The Calendar

by David Ewing Duncan

  Proportionally; and the power of Saturn

  Began to rise with Libra just as we

  approached a little thorpe.

  Chaucer, who also wrote a treatise on the astrolabe, was undoubtedly more adept at making such ‘guesses’ than our young men from Pisa and Kent. Yet his inclusion in his tales of references to angles of the sun suggests his audience by the mid-1300s was familiar with the idea, though even then the times and measurements are given as ‘more or less’, as if this is close enough for pilgrims trekking leisurely along the road to England’s most holy city.

  Packing up a satchel on the appointed day, the squire’s son in Kent would have started off with prayers for a safe journey in the cool darkness of his village church. Then, before the sun rose too high, he would have set off for London, possibly accompanied by a servant, joining a highway like the one Chaucer wrote about: filled with messengers, knights, monks, merchants, ne’er-do-wells, highwaymen and pilgrims.

  London would have seemed enormous to this country boy. A city of perhaps 20,000 packed inside thick stone walls, it drew in people from all over England, and a few from foreign lands, with ships at anchor on the Thames from as far away as the Levant. Merchants bought and sold in markets reeking of dung, perfume and exotic spices. Our student-to-be would have seen beggars in rags wailing for a few grains of barley, courtiers in colourful livery from the royal palace, soldiers sporting broadswords in sheaths attached to their belts, and merchants from France and Italy calculating everything so quickly on abacuses that one could hardly see their fingers move.

  Staying overnight in a London inn, the boy would have continued westward towards Oxford, following the snaking, narrowing, lazy flow of the Thames, and passing by hedgerows ablaze with autumn colours and the earthy smell of fields turned over for the winter. Arriving at the gates of Oxford, the squire’s son would have seen a small, sleepy market town along the river, where perhaps a few hundred students had come to live among the townspeople--who often found the students loud and obnoxious. Oxford at one point shut down between 1209 and 1214 when a student killed a townswoman, and a local mob hanged two or three students in retaliation.

  Mostly the students stayed in modest houses of stone and thatch in the neighbourhood surrounding St Mary’s Church. The boy would have seen none of today’s grand quads, libraries and other university buildings, because in 1240 they had not yet been built. The only evidence that he was in a university town was the sight of other boys and men dressed in black robes; among them a scattering of masters, including perhaps Roger Bacon, who might have been teaching then at Oxford.

  Taking a deep breath, the boy would have turned into one of the small, cramped buildings where he was told the registrar kept his records, just as his counterpart in Bologna was strolling into the equivalent office to matriculate in this ancient city in northern Italy. Neither realized that he was headed toward an encounter with the unknown unlike anything their fathers or grandfathers could have imagined, a new way of approaching the world that was already turning the university into a major intellectual battleground between the forces of faith and reason, the sacred and the secular. This battle would alter for ever the way Europeans thought about themselves and the universe, and it would shift the fundamental perception of time away from ‘more or less’ to ever more precise expectations in the generations that followed the boys from Kent and Pisa.

  The universities did not start out as crucibles for an intellectual revolution. Originally referred to as universitas magistrum or universitas scholarium--’university of masters’ or ‘university of students’--at first they were little more than gatherings of students in certain cities, attracted by masters whose fame allowed them to charge fees. Many of the earliest university teachers came from the ranks of translators who had trekked to Toledo and Sicily and returned to teach the ‘secrets’ of Aristotle, al-Biruni and Euclid. These universities operated in rented halls and hostels, with wealthier students renting their own rooms, and those with fewer resources, such as our shipowner’s son and squire’s son living either with their masters or in inns and local hostels. The spirit of these enclaves was one of a shared adventure in learning--a profound experience for young men coming from Pisa, Kent and elsewhere. Students with more ecclesiastic leanings, or in economic straits and in need of free housing, joined one of the new Catholic orders attached to the universities, such as the Franciscans and Dominicans.

