c. 1999 Religion News Service
UNDATED _ We turn the pages of our calendars almost unthinkingly, a mundane task that moves us inexorably toward a third millennium.
The human impulse to order time has been evident as long as we could follow the cycles of the moon and the passage of seasons.
The calendar organizes the business of human lives the world over, so it seems a secular creation. But while the need for regular taxation to support armies and governments has played a part in the pursuit of a reliable accounting of time, the real force behind most calendars has been religion.
We use the Gregorian calendar, named for Pope Gregory XIII who oversaw its reforms. This name carries a history with roots in Christian theology, obscuring the fact that it extends back to the Julian calendar devised in 46 B.C. under the rule of Julius Caesar.
However spiritual its origins, the calendar’s story is replete with political whims and crises, bureaucratic delays, religious disputes and even the odd calamity _ specifically, the Black Death. The Gregorian calendar’s survival and dominance as the world’s calendar is also a testament to European colonialism that ultimately took it around the world.
How the calendar documents the passing years is a reflection of the belief that Jesus was a historical as well as a religious figure. It is by counting forward from the first year of his birth, as calculated by Dennis the Little, a sixth century abbot, that we arrive at a new millennium.
It may very well be, however, that Dennis _ who was known for his humility _ miscounted.
As calendar historian E.G. Richards quotes an anonymous sage, “God made the days and nights, but man made the calendar.”
The calendar is a relic of an ancient cultural shift, as one power gave way to another. But even as the Christian church assumed greater authority, it continued to use the Roman Julian calendar until the late 16th century.
The Julian calendar had been devised by a Greek astronomer in Egypt named Sosigenes. He “advised Caesar to abandon any pretense to a lunar calendar and to divide the … year into 12 months, with no attempt to relate them to the moon,” Richards writes in “Mapping Time: The Calendar and Its History.”
We still, more or less, count the days of our months as the Romans did and call our months by the same names.
With Gregory XIII’s 1582 reforms, the leap year was recalculated and the date of Easter was stabilized in spring, halting a slide that had it occurring later and later in the calendar year. In the process, several days were cut from the calendar.
Global peer pressure ensued as Christian countries began adopting the Gregorian calendar. Christian or not, other countries followed until as late as 1926.
“The failure of some countries to adopt the new calendar sometimes gave them problems,” Richards writes. “In 1908, the Imperial Russian Olympic team arrived in London 12 days too late for the games.”
Other calendars survive, of course, guiding the world’s religions and based on different cultural markers. Still, the Gregorian calendar became analogous to a common language.
Adoption of the calendar became a practical matter. Richards argues it made international trade possible.
“People say time is money,” observes Robert Grudin, author of “Time and the Art of Living.” “But time is much more difficult to figure than money.”
By the 11th century, it was common in Western Europe to divide world history by the date of Jesus’ birth.
Any given year is designated either A.D. for Anno Domini, “year of the Lord,” or B.C. for “before Christ.” The more religiously neutral and secular “Common Era,” C.E., or “Before the Common Era,” B.C.E., is also used, but it refers to the same time line.
“Of course, people have to ask themselves what makes it common,” observes the Rev. James A. Wiseman, an associate professor of theology at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.
“For a Christian, the coming of Christ is simply the center of history,” Wiseman says. “It is why we are called Christians. It is so inescapably basic that it’s almost hard to say anything more profound than that.”
Human calculation, however, is subject to human error.
As Richards tells it, Dennis the Little settled on the date of Jesus’ birth after consulting, among other things, the ancient account of Clement of Alexandria. Clement placed Jesus’ birth in the 28th year of the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus. Dennis mistakenly counted from the date Augustus accepted the title of emperor, rather than his defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium.
The Christian era began with A.D. 1. By the abbot’s reckoning, we will not enter a new millennium for another 400-odd days, at the start of 2001. Scholars, however, suspect Dennis was off by a few years. They debate by how much. In fact, we may have unceremoniously crossed into the new millennium sometime earlier in this decade.
Whether Dennis miscounted or not is now almost beside the point. It may also be that the next millennium doesn’t begin until Jan. 1 of 2001, but round numbers enchant humans.
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That is something else we share with the Romans, who “made much of the completion of large units of time from the founding of Rome,” according to a paper from the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University.
So the world prepares for a global party on Jan. 1, 2000.
“A millennium is an arbitrary boundary,” notes Grudin, an English professor at the University of Oregon.
“But periods like centennials and millenniums do operate like enormous alarm clocks,” he says. “They awaken whole civilizations to the passage of time and the challenge of renewal.”
The months mark time in more modest increments. It took centuries to untangle problems created by the months of the old Roman calendar.
“For secular purposes, the old Julian calendar was good enough,” says Richards, formerly a senior lecturer at King’s College at the University of London. “It was Easter that really bothered them.”
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Dennis the Little (his Latin name was Dionysius Exiguus) came up with the concept of Anno Domini, or A.D., while grappling with the problem of fixing in time two central tenets of Christian theology: that Jesus was born and later rose from the dead.
The attempts to solve the Easter problem were unsuccessful, however. Problems with the calendar persisted into the late 16th century, vexing a succession of popes already distracted by other troubles. There was the Black Death, or plague, in 1347-1348. There were internal problems, finally resolved in 1417, after the church confronted “two popes, then three contenders.” Then in the mid-15th century, there was the specter of the Reformation.
Gregory XIII became pope in 1572. He immediately turned his attention to the calendar. The church eventually accepted the proposals of an astronomer and physician named Aluise Baldassar Lilio. A decade after becoming pope, Gregory signed a papal bull on Feb. 24, 1582, establishing the new calendar that would carry his name.
By then, the Christian church was divided in three: Roman Catholic,Protestant and Eastern Orthodox. Protestants were loath to have anything to do with the pope or his calendar.
“The Protestant bishops were not eager to adopt a proposal from the pope, whom they considered to be the Antichrist,” Richards writes. “Accordingly, they replied with delaying tactics. … They also used other arguments, including the notion that the world was about to end so there was not much point in reforming the calendar.”
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However, Richards explains, “As the difficulties attendant on having different calendars in the different states of Europe became intolerable, the Protestant countries saw sense and followed, one by one, the Catholics in adopting the new calendar.”
Under the Romans, Jan. 1 had marked New Year’s Day. The early Christians instead set New Year’s Day on the dates of various religious festivals, and would begin the new year on Christmas Day, Easter or days in March or September. It was the Gregorian calendar that returned New Year’s Day to the date we celebrate today.
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The approach of the next Jan. 1, with all that the year 2000 conjures in our imaginations, touches something almost primal in the human experience.
Wiseman of Catholic University, a Benedictine monk, says various faiths view human existence as “enveloped by mystery,” and calendars give us a way of ordering that mystery.
“I think,” he says, “that a calendar helps you find yourself, and your life, and your relationship to other people and to the passing of the centuries.”
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