In the first place, a “year,”
according to our holy and wise teachers, is the periodic return of the sun to
the same point from which it began, a circuit which contains the distinctive
fivefold characteristic of time. For time is divided and drawn together by
units of day, [1357A] week, month, season, and year. The same is true of the
year itself, which is divided into units of hour, day, week, month, and season,
yet its movement remains continuous and uninterrupted by intervals, so that the
divisions perceived in light of its alterations are merely the measurement of
time’s continuous and uninterrupted movement.
If in such manner, then, the year
unfolds for us according to the movement of the sun, it follows that the year
acceptable to the Lord (as Scripture calls it), when understood
allegorically, is the entire extension of the ages, beginning from the moment
when God was pleased to give substance
to beings and existence to what did not exist, and, through His providence—like
an intelligible sun whose power holds the universe together in stability and
graciously consents to emit its [1357B] rays—He deigned to vary the modes of
His presence so that the good things He planted in beings might ripen to full
maturity, until all the ages will have reached their appointed limit. (Maximus
the Confessor, Ambigua to John: Ambiguum 46, in On Difficulties in the Church
Fathers: The Ambigua, 2 vols. [trans. Nicholas Constas; Dumbarton Oaks
Medieval Library; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014], 2:203, 205)
