Nathaniel Perrin


Easter marks one of the two high points of the church calendar. As Christmas celebrates the advent and birth of the Messiah, so does Easter commemorate his death and resurrection. And yet Easter is one of those odd holidays that moves around each year seemingly by the arbitrary hand of some higher power.

What is not so commonly known today is that the date of Easter proved to be the subject of bitter, and sometimes violent debate in the history of the church, with implications both political and cultural.

## Etymology

But first an etymology.

As most know, Easter is the Christian reinvention of the Jewish holiday of Passover (פֶּסַח - Pesach). Passover was instituted in Exodus 12 at the culmination of the Ten Plagues in Egypt where the angel of death would pass over the households of Egypt and slaughter the firstborn of each household, except for those households of Israel who painted lamb's blood upon the doorway. This symbolizes not only the fulfillment of liberation of slavery but also protection from death through the blood of an innocent sacrifice.

The parallels with Christ's sacrifice are striking, and it is not without reason that it was ordained that Christ was tried and put to death on Passover weekend.

The Hebrew name of Pesach was thus used to refer to the celebration and for most Western languages continues to be used so today.

The Greeks transliterated it into Πάσχα and the Romans carried the name into Latin as *Pascha*.

This name for Easter is maintained in modern Romance languages as Pâques in French, Pascua in Spanish, and Pasqua in Italian.

Even many Germanic languages have maintained this name with Dutch using Pasen and Swedish using Påsk.

Strangely, English and German are the two outliers which do not use the same "Passover" name for Easter.

For English, we first see reference to this Easter name in the chronicler Bede's *De Temporum* (725) where Bede refers to the Saxon name for what we call April as "Eosturmonath". He claims that the name "Eostur" refers to the ancient Saxon goddess "Eostre". This seems plausible at first sight as so many of our months and day names come from Germanic pagan deities. However, there simply is no other reference to or mention of this goddess in any other literature or archeological sources. It is completely possible that Bede merely speculates on this.

Another possible explanation is that Easter occurs around the time of the spring equinox. Because spring equinox festivities generally focus on longer daylight hours and earlier sunrises, and the sun rises in the East, the name is merely a reference to this. Like how the date of Christmas is tied to winter solstice festivals. This idea can be corroborated with a comparison to German who call the holiday *Ostern* and East *Ost*, both from the High German word *ōstarun*. 

## The First Easter Controversy - Quartodecimanism

The first Easter controversy emerged very early on in the history of Christianity, during the apostolic generation, and was concerned with the question whether the celebration of Christ's death and resurrection should happen on the day of his death (the Passover) or on the Sunday of his resurrection. Those who pushed for the Passover date were referred to as Quartodecimanism, because Passover is celebrated on the fourteenth (*quarta decima*) of the Jewish month Nisan.

The very first mention of Easter as a holiday in fact comes from the 2nd century when Melito of Sardis wrote an essay "On the Pascha" arguing for this Passover celebration date. The Western tradition, the generation following the apostolic ministry of Peter and Paul tended toward the Sunday celebration while Eastern Christians following the Apostle John tended toward the Friday date.

It became such a tenuous issue that Eusebius attests (V.23-24) the early church father Polycarp traveled from Anatolia to Rome in part to hold discussions with his Western counterparts on this Easter date issue. However, at the time they decided to practice their customs separately but remain reconciled within a single faith.

At a high level, the issue boils down to questions of theme and identity.

The first few generations of Christianity struggled to establish itself as an independent faith not attached to Judaism. Many external writers of the time referred to Christianity as a Jewish sect (as there were many), and even within the first generation Christ-followers would attend synagogue in cities where there was no establish presence.

This led to an internal tension within Christian communities as to the degree to which Christianity should be a Jewish faith. This is a large theme in the Pauline epistles, as he strove to disconnect Christian practice from "Judaizing" influence which he argued re-introduced legalism that undermined the very core of Christian doctrine.

By celebrating Easter in the same way as the Jewish faith, Christianity seemed to merely be a subset of Judaism.

On the other hand, other Christians felt it extremely important to reclaim the theme of Passover and definitively state that Christ's death is a repetition of the original Jewish Passover tradition. To disconnect the holiday from this historic event was to undermine the definitive theological connection between the two and also to deny that Christ was reclaiming and reinventing the Passover tradition through the new covenant, as much of the Christian tradition frames itself as a new iteration against the old version of Judaism.

Eventually, this conflict came to a head by the close of the 2nd century as several synods were convened to rule on the question of the date of Easter. As Eusebius recounts, these synods ruled that Sunday would be the official day of Easter, placing greater emphasis on the resurrection of Christ and his triumph over death as the real essence of the holiday.

