The Most Poetic Time Zone in History

What would life be like in MMT (Medieval Monastic Time)? No clocks allowed.

Methinks it were a happy life
To be no better than a homely swain,
To sit upon a hill as I do now,
To carve out dials quaintly, point by point
Thereby to see the minutes how they run:
How many makes the hour full complete,
How many hours brings about the day,
How many days will finish up the year,
How many years a mortal man may live.
—Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI

Last week we pondered the monumental paradox of medieval monastic life, and on Sunday we studied a remarkable painting that emerged from the sonorous, candlelit spirituality and mysterious creative energies of a medieval monastery. The monk who painted that image prayed in a church that took twenty-three years to build. Twenty-three years. The bishop who founded the monastery, laid the church’s first stone, and patronized its artwork was long dead when the edifice was finally complete.

Nowadays, major construction projects rarely last twenty-three months, much less twenty-three years. The Empire State Building—the world’s tallest structure for almost forty years, and built at a time when technology was quite primitive by twenty-first-century standards—was open for business eighteen months after the work began.

And yet, twenty-three years was a fairly quick turnaround for medieval construction. You’ve probably heard of cathedrals that took centuries to build. Centuries—that means not one person who was there at the beginning lived to see the epic masterpiece completed. Would modern societies even bother beginning a project that might take a century to complete? Does the modern mind even tolerate timescales of that magnitude? Heck, I’m reluctant to plant an apple tree knowing that I might have to wait seven years for the sluggard to give me return on investment, and then I also feel a vague (and rather illogical) resentment at the possibility that it will outlive me, bearing fruit in my absence as though everything is perfectly normal.

Medieval folks, on the other hand, enthusiastically planted buildings that would take not seven but seventy (or more) years to reach maturity, and they did not spurn the thought of full fruition arriving only after death—this would be a homage to their noble and enduring labor rather than a grim reminder of their mortality. And in any case, eternal salvation was a far more urgent task than the construction project. There would be plenty of time to admire the finished structure from heaven.

However, there’s something more going on here. It wasn’t just that medieval communities had different ideas about earthly labors and life after death. We must also understand that waiting a hundred years for a new church in the Middle Ages was not like waiting a hundred years for a new church in the modern world. It cannot possibly have been—because the passage of months and years was not the same for them as it is for us. The nature of time itself was not the same for them as it is for us.

BENVOLIO: Good morrow, cousin.
ROMEO: Is the day so young?
BENVOLIO: But new struck nine.
ROMEO: Ay me, sad hours seem long.
—Romeo and Juliet

Clocks are everywhere in modern life. Phones, computer screens, ovens, nightstands, interior walls, exterior signs, classrooms, human wrists—they all have clocks. We often hear complaints about the stress of perpetually busy lives and tight schedules and looming deadlines, and clocks are implicated in these complaints—“the clock is ticking,” as they say. But I don’t think modern society realizes what clocks really are. A clock is not simply a high-precision method of measuring time. Rather, clocks create time. More specifically, they create a certain kind of time. It’s called abstract time.

In this context, “abstract” doesn’t mean “theoretical” or “philosophical.” It means what Latin abstractus means: pulled away. Abstract time is time that has been pulled away from primal, observable realities such as sunlight and astronomical motion, and therefore also from a nexus of sensory and psychological forces that enrich and deepen and beautify human life. Heart rates vary with our emotional state; day length varies with the seasons; rivers flow more quickly after a rain; a walking pace quickens when a loved one is seen in the distance; constellations appear over this or that hill; the tracery of lengthening shadows is unique to each village; church services never begin until the bell has been rung…. But the clock cares nothing for these things. Clock time is independent, dominant, even godlike in its everlasting, immutable tickings and tockings to which the cycles of the earth, moon, and sun must conform—to which the grand and cosmic motions of the very heavens must conform!

The constellations Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, and Serpens.

In the Middle Ages, one “hour” was not a fixed length of time, because day and night were divided into twelve hours regardless of season. In an era governed by clock time, one hour is exactly the same on every day of the year and in every forest, field, village, and city upon the face of the earth. In the Middle Ages, Roger Bacon understood a second as a fourth division of time relative to the lunar cycle. In an era governed by—and utterly dependent on—clock time, a second

is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the cesium frequency, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the cesium-133 atom, to be 9,192,631,770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to 1/s.

That’s the official scientific understanding of a second. It’s so hyperbolically precise as to be largely incomprehensible and almost comical. I acknowledge that technological progress requires such precision. But what does human happiness require?

All pre-modern cultures possessed modes of the calculation of time…. But the time reckoning which formed the basis of day-to-day life … always linked time with place—and was usually imprecise and variable. No one could tell the time of day without reference to other socio-spatial markers: “when” was almost universally either connected with “where” or identified by regular natural occurrences. The invention of the mechanical clock and its diffusion to virtually all members of the population … were of key significance in the separation of time from space. The clock expressed a uniform dimension of “empty” time.
—Dr. Anthony Giddens, professor at Cambridge and renowned sociologist

Enter with me for a few moments into the medieval monastic time zone. Let’s say it’s the year 1024, and we’re in an Anglo-Saxon monastery—mechanical clocks were not invented until the fourteenth century, so we’re safe from those. Sand-based hourglasses are another source of absolute time, but we’re safe from those too; despite their rudimentary construction and operation, they also were not invented until the fourteenth century. Water clocks are similar to hourglasses and have existed since Antiquity, but nowadays (remember that we’re in the eleventh century), they’re not common. And in any case, they’re either too labor-intensive or too complex for widespread use. The most common timekeeping “technology” is the sundial, which cannot produce absolute time, and cannot do much of anything under cloudy skies.

The monastery does not exist without rhythm and order. The psalms must be sung at their appointed time. The community must rise and retire together. Our rule of life is just that—a Rule, from Latin regula, a measuring tool. And yet, we have no clock. Absolute time does not exist here. Instead, we have “material time”: time that is poetically interwoven with real, material things that we can see and hear and feel and love. We have no device that keeps time; we have ways of revealing time as it emerges from the encounter between the cosmos and the little share of earth where the sacred drama of our own lives is unfolding. Everything—our prayers, our labors, our conversations, our thoughts, the very essence of our temporal consciousness—everything that we have and do is shaped by material time, that is, by a harmonious union of cosmic movements and the physical place that we call home.

The constellation Boötes.

We are not really different in this way from the peasants, or the artisans, or the nobles, or even the king himself. But the challenge of discovering time is more acute in the monastery, because we must rise to pray in the darkness before dawn, when the sundial is silent. It is true that a lonely monk can keep vigil and measure the passage of time by chanting psalms, but this method is not so regular as we would like, and monks who stay up late reading poetry are, like anyone else in such circumstances, apt to fall asleep. It is good for overcast nights. Otherwise, we have the stars.

The constellation Orion.

In the movements of the heavenly bodies we not only behold the wonder of Creation—we also read the hours of the night. A holy and learned man of blessed memory, Gregory of Tours, even wrote a book to help us do this. De Cursu Stellarum, it was called: “on the course of the stars.” It teaches just enough astronomy to help a simple monk look into the night sky and find there the moment when the song of praise should begin.

If we know how the stars move through our monastery, we also know the time with all the accuracy that our way of life requires. I will share with you an example written by some of our fellow monks from the Continent:

On Christmas Day, when you see the Twins lying, as it were, on the dormitory, and Orion over the chapel of All Saints, prepare to ring the bell. And on the first of January, when the bright star in the knee of Boötes is level with the space between the first and second window of the dormitory, and lying as it were on the summit of the roof, then go, and light the lamps.