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

by G. J. Whitrow

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  world coming to an end. Many prophets in the tenth century believed that the world would come to an end in the year 1000, but according to A. J. Gurevich the legends concerning mass psychoses in Europe as the year 1000 approached originated at the end of the fifteenth century when people really were afraid that the end of the world was imminent. 20

  Millenarian belief arose from combining the idea expressed in Psalm 89: 4 that 'A day with the Lord is as a thousand years' with the interpretation of the Sabbath, or seventh day, as a symbol of heavenly rest in accordance with Hebrews 4: 4-9. The most influential exponent of millenarian beliefs in the Middle Ages was Joachim of Fiore ( 1145- 1202). He was a Cistercian monk who became Abbot of Curazzo in Calabria, in southern Italy. This was a part of the world where Greek culture and the Roman Church met and where there was a strong Saracen influence. Consequently, it was a region subject to many cross- currents of thought and belief. Joachim eventually broke away from the Cistercians and retired to a lonely spot in Calabria where disciples gathered around him and he was given papal permission to found his own congregation. Joachim's idea of a completely unworldly religious order nearly found expression in the confraternity that began to form around the followers of St Francis of Assisi shortly after Joachim's death, but the main body of Franciscans soon made concessions to the demands of everyday life.21 Eventually, in 1570, Joachim's community was absorbed by the Cistercian order.

  Joachim called his monastery San Giovanni in Fiore in expectancy of the new life that must come to flower.22 He was a keen student of the scriptures, particularly the Book of Revelations, and while meditating in his Calabrian retreat on the mystery of the Trinity and how it related to the time-process he had moments of intense spiritual illumination that led him to formulate a new millenarian philosophy of history. He laid great emphasis on the unity of the Trinity, arguing that root, stem, and bark together form one tree. Joachim claimed that there are, however, three distinct ages or states: that of God and the Old Testament, which was the age of fear and servitude; that of Christ and the New Testament, which is the age of faith and submission; and the Third Age of the Everlasting Gospel, or Age of the Holy Spirit, that will supersede the Old and New Testaments and be the age of love, joy, and freedom. His fervently expressed hope in the coming of the Age of the Holy Spirit may have had its origin in the Jewish concept of the Messianic Age, for like the latter it was regarded by him as lying essentially within history and not beyond it, being indeed the climax of history. This belief was totally

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  irreconcilable with the Augustinian view that, in so far as it is possible for the Kingdom of Heaven to occur here on earth, it has already been realized in the Church.23 Joachim's concept of history was far more dynamic than St Augustine's. As an authority on the influence of Joachimism has remarked:

  'What characterizes this Christian revolutionary tradition from Joachim of Fiore to John Huss, from Thomas Münzer to the theologies of hope and political theologies of our own day, is that the Kingdom of God is not conceived as another world in space and time, but as a different world, a changed world, a world changed by our own efforts. . . . This means that human history is where all the issues are settled.'24

  Joachim had a profound influence on later prophecies down to the end of the seventeenth century. It is difficult for us now to understand how it was that so many serious thinkers in those days were prophetically- minded. Even Isaac Newton ( 1642- 1727), although not directly influenced by Joachim, devoted much of his time to the correlation of prophecy, history, and the end of the world.25Granted his initial assumptions, however, he was in fact just as scientific in his calculations in that field as in his famous contributions to mathematical physics and astronomy.

  The measurement of time

  In his well-known book Feudal Society, the historian Marc Bloch has laid particular emphasis on the fact that in the Middle Ages men found it difficult to appreciate the significance of time because they were so ill- equipped to measure it. For not only were water-clocks rare and costly, but in countries such as England, northern France, the Netherlands, and Germany sundials were inadequate because skies were so often cloudy. According to Asser Life of King Alfred, that intellectual monarch had candles of equal length lit successively to mark the passing of the hours; but, as Bloch remarks, 'such concern for uniformity in the division of the day was exceptional in that age.'26 To illustrate the point, he describes an incident recorded in a chronicle of Hainault concerning a judicial duel that was to take place at dawn. Only one contestant appeared and at the end of the prescribed waiting period, the hour of nine he asked for the non-appearance of his adversary to be legally recorded. The judges had to decide whether the time limit had been reached. They deliberated, looked at the sun and then questioned the

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  clerics, since the practice of the liturgy and the regular tolling of church bells had accustomed them to a more precise knowledge of the rhythm of the hours than the judges themselves possessed. As Bloch has commented, 'To us accustomed to live with our eyes constantly turning to the clock, how remote from our civilization seems this society in which a court of law could not ascertain the time of day without discussion and inquiry!'27