Those who remained stoutly in favor of Quartodecimanism such as Polycrates of Ephesus were briefly excommunicated by Pope Victor I until other Western bishops such as Irenaeus pressed the Pope to re-admit Quartodecimans. We have other testimonies of others like John Chrysostom simply denying Quartodecimans admittance to church at all. This was an issue not taken lightly.

What is not clear after is what point Christians all shifted to celebrating the Easter date on Sunday, though we do know this was very nearly universally adopted following the Council of Nicaea if not before then. However, Nicaea was itself concerned with another aspect of the Easter controversy.

## The Second Easter Controversy - Jewish or Roman Calendar

So it had been established by the end of the second century that doctrinally at least Easter should be celebrated on Sunday. But this did not quite settle the issue as there were different calendars at play here.

The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar, consisting of 29-30 days each month, with an extra lunar month added each year to average out the days.

By contrast, the Julian calendar introudced by Julius Caesar is a purely solar calendar of 365 days with a leap day every fourth year.

So while Christians were agreed that Easter would fall upon the "Sunday" following Passover, it was not definitively clear whether this meant adherence to the Jewish calendar for reckoning the date of Passover or if some corollary date in the Roman calendar should be used.

This again sparked dispute and debate depending on the apostolic heritage of various church communities.

In fact, it was of such significance that it was a primary point of discussion during the first ecumenical council of Nicaea which is known today for "writing the book" on core Christian doctrine across various branches and denominations, with regard to the divine and human nature of Christ, and other key theological questions.

Emperor Constantine I took more executive action in this decision and ruled that the date of Easter simply could not be celebrated according to the Jewish calendar because that meant that there would be some years in the Roman calendar where Easter would be celebrated twice.

It was determined that Easter should be celebrated **on the first Sunday after the first full moon following spring equinox** and that decision in 325 AD is how we still determine the date of Easter today. This was based on the Alexandrian method of measuring years, as Alexandria was one of the largest scientific centers of the period and was seen as most precise in calculating time. This ensured that Easter would follow a 19-year cycle before it was celebrated on the same day again, as it continues to this day.


## The Third Easter Controversy - Ireland versus Rome

However, this did not mark the end of Easter's controversies, as trouble reared its head again a few centuries later.

This third one originates with St. Patrick, whose own festival is just now behind us. While we generally picture the spread of Christianity across early medieval Europe as the emanation of concentric circles going from France to England and Germany and from there to Scandinavia and Poland, etc. there are exceptions to this rule.

Ireland is one such exception as one extremely early adopter of Christianity for the region, especially as it was never occupied or controlled by the Romans. St. Patrick is notable for establishing one of the only centers of Christianity north of Mediterranean that was so completely independent of Rome.

Because Ireland was such as an early adopter, Irish missionaries would cross the Irish Sea to evangelize peoples of England. We even have the Irish monk Columbanus traveling to modern-day Belgium as a missionary and founding one of the most popular centers of monastic learning and teaching on the European continent, Luxeuil Abbey in France and Bobbio Abbey in Italy being among them.

On the other hand, we have the famous missionary St. Augustine (no connection to *Confessions* Augustine, the bishop of Hippo) who was sent from Rome to evangelize England. Because of this there were two separate Christian influences in Saxon England, the Celtic and the Roman strain.

This was not problematic earlier on as they shared the common goal of converting pagans on the British Isles to Christianity. However as paganism began to disappear from English shores, the cultural tensions between the Celtic and Roman variants became more pronounced, as is only natural when two cultures come in contact with one another.

Ironically, the one single issue which was the breaking point between these two Christian elements was the date of Easter.

Because Ireland never had a Roman presence, it never had adopted the Roman calendar. Irish monks at the isle of Iona had adopted the practice of celebrating Easter on an 84-year cycle which had been the general practice in Celtic Gaul and even for some Romans prior to the Council of Nicaea. However, this clashed with the 19-year cycle ruling established by the Council of Nicaea.

This proved one of the most politically significant disputes in the episodes of Easter controversies as bishops, priests, and even political appointees were chosen, passed over, dismissed, and even exiled based on their positions on this issue in medieval English lands.

The most notable of these situations involves the kingdom of Northumbria, in Northern England today. While Roman Christianity had gained a strong foothold in Northumbria, a man named Oswald gained the throne in 633, and he was incidentally educated and raised in part by Irish monks. Oswald invited many Irish monks to positions of prestige and influence in his kingdom, and he was one of the most proactive rulers of Northumbria to promote a general conversion to Christinaity.

Following Oswald's death, Oswiu came to power in Northumbria which had grown very largely divided between Celtic and Roman Christianity. The issue of the date of Easter was coming to a head not only because it proved logistically challenging for lords to arrange feast days in mixed communities, but also because it was an indicator of which side possessed true hegemony, and neither side wished to back down.

