The Conundrum of the Past
is coming an hour and now is…
The mirror of the past is the only way to peer at the image of the Son of Man. The reflection is darkened by time and sin. Specters of the dead, haunting the dusty stacks of long-ago thoughts, turn up repeatedly, if indistinctly, on library shelves and in the dens of archivists. Storytellers such as the Greek Homer, abstract philosophers such as the Athenian Plato and John the Evangelist, poets such as King David and the Italian Petrarch, historians such as the Romans Livy and Tacitus, biographers such as the Greek Plutarch and the Physician Luke, essayists such as the Roman Seneca, the emperor Marcus Aurelius, and the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne, lived the past, made it their own, spoke to it and heard a response. Such writers expressed empathy toward past lives that span the ages. They engaged in a dialogue with the past, a discussion of self in light of others, creating a sensitive portrait, based on the varied experiences of humans at particular places and times, of the image of God in man, the Son of Man, apparent throughout the ages. This is true history.
History has always promised so much. Since the future is unknown and the present a fleeting moment upon which nothing wise and solid can be based, only the past remains to teach us, to inform us how to live, to provide us with guidelines on what is true and lasting, to give us the truth. And yet, history has seemingly failed us.
Notwithstanding that there are countless history books and university academics who specialize in all branches of the past, that there are television channels, historical novels, Hollywood movies, that inform watchers and readers of the past, the world is much the same today as in the past, plagued by war, violence, injustice, ignorance, sin, and mental malaise. Titus Livius, Livy, at the beginning of his epic history of the rise of the Roman Empire, wrote: “The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.”[1]
Livy wrote at a time of moral and political sickness, when Roman society had passed through cataclysmic civil wars that destroyed the Republic only to be followed by an age dominated by one man, Augustus Caesar. Livy was an expert at his sort of medicine, didactic history, and his account of Rome’s rise to power throughout the Mediterranean is highlighted by moral treatises and a parade of personalities, the good, like Cincinnatus and Scipio, the bad, like Philip V of Macedon, and the tragic, like Hannibal. To detail the events of right and wrong, Livy used the narrative. Through his account of the actions of humans struggling with themselves and others in time, Livy’s readers might gain a sense of the reality of the past, a sense of historical identity.
Other historians besides Livy wrote during the Augustan Age and after, during the Pax Romana, when the Roman Empire provided relative peace and harmony from southern Europe to northern Africa to the Middle East. Their message was the same as Livy’s: that Rome’s rise to power was based on discipline, virtue, self-sacrifice, respect for others, and piety. Tacitus presented this message to the Romans a century after Livy in his Histories, Annals, and Agricola. Plutarch, whose writings are less pessimistic than Tacitus’, in his Lives and Moralia also taught the same moral precepts. Indeed, historical inquiry and writing was a dynamic part of Roman culture during the several centuries after the birth of Christ. Some, like Arrian and Dio Cassius, wrote in Greek; others, like Suetonius and Ammianus Marcellinus, wrote in Latin. All wrote from the heritage established by the Greeks centuries before, a heritage based on Homer and Hesiod, Herodotus and Thucydides, Xenophon and Polybius, Plato and Aristotle, Zeno and Epicurus. What emerged were fundamental assumptions of justice based on the rule of law, republicanism, the brotherhood of humankind, action tempered by thought, the pursuit of truth and the courage to defend it, the essential harmony of nature, the existence of universal ideas, veneration for ancestors, and a respect for the lessons of the past.
But if history is medicine for a sick mind, as Livy said, and if the Roman Empire was a time and place when Clio, the muse of history, was lavishly entertained, her patronage encouraged, then what explains the paradox that Roman society should grow so many cancers, spread so many plagues, catch so many fevers? Why did the Roman Empire decline, its civilization replaced, its power eradicated, its culture transformed? Why did the medicine of history not halt this dissolution? Why were the lessons of the past not sufficient to enlighten the Romans and lead them to surpass the greatness of the Greeks rather than to crumble to the illiterate, ahistorical hordes of Germanic invaders?
History purports to tell the story of past lives. But are politics, wars, social changes, and economic processes the stuff of life? How meaningful is it to know that the Battle of Cannae killed thirty thousand Romans, that Lincoln won the Presidency without a popular majority, that class struggle brought about the French Revolution, that declining production may have brought down Rome? Marx saw history as the story of class conflict. Plutarch saw it as the story of great lives. To Livy, history was a didactic tale of good and bad. To Augustine, it was the tale of two cities, of God and of Man. More recently, history is the study of institutions, of collective human behavior, of subconscious motivation, of the subtle pursuit of power in everyday life, of the impact of anonymous forces on the individual human. History today is more sophisticated, more penetrating, than ever before. Historians employ a variety of research techniques, social-scientific models, and quantitative methodologies to accumulate greater amounts of more precise data. But our expanding knowledge masks a startling omission. Socrates confessed that his knowledge merely made him more aware of his ignorance. History, the story of human experience, tells us about the external environment in which humans act: the kingdoms, societies, institutions, schools, economic and social structures, religious systems, and worldviews of countless, varied humans. Rarely does history probe within the outer clothing to reveal our stark nakedness. Rarely does history tell about our humanness, what sets us apart from other beings, what makes each individual unique, what is that glowing ember within each of us.
History is the bad news, the chronicle of sin and crime, disaster and death, rather than the bearer of happy tidings. Marx correctly said that there would be no history if there was no conflict. Open any history book and see that the story is of war, politics, exploitation, class conflict, and the misfortune of all sorts of hapless souls. History if rarely an account of the pleasant events of the past. Gibbon told not of Rome’s virtues but of Rome’s vices, not of birth but death. To remind his readers of the glorious days of the Republic, Tacitus felt compelled to recount the crimes of the Caesars. Historians today are busy finding new skeletons in the closets of the past, telling tales of the sufferings of the disadvantaged and the exploited, rewriting history to relate the struggles of political and social minorities. To be sure, these new histories record the victories of the downtrodden just as traditional histories eulogized the heroism of select individuals during times of war and revolution. What is common to old and new histories is the tendency to select conflict as the medium for relating the perceived virtues and triumphs of past individuals. The history of love and happiness as well as the current news of good tidings are eschewed as trivial, dull, and not very marketable. Happy stories are inevitably light and comic stories. History is more apt to be ponderous and dramatic, with a touch of tragedy amid greatness. The stuff of history is as serious as the stuff of philosophy. And it is as rare to find a history of contentment as it is to find a contented philosopher.
Freud went too far in assuming that civilization is the cause of human misery. Locke’s idea of the Eden-like character of humans in the state of nature seems similarly ridiculous. Yet that we can find in almost all tragic stories of the past kernels of positive thinking, optimism, and satisfaction; that we can find in the most dismal accounts of destruction and terror grounds for hope; that amid all of the sufferings of humankind we still find humans refusing to give up—these constant examples of perseverance, faith, and patience indicate that somewhere hidden amid the external affairs of human existence, the conflicts, wars and disasters, there exists in humans a will to happiness, a core of contentment, that seems worthwhile to evoke and to portray.
Will Durant, in his monumental The Story of Civilization, says of the ancient biographer Plutarch that “it is refreshing to find a philosopher who is wise enough to be happy.”[2] Plutarch’s life contained many possible sources of discontent. A Greek living in the Roman empire, Plutarch was all too aware of the violent legacy of the Greek and Roman past. His native Chaeronea was the site four centuries earlier of the battle that destroyed the Theban Sacred Band and resulted in the loss of Greek city-state independence. Plutarch himself escaped the violence of the preceding and subsequent centuries that enclosed the Pax Romana. But like all humans Plutarch had his share of trials and grief. And if it was not enough to be cognizant of the manifold human crimes that comprise the past, Plutarch was as well a philosopher, a thinker, and hence prey to the despair and depression that ruminators feel. That Plutarch found happiness was due not so much to his wisdom or grand thoughts, rather to his dialogue with the past, because of which he found that rare strand in the web of time that inspires a benevolent and contented spirit.