  One of the peculiarities revealed in many surviving documents from the Middle Ages is the lack of precision with which the times of events and measurements of duration were recorded. John Nef, in his Wiles Lectures of 1956, concluded that, if we seek the origins of our modern quantitative-mindedness, we must concentrate on the last decades of the sixteenth century.28 Earlier we find little trace of it generally, and so we ought not to be surprised to find it missing from the ordinary person's consciousness of time in those days. In his book Time in French Life and Thought Richard Glasser has drawn attention to the fact that nowhere in the Chanson de Roland do we find any indication of time. The epic poet 'was aware neither of the falling of leaves in autumn nor of the passing away of generations. These were phenomena which in no way attracted his attention. The essential quality of the world was its transitoriness vis-à-vis God, not the visible change which went on unceasingly in the world.'29 Until the fourteenth century only the Church was interested in temporal measurement and division. Even the concept of the hour was not used as a unit of duration before the time of Middle French. In the popular tongue it was used only to indicate a point in time.30

  In view of the slowness with which changes of mental outlook came about in those days, it is not surprising that even after the introduction of the mechanical clock in the fourteenth century most people, including many of the more sophisticated, were far less concerned in their daily life with the passage of time than we are. A striking example is provided by a famous maker of astronomical instruments, Jean Fusoris, who was arrested on suspicion of treason in 1415, during the invasion of France by Henry V. Interrogated twice in a single year, on the first occasion he claimed to be 'fifty or thereabouts' and on the second 'sixty or thereabouts'!31

  In England, parish registers providing dates of birth were instituted by law in 1538. Previously when someone's age had to be formally determined it had to be done in the presence of a sheriff of the county and a 'jury' composed of local people who knew the person concerned. This procedure was followed when a minor inheriting property claimed to

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  have become of age, or when it was thought necessary to determine legally that someone had attained the age when he or she was allowed to marry. Of course, the indifference to time generally attributed to medieval people was not absolute. Already by the year 1200 there were numerous signs of economic pressure on time, and even two centuries earlier it appears that peasants and artisans near Fleury tended to ignore feast-days through a need to work in their fields.32

  Another indication that our medieval forebears had very different standards from ours for recording the lapse of time is revealed by the way in which they dated their letters. As late as the fifteenth century it is doubtful whether peo
ple in general knew the current year of the Christian era, since that depended on an ecclesiastical computation and was not used much in everyday life. They seldom dated their letters and when they did it was by the year of the king's reign. Even when chroniclers of the period gave the year of our Lord it was often wrongly stated. This is not surprising since different numbers were assigned to the year in different places. R. L. Poole has given the following hypothetical example to illustrate this:

  If we suppose a traveller to set out from Venice on March 1, 1245, the first day of the Venetian year, he would find himself in 1244 when he reached Florence; and if after a short stay he went on to Pisa, the year 1246 would already have begun there. Continuing his journey westward he would find himself again in 1245 when he entered Provence and on arriving in France before Easter (April 16) he would be once more in 1244.33

  This seems a bewildering tangle of dates, but as a rule the traveller would take note only of the month and the day. If, however, he did consider the year it would be that of the place where he usually lived. In practice, only writers of documents and chronicles were concerned with the number of the year.

  Months and days were, of course, more likely to be correctly stated, and letters were frequently dated in this respect but much more use was made of festivals and saints' days. In his Introduction to the Paston Letters J. Gairdner pointed out that letters were often dated as being written on a particular day of the week, say Monday or Wednesday, before or after such a celebration. For example, Agnes Paston even dated a particular letter (No. 25) during the week by reference to the Collect of the previous Sunday: 'Written at Paston in haste, the Wednesday next after Deus qui errantibus.'34 The modern practice of numbering the days of the month consecutively from the first to the last came to the West from

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  Syria and Egypt in the second half of the sixth century. Pope Gregory VII introduced it into his chancery, but his successors reverted to the old Roman style. The revival of learning under Charlemagne (c. 800) was in the Latin tradition, and so there was an official reversion to the Roman style in the Imperial chancery too which persisted for centuries.

  A far more modern attitude to time and dates was adopted in the previous century by the famous Italian poet and reviver of classical literature Petrarch ( 1304-74). Time was the theme that fired his heart as a young student and affected him for the rest of his life. Because he kept a detailed record of the temporal milestones in his life we have more precise information about him than of anyone who lived before him. In all his writings, poetry as well as prose, he maintained what has been described as 'an attention nothing less than astounding to exactitude in date'.35 Moreover, unlike most medieval letter writers--and, for that matter, even unlike most of us today when we dash off our epistles without much thought about the time--Petrarch 'spells out the dates (including the hour) with weight and deliberation, as if to stress the importance of taking one's bearings in time'.36 For example, in a letter written in 1364 he was careful to give the precise hour of arrival of the boat that brought news of the Venetian victory against Crete. 'It was, I believe, the sixth hour of June 4, this year 1364.' Although time seems always to have been important for Petrarch, he tended to value it even more as he got older because he realized that, as with other things, it becomes more precious as it becomes less plentiful. In his responsiveness to temporal processes he differed from many of his contemporaries and we can look upon him as the forerunner in literature of those, like Spenser and Shakespeare in the late sixteenth century, who were greatly concerned with the irreversible effects of time on the human mind and spirit. Although western-European society in the Middle Ages developed no general concept of progress, many important innovations were made. Indeed, in technology western Europe advanced far beyond the Roman empire. The Romans were in some respects good engineers, as is evident from their sophisticated heating systems involving plumbed hot water and their networks of roads, but in other ways they were often surprisingly primitive. Apart from those transmitted from China, medieval inventions included, for example, spectacles for reading, the spinning wheel, stronger iron tools than had been previously available, the heavy plough, and the use of coal as a fuel. Moreover, in the building of the great Gothic cathedrals many new devices were introduced, including flying buttresses. Some of the most important innovations in