To resolve this, Oswiu called the Synod of Whitby in 664 AD to rule once and for all on this date of Easter question. The other prime issue of this synod was whether monks were to shave their heads (tonsure) in the Irish or Roman style. After long and tenuous debate, it was ruled that Northumbria would align itself with Roman Catholicism on both issues. By all accounts, Oswiu merely attended and presided over the synod without intervening directly, but this was also politically convenient for him to align himself with Roman Christianity as it gave him more leverage to wage war against the Britons to the West and the Scottish peoples of the North who were more Celtic than Roman.

In either case, this synod incidentally spelled the beginning of the end for Celtic Christianity as a cultural hegemon as the major English kingdom of Northumbria swung to the side of Rome, and over time all of the British Isles would slowly align themselves to Roman Catholicism for the following centuries until the Reformation came nearly a millennium following the Synod of Whitby.

## The Date of Easter Today

One would think the matter definitively settled by this age, considering how many controversies have existed over the date of Easter.

However, many Eastern Orthodox churches celebrate Easter on a different day than Western churches. Again this boils down to the divergence of calendars.

The Julian calendar was the universal Christian calendar for quite some time, but it is not the calendar we use today.

In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII, the central pope of the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent, also implemented a new reformed calendar that added precision to the Julian Calendar. This Gregorian Calendar added exceptions to leap years in order to keep the calendar better aligned with the solar cycle. For the Gregorian Calendar, leap years would be celebrated every four years except on a century year unless that century year was divisible by 400. So for example while 1600 and 2000 were leap years, the years 1800 and 1900 were not. 2100 will also not be a leap year.

The adoption of the Gregorian calendar was very gradual and unique to each country, but it was adopted across the British Empire in 1752 when a few days were "erased" from history. This also is one of the last British reforms to have taken root in colonial America before the American Revolution severed ties between the two states.

So while the Western world today celebrates Easter according to the Gregorian calendar, the Eastern Orthodox church uses the original Julian calendar and Alexandrian method as ruled by the Council of Nicaea. However, with the Western and Eastern churches already split by the time of this divergence, there was no need for further controversy.

--

One cannot help but reflect that this was certainly was one of Christ's chief concerns when he died on the cross and rose again, and one can only hope that Heaven is keeping its calendar in line with ours, lest there should prove to be a Fourth Easter Controversy when Christ returns and there is a calendar desync between the new heavens and new earth.

The Easter Controversy (x3)

[Photo by Sebastian Voortman.](https://www.pexels.com/photo/two-white-concrete-statues-covered-by-dust-566641/)

*I wrote this originally five years ago for a former iteration of this blog.*

> the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
> excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
> o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
> with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to
> me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
> What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
> how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
> express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
> in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
> world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
> what is this quintessence of dust? - Hamlet

It is hard to write about a human condition. Single line platitudes invariably fall into some mixture of sentimental contrivance and egregious myopia. It just sounds repulsive to the modern ear. Perhaps this is due in part to advertising and its unrelenting recycling of banalities. Motivation taglines that reduce the universal human to a universal consumer.

But fortunately a phrase such as "quintessence of dust" has not yet been co-opted by the marketing machine. Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

Quintessential is a term that has fallen out of usage. To be quintessential is to be classic in some sense. The diner, for example, is quintessentially American.

But let's pick apart this term etymologically. "Quintessence" derives from the scholastic concept of *quinta essentia* which is recognizably translatable as the "fifth essence". It is a Latinization of a Greek term we recognize as "element".

These elements are, for Greek science, what we remember as fire, earth, water, and air.

There is something we have lost with our modern periodic table ranging across 200 distinct entities.

When you say something is elemental, something is essential to the very thing, there is a lot more meaning when you liken the heart to fire than to carbon or nitrogen. Something more visceral when you have four elements to choose from.

The entire cosmos from droplets of dew to the burning of the stars to the sinewing of the flesh to the rock formations torturously sundered into the face of the earth, all these are derived from four base elements.

The world cannot exist apart from these four. Or so it was told.

Then Aristotle comes along as he does, and he theorizes that fire, water, earth, and air don't quite capture the totality of the universe. There must be a fifth element out there: aether.

So he coined it. And so aether entered scientific discourse for a very long time. So long in fact that it was tossed around as a hypothetical until Einstein definitively put it to bed in 1905.

Aether as a concept is significantly older than gravity, electricity, waves, particles, fluids, and planets.

So what is aether?

Though it had a long shelf life in the scientific world, there was never quite a firm agreement on what aether is. Is it the force of life? Some light-bearing invisible substance that passes through the vacuum? 

This fifth element aether became a mysterious silhouette that coul potentially answer many leading scientific questions across disciplines such as optics, biology, astronomy, chemistry, and others.

It was the theoretical missing link that could potentially unify all of natural science.

So, if you will permit some creative reading for the sport of it, what if Hamlet's idea is taht the fifth essence of the universe--something on the level of aether--is dust. Dust as the missing link.

