and fire.
Look at the things actually mentioned in Genesis 1, especially from days four, five, and six. Bruce Vawter long ago pointed out one thing: various ancient cultures worshiped each of them. The Egyptians worshiped the sun. The Babylonians worshiped the moon. Others worshiped sea creatures or cows or birds.
Vawter argued that the sacred writer in fact laughs at those cultures. By enumerating those things in Genesis 1, he cuts them down to size. They are not gods. They are, in fact, created for man’s use, for his dominion.
Take the sun and moon. Far from being deities, they are given practical purposes. They are to “govern the day and the night” and to “mark the seasons, the days and the years.” God gives man his first calendar, with cycles of time: the day, the month, the year.
The Psalmist regularly praises God for the sun and moon. “Yours is the day and yours is the night; you set the moon and sun in place” (Ps. 74:16). “Praise Him, sun and moon! Praise Him, all shining stars!” (148:3). Indeed, their apparent greatness makes the human person even more aware of his dignity: “When I consider the heavens, the work of your hands, the moon and stars which you have set in place—what is man that you are mindful of him? . . . Yet you have made him little less than a god.” (8:4-6).
The heavenly bodies are not due worship, but they do remind us of the worship due God. Among the missions given to the sun and moon are demarcating the seasons. The Jewish calendar is lunar, and the great feast of the year—Passover—falls on the twilight of the fourteenth of Nisan (Exod. 12:6), which, because the Jewish calendar is lunar, is always a full moon. That’s also why, prior to the Council of Nicaea, there was a dispute between two camps about when to observe Easter. The Quartodecimans wanted it to coincide with the full moon of Passover, but, since Passover could be any day of the week, their system disconnected the Day of Resurrection from Sunday. Their opponents—with whom the Council of Nicaea eventually decided and whose method has remained until our day the Christian method of calculating Easter—placed the Great Feast on the Sunday after the first full moon of spring. And because the full moon can vary, that is why Easter is a moveable feast. (I have criticized an idea to promote “ecumenical unity” with the Orthodox in time for the 1,700th anniversary of Nicaea in 2025 by abandoning the lunar formula and pegging Easter to a fixed Sunday—i.e., the second or third of April.)
The movements of the heavenly bodies don’t tell the future, but they do speak of the love that has given the future its meaning and end. So when you go out tonight and see the jolly full moon beaming down at you, recognize whose love it is when Dante wrote about “the love that moves the sun and the other stars,” the love that moves the spheres.