Desacralizing Time
The makeover of space, from a sacred realm to a utilitarian plane, and from God’s creation to a reservoir of resources, was accompanied by a similar desacralization of time. In the course of just a few short centuries, time was made over to conform with the same scientific criteria used to expropriate space. The medieval sense of time, with its emphasis on the changing cycles and seasons of nature, the unhurried rhythms of daily rounds, and the long periods of prayer time in preparation for eternal salvation, was transformed into a thoroughly modern and scientific tableau, based on objectivity, rationality, mathematical calculation, detachment, and appropriation. Time was denatured and scientized.
The great struggle over the meaning and nature of time began, interestingly enough, with an epic battle between the Church and an incipient merchant class at the end of the medieval era and the beginning of the early modern era. The dispute was over the question of usury. At stake were two different notions of security, one sacred and centered on eternal salvation, the other profane and directed toward a material cornucopia.
The Church prohibited usury. In Matthew 6:24, it is written: “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. We cannot serve God and Money.”
Usury was a rare event in the early Middle Ages, as most of Europe was still a subsistence-based economy relying on barter as the dominant form of trade and exchange. As population, cities, and trade began to expand in the twelfth century, money became more important in regulating economic transactions and exchanges. A new class of merchants and bankers began to lend money at interest, reaping tremendous profits in the process.
The Church argued that usury was a mortal sin punishable by eternal damnation. In support of this contention, it cited chapter and verse from both testaments. In Exodus 22:25, God warns his chosen people: “If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not be like a moneylender; charge him no interest.”
The Vatican made it clear that it was not opposed to the “just” price but considered usury an improper gain and, therefore, theft. According to St. Thomas Aquinas:
Money was invented chiefly for exchange to be made. So the prime and proper use of money is its use in disbursement in the way of ordinary transactions. It follows that it is, in principle, wrong to charge for money lent, which is what usury consists of.
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At the heart of the controversy over usury, or profit, was the question of use of time. The merchants argued that “time is money.”
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For merchants, time was critical. Their success depended on their ability to use time to their advantage; knowing when the best time was to buy cheap and sell dear and how long inventory should be allowed to stay on hand; determining the time it would take for goods to arrive, or how long it would take to ship them to their destination; anticipating changes in exchange rates, the rise and fall of prices, changes in labor availability over time, and the time necessary to make a product. The merchant who garnered the most knowledge of how to predict, use, and manipulate these various time frames commanded the best prices and made the most profit.
The Church contended that time belonged exclusively to God, who dispenses it freely in his temporal kingdom. Time is a gift God grants so that human beings may use it to prepare for their future salvation. By usurping time, the merchants, bankers, landlords, and entrepreneurs were usurping God’s authority. Summing up the official position of the Vatican, Thomas Chobham argued that in charging interest, “the usurer sells nothing to the borrower that belongs to him. He sells only time which belongs to God. He can therefore not make a profit from selling someone else’s property.”
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If, however, time was reducible to a commodity that could be bought and sold, then the more profit one could amass, the more time one could buy for oneself. By charging greater interest and reaping greater profits, one could buy other people’s time as well, thus adding to the amount of time available.
How, then, did human beings ensure their perpetuation and survival? By faith in God or by the accumulation of money? Medieval historian Jacques Le Goff sums up the significance of the great battle to define humanity’s future: “The conflict, then, between the Church’s time and the merchant’s time takes its place as one of the major events in the mental history of these centuries.”
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The Church eventually capitulated over the question of time, and the merchant’s victory cleared the way for the birth of a money economy. “Market price” was substituted for “fair price,” and the ground was laid for the ascendance of market capitalism and the slow, steady decline of ecclesiastical power in Europe.
The conception of time changed in another profound way in the period that separated the late medieval era from the early modern. The invention of the schedule and the mechanical clock in the thirteenth century by the Benedictine monks radically altered human beings’ conception of time, providing still another critical development on the road to a market economy and nation-state governance.
For much of recorded history, the calendar ruled over human affairs. It served as the primary instrument of social control, regulating the duration, sequence, rhythm, and tempo of life and coordinating and synchronizing the shared group activities of the culture. The calendar is past-oriented. Its legitimacy rests on commemoration. Calendar cultures commemorate archetypical myths, ancient legends, historical events, the heroic deeds of gods, the lives of great historical figures, and the cyclical fluctuations of astronomical and environmental phenomena. In calendar cultures, the future takes its meaning from the past. Humanity organizes the future by continually resurrecting and honoring its past experiences.
The calendar continues to play an important role in contemporary culture. Its political significance has been greatly reduced, however, with the introduction of the schedule. The schedule exerts far greater control over time allocation than the calendar. While the calendar regulates macro time—events spread out over the year—the schedule regulates micro time—events spread out over the seconds, minutes, and hours of the day. The schedule looks to the future, not the past, for its legitimacy. In scheduling cultures, the future is severed from the past and made a separate and independent temporal domain. Scheduling cultures do not commemorate; they plan. They are not interested in resurrecting the past but in manipulating the future. In the new time frame, the past is merely a prologue to the future. What counts is not what was done yesterday, but what can be accomplished tomorrow.
The calendar and the schedule differ in still another important way. While modern calendars have become increasingly secularized, throughout most of history their social content was inseparably linked to their spiritual content. In traditional calendrical cultures, the important times are sacred times and are observed through the commemoration of special holy days. The schedule, in contrast, is associated with productivity. Sacred values and spiritual concerns play little or no role in the formulation of schedules. Time, in the new scheme of things, is an instrument to secure output. Time is stripped of any remaining sacred content and transformed into pure utility.