And not dust as we typically imagine it. But what we are. Humans, transmogrified from the dust.

Dust itself is a primary theme throughout the Hebraic telling of things. The word "עָפָר֙" appears over a hundred times across the Old Testament: it refers to lowliness as in the case of *Job*, ephemerality as in the case of *Ecclesiastes*, or as a metaphor of innumerable abundance as in the promise made to Abraham of his descendants.

It first appears in the Creation myth when God forms man out of dust and breathes life into him. While the rest of creation is spoken into being, the human race is culled out a pre-existing material substance. Dust.

Hence the cliche "From dust you came and to dust you will return" coined either by Kansas or *Ecclesiastes*, take your pick.

This image should give us pause. What it is to be made of dust.

Consider the last person you held in your arms, how they could simply evaporate into a sooty, powdery pile of dust through your fingers. In fact they will invariably end up this way.

Consider how much of your past self lies as sheets of dust under bed. The more you cast off of yourself, the more there is to haunt you. Dust as a specter, your past self as a voyeur of the future.

Consider old houses abandoned by dead relatives or strangers. Shelves and furniture and books caked in the flesh of the dead.

This is what dust is. This what you were, and this is what you will become.

We forget how appalling such an image should be. To call ourselves dust.

But that is not the end of the story. This isn't some ode to rejoice in the meaninglessness of life.

We are not mere dust but the quintessence of it.

We are not derivations but elevations. Whether as the Hebraic says by the breath of God or as the Hellenic says by the possession of *logos*. Or as others in the West have gone on to name as the soul or free will or consciousness. All of these as some label to distinguish the animating force that exalts us from the dust.

These various terms do not capture such a quintessence in its entirety. There is something indeterminable, ineffable about the human being that these concepts can barely taste.

It is because of this unnamed thing that we are raised from brute materialism to pure determinism.

With the assiduous encroachment of sciences social and physical into all spheres of lief, there is a strong temptation to parse out every single occurrence into a predetermined cause-and-effect. Genetics, economics, sociology, psychology, among other disciplines whose langauge games we widely employ to rationalize the problems of our lives. It is the tool of identitarianism (a term whose meaning also is revealed in etymology) to cast blame on the forces of determinism.

Those whose personal conceptual space is determined by political ideology are often guilty of this. Concocting general patterns and statistics as pre-emptive authorities over their own lives. To explain the crumble or enfetterment. 

This all depends upon a logic of determinism that all has been decided already in the lot of one's own life. That there is no free will or fate to fight for or overturn. A whole retinue of externalities has totalistic control over our personal lives.

Unfortunately, the extent to which someone assigns an aspect of themselves to this mode of thinking is an extent that has been cordoned off to mental slavery. Enslavement to ideas and thought patterns that increase learned helplessness, anxiety, misery, despair, and those factors. To give the perceived enemy more control and power than they probably even have.

To reject determinism is to recognize this little ineffable, quintessential blip and what it does for us, whatever this blip is. It allows us to strive and to overcome the problems set before us. To contest the roll of the dice. To play the game.

The unpredictable choreography of time, uncountable as dust swirling in a sunlit hallway. Too intricate and random for any finitude to calculate. 

Even in this age, human beings still possess this glint of spontaneous vitality, no matter how insistently other forces have tried to suffocate it. For two millennia, aged scientists with baggy eyes and an aversion to the real world have hunched over lifeless texts to try to determine and control the fifth element ether. To put it into a closed off box.

But vitality can never be captured by science. All you get is an ossified shadow. The residual glow of its power.

And for as long as there is a sliver of the human essence in us. Soemthing that can escape the constricting noose of scientific causality, there is hope. Hope that we are not thoroughly enslaved to external forces. That we do not need to subject ourselves to the prisons of the mind.

That our quintessence, as humble dust, is that we can never be fully determinable.

The quintessence of dust

*Fast Antiates Maiores* reconstructed. [Source URL](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Museo_del_Teatro_Romano_de_Caesaraugusta.43.jpg).

The calendar occupies a strange place between man and cosmos. On the one hand it is a technology for the organization and division of time in the human reckoning of things. On the other a system for mapping the cycles of the stars and planets onto our terrestrial plane.

Our English rendering *calendar* flows down to us from old Roman custom. 

The Romans counted their months by dividing them between three principal days of the lunar cycle: the calends, the nones, and the ides.

The calends was the first day of the month and occurred when the first sliver of the moon appeared in a new moon cycle. Unlike other calendar systems built upon decentralized mathematical and scientific calculations, the Roman calends could only be dictated by the priesthood. When the priests determined it was the first day of the month from their vantage point on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, a priest would stand and call out (*calo*) and herald the coming of the new month.

One must remember that Rome has a long heritage of centralized, pontifical authority. Where persons and offices determine what is true *ex cathedra*, more true than individual observation or conviction.

