The Calendar (16 page)

At least this was the theory. In reality, the king and queen’s rival Easters were tolerated for several years--until Oswiu’s son, trained by the Catholics, convinced his father that something should be done if the country was to have the sort of unified church rulers sought in those days. So in 664 defenders of both traditions gathered for a conference to decide the issue at the monastery of Streanaeshalch--the ‘Bay of the Beacon’--at Whitby, on the coast some 40 miles north of York. Bede tells us it was a cordial, if sometimes passionate, exchange, an outback version of Nicaea in 325, where rival sects gathered to feast and freely debate before a sovereign who at the end would make a decision affecting the future of the holy days.

An Irish bishop named Colman argued the case for the Celts, invoking the authority of the apostle John to defend his Church’s dates. On the Roman side an abbot named Wilfred cited the authority of Nicaea and other councils, adding that ‘a few men in a corner of a remote island should not be preferred before the universal Church of Christ throughout the world’. Would these scruffy islanders, Wilfred asked, remain backward and outside the mainstream of European culture, or would they join the same mighty Church championed by the Franks and other kingdoms?

King Oswiu was no fool. He believed in the Irish teaching he had grown up with, but he also understood that it made little sense to remain obstinate against Rome and the rest of Catholic Europe. So in the end he decided to abolish the Celtic system and to adopt the Roman, saying he was especially swayed by Wilfred’s argument that the pope, as the successor to St Peter, had the authority to decide Church dogma. Wilfred quoted Christ as saying: ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church.’ More to the point for the literalists of the early Middle Ages, Wilfred quoted Christ as saying he gave to Peter ‘the keys of the kingdom of heaven’. Oswiu responded by asking the Celtic bishop if Christ actually said these words. Bishop Colman admitted he did, and that the Celts had no such authority given to the founders of their Church. Bede, a Catholic himself, tells us what the king said next:

‘Then, I tell you, Peter is the guardian of the gates of heaven, and I shall not contradict him. I shall obey his commands in everything to the best of my knowledge and ability; otherwise, when I come to the gates of heaven, there may be no one to open them, because he who holds the keys has turned away.’
When the king said this, all present, both high and low, signified their agreement and, abandoning their imperfect customs, hastened to adopt those which they had learned to be better.

This was not entirely true. Several Irish hard-liners returned to their bleak monastery on the Scottish island of Iona and continued to flout Rome. These included Bishop Colman, who retreated first to the Celtic monastery on Iona and then to western Ireland with thirty monks to avoid accepting the Roman calculation of Easter. As late as 687, a quarter century after Whitby, the Irish-trained bishop Cuthbert admonished die-hard Celts to stay the course with Rome. He told his disciples to have ‘no dealings with those who had wandered from the unity of the Church either through not celebrating Easter at the usual time or through evil living’.

Soon after the synod the pope dispatched Theodore of Tarsus, a native of Asia Minor, to take over as Archbishop of Canterbury. His name had been at the bottom of the short list; he was apparently selected because several others refused to take the position. It was under Theodore that the monasteries at Jarrow and Wearmouth were founded by Benedict Biscop. Theodore also oversaw the religious integration of the Celts and Catholics leading up to Bede’s time, a period that turned out to be a brief moment of near stability in Anglo-Saxon Britain. It lasted until the ninth century, when the first Viking long boats appeared off the beaches of Northumbria.

Bede in his
History
is clearly a partisan of the Catholics’ method for dating Easter. But he does not leave it at that. As a teacher and practitioner of
computus,
he set out to prove that the Church was correct beyond a doubt about the true Easter. This effort began modestly in 703, when he was about thirty years old. He wrote a short work on time reckoning,
Liber de temporibus,
for his students: a combination how-to, analysis and refutation of the Christian Celts’ stand on Easter. In this work the young Bede also confirmed Dionysius’s system of 19-year cycles to determine Easter and his use of
anno Domini.
This seal of approval brought these systems into the mainstream of the Middle Ages, which widely read and revered Bede over the next several centuries. In 725 he wrote a longer version of the
Liber de temporibus
at the request of his students, titled
De temporum ratione,
a tome that has been found in over a hundred libraries and collections of medieval manuscripts across Europe, attesting to its popularity. No comparable scientific work was written about time and the calendar in the Latin world until the era of Roger Bacon, almost five centuries later.

