The Calendar (10 page)

*A month in a local Greek calendar.

As for Easter, most Christians agreed by 325 that it should be preceded by a fast, and that the sacred day itself should have some relationship with the full moon that falls during the Jewish month of Nisan. Beyond this, individual churches and sects split on the issue of holding Easter always on a Sunday or according to the approximate date in Nisan that Christ rose from the dead, which changed according to the drift of the Jewish lunar calendar. By the third century a rising anti-Semitism among non-Jewish adherents added to the confusion, as Christians became biased against using dates that depended on when Jewish priests determined the start of Nisan to be. So a third choice emerged: linking Christ’s resurrection to the solar year and to Caesar’s calendar by using the spring equinox as a fixed astronomic date to determine Easter. With this anchor date decided, a formula could be devised to correlate the equinox with the phases of the moon and the weekly cycle of Sundays.

None of the surviving canons issued by the council mentions the Easter problem directly, though the rules that emerged from Nicaea are well-known among Christians: that Easter will fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox, but shall never fall at the beginning of the Jewish Passover. The sentiment of the assembled bishops was recorded by Constantine himself in a letter addressed to bishops and other church leaders who did not attend the council. ‘By the unanimous judgment of all,’ wrote the emperor, ‘it has been decided that the most holy festival of Easter should be everywhere celebrated on one and the same day.’ In the same letter Constantine notes that the council opposed the practice of following the Jewish calendar to determine Easter. ‘We ought not,’ he says in a letter charged with anti-Semitism, ‘to have anything in common with the Jews, for the Saviour has shown another way.’

But the council’s solution was hardly perfect. First off, it codified a holiday that changes dates every year, a confusing notion for the average Christian or recently converted pagan used to annual holidays falling on the same date every year. A second problem was that Nicaea’s Easter solution required what was then impossible: an accurate determination in advance of a date that assumed a precise knowledge of the movements of the sun, earth and moon. Ancient scientists could calculate only an approximate date, a reality that would haunt time reckoners for centuries as they tried, and failed, to determine true dates for Easter. In the absence of good science most churches fixed on an arbitrary date for the vernal equinox on 21 March.

Another blemish in the Nicaea solution was the failure of the council’s bishops and time reckoners to correct the central flaw in Caesar’s calendar: the annual error of 11 minutes. This meant that an Easter tethered to a fixed spring equinox would drift backward with the rest of the calendar, filling behind the true orbit of the earth by one full day every 128 or so years. By 325 the Julian calendar was already three days behind where it stood when Caesar introduced his reforms in 45 BC, when the vernal equinox fell on 25 March. By Bacon’s day the true equinox had dropped back to 14 March, though the church continued to follow the practice after Nicaea of rigidly determining Easter according to a 21 March equinox, arbitrarily set at the time of the council.

On the other big issue at Nicaea--the nature of Christ--the council debated heatedly throughout that long-ago summer, finally issuing on 25 July the Nicene Creed, which declared Arianism a heresy and affirmed that Christ and God came from one substance and had both always existed. But far more important than the nature of Christ or the date for Easter was Nicaea’s codification of Constantine’s fusion of church and state, an expedient political move by this shrewd emperor that was to link inexorably the Church to secular power, wealth and absolutism for many centuries to come--first as an adjunct to imperial Rome and later as an independent entity that derived its all-embracing influence from its own imperial-style hierarchy and assumption of power over Christian domains.

Constantine closed the council by admonishing the still-fractious bishops to keep their unity at all costs and to use their new-found power with care. ‘Be like wise physicians,’ he said, ‘who treat different cases with discrimination, and are all things to all.’ Undoubtedly no one assembled on that hot Mediterranean day, feasting on Constantine’s meats and fruits and sipping his wine, had any idea how prophetic the emperor’s final words would be

5 Time Stands Still

Try as they may to savour the taste of eternity, their thoughts still twist and turn upon the ebb and flow of things in past and future time. But if only their minds could be seized and held steady, they would be still for a while and, for that short moment, they would glimpse the splendour of eternity, which is for ever still.
Augustine of Hippo, c. AD 400

Less than a century after Constantine celebrated the success of his council at Nicaea, a Roman foot soldier stood sentry on a snow-swept river bank at Mainz in what is now Germany. Shivering in his armour and military wraps, this anonymous infantryman watched the ice-choked Rhine and the opposite bank, where hundreds of cooking fires burned, tended by a vast and growing horde of German
barbari.
This lone soldier might have been a Roman, or more probably a Romanized German recruited by the faltering empire to help defend its northern border. Whatever his nationality, as he stamped his feet to stay warm on this frigid December day in 406 he almost certainly was not thinking that Rome itself hung in the balance. Even when he looked up and saw to his horror that the masses across the river were moving toward him over the ice, he could hardly have imagined that this was the beginning of the end of the ancient world in the West, and for Europeans an end to time itself as they had known it.

The sentry sounded the alarm and his legion scrambled to meet the barbarians, a coalition of tattooed, scraggly, fur-clad Germans from the tribes known as the Alans, the Sueves and the Vandals. But the Roman garrison was fatally depleted. Most of the men had been pulled off the Rhine frontier to join a desperate counter-attack against yet another army of
barbari,
the Ostrogoths, then invading the Balkans. Removing the Rhine legions was a calculated move by the Roman military, who were betting that the Germans there would not attack during the winter. But no one had counted on the fact that the Rhine might freeze solid, a rare occurrence. Nor could the emperor and his generals have known that the Germans were themselves fleeing the savage invasion of their country by the Huns.