The calends was noteworthy in the Roman world not merely for the cosmic alignment of moon, sun, and earth to form a new moon but also because it was the day of debts. On the first day of the month, debts could be collected. 

Our word "calendar" derives from *calendarium* which was the name given to this book of debts, an accounting ledger both in a cosmic and fiscal sense which marked how much was owed and by whom.

In the world of modern accounting, we maintain some downstream variation of this in our governmental tax structures, reckoning debts to the state at the level of the year, aligned with the cosmic revolution of the earth around the sun.

But this modern rendering is decoupled from the religious significance of such accounting. And this marks what perhaps is the deepest guilt of modern society, an obligatory truth we have forgotten.

To be born is to exist in debt.

Debt in contemporary vernacular usage has been constrained greatly in scope, often only to refer to fiscal or material forms of obligation.

But debt exists in a much broader scope as its Latin origin indicates. For the original word functions much like an English helping verb indicating that one *ought* to do something, one *should* do something, one *must* do something.

Debt in this sense is deeply tied to concepts of duty, the ethics of obligation.

And the calendar in this light is not just a table for the division of days, weeks, months, and years according to the ways of the gods and the ways of men. It is a cosmic ledger of our debts. The debt of our time.

This is a chief insight of Protestantism, as Weber observes. That our time is not our own. Nothing at all is our own in an absolute sense. All we have and are and will gain is due to God. We are merely borrowers of the thousand talents. One of modern conservatism's fundamental errors is to elevate the notion of property above all else, failing to recognize that all which is owned is also owed.

In the world of finance, we have finite sums that we may can spend or use. In the world of life, we have finite time that me way spend or use until our allocation is extinguished in the embrace of death.

This finite sum is a gift. And it is not one to be squandered.

Richard Baxter treated this theme most exhaustively in his sermon "The Redemption of Time". Much like our life has been redeemed by Christ, so too must we redeem our time, to make it of good use in service to the God who has granted us such time.

In one section, Baxter points to the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus teaches that we shall all on the day of judgment have to explain *every* useless (ᾱ̓ργός) word we have ever spoken. The Greek here is the antonym of ἔργον which is used to indicate any work, labor, deed, or task. The Twelves Labors of Hercules, Hesiod's *Works and Days*, etc. What we do with our lives in the short time we have been granted.

One can get a sense for the Puritan interpretation of time here by his reading:

Now then if there be an account to be given, and a reckoning to be made for these rubbish speeches, judge, if it be not a want of redeeming the time, to lay it out in such a thing as will bring a sore and heavy burden afterwards without repentance to cast it off; and judge if he which makes much of time had not need take much heed of this ill-spent breath. Not alone then wicked speak∣ing when one bel•heth forth lewd and filthy words, not slanderous and backbiting talk, (when one whispers of his neighbour's faults behind his back, uttering (perhaps) also lying reports, and fathering that upon him which he never did or meant;) but even vain, needless, and unprofitable words..."

Biblical ethics places great emphasis on the sins of the tongue, the words spoken and the things said. But there is a sense in the Puritan reading where the sin is not just a matter of the motives or consequences of the words, but the fact that they misuse the time granted us.

This may seem rather extreme in a contemporary lens, but it does make one wonder the exactitude to which God would judge us for redeeming the time. For as history shows time and again, the extremeness of a belief has little to do with its usefulness. Extreme views quite easily become mainstream and former commonplace wisdom can become taboo even within the space of a generation.

This uneasiness we feel toward the use or misuse of our time can be seen as the wellspring of guilt. It is no coincidence that the Germans use the one word *Schuld* for both guilt and debt.

We feel guilt at the theological debt owed.

And this brings us back to Rome.

The *calendarium* appears twice in Seneca's "De Beneficiis", a Stoic treatise on gifts, charitable services, essentially giving something without anything ostensibly being required in return.

The gift has taken on a new level of significance in 20th century philosophy as a central theme in Derrida and other postmodern writers who write on how even a "free" gift introduces social or psychological obligations that consequently mean the gifter actually is receiving something in return.

In simple terms, it is why ancient kings would give away lavish gifts or Caesars would give bread and circuses for the poor. Not out of charitable selflessness but rather as ostentatious display or politicking. One can readily see this in modern philanthropy and the tax exemption structures built around the nonprofit industrial complex which fund lucrative or desirable outcomes. This is a primary mode of dark liberalism which leverages capital to the benefit of the giver but behind the safety net of sanctimonious platitudes.

This idea was brought back to the forefront by Marcel Mauss in his famous seminal essay "The Gift", but it should be noted that this essay is itself deeply indebted to Seneca's work "De Beneficiis".

