IV.7.6
MONASTIC TIMETABLE & ITS
EFFECT UPON THE CREATION OF A
MODERN CONCEPT OF TIMING
Not among the least of the monastic contributions to
Western life is the impetus which it gave to the modern
concept of timing. Max Weber was one of the first to sense
this connection when in his analysis of the role of Christianity
on economic development, he wrote: "In that epoch
the monk is the first human being who lives rationally, who
works methodically and by rational means toward a goal,
namely the future life. Only for him did the clock strike,
only for him were the hours of the day divided for prayer."[221]
The division of day and night into twelve hours is a concept
that the Greeks appear to have learned from the Babylonians,
but one that does not seem to have had a deep effect
on the actual conduct of the daily life of the Greeks.[222]
Because the hour was calculated as 1/12 of the span of the
day, from sunset to sunrise, its length varied not only with
each successive day, but also between each day and each
night. Only during the equinoxes were the hours of day
and night of equal length. Astronomers and scholars could
cope with the daily adjustments subsumed in this system,
but in rural life, both in Greece and in Rome, man continued
to determine time, as he had done in the most
remote ages, by measuring the length of his shadow with
the sole of his foot.[223]
Sundials, which measured shadows in
a more systematic manner, as well as water clocks were
well known in ancient times and seem to have been of some
importance in Roman public life.[224]
But in the Middle
Ages, the only corporate segments of society where the
whole of the daily cycle of activities was regulated by the
striking of a bell, were the church and the monasteries.[225]
The humble task of seeing that the services began at the
right time, varying with the seasons, required careful
thought and no mean knowledge about the movement of
the stars. St. Benedict considered this task to be of such
extreme importance that he entrusted it to the care of the
abbot, whom he admonished to perform this duty either in
person or to delegate it to a brother so careful "that everything
may be fulfilled at its proper time."
[226]
Computus, i.e.,
the study and transmission of the knowledge about the
Christian calendar, became a primary curricular subject of
monastic learning, for which Bede (as Charles W. Jones has
shown) played the role of prototypal master as author of
De Temporibus, which became a textbook for centuries to
follow.
[227]
In later monastic practice the timing of the
religious services, no easy task, became the charge of the
sacrist
[228]
who, if he struck the bell for the meals or various
parts of the divine office too late or too early, committed a
breach of duty. For such a defection he was bound to give
satisfaction at the next chapter meeting or, in the case of
graver negligence, during the divine service, by standing at
the foot of the steps of the presbytery with his body bent
to the ground (
stans incurvus) and retaining this penitential
position throughout the
Kyrie eleison until the completion
of the service with the end of the
Deo gratias.[229]
On clear days and nights the relative length of each hour
could be established with the aid of a sun dial or by the
position of the stars. Rachel L. Poole published the text of
a monastic star time-table of the eleventh century which
gives accurate instructions to be followed by the night
watchman of a monastery near Orleans.[230]
A typical example
follows:
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 January first, when the bright star in the knee
of Artophilax (i.e., Arcturus in 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.[231]
Similar directives concerning the relative position of stars
to predetermined architectural features, at the desired hour,
are given for the nights of all of the other important
offices of the year.
On dull days and nights, however, neither the sun
quadrant nor the stars were of any use. On these occasions
the sacrist's only recourse was the water clock. Excavations
conducted in 1894 in the ruins of the Cistercian Abbey of
Villers brought to light five fragments of slate, incised in a
delicate cursive minuscule of the second half of the thirteenth
century, with a series of minute instructions to the
sacrist of Villers for regulating the monastery's water
clock.[232]
The texts disclose that this water clock ran in
cycles of 32 hours, that it had to be refilled when three-fourths
depleted,[233]
and that its deficiencies in precision
were checked by the angle of the shadows cast by the sun
upon the jambs of the windows in the apse of the abbey
church.[234]
There was no need in any institution of the secular world
to transmit or nurture similar skills. The life of the medieval
peasant was controlled by such simple and ever recurring
events as the rising and setting of the sun, the waning and
waxing of the moon, events whose seasonal variations
placed little strain on the human ability to time action
through observation. Even in military life where failure to
maintain schedules might become a matter of survival,
there were no timing needs of comparable complexity, comparable
duration, or comparable consistency. Between the
military division of the night by the Greeks and Romans
into watches marked by the change of sentries and the
time-controlled activities of the modern professional man
who regulates the hours of both his work and his leisure
(even his sleep!) by a portable timepiece attached to his
wrist, there lies historically the monastic practice of dividing
the day into a carefully calculated sequence of religious
services (matin, lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, and
compline) in which the 150 psalms could be cited in their
entirety in the course of a week.