Plutarch engaged the past not only in his historical works, the Parallel Lives, but in his Essays as well. In “On Contentment,” for example, Plutarch provided a common-sense approach, based on his knowledge of human experience, toward finding happiness. Some of his advice is simple and logical: do not focus on the possessions, the talents, or the fortune of others and ignore your own gifts and advantages; moderate your desires before their constant pursuit controls your life; practice positive over negative thinking; don’t struggle against, rather accept, your lot in life. Plutarch naturally followed Plato’s dictum of “know yourself”; discover what you are “naturally suited” to do and live accordingly.[3]
Plutarch himself wrote in On Contentment: “The world is a temple of the highest sacredness, and nowhere could be more suitable for divinity; and man is introduced into this world by means of his birth not to view manufactured, immobile images, but to gaze upon what Plato describes as the perceptible likenesses of intelligible things which divine intelligence has manifested as containers of an inherent principle of life and movement–the sun, moon and stars, the rivers with their continuous discharge of renewed water, and the earth with its supply of means of nourishment for plants and creatures. Life is an initiation into these things and there is no more perfect way to celebrate them; life, therefore, should be full of contentment and joy.”
Plutarch believed that contentment relies on a historical perspective. Discontent is a product of living in the fleeting present, hungering for the future, with no thought of the past, no mature contemplation of the future based on the possibilities suggested by the past. “Anything present is accessible for the minutest fraction of time and then escapes perception, and consequently foolish people think that it ceases to be relevant to us, or ceases to be ours.” One must rely on memory, keeping past experiences close at hand, making them a part of the ongoing present. The memory of past experiences represents the essence of oneself, one’s being: the self as it encompasses past, present, and future. Plutarch believed that each human has an “innate well of contentment” filled with the ongoing experiences of time’s fluidity. The variety and whims of human experience brace the thinker for the infinite possibilities of the future, good and bad, and for the one certainty of time, death. “Remember the past without ingratitude,” Plutarch counseled, “and approach the future happily and optimistically, without fear and without apprehension.”
Plutarch, who practiced what he preached, told his wife upon the death of their daughter at the age of two: “Please try . . . to use your mind as a vehicle for often returning to the time when this child of ours had not yet been born and we had no reason to blame fortune; and then connect that time with the present, and imagine that our circumstances are no different again. You see, my dear, we will seem to regret that our child was ever born if we find more to complain about now than in the situation before her birth. We must not erase the intervening two years from our memories, but since they brought happiness and joy, we must count them as pleasant. The good was brief, but should not therefore be regarded as a long-term bad influence; and we should not be ungrateful for what we received just because our further hopes were dashed by fortune.”
Plutarch wrote bios, stories of human life, discovering that: “The virtues of these great men [serve] me as a sort of looking-glass, in which I may see how to adjust and adorn my own life. Indeed, it can be compared to nothing but daily living and associating together; we receive, as it were, in our inquiry, and entertain each successive guest, . . . and select from their actions all that is noblest and worthiest to know.”[4] Plutarch sought to see the oneness of human experience, to link self with others by means of a dialogue with the past–to see oneself reflected in others’ lives.
One of Plutarch’s most avid readers over the centuries was Michel de Montaigne, who claimed that his Essays relied heavily on what he had learned from Plutarch’s Lives and Moralia. Montaigne relied on Plutarch during some of the most anxious moments of his life. Death, an all too frequent visitor for a man who lost his father, best friend, younger brother, and five children all by the time he was fifty, transfixed Montaigne. In a 1570 letter, Montaigne dedicated to his wife Francoise de La Chassaigne his friend La Boetie’s translation of Plutarch’s “Letter of Consolation to His Wife.” The couple had recently lost their first born, Thoinette, at the age of two months. Montaigne claimed that all of his feelings regarding the sad event were best summed by Plutarch, who consoled his wife upon the death of their daughter at the age of two. Montaigne and his wife had five times the experience of this most fleeting moment of life. Six daughters they conceived and brought forth: all save one died within three months. The last, Marie, died within a few days of her birth. Montaigne was (like Plutarch) not the type to bounce an infant on his knee in play. Yet to bury five infants, five wonderful examples of God’s grace, each a singular incarnation, took a significant toll on Montaigne, who characteristically (and stoically) submerged his feelings under the weight of philosophy and faith. What more proof is needed to show humans to be doomed to mirror the passing instant, overwhelmed by the passage of time, uncertain where they are going and where they have been, living only in the narcissistic moment?
Death defined Montaigne’s being. Born in1533, he spent his life on the family estates in the wine region of Bordeaux. He served for years in the Bordeaux parlement, and was an adviser to royalty. He married in 1565, just three years before his father’s death to kidney stones. The son inherited the disease five years later, and lived with it for almost twenty years before it finally killed him in 1592. Montaigne enjoyed semi-permanent retirement during these years of disease and expectation of death. He typically spent his days in his library, secluded from the rest of the chateau. There he surrounded himself with the past, with his favorite authors and their profound words, carved into the beams of the ceiling and elsewhere throughout the cylindrical room.
Montaigne wrote the course of his life into his Essays. He followed the ancient Stoics in believing that one must control one’s passions and live moderately, rid oneself of needless emotions and conquer the fear of death. Philosophy can teach us how to die, Montaigne declared, as had so many philosophers before him. But great thoughts could not turn away the fear of acquiring, and pain of having, kidney stones. In his longest essay, the Apology for Raymond Sebond, Montaigne challenged the human presumption of reason, questioned what can be known, and explored the dependence of humans upon God. His Essays are introspective, intuitive, in which he discovered the universality of his own experiences, confronted his own mortality, and discovered the means of achieving contentment. Montaigne decided that knowledge, if it could be gained, must be based on tracing his own movement over time.
Montaigne subjectively embraced his own experience as a moment of existence, but with sensitivity to the past lives of others. He developed a mature sense of historical distance while remaining empathetic toward past humans, but assumed that his own experiences were just as, if not more, important than those of Cicero and Caesar: “I would rather be an authority on myself than on Cicero. In the experience I have of myself I find enough to make me wise, if I were a good scholar. . . . The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own. . . . Let us only listen: we tell ourselves all we most need.” Montaigne recorded human history as a participant rather than as an observer. He broke from the fundamental assumption held by historians of his own time as well as by historians of antiquity of the necessary separation between the subject and object of inquiry. Montaigne was a historian of humanity because he was a historian of himself. He was aware that it is absurd for a human to try to objectively analyze humans. Who can objectively analyze one’s own self, one’s own being? The mirror image of humanity always stares right back. Montaigne turned autobiography into a general history of human experience. Montaigne argued that if we “listen” to the past “we tell ourselves all we most need.”
Montaigne refers to his Essays as “history”—not a standard, static history, but one that changes as the object of inquiry, the self, changes. “I do not portray being: I portray passing. Not the passing from one age to another . . . but from day to day, from minute to minute.” Montaigne focused on the particular, humdrum events and thoughts of his life, and in the process painted a portrait of human experience. The reader of the Essays can look at Montaigne’s life in the continuum of time, and at a given moment, and see it reflected in one’s own passing, one’s own particular moments. Montaigne’s confrontation with death, his search for happiness, his need “to live appropriately,” becomes my own. Through my dialogue with Montaigne’s past I come to see my own past.
