Leap

One thing I learned from television is that Jesus wasn’t born on December 25. This is a topic of long scholarly debate, maybe, but it was also a staple of the lowest tier of televised historical documentaries, popular in the late 1970s and 1980s, on themes no less serious than whether Nostradamus predicted Hitler or whether the wreck of Noah’s ark had been discovered on some remote mountainside in Turkey. The details are fuzzy now but I suspect it may have been an episode of In Search Of… that introduced me to the idea—likely true in contradistinction to most of the tripe in which such programming tended to wallow—that the historical figure of Jesus had about as much to do with December 25 as he did the Fourth of July.

Such programs dispensed only as much actual history as they required to make some insane case that Jesus was actually an alien or that the Mayans invented computers, and so would have steered well clear of the actual explanation for the dates of both Christmas and Easter—that they’re tightly bound to the winter solstice and the vernal equinox, respectively. It’s a little disappointing but not at all surprising to learn that in its role as the state religion of Rome from 313 onward, Christianity should exhibit such a politically-motivated mainspring in its internal clock, but the fact is that Constantine, the wily Roman Emperor who recognized the value of the religion to bind his disparate empire without costing him the temporal power he coveted, chose these dates—or strongly suggested to his sock puppets at the Council of Nicaea that they choose them—in order to co-opt celebrations that were already happening. In short, he built a chronological empire atop the older pagan one he wished to destroy. Well played, Flavius. Well played.

The Roman Catholic approach to time, generally, is like a SNL sketch gone amok. Whether deliberately or by happy accident the Church spent centuries accumulating cycles of routine so complex that everyone has to spend all their time figuring out how it works and nobody has a moment to ask why. It’s a classic means of ensuring the loyalty of one’s subjects, employed with such flair in later years by the likes of Louis XIV, in which nobles had to devote so much effort to learning the encyclopedic details of the French minuet that any efforts to plot against the Sun King would be foiled by sheer exhaustion.

That said, there’s value in structuring time. I do it here, with my weird fixation on this entirely artificial span—the fortnight—which I suspect I chose more because it has a funny name than for any rational purpose. Fortnights make considerably less sense in the abstract than, say, the cycles of a ship’s bell; probably less sense than the hyper-rational French Revolutionary calendar with its ten-day weeks and hundred-minute hours. But the key thing about time is that it’s got to have some kind of structure to be useful. Rationality makes the math easier, but doesn’t guarantee positive outcomes. There’s a theme here—I extoll the virtues of democracy, but in practice it produces just as many blue-blooded fatheads as the strictest hereditary monarchies. In the end it’s better to select one than none of them at all. Just ask a Somali.

Now, in consequence of my ongoing novel research I’ve been basking in the intimate details of 14th century English life, a venture which requires one to learn a few things about what we now call Roman Catholicism, but which at the time—in spite of the cracks that were already forming—was simply the religion of Europe. And boy, it’s some wild stuff. If you’re ever looking to blow your mind, go read up on dominical letters. This is a system which uses letters to represent days of the week and subsequently to indicate the day of the week a given year begins, which can then be used to figure out, via a process akin to doing one’s taxes, what day a given saint’s feast is to be celebrated on. Of course the most notable feast day is Easter, which bounces around like a cat at two in the morning. The algorithms for making these calculations I guess is easier than they would be faced with a year with days simply numbered 1 through 365, though I couldn’t figure out how any of them worked. It’s the perfect system for a religion so long dedicated to keeping a rigid barrier—sometimes an actual physical barrier¹—between the clergy and the lay people. The perfect system for a perfect marriage of Christian faith and bureaucracy, with apologies to any Catholics, or Romans, out there in reader-land.

Anyway, the sheer mathematics of all of this fastidious timekeeping presented a problem for the Church, one which had been steadily growing since Constantine selected the dates for the two key Christian celebrations. Namely, that Easter was steadily drawing away from the vernal equinox. A small discrepancy between the length of the solar year and the so-called Julian calendar, with its regular pattern of 100 leap-years every four centuries, had slowly pushed Easter away from its already tenuous connection with natural cycles.

