-131-
Attitudes to time and history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
In the sixteenth century people tended to be obsessed with the destructive aspect of time. The typical Renaissance image of time was as the destroyer equipped with hour-glass, scythe, or sickle. This attitude to time can be seen in Shakespeare, notably in his sonnets and in The Rape of Lucrece, especially stanza 133:
Mis-shapen Time, copesmate of ugly Night,
Swift subtle post, carrier of grisly care,
Eater of youth, false slave to false delight,
Base watch of woes, sin's pack-horse, virtue's snare,
Thou nursest all and murder'st all that are:
O, hear me then, injurious, shifting Time!
Be guilty of my death, since of my crime.
In Shakespeare's sonnets time is treated with what has been described as a 'polyphonic grandeur unmatched in English literature'. In some ways his attitude to time appears to have been very different from ours. For example, whereas we like to think of his plays as having been written for all time, it is most unlikely that that is how he thought of them himself. In his day the average run of a play was not more than five performances, few plays were ever revived and hardly any were printed. It is probable that Shakespeare wrote his plays not for the sake of posterity, but to earn enough money for him to be able to retire in comfort to his native Stratford-upon-Avon. A distinguished Tudor historian has pointed out that when Shakespeare lived, 'No playwright in his senses could have supposed himself to be writing for all time. The Elizabethans lived in the present.'17 To them ars longa, vita brevis would have been meaningless.
While Shakespeare's concern with time was only at the personal level, his contemporary Edmund Spenser was obsessed with time at all levels, including the astronomical.18 Although the Church Fathers had converted history from an endless sequence of cycles to a vision of the whole universe moving from Creation to Redemption, the figure of the circle still dominated human thought in astronomy in the sixteenth century. This had a great influence on Spenser who, despite his profound concern with time, was essentially a backward-looking figure. As a recent authority on the role of time in his poetry has remarked, Spenser believed that 'our mortality and the insufficiency of all created things is, by grace, only one aspect of a
-132-
total situation of which cyclical return is the other face, until such time as time shall cease'.19
Another contemporary of Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, was also greatly concerned with the depredations of time. He believed that the objective order of the universe was revealed in history and that it provided a vision of the meaning and purpose of human life. His massive History of the World, composed between 1608 and 1614 during his imprisonment in the Tower of London, was dedicated to James I, but instead of being pleased that learned but tetchy monarch complained that the book was 'too sawcie in censuring princes'! It was dominated by Raleigh's preoccupation with time, especially the poignant contrast between the temporal scale of his own life and the vast enterprise he had undertaken. Although he left his book incomplete after covering the period from the Fall of Adam to the Fall of Carthage, it runs to over 2,700 pages in the reprint of 1829. Well aware of the cosmic significance of time, he was convinced that all along the world was tending to get worse and worse. In holding this belief he was in general accord with the prevailing opinion of thinkers and writers of the Renaissance and Reformation eras, who were almost entirely backward-looking. Overwhelmed by a sense of the significance of the 'Cosmic Fall', they tended to believe in the existence of a primeval 'Golden Age', followed by irreversible decline. One of the starkest expressions of this view was Martin Luther's in his commentary of 1545 on the Book of Genesis: 'The world degenerates and grows worse every day. . . . The calamities inflicted on Adam . . . were light in comparison with those inflicted on us.' Luther also complained that after the Flood the trees and fruits of the earth 'are but miserable remnants . . . of those former riches which the earth produced when first created'.20
The backward-looking tendency in the sixteenth century is indicated by the word Rinascita ('Renaissance'), invented by Vasari and others in Italy, for it signified the rebirth of something old and not the introduction of something new. Later that century rulers such as Philip II of Spain, Elizabeth I of England, and Henry IV of France thought of themselves as upholders and maintainers and never as founders and innovators. Indeed, as a biographer of the French monarch has pointed out, 'Such an attitude caused Henry to describe himself to the Assembly of Notables as "Liberator and Restorer of the French State".'21 These rulers regarded their reforms as a return to some pristine model of the past.
Similarly, Vieta ( François Viète), the greatest mathematician of the
-133-
sixteenth century, regarded innovation as renovation. Moreover, even the numerous technological advances in western Europe in the Middle Ages led to no general concept of technological progress.
During the Renaissance men became more and more aware that almost everything changes with time and so has a history. However, whereas in the Middle Ages the linear interpretation of history had been stressed because of its significance for Christian doctrine, in the Renaissance there was a marked revival of the cyclical view, because there was more concentration on secular history. Greater attention was paid to the literature that had survived from classical antiquity and to the cyclical point of view that characterized much of it. For example, Giorgio Vasari (1511-64) in his Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects favoured this idea in the history of art, believing--not surprisingly--that after Michelangelo (1475-1564) art was more likely to decline than to progress still further. More surprisingly, Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the prophet of scientific advance, in one of the last essays that he wrote, 'Of Vicissitude of Things', adhered to a cyclical view of history in general:
In the Youth of a State, Armes doe flourish: in the Middle Age of a State, Learning: And in them both together for a time: In the Declining Age of a State, Mechanical Arts and Merchandise. Learning hath his Infancy, when it is but beginning, and almost Childish: Then his Youth, when it is Luxuriant and Iuventile: Then his Strength of yeares, when it is Solide and Reduced: and lastly his Old Age, when it waxeth Dry and Exhaust. But it is not good, to looke too long, upon these turning Wheeles of Vicissitude, lest we become Giddy.