Montaigne’s dialogue with the past was a didactic interaction with past human failure and success. Montaigne used his past, Socrates’s past, Cicero’s past, Alexander’s past, and others, to teach himself the ways of life, the keys to happiness. He learned from Socrates the philosopher’s calm approach to death, seeing the final moment as just that, a moment, nothing more. He learned from Alexander that war and conquest may be accompanied by magnanimity and humanity. He learned from Epaminondas that the most important virtues of the great and powerful are innocence and humility. He learned from Julian the ease by which one may remain chaste and abstain from drink. Solon taught Montaigne to endure the tricks of “fortune” with “tranquillity,” “contentment,” and “resolution”—the stuff of happiness. From others, less famous, Montaigne learned that preparations for death need be simple rather than concerned with “the pomp and ceremony” of the funeral march. He learned from “a simple Spartan boy” the human capacity to endure intense pain. In response to the supposed goal of philosophy to prepare one for death, Montaigne pointed to the peasants who worked his estates, who approached death with “better grace . . . than Aristotle.” “I never saw one of my peasant neighbors cogitating over the countenance and assurance with which he would pass this last hour. Nature teaches him not to think about death except when he is dying.”
Montaigne learned from twenty years of interacting with his own past, the pasts of his friends and neighbors, the pasts of his ancestors the French, Greeks, and Romans, that the study of the past teaches one to learn how “to live appropriately.” A person says, “If I had been placed in a position to manage great affairs, I would have shown what I could do”. Another says: “I have done nothing today; ‘I have spent my life in idleness’.” Montaigne responds: “What! Have you not lived?” “Have you been able to think out and manage your own life?” If so, “you have done the greatest task of all.” “We seek other conditions because we do not understand the proper use of our own, and go out of ourselves because we do not know what is within us.” To be happy one has to accept oneself. To accept oneself one has to accept the present and the past, not struggle, trying to overcome, to surpass, to vicariously change or make up for limitations or mistakes, to somehow alter the past or the present by living the anticipated future differently. One simply has to accept the past and present, which in so doing will guarantee the acceptance of the future.
Nevertheless, the most difficult human accomplishment is to accept the past. The past haunts us. We constantly struggle to engage the past, to meet its demands, to fulfill its requirements, to overcome its limitations, to exceed its boundaries. The past tells us who we should be, what we should become, how we should think, by what we should measure ourselves, what is likely to happen, what choices are available, what is inevitable and what is not. The past, being the only yardstick by which to measure experience, the only guide of the varying directions to proceed, the only judge of what to do and become (since the present is fleeting and the future unknown), controls, dominates, oppresses, even forms us.
Acceptance of the past is the most elusive phenomenon in human experience. Think how different the world would be had Hitler accepted himself as a young artist in Vienna before World War I, had he accepted Germany’s defeat in 1918. Great was world change because of eighteenth-century intellectuals such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who refused to accept British colonial rule. Much of the same can be said of explorers such as John Smith and Christopher Columbus, both of whom impatiently drove themselves forward in search of wealth and fame—and the world was henceforth irrevocably changed. What if Luther and Calvin had been enraptured more with piety than with politics? Yet the Medieval and early Modern Popes and their secular counterparts in western European kingdoms were unequaled in their hubris and delight in the fleeting and transient. European affairs have always been marked by resistance, whether it be those like the Hebrews who resisted oppression with bloodshed, those like the Romans who resisted peace and anonymity for war and glory, or those like the Athenian philosophers who resisted silent contemplation to pronounce revealed truth.
The past oppresses in so many ways. One constantly judges oneself according to what one has been (and based on what one has been, what one hopes to be). One judges oneself according to what parents, friends, society, country have been. In America at the beginning of the third millennium, Anno Domini, the past demands success, money, good looks, great career, big house, two cars, happy suburban lifestyle, thin waist and strong muscles, youthful good looks—in sum an independent, materialistic, narcissistic approach to life. Those who think they are rebellious are rebelling against the dimensions and restrictions of the past. The past tells one to be happy and carefree, unafraid of death, living forever in the sun, young and exciting, progressive, being the best one can be—to be anxious, scared, passive, old, conservative is to be overwhelmed rather than liberated by the past. History shows with countless examples that the burden of the past occurs in all societies. Two centuries ago the past so dominated a group of restless Americans that they rebelled against England to secure for the future the benefits of the conservative and traditional British Constitution. The claims of the Christian past and the search to recreate the Christian societies of the first century, Anno Domini, drove the English Puritans of the seventeenth century to cross the Atlantic and to settle New England. The art and literature of the Renaissance, the greatness of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, derived simply from their attempt to imitate past models of writing and sculpture. Medieval and modern science was for centuries the story of trying to live up to, then to disprove, Aristotle. Rome built its empire on its piety to the past. Clearly each human constructs an identity based on the past, both one’s personal past and the past as represented by society and culture.
Modern historians endeavor to control the past thereby surpassing its limitations in the present and the future. Through the process of exhaustive research and interpretation the historian makes the past conform to an image of the present and an expectation for the future. Yet as Augustine argued, the past cannot be relived, only recalled, re-experienced in the mind, the analysis of which points out limitations and mistakes, errors to be corrected. One reviews the past out of discontent, not because of happiness. He who is happy has no need for the past; the present alone matters, and the contentment felt now, at this moment. One yearns for the future because of dissatisfaction just as one pines for the past because of dissatisfaction. The standard cliché respecting the utility of historical inquiry is that history helps one learn from the past to prevent repeating the same mistakes in the present. One studies history as a corrective, a stimulant, a confession, an absolution to counter the mistakes, depression, guilt, and yearning for forgiveness that one feels in the immediate moment. The past is a tonic or a purgative depending upon the needs of the moment.
The discontent of civilization is what makes historical inquiry relevant. If we understood the essence of civilization, the ins and outs of change and conflict, why civilizations last as long as they do and why they eventually decline, why Rome fell, perhaps we would discover a basis for contentment. Unfortunately historical inquiry is itself, like human civilization, tenuous and relative, inconsistent and changing. Historians admit that each generation remakes the past to fit its own present and perceived future. Interpretations of the causes of major world events change from decade to decade. Each generation of thinkers seems convinced that their methods and answers reflect the truth even as a new generation of younger thinkers erects new paradigms.
Particularly during the past several centuries the answers to questions of history and the search for contentment have been elusive. Traditional Christian society offered to humans a sense of security and belonging, a sense of truth and reality, a sense of authority. But beginning in the Renaissance and continuing through the Enlightenment to today we find a questioning of the traditional authorities of knowledge, ethics, and beliefs. The Industrial Revolution brought a challenge to the community, to traditional social classes and republican modes of government. Old forms of certainty and truth in the twentieth century were quite abandoned–this is true for any society that has seen its traditional organic, agrarian structures fall to social and geographic mobility, modern communications, the impersonality of the city, bureaucratization—all of the characteristics of modernization. Without the old structures and universals of agrarian life the individual is released into a world that provides few absolutes. The individual searches for meaning, but finds, according to modern social scientists, alienation, loneliness, and anomie. Rather than achieving meaning from the community, as in the traditional society, the modern individual finds meaning in artificial groups without the sanction of time or nature. Some individuals turn within for comfort, find meaning in self-satisfaction, in narcissism. One serves oneself not God, Church, Society. To focus on oneself and one’s happiness is not bad, but to do so without any sense of truth leads to unhappiness. If all one can do is give oneself pleasure in the immediate moment without a sense of pursuing or living for a higher object, one is not going to be very happy—Augustine’s Confessions teaches us this lesson. If current structures in society do not help a person find meaning, if religious institutions fail to inspire knowledge of God, if government grants no role, if there is no clear sense of community, if one exists in an impersonal environment—then either the structures have to change to accommodate the search for meaning, or the individual must find a different source of meaning.