Seneca refers to calendars twice. In the first instance he writes, "Nemo beneficia in calendario scribit" (*De Beneficiis* I.2). In translation this can be rendered as "No one records gifts in the book of debts (calendar)".
This highlights the spontaneity of the gift as something falling outside the exact, deterministic ordering of time. At the same time, one does not record or remember a gift because as a gift it is not a debt to be owed. One does not remind the recipient of a debt to be collected.

In a later passage, Seneca is characterizing gold, silver, and iron as evils the gods buried beneath the earth but which we have dug up to inflict evil upon one another to satiate our vindictive greed. And then he writes,

"Et tamen adhuc ista aliquam materiam habent; est, in quo errorem oculorum animus subsequi possit. Video istic diplomata et syngraphas et cautiones, vacua habendi simulacra, umbracula avaritiae quaedam laborantis, per quae decipiat animum inanium opinione gaudentem. Quid enim ista sunt, quid fenus et calendarium et usura, nisi humanae cupiditatis extra naturam quaesita nomina?" (Ibid. VII.10 )

To paraphrase in translation: And yet even these things have some substance; there is something for the mind's eye is able to follow. I see bonds and contracts, securities, empty symbols (*simulacra*) of possession, some kind of shelter for laboring greed, through which the mind is deceived, rejoicing in the illusion of ownership. For what are these very things, what are interest and ledgers (*calendarium*) and loans, but names for human desire sought beyond nature.

Again, Seneca introduces the calendar as a nefarious force. One that constricts and confines us as tools of human greed. Taken on its own, this quote shows remarkable applicability for a global financial market which recently crashed from collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and once again chokes the middle class out of home ownership through real estate investment trusts (REITs). 

For time immemorial, financial systems and institutions have concocted a panoply of wizardry and fancy terminology to camouflage the unending extraction of wealth.

But moralisms aside, one should consider this from the viewpoint of temporal debt.

If God has granted us time, is it as a gift or as a loan?

The concept of "redeeming the time" runs the risk of casting God as a greedy lender who is waiting to pounce on his returns. We must not forget that Jesus also parables God as a generous master who forgives debts. How Pauline theology underscores Christ as a liberator who grants us freedom.

The guilt of debt lends itself to legalism. That life must be crushed in the grindstone to extract every kernel of worth.

If grace is given to us as a gift, then in what ways could we say that time is also a gift to us. To enjoy without use or end goal. And in enjoying this gift to thereby redeem it, perhaps.

It is a difficult question and one that cannot be answered here. Only posed. How we can balance the obligation we owe to the divine versus the freedom we have in what we have been granted.

And there are much broader investigations we could make. A structural comparison of how calendars ranging from the Mesoamerican to the Mesopotamian to the Chinese illustrate cultural or universal characterizations of the relation between man and cosmos, debt and time. This is only one strand.

It is perhaps most fruitful to reflect in closing on Christmas, a calendar holiday most associated with gift giving. How in the Christian understanding, Christ is the gift God gave to the world.

We commemorate this holiday not because God instructs us too, but rather, as is good etiquette for any recipient of a particularly lavish gift, we make sure to remember and express our gratitude for what we have been given. 

The calendar implication of Christmas is that we are marking our own accounting books to remember the debt that we paid in our sin. But one that we have been redeemed of. A transaction that has been zeroed out on our behalf. And to be freed from debt is something to rejoice in. As we augur a new year, a new cycle of time that we have been granted. To use in grace, not just for ourselves as some idea of property, but as something for the larger whole.


A quick reflection on the Roman and Christian implications of the calendar

Calendratics: debt and time

Notes on Gadamer's Truth and Method

[Image Credit](https://www.istockphoto.com/portfolio/style-photography?mediatype=photography)

Medicine is rooted in the notion of *vis medicatrix naturae*. Nature is the healer. We merely aid or inhibit its process.

An organism possesses an internal equilibrium which exists in relation to an external equilibrium of its environment. Given water of a suitable composition and temperature, a fish may survive with an internal equilibrium through metabolic, circulatory, and other physiological systems.

Disease is the disruption of such internal equilibrium, whether from internal or external causes.

Medicine is the corrective process which seeks to re-establish this homeostasis of the organism.

For the history of our species, humanity has existed with a relative homeostasis compatible with many different climates and biomes, often through the medicinal adjustments of clothing and shelter for more extreme weather conditions.

However this relative environmental stability has come under threat in recent centuries with the advent of industrial technologies and its ecological impacts.

Many attribute simple phenomena changes such as regional temperature fluctuations to this through the rhetoric of climate change. Perhaps a helpful phrase but unfortunately excessively reductionistic.

Consideration of ecological change should not be restricted to temperature or vague symbology of pollution. Prudence requires more targeted investigation of the causes and effects industrial civilization makes upon human ecology and consequently physiology.

One such pollutative phenomenon which is only beginning to gain widespread notice is the effect of plastics and its radical metabolic impacts on animal and human populations. There are others to be sure, but these are not to be documented here.