  The greatest of the early masters was Peter Abelard (c. 1079-1144), son of a minor Breton lord and a proponent of the newfangled logic of Aristotle. An intoxicating lecturer, he is sometimes credited with single-handedly attracting the original crowds of students that made possible the university in Paris. The young Abelard epitomized the sort of person drawn to the new style of learning in the twelfth century. Brilliant and relentless in his scholarship, freewheeling and passionate in his lifestyle and personality, he represented a profound shift away from the cloistered approach of learning and towards a search for the truth in open discourse and disputation, and through the unfettered power of his intellect.

  Predictably, conservatives criticized the new thinking and the entire project of the universities, launching a centuries-long battle between traditionalists and men such as Abelard. As early as the 1060s a leading cardinal, Pier Damiani (1007-1072), warned that the new learning represented a grave danger to bedrock medieval beliefs and might eventually cause a split between the world of reason and that of faith. He and others of a similarly contemplative bent worried not only about offending God but about the unsettling effect on the faithful should basic tenets of the Church be undermined. Less philosophical critics simply condemned the new teachings, calling heresy anything that contradicted the Church. Still, the universities proliferated, with Bologna the first to receive an official charter in 1088. Paris received its charter in 1150, as did Oxford in 1167, though the rush did not come until the 1200s and 1300s, when dozens of schools were officially opened, from Salamanca in Spain (1218) to Krakow in Poland (1364).

  The university curriculum began with training in four or five general areas: theology, law, medicine, arts or philosophy and music. The masters also taught what was known about astronomy, mathematics and other sciences, though these more empirical subjects tended to be overshadowed by the deep philosophical and theological controversy touched upon by Hermann the Lame, promulgated by the Arabs, and shouted about by Abelard: what to do about the growing evidence that two truths existed, that of the Church and that suggested by nature and reason.

  This was hardly a new quandary. It revisited an old debate from the waning days of the Roman Empire, depicted by St Augustine as the ‘city of God’ versus ‘the city of man’. It also was a recasting of the ancient dispute between, on one hand, the Aristotelian notion of the particular and the individual, of empiricism and logic, and, on the other, the Platonic ideal that the general and the universal are everything, and that perfection exists but is beyond human comprehension. In ancient times a great pendulum had swung back and forth between these two world views, with Caesar and the Rome of the early emperors representing a swing toward the secular, and Constantine and later Augustine swerving over to embrace the sacred.

  Now for Europe in the High Middle Ages, this debate had returned in full fury to become an epochal argument, one that would either propel it into a new age of empiricism and secularism or sustain it in a world of mysticism and faith.

  For several centuries, until long after Copernicus and even Galileo, the outcome would remain unclear, with traditionalists fighting back at every turn. Abelard himself was eventually destroyed, in part because of his own outrageous departure from acceptable behaviour when he wooed the young Heloise, the teenage niece of a prominent canon in Paris, had a son with her, then married her in secret--which prompted the girl’s irate uncle to have the master scholar castrated. More serious for Abelard’s career, if not his anatomy, was his practice of intentionally upsetting his enemies by publishing such works as his Sic
et Non, which explicitly laid out the contradictions of various Church leaders on important theological points. He also challenged orthodox views on the nature of God, Christ and the Holy Spirit, a sore spot of Catholicism since the age of Constantine, when the Council of Nicaea condemned Arianism over this same issue.

  After being charged with heresy for his ideas, Abelard retired to a hermitage, became an abbot, and was eventually tried by his enemies--led by Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153). The French-born leader of a movement towards more mysticism and reliance on faith, not less, Bernard spoke for the old guard when he criticized those who learned ‘merely in order that they may know’, insisting that ‘such curiosity ... is blameable’. Calling Abelard a ‘hydra of wickedness’ he condemned all learning that was not directly necessary to serve God, proclaiming that the only road to truth was to maintain a ‘pure conscience and unfeigning faith’.