History, all inquiries, or historia, of natural and human affairs in the past, have always promised knowledge, progress, contentment, wisdom. If natural history—science–was going to deliver progress and peace and happiness, something went wrong. What? Is there a reason why historical knowledge, scientific knowledge, has failed us? It is because of the fallacy of objectivity, the fallacy of cause and effect, the fallacy of the historical and scientific methods, which provide us with general knowledge about things outside of ourselves, but not knowledge of ourselves, which is the only means by which true progress, true knowledge and wisdom and contentment, can occur.
One of the casualties of science, of all scholarship during the past century and a half, is the division of faith and reason, which for centuries was considered united; now it is divided, and for the worst, as knowledge, contentment, peace cannot be considered through the objective mindset, but must rely on the subjective, the self, and the self’s relationship with the Other, the numinous, God.
History is human and natural, is subjective and objective, involves the public and the person, the group and the self. Personal history is as important as public, general, human history. The history of self is a means to make history mean something. But the self is not alone. The self is surrounded by others, by the Other, whether that Other is the human race, all life, nature, the ultimate reality, God. Whenever a person tries to fit himself amid something larger, it is a spiritual quest, a means by which to extend what is the core of self, the soul or spirit, out to others, to engage in a dialogue to influence and be influenced, to know and have others know, to find a place to fit and be content.
All knowledge, all science, all religion, the search for truth, the questions and answers of existence, are historical in nature because of time; passing time means that the past is the only repository of information that we can examine besides the fleeting moment, which appears inadequate upon which to base knowledge. We are so tied to cause and effect, sequence of events, that we of necessity rely on the past to provide us with knowledge and wisdom. So knowledge, contentment, wisdom, and progress are united with time and history, which involves the group and the individual, personal and human history.
Because of this reliance on time and history, humans focus on central events in the past to provide meaning, a point of reference. Significant events help humans gain bearings, so to speak, in their own lives and communities. If we examine the means by which humans gain meaning in time, it is by measuring its passing in minutes, hours, days, weeks, years. We keep track of our years, our time, and automatically measure everything according to our own personal history. Humans have latched onto dating systems and chronologies as the means by which we keep track of ourselves vis a vis others in time. We keep track of where we are in terms of our own passing, our own age, and the passing of our own time, our generation, and the passing of centuries, even millennia. There have been and are many different kinds of dating systems. The one universal dating system upon which governments, business, travel, and education are based is to measure years chronologically according to centuries and millennia. We date according to Common Era (CE) and Before Common Era (BCE) to provide reference of human passing over time. But what do these mean, CE and BCE? Upon what are they based? Where do they derive? The birth of the child Jesus—the incarnation. Time as we measure it today is linked to a religious, even a supernatural, moment.
To look at this moment, to see what happened upon which we base our lives, chronologically, is to discover what is missing, to see why the promise of history and knowledge has passed us by, to discover what the true source of contentment might be.
The Conundrum of the Present
I am…
William James, an avid reader of the Meditations of the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, once commented on a “’curious paradox’ found in Aurelius, namely that all life equaled the present but the present was too short to have significance.”[5] The Meditations is a diary meant only for the author written sporadically in consolation, expression, rumination, joy, and sorrow. Marcus Aurelius was at heart a Stoic philosopher whom fate had thrust into a position of utter responsibility as leader of a state of millions of people. During his reign, from 161 to 180, Anno Domini, the Roman Empire suffered military disasters and plague. Aurelius found himself usually not in Rome but encamped on the Danube River facing Germanic invaders. That Stoicism taught human equality and the brotherhood of all mankind was not lost on Aurelius, who resented his military duties and ruminated about the nature and meaning of life. He based his ideas of the brevity and insignificance of life, the irrelevance of fame and glory, and the ignorance and depravity of humanity, on the contemplation of his own thought and experiences in light of the thoughts and experiences of other, past humans. “Think of the countless changes in which you yourself have had a part,” he told himself on one occasion. Then, broadening his awareness of other humans, he considered “the times of [the Roman emperor] Vespasian; and what do you see? Men and women busy marrying, bringing up children, sickening, dying, fighting, feasting, chaffering, farming, flattering, bragging, envying, scheming, calling down curses, grumbling at fate, loving, hoarding, coveting thrones and dignities. Of all that life, not a trace survives today. . . . Take a similar look a the records of other past ages and peoples; mark how one and all, after their short-lived strivings, passed away and were resolved into the elements.”[6]
Aurelius clearly perceived existence in terms of the present as a “moment” in time. But this awareness was based not on a restricted perception of time and existence, rather on a broad perspective, to the degree that Aurelius could conceive of one’s life as a solitary moment amid the many moments that make up existence as a whole. “In the life of a man, his time is but a moment.” Life for Aurelius was a continuum of movement from past to future, a seamless process, a flowing, the stops or moments of which reduce to nothingness. Whereas another might see one’s life as an end in itself, a complete teleological whole, Aurelius understood life as just a moment in something much greater, something incomprehensible. As just a moment in time, the duration of life is insignificant. “Were you to live three thousand years, or even thirty thousand, remember that the sole life which a man can lose is that which he is living at the moment. . . . This means that the longest life and the shortest amount to the same thing.”[7]
Historians often assume that a true sense of history depends upon a sense of linear movement such as Christians developed during the first millennium, Anno Domini, since secularized into the historicism of our own age. Aurelius’s sense of history was cyclical: “all the cycles of creation since the beginning of time exhibit the same recurring pattern, so that it can make no difference whether you watch the identical spectacle for a hundred years, or for two hundred, or for ever.” But hidden within this cyclical sense of time was a broad historical perspective. In his awareness of the transience of life in the rapid movement of time, in his belief that past, present, and future lives are similarly brief and insignificant in the scale of time, Aurelius was able to break from the constraints of the moment to see in the future what is in the present, what was in the past. We see all three strands of time in his statement that “the good man’s only singularity lies in his approving welcome to every experience the looms of fate may weave for him.” This man who lived in the moment constantly anticipated the future from the perspective of the past: “keep before your eyes the swift onset of oblivion, and the abysses of eternity before us and behind.” With such awareness Aurelius was able to see that existence “is not mere sequence alone, but an order that is just and right.” The varied moments yield a transcendent truth. His life, moment by moment, was an attempt to be “in tune with every note of thy great harmony,” to live a life that conforms to truth.”[8]
Aurelius lived each moment, “every one of life’s experiences,” trying to gauge “its worth to the universe,” to the whole. Believing that in the “present moment” is found “all that has been since time began, and all that shall be unto the world’s end,” seeing “virtue” as a transcending force, he tried to cultivate “the divine spirit within me” to achieve such virtue so as to gain awareness of the whole. To develop “holiness within” was to yield “selfless action without.”[9] Inner knowledge and consequent action consistent with the order and harmony of the universe derive from an awareness of time, the human past, and one’s personal past, which spawns a sense of well-being, a contentment with oneself, happiness.
Marcus Aurelius’s death in 180 inaugurated a period of slow decline that resulted in the Fall of the Roman Empire. Thinkers at the end of the second into the third and fourth centuries tried to find meaning at a time when society seemed old and decayed, humans were weighed down with sin and suffering, and the world as they had known it was coming to an end. Some sought an escape to a new and better reality by means of the mind. This was certainly true of the third century Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus, who believed that the means of achieving the divine lies within the self–to unite with the ultimate reality, the One, in an ecstatic transformation. Gnostic philosophers and Christians believed that reality is nonmaterial, noncorporeal, hence must be ignored, neglected, or punished. This period from the third to the fifth century, Anno Domini, was the time of the great desert hermits and self-mutilators such as Simon Stylites, who believed that the body has nothing to do with personal identity, indeed hampers man’s experience with the divine world. Total sexual abstinence was extremely popular; some fanatics castrated themselves; others refused to bathe; some loaded chains on their bodies to purge it of sin; others practically starved themselves in the name of purity. Such actions implied tremendous guilt, which appears to have been a common experience as a response by individuals and groups to the growing problems of the Roman Empire, such as civil war, famine, epidemics, violence, and apathy.
