MAKING THE TIME

But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law: That he might redeem them who were under the law: that we might receive the adoption of sons.

—Galatians 4:4–5

One of the more distinguishing characteristics of Christianity is its notion of time—or at least of what happens in time. While classical philosophy abstracts from the spatial and the temporal in order to arrive at the eternal, and while Eastern religions, with their various doctrines on reincarnation, generally conceive of time as cyclical, Christianity is grounded in Judaism's realization that the God of eternity has definitively entered into the particularity of history. This belief crescendos in the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, when, in the "fullness of time," the Word through whom all things were made became flesh (John 1:3, 14); and it anticipates the final consummation of time, when God will be all in all (I Corinthians 15:28).

The Christian stress laid on divine revelation's entry into a specific and real point of time can be seen in the care that St. Luke gives to identifying the precise historical moment in which St. John the Baptist began his preaching (Luke 3:1). And it may also be seen in more mundane areas as well, from the way we count our years to the way we measure our day. In former ages this influence was much more palpable: when the liturgical calendar exercised the imagination more than the secular, late August would be known as Bartholomew-tide (in honor of the St. Bartholomew's feast day, August 24) and an Indian summer would be called St. Martin's summer (warm weather around November 11, St. Martin's Day). Below are a few of the lingering ways in which Catholic Christianity continues to affect our perception of time.

B.C. and A.D. While the ancient Romans counted the passage of the years from the founding of their city (ab urbe condita, or A.U.C.) and while Jewish calendars begin with the creation of the world (anno mundi, or A.M.), it is the Christian chronology—the starting point of which is the birth of Jesus Christ—that has come to hold sway around the world. Several competing Christian timetables had been in use for a while when in the sixth century Pope John I commissioned a Scythian monk named Dionysius Exiguus to provide a viable calendar for liturgical use. Synthesizing some of the existent calendars, Dionysius took as his terminus a quo the Incarnation of Our Lord, but he made one crucial error, calculating that Christ was born in the year 753 A.U.C. when in fact the latest he could have been born was 750 A.U.C. Several medieval scholars caught the mistake, but Dionysius' calendar endured nonetheless, leaving us with the anomaly that Christ was born three to six years "before Christ."

Regardless of the blunder, the idea of a "Christian era" appropriately reflects the Catholic sense that the advent of the God-man has ushered in a new dispensation of time. The terms B.C. ("Before Christ") and A.D. (anno Domini, or "year of the Lord") thus have a theological as well as a practical significance, though they are slowly being replaced in scholarly circles with B.C.E. and C.E., "Before the Common Era" and "Common Era," respectively. While these politically correct terms are somewhat overstated (the Christian era, for instance, is not held in common with traditional Chinese and Muslim cultures), it is interesting to note that the A.D. dating has never been the sole means of annual measuring in Christendom. Until the fourteenth century Spain retained a chronology that began with the Roman conquest of that land, while the Greek Orthodox world did not adapt Dionysius' chronology until the fifteenth century. Instead of the Era of the Incarnation, France in the eleventh century toyed with an Era of the Passion, which began around the year A.D. 33. Yet another convention accepted the Dionysian dating but used a different name. Instead of A.D., some old records show the abbreviation An. Sal. Rep.,Anno Salutis Reparatae, "in the year of salvation regained." To this day, An. Sal. Rep. occasionally makes a surprise appearance, as on a University of Notre Dame campus statue honoring its founder, Father Edward Sorin.

Calendar. Not just the counting of years but the reckoning of the year itself has been influenced by the Church. Since the first century B.C., the West had relied on the Julian calendar, named after Julius Caesar and devised by the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes. The calendar, however, was flawed, losing eleven minutes a year, and so after over fifteen hundred years of use, ten whole days had been "lost." To correct the error, Pope Gregory XIII ordered the calendar to be revised: ten days in 1582 were to be skipped (October 5 for that year would become October 15), and leap years were to occur only ninety seven times in four hundred years. Though the Gregorian calendar successfully brought a closer alignment of our marking of time to the actual solar year, it was initially resisted by Protestant and Eastern Orthodox countries. Britain, for example, did not adopt the calendar until 1752, while to this day several Eastern Orthodox communities reject it as a virtually heretical invention of the papacy.

Sunday and the Weekend. Taking Saturday and Sunday off from work is a relatively recent phenomenon, but the anchor of the weekend, Sunday, is a quintessentially Christian day that goes back to Apostolic times. In flagrant violation of Roman law (which forbade unauthorized religious assemblies), the first Christians gathered to offer the Eucharistic sacrifice early Sunday morning, the day on which Christ rose from the dead. As Pope Benedict XVI explains in one of his earlier writings, observing the Lord's Day even under threat of death was not for them "a case of choosing between one law andanother, but of choosing between the meaning that sustains life and a meaningless life." Given the paramount importance of the Lord's Day in Christian life and thought, it is not surprising that its observance even anticipated our modern weekend in some respects. As early as the fourth century, many masters would release their slaves from work on Saturday so that they could better prepare for Sunday, the day on which no distinction was made between free man...