De temporum ratione
and the shorter pamphlet are part compilation of known ideas and part original thinking. Bede started with an assumption that might have made Augustine squirm: that the universe as created by God was a place of order in which all phenomena could be rationally and logically explained, even if much of it was beyond human comprehension. Following the ancients, he writes that this universe consists of the elements earth, air, fire and water, and that the earth lies at the centre--surrounded, as Christian theology taught in that period, by seven heavens: air, ether, Olympus, fiery space, firmament, the heaven of angels and the heaven of God. (This is where we get the term ‘seventh heaven’ to describe something truly wonderful.) He provides primers on how to count to one million using one’s fingers--the only handy counting device available to Bede--and how to master Roman and Greek numerals. He also explains the divisions of time as they then existed, following Isidore of Seville’s list, from the smallest unit to the largest: moments, hours, days, months, years, centuries and ages.

Bede also writes about the long-held Christian belief that the earth had passed through six ages since the Creation. The first five, he said, had been marked by the Creation, the Flood, Abraham, David and the captivity of the Jews in Babylon. The sixth and current age began with the birth of Christ. This idea of a ‘calendar’ of six ages came from the words of the apostle Peter. He says in the Bible that ‘one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years is one day’. In the Middle Ages Christian chronographers interpreted this to mean that each age of the earth would last roughly a thousand years. This was probably not Peter’s intent; since he seems to be saying in this passage that time to God is meaningless because he is omnipotent and timeless. Nevertheless, Western chronographers before and after Bede used this passage to date the beginning of the world to about five thousand years before Christ’s birth.

Bede, however, studied the problem and came up with his own dating of the five ages, based on a careful reading of Old Testament texts translated directly from Hebrew to Latin rather than relying on third-or fourth hand translations from Hebrew to Greek to Latin. He concluded that the time span from the Creation to the birth of Jesus was 3,952 years. As for the duration of the sixth age after which Christ himself was supposed to inaugurate a seventh and final age of heaven on earth--Bede stuck with Augustine of Hippo’s admonition to avoid trying to predict the future, which the monk from Jarrow agreed that only God knows.

Incredibly, Bede’s calculation of the first five ages of the Earth led to an accusation of heresy, because his time span was at odds with those of other revered chronographers, including Isidore. Someone at a Saxon feast held at Jarrow shouted the allegation after a liberal amount of alcohol had been consumed. The charge infuriated Bede; he shot off a letter defending himself that suggested his accusers were ignorant fools. Apparently nothing came of the accusation.

In the sections of
De temporum ratione
about Easter, Bede calculated the holy day up to the year 1063 using Dionysius Exiguus’s basic system of calculations, with one change. Instead of figuring the dates in arbitrary 95-year periods, Bede used a 532-year cycle in which the Easter date repeats itself, based on multiplying the 19-year lunar-solar cycle times four (to account for the leap year) times seven (the cycle of a week from Sunday to Sunday). At least one earlier mathematician had stumbled on this cycle, though Bede was the first to use it systematically.

But Bede was not content simply to record categories and make calculations like other computists before and after him. Turning to empirical observation, he designed a complicated sundial that he checked every day to keep track of equinoxes. He hoped this would provide him with an objective estimation of the true Easter. In 730 he set out to prove to a friend that the equinox did not fall on 25 March, as some insisted. Bede confirmed this with his sundial and kept up his daily record of the shadows cast to show that another equinox fell on 19 September, 182 days later. Continuing his observations for another six months, he discovered that the spring equinox in 731 did not fall on precisely the same line
(horolo-gii linea)
on his sundial as before, suggesting that the leap-year system of 365 1/4 days was not entirely accurate. This was an extraordinary find for a man using a sundial in dark-ages England. It is a pity that he had no working knowledge of a more accurate timepiece, such as a water clock. As it was, Bede had no way to divide the solar year into units smaller than very basic fractions, which means he had no way to quantify his discovery. He also got the true spring equinox wrong, since by 731 the error in the Julian calendar had caused it to drift more than six days since Caesar’s reform in 44 BC. This put the true spring equinox during Bede’s experiment at 18 or 19 March.

