At this time, however, Christianity was only one among a number of competing religions in the Roman empire which were coming increasingly under the cosmopolitan influence of Hellenistic civilization. Stoicism had declined, the last prominent exponent of its philosophy being Marcus Aurelius who ruled from 161 to 180. His Meditations, with their emphasis on the vicissitudes of perpetual change, exude an air of world-weariness. The following century saw the spread of Gnosticism, the believers in which laid claim to secret, or privileged, knowledge and so were called gnostikoi ('knowers'). It was a way of thought based on
-59-
the general Hellenic idea that salvation is obtained by knowledge. Besides Christian forms there were others such as Hermeticism and Manichaeism. One of the most characteristic features of Gnostic thought was the fundamental dualism of God and the world, the Deity being regarded as completely transcending the world which, so far from being his creation, was the realm of the Devil and consequently irredeemably evil. Gnosticism can be looked upon as a revolt against Greek science. Although dualistic it was quite different from Platonism: cosmic time was not the moving image of eternity but 'at best a caricature of eternity, a defective imitation far removed from its model'.44 Similarly, Gnosticism was opposed to orthodox Christianity by its hostility to history, for instead of being based on the idea that God prepares for the future by way of the past it regarded the world as one from which God was absent. Consequently, when Gnosticism was combined with Christian ideas the result was soon judged unacceptable by the Church. Nevertheless, this peculiar combination had a long life and was destined to reappear in the Middle Ages as the Albigensian heresy that flourished for a while in southern France but was eventually crushed in the first quarter of the thirteenth century by the northern French at the command of the most powerful of the medieval Popes, Innocent III.
Among other forms of religion that flourished in the Roman empire was Mithraism. This extremely masculine religion appealed to the Roman army. The founding father of modern Mithraic studies, Franz Cumont, showed that Roman Mithraism was a continuation of the Iranian religion of Zarathustra and that its origins can be traced back to the Hindus, for in the Vedic hymns we encounter the name Mitra. According to Cumont, despite the theological differences between the Vedas and the Avesta, 'the Vedic Mitra and the Iranian Mithra have preserved so many traits of resemblance that it is impossible to entertain any doubt concerning their common origin'.45
Two different iconographical images of Mithra have survived. In one found only in the West, e.g. in the course of excavations in the City of London, he appears as a handsome bull-slaying god, signifying the renewal of the world at the time of the New Year. In a marble group in the British Museum depicting the bull-slaying Mithra the most striking feature is that three spikes of wheat are shown issuing from the wound of the sacrificed bull.46
Mithra's other form, found in the Eastern as well as the Western world, is as a lion-headed monster around whose body a serpent is coiled. The snake is sometimes decorated with signs of the zodiac. It therefore
-60-
represents the path of the sun around the ecliptic and indicates the connection between Mithra and the Iranian god of time, Zurvan. This symbolism is similar to that found in many ancient cultures, including those of Mesoamerica, in which the serpent represents cycles of endless time, perhaps suggested by the fact that the snake periodically sheds and renews its skin. In the story of the Fall in the third chapter of Genesis the destroyer of Man's primeval innocence is also depicted as a serpent. The representation of endless time by a snake swallowing its own tail and bearing the legend 'My end is my beginning' occurs later in rings worn on the finger, such as that possessed by Mary, Queen of Scots.