Lacking the resources to stop them, Rome watched helplessly as the Mainz hordes and other waves of invaders poured across borders that had held firm for four hundred years to ravage defenceless cities. Britain was lost in 410 when its Roman garrison departed to defend Gaul, never to return. Soon after, Gaul itself began to break apart; Spain too slipped slowly away in the west, along with parts of the Balkans in the east. A marauding band of Visigoths reached the gates of Rome itself in 410, crashing through its walls to sack a city that for centuries had been one of the greatest powers in the earth’s history.

Inevitably the gathering chaos affected people’s perceptions of time and the calendar as the predictable patterns of Roman life began to crumble. Caesar’s calendar would remain the official calendar in the West long after the empire fell, though more and more people found an organized list of days, months and years irrelevant. They had more immediate concerns, such as finding enough to eat and avoiding the ravages of the
barbari.

But chaos was not the only outcome of the empire’s collapse. Nor did every Roman institution falter. One, in fact, grew stronger amidst the disorder and decay: the Catholic Church. Originally designed by Constantine as a vehicle to enhance the political might of Rome, the church ended up superseding it, retaining its power and influence in the ecclesiastic realm, particularly as the
barbari
dropped their pagan gods and embraced a Church that demanded--and got--an allegiance much stronger than the imperium itself had ever known. This was because the church claimed jurisdiction not over lands and armies but over souls, an authority that would extend during the coming centuries into virtually all aspects of a Christian’s life.

This amounted to a new societal order in Europe, including a new concept of time--something Christian theologians call
sacred time.
Neither cyclical nor linear, it is rather a kind of anti time that Christians equate with God, who is perfect, eternal and timeless.

The idea of sacred time was hardly new. In one form or another it had existed since religions developed concepts of eternity and the afterlife, core beliefs for ancient Egyptians, Jews and many other cultures. Sacred time had been a part of Christianity from its earliest days, though much as they do today, Roman-Christians had tended to keep God’s time in their religious lives, while continuing to operate in their daily lives on real time--on the passage of hours, days, months and years. But as Rome’s political power ebbed and the Church rose from its ashes, the sacred soon overwhelmed the profane.

The man who best articulated this new order was Augustine of Hippo (354-430), a bishop and theologian who wrote two of the most influential Christian books outside of the Bible:
The Confessions of St Augustine
and
The City of God.
In both works Augustine takes some pains to explain ‘sacred time’ and why he believed it was more ‘real’ than secular time, which is fleeting.

Augustine’s long life straddled the years when Rome slid from a still-formidable empire under Constantine’s immediate successors into the widening abyss of final decline. He was 52 years old in 406, when the Mainz hordes broke through the frontier, and lived to see the dismemberment of Gaul, Spain and North Africa. Indeed, the backdrop of the empire’s slow collapse obviously influenced Augustine’s philosophical outlook, which favoured a secure, perfect ‘city of God’ over the faltering ‘city of man’.

Born just 17 years after Constantine’s death, Augustine grew up in the small provincial city of Tagaste, 40 miles from the coast of what is today Algeria. In a meteoric early career as a philosopher and teacher, he moved from his little town to Carthage, then to Rome, and finally in his early thirties to the imperial court at Milan, at that time the
de facto
capital of the Western empire. This was during the reign of Theodosius I (d.395), the last powerful emperor to reign over the entire empire. In his palace the young Augustine became the court teacher of rhetoric, a coveted position that might have led to high political office, power and wealth.

But Augustine was a troubled young man. Living a life he describes in his
Confessions
as one of near debauchery and moral vacuousness, he tried and rejected several of the religions popular at the time. Then in 386, at the age of 31, he was alone in a Milan garden when he says he heard the voice of a child when no child was there. The voice commanded him to open a nearby Bible, which told him to give himself over to Christ. He did, resigning his post in the imperial household and eventually returning to North Africa to become a bishop of the small port city of Hippo--today’s Annaba in modern Algeria, on the sea near the border with Tunisia.

Known as the last great intellectual of the classical era, Augustine set out to create a philosophical structure that linked his new religion to one of the giants of the ancient world, Plato, equating this long-dead Athenian’s ideas about a prime mover/creator with the Christian God, and Plato’s notion of a perfect universe, existing beyond our flawed world, with the Christian concept of heaven. Augustine borrowed from Plato’s conception of time as being by definition in motion. This makes it an imperfect attribute of an imperfect world, since the realm of the prime mover is a place of perfection that by its nature is timeless and immutable. It has no beginning or ending, nor any movement forward or backward, and therefore has no time to measure. Recast in Christian terms, this ideal is what Augustine meant by sacred time.

‘The world was made not in time,’ Augustine says in
The City of God,
‘but together with time.’ This means that God the creator may have set in motion the idea of time as perceived by humans, but he himself exists outside of it, a concept that Augustine argues is ultimately a matter of faith. ‘Follow the One,’ he says, ‘forgetting what is behind, not wasted and scattered on things which are to come and things which will pass away . . . and contemplate Thy delight which is neither coming nor passing.’

A discussion of Augustine’s ontology may seem a bit abstract for a book about little squares marching along on a calendar, except that it represented a powerful current then forming in Europe and in the Church, which for centuries would cast a suspect eye on anyone who tried to delve too deeply into matters of time. Augustine understood the need for a simple calendar that kept track of holidays, legal days and birthdays. Nor did he oppose a philosophical discussion about the nature of time. What he opposed was an overemphasis on trying to quantify the past, particularly on issues such as the creation--something he considered a waste of time for those seeking the perfection of God. He was even more critical of those who tried to predict the future, which in his mind was the sole province of God. These included astronomers and mathematicians who used planets and other cues from nature to predict the future beyond the next harvest or the seasonal coming of winter and spring. ‘In the Gospel we do not read that the Lord said: I am sending you the Holy Spirit so that he can teach you about the course of the sun and the moon,’ Augustine wrote in a 404 letter. ‘He wanted to make Christians, not mathematicians.’