The Calendar

by David Ewing Duncan

  The choice of Nicaea was no accident. Situated strategically in the east, near the new heart of Constantine’s revamped empire, the city was easily reached by the three hundred or so bishops who attended, and their delegations. Nearly all of these came from the east, in part because Christianity had permeated few areas in the west. Sylvester I, the ageing bishop of Rome--at this time all major bishops were called by the honorific papa, or ‘pope’--did not come because he was too ill, but he sent representatives.

  Constantine was so anxious to convene this meeting that he paid the bishops’ expenses, placing at their disposal the empire’s system of public conveyances and posts along its highways. At Nicaea he paid for food and lodging. The sessions were held at a large basilica converted into a church and in the audience chamber of an imperial palace, possibly situated on the shore of today’s Lake Iznik.

  The council opened in the late spring, probably on 20 May, without Constantine. He came a month later. The early sessions were held in the city’s main church, with the doors open to the lay public. Even pagan theologians participated in some of the debates. Gathering in small groups under colonnades and in gardens, dressed in togas and robes, they argued the relationship between God and Christ and the meaning of passages in holy texts, breaking for sumptuous meals of wine, meats, fruits and vegetables laid out by imperial servants.

  For many of the bishops and priests it must have been a heady moment, if slightly surreal. Just a few years earlier many of them had been practising their religion in secret. Some had been viciously persecuted. Paul, a bishop from Neo-Caesarea, had lost the use of his hands after being tortured with hot irons. Two Egyptian bishops each had had an eye gouged out. One of these, Paphnutius, had also been hamstrung. Constantine later singled him out at Nicaea and kissed his mutilated face. The historian Eusebius, an eyewitness at the council, writes about the lavish feast held on 25 July to celebrate Constantine’s twentieth year as emperor, and the lingering fear felt by the bishops as they passed guards in the banquet halls and saw ‘the glint of arms’ that so recently had been turned against them.

  But this turnaround from fear to feasting was nothing compared to Constantine’s sudden transformation of a church that for three hundred years had lacked a central authority. Scattered and at times hounded by the authorities, Christianity had operated less as a single cohesive religion than as a collection of sects and denominations following the same basic tenets but differing on points major and minor--such as when to celebrate Easter. Unity had always been a goal, though most congregations had remained more or less independent of one another, with doctrine and details of worship left to the local elders and members to decide. In cities large enough to assign a bishop, these prelates had exercised some authority, but as one historian noted in talking about Alexandria’s freewheeling churches, with their many controversies and bickering between sects and church leaders, ‘it was not an exceptional thing to have a doctrine of one’s own.’

  Constantine’s mandate at Nicaea was to put a lid on this free-for-all by establishing a set of uniform rules governed by a centralized structure headed by himself as emperor. To accomplish this, Constantine called on the bishops to resolve differences ranging from petty disputes to fundamental controversies, the most important one at the time being the question of whether or not God the Father came before Christ the Son, or if they had both always existed. A popular Alexandrian theologian and preacher named Arius had been espousing the former, teachings recently condemned by his chief rival and detractor, the bishop of Alexandria. Both Arius and the bishop had been invited to make their case at the council.

  Constantine arrived at Nicaea on about 19 June 325, and was immediately handed a thick packet of papers detailing controversies large and small among the attendees. He carried the packet with him into the audience hall of his palace, where he officially opened the council wearing a robe of gold and draped with jewels like a Persian king. Sitting on a golden throne in front of the prelates, he listened to welcoming speeches before rising to answer the mostly Greek-speaking bishops in Latin. Through a translator he welcomed them but quickly got to the point about the purpose of this council, holding up the packet of papers like a scolding father. He told them, ‘I your fellow servant am deeply pained whenever the Church of God is in dissension, a worse evil than the evil of war.’ Ordering the bishops to set aside their arguments, he took the packet and dropped it into the flames of a brazier. As it burned he told his audience that they must use this council to establish a uniform doctrine they all would follow--an imperative that became the guiding force behind the Catholic (‘universal’) church for centuries to come and would profoundly affect all aspects of life, including attitudes toward measuring time.

  Details of the Easter debates at Nicaea are not recorded, although the controversies leading up to the council are well-known. For almost three centuries this issue had frustrated the followers of Christ, who were anxious to celebrate properly the signal event in their religion.

  The problem arose because no one who witnessed Christ’s death and resurrection had thought to jot down a date. Even worse, the Gospels that recount Christ’s biography offer contradictory information in vague references about the timing of these events. All agree that Christ rose on the first day of the Jewish week-a Sunday. But which Sunday? Three Gospels--Matthew, Mark and Luke--suggest the Sunday after the Passover feast in the Jewish month of Nisan. The Gospel of John, however, indicates another date in Nisan, a dichotomy exacerbated by the drift of the Jewish lunar calendar in the years following Jesus’s crucifixion.

