Time in History: Views of Time From Prehistory to the Present Day

by G. J. Whitrow

  It was also through Bede that the AD system of reckoning the years

  -73-

  from the Incarnation of Christ, that had been devised two centuries before by Dionysius Exiguus, was introduced into England. Dionysius' cycle of the year began with 25 March, the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. From the time of Bede the Christian era became established for the dating of charters, but at first only in England. According to R. L. Poole, 'It passed to the Continent by the means of Anglo-Saxon missionaries and scholars. St Boniface took it with him into the Frankish kingdom. But it does not appear to have been regularly employed in the Royal Chancery until the last quarter of the ninth century, from which time it became a fixed element in diplomas.'5 It was not until the pontificate of Pope John XIII, elected in 965, that the Papacy began dating by the year of the Incarnation, but the practice was not uniformly adopted until the time of Pope Leo IX, elected in 1048.

  Chapter 35 of Bede De temporum ratione is the locus classicus of the concept of the 'ages of man', the medieval division of human life into a number of distinct periods best known to us today through the speech on the 'seven ages of man' by Jaques in Shakespeare As You Like It (Act II, scene 7). Most ancient and medieval writers thought of human life not as a continuous development but instead as punctuated by a number of sudden changes from one 'age' to the next. (This idea was extended to prehistory by the social anthropologist A. van Gennep who, in 1909, introduced the term les rites de passage for the rituals originally associated with such changes in the life of the individual.) Bede was the first Englishman to describe the theory of the four 'ages of man'. For the source of this we must go back to the Pythagoreans of the sixth century BC, whose cosmological speculations were based on the 'tetracys', that is, the geometrical symbol composed of ten discrete points symmetrically arranged in the form of an equilateral triangle with sides of four points each. The number four came to be associated with many natural phenomena, for example the four seasons, the four cardinal directions, and the four elements of the Greek theory of matter from Empedocles to Aristotle.

  For some 2,000 years great significance continued to be attributed to the number four. For example, long after Bede, in his Boke of Nurture John Russell, who had been Marshal of the household of the great patron of learning, the youngest son of Henry IV, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester ( 1391- 1447), described how the four courses of an elaborate fish-dinner that he had prepared for his master and guests was accompanied by appropriate 'subtleties', or ornamental devices. During the first course Duke Humphrey's guests were to contemplate the

  -74-

  representation of a 'galaunt yonge man' standing on a cloud (signifying the element 'air') at the beginning of spring (associated with the sanguine humour). During the next course they were faced by the representation of a 'man of warre' standing in fire (associated with summer and the choleric humour); and while consuming the third course they were confronted by the form of a man with a 'sikelle in his hande' standing in a river (signifying water and the phlegmatic humour associated with autumn and harvest-time). The fourth and final course, which came with spices and wine, ushered in a representation of winter in the form of a man 'with his lokkys grey, febille and old' sitting on a cold hard stone (signifying the element 'earth and the melancholy humour). 'Thus,' as J. A. Burrow remarks, as Duke Humphrey's guests worked their way through this very unpenitential fish banquet, they were invited to see in it the four courses of their own life's feast.'6

  Although Bede discusses the theory of the 'four ages and even refers to the alternative concept of the 'six ages' he makes no mention of the ,seven ages' later described by Shakespeare. He could not mention it because it was not known in the Latin West before the revival of learning in the 'renaissance of the twelfth century' (a useful term due to the American medievalist Charles Homer Haskins, who introduced it in 1927). The idea of the 'seven ages' unlike that of the four, was astrological in origin. It goes back to the astronomer Ptolemy of Alexandria (fl. c. AD 150), seven being the number of the 'planets', including the sun and moon. This idea is fully described in Ptolemy Tetrabiblos ( iv. 10). (A translation into English, by F. E. Robbins, was published in 1940. An excerpt appears on pp. 197-8 of the Appendix to the book by Burrow cited above.)

  Although through the efforts of Charlemagne, who was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope in the year 800, the centre of European culture began to move northwards from the Mediterranean, the Viking raids of the ninth and tenth centuries delayed the full effects of this until about the year 1000. England particularly suffered from these raids, so that by the time of the twelfth-century renaissance it was, in the words of R. W. Southern, 'a colony of the French intellectual empire, important in its way and quite productive, but still subordinate'.7 The main creative activity of the English monastic houses was in historiography. With the notable exception of Bede and the authors of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, earlier generations had not, on the whole, been greatly interested in historical records, but the Conquest brought about a great transformation. The Normans insisted on the production of titles

  -75-

  to estates and threatened to confiscate those for which none were forth- coming. In these conditions, the Conquest convinced the English monasteries that corporate survival depended on the discovery and preservation of the past. Consequently, as Southern has argued, 'history was not simply an adornment: it was a necessity'.8

  One of the principal features of the renaissance of the twelfth century was a great increase in historiography, stimulated not only by the Norman conquest of England but also by the crusades and the rise of the north Italian communes, or city-states. Moreover, men such as the great ecclesiastical architect Abbot Suger of St Denis (c. 1081-1151), who devoted his later years to composing a laudatory life of the French monarch Louis VI ( 1081-1137), effectively a second founder of the Capetian dynasty, wrote history with the object of producing favourable propaganda rather than documentary facts. Suger's historical writings led the monks of his abbey to develop a taste for history and hence to compile a series of chronicles. In the same century universal history also flourished, mainly with the object of determining the end of the world, after the year 1000 had passed without any sign of its impending occurrence. This type of history was, of course, theologically rather than politically orientated. The influence of the twelfth-century apocalyptic historians was destined, however, to be soon overshadowed by that of Joachim of Fiore (see pp. 81-2).