George Woodcock has observed, “It is a frequent circumstance of history that a culture or civilization develops the device that will later be used for its destruction.”
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The schedule, more than any other single force, is responsible for undermining the idea of spiritual or sacred time and introducing the notion of secular time. Needless to say, the Benedictine monks never for a moment intended the invention of the schedule to be used for any purpose other than to better arrange one’s time on Earth in preparation for eternal deliverance. Little did they suspect that it would become the primary tool of modern commerce.
The Benedictine order was founded in the sixth century. It differed, in one important respect, from other Church orders. St. Benedict emphasized activity at all times. His cardinal rule, “Idleness is the enemy of the soul,” became the watchword of the order.
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The Benedictines engaged in continuous activity, both as a form of penitence and a means of securing their eternal salvation. St. Benedict warned the members of his order that “if we could escape the pains of hell and reach eternal life, then must we—whilst there is still time—hasten to do now what may profit us for eternity.”
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Like the merchant class that would follow in their shadow, the Benedictines viewed time as a scarce resource. But for them, time was of the essence because it belonged to God, and because it was his, they believed they had a sacred duty to utilize it to the fullest in order to serve his glory. Toward this end, the Benedictines organized every moment of the day into formal activity. There was an appointed time to pray, to eat, to bathe, to labor, to read, to reflect, and to sleep. To ensure regularity and group cohesiveness, the Benedictines re-introduced the Roman idea of the hour, a temporal concept little used in the rest of medieval society. Every activity was assigned to an appropriate hour during the day. Consider the following set of instructions from the Rule of St. Benedict:
The brethren . . . must be occupied at stated hours in manual labor, and again at other hours in sacred reading. To this end we think that the times for each day may be determined in the following manner. . . . The brethren shall start work in the morning and from the first hour until almost the fourth do the tasks that have to be done. From the fourth hour until the sixth let them apply themselves to reading. After the sixth hour, having left the table, let them rest on their beds in perfect silence.
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To make sure that everyone began each activity together at the prescribed moment, the Benedictines introduced bells. Bells pealed, jangled, and tinkled throughout the day, hurrying the monks along to their appointed rounds. The most important bells were those that announced the eight canonical hours when the monks celebrated the Divine Offices.
The Benedictines ordered the weeks, and the seasons, with the same temporal regularity as they did the day. Even such mundane activities as head-shaving, bloodletting, and mattress-refilling took place at fixed times during the course of the year.
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The Benedictines introduced more than a new temporal orientation when they introduced the “schedule.” Eviatar Zerubavel wisely observes that, in appointing prescribed hours for specific activities and in demanding rigid obedience to the performance of these activities at the appropriate time, the Benedictines “helped to give the human enterprise the regular collective beat and rhythms of the machine.”
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Political scientist Reinhard Bendix has described the Benedictine monk as “the first professional of Western Civilization.”
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To secure proper compliance with the prescribed schedule, the Benedictines developed a tool that could provide them with greater accuracy and precision of time measurement than could be obtained by reliance on bells and bell ringers. They invented the mechanical clock. Lewis Mumford once remarked that “the clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the Modern Age.”
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The first automated machine in history ran by a device called an escapement, a mechanism that “regularly interrupted the force of a falling weight,” controlling the release of energy and the movement of the gears.
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At first, this new invention was used exclusively by the Benedictines as a means of assuring greater conformity with the daily schedule of duties. The clock allowed the clergy to standardize the length of hours. By establishing a uniform unit of duration, the monks were able to schedule the sequence of activities with greater accuracy and synchronize group efforts with greater reliability.
It was not long, however, before word of the new marvel began to spread. By the late fifteenth century, the mechanical clock had stolen its way out of the cloisters and had become a regular feature of the new urban landscape. Giant clocks became the centerpiece of city life. Erected in the middle of the town square, they soon replaced the church bell as the rallying point and reference point for coordinating the complex interactions of urban existence.
Just a century earlier, the grandeur of the Gothic cathedral had marked the status of a community, but now, the erection of the town clock became the symbol of city pride. In 1481, the residents of Lyons petitioned the city magistrate for a town clock, justifying the expenditure of city funds on the grounds that “more people would come to the fairs, the citizens would be very contented, cheerful and happy, and would live a more orderly life.”
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The first clocks had no dials. They merely sounded a bell on the hour. Indeed, the term “clock” comes from the Middle Dutch word
clocke
, which means “bell.” By the sixteenth century, clocks were chiming on the quarter hour, and some were being constructed with dials to demarcate the passing of each hour. In the mid-1600s, the pendulum was invented, providing a much more exacting and reliable timing mechanism. Shortly thereafter, the minute hand was introduced. The second hand did not make its debut until the early 1700s, when it was first used by astronomers, navigators, and doctors to record more accurate measurements.
The idea of organizing time into standardized units of hours, minutes, and seconds would have seemed strange, even macabre, to a peasant serf of medieval times. A day then was roughly divided into three sectors: sunrise, high noon, and sunset. The only other reminders, says Lawrence Wright, were “the seeding and harvest bell that called them to work, the sermon bell and the curfew bell.”
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Occasionally, one might hear the sound of the “gleaning bell, the oven bell when the manor oven was fired to bake the bread, the market bell, and the bells that summoned them to feast, fire, or funeral.”
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Even in these instances, time was not something fixed in advance and divorced from external events. Medieval time was still sporadic, leisurely, unpredictable, and, above all, tied to experiences rather than abstract numbers.