The Calendar (13 page)

Before the Rules a monastery’s abbot typically arranged tasks and schedules for his tightly-knit community. But Benedict, working in the spirit of creating uniform rules for the universal (Catholic) church, refused to leave this to the whim of individual abbots. Wanting to be sure that a monk in Naples was saying the same Psalm at the same hour as one in Provence, he ordered that time be kept accurately and objectively by using the best clocks then available: the sundial and water clock, and later a ‘candle clock’ made to burn in measured hourly increments.

Benedict’s Rule started with the Christian calendar as it then existed, with its saints’ days, holy days associated with Christ’s life, celebrations and feasts. He then assigned tasks and duties to virtually every day of the year, using as his inspiration the Roman army’s system of loosely dividing the day into hours, with daily watches rotating on the third, sixth and ninth hours (morning, noon and afternoon). Benedict ordered these three key points announced each day in the monastery. He also delineated canonical hours that did not have to be announced: dawn
(matutina),
sunrise
(prima hora),
sunset (
vespera
) and the coming of complete darkness at night (
completorium
). He listed certain Psalms to be read each day and at the beginning of the seven named hours so that everyone would know the correct hour and when it began. He fixed precise hours for waking, eating, working and resting, and staggered them according to the seasons. For instance:

During the winter, that is from 1 November
(a Kalendis Novembribus)
till Easter, the time of rising will be the eighth hour of the night, according to the usual reckoning. From Easter till 1 October
(Kalendas Octubres
) the brethren should set out in the morning and work at whatever is necessary from the first hour till about the fourth. From the fourth hour until the Sext they should be engaged in reading. After the sixth hour, and when they have had their meal, they may rest on their beds in complete silence. . . . The Nones prayers should be said rather early, at about the middle of the eighth hour, and then they should work again at their tasks until Vespers.

Benedict’s system meant that Christian monks for centuries would live under Rome’s civil calendar and the Roman army’s day, imposed far more strictly than by the old empire’s magistrates and generals. But the idea here was not temporal power or political order but a test of willpower and belief, and a means by which monks could fill their days with manual work that would keep their minds sharply focused on spiritual matters. ‘Idleness is an enemy of the soul,’ wrote Benedict.

The abbot of Nursia’s rules eventually spread to monasteries across Europe, becoming a symbol of faith for devotees in a medieval era that otherwise ignored time. As something that set apart monks from the rest of society, the Benedictine system also engendered in laymen a sense that following a strict schedule of duties according to the clock was an important part of religious devotion. Eventually, the Benedictine’s sense of time crept into everyday life and language. The word
siesta,
for instance, comes from the abbot setting aside an hour of rest after the midday meal at the sixth hour. Devout Catholics still pray at
matins
in the early morning and at
vespers
in the evening. Some historians believe that modern capitalism, with its use of time as an economic unit--for wages, contracts and interest rates--grew in part out of the Benedictine fixation on measuring time.

When Cassiodorus was still a young man he met, and perhaps was taught by the third of our troika in Rome, an abbot named Dionysius Exiguus (c. 500-560)--’Little Dennis’. Described as a Scythian--one of a barbarian people who a century earlier had been driven south by the Huns from their ancient home in the Caucasus--little is known about Dionysius other than his work on the calendar and on one of the first collections of official Catholic rules known as canons. He knew Boethius and Cassiodorus, but was probably older. Late in life Cassiodorus remembered him fondly as a brilliant scholar with a great fluency in translating Greek and Latin. Also an accomplished mathematician and astronomer, in 525--the year Boethius was executed--Pope John I (d. 526) asked him to calculate the Easter date for the next year. At the time this was part of an effort by the Roman church to wean itself from its sister church in the East, who long had treated the science of determining Easter like some arcane pharaonic secret, a mystery understood only by those steeped in the tradition of Aristarchus and Claudius Ptolemy. With a wave of his Latin quill Dionysius changed all of this, ending the long hegemony of Alexandria by co-opting their formulas and methods, freeing Rome at last from the time lords of this ancient city of stargazers.

Of course, Dionysius was careful to couch his work in terms that would be acceptable to the spiritualists of his day, insisting in explanations about his work that the holy day of Easter should be calculated ‘not so much from worldly knowledge, as from an inspiration through the Holy Spirit’. He then promptly turned to astronomy and mathematics to make his calculations, adopting what in those days was the most accurate method available, the 19-year lunar cycle. Essentially he updated the table computed by the Alexandrian bishop Cyril, extending it for another 95 years, from 532 to 627.

We needn’t plunge too deeply into the numeric complexities of these long-forgotten tables, although a brief dip will help explain what a man such as Dionysius knew and had to work with as he struggled to make sense of his Christian-Roman calendar. For example, in the chart below are four years in Dionysius’s first 19-year cycle:*

*He is using the old Roman system of kalends, ides and nones, which would linger throughout the Middle Ages.

Below are explanations of each of the lines headed up by a Roman numeral:

I: This number has nothing to do with calculating Easter. It refers to a system of dating Roman documents in 15-year cycles called
indictions,
a style of dating so widely used for financial and legal documents (often in conjunction with the date of a consul or emperor’s reign) that Dionysius included it as a helpful guide to the year for those using his table.