  Abelard’s downfall did not squelch the new thinking, as Bernard undoubtedly hoped it would. But it did remind scholars of a need to be prudent in what they said and wrote, at least in public. ‘When the object of the dispute can be explained more clearly through the rules of the art of logic,’ wrote the Italian scholar and ecclesiastic Lanfranc (c. 1005-1089), a confidant of William the Conqueror and later the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘I conceal the logical rules as much as I can within the formulas of faith, because I do not wish to seem to place more trust in this art than in the truth and authority of the Holy Fathers.’

  Despite this, a growing number of intellectuals followed Abelard’s lead in seeking truth through logic and nature--though few as effectively as an Arab in Cordoba named Abu al-Walid Mohammed Ibn Rushd (1126-1198), known in the West as Averroes. A teenager when Abelard died, Ibn Rushd lived in an era when the Islamic world itself had been locked in a debate between the sacred and the secular, with the same enormous stakes. By now, however, the great Islamic empire was long gone, succeeded by shifting emirates and sultanates that tended to be religiously conservative and uninterested in learning. And with it was gone the era of the House of Wisdom, when Aristotle and Mohammed could be studied side by side. One exception had long been Moslem Spain, though it was now ruled by North Africans more orthodox than previous emirs, even as the Moors slowly lost territory to the Christians.

  It was against this backdrop that the physician, judge and philosopher Ibn Rushd wrote what Europeans considered the most thorough and enlightening commentaries to date on Aristotle and the Aristotelian universe. Called ‘the commentator’, a play on Aristotle’s appellation ‘the philosopher’, Ibn Rushd conceived of a philosophical argument that tried to solve the dilemma between the sacred and the secular by insisting that two contradictory truths could exist: one for science and ‘natural reason’ and one for ‘revelation’. According to his philosophy:

  When a conflict arises we will therefore simply say: here are the conclusions to which my reason as a philosopher leads me, but because God cannot lie, I adhere to the truth he has revealed to us and I cling to it through faith.

  At first Ibn Rushd’s ‘double truth’ was merely frowned upon. Then it was aggressively challenged by religious authorities in Christian Europe and Islamic Cordoba. Declaring that Aristotle was not a god, but a man and therefore fallible, bishops and imams alike objected to Ibn Rushd’s insistence that science was on par with divine truth. They also were horrified by Ibn Rushd’s assertion that while science proved that God was the mechanistic mover of the universe, God himself was a ‘machine’ entirely removed from interference in human affairs. According to Ibn Rushd, it was the laws of nature--of this machine--that uphold the eternity of the universe and the passage of time. This idea denied a range of core Christian and Moslem beliefs, including creation, the doctrine of an active and fully engaged God, and the immortality of the individual soul.

  Ibn Rushd’s ideas nonetheless resonated with many intellectuals in Europe, working their way into a gradual rethinking of time by Christians, begun with the likes of Hermann the Lame. For instance, around 1200, a Norman mathematician and encyclopaedist named Alexander of Villedieu suggested there may be two truths in regard to time reckoning. He makes no direct mention of Ibn Rushd’s work, and as a pious Catholic he would have been horrified to be mentioned in the same sentence with this near-heretical Arab. Yet he was advanced enough in his thinking to use Hindu numbers, and was reasoning along the same line as Ibn Rushd when he divided the measurement of time into two categories: what he called philosophical computus, by which he meant time as measured by science, which is infallible; and ecclesiastic time, which he curiously referred to as ‘vulgar’ computus, ‘the science of dividing time according to the custom of the Church’. But Alexander dodges the potential controversy of his categories by telling us that he does not want to discuss the philosophical computus, but will confine his comments to the ecclesiastic.

  Eventually the Italian master Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) solved the dilemma, at least temporarily, by rejecting the incompatibility of the two truths. He argued that in fact both ‘truths’ point in the same direction: towards God and towards the universe of ideas and morals created by God. To do this Aquinas made the breathtakingly bold assertion that Platonic universals could be proven by Aristotelian logic. In other words, this brilliant Italian philosopher and theologian, born in a castle to the noble counts of Aquino and trained in Naples and Cologne, attempted in a comprehensive manner to unite the worlds of Aristotle and Plato.

