The Books: “The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself” (Daniel J. Boorstin)

Science/Philosophy Bookshelf:

Discoverers.jpgAn excerpt from the MASSIVE book by Daniel Boorstin The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself.

This excerpt comes from the first chapter, which discusses human beings and time – how different cultures have figured out time, and the calendar, in different eras. It’s amazing stuff, I tell ya!


EXCERPT FROM The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself, by Daniel Boorstin.

Many of the early Christians, following their own literal interpretation of the Bible, fixed the death of Jesus on a Friday, and the Easter resurrection on the following Sunday. But if the anniversary of the festival was to follow the Jewish lunar calendar, there was no assurance that Easter would occur on a Sunday. The bitter quarrel over the calendar led to one of the earliest schisms between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Church of Rome. The Eastern Christians, holding to the lunar calendar, continued to observe Easter on the fourteenth day of the lunar month, regardless of the day of the week. At the very first ecumenical (worldwide) council of the Christian Church, held at Nicaea in Asia Minor in 325, one of the world-unifying questions to be decided was the date of Easter. A uniform date was fixed in such a way as both to stay with the traditional lunar calendar and to assure that Easter would always be observed on Sunday.

But this did not quite settle the matter. For community planning someone still had to predict the phases of the moon and locate them on a solar calendar. The Council of Nicaea had left this task to the bishop of Alexandria. In the ancient center of astronomy he was to forecast the phases of the moon for all future years. Disagreement over how to predict those specified cycles led to a division in the Church, with the result that different parts of the world continued to observe Easter on different Sundays.

The reform of the calendar by Pope Gregory XIII was needed because the year that Julius Caeser had borrowed from the Egyptians, and which had ruled Western civilization since then, was not a precise enough measure of the solar cycle. The actual solar year — the time required for the earth to complete an orbit around the sun — is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds. This was some 11 minutes and 14 seconds less than the 365 1/4 days in the Egyptian year. As a result, dates on the calendar gradually lost their intended relation to solar events and to the seasons. The crucial date, the vernal equinox, from which Easter was calculated, had been fixed by the First Council of Nicaea at March 21. But the accumulating inaccuracy of the Julian calendar meant that by 1582 the vernal equinox was actually occurring on March 11.

Pope Gregory XIII, though notorious now for this public Thanksgiving for the brutal massacre of Protestants in Paris on Saint Bartholomew’s Day (1572), was in some matters an energetic reformer. He determined to set the calendar straight. Climaxing a movement for calendar reform which had been developing for at least a century, in 1582 Pope Gregory ordained that October 4 was to be followed by October 15. This meant, too, that in the next year the vernal equinox would occur, as the solar calendar of seasons required, on March 21. In this way the seasonal year was restored to what it had been in 325. The leap years of the old Julian calendar were readjusted. To prevent the accumulationi of another 11-minute-a-year discrepancy, the Gregorian calendar omitted the leap day from years ending in hundreds, unless they were divisible by 400. This produced the modern calendar by which the West still lives.

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1 Response to The Books: “The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself” (Daniel J. Boorstin)

  1. John Cunningham says:

    Pope Gregory’s calendar was quite a reform, with the 11-day jump forward. I think that England, and its American colonies, declined to follow this Papist change until 1753 or 1755. I vaguely recall reading of rioting in some English towns by laborers who wanted pay for the 11 days. And Russia, following the Orthodox calendar, did not switch until the Bolsheviks came in. This is why the October Revolution was celebrated on November 7.

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