The centuries of the Later Roman Empire were years of conflict between two different expressions of the same civilization. The polytheistic, superstitious, pantheistic pagans, who watched constantly for divine signs to indicate the course of the future, became the quasi-monotheistic, similarly superstitious Christians who conceived of a variety of supernatural forces of both good and evil who waged war over the Christian soul. There were more similarities than differences between paganism and Christianity, so that it was common to find, during the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, anno domini, Christians who like the philosopher Boethius could not quite rid themselves of their pagan proclivities, and pagans who like the emperor Constantine were sufficiently attracted to Christianity to approach full conversion.
Constantine, the first Christian emperor, came to power after the third century of almost complete chaos and war. Roman armies fought Roman armies in bloody civil wars. Roman generals declared themselves Emperor only to die at the hands of other Roman generals with similar claims. From 235 to 384 there were 26 emperors; all save one died a violent death. This period of civil war was brought to a temporary halt by the emperor Diocletian, who imposed an autocratic rule over the Romans, including the establishment of a system of imperial power, the Tetrarchy (an Augustus of the West and of the East and subordinate Caesar of the West and of the East), designed to prevent succession problems and civil war; each of four leaders ruled a region called a prefecture. Diocletian sought to root out any subversion to his absolute authority. He believed that Christians, refusing to worship the traditional gods, were subversive, hence several years of bloody persecution ensued.
In 305 Diocletian, who had ruled Rome for twenty years, abdicated in favor of two new emperors (Augusti) and two Caesars (lieutenants to the Augusti), one of whom was Constantine Chlorus, father of Constantine. Contantine grew up at the court of Diocletian, learning from the emperor, eventually serving as a soldier. With Diocletian’s abdication Constantius Chlorus was named Augustus; Constantine, passed over as Caesar, returned to Britain to be with his father. However after a brief reign of a year, Constantius Chlorus died–the Roman legions of Britain proclaimed Constantine heir and emperor. Diocletian’s Tetrarchy had clearly failed, particularly because of Rome’s age-old problem that if a military commander had the support of troops, he could proclaim himself Augustus. Constantine’s rivals were many, which turned into civil war, out of which Constantine slowly emerged triumphant. At the Battle of Milvian Bridge, 312 anno domini, Constantine defeated his chief rival Maxentius. On the eve of battle, Constantine had a vision of a blazing cross in the sky. His success convinced Constantine to embrace the deity of the cross. Upon his conversion, Constantine became a Christian with pagan undertones, as he remained devoted to the pagan sun-god, Sol Invictus.
Constantine’s Christianity was of the most elementary kind, the intricacies and subtleties of his adopted religion escaping the emperor, making him a pawn for the many bishops who had political and theological agenda. Constantine ruled as Augustus of the West while Licinius was Augustus of the East. After sharing power with others for decades Constantine finally defeated Licinius in 324 and became sole emperor of Rome. A Christian emperor, he threw his autocratic weight in terms of wealth and power behind the Church, providing exemptions of service and taxation for the clergy, granting the Church tremendous wealth, allowing bishops significant influence over his decisions.
In the year 325, at Nicaea in western Turkey, bishops from throughout the Roman Empire came by order of Constantine to reach a unified position on the many divisive issues facing the Church, chief of which was the question of the role of Jesus Christ in the Church, and whether or not Jesus is the logos, eternally at one with God the Father, or the Created Son, not co-eternal, rather subordinate to the Father. One of the most significant documents in the history of Christianity emerged from the Council of Nicaea: the Nicene Creed, which proclaimed the Triune God, which became the basis for the Christianity of western and eastern Europe. Even today millions of Christians proclaim the Nicene Creed as their statement of faith.
A year later, however, Constantine accused Crispus, his eldest son, and Fausta, his wife and daughter of Maximian, former emperor with Diocletian, of unknown conspiracies; both were executed. The executions revealed Constantine’s credulous and suspicious personality as well as the autocratic conceptions of his own power. Constantine’s family had divergent loyalties, a house of intrigue and violence–and yet it was the leading Christian family of the empire.
Constantine died in 337; on his deathbed he was baptized, cleansing himself from his many sins. Constantine left the Empire to his three surviving sons, Constantine II, Constans, and Constantius II, co-emperors of Rome. Predictably, upon the emperor’s death the many stored-up rivalries and ambitions among his brothers, nephews, cousins, and sons came to a head. A blood-bath ensued, and many members of the House of Constantine were eliminated. In time the three sons of Constantine became rivals for power, and periodic civil conflict continued.
The transition from paganism to Christianity reached a climax during the fourth century, an age of great pagan philosophers and orators such as Julian, Themistius, Libanius, and Symmachus and influential Christian apologists and theologians such as Eusebius, Ausonius, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine. The Roman Empire of this time bridged not only differing religious expressions but different cultural and linguistic traditions, Latin and Greek, as well as disparate political traditions—republicanism and authoritarianism—and different continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. Ruling for twenty-four years (337-361) over this complex, diverse empire was the emperor Constantius II, son of Constantine. Constantius was an Arian Christian whose reign is memorable for its protection and promotion of Christian institutions and theology. Historians then and since, finding in Constantius’s philosophic, heroic successor Julian a character more to their liking, have generally maligned Constantius as a paranoid, murderous tyrant. Suspicious and cautious he was indeed, as well as a warrior and judge with blood on his hands. Constantius, interestingly, also was an active promoter of Christ’s Kingdom who simultaneously considered himself a philosopher in the best Hellenic tradition. Constantius was a normal, neither brilliant nor superior, man whom birth elevated to leadership of an artificial, decaying structure of social and political institutions. His personal life of insecurity and searching mirrored the Late Roman Empire. Artificial material and structural forms of order took the place of organic expressions of order and harmony represented by love. Constantius, had he the ability to break from the constraints of duty and artificially-imposed roles and responsibilities, might have found agreement with a theologian who was a mere boy at the emperor’s death in 361. Perhaps it was Augustine’s childhood memories that helped to formulate his adult theory to explain the demise of Rome. Human structures and institutions, created in time according to human passions, desires, and limitations, never match their intended goals, however idealistic, and are doomed to fail. Only those human constants of love, which are unable to be fully institutionalized, will in the end succeed, become ends in themselves. Love, the philosophy in a nutshell of the Son of Man, was the common ground of Aristotelian virtue, Platonic idealism, the philosophy of the Stoics, the search of the Gnostics, and the messianic aims of the Hebrews. Amid the destruction of temples and cities and deaths of countless thousands at the end of the ancient world was love undaunted.
Augustine’s though matured during the late fourth century when the Roman Empire staggered under a series of internal and external blows. Internally, centuries of civil war had taken its toll on manpower, the Greco-Roman city, thought and culture, and the general sense of well being of the individual Roman. Autocratic emperors had removed any vestiges of once Republican Rome. Slavery and serfdom were on the rise. Cities were places of vice and filth. At the same time a variety of less “civilized” peoples on Rome’s borders sought to enjoy the wealth, infrastructure, and civilization of the Roman Empire. Parthians to the east, Germanic tribes to the north, and Numidians and Berbers to the south put constant, unrelenting pressure on the borders of the Empire. At various times these peoples pierced holes, as it were, in the armor of the Empire’s defenses. One such occasion was the Battle of Adrianople in 378, where Roman emperor Valens died at the hands of the invading Goths.