In the course of the seventeenth century the pessimistic and backward- looking attitudes to time that had characterized the previous century were gradually replaced by optimistic and forward-looking views. An optimistic view of the future was expressed by Francis Bacon in an early unpublished essay of 1603. It bore the significant title Temporis partus masculus (The masculine birth of time).
Mary Tiles in a recent paper with the title 'Mathesis and the Masculine Birth of Time' has discussed Bacon's ideas on scientific method and his peculiar terminology.22 Something is a 'birth of time' if it arises from cumulative corporate experience. Truth was regarded by Bacon as the 'feminine birth of time', whereas by the 'masculine birth of time' he meant active intervention in the world amounting to an exercise of power over nature. Bacon distinguished knowledge derived from ancient
-134-
texts from that actively sought by modern natural philosophers. The term 'mathesis' refers to the ordering of knowledge (classification, etc.), particularly by means of mathematics. Bacon wrote: 'Science is to be sought from the light of nature, not from the darkness of antiquity. It matters not what has been done; our business is to see what can be done.'
The scornful rejection by Bacon of the doctrine that the ancients had encompassed all knowledge was echoed by, among others, John Wilkins who in The Discovery of a New World, published in 1638, attempted to show that the moon is inhabited. In it he wrote: 'There are yet many secret Truths which the ancients have passed over, that are yet left to make some of our Age famous for their Discovery.' Two years later, in A Discourse concerning a New Planet, in which
he advocated the Copernican theory, he wrote even more significantly:
Antiquity does consist in the Old Age of the World, not in the youth of it. In such learning as may be increased by fresh Experiments and new Discoveries: 'tis we are the Fathers, and of more Antiquity than former Ages; because we have the advantage of more Time than they had, and Truth (we say) is the Daughter of Time.
This slogan (Veritas filia temporis) was much used in the sixteenth century and has a fascinating history, as has been shown by Fritz Saxl in his erudite chapter bearing this title in the Ernst Cassirer Festschrift.23 In an important footnote (p. 200) he mentions that his 'learned friend' Dr Klibansky had informed him that it can be traced back to ancient Greece where two different traditions prevailed: 'Time reveals either guilt and its punishment, as in Aeschylus' tragedies, or it reveals true valour and the honour due to it, as in Pindar's aristocratic poetry. Sophocles uses it to express his humble faith in the justice of divinity.'
The change from a backward to a forward temporal orientation was also advocated, in 1627, by a young Anglican divine, George Hake- will, in a refutation of Bishop Goodman Fall of Man ( 1616), an unremittingly gloomy demonstration that the world was approaching extinction. The question of the 'last days' aroused the intellectual interests not only of chronologists but also of mathematicians. Baron Napier of Merchiston, who published his famous Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptis in 1614, valued his invention of logarithms because it helped to speed up his calculations of the number of the Beast in the Book of Revelations, whom he wished to identify with the Roman Pope! Hakewill's book of over 600 pages bore a lengthy title that began: AnApologie of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World or an Examination and Censure of the Common Errour Touching Nature's Perpetuall and Universall Decay
-135-
Apologie of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World or an Examination and Censure of the Common Errour Touching Nature's Perpetuall and Universall Decay . . . In this prolix publication Hakewill, who was influenced by Bacon, dismissed the traditional lamentations about decay as merely a manifestation of 'the morosity and crooked disposition of old men, always complaining of the hardness of the present times, together with an excessive admiration of Antiquity'.24 At first his views met with considerable opposition, but as the century progressed they came to be widely accepted. For example, we find Milton declaring in one of his Latin essays that 'Natura non pater senium' ('nature does not suffer from old age').
The world was not necessarily getting worse; still less did it show signs of ending, despite the prophets of the 'Fifth Monarchy', who had announced that the Millenium would arrive in 1666. Why believe Nostradamus, who a century earlier, had assigned the end of the world to 31 July 1999? An important contributory factor to the development of a sense of time associated with a forward-looking perspective of political action was provided by the 'Antichrist' myth which became wide- spread in England in the mid-seventeenth century during the religious and political upheavals of the civil war and its aftermath. This myth looked forward to the defeat of Antichrist, variously identified with the Pope, the bishops, the whole hierarchy of the Church of England, the King, and the royalists. Gradually, however, as Doomsday was repeatedly postponed, the Golden Age was transferred from the past to the future and millenarian prophecies were replaced by Utopian programmes. As Carl Becker has neatly summarized it, in the eighteenth century 'The philosophers called in Posterity to exorcise the double illusion of the Christian paradise and the golden age of antiquity.'25
A forward-looking perspective also greatly influenced those who rejected scholastic philosophy and replaced it by the experimental philosophy advocated by Francis Bacon. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century gave rise to what has been called 'the quarrel of ancients and moderns'. The essential point at issue was that unquestionable authority should no longer be attributed to the thinkers and writers of antiquity. In France a general attack on appeals to authority in scientific matters was made by Bernard de Fontenelle in his Digression sur les anciens et les modernes, published in 1683.