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  the Middle Ages were connected with the use of the horse as a source of motive power. A more efficient harness than the crude yoke, which had been so well suited for draught-oxen, was introduced about the ninth century. Late that century Alfred the Great noted, with apparent surprise, that horses were used for ploughing in Norway.37 This would have been impossible with the yoke-harness, because as soon as the horse begins to pull with it the neck-strap presses on the animal's windpipe and thus tends not only to restrict the flow of blood to its head, but also to suffocate it!

  Another important development was the iron horseshoe that was nailed on to the hoof. Previously, the shoe had only been tied on and this greatly impeded the animal's progress. The first indisputable evidence of the use of nailed horseshoes goes back to the ninth century. The development and the elaboration of metal armour for protection in warfare and jousting gave considerable impetus to the craft of the blacksmith. This was destined to be of particular importance to the measurement of time, because the blacksmith was the forerunner of those who constructed the first mechanical clock. It is surely significant that one of the greatest of these, Richard of Wallingford, Abbot of St Albans in the early fourteenth century (see ch. 7), was the son of a blacksmith.

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  6. Time in the Far East and Mesoamerica

  India

  It has already been suggested (ch. 5), that the Islamic atomistic theory of time may have been the result of Indian influence. In discussing this possibility, MacDonald has drawn attention to an article on 'Atomic Theory (Indian)' by Hermann Jacobi.1 In it Jacobi referred to the theory of the momentariness of all things formulated by the Sautrânkitas, a Buddhist sect which originated in the second or first century BC. According to that theory everything exists for only an instant and is then replaced by a facsimile of itself, so that it is but a series of momentary existences like the successive frames in a cine-camera film. The concept of entities that appear for only an instant and then disappear was used by Buddhists to prove that all is merely appearance and that absolute reality does not fall within the domain of the intellect. But how and why this atomistic temporal concept, which Buddhism used for its own purposes, was adapted to the very different objects of Islam remains an open question.

  In Classical antiquity there were connections between Europe and India even before the conquests of Alexander had extended as far as the north-western part of the Indian subcontinent. Already in the sixth century BC, at the time when Buddha and Mahavira lived, that part of India was ruled by the Achaemenids of Iran, and Iranian influences have been important in India ever since. As in the Zurvanite system, philosophical speculations concerning time formed the essential part of a particular Indian philosophy known as the Kalavada that was later absorbed by other systems. The term kala was originally employed by the Hindus in the Rig-Veda to denote the 'right moment' in connection with sacrificial ritual. Later it came to denote 'time' generally, and it was usually employed in that sense in Sanskrit writings. In the Vedic period the abstract idea of time was regarded as the fundamental principle of the universe, but whether it was made into a deity is uncertain. The word

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  kala has been associated, however, with Kali, 'the Black One', one of the forms of the consort of the god Siva. Time was regarded as black and connected with Siva, god of destruction, because it is hard and pitiless.

  Anindita Balslev has recently drawn attention to the subtlety of many of the Hindu philosophical arguments, for example that concerning the perceptibility of time which took place in the eleventh century. On the one hand, the Bhatta-Mimamsaka school argued that time is pe
rceptible, whereas their Nyaya-Vaiseka opponents claimed that it is only an inferred concept because it lacks sensible qualities, such as colour, form, etc. The former school maintained that sensible qualities are not the sole criteria of perceptibility and that time is perceived always as a qualification of sensible objects. In other words, events are perceived as quick, slow, etc., and these properties involve a direct reference to time. Their opponents retorted that time per se cannot be perceived and that inference is the only means of our knowing time as an ontological reality.2 Other subtle philosophical discussions concerned the contrast between the objective reality of the instant and the ideal nature of duration, because the latter is a mental construct, whereas the former is experienced (the opposite of what we think in the West today).

  Indians wrote no historical books with numerical dates and regarded personal life as one of a succession of lives of the same individual repeated infinitely often in endless time. This idea of metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls, has only occasionally appeared in the West, in particular in the school of Pythagoras, which may have been subject to Eastern influences, since he was roughly contemporaneous with Buddha--and also with Zarathustra. Although a minor error in the recitation of the Vedas was looked upon with strong disapproval, passing events were regarded by the Hindus as devoid of real significance and so it is not surprising that no importance was attached to providing them with accurate dates. The Hindus were much more interested in devising elaborate cosmic cycles of vast and terrifying proportions. With their love of large numbers, they assigned to a single cycle 12,000 divine years, each of 360 solar years, totalling 4,320,000 years, and 1,000 of such cosmic cycles constituted one kalpa. This was equal to but one day in the life of Brahma.3