In 410, the unthinkable occurred, when Goths under Alaric entered and sacked the city of Rome, which had been spared such violence for eight hundred years. Romans wondered what were the causes of such catastrophes plaguing the Empire. Pagans argued that the reason for Rome’s troubles was the abandonment of the worship of the traditional gods, such as Jupiter, whose anger was bringing the Empire to a halt. The Christians were to blame for substituting a new religion for the traditional beliefs of early Rome. The Christian bishop of the city of Hippo in North Africa, Aurelius Augustine, took exception to these attacks on Christianity. He decided to write a book in response. The City of God became one of the great religious treatises of all time, and provided a clear answer to the question, What caused the Fall of Rome?
Aurelius Augustine’s answer was twofold. On a grand scale of human history, he argued that there are two cities, the City of Man and the City of God. The former is corrupt, sinful, the heir to the original sin of Adam; the latter is timeless, eternal, untouched by sin and evil. The former City of Man, humans and their institutions, will never succeed at approaching the absolute truth and harmony of the City of God while on this earth and subject to the consequences of sin. Just as the body slowly ages and decays and death awaits all humans, likewise human institutions—such as the Roman Empire—age, decay, and die. Romans often referred to the city of Rome as the Eternal City; but this is completely false, Augustine argued, for nothing created by human hands can be eternal. Rome, then, is destined to fall, just as all empires, all institutions, all human creations, each human, is destined to fall, to die. Live life with your eyes on the City of God, and await your destiny, after death, of becoming a citizen of that Eternal City.
How precisely does one became a citizen of the Eternal City of God? Augustine used the story of life, in this case his own, to find the answer. Introspective even when growing up in the North African city of Thagaste, arrogance and vanity compelled him to reject his mother Monica’s Christian teachings to pursue success and fame as a scholar and orator. Sin drove him to unhappiness even as he sought happiness through philosophy. Cicero and Roman Stoicism had an early influence on Augustine, who found appealing the Stoic notions of humanitas: a common humanity, equality, and the dignity of humankind. The Stoics emphasized human experience as the key to happiness, but all of Augustine’s attempts to unlock the door failed. During these years of his late teens and twenties Augustine was a materialist who, when Stoicism could not provide sufficient answers, sought elsewhere. The words of his autobiography, Confessions, exudes the pain of recollection that he strayed so far as to embrace an eastern materialistic philosophy, Manicheism. Augustine sought from the Manicheists an explanation of the pain and sorrow he felt, the evil within him. The Manicheist solution was simple: evil has a material presence within oneself; likewise the material of good can be increased or decreased depending upon lifestyle. Manicheism, however, did not bring him contentment.
In pursuit of success–in pursuit of truth–Augustine migrated to Rome, then to Milan, where he taught rhetoric. At Milan he came under the influence of the Bishop, Ambrose. Augustine admired Ambrose, who influenced Augustine to begin a reassessment of Christian scripture, which Augustine had long considered with disdain as filled with fantastic stories that did not even make eloquent reading. But, Ambrose suggested and Augustine considered, what if the stories of the Old and New Testaments were allegories of more profound spiritual phenomena? Meanwhile Augustine read Neoplatonist philosophers such as Plotinus, who helped to convince Augustine that truth is spiritual not material, and that sin is not a substance but willful error in behavior.
Slowly, under the onslaught of the appeals of his mother, the sermons of St. Ambrose, and Neoplatonic arguments that reality is spiritual, Augustine turned to Christianity. He studied the Scriptures, particularly the Epistles of the Apostle Paul. He found in Paul a rational theology of a mind equal to his own.
At this point living at Milan, wealthy, successful, and famous, understanding the contributions to human understanding of the Stoics, Neoplatonists, and Manicheists, deeply influenced by Ambrose and his own mother, Monica, Augustine now realized that his experiences were Paul’s experiences. Paul, too, had been burdened by the reality of sin, the constant helpless recognition of his own willfulness and error. Notwithstanding his new awareness, Augustine found the struggle with the flesh defeated his desire for chaste living. Eventually sin and unhappiness drove him to a pinnacle of personal anguish where he sought the strength to control his temporal desires. While in the garden at the home of a friend, Augustine broke down into tears during which he heard a child’s voice cry, “Take it and read, take it and read.” Augustine answered the child’s call by turning to Paul’s Epistles and reading the first passage upon which his eyes fell, which was Paul’s comment, “Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” The words hit home and Augustine was changed, born again.
What is most fascinating about his conversion experience was the child’s voice. What really happened? Was it the wind? Was it Augustine’s imagination? Perhaps it was his unconscious mind, the voice of despair from his sinful youth. Upon hearing the voice Augustine’s first response was to think “hard whether there was any kind of game in which children used to chant words like these”–clearly it was an auditory event. But why a child’s voice? Why not a blinding light or a booming expression of omnipotence? Notwithstanding Augustine’s beliefs respecting original sin, a child represents innocence if for no other reason than that a child is beginning, newness, potential–and the future awaits. A child best represents humanity in its purity, for it is new to the world, and in its questioning, its wide-eyed wonder. It is not surprising that the Gospel writers Matthew and Luke began their stories of the life of Jesus with tales of his birth. Their message was that the Messiah was ever youthful, ever innocent, ever pure, ever simply human–uncorrupted, unmoved, by civilization. The child symbolizes the inherent equality and dignity of humanity; the child is a model of humanity, transcending time and place: what can be less unique, less an individual, than a newborn? Augustine’s experience of the voice of the child was all things and more: imagination, the unconscious mind, the wind blowing, a thought and a memory, corporeal and auditory, distinctly heard in a passing instant. The voice was all the phenomena, events, thoughts, and feelings that make up an individual human–a transcendent occurrence in a single moment of time.
Based on this experience, Augustine wrote the Confessions, which recounts his life from childhood to middle age, tells the story of his conversion, and traces his passage over time. In examining time, he became aware that neither the past nor the future exist, only the fleeting present of no duration. Augustine discovered the human quandary of how to achieve knowledge in the passing moments of fluid experience. Augustine concluded that time is the experience of each individual’s mind as it recalls the past by memory, awaits the future by expectation, and gauges the present by momentary awareness.
He illustrated his idea of time by means of the recitation of a psalm: “Once I have begun, as much of the psalm as I have removed from the province of expectation and relegated to the past now engages my memory, and the scope of the action which I am performing is divided between the two faculties of memory and expectation, the one looking back to the part which I have already recited, the other looking forward to the part which I have still to recite. But my faculty of attention is present all the while, and through it passes what was the future in the process of becoming the past.” Augustine transformed such a humble example taken from any random moment of a person’s experience into an explanation for human history itself. “What is true of the whole psalm is also true of all its parts and of each syllable. It is true of any longer action in which I may be engaged and of which the recitation of the psalm may only be a small part. It is true of a man’s whole life, of which all his actions are parts. It is true of the whole history of mankind, of which each man’s life is a part.” Time, the movement from future to present to past, hence history, is completely personal, in the mind, an individual’s fleeting recollection of events experienced either vicariously or actually.
The Confessions portrays Augustine’s personal experience of time as the human experience of time. Birth and death, creation and judgment, were the beginning and the end of Augustine’s life-span of seventy-six years. His life was one of infancy and childhood, rather like the creation of Adam and Eve and the age of the Patriarchs. His teen years were similar to the Hebrew sufferings in Egypt and the wanderings in the wilderness. His twenties were like the years of the kings of Israel and Judah and the captivity in Babylon. The millennium after King David were centuries of expectation of the Messiah; likewise Augustine’s young adult years were in expectation of the truth. Then it came in an instant: the voice of the child, the incarnation of Christ, a moment in time when God became Man in Augustine’s experience. His subsequent years were filled with memories of the grand event—likewise Christians have recalled the life and death of Jesus and have tried to use memory to confront their own individual presents and futures as they have approached, collectively, the end.