The Mithraic lion-headed god symbolized Eternity. This representation of Mithra appears to have been derived from Egyptian art, and it has been suggested that it may have been influenced by the bandages of mummified corpses.47 There are indications that in Egypt the god of eternal time was identified with Osiris. In some representations, in the Book of the Dead, the phoenix is depicted as arising from him.48 The phoenix is also sometimes depicted in Mithraic contexts. Since Egyptian theology was influential in Imperial Rome, M. J. Vermaseren has argued that 'neither Iran nor Egypt alone formed the cult of the lion- headed god in Mithraism, but the Hellenistic age in general, of which Egypt was a major component, formed a concrete representation of the abstract idea of eternity.'49
Besides the various religions of eastern origin that flourished in Rome during the second and third centuries AD, there was also a resurgence of philosophical speculation. This was based on a revival of Plato's ideas and so is called Neoplatonism. The greatest figure of this school was Plotinus (c. 205-70). Born in Egypt, he settled in Rome in 244. In his philosophy reality is the spiritual world contemplated by reason, the material world being a mere receptacle for the ideal forms imposed on it by the world- soul. The seventh part of his third Ennead ('On Time and Eternity') can be regarded as meditation on the passage in Plato Timaeus (37-8) where time and the creation of the world are discussed.50 Plotinus believed that the origin of time was to be found in the life of the world-soul. The question as to whether time could conceivably exist if there were no 'soul' (or mind) to apprehend it had been raised, but not answered, by Aristotle, whose definition of time as the 'numbering' of motion and change in relation to before and after appeared to presuppose the existence of a 'soul' that contemplates and measures it. For most philosophers of classical antiquity the world was both animate and divine. Consequently, it was possible for them (but not for Christians, because
-61-
they rejected pantheism) to speak of a world-soul that could measure time, and this was, in fact, the answer given by Plotinus to Aristotle's question. Plotinus also advanced beyond Plato by modifying the latter's famous metaphor of time as the moving image of eternity, since he was more concerned to stress the difference between, rather than the resemblance of, time and eternity. In his opinion, although everything that exists must be like its cause, the fact that one thing is produced by another implies that they are different. Adopting a hierarchical standpoint and preferring to speak in terms of 'life' rather than 'motion', Plotinus regarded time as an intermediate between eternity (or the higher soul that contemplates eternity) and the motion of the universe which reveals time as the 'life' (or creative power) of 'soul'.51 Although not a Christian, Plotinus was in some respects a forerunner of St Augustine, particularly because he thought of time in psychological terms.
Early in the fourth century the struggles that had occurred intermittently between the Roman state and the Christian Church ended with the latter proving the stronger, partly as a result of the military upheavals that had threatened the former in the middle of the previous century. Two events of outstanding importance then helped to settle the fate of each; the capital of the Roman empire was transferred to Byzantium, renamed Constantinople, and Christianity became the state religion. In his earlier years the emperor Constantine (c. 288-335) had been an adherent first of Hercules and then of Sol Invictus. His conversion to Christianity marked a turning-point in the history of both the Church and Europe. The 'Chi-Rho' monogram of Christ began to appear on Constantine's coins in the year 315. At the same time, the Bishop of Rome began to become more important in the west, partly because the Emperor no longer lived in the old capital.
Whereas Augustus had had the poet Virgil to sing his praises, Constantine had the ecclesiastical politician and historian Eusebius as the man who sat immediately to the right of his throne during the sessions of the Council of Nicaea in 325 and exercised a decisive influence on the creed and discipline of the Universal, or Catholic, Church. Constantine was declared to be Emperor by divine right. As a result, he 'gained rather than lost by his willingness to exchange the style and title of a god for that of God's vice-gerent'.52 Later that century the Empire was finally split up into an eastern and a western part. Thereafter, the latter, which was the more direc
tly threatened by invaders, could no longer call upon the stronger military forces of the former. After the western ruler
-62-
Honorius had refused the province of Noricum (southern Austria) to the Visigothic king, Alaric, whose lands were under pressure from the Huns to the east, the latter marched with his troops on Rome in the year 410 and sacked the 'Eternal City'. This unprecedented catastrophe shocked the Empire profoundly. It led the Bishop of Hippo (near Carthage) to write soon afterwards his great book The City of God, the first philosophy of history, in order to rebut the charge that the sack of Rome was punishment for the abandonment by its citizens of their traditional pagan gods.