  This vagueness arose because the earliest Christians cared little or nothing about dates, for the understandable reason that Jesus’s disciples and first followers fervently believed in their saviour’s imminent return. For them time was irrelevant, a point underscored by the apostle Paul, who did not date his letters that appear in the New Testament. He explains why in an epistle written to the church in Galatia, in which he reprimands those Christians who pay attention to ‘days and months and times and years’, accusing them of being more interested in astrology and earthly matters than in God. In another letter Paul exhorts the Christians of Colossae, in central Asia Minor, not to judge others by what they eat or drink, ‘or in respect of a holiday, or of the new moon or of the Sabbath, which are a shadow of things to come.’

  When Jesus failed to return immediately, Christians realized they needed some sort of system for dating. By the second century they started writing schedules of when to worship, and crude calendars of saints’ days and other Christian holidays. They also began to argue about dates, such as whether to worship on Saturday or Sunday, and how to draw up a chronology of events in Jesus’s life. This became increasingly important to a religion that is based on real events as recorded in the Bible, which says that Christ lived in actual time: he was born, raised by Mary and Joseph, was baptized, became a teacher, was tried and executed, and rose from his tomb three days later. These central events are the underpinnings of the Gospels and of Christianity itself, which makes this a religion of history and the calendar--a potent and critical reality for early adherents even as they grappled with another core tenet of their religion: the doctrine of eternal life and a God who exists outside of time.

  This dichotomy between the Christ that exists beyond time and the historic Christ became an early source of tension in Christianity. It later became one of the great theological conundrums of the Middle Ages, when the timeless Christ of dogma and mysticism reigned supreme. Even so, the notion of empiricism and measuring time never entirely died out, in part because of the Church’s need to understand enough about the temporal world to designate a proper date for Easter.

  By the time of Nicaea, Christians had more or less agreed upon dates for celebrating Christ’s birth and other key events. These included days set aside to mark the martyrdom of saints--dates meant to record in real time important episodes in the Christian calendar and to provide an alternative to pagan holidays. The
first known martyr’s day to be commemorated seems to have occurred in the mid-second century, when the bishop of Smyrna was burned at the stake ‘on the second day in the beginning of the month of Xanthicus,* the day before the seventh kalends of March, on a great Sabbath, at the eighth hour. He was arrested by Herod, when Philip of Thralles was High Priest, and Statius Quadratus Proconsul, during the unending reign of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ According to an eye-witness, the bishop’s bones were taken away and interred in a place ‘where the Lord will permit us ... to assemble and celebrate his martyrdom--his “birthday”--both in order to commemorate the heroes who have gone before, and to train and prepare the heroes yet to come.’

  *A month in a local Greek calendar.

  As for Easter, most Christians agreed by 325 that it should be preceded by a fast, and that the sacred day itself should have some relationship with the full moon that falls during the Jewish month of Nisan. Beyond this, individual churches and sects split on the issue of holding Easter always on a Sunday or according to the approximate date in Nisan that Christ rose from the dead, which changed according to the drift of the Jewish lunar calendar. By the third century a rising anti-Semitism among non-Jewish adherents added to the confusion, as Christians became biased against using dates that depended on when Jewish priests determined the start of Nisan to be. So a third choice emerged: linking Christ’s resurrection to the solar year and to Caesar’s calendar by using the spring equinox as a fixed astronomic date to determine Easter. With this anchor date decided, a formula could be devised to correlate the equinox with the phases of the moon and the weekly cycle of Sundays.

  None of the surviving canons issued by the council mentions the Easter problem directly, though the rules that emerged from Nicaea are well-known among Christians: that Easter will fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox, but shall never fall at the beginning of the Jewish Passover. The sentiment of the assembled bishops was recorded by Constantine himself in a letter addressed to bishops and other church leaders who did not attend the council. ‘By the unanimous judgment of all,’ wrote the emperor, ‘it has been decided that the most holy festival of Easter should be everywhere celebrated on one and the same day.’ In the same letter Constantine notes that the council opposed the practice of following the Jewish calendar to determine Easter. ‘We ought not,’ he says in a letter charged with anti-Semitism, ‘to have anything in common with the Jews, for the Saviour has shown another way.’

  But the council’s solution was hardly perfect. First off, it codified a holiday that changes dates every year, a confusing notion for the average Christian or recently converted pagan used to annual holidays falling on the same date every year. A second problem was that Nicaea’s Easter solution required what was then impossible: an accurate determination in advance of a date that assumed a precise knowledge of the movements of the sun, earth and moon. Ancient scientists could calculate only an approximate date, a reality that would haunt time reckoners for centuries as they tried, and failed, to determine true dates for Easter. In the absence of good science most churches fixed on an arbitrary date for the vernal equinox on 21 March.

