November 1st is All Saints Day – the day in the Roman Catholic church calendar on which all the saints not otherwise commemorated are remembered. It’s also known as All Hallows Day in English. The night before is Halloween, which is the annual occasion on which a huge volume of sewage appears online, claiming that “Halloween is pagan,” often with “haw haw” following. In fact Halloween is modern, post-Reformation. In his book “Stations of the Sun,” Ronald Hutton gives a very good account of the real origins of the event, and also its supposed earlier roots.
All Saints itself is not an ancient feast. I thought initially that it might be interesting to look at some sermons delivered on All Saints Day in antiquity, but I found a surprising dearth of these. There are some sermons commemorating all the martyrs; but that’s not the same thing.
So I could only find three possible candidates. The first is by pseudo-Bede, Sermo in sollemnitate omnium Sanctorum, CPL 1369 (text PL 94, 450), also attributed to ps.Augustine, sermo 209. It seems in fact to be 9th century.
A second one seems to be unpublished. It is not included in the CPG, and I only found out about it because it is listed in Pinakes. It’s Michael Hierosolymitanus the Syncellus (d. 846), Sermo in Festum Omnium Sanctorum. It’s preserved in two manuscripts in the Dochariou monastery on Mt Athos, one 17th century, the other 17-18th century. Michael is not that obscure a guy, but I could learn nothing about this work. However I gather that he translated material from Latin into Greek in other works, and so he may have been influenced here also by western practice.
The third was by Eusebius Alexandrinus, Sermo viii. De commemoratione sanctorum, CPG 5517, PG 86 357:361. This also exists in Georgian. This is part of a collection of 22 homilies, of uncertain authorship, where the manuscript just says “Eusebius”. It’s thought that the sermons are 5th or 6th century. But this item is not actually a sermon, but rather an answer to a question about why the martyrs should be commemorated.
The lack of a mass of festal sermons again indicates the late date for the feast of All Saints.