and an eternal afterlife were woven over centuries, out of ancient and multicoloured threads from Egypt, Persia, Israel, Greece, Rome and beyond.
Not in every case, though. In the eighteenth century, the political writer Thomas Paine, known among other things for his searing attacks on religion (we’ll meet him again in chapter 8), described Christianity as ‘a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the sun’. The early Christians certainly did take symbols and rituals from the rival sun cult. But there is a fundamental difference between the two that Paine’s criticism doesn’t acknowledge; an aspect of Plato’s thought that mainstream Christianity did not ultimately accept.
Plato’s creator existed within the universe, fashioning the celestial spheres from the material he had available. ‘Out of disorder he brought order,’ Plato wrote in Timaeus, shaping a world that was ‘as far as possible a perfect whole and of perfect parts’. By contrast, the Jews believed in a transcendent God above and beyond the cosmos, who made the world from nothing. ‘The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool,’ says the Hebrew Bible’s book of Isaiah.
In general, Christians stuck with the latter view. Eusebius, for example, was happy to liken Constantine to the sun: ‘As the sun . . . liberally imparts his rays of light to all,’ he wrote, ‘so did Constantine, proceeding at early dawn from the imperial palace, and rising as it were with the heavenly luminary, impart the rays of his own beneficence to all who came into his presence.’ But at the same time he made clear that even the sun is not divine in itself, but just part of God’s creation. Constantine might have been loyal to Sol, but for Eusebius, the ultimate focus of worship was outside the universe. The emperor’s support of Christianity meant that men were no longer ‘to look with awe upon the sun or moon or stars and attribute miracles to these, but rather to acknowledge the one above these, the invincible and imperceptible Universal Creator, having learned to worship him alone’.
That’s the position still held by the Catholic Church. Guy Consolmagno, chief astronomer at the Vatican Observatory, put it clearly in 2013: ‘The God I believe in is not of the universe, but existed before the universe began; not a part of nature, but supernatural.’ It’s a belief that allows for an all-powerful God, unlimited by the universe’s existing rules or resources. But that’s not all. It also has profound consequences for the cosmos itself. Plato’s cosmos was a living, intelligent creature, divine in its own right, with its own soul that spread through all of reality. Consequently everything within the universe shared in that soul: from animals and people, with our mortal bodies, to the stars, which Plato described as ‘divine and eternal animals’. Largely thanks to him, such beliefs were common in the classical world. Five centuries later, the Roman historian Pliny the Elder described the sun as ‘the soul or . . . the mind of the whole world’. Earlier societies with celestial gods, such as the Egyptians and Mesopotamians, whatever their views on the post-mortem fate of human beings, would also have seen the universe as an interconnected, living system. When they made the sun, moon and planets into gods, they were really worshipping the cosmos itself.
The significance of the switch to monotheism, then, goes beyond the reduction from many gods to one. It’s really a transformation in the kind of universe in which we live. The fifth-century theologian Augustine of Hippo cemented the mainstream Christian view. He had huge respect for Plato: ‘None come nearer to us [Christians] than the Platonists,’ he writes. But he dismissed the idea of a cosmos infused with God’s soul. ‘Who cannot see what impious and irreligious consequences follow, such as that whatever one may trample, he must trample a part of God, and in slaying any living creature, a part of God must be slaughtered?’ In effect, says Campion, Augustine ‘rejected the notion of the universe as a living creature . . . Instead, some parts of the world were no longer alive and were distinguished from those that were.’
I’m not sure that Constantine himself would have seen it that way. But his conversion marks the moment, for western civilisation at least, when humanity rejected the cosmos as a divine, living being, as all that there was. Instead, it became merely the product of a separate creator. Where once humanity’s fate was determined by the movements of the celestial bodies, and the stars gave home to the gods, now we were no longer at the centre of a universe that encompassed everything. It was possible to imagine stepping outside it and looking down.
Our religious beliefs remain steeped with the influences of the sun, moon and stars. But one more tie with the cosmos was cut.
1 From the Hittite dsius, or Sanskrit dyaus; later ‘Zeus’ in Greek and ‘Jupiter’ in Latin.
2 Archaeologists have seen the planetary calendar everywhere from ruined baths of the first-century emperor Titan to the wall of a house buried by the volcano Vesuvius in AD 79.
3 This was probably the sanctuary at Grand, origin of the astrological tablets mentioned in chapter 3.
4 Historians disagree about whether Sol Invictus was a rebranding of Elagabalus, or the traditional Greco-Roman Sol, or a completely new solar deity.
5 The term ‘Catholic’ comes from the Latin catholicus (or katholikós in Greek), meaning universal.
6 The Apostles’ tombs and relics were removed by his son, Constantius. Constantine is now seen not as a deity, but as a saint.
5
TIME
In the archives of Oxford University’s Bodleian Library there’s a small but unusually chubby book. Known simply as ‘MS Ashmole 1796’, it consists of around 200 pages of calfskin bound between leather-covered wooden boards. Written in the fourteenth century, its square black lettering is adorned with painted capitals and interspersed with neat diagrams showing complicated mechanical arrangements of axles and wheels.
The book was bequeathed to the university in the seventeenth century by the collector and astrology enthusiast Elias Ashmole, and lay unstudied for hundreds of years. In 1965, an Oxford astronomy historian named John North finally translated its Latin script, along with a note in the margin, Hic est liber sancti Albani, which translates as ‘This is a book of St Albans’. He realised that hidden among these pages was something special; a description of a spectacular invention to which a monk called Richard of Wallingford, the abbot of St Albans monastery from 1327 to 1335, dedicated much of his life.
The invention was a colossal clock, installed high beneath the great south window of the abbey’s church. But Richard’s construction was no ordinary timekeeper. It was a sophisticated, self-moving model of the cosmos, unlike anything else known when it was built, and so far ahead of its time that when the librarian and antiquities specialist John Leland saw it two centuries later, in 1534, he described it as a marvel still without equal in all of Europe. The clock demonstrated the workings of the universe, Leland said, from the oceans to the heavens: ‘One may observe the course of the sun, the moon, or the fixed stars, or again one may regard the rise and fall of the sea.’
No trace of the clock now remains, and for modern historians reading those words it was hard to know what Leland really saw – until North realised in the Bodleian Library that he was holding Wallingford’s instructions for building this very machine. The secrets he discovered reveal not just an impressive invention, but a crucial moment in human history.
This chapter, then, tells the story of why and how the monks of Medieval Europe chased down time, and how in doing so they transformed humanity. As we’ll see, their efforts to track daily cycles ever more accurately were ultimately successful beyond their wildest dreams. Yet they also destroyed the very thing they pursued. Until this point in history, time was a sign of the divine cosmic order, as shown to us through the cycling motions of the sun, moon and stars. The invention of mechanical clocks unleashed a very different kind of time, powerful enough to weaken our bond with both God and the universe, and set the foundations for a new way of life.
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