  Among the technical arts cultivated in some continental schools that began to affect England soon after the Norman Conquest were those of measurement and calculation. Haskins has drawn attention to interesting evidence for this in an autobiographical fragment written by a Benedictine prior, Walcher of Malvern, whose tomb survives there bearing the date 1125. In it he refers to the lunar eclipse of 30 October 1091 that he happened to observe in Italy. On returning to England, he discovered that several hours appeared to have separated the time of the eclipse in Italy and in England. Puzzled by this, he was careful later to record the time as precisely as he could when, unexpectedly, on 18 October of the following year the moon underwent another eclipse:

  I at once seized my astrolabe and made a careful note of the time of full eclipse, which was a little more than three-quarters of an hour after the eleventh hour of the night. If this time is converted into equinoctial time, it will be found to be shortly before 12.45. Hence, according to this rule which I have explained earlier, the lunar cycle began on 3 October at 19.30 hours.9

  -76-

  As Southern has remarked, this passage, only part of which I have quoted, illustrates the difficulties encountered in those days of telling the time and Walcher's anxiety for precision in seeking to establish the exact correlation between the phases of the moon and the solar calendar.

  To men of the Middle Ages astronomy was of particular interest because it seemed to offer the best means of understanding, and possibly controlling, terrestrial events. An essential tool for en
abling astronomers to advance beyond the stage reached by Bede was the astrolabe. This instrument had been introduced in the West in the eleventh century from the world of Islam, which in those days enjoyed a higher degree of civilization and of scientific and technological expertise than the West. For anyone in northern Europe to attain a proper understanding of Islamic science it was necessary to go abroad. Among the first to do so for this purpose was Adelard of Bath (fl. 1116-42). He first went to Paris, but not finding what he wanted there, he moved on to Salerno in southern Italy and then to Sicily, where he learned Arabic. Later he probably visited Spain. His outstanding role in the development of science in the Latin West was due to his translations from the Arabic, which were of a crucial and seminal nature.

  The Islamic world

  The origin of Islamic interest in science can be traced back to the closure by Justinian of the Neoplatonic Academy at Athens in 529. Scholars from there were invited to Iran, and they brought much Greek learning with them. Interest in the subject having thus been aroused among learned men in western Asia, a scientific institute was eventually set up in Baghdad after the Muslim conquest of much of that region. It attained its highest reputation during the caliphate of al-Ma'mun ( 813-33), son of Harun-al-Rashid of Arabian Nights fame, and himself an astronomer. By the end of the ninth century many Hellenistic scientific and technological works had been translated into Arabic, including Ptolemy great astronomical book Syntaxis, which is usually known today by its Arabic title The Almagest. As a result of all this activity, Baghdad was the true successor of Alexandria, the former intellectual capital of the Hellenistic world. Knowledge of Greek science and technology, combined with Iranian and Indian traditions and enhanced by further scientific studies and inventions, spread from there to other parts of the Islamic world, including Sicily and southern Italy and especially Moorish Spain, where by the twelfth century the main centres of learning were in Cordoba and Toledo.

  -77-

  Muslims in all parts of the Islamic world required mathematically educated persons who would be able to determine the astronomically defined times of prayer and the direction of Mecca. It is, therefore, not surprising that many portable instruments for the determination of time were required, including the chief instrument used by both Arabic and Latin astronomers, the astrolabe. This instrument was known to Ptolemy in the second century AD, and the underlying mathematical theory of stereographic projection can be traced back at least to Ptolemy's great predecessor Hipparchus ( second century BC).

  The form of astrolabe used in medieval Europe, however, was derived from the Muslim type found in Spain. A good English account of it was given by the poet Chaucer in the second half of the fourteenth century. It consisted of a circular metal plate (usually brass) graduated in degrees around its rim. It was marked with a datum line (or diameter) and hinged to its centre was a rotating line (or pointer). Portable models could be hung from a ring on the rim so that the datum line was horizontal. By directing the pointer at a particular star, its altitude could be read off against the scale on the rim to an accuracy of about one degree. For any given latitude the Pole star has effectively a constant altitude and the other stars appear to revolve around it owing to the Earth's diurnal rotation. On the front of the astrolabe there was a thin plate (the tympan) on which was engraved a stereographic projection of the lines of altitude and azimuth (angular distance along the horizon) as they would be for an observer at a given latitude. An open-work star map in stereographic projection (known as the rete) was in front of the tympan, and could be rotated by hand over the lines of altitude and azimuth.

