Anne
Lake Prescott
English Department
Spring, 2000
Father
Time as a Multiculturalist
Today
I would like to offer you a paradox, one relevant
to what is, sort of, the millenium, and also to
our current interest in cultural diversity. This
is the paradox: the effort by the Catholic Church
in early modern Europe to make the Christian calendar
uniform and rational in fact increased calendrical
disparities in Europe and its dominions. My paradox
has a second part. Because Christians who sought
to reform the calendar were looking for a more accurate
way to predict each year's Easter, and because the
rules for establishing that date derive ultimately
from Jewish rules for dating Passover and would
also be helped by calculating the time since Creation,
reformers had to focus harder than ever on other
cultures' calendars. Ironically, a desire for uniformity
and accuracy, combined with a new technique-printing-that
disseminated yearly calendars to a wide readership
all over Europe, also intensified awareness of human
variety.
Educated
Christians knew that the Julian calendar in use
since Roman times urgently needed reform. Only with
a better calendar could one be sure that the faithful
(and even the unfaithful, for that matter) were
celebrating Easter on the right day because the
spring equinox, to which Easter is tied, had itself
fallen on the right day-that is, the day God had
established for it. Easter is a "moveable feast,"
but it should move according to rules based on a
correct cosmology. (When Dennis the Short-Dionysius
Exiguus-first invented the system of A.D., by the
way, Europe had not yet imported zero, that invaluable
symbol of emptiness developed in India and then
by the Arabs. That, and not Dennis's inadvertence,
is why there is no "Year Nothing A.D.")
It
is true that Christian experts in calendrical computistics
had long known that their calendar was in serious
trouble. "Intolerable, Horrible, and Laughable,"
the medieval scholar Roger Bacon called it. The
Council of Nicea had long ago fixed the date of
the equinox on March 21, but gradually it had slipped
backwards, thanks to the sun's habit of dawdling
just a little on its yearly stroll through the zodiac.
(We call this the precession of the equinoxes, which
is why we do indeed live in the dawning of the Age
of Aquarius as the sun slips away from Pisces.)
By the 1570s the vernal equinox had reached March
11. Should the world last 22,646 more years, wrote
one exasperated Englishman, Midsummer's day would
fall on the winter solstice. Clearly the time was
more than ripe for reform.
It
was also ripe, I suspect, because by now a number
of people were more than ever impressed by notions
of regularity in the heavens, by whatever is clear,
uniform, predictable. The same impulses that were
to bring modern science and mathematics, better
maps, increased government bureaucracy and royal
absolutism, music with greater stress on a defined
tonic note, perspective in painting, and, eventually,
buildings like Versailles, also led Pope Gregory
XIII to agree that the calendar should be more rational
and accurate. So he called a council and, following
the advice of such experts as Clavius, for whom
a section of the Moon is now named, he proclaimed
that starting in 1582 the date of the spring equinox
would again be March 21. And, he said, the year
would officially start on January 1, just as it
had in the Roman Empire, and not on March 25, as
it did in England, as it did in England, for example.
Many nations complied, but not all, especially Protestant
ones. Only in 1752 would England cave in.
And
that is the cause of my first paradox. Gregory had
hoped that all Christians would adopt the reform,
but in fact his effort split first Europe and many
other places into more dramatically divided time
zones. For almost two centuries, those who crossed
from Dover to Calais had to adjust not just their
clocks but also their calendars, moving the date
of the day forward by ten days or more and, if traveling
between January 1 and March 24, changing the year
as well. In some years, Gregorians in Madrid or
Mexico City would be feasting on an Easter roast
while Julians in London were still pushing the baked
haddock around on their Lenten plates. Nor is the
division healed yet. Yesterday was the Orthodox
Easter.
What
happened in Europe, then, was the opposite of the
uniformity for which the reformers had hoped. But
that failure to achieve unity produced something
else-an increased knowledge that different groups
of people have different ways of counting the days.
Now, it is true that ever since homo sapiens began
diffusing out of Africa many thousands of years
ago our species has developed various ways of counting
the hours or days and it is also true that in Christian
Europe different countries, even different cities,
once used different dates on which to start the
year. But in Renaissance Europe such differences
became more unavoidably noticeable-and more inconvenient-as
communication became more rapid and exploration,
trade, and conquest brought the first stirrings
of what we call globalization. Those indifferent
to what foreigners were up to would nevertheless
read about other dating schemes in the thousands
of calendars that saw print every year, bought by
the learned and semi-literate alike. Even as nationalism
increased, and even as a taste for uniformity and
rationality began to show up in everything from
French gardens to military diagrams, businessmen,
travelers, and ordinary almanac-owners had to accept
the fact that different folks have different calendars.