Augustine’s view of personal time, as expressed in the Confessions, found few adherents in the coming years, because it implied the self not society, a personal relationship with God rather than the Church. At the same time, his scheme of history as described in the City of God, of an omniscient God in charge of a Heavenly City toward which the inhabitants of the sinful City of Man strive to gain entrance, was embraced by Christians over the next thousand years as providing a wonderful corollary to the growing power of the Church, and the notion that the Church was the guardian of the Holy City in an otherwise dismal world.
Augustine’s theories of time and history were symbolic and contemplative if difficult to experience. Christians before and after his age were looking for a system of measuring the passage of time that would bring relevance to their lives as they awaited the coming City of God. Theologians and chronologers were particularly concerned with dating the Resurrection, that is, Easter. They had to rely on a motley of Greek, Roman, and Hebrew dating systems, until Dionysius Exiguus, in the sixth century, tried to base the reckoning of the dates of Easter not according to the older systems, rather according to a new system based on the greatest event in human history, the incarnation of Christ. He used Luke 3,1 (John the Baptist appeared during the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius, 28-29) combined with Luke 3:23 (Jesus was about 30 years old when he began his ministry), to estimate the year 1 (the first year or the year of our Lord, Anno Domini).
The birth of God become man, the nativity of the Son of God, the act of the Word becoming flesh, the incarnation of Christ, the Messiah, is the central moment in human history if for no other reason than that the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem two thousand years ago has made such a profound impact on human expression, thought, and institutions. This statement should go without saying, but if it does not, then consider the following most obvious example of the continuing impact of the Incarnation. The year of this writing, 2014, is a numerical symbol for a solar year, the 2014th since some important event, so important an event that clocks, calendars, cell phones, governments, security agencies, world financial institutions, and more, base their systems, their very institutional beings, on an event that happened so long ago. How did this dating system emerge, and around what event? The answer to the former question is long and complex, covering centuries of attempts to erect chronological systems around the event, which was like so many other such events that occur everyday and have occurred everyday for the past thousands of years: the birth of a child.
One might assume that an event so important to world history would have been and is well known and celebrated around the world on its anniversary—and it is. One might assume that such a significant event would likewise be so well known in all of its details that the exact time, place, setting, time, and chronology compared to other events would be well known—but not so. Strangely, arriving at a correct date for the birth of Jesus of Nazareth has long been a perplexing, unsolvable problem. Jesus could have been born during any one of a range of a dozen years two millennia ago. Of these, the least probable year for his birth is the year 1. There exist only two sources, the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke, which provide any information whatsoever about this central event in the history of humankind. Yet the two Gospels cannot be reconciled chronologically. Indeed, the four sources that purport to provide biographical portraits of Jesus–Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John–as a whole provide limited contradictory accounts of his birth. And yet the birth of Jesus of Nazareth is considered the central even in human history by the religion, Christianity, with the most adherents worldwide, and it has for centuries been the basis for the world’s most commonly accepted dating system: the linear system of Ante Christos (BC) and Anno Domini (AD), since euphemistically renamed Before the Common Era (BCE) and Common Era (CE).
Time is so important to humans individually, collectively, personally, and institutionally. Yet what is known of time? What is it? Theologians, philosophers, and historians for centuries have tried to uncover the true nature, to comprehend, time. Is time an artificial measure, a tool by which humans trace their own existence? Or, does time have an independent existence, a phenomenon separate from human experience? Is time geologic, the earth carving a temporal path from its beginning to its end? Is time dependent upon human awareness?—hence without humans to know and trace it time is meaningless, nonexistent. Is time an absolute, a constant that can be measured with mechanical devices, a certainty that, as Newton believed, has very little fluctuation, hence allows humans the confidence to base our lives upon it? Clocks, chronometers, and calendars help us to safely trace the passing of years, days, months, which gives us meaning, helps us to know ourselves and our world. Or is time relative, as Einstein believed? Einstein argued in the theory of relativity that time depends on movement, that a person who travels at an extremely high rate of speed experiences time differently than a person at rest. Since it depends upon the experience of an individual, time is inconstant and fluctuating, governed by outside forces, significant only insofar as it yields for each person a way to gauge personal movement. According to the theory of relativity, one person’s time is not the same as another person’s time. Although time appears to move quickly in the twenty-first century because humans move rapidly, coming and going, and information is quickly exchanged, seemingly in an instant, does this mean an individual perceives time any differently than someone from the past, say in first-century Rome? Does a person’s bodily movement, the movement of the mind, the aging process, change with changing technology, with rapidity of motion? Is it important to know one’s age or date of birth, to know the year, the month, the day, the hour, the minute, the second? What does it mean to regulate institutions, government, the most minute human events, according to the passage of seconds, minutes, and hours? Does an individual experience life differently by knowing the precise time according to satellites, cellular devices, computers, and atomic clocks?
The Gospel of Matthew records the birth of Jesus as occurring toward the end of the reign of Herod the Great, King of Judaea, who died in the year 4 Ante Christos/Before the Common Era. Matthew’s Gospel portrays the world as in need of a savior; then a star appeared, followed by visitors, the magi, coming from the East. Through the magi, according to Matthew, Herod learned of the birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem, which led the desperate king to order the murder of all children in Bethlehem under the age of two years, according to the period during which the child was purportedly born. Matthew’s account has little precision in terms of actual events, placing several isolated episodes together into one not entirely convincing narrative. Matthew wrote in Greek, the language of learning in the Roman Empire, of which Judaea was a part. The dating systems used at this time in the Roman Empire were Roman and Greek. According to the former, Roman system, Jesus of Nazareth was born about 749-751, a.u.c. (ab urbe condita, from the legendary founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus). According to the Greek dating system, Jesus of Nazareth was born at the end of the 193rd Olympiad or beginning of the 194th Olympiad (an Olympiad having occurred every four years since its founding almost 770 years before)–in short, 6-4, Ante Christos, Before the Common Era.
Luke, who professed at the beginning of his gospel to give his readers an accurate and complete story of the life of Jesus, provided two different accounts of Jesus’s birth that would result in two contradictory dates. Like Matthew, Luke, in chapter one, used episodic accounts, bringing into his narrative the stories of the visits of the angel Gabriel to Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, and Mary mother of Jesus. According to these stories, Jesus was born six months after the birth of John the Baptist, which occurred near the end of the reign of King Herod, which conforms with Matthew’s dating system. Unlike Matthew, however, Luke’s account, in chapters two and three, also provides chronological facts by which to date the birth of Jesus. Luke’s gospel implies simultaneity to several events: the creation of the province of Judaea by the Romans after almost a half century of rule by Herod and Herod Archelaus; Augustus Caesar’s ordering of a census; the subsequent rebellion of Judas of Galilee; and the appointment of Quirinius as Governor of Syria. Luke’s system of dating according to simultaneous public events is as sophisticated as the best Roman historians of the first century. According to Luke, Jesus was born in 760 a.u.c. or two years after the 196th Olympiad (i.e., 6 Anno Domini, Common Era).
In Luke, chapter three, the historian dated the beginning of Jesus’s ministry to several simultaneous public events: the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was Procurator of Judaea; Herod Antipas was Tetrarch of Galilee; Philip, son of Herod, was Tetrarch of Ituraea and Trachonitis; Lysanias was Tetrarch of Abilene; and high priests of the Sanhedrin were Annas and his son Caiaphas. Luke also stated in chapter 3, verse 23, that Jesus was about thirty years old when he began his ministry. Had Luke been exact regarding Jesus’s age at this time, then it would be clear that he was born a few years after the death of King Herod, about 1 or 2 Ante Christos/Before the Common Era. Luke’s vague statement in 3:23 does not, however, accord with Matthew, or even with Luke’s earlier statements regarding the incarnation.