Like Paul of Tarsus, Augustine of Hippo was a convert to Christianity, having previously been a Manichee and then a Neoplatonist like Plotinus. His Confessions, written not long before the Fall of Rome, was an even more original form of literature than Rousseau's written more than a thousand years later, for it was the first true autobiography. It led William James to call St Augustine, although he lived so long ago, 'the first modern man'. In it he gave an account of his life including his conversion to Christianity and his struggle against rival doctrines.
Even after he had ceased to be a Neoplatonist, St Augustine remained very much under the influence of Plato's philosophical ideas, in particular those concerning time. Like Plato, he believed that the concepts of time and the universe were inseparable, each being essential to the other. In The City of God ( xi. 5, 6; xii. 16) he argued that time can have no existence unless things are actually happening, and in his Confessions ( xi. 14) when replying to the question what was God doing before he made heaven and earth, 'I answer not,' he wrote, 'as one is said to have done merrily (eluding the pressure of the question), "He was preparing hell (saith he) for pryers into mysteries".' In both books we find him passionately concerned with the nature of time and vigorously rejecting cyclical theories of history. In The City of God ( xii. 13) he wrote:
The pagan philosophers have introduced cycles of time in which the same things are in the order of nature being restored and repeated, and have asserted that these whirlings of past and future ages will go on unceasingly. . . . From this mockery they are unable to set free the immortal soul, even after it has attained wisdom, and believe it to be proceeding unceasingly to false blessedness and returning unceasingly to true misery. . . . It is only through the sound doctrine of a rectilinear course that we can escape from I know not what false cycles discovered by false and deceitful sages.
Like Plotinus before him, St Augustine, in Book XI of his Confessions,
-63-
submitted Aristotle's concept of time to searching criticism. He argued that time and motion must be more carefully distinguished from one another than they were by Aristotle. In particular, he objected to correlating time with the motions of the heavenly bodies, since time would still exist if the heavens should cease to move but a potter's wheel continued to rotate. For there would be some temporal duration represented by each revolution of the wheel and a certain number of these revolutions would still take place in the interval of time we call a day, even though the motion of the sun had ceased. Similarly, if a body be sometimes in motion and sometimes at rest, we measure its period of rest as well as its period of motion by time. In place of Aristotle's association of time with motion and his appeal to the uniform daily revolution of the heavens as its basis, St Augustine turned, not as Plotinus had done to the concept of the 'world-soul' but to the human mind for the ultimate source and standard of time. Whereas Aristotle did not enquire into the mental process by which we perceive time, because he believed that our minds must necessarily conform to the time of the physical universe, St Augustine took the mind's activity as the basis of temporal measurement. He considered the problem of measuring the time taken by a voice in making a single sound. Clearly, before the sound begins we cannot measure the time it is going to take, but after it has sounded how can we measure it, since it is then no more? Nor can we measure it in the present if we regard the present as an indivisible instant that is truly momentary and without duration. St Augustine came to the conclusion that we can measure time only if the mind has the power of holding within itself the impression made by things as they pass by even after they are gone. In other words, we do not measure the things themselves but rather something that remains fixed in the memory. It is the impression that passing events leave in the mind that we measure, for only this impression remains after they have passed. The mind has the power of distending itself into the future by means of anticipation and the past by means of memory. In the present there is only the attention of the soul by means of which the future becomes the past, and only when the constant diminishing of the future of the sound has made it entirely past can the mind measure it in terms of some preconceived standard. St Augustine did not explain how the mind could be an accurate chronometer for the timing of external events, but as the pioneer of the study of psychological time he stands in the front rank of those who have contributed to the understanding of our sense of time.
Whereas for most Greeks and Romans, whether they believed in
-64-
cycles or not, the dominant aspects of time were the present and the past, Christianity directed man's attention to the future. In the words of the philosopher Erich Frank, 'With Christianity . . . man acquired a new understanding of time.'53 The Christian view of time directed to the future, as presented by St Augustine, differed from the ideas of time current in Classical antiquity in that it was neither cyclic nor would it continue indefinitely without anything essentially new occurring. John Baillie has made the further point that, in his detailed criticism of cyclical views of time, St Augustine was anxious to defend the doctrine of creation and particularly its corollary that 'through the creative power of God the course of events is characterized by the emergence of genuine novelty.'54 In assessing the importance of St Augustine for the development of the Christian view of time, his writings can be contrasted with the New Testament. Olaf Pedersen has recently drawn attention to St Paul's complete indifference to time and chronology: he never even dated his letters.55 Presumably this total lack of interest was due to his belief, which he shared with other early Christians, that the Second Coming was imminent ( Romans 13: 11-12). Time for Christians began with the Creation and would end with Christ's Second Coming. World history was bounded by these two events. The spread of this belief marks the divide between the mental outlook of Classical antiquity and that of the Middle Ages. Moreover, our modern concept of history, however rationalized and secularized it may be, still rests on the concept of historical time which was inaugurated by Christianity.56
Although it is to Christianity that we owe our modern temporal orientation, it is to the Romans that we are mainly indebted for the form of our calendar and conventions of time recording. Prior to Julius Caesar, however, Roman achievements in chronometry were far from impressive. For example, when Rome's first sundial was brought to the city from Sicily in 263 BC, during the first Punic war, and was erected in the Forum it was inaccurate because it indicated the time appropriate to the place whence it came which was more than four degrees to the south. It was not until 164 BC, almost a century later, that a public sundial was erected that was appropriate to Rome's latitude. A public clepsydra was set up in Rome in 158 BC by Scipio Nasica. The introduction of clocks into Roman law courts, following the practice in Greece, led some unscrupulous lawyers to bribe the clepsydra attendant to regulate the water supply in their favour. From Caesar we learn that water-clocks were used in military camps to time the night watches ( De bello Gallico,
-65-
v. 13). According to St Mark (13: 35), there were four night watches: evening, midnight, cock-crow, morning.
Writing in Imperial times, the poet Juvenal (c. AD 50-130), informs us that in his day wealthy members of the upper class had private water- clocks and special slaves to read them and announce the hours to their masters. Clocks thus came to be regarded as s
tatus symbols. An example of this occurs in Petronius Feast of Trimalchio, Trimalchio having a beautiful clock in his dining room. Nevertheless, the unequal hours and comparative inaccuracy of Roman clocks led Seneca ( Apocolocyntosis, ii. 2-3) to complain that it was impossible to tell the exact hour 'since it is easier for philosophers to agree than for clocks'!
Our present calendar is a modification of the calendar introduced by Julius Caesar on 1 January 45 BC and since named after him (see Appendix 1). Previously, the Romans had tried to bring their civil calendar, which like many ancient calendars was based on the moon, into line with the astronomical year based on the sun by adopting a system involving an additional or intercalary month every second year. Since the length of this month was not determined by any precise rule, the pontiffs were left to exercise their discretion, and they frequently abused this power for political ends. By manipulating the number of days in the intercalary month they could prolong a term of office or hasten an election, with the result that by the time of Julius Caesar the civil year was about three months out of phase with the astronomical year, so that the winter months fell in the autumn and the spring equinox came in the winter. Acting on the advice of the Greek astronomer Sosigenes, Caesar directed that to correct this anomaly the year 46 BC should be extended to 445 days. Although this led to it being called 'the year of confusion', his object was to put an end to confusion. He also abolished the lunar year and the intercalary month and based his calendar entirely on the sun. He fixed the true year at 3651/4 days and introduced the leap year of 366 days every fourth year, the ordinary civil year comprising 365 days. He ordered that January, March, May, July, September and November should each have 31 days, the other months having 30 days, except February which should normally have 29 but in leap years would have 30. Unfortunately, in 7 BC this neat arrangement was interfered with in order to honour Augustus by renaming the month Sextilis after him (he believed that it was his lucky month) and assigning to it the same number of days as the preceding month that had been renamed after his murdered great-uncle by Mark Antony. A day was thus taken away from February
Time in History: Views of Time From Prehistory to the Present Day Page 9