Humans now suffer internal disequilibrium as part of the fruits of industrialism and man's war on both God and nature. The external environment has been poisoned against us by our own machinations.

Unfortunately, the instruments of power do not lie with us to holistically and cohesively revert external ecologies to a more suitable equilibrium.

This means that medicine has acquired in our time an additional responsibility: to protect our internal equilibrium against the poisons invading us from industrial society.

We must counter-act the damages wrought upon our bodies by sedentary lifestyles, the screens, the pharmaceuticals, the various electrical and chemical alterations flooding through us, the stressors baked into modern life.

To return to pre-industrial cortisol baselines, we unfortunately do require the use of medication.

This I view as the first object of the science of nootropics. To correct and counteract the technological miasma pervading us and slowly corrupting and degenerating the human organism. Rather than a transhumanist project, it should fundamentally be a humanist one.

We cannot in total prevent industrial society from poisoning our bodies, but we can certainly mitigate it. That is where the fight begins. The fight for life, vitality.

Brief thoughts on self-medication

[Daniel Boone](https://www.istockphoto.com/vector/daniel-boone-american-pioneer-an-illustrated-scene-gm1286950756-383303148)

### Neural Sociology

One way to consider the current state of affairs is this. The average human being exists as a neuron within a larger cranial complex, one whose neural networks are the vehicle for the transfer of two fundamental entities: financial assets and political consent. Both could fall under umbrella labels such as capital or consumerism, but they are also irreducible to each other.

Just as electricity operates as the currency of exchange and communication within the physiology of the brain, so too do money and ideology operate as two corollary vehicles of flux in this parallel model of network exchange. Neurons respond to stimuli. With regard to consumerism, marketing and sales are the technical disciplines directed to stimulate the human node for the sake of eliciting very precise responses of the purchase, the upsell, and the product referral. Some marketing and sales teams are sophisticated enough that they have been able to remold some human nodes as self-stimulating (i.e. addicted) through phone brain and other means. This is how the consumerist sciences can optimize the human nodes. To minimize the financial stimulus (ad spend) required to produce the maximal amount of transferred financial assets. 

What must also be considered are the network effects of consumerism. How various nodes are better positioned to influence others into the same kind of consumerist responsiveness. Which is why the consumerist sciences place considerable weight on securing access to influencer nodes as they can have considerable, even exponential downstream effects.

The techniques and processes of the science of material consumerism have been applied with relative success to its sister phenomenon: political consumerism.

A pure democratic system could be said to also operate on this neural model where localized nodes receive ideological stimulus and secrete or effuse ideological output which manifests occasionally in votes but more often in the politics that lies outside the election cycle through discourse, leveraging, and other means. This is why centralized democracy in both monopolistic and oligopolistic flavors tends to instantiate and cultivate ideology factories that aim toward the near constant if not omnipresent informing of political neurons. 

Thus the procedure of political information depends on the twofold goal of (1) determining what the political neuron should think about this given here-and-now event as well as (2) cultivating the right kind of responsivity that the neuron will be able to produce the desired kind of opinion in response to future events without external stimulus. More so than even the case in material consumerism, the node should believe themselves the originator of these opinions, interpretations, and ideologies, or at the very least incapable of framing the situation in such a way so as to realize how their thoughts are merely the product of systems of mass consent manufacturing.

Both neural models may be decentralized in that no intent, will, or intelligence is attempting to guide the patterns of stimuli and response across the network.

There may also exist models in which certain agents may have directed ends or goals they wish to meet and possess the tools with which to slowly and gradually transform the stimuli-response patterns of material and political consumers toward certain aligned patterns. This may be called social engineering. To enact social engineering on entire human populations requires both considerable technological, financial, and political resources and is a painstakingly slow and often erroneous evolutionary progression. 

What further complicates understanding Intelligent Design in social engineering is that even if a few clusters of agents are pulling the levers so to speak, their goals are often at odds with one another so they may be engaged in tactical neural warfare, or they may simply be incompetent at influencing outcomes so the changes they gradually introduce into the social neural ecosystem is not aligned with their goals or objectives.

One could go on to consider how demography, jurisprudence, religion, and other factors influence the behavior of human nodes, but this is a general lay of the land.

The end result of a neural system where human intent is at play is that the human being is framed as a clinical subject to be completely and fully enclosed within a purely controlled environment. Each node's material and political choices are controlled by upstream factors and levers to produce the desired outcomes for whoever's jurisdiction they fall under. A covert feudalism where lords operate from shadows to leverage mass populations to enact the goals of the few.

It is a world where the masses are subject to the machinations of graph theory. Consensus is coaxed if not coerced. And much of this would have been impossible merely a century ago, but with the advent of many technologies of "colossalism", it is now possible to centrally manage or distribute control both over a wider range of human entities and at an exponentially deeper level than would have been possible before. 

