In 1967, on the day appointed for repenting mistakes in judgment at Salem, Samuel Sewall of Boston stood silently in old South Church, Boston, while his confession of error was read aloud. He alone among judges of the falsely accused (and truly executed) "witches" of Salem had the courage to undergo such public chastisement. Four years later, the same Samuel Sewall made a most joyful noise unto the Lord-- and at a particularly auspicious moment. He hired four trumpeters to herald, as he wrote, the "entrance of the eighteenth century" by sounding a blast on Boston Common right at daybreak. He also paid the town crier to read out his "verses upon the New Century." The opening stanzas seem especially poignant today, the first for its relevance (I am writing this essay on a bleak January day in Boston, and the temperature outside is -2 degrees Fahrenheit), and the second for a superannuated paternalism that highlights both the admirable and the dubious in our history:
I do not raise this issue either to embarrass the good judge for his tragic error, or to praise his commendable courage, but for an aspect of the tale that may seem peripheral to Sewall's intent, but that nevertheless looms large as we approach the millennium destined to climax our current decade. Sewall hired his trumpeters for January 1, 1701, not January 1, 1700-- and he therefore made an explicit decision in a debate that the cusp of his new century had kindled, and that has increased mightily at every similar transition since (see my main source for much of this essay, the marvelously meticulous history of fins de siecle--Century's End by Hillel Schwartz). When do centuries end?--at the termination of years marked '99 (as common sensibility suggests), or at the close of years marked '00 (as the narrow logic of a peculiar system dictates)? The debate is already more intense than ever, though we are still several years from our own forthcoming transition, and for two obvious reasons. First--o cursed spite--our disjointed times, and our burgeoning press, provide greatly enhanced opportunity for rehearsal of such narrishkeit ad nauseum; do we not feast upon trivialities to divert attention from the truly portentous issues that engulf us? Second, this time around really does count as the ultimate blockbuster: for this is the millennium1, the great and indubitable unicum of any human observer (though a few trees, and maybe a fungus or two, but not a single animal, have been through it before). On December 26, 1993, The New York Times ran a piece to bury the Christmas buying orgy and welcome the new year. This article, on commercial gear-up for the century's end, began by noting: "There is money to be made on the millennium...in 999 feelings of gloom ran rampant. What the doomsayers may have lacked was an instinct for mass marketing." The commercial cascade of this millennium is already in full swing: in journals, datebooks, the inevitable coffee mugs and T-shirts, and a thousand other products being flogged by the full gamut, from New Age fruitcakes of the counterculture, to hard-line apocalyptic visionaries at the Christian fringe, to a thicket of ordinary guys out to make an honest buck. The article even tells of a consulting firm explicitly established to help others market the millennium--so we are already witnessing the fractal recursion that might be called metaprofiteering, or growing clams of advice in the clam beds of your advisees' potential profits. I am truly sorry that I cannot, in current parlance, "get with the program." I feel compelled to mention two tiny little difficulties that could act as dampers upon the universal ballyhoo. First--though I will not make a big deal of this technicality--millennia are not transitions at the ends of thousand-year periods, but particular periods lasting one thousand years; so I'm not convinced that we even have the name right. Second, if we insist on a celebration (as we should), no matter what name be given, we had better decide when to celebrate. I devote this essay to explaining why the second issue cannot be resolved--a situation that should be viewed as enlightening, not depressing. For just as Tennyson taught us to prefer love lost over love unexperienced, it is better to not know and know why one can't know, than to be clueless about why the hell so many people are so agitated about 1999 vs. 2000 for the great divide. At least when you grasp the conflicting, legitimate, and unresolvable claims of both sides, you can then celebrate both alternatives with equanimity--or neither (with informed self-righteousness) if your persona be sour, or smug. RIGHTFUL NAMES. Millennium does mean, by etymology, a period of one thousand years. This concept, however, did not arise within the field of practical calendrics, or the measurement of time, but in the domain of eschatology, or futuristic visions about a blessed end of time. Millennial thinking is embedded in the two apocalyptic books of the Bible--Daniel in the Old Testament and Revelation in the New. In particular the traditional Christian millennium is a future epoch that will last for one thousand years, and end with a final battle and Last Judgment of all the dead. As described by Saint John in one of his oracular visions (Revelation 20), Satan shall be bound for one thousand years and cast into the bottomless pit; Christ shall return and reign for this millennium with resurrected Christian martyrs. Satan shall then be loosed; he shall team up with Gog, Magog, and a host of other baddies, for a final battle; Christ and the good guys win, the devils end up in "the lake of fire and brimstone"; all the dead are now resurrected and, in a Last Judgment at this end of time, either rise to live with Jesus, or end up in that other, unpleasant place along with most of history's interesting characters.