The need to establish an objective criterion of historical truth was clearly realized by Jean Bodin in his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Method for the easy understanding of histories) of 1566, but
-136-
although he castigated those who sighed for a lost Golden Age, he still adhered to the cyclical concept of history, as did the Italian philosophers of history Machiavelli and Guiccardini earlier that century. Machiavelli thought that history is dominated by an oscillation between the bad and the good but with the bad tending to be in control longer than the good. Belief in the cyclical nature of history was, in fact, widespread from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century despite the Church's view that time extends from the Creation to the end of the world, both being unique events. Despite his cyclical views, Bodin was one of the first to attempt to discover whether there are any causal factors controlling the rise and fall of empires and so producing a common direction of historical events. According to a modern authority, he also gave 'one of the best early surveys of the history of historiography'.26
Although the Bible provides no dates, its chronology, particularly that of the Old Testament, became important following the Reformation and the resulting theological disputes. Previously, the Bible had not been regarded by the Church as a historical document but allegorically as an oracle. The view of Protestants such as Luther, however, was that the Bible (which for them replaced the Church as the ultimate source of religious authority) should be taken literally--a point of view that has not been entirely eliminated even in our own day. In England, Richard Hooker (c. 1554-1600), in the course of his intellectual defence of the theological and ecclesiastical media via of the Anglican Church, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, criticized the Puritans for attempting to apply Old Testament precepts to contemporary society, for which they were irrelevant because of the very different circumstances that prevailed. In the following century, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza ( 1632-77) went still further in regarding the Bible purely as an historical document and so was a forerunner of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical experts in the higher criticism of that work.
Scholarly historical chronology, in particular of classical antiquity, began with the publication in 1583 of the De emendatione temporum of the great scholar J. J. Scaliger ( 1540- 1609). He introduced in 1582 the system of Julian days beginning at noon on 1 January 4713 BC (for chronological purposes this was the date chosen by him for the Creation) so as to avoid the irregularities in length of the months and years when calculating the time between two events. The number of the Julian day beginning at noon on 1 January 1988 is 2,447,162. Julian days are still used by astronomers, for example, for the times of maximum and minimum brightness of variable stars.
-137-
Despite Scaliger, when the philosopher René Descartes ( 1596-1650) was engaged in his quest for absolute certainty he dismissed history as being based on mere opinion and arbitrary subjectivity, the historical sciences in his day being in a more primitive state than the mathematical. Indeed, the first formulation of criteria for testing the authenticity of documents, particularly charters and other manuscripts in medieval Latin, was not achieved until after Descartes' day by Mabillon in his De re diplomatica, published in 1681. The process of corruption of texts was ultimately arrested by printers, but not until the eighteenth century. At first, following the invention of movable type about 1450, texts actually appear to have been altered more rapidly by early printing methods than they had been by medieval copyists.27
Another work published in 1681 was the first French detailed world- history, Jacques Bossuet Discours sur l' histoire universelle; but although he dealt with the rise and fall of empires, Bossuet omitted all those that were not Christian, except for Greece and Rome in so far as he considered that they were relevant for the establishment of Christianity. Nevertheless, Bossuet's book
is important in the history of historiography because it was one of the first universal histories after Raleigh's. Bossuet believed that man's actions are supervised by a Divine Providence, so that, however inexplicable and surprising particular events may seem to be, they nevertheless advance in 'une suite reglée'.
-138-
9. Time and History in the Eighteenth Century
The invention of the marine chronometer
In the eighteenth century the outstanding achievement concerning time was the invention of the marine chronometer, which revolutionized navigation and thereby saved countless lives. The practical need for precise timekeeping at sea dates from the voyages planned by Prince Henry the Navigator in the fifteenth century. After the Cape of Good Hope had been rounded in 1488 it was east-west distances that mattered, and the need arose to determine longitude at sea. This was more difficult than determining a ship's latitude, since that could be obtained by measuring the altitude of the sun at local apparent noon with the aid of the cross- staff or the astrolabe. (The sextant did not come into practical use until later.) Whereas the poles of the earth's axis of rotation serve as universal reference points for the measurement of latitude, there are no such natural aids for the determination of longitude. Instead, an arbitrary zero of longitude has to be chosen. This is called the 'prime meridian'. The longitude of a place can then be obtained by determining the time that would be taken by the earth to turn through the angle which would bring the meridian through that place into the position the prime meridian was in at the epoch when the ship's position was being determined. The definition of longitudinal distances on land by means of differences in local time was known to the Greeks of the third century BC and possibly earlier.
Time in History: Views of Time From Prehistory to the Present Day Page 18