II: To calculate the true Easter, astronomers started by noting the ‘age’--or phase--of the moon during a given year on a set date in the solar calendar. This was arbitrarily set by Dionysius at 22 March, the day after the official spring equinox as determined at the time of the Council of Nicaea. For instance, in 532 the moon’s age was o days old on 22 March--a new moon. This age-number is called an
epact.
Because the lunar years runs 11 days fast against the solar year, the age of the moon on any given date in the Julian calendar will always be 11 days ‘older’ the next year. Thus in 533 the epact of the moon was not 0, but 11.

A year later, in 534, the epact moved another 11 days back, for a total of 22 days of movement since 532. But because the moon runs in a 295 day cycle (rounded up to 30 days by Dionysius), the next year, 535, has an epact of 3, determined by taking 22+11 + 33--the 30-day month + 3. And on it goes with eleven added to each year, running on a 30-day cycle.

The epact is important because in the 19-year lunar cycle this number will always be the same for each year in the cycle. (See number of the year in the 19-year progression.) This formula made it simple for anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of numbers to calculate Easter, though later time reckoners would realize that the moon does not fit precisely into this cycle, since the lunar month is actually less than 30 days. Whether or not to use epacts became a hotly debated topic during the deliberations in the sixteenth century that led to the Gregorian reforms in 1582.

Ill: This is the day of week that fell on 24 March, which was used to determine on which date the Sunday after the equinox would fall.

IV: The year in the 19-year lunar cycle.

V: This is the beginning of Passover, corresponding to 14 Nisan in the Jewish calendar--a date that Christian time reckoners were ordered to avoid by the bishops at Nicaea, who dictated that Easter could never be held on the day Passover begins. If the calculations for Easter indicate a date on 14 Nisan, the celebration was moved to the following Sunday.

VI: The correct date each year for Easter Sunday, based on the formula in use at the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325. This has Easter falling on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.

Dionysius, like other Easter time reckoners past and present, provides numerous equations that prove the interconnectedness of these dates mathematically.* These are practical for the serious ecclesiastic task at hand but also seem in their elegance to be the product of a mind that enjoyed the precision and exactitude of equations for their own sake, despite his devout talk about ‘the Christian concept of time’.

*One flaw in Dionysius’s system was the impossibility of matching up the seven-day week, in which Sunday fell, mathematically with a 95-year period of 19-year cycles. Obviously seven does not divide into 95, which meant this table was still not entirely accurate as a predicdve tool. A mathematician in Aquitaine named Victorius figured out a solution to this problem c. 457 by figuring out that Easter dates repeat themselves every 532 years, 532 being a number divisible by 19 and by 7. Apparently Dionysius was unaware of Victorius’s discovery.

Dionysius’s contribution to our calendar went far beyond the pedestrian task of calculating another 95 years of Easters. When he published his tables he included a reform that was little noticed in his own day but now affects virtually everyone in the world: the system of dating known as
anno Domini
(AD), ‘the year of our Lord’--which many people now call the
common era
(CE).

In a letter to a bishop named Petronius, Dionysius complained that earlier Easter tables used a calendar widely followed at the time, which started its year one in AD 284, the year that Emperor Diocletian ascended to the throne. Under this system, the year Dionysius wrote his letter--which we call AD 531--was designated the year 247
anno Diocletiani,
the year of Diocletian. But Diocletian was a notorious persecutor of Christians, noted Dionysius, who tells Petronius that he ‘preferred to count and denote the years from the incarnation of our Lord, in order to make the foundation of our hope better known and the cause of the redemption of man more conspicuous.’ Dionysius calculated that Christ was born exactly 531 years earlier--which became
his
base year of AD 1. (Dionysius did not designate a year 0 because the concept of zero had not yet been invented.) Where the abbot got this date for Christ’s birth is unknown. Nor is it clear if his scheme was an original idea or one already informally used. Whatever the source, Dionysius was the first ever to use the system we all now take for granted when he wrote on his Easter tables
anni Domini nostri Jesu Christi
(the years of our Lord Jesus Christ) 532-627.

Unfortunately, Dionysius almost certainly got his dates wrong. The true moment of Christ’s birth is unknown and a matter of immense controversy even today, given the vague and contradictory information available on Christ’s early life. The Gospel of Matthew claims he was born in the time of Herod the Great, who died in 4 BC. This means the birth must have occurred before this date. Other Gospels and historical sources suggest dates ranging from 6 or 7 BC to AD 7, though most historians lean toward 4 or 5 BC. This means the year 1996 or 1997 was probably the true year 2000 in the anno Domini calendar, if one does the arithmetic without a year 0.

Anyway, it took time for Dionysius’s use of anno Domini to catch on. Some Christians resisted it because they preferred the anni Diocletiani, also called the ‘Era of the Martyrs’, a period held in veneration despite its association with an anti-Christian emperor. (Coptic Christians in Egypt still use anni Diocletiani; for them, the year AD 2000 will correspond to the year 1716 in the ‘Era of the Martyrs’.) It was Dionysius’s friend Cassiodorus who first used the AD system in a published work when he and his monks wrote their textbook in 562 on how to determine Easter and other dates, the Computus paschalis. Other Italians gradually accepted the AD system over the next several decades, followed very slowly by other regions of Christendom.

Early Catholic missionaries introduced the system in Britain, where newly converted Saxons issued edicts dated with anno Domini in the seventh century. It first appeared in Gaul during the eighth century but did not come into wide use in Europe until the tenth century. In some outlying provinces, including parts of Spain, the AD system was not adopted until the 1300s. Christians did not use the inverse of anno Domini, BC (for ‘before Christ’) until 1627, when the French astronomer Denis Petau apparently became the first ever to add BC to dates while teaching at the College de Clermont in Paris.