How, then, did this original concept of a forthcoming reign of Christ become transmogrified in popular speech into a word for calendric transitions at multiples of one thousand? The main reason must be simple confusion, and loss of knowledge about the original meaning, as apocalyptic versions of Christianity, not to mention Bible reading in general, decline in popularity (despite, to say the least, vigorous continuing support in some circles)! but a rational of sorts for the transfer of meaning does exist within the history of eschatology, particularly in its intersection with my profession of geology in attempts to ascertain the age of the earth. Many biblical passages state that God's day may be compared with a thousand human years: "Be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day" (2 Peter 3;8; see also Psalm 90). This comparison, read literally, led many interpreters to conclude that the seven days of creation must correspond with a maximal duration of seven thousand years for the earth from creation to final destruction at the Last Judgment. In this scheme, the seventh or last cosmic epoch, corresponding to God's day of rest after six days of furiously creative activity, would be a one-thousand-year period of bliss, the grand Sabbath of the traditional millennium. If either science or hermeneutics could then determine the time of the earth's origin, we might know the moment of inception for this last happy age2. Most calculations of the earth's antiquity, if done literally from biblical life spans and other ancient sources, place the creation somewhere between 3671 b.c. (the Jewish calendar) and more than 5500 b.c. (the Septuagint, or Greek Bible). Therefore, a transition into the millennial age might well be on the horizon--or should have occurred just a while ago, according to your favored calculation. True, none of the suggested times of creation give any reason to redefine a millennium as a transition around a date with three zeros in its written for, but at least we may understand why people might conflate a future period of millennial bliss with some system for counting historical time in periods of one thousand years. RIGHTFUL TIMES. As a man of below-average stature myself, I am delighted to report that the source of all our infernal trouble about the ends of centuries may be laid on the doorstep of a sixth-century monk named Dionysius Exiguus, or (literally) Dennis the Short. Instructed to prepare a chronology for Pope Saint John I, Little Dennis decided to begin countable years with the foundation of Rome. But, neatly balancing his secular and sacred allegiances, Dionysius then divided time again at Christ's appearance. He reckoned Jesus' birth at December 25, near the end of year 753 A.U.C. (ab urbe condita, or "from the foundation of the city," that is, of Rome). Dionysius then restarted time just a few days later, on January 1, 754 A.U.C.--not Christ's birth, but the Feast of the Circumcision on his eighth day of life, and also, not coincidentally, New Year's Day in Roman and Latin Christian calendars. Dionysius's legacy has provided little but trouble. First of all, he didn't even get the date right, for Herod died in 750 A.U.C. Therefore, if Jesus and Herod overlapped (and the gospels will have to be drastically revised if they did not), then Jesus must have been born in 4 b.c. or earlier--thus granting the bearer of time's title several years of life before the inception of his own era! But Dennis's misdate of Jesus counts as a mere peccadillo compared with the consequences of his second bad decision. He started time again on January 1, 754 A.U.C.-- and he called this date January 1 of year one a.d. (Anno Domini, or "year if the Lord")--not the year zero (which would, in retrospect, have spared us from ever so much trouble!). In short, Dennis neglected to begin time with year zero, thus discombobulating all our usual notions of counting. During the year that Jesus was one year old, the time system that supposedly started with his birth was two years old. (Babies are zero years old until their first birthday; modern time was already one year old at its inception.) The absence of a year zero also means that we cannot calculate algebraically (without making a correction) through the b.c.-a.d. transition. The time from 1.5 b.c. to a.d. 1.5 is one year, not three years. The problem of centuries arises from Dennis's unfortunate decision to start with year one, rather than year zero--and for no other reason. If we insist that all decades must have ten years, and all centuries on hundred years, then year 10 belongs to the first decade--and, sad to say, year 100 must remain in the first century. Thenceforward, the issue never goes away. Every year with a '00 must sound as the hundredth and final year of its century--no matter what common sensibility might prefer: 1900 went with all the other 1800 years to form the nineteenth century; and 2000 must be the completing year of the twentieth century, and not the inception of the next millennium. Or so the pure logic of Dennis's system dictates. If our monk had only begun with a year zero, then logic and sensibility would coincide, and the wild millennial bells could ring forth but once and resoundingly at the beginning of January 1, 2000. But he didn't. Since logic and sensibility do not coincide, and since both have legitimate claims upon our decision, the great and recurring debate about century boundaries simply cannot be resolved. Some questions