Subsequent chronologers who tried to date the birth of Jesus of necessity relied on Matthew and Luke supplemented by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. In his Antiquities and History of the Jewish War, Josephus provided confirmation of some of the events and rulers listed in Luke, chapter two. Josephus’ difficulties in dating events is illustrated by his chronology of the Roman destruction of the temple. Rather than relying on the Roman system of ab urbe conditia of the Greek system of Olympiads, Joseph used a Hebrew system according to significant events and the rule of kings: “From its first foundation by King Solomon to its present destruction, which occurred in the second year of Vespasian’s reign, was a period of 1,130 years, 7 months, 15 days; from its rebuilding in the second year of King Cyrus, for which Haggai was responsible, to its capture under Vespasian was 639 years, 45 days.”[10]
The problem facing chronologers was, besides the inherent contradictions in the gospels of Matthew and Luke and the lack of an account of Jesus’s birth in the other two gospel writers Mark and John, that ancient historians and scientists disagreed upon which chronological system to use to date events. The great Athenian historian, Thucydides, relied on the reigns of Spartan ephors and Athenian archons to provide dates in his account of the Peloponnesian War. The Greek historian Polybius in his Histories used the more accurate and, from the standpoint of the Greeks, universal dating system of the Olympiads. The Roman historians Livy, writing during the reign of Augustus, and Tacitus, writing about a hundred years later during the reign of Domitian, used, besides the Olympiads, the system of dating events from the founding of the city of Rome (ab urbe conditia). In subsequent centuries, however, Christian writers, unwilling to rely on pagan dating systems, wished for a chronological system based on religious events. Eusebius of Caesarea, writing during the reign of Constantine, added to the pagan dating systems and the chronology of Josephus a hypothetical chronological scheme beginning with the birth of the Patriarch Abraham. Yet three hundred years after the incarnation, Eusebius still struggled to date the birth of Christ: “It was the forty-second year of Augustus’s reign, and the twenty-eighth after the subjugation of Egypt and the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt, when our Saviour and Lord, Jesus Christ, at the time of the first registration, while Quirinius was governor of Syria, in accordance with the prophecies about Him, was born in Bethlehem, in Judaea.”[11]
Aurelius Augustine, born a few decades after Eusebius’s death, provided an alternative to formal chronologies and history, dating systems, and the record of public events. Augustine realized that the incarnation and resurrection cannot really be understood according to reason and logic, the stuff upon which chronologies and dating systems are based. The New Testament itself, specifically the Gospel of John, provides support for Augustine’s method of personal time to understand the incarnation and its significance.
Unlike Mark, John does not altogether ignore the birth of Christ; instead, he finds it irrelevant. Jesus is the eternal word, the logos, not born in the traditional sense of created by God in the act of conception in the woman’s womb, rather he is co-eternal, is, God become incarnate. The typical sense of the human experience of time—birth, life, death—is disrupted by the incarnate God coming into the world. John implies the confusion that results when he says, in chapter one, that John the Baptist precedes Christ’s coming, but in reality, as the Baptist tells others, although it will appear that Jesus comes after him in reality he comes before him, existing first. The order and sense of time are confused by Christ’s coming: the logos is already in time; we are just now made aware of it. This confusion is made apparent at the wedding at Cana, where Jesus turns the water into wine; the master of the feast notes that it is best, and typically is reserved till later in the feast. The traditional sequence of events, therefore, has been altered by Jesus. In the first few chapters John refers to “the first day,” “the second day,” implying chronological order, which is made nonsensical by the episodic nature of the retelling of events during Jesus’s time on earth. The Jews, with a traditional sense of time’s order, are put into a conundrum by Jesus’s interpretation of time. When in John, 2:19, Jesus tells the Jews, “destroy this temple and in three day’s I will raise it up,” they assume that Jesus is talking about a building and a traditional sense of time—the temple took forty-six years to build! But Jesus is referring to the temple of his body, which reveals how his interpretation of time is personal, based on his own bodily sense of time, rather than public, based on the people’s sense of time.
Jesus’s unique interpretation of time is illustrated again in John, chapter three, when he converses with the Pharisee Nicodemus. Jesus uses veiled and strange words to indicate his sense of salvation, which is dependent neither upon time nor place; it is like the wind. Jesus confuses Nicodemus when he says that one must be “born again,” a reference to a person experiencing a new beginning, not in time, through movement and growth, but in beliefs and personality, in the core of being not subject to time. Jesus tells Nicodemus that a person does not know where the spirit comes from or where it goes, that is, the past and the future, but only that it is, in the present. Those born of the spirit, born again, do not know the origins of the spirit of revelation, of their destiny.
In chapter four, John provides the example of the Samaritan woman and Jacob’s well, which again reveals Jesus’s unique sense of personal time. In the story, Jesus arrives at a particular time and place; it is the sixth hour. A woman arrives (by apparent happenstance) to draw water. Jesus requests a drink of real water in time to quench his bodily thirst acquired during travel. In response to her confusion (that a Jew would request a drink from a Samaritan), he says that he can provide her with a drink of water that transcends time; this drink quenches thirst, period. By quenching thirst, this drink stops thirst, bodily movement that brings about thirst, stops time, hence no more bodily thirst in time. In this singular moment, the transcendence is gained, life that lasts an eternity, everlasting, that is, a singular moment than continues on and on. Jesus then tells the woman that there will come a time, and the time is now, in the present, when worshipers will not worship at a place, but in spirit and truth, that is, not according to time and space, but in the singular moment. For something to be coming but is, becoming and being, shows again that in the presence of the logos, time is altered. The woman then says the messiah is coming; Jesus contrasts this future-oriented statement with the proclamation, “I am,” meaning that the messiah is now, in the moment, and not in the future. When she leaves the disciples ask Jesus to eat, but he refuses this momentary bodily nourishment, claiming that he has food that is spiritual, that transcends the moment. Emphasizing this, he mentions the saying, four months then the harvest; he says on the contrary that the harvest is already present. The traditional sense of time, moment by moment, is distorted in this episode, and indeed, in many other episodes that follow in John’s Gospel.
The philosophy and methods of Augustinian, or personal, time, revealed in the Gospel of John to be how Jesus of Nazareth conceived of time, appears to have been the approach of Mary the mother of Jesus to reflecting on her son’s life. Twice in the Gospel of Luke (2: 19 and 2: 51), Mary responded to the amazing events she had experienced and witnessed—the virgin birth, shepherds proclaiming the Messiah, prophecies of Simeon and Anna, and Jesus’s statement in the temple that “I must be in my father’s house”–not logically or rationally, which was impossible, rather intuitively, pondering such events in her heart. Following Mary, the person seeking to understand the life of Jesus must use personal time, pondering in one’s heart the events recorded in the four Gospels.
Livy, The Early History of Rome, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1971), 34.
[2] Will Durant, Caesar and Christ: A History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from their Beginnings to A. D. 325 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944), 486.
[3] Plutarch, Essays, trans. Robin Waterfield (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 227.
[4] Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. John Dryden (New York: Modern Library, 1932), 293.
William James, The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), xxxi, quoting the editor.
[6] Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. (), 64, 70-71.
[7] Ibid., 49-51.
[8] Ibid., 50, 61, 64, 66, 68.
[9] Ibid., 52, 82, 97, 99.
Josephus, The Jewish War, trans. by G. A. Williamson (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1970), 347.
[11] Eusbius, The History of the Church, trans. by G. A. Williamson (London: Penguin Books, 1989), 17.
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