  An early form of analogue computer, the astrolabe was primarily designed to solve problems of spherical trigonometry to shorten astronomical calculations.10 From the scales engraved on it, it was possible to determine the positions of the so-called 'fixed stars' in relation to the horizon and of the sun, moon, and planets in relation to the stars. Designed for the latitude of a particular place, its most important use was to determine the precise time of day or night from an observation of the altitude of the sun or one of the stars mapped on the rete, but of course by modern standards the result was not very accurate. Moreover, although the astrolabe enabled long calculations to be avoided, the computing of planetary positions, for example, for casting a horoscope, still involved a considerable amount of work.

  As regards other time-measuring instruments, extensive remains of two monumental Islamic water-clocks still survive at Fez in Morocco.11

  -78-

  A book in Arabic On the Construction of Water-clocks, believed to be partly based on the translation of a Hellenistic treatise in Greek, preserves the idea of the invention of the basic machinery of a water-clock by Archimedes, together with later ingenious additions to the mechanism made by either Byzantine or Islamic craftsmen. It was probably composed after 1150. It has recently been edited and translated into English by D. R. Hill, who points out that 'horologically, it provides an important link between the water-clocks of the Hellenistic world and those of Islam'.12 Detailed discussion of some other Islamic clocks will be found in a book written in Baghdad about 850 and also translated by D. R. Hill.13

  One special case in which the influence of Islam made an important cultural contribution to the development of temporal concepts in Europe concerns music. Early medieval church music was all plain chant, in which the notes had fluid time values. Mensural music, in which the durations of the notes had an exact ratio among themselves, seems to have been an Islamic invention. It was introduced into Europe about the twelfth century. It was at this time too that there appeared in Europe the system of notation in which the exact time-value of a note is indicated by a lozenge on a pole.

  As regards the theoretical and philosophical analysis of time, the most important and original contribution of medieval Islamic thinkers was their theory of discontinuous, or atomistic, time.14 The most famous exponent of this concept, but not its originator, was the twelfth-century philosopher Moses Maimonides, who wrote in Arabic although he was a believing Jew. In the most celebrated of his works. The Guide for the Perplexed, he said: 'Time is composed of time-atoms, i.e. of many parts, which on account of their short duration cannot be divided. . . . An hour is, e.g. divided into sixty minutes, the second into sixty parts and so on; at last after ten or more successive divisions by sixty, time-elements are obtained which are not subjected to division, and in fact are indivisible.'15 This atomistic view of time was associated with a drastically contingent and acausal concept of the world, its existence at one instant not implying its existence at any subsequent instant.

  D. B. MacDonald has speculated on the difficult question of the origin of this view in Islam and has suggested that it arose from a Muslim heresy 'in that dark but intense period of theological and intellectual development which stretched from the death of Muhammad for at least two and a half centuries'.16 The atomistic theory of Epicurus, the methods of the Greek sceptics, and Zeno's paradoxes concerning time

  -79-

  and space may all have influenced the heretics concerned, but MacDonald could find no trace of any Greek theory combining material and temporal atomism and sought instead to attribute the occurrence of the latter in Islamic thought to Indian influence.

  The Islamic calendar is one of the few remaining purely lunar calendars, the year being just over ten days shorter than the tropical year, or year of the seasons. The Islamic era began on 16 July 622, the first day of Muhammad's flight to Medina. The circumstances in which this was adopted as an epoch, instead of the time when the Prophet was either born or entrusted with his divine mission or died, are explained by al-Biruni ( AD 973-c. 1050) in his great work The Chronology of Ancient Nations.17 The fundamental instant in Islamic life occurs with the new moon, which must be watched for and established by two 'witnesses of the instant'.18 The 'perfect instant', however, is the Hour of the Last Judgement, for the 'witness' of this instant is the divine Judge himself.

  The periodization of history
and millenarianism

  This type of eschatological view of time was, of course, not confined to Islam, for we find it also in Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and early and medieval Christianity. In the Christian case, it led to the periodization of history, a chronological method that we still use, although nowadays we approach history from a purely secular point of view. Medieval historians followed the scheme devised by St Augustine for dividing world history into six ages corresponding to the six days of Creation described at the beginning of Genesis. Living in the troubled times of the late fourth and early fifth centuries, St Augustine regarded the Christian era as the age of senility and decay that would lead to the seventh age when time would end, although he was careful not to forecast a definite date for this. The most important change in the Christian outlook on history between the Apostolic age and that of St Augustine was the gradual realization that the end of the world was not at hand. He laid particular emphasis on those passages in the New Testament (e.g. Mark 13: 32) that emphasize our total ignorance of when the Second Coming will occur. Bede too believed that the time of Doomsday is concealed from mankind.

  As Beryl Smalley has said, 'The concept of the six ages saddled medieval historiographers with a gloomy picture of their times.'19 But, even though it discouraged optimism and ruled out the possibility of progress, it did not weigh too heavily on medieval historians, particularly because the year 1000, which had been awaited by many with a mixture of hope and trepidation, had passed without any sign of the