have answers because obtainable information decrees a particular conclusion. The earth does revolve around the sun and evolution does regulate the history of life. Some questions have no answers because we cannot get the required information (I doubt that we will ever identify Jack the Ripper with certainty). Many of our most intense debates, however, are not resolvable by information of any kind, but arise from conflicts in values or modes of analysis. (Shall we permit abortion, and in what circumstances? Does God exist?) A subset of these unresolvable debates--ultimately trivial, but capable of provoking great agitation, and thus the most frustrating of all--have no answers because they are about words and systems, rather than things, and the phenomena of the world (that is, "things") therefore have no bearing upon potential solutions. The century debate lies within this vexatious category. The logic of Dionysius's arbitrary system dictates one result--that centuries change between '00 and '01 years. Common sensibility leads us to the opposite conclusion: we want to match transitions with the extent or intensity of apparent sensual change, and 1999 to 2000 just looks more definitive than 2000 to 2001, so we set our millennial boundary at the change in all four positions, not at the mere increment of 1 to the last position. (I refer to this side as "common sensibility" rather than "common sense" because support invokes issues of aesthetics and feeling, rather than logical reasoning.) One might argue that humans, as creatures of reason, should be willing to subjugate sensibility for logic; but we are, just as much, creatures of feeling. And so the debate has progressed at every go-round. Hillel Schwartz, for example, cites two letters to newspapers, written from the camp of common sensibility in 1900. "I defy the most bigoted precisian to work up an enthusiasm over the year 1901, when we will already have had twelve months' experience of the 1900s." "The centurial figures are the symbol, and the only symbol, of the centuries. Once every hundred years there is a change in the symbol, and this great secular event is of startling prominence. What more natural than to bring the century into harmony with its only mark?" I do so love human foibles; what else can keep us laughing (as we must) in this tough world of ours? The more trivial an issue, and the more unresolvable, so does the heat of debate, and the assurance of absolute righteousness, intensify on each side (just consider professorial debates over parking places at university lots). The same clamor arises every hundred years. An English participant in the debate of 1800 vs. 1801 wrote of "the idle controversy, which has of late convulsed so many brains, respecting the commencement of the current century." On January 1, 1801, a poem in the Connecticut Courant pronounced a plague on both houses (but sided with Dionysius):
The same smugness reappeared a century later. The New York Times, with anticipatory diplomacy, wrote in 1896, "As the present century draws to its close we see looming not very far ahead the venerable dispute which reappears every hundred years--viz: When does the next century begin? ...There can be no doubt that one person may hold that the next century begins on the 1st of January, 1900, and another that it begins on the 1st of January, 1901, and yet both of them be in full possession of their faculties." But a German commentator remarked: "In my life I have seen many people do battle over many things, but over few things with such fanaticism as over the academic question of wen the century would end...Each of the two parties produced for its side the trickiest of calculations and maintained at the same time that it was the simplest matter in the world, one that any child should understand." You ask where I stand? Well, publicly of course I take no position because, as I have just stated, the issue is unresolvable: for each side has a fully consistent argument within the confines of different but equally defensible systems. But privately, just between you and me, well, let's put it this way: I know a young man with severe cognitive limits as a result of inborn mental handicaps, but who happens to be a prodigy in day-date calculation (he can, instantaneously, give the day of the week for any date, thousands of years, past or future; we used to call such people idiot savants, a term now happily fading from use, though I have no love for the euphemistic substitute, "savant syndrome"). He is fully aware of the great century debate, for nothing could interest him more. I asked him recently whether the millennium comes in 2000 or 2001--and he responded unhesitatingly, "In 2000. The first decade had only nine years." What an elegant solution, and why not? After all, no one then living had any idea whether they were toiling in year zero or year one--or whether their first decade had nine or ten years, their first century ninety-nine or one hundred. The b.c./a.d. system wasn't invented until the sixth century, and wasn't generally accepted in Europe until the eleventh century. So why don't we just proclaim that the first century had ninety-nine years-- since not a soul then living either knew or cared about the anachronism that would later be heaped upon all the years of their lives? Centuries can then turn when common sensibility desires, and we underscore Dionysius's blessed arbitrariness with a caprice, a device of our own that marries the warring