  Part of Thomas’s argument rested on a theory that time and the universe could not be eternal, as Aristotle claimed, but must have started with an original, unmoved mover, which Thomas says is God. He then sets out in his massive Summa Theologica, which he worked on until his death in 1274, to apply the rules of science as argued by Aristotle to prove the reality of God’s perfection, of the Creation and the existence of the human soul, and of the ethical foundation of Christian virtue. This attempted conciliation of the sacred and the secular provided the great philosophical compromise of the Middle Ages, permitting intellectuals on both sides of the great divide of the two truths some breathing room.

  But Thomas’s opus was not initially well received either by the followers of Ibn Rushd, who accused him of faulty logic, or by the Church. At first conservative Church leaders condemned his Summa as being overly radical, though just a generation after Thomas’s death his philosophy was embraced by the Church. It became the official theological response to the new knowledge and a counter to Ibn Rushd--a point vividly made in a painting rendered during this period of an enormous Thomas enthroned, ‘crushing’ under his feet a tiny, bearded and turbaned Ibn Rushd. Thomas was made a saint in 1323.

  For a time Thomas’s philosophy comforted conservatives and scholars who shared Alexander of Villedieu’s discomfort in acknowledging truths that seemed to contradict the Church. But it also gave a green light of sorts for science to seek its own truths, though within strict limits--as Bacon would discover, and many years later Galileo. Another period painting amply demonstrates this, illustrating a gigantic St Augustine, dressed in glittering medieval robes, crushing underfoot a tiny Aristotle in a simple tunic. Yet the Aquinas compromise had the advantage of at least quieting the all-encompassing theological debate so that men such as Bacon could begin to turn their attention towards using the new knowledge of the Greeks, Arabs and Indians for scientific endeavours, rather than to score points in heated philosophical debates.

  But Ibn Rushd and like-minded Islamic scholars did not win even this partial victory in their own homeland. Towards the end of Ibn Rushd’s life the conservatives in Spain struck hard against the celebrated schools in Cordoba, denouncing Ibn Rushd and other intellectuals and later disavowed his work. For even as Europe finally began to absorb the learning brought to its frontiers by Arabs, the world of Islam was filling deeper into a period of political turmoil and outside threats from Mongols and others, hastening a growing chill in its intellectual life.

  With the fate of the human soul and the beliefs of
a thousand years hanging in the balance, scientific pursuits remained largely fringe endeavours for intellectuals during the 1100s and 1200s. Peter Abelard, for one, brushed off mathematics, astronomy and virtually all science, insisting in 1140 that ‘philosophy can do more than nature’. As for time reckoning, he dismissed it as being in the same low category as usury, useful in the hallowed halls of the university only for collecting fees from students based on elapsed time. Thomas Aquinas a century later was equally dismissive of time reckoning, refusing to allow that it was real in Aristotelian terms. Like Abelard, Thomas argued that time fixing should be excluded from the theoretical sciences, also ranking it as a lowly mechanical art unworthy of scholarly contemplation. Even those who pondered the new texts with an eye towards learning more about science tended to simply read Ptolemy, Galen, Euclid and the Arab astronomers, rather than trying to apply their ancient ideas to anything new.

  Still, a scattered handful of scholars pored over the mass of new knowledge and tried to make sense of it, and attempted to apply it to everything from human anatomy to more accurately measuring time.

  One of the first hands-on time reckoners steeped in the new knowledge was Reiner of Paderborn (c. mid-twelfth century), dean of the cathedral at Paderborn, on the Lippe River in western Germany. Now all but forgotten, Reiner wrote a treatise in 1171, Computus emendatus, that applies the new Hindu numbers and mathematics to the old formulas of computus involving the Easter calculation--and proves that the old 19-year lunisolar cycle was misaligned with the true movements of the sun and moon. This error amounted to one day lost every 315 years--that is, every 315 years the 19-year cycle of lunar and solar years slipped a day against the Julian calendar. Reiner’s measurements also led him to the near-heretical conclusion that all attempts by computists to date the age of the world, and to create a timeline of history dating back to creation, were mistaken, given the errors in the calendar.