  Another blemish in the Nicaea solution was the failure of the council’s bishops and time reckoners to correct the central flaw in Caesar’s calendar: the annual error of 11 minutes. This meant that an Easter tethered to a fixed spring equinox would drift backward with the rest of the calendar, filling behind the true orbit of the earth by one full day every 128 or so years. By 325 the Julian calendar was already three days behind where it stood when Caesar introduced his reforms in 45 BC, when the vernal equinox fell on 25 March. By Bacon’s day the true equinox had dropped back to 14 March, though the church continued to follow the practice after Nicaea of rigidly determining Easter according to a 21 March equinox, arbitrarily set at the time of the council.

  On the other big issue at Nicaea--the nature of Christ--the council debated heatedly throughout that long-ago summer, finally issuing on 25 July the Nicene Creed, which declared Arianism a heresy and affirmed that Christ and God came from one substance and had both always existed. But far more important than the nature of Christ or the date for Easter was Nicaea’s codification of Constantine’s fusion of church and state, an expedient political move by this shrewd emperor that was to link inexorably the Church to secular power, wealth and absolutism for many centuries to come--first as an adjunct to imperial Rome and later as an independent entity that derived its all-embracing influence from its own imperial-style hierarchy and assumption of power over Christian domains.

  Constantine closed the council by admonishing the still-fractious bishops to keep their unity at all costs and to use their new-found power with care. ‘Be like wise physicians,’ he said, ‘who treat different cases with discrimination, and are all things to all.’ Undoubtedly no one assembled on that hot Mediterranean day, feasting on Constantine’s meats and fruits and sipping his wine, had any idea how prophetic the emperor’s final words would be

  that this recently outlawed religion would truly become ‘all things to all’ in every realm, including time, replacing Rome itself as the most powerful single entity ruling the lives and souls of millions of people and countless generations yet to come.

  5 Time Stands Still

  Try as they may to savour the taste of eternity, their thoughts still twist and turn upon the ebb and flow of things in past and future time. But if only their minds could be seized and held steady, they would be still for a while and, for that short moment, they would glimpse the splendour of eternity, which is for ever still.

  Augustine of Hippo, c. AD 400

  Less than a century after Constantine celebrated the success of his council at Nicaea, a Roman foot soldier stood sentry on a snow-swept river bank at Mainz in what is now Germany. Shivering in his armour and military wraps, this anonymous infantryman watched the ice-choked Rhine and the opposite bank, where hundreds of cooking fires burned, tended by a vast and growing horde of German barbari. This lone soldier might have been a Roman, or more probably a Romanized German recruited by the faltering empire to help defend its northern border. Whatever his nationality, as he stamped his feet to stay warm on this frigid December day in 406 he almost certainly was not thinking that Rome itself hung in the balance. Even when he looked up and saw to his horror that the masses across the river were moving toward him over the ice, he could hardly have imagined that this was the beginning of the end of the ancient world in the West, and for Europeans an end to time itself as they had known it.

  The sentry sounded the alarm and his legion scrambled to meet the barbarians, a coalition of tattooed, scraggly, fur-clad Germans from the tribes known as the Alans, the Sueves and the Vandals. But the Roman garrison was fatally depleted. Most of the men had been pulled off the Rhine frontier to join a desperate counter-attack against yet another army of barbari, the Ostrogoths, then invading the Balkans. Removing the Rhine legions was a calculated move by the Roman military, who were betting that the Germans there would not attack during the winter. But no one had counted on the fact that the Rhine might freeze solid, a rare occurrence. Nor could the emperor and his generals have known that the Germans were themselves fleeing the savage invasion of their country by the Huns.

  Lacking the resources to stop them, Rome watched helplessly as the Mainz hordes and other waves of invaders poured across borders that had held firm for four hundred years to ravage defenceless cities. Britain was lost in 410 when its Roman garrison departed to defend Gaul, never to return. Soon after, Gaul itself began to break apart; Spain too slipped slowly away in the west, along with parts of the Balkans in the east. A marauding band of Visigoths reached the gates of Rome itself in 410, crashing through its walls to sack a city that for centuries had been one of the greatest powers in the earth’s history.

  Inevitably the gathering chaos affected people’s perceptions of time and the calendar as the predictable patterns of Roman life began to crumble. Caesar’s calendar would rem
ain the official calendar in the West long after the empire fell, though more and more people found an organized list of days, months and years irrelevant. They had more immediate concerns, such as finding enough to eat and avoiding the ravages of the barbari.

  But chaos was not the only outcome of the empire’s collapse. Nor did every Roman institution falter. One, in fact, grew stronger amidst the disorder and decay: the Catholic Church. Originally designed by Constantine as a vehicle to enhance the political might of Rome, the church ended up superseding it, retaining its power and influence in the ecclesiastic realm, particularly as the barbari dropped their pagan gods and embraced a Church that demanded--and got--an allegiance much stronger than the imperium itself had ever known. This was because the church claimed jurisdiction not over lands and armies but over souls, an authority that would extend during the coming centuries into virtually all aspects of a Christian’s life.

  This amounted to a new societal order in Europe, including a new concept of time--something Christian theologians call sacred time. Neither cyclical nor linear, it is rather a kind of anti time that Christians equate with God, who is perfect, eternal and timeless.