camps. Neat, except that I think people want to argue passionately about trivial unresolvabilities--lest they be compelled to invest such rambunctious energy in real battle that might kill somebody. What else might we salvage from rehearsing the history of a debate without an answer? Ironically, such arguments contain the possibility for a precious sociological insight: since no answer can arise from the "externalities" of nature or logic, changing viewpoints provide "pure" trajectories of evolving human attitudes--and we can therefore map societal trends without impediments of such confusing factors as discovered truth. I had intended to spend only a few hours in research for this essay, but as I looked up documents from century transitions, I noticed something interesting in this sociological realm. The two positions--I have called them "logical" and "common sensible" so far in this essay--also have clear social correlations that I would not have anticipated. The logical position--that centuries must have one hundred years and transitions must therefore occur, because Dionysius included no year zero, between '00 and 'O1 years--has always been overwhelmingly favored by scholars, and by people in power (press and business in particular), representing what we may call "high culture." The common sensible position--that we must honor the appearance of maximal change between '99 and '00 years, and not fret overly about Dionysius's unfortunate lack of foresight--has been the perpetual favorite of that mythical composite once designated as John Q. Public, or "the man in the street," and now usually called vernacular or pop culture. The distinction goes back to the very beginning of this perpetually recurring debate about century transitions. Hillel Schwartz traces the first major hassle to the 1699-1701 passage (place the moment where you wish), the incarnation that prompted Samuel Sewall's trumpeting in Boston. Interestingly, part of the discussion then focused upon an issue that has been persistently vexatious ever since: viz., did the first millennial transition of 999-1001 induce a period of fear about imminent apocalyptical endings of the world--called "the great terror" by supporters of this position. Opinions range from luridly supportive (see the remarkably uncritical book by Richard Erdoes, who elevates every hint of rumor into a dramatic assertion), to the fully debunking (see Hillel Schwartz, previously cited, and scores of references cited in chapter one therein). I will, in my ignorance, take refuge in the balanced position of the French historian Henri Focillon (in his book The Year 1000). Focillon allows that apocalyptic stirring certainly occurred, at least locally in France, Lorraine, and Thuringia, toward the middle of the tenth century. But he finds strikingly little evidence for any general fear surrounding the year 1000 itself--nothing in any papal bull, nothing from any pope, ruler, or king. On the plus side, one prolific monk named Raoul Glaber certainly spoke of millennial terrors, stating that "Satan will soon be unleashed because the thousand years have been completed." The also claimed, though no documentary or archaeological support has been forthcoming, that a wave of new church-building began just a few years after 1000, when folks finally realized that Armageddon had been postponed: "About three years after the year 1000," wrote Glaber, "the world put on the pure white robe of churches." Glaber's tale provides a striking lesson in the dangers of an idée fixe. He was still alive in 1033, still trumpeting the forthcoming millennium--though he admitted that he must have been wrong about Christ's nativity for the beginning of a countdown, and now proclaimed that the apocalypse would surely arrive instead at the millennium of Christ's Passion, in 1033. He read a famine of that year as a sure sign: "Men believed that the orderly procession of the season and the laws of nature, which until then had ruled the world, had relapsed into the eternal chaos; and they feared that mankind would end." I doubt that we should grant such critical acclaim to Fra Glaber (who, according to other sources, was quite a wild character, having been expelled from several monasteries during his checkered career). I do tend to side with critics of the great terror. Why, after all, should 1000 have provoked any great reaction at the time--especially since Dionysius's system had not been generally accepted, and different cultures hadn't even agreed on a date for the inception of a new year. I suspect that the notion of a great terror must arise largely as an anachronistic back-reading, combined with clutching at a few legitimate straws. As another reason for doubting a great terror in 999-1001, the legend of such an episode only begins with a brief mention in a late-sixteenth-century work by Cardinal Cesare Baronio. Once the debate on century endings got started in the 1690s, however, back-reading into the first millennium became inevitable. Did the legendary terror occur at the end of 999 or 1000? Interestingly, the high-culture-vs.-pop-culture distinction can be traced even to this anachronistic reconstruction, with scholars favoring 1000, and popular legends 999. Hillel Schwartz write:
The pattern has held ever since, as the debate bloomed in the 1690s spread in the 1790s with major centers in newspapers of Philadelphia and London (with added poignancy as America mourned the death of George Washington at the very end of 1799), and burst out all over the world in a frenzy of discussion during the 1890s. The 1890s version displays the clearest division of high vs. vernacular culture. A few high-culture sources did line up behind the pop favorite of 1899-1900. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany officially stated that the twentieth century had begun on January 1, 1900. A few barons of scholarship, including such unlikely bedfellows as Sigmund Freud and Lord Kelvin, agreed. But high culture overwhelmingly preferred the Dionysian imperative of 1900-1901. An assiduous survey showed that the presidents of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown, and the University of Pennsylvania all favored 1900-1901--and with the entire Ivy League so firmly behind Dionysius, why worry about a mere kaiser (even though the King of Sweden rallied to Wilhelm's defense). In any case, 1900-1901 won decisively, in the two forums that really matter. Virtually every important public celebration for the new century, throughout the world (and even in Germany), occurred from December 31, 1900, into January 1, 1901. Moreover, essentially every major newspaper and magazine officially welcomed the new century with their first issue of January 1901. I made a survey of principal sources and cold find no exceptions. The Nineteenth Century, a leading British periodical, changed its name to The Nineteenth Century and After, but only with the January 1901 issue, which also featured a new logo of bi-faced Janus, with an old bearded man looking down and left into the nineteenth century, and a bright youth looking right up into the twentieth. Such reliable standards as The Farmer's Almanack and The Tribune Almanac declared their volumes for 1901 the "first number of the twentieth century." On December 31, 1899, The New York Times began a story on The Nineteenth Century by noting, "Tomorrow we enter upon the last year of a century that is marked by greater progress in all that pertains to the material well-being and enlightenment of mankind that all the previous history of the race." On January 1, 1901, the lead headline proclaimed "Twentieth Century's Triumphant Entry," and described the festivities in New York City: "The lights flashed, the crowds sang, the sirens of craft in the harbor screeched and roared, bells pealed, bombs thundered, rockets blasted skyward, and the new century made its triumphant entry." Meanwhile, poor Carry Nation never got to watch the fireworks, or even to raise a glass, for a small story on the same first page announced, "Mrs. Nation Quarantined--Smallpox in jail where Kansas saloon wrecker is held--says she can stand it." So high culture still held the reins of opinion last time around--even in such organs of pop culture as The Farmer's Almanack, no doubt published by men who considered themselves among the elite. But consider the difference as we approach this millennium--for who can doubt that pop culture will win decisively on this most important replay. Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick stood by Dionysius in book and film versions of 2001, but I can hardly think of another source that does not specify the inception of 2001, but I can hardly think of another source that does not specify the inception of 2000 as the great moment of transition. All book titles of our burgeoning literature honor pop culture's version of maximal numerical shift--including Ben Bova's Millennium: A Novel about People and Politics in the Year 1999; J.G. de Beus's Shall We Make the Year 2000; Raymond Williams's The Year 2000; and even Richard Nixon's 1999: Victory Without War. Prince's album and lead song 1999 cites the same date from this ne plus ultra of pop sources. Cultural historians have often remarked that expansion of pop culture, including both respect for its ways and diffusion of its influence, marks a major trend of the twentieth century. Musicians from Benny Goodman to Wynton Marsalis play their instruments in jazz bands and classical orchestras. the Metropolitan Opera has finally performed Porgy and Bess--and bravo for them. Scholars write the most damnedly learned articles about Mickey Mouse. This remarkable change has been well documented and much discussed, but commentary has so far missed this important example from the great century debate. The distinction still mattered in 1900, and high culture won decisively by imposing January 1, 1901, as the inception of the twentieth century. Pop culture (or the amalgam of its diffusion into courts of decision-makers) may already declare clear victory for the millennium, which will occur at the beginning of the year 2000 because most people so feel it in their bones, Dionysius notwithstanding--and again I say bravo. My young friend wanted to resolve the debate by granting the first century only ninety-nine years; now ordinary humanity has spoken for the other end--and the transition from high-culture dominance to pop-culture diffusion will resolve this issue of the ages by granting the twentieth century but ninety-nine years! How lovely--for eternal debates about the unresolvable really do waste a great deal of time, put us in bad humor, and sap our energy from truly important pursuits, Let us, instead, save our mental fight--not to establish the blessed millennium (for I doubt that humans are capable of such perfection), but at least to build Jerusalem upon or planet's green and pleasant land. |
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