It
is instructive in this regard to see how England's
many almanacs responded to this increased variety
after the Gregorian calendar went into effect in
most, but not all, European countries. Almanac makers
wanted to be patriotic, and many probably wanted
no truck with any calendar invented by that foreign
"Antichrist," the Pope. But they also knew that
Englishmen needed to deal one way or another-trade,
travel, war, friendship, diplomacy, scientific discovery-with
foreigners. So most almanacs after 1582 list the
year's major Christian dates under two or three
headings. The headings are invented at the almanac
maker's pleasure: "The English account" says one,
who also gives "The Romish Account." Another has
the "Old" and the "Forrain." Yet another the "Usuall"
and "Reformed." One says "Julian or English, used
in great Brittain" and "Gregorian or Roman used
beyond Sea." Several have "The common," "the Romane,"
and the "true" (that system dating was for people
who knew that the English calendar was in bad shape
but who didn't like Pope's reform either-I spare
you the arguments). A more complex set of headings
reads "The Julian, Soligenian, or English account"
and "The Lilian, Gregorian, or Roman account." Sometimes
the Gregorian days and numbers are in Latin, as
though to give them a learned but also alien and
Catholic look.
The
second part of my paradox can be more briefly sketched.
I have noted that the chief reason for calendar
reform was the need to bring some uniformity and
order to establishing the date for Easter each year.
One would think that getting the right date for
Easter would be easy: calculate the equinox, see
what the moon is up to, count forward to the next
Sunday, and voilą-order the lilies, ham, and egg
dye. But on what day did the first Easter fall?
Well, that depends on when you think Jesus was born.
Did Dennis the Short get it right? Not everybody
thought so. And when was the equinox at the Creation?
That date depends on how old the world is, and to
estimate the time since Creation Christians needed
the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish calendar. For example,
the Scottish pastor, Robert Pont, writes in his
Newe treatise on the right reckoning of the yeares
(1599) that in determining the world's age we should
work backward, starting with the Hebrew month Tishri,
when the world was probably created, even though
the book of Exodus establishes Nisan as the first
month. (Those in this room probably have a radically
different method for calculating the age of the
universe-mine depends partly on the Hubble telescope-but
most of us still feel that knowing how old everything
is remains somehow important).
The
basic problem for Christian computistics-and indeed
for everyone living in what many now call our "common
era"-is that the Gregorian calendar remains based
on the Roman system, which was largely solar. But
Christians derive Easter, which determines much
of the liturgical year, from a Jewish system, and
the Jewish calendar is essentially lunar. How to
reconcile the sun and the moon? You can imagine
the lovely opportunities for literary and philosophical
speculation, let alone thoughts on gender. In any
case, even as European computists sought to bring
better history and better math to computing a calendar
that would serve all Christians, they perforce looked
to Jewish tradition and even to Egypt, from which
many people thought the Greeks and the Jews had
derived much of their wisdom. Again, this was not
wholly new. But controversy over the new Gregorian
calendar and a flood of works on the topic by authorities
from the great Joseph Scaliger to Queen Elizabeth's
astrologer, Dr. John Dee, raised the consciousness
of even the most isolated readers. Once again, the
new print technology brought increased uniformity
in some regards-hundreds, even thousands would read
the identical text-but also encouraged an increased
awareness of diversity in other regards.
Once
again, English Renaissance almanacs show that at
least a little information about other cultures
spread to a large public, fragmentary, distorted,
and crude though the lessons might be. Just to give
you a few examples: a 1593 calendar gives at the
top of each month's page the different names of
the months in English, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew,
noting that this last is the Jews' tenth month.
An almanac for 1627 has a little section on "The
divers beginning of yeares and dayes with divers
Nations" that lists the day's start according to
the Persians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Bohemians,
Poles, Italians, English, Dutch, Germans, Arabians,
Umbrians, and Astronomers (who here seem to be a
"nation"); a similar list follows for New Year's
Day. Another almanac explains that Romulus, founder
of Rome, started the year at the spring equinox
but that Troy had begun it at the summer solstice-intriguing
information for anyone who believed, as many once
did, that Britain was founded by a wandering band
of Trojans.
And
that is how, in Renaissance Europe, Father Time
became more consciously and visibly a multi-culturalist.
With faster communication thanks to print, and with
new knowledge of other cultures (even if that knowledge
too often served murder and oppression as well as
trade), Renaissance efforts to make Father Time
fly straighter on his winged feet, wield his sickle
in smoother curves, and pour the sand through his
hourglass more accurately-in short, to be more uniform-in
fact led Christians to work with two different calendars
and provoked experts to learn and publish even more
about non-Christian ways of counting time. Even
the most parochial and patriotic English farmer
or craftsman, if he studied his almanac, would know
that a few miles away it was a different day and
perhaps a different year. And if he read a bit further
he would know that those strange folks the Jews
had a month called Nisan and that Babylonians and
even Trojans each had their own systems for making
Father Time fly. And now, according to Barnard's
own system of counting the minutes, it is time for
me to stop.
.jpg)