Bede, a refreshingly candid critic of his own work, suspected that his calculations were not entirely accurate. He invited others to improve them while he kept working to refine his observations himself. Since northern Britain is far less sunny than the Mediterranean, and lines of shadow on even the best sundial face are fuzzy and lacking in detail for many months of the year, Bede looked around for other natural time markers. He discovered tides. Taking long walks along the sand-and-rock coast of Northumbria, he seems to have kept a close, scientific eye on the ebb and flow of the ocean, eventually working out how to use the tides to measure the phases and orbit of the moon. He used them to concoct a formula for finding the zodiac sign the moon was passing through given its phase, allowing him to come up with an improved method for fixing the age of the moon on the first day of a given month. This project had little to do with the Easter computation, but it proved useful for astrologers, who used his zodiac equations to predict the future in a way that would have greatly disturbed the pious monk from Jarrow.

Bede went further than most toward embracing objective science, but he remained limited by the mind-set of his era’s spirituality. We cannot forget that Bede was primarily a religious man devoted to his canonical duties and that most of his scholarly work was not scientific, but religious. We must also remember that Bede counted with his fingers as much out of choice as necessity, reiterating the familiar explanation that monks were not supposed to delve too deeply into the details of God’s creation. When confronted with the need for complex fractions in calculating time, he simply rounded up or down, perhaps insisting like Isidore that God’s reckoning, so far as it was understood, consisted of single digit numbers--the ones that could be counted on the fingers of a human hand. Likewise he taught that there was no need to measure half or quarter hours with water clocks; that the ‘God-given hour’ was a small enough unit of time. He told his students to use the twenty-four-hour system for scholarly purposes, but warned them this had no application to everyday life, particularly for the
vulgus
(great masses), who had no way to measure hours accurately and seemed to prefer the informal system of ‘hours’ gauged by looking up at the position of the sun. ‘It is not for man to know the moments set by God,’ Bede quoted from the Bible.

Still, Bede devised a clever theory that attempted to explain the apparent discrepancies between secular time and sacred time. He suggested that there exist three categories of time--time determined by nature, such as the solar year of 365 1/4 days; time fixed by custom, such as the 30-and 31-day months that belong to neither the solar year nor a lunar phase; and time set by an authority either human or divine, such as the Olympiad every four years or the Sabbath every seventh day. Like Augustine of Hippo, he believed God’s time superseded all other forms. This hierarchy of truths about time allowed Bede to embrace science, on one hand, and a world of miracles and God’s omnipotence, on the other. Indeed, this is a man who carefully studied sundials but also filled his histories with stories about bishops curing blind men and prophecies about monks being massacred.

Bede finished his
Ecclesiastic History of the English People
four years before his death in 735, concluding with an enigmatic statement. ‘What the result of this will be the future will show,’ he writes, a curiously modern-sounding mix of pride and uncertainty, and a sense that humanity still had more to learn--a notion rare in his era, when most people believed that mankind had attained all of the knowledge it ever would, and that the world would soon end. Remembered fondly by his own peers and by subsequent generations, Bede’s furtive embrace of the scientific method was centuries before his time, and would later amaze and hearten scientifically oriented thinkers such as Roger Bacon.

7 Charlemagne’s Sandglass

Time belonged only to God and could only be lived out. To grasp it, measure it, or turn it to account or advantage was a sin. To misappropriate part of it was theft.
Jacques Le Goff