It’s a little astounding, to those of us who imagine medieval people as a benighted bunch woefully deprived of YouTube, to learn that as early as the 8th century such luminaries as the Venerable Bede were beginning to notice this. By the 16th century it had become a hot topic. Dante knew about it! Imagine Dante sitting outside a cafe in Florence chatting with his buddies about how Easter was adrift and how it was like having windshield wipers that weren’t quite in time with the music on the radio. 

The Vatican was besieged with papers and articles on the matter over the hundred-something years since Pope Sixtus IV failed in 1476 to get the reform accomplished when his selected mathematician, one Johannes Müller von Köngsberg, who plied his craft Cher-like under the neat moniker Regiomontanus, died.

The issue continued to fester until 1545, when the Council of Trent—a sort of Catholic constitutional convention that came about in the interest of showing that the Protestants weren’t the only church that could get ‘em some reform—told Pope Paul III to go ahead with the big calendar project. Paul responded by dying, but the gauntlet had been thrown down, and the next pope would surely bring the matter to action.

Actually the next pope died without doing anything as well, as did the next pope after him, and the next one. And the next one. And the next one.

But the next one, Pope Gregory XIII, well he was a go-getter. A mere half-decade after becoming pope he did something that would boggle the minds of those of us in this latter age who watched an actual rapist encouraging people to inject bleach in their veins to fight off a pandemic: in 1577 he solicited the opinions of the entire mathematical community of Europe.

This must have been like Lallapalooza for Medieval mathematicians. Would that we had a Frontline episode full of interviews with these guys, all funny hair and pocket protectors and chalkboards, bubbling with the fervent joy of their subject. Would that they’d have known their work would inform our lives almost five hundred years later. Even my man Tycho Brahe weighed in with some observations on the nature of the Julian discrepancy. 

Ultimately it was a suggestion by a doctor from the toe of Italy, one Aloysius Lilius, which would inform the pattern of the new calendar. In it, the number of leap years in four centuries is reduced by three, so 97 (instead of 100) out of every 400. In the interest of eliminating the debt that had accumulated in the 1,250 years since Constantine introduced a bug into the software of Christianity, there would be a gap between the two calendars which would plague historians for centuries to come. Across Europe, people went to bed on the night of Thursday, October 4, 1582 and woke up the morning of Friday, October 15.

Of course, lest we fall into thinking that the adoption of the Gregorian calendar was some rare lacuna in the otherwise unsullied tapestry of superstition and Machiavellian power games and irrational hatred of the Other under which Europe labored for most of its history, the story doesn’t end there. Catholic nations like Spain and Portugal, in a rare instance of forward thinking, adopted the new calendar right away, but Protestant nations weren’t about to kowtow to a Catholic innovation. Like the U.S. clinging to the entirely idiotic Imperial measurement system with the same ignorant zealotry that drives people to festoon their pickup trucks with MAGA flags and and openly carry firearms into Denny’s, most countries ignored the Gregorian calendar until they arrived at a crisis point, presumably the incipient elision of Easter with Groundhog’s Day.

And so it went, one country after another taking tentative steps into a future which was only ten days away but extended all the way into the Age of the iPhone. Saudi Arabia, for reasons only known to God and the Saudi Royal family, took the leap last, in 2016. Ethiopia, Nepal, Iran and Afghanistan are still out there in the wilderness, but for the rest of humanity the Gregorian calendar is as close to a universal man-made truth as we’re ever likely to get. Who says the Catholic Church never gave us anything but holy wars and pedophile scandals?

1. For many hundreds of years Catholic liturgy was performed behind a “rood screen,” in Latin, no less, meaning that congregants couldn’t see or comprehend what was going on. They simply waited patiently to be spared the torments of Hell by their professional clergy.