Where before it would have required immense effort to track the geographic region and financial resources of even a few individuals, now even the eyeball movements of entire populations can be safely computed and tracked. Generative AI provides immense opportunities for enshrouding each individual within an abundance of custom-tailored content to meld and shape the clinical subject as desired.

---

### Responses to Totalistic Consumerism

This model is not novel. It can be described as post-human or anti-human. For it completely eschews human agency. But one should also wonder, if there are such systems of social engineering at play, would they not also be directed toward whittling down and reducing human agency as much as it can? Receptors are more useful than agents. The degree to which such machinery is able to modify the extent or grip of the human will is a question beyond consideration here.

One thing of material consideration here is the trajectory of such a reshaped neurology. What does it converge to?

This is perhaps best described as the hyperreal.

What in our lifetimes we have taken to be authoritative disbursers of knowledge may become so radically and pervasively (and clumsily) manipulated, that many register a certain degree of mistrust toward any of these instruments of media in both the material and political flavors of consumerism. And while many of us are used to being lied to through such instruments, there are few things as offputting as being lied to poorly. And when the lies upcrank in frequency, it certainly does not mend matters.

And one resoundingly common instrument in this supposed program of manipulation is the Internet.

There will always be many either without the sense or will to recognize the ideological zoos they have been born and bred in. Others may see the zoo for what it is but acquiesce for they understand that significant opportunities for advancement often accompany participating in the exhibition. A dolphin that dances for the masters will get more fish than the grump in the corner. These cynics buy in and do the circus show for the rewards it entails. If needed, forgetting what they give up in the process. They engage in the proxy wars of the hyperreal as the various conumerist-politico wings engage in their endless neural dance.

A third class may also exist of those who feel on some instinctive level the dissonance between the hyperreal of social engineering and the other real world which existed before the Internet. They may sense something is off, but their dopamine triggers are so deeply ensnared and entangled within a neural system, they lack the necessary wherewithal to do anything about it. They remain passive, despondent like animals consigned to experimentation. The roll of dice to decide how things turn out for them.

As often happens, people will not necessarily fall under one single class but have a certain mixture of the different ones to varying degree.

What is likely to happen is the continued growth and perhaps ascension of a fourth class: the offline.

The offline can be described as those who live primarily analog lifestyles that are disconnected the neural machinery of social engineering.

Their senses are not constantly bombarded with ads or digital content, so they have no need to resist or fight the urges and impulses a phone may implant in them.

They are not subscribed to the everyday cycle of news outrage, so their cortisol levels are not inflammed to the same extent the enplugged may be with the ongoing stream of news events.

What an offline lifestyle looks like may vary. Those old enough to be pre-boomer may still persist in this lifestyle (though even these are often subject to network television, even when they do not use the Internet). Those who live in the rural recesses of society often have a greater propensity to live in this degree of disconnection. We have always had the Amish, embedded within American jurisdiction but disconnected from it.

---

### The Offliner

Utopianism emerges in waves, ever since the foundings of America. Here we have a new wave. One digital symptom of this is the effusive growth in the DIY and homesteader genres across many regions and both genders. As digital cynicism deepens so too does a desire for an "off the grid" lifestyle.

But desire does not always produce change. Many dreams are craved for, and few are realized. And in fact pro-offliner content remains still an instrument of the digital. It can be a psychological facade by which the influencers of the genre broadcast how offline they are through online means. And those who spend hours reading DIY content or basking in homesteader images remain engaged in a form of digital consumerism rather than developing the habits by which they become offliners.

To be offline is not to be completely disconnected from the Internet in total. But rather to have one's agency unimpaired and unimpacted by the dual tweezers of smartphone and Internet. They do not subconsciously crave the tingle of haptic feedback or social media viewership. They use the tool without the tool using them.

This community will become more self-aware and well-defined as time goes on.

Perhaps it entails hamlets and communes disconnected from the Internet. Intertribal communication conducted through physical mail and private couriers. Encylopedias and manuals in physical rather than digital form. A return of artisanal apprenticeship for metallurgy, carpentry, etc. The boundary between analogue and digital is not firmly fixed (where does the fax reside?), and it will likely be up to each respective community to develop and ordain the proper restrictions on technology as the Amish do.

In the next decade or two, we will most likely see an upsurge in the popularity of the "offliner" as a concept in the digital sphere. Homestead literature will abound. New forms of courtship that are decidedly post-dating, a return perhaps to practical marriage in response to the current digital burnout. Starter kits and perhaps financing plans for those seeking to go offline. These are not trends that will take over society wholesale, but rather subgroups among the more conservative-minded who want to reject the digital politics of global Internet cosmopolitanism. Those enamored with recapturing the frontier aesthetic as it existed in the American grain. 

This of course presuming that regulatory or other action does not directly or indirectly block these neurons from cutting themselves out of the network