Gospel we do not read that the Lord said: I am sending you the Holy Spirit so that he can teach you about the course of the sun and the moon,’ Augustine wrote in a 404 letter. ‘He wanted to make Christians, not mathematicians.’
Augustine, however, was hardly the last word on how to treat the past and future, and time itself. Indeed, his mysticism and reliance on faith would continue to bump up against those who wanted to categorize and measure the past--especially the Christian past--and those who wanted to plan or to predict the future in a systematic and scientific manner. It was the tension between these two ideals, the sacred and the profane, that would dominate the next millennium in Europe, though one side was clearly the victor--even as Rome’s political and cultural collapse combined with Augustine’s philosophy of anti time to all but extinguish any scientific interest in the calendar, or in making it more accurate.
And yet, as we shall see, the light of scientific curiosity was never quenched entirely. Even in the darkest days after the fall of Rome a progression of isolated monks and thinkers remained inquisitive, inasmuch as they were able, about nature and science--including ways to better measure what Augustine said was unmeasurable: time.
Augustine himself conceded that time reckoning could be tolerated in one area where the sacred and the profane could not be disentangled: calculating and predicting the date for Easter. This could be determined only by someone knowledgeable in astronomy and mathematics--and so the calculation of the date of Easter became the slender thread that science would hang by over the coming centuries. This was ironic, given that Christians who condemned science as a blasphemous intrusion into God’s domain were forced to rely on science to date the most mystical event in their pantheon of miracles and otherworldly epiphanies: the resurrection of Christ.
The history of science in the Middle Ages would have been very different if the bishops at Nicaea had decided simply to name a fixed date for Easter in the solar calendar. But they did not. Instead, in the wake of Nicaea, Christians developed what became a complex equation to determine the proper day, forcing time reckoners to return to something Caesar had dispensed with centuries earlier: a dependence on the moon. Almost by accident they found themselves confronting the ancient conundrum of trying to correlate the phases of the moon with the orbit of the earth--the same problem that had plagued calendar-makers from China and Babylon to pre-imperial Rome as they tried to fuse a 354-day lunar year with a roughly 365 1/4-day solar year.
Even today this lunar-solar link-up is a challenging astronomical problem, one that must compensate for a complicated range of gravitational tugs and pulls from the sun, moon and other celestial bodies; the slow degradation of the orbits of the earth and moon over time; the slightly elliptical orbits of the earth and moon; and the spin of the earth on its axis--all factors that Christian time reckoners in the era of Nicaea had no inkling about when they devised their basic formula for Easter. Below is a 14-step algorithm devised by modern-day Catholic astronomers, who factor in some of the variables to come up with an almost precise Easter date-- almost, because there are always minute fluctuations in the movements of the earth, moon, planets and stars that make an absolutely exact measurement impossible to predict.
a = year% 19
b = year/100
c = year%100
d = b/4
e = b% 4
f
Augustine, however, was hardly the last word on how to treat the past and future, and time itself. Indeed, his mysticism and reliance on faith would continue to bump up against those who wanted to categorize and measure the past--especially the Christian past--and those who wanted to plan or to predict the future in a systematic and scientific manner. It was the tension between these two ideals, the sacred and the profane, that would dominate the next millennium in Europe, though one side was clearly the victor--even as Rome’s political and cultural collapse combined with Augustine’s philosophy of anti time to all but extinguish any scientific interest in the calendar, or in making it more accurate.
And yet, as we shall see, the light of scientific curiosity was never quenched entirely. Even in the darkest days after the fall of Rome a progression of isolated monks and thinkers remained inquisitive, inasmuch as they were able, about nature and science--including ways to better measure what Augustine said was unmeasurable: time.
Augustine himself conceded that time reckoning could be tolerated in one area where the sacred and the profane could not be disentangled: calculating and predicting the date for Easter. This could be determined only by someone knowledgeable in astronomy and mathematics--and so the calculation of the date of Easter became the slender thread that science would hang by over the coming centuries. This was ironic, given that Christians who condemned science as a blasphemous intrusion into God’s domain were forced to rely on science to date the most mystical event in their pantheon of miracles and otherworldly epiphanies: the resurrection of Christ.
The history of science in the Middle Ages would have been very different if the bishops at Nicaea had decided simply to name a fixed date for Easter in the solar calendar. But they did not. Instead, in the wake of Nicaea, Christians developed what became a complex equation to determine the proper day, forcing time reckoners to return to something Caesar had dispensed with centuries earlier: a dependence on the moon. Almost by accident they found themselves confronting the ancient conundrum of trying to correlate the phases of the moon with the orbit of the earth--the same problem that had plagued calendar-makers from China and Babylon to pre-imperial Rome as they tried to fuse a 354-day lunar year with a roughly 365 1/4-day solar year.
Even today this lunar-solar link-up is a challenging astronomical problem, one that must compensate for a complicated range of gravitational tugs and pulls from the sun, moon and other celestial bodies; the slow degradation of the orbits of the earth and moon over time; the slightly elliptical orbits of the earth and moon; and the spin of the earth on its axis--all factors that Christian time reckoners in the era of Nicaea had no inkling about when they devised their basic formula for Easter. Below is a 14-step algorithm devised by modern-day Catholic astronomers, who factor in some of the variables to come up with an almost precise Easter date-- almost, because there are always minute fluctuations in the movements of the earth, moon, planets and stars that make an absolutely exact measurement impossible to predict.
a = year% 19
b = year/100
c = year%100
d = b/4
e = b% 4
f
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