Humanities departments in universities across the West have been engaged in a struggle to redefine the world as we know it.
Challenging individual and collective identities, historical narratives, concepts of justice, and even the language we use, all in the name of the humanist pursuit of truth, reason, and “correctness.”
It is thus surprising to note the one central aspect of our daily lives that has received almost no attention – the calendar.
The Gregorian calendar is accepted today as the lingua franca of calendars, used universally for communication about dates, even by civilizations that maintain their own national or religious calendars. But what are the roots of this calendar, and is it truly the best way to keep time?
The calendar, instituted by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, was only a slight modification of the Julian calendar, which had been the dominant calendar across Europe for the previous 1,500 years and was itself adapted from the Roman Republican calendar, which was likely borrowed from the Greeks, who took their calendar from the Babylonians, which is closely related to the Hebrew calendar.
But let’s go back to the beginning.
Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome, supposedly created the Roman calendar that initially included only ten months (304 days) and began in March. It was a total mess of a calendar even by the standards of the time.
This calendar was so problematic that – according to Roman legend – Romulus’s successor, Numa Pompilius, fixed it by adding two months: January and February. This was likely an attempt by Pompilius to emulate the Greeks, especially in light of the fact that Pompilius was thought to have been a student of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras.
The Greek calendar, like the Babylonian one before it, was a lunisolar calendar that included 12 lunar months with intercalated leap days – three of every eight years in the Greek calendar and seven of every 19 in the Babylonian calendar. Like the Hebrew calendar, these systems balanced lunar and solar progressions to maintain a strong connection between the cycle of the year and the most universally observable natural phenomena.
As Pompilius’s knock-off adaptation of the Babylonian and Greek calendars deviated further from the originals, it became increasingly messy. The addition of January and February distorted the names of numbered months like September, which became the ninth and not the seventh month, and December being the twelfth and not the tenth month, a truly confusing development.
Even more egregious, Pompilius left the determination of when the calendar would be intercalated up to the kings (and later the Senate) of Rome. While this may seem like a positive emulation of the ancient Hebrew process of intercalation, determined by the central court in Jerusalem, it lacked the discipline of strict court procedures and precise examination of witnesses to keep it tied to natural observations.
In Rome, the determination of the calendar quickly became a political tool to extend to shorten the terms of rival officials in the republic, and Pompilius’s reform ultimately failed to stabilize the calendar after the Greek and Babylonian models.
Julius Caesar ultimately tried to fix all this by completely abandoning the lunar calendar in favor of the Egyptian civil calendar. This Egyptian calendar, maintained in tandem with their older lunar calendar, was strictly organized for bureaucratic efficiency. It contained 12 months of 30 days, with five additional days “outside” the regular calendar in order to maintain an approximation of the solar cycle at 365 days.
Caesar’s only adjustment was spreading the five additional days across the calendar, and adding a system of intercalation, adding a leap day (a second February 23rd) every four years to more closely align with the solar cycle. After Caesar, the only major change that the calendar underwent was renaming Quintilis and Sextilis as July and August, in honor of Julius and Augustus Caesar respectively. This calendar remained in place for 1,500 years, long after the collapse of Rome.
So what was Pope Gregory’s big innovation that enshrined him in history as the inventor of the modern calendar?
He simply reduced the frequency of leap years, turning all years that are multiples of 100 into standard years, despite being multiples of four, unless they were also multiples of 400. For example, 1,900 would not include February 29th, but 2,000 would, since the former was a multiple of 100, and the latter of 100 and 400. This very slightly fixed the calendar’s alignment with the solar cycle, necessitating skipping forward ten days at its institution.
As far as the motivation for this reform, it was primarily an attempt to fix the date of Easter that had shifted later into the solar cycle over a millennium and a half due to inaccuracies in the Julian calendar. Since Easter’s observance was based on a combination of lunar and solar calculations, fixing the calendar would simplify the calculation of the “correct date” for the holiday’s observance.
But ever skeptical of a Catholic plot, Protestant Europe resisted the change for over 100 years and the Eastern Orthodox countries held out until the early 20th Century with Greece and the newly created Soviet Union attempting to modernize in the face of military and economic setbacks.
But is the Gregorian calendar truly “modern” in the full sense of that term? Does it represent the progress of human achievement from a dark past towards a greater appreciation of knowledge and truth?
Let’s look at some facts:
- By arbitrarily setting months at 30, 31, 28, and sometimes 29 days, the “month” (named for its connection to the moon and its cycles) has lost all connection to the natural world and observable phenomena.
- The names of the months are a bad joke: half of them are named for Greco-Roman deities, two for Roman dictators, and the remainder are misnumbered Latin.
- The New Year is irrelevant. Even for Christians, it’s not attached to a specific religious date, and there is no natural phenomenon that occurs on January 1.
- Even the improved intercalation, aimed at making the year slightly more accurate than the Julian calendar, is still imperfect by 26 seconds a year.
So why has this calendar been so broadly accepted? And why have the academic champions of critical theory, ostensibly determined to leave no stone unturned, turned a blind eye to this truly absurd system for marking the passage of time?
Is it simply a matter of convenience, learning from the failure of the French revolutionary calendar and the League of Nations’ calendar, that some fights aren’t worth fighting?
Or could it be that the same academics seeking to undermine Western civilization slavishly take for granted the Roman/Christian claim that the Hebrew calendar is archaic nonsense?
It might shock them to discover that a resurgence of the Israelite understanding of time could actually strike a major blow to the Fourth Empire’s grip on human consciousness.
Perhaps abandoning a calendar that enshrines the old gods of Rome and prioritizes utilitarianism over an honest connection to the natural world is exactly what our generation needs in order to escape the darkness of Esav’s ideological paradigm and step into the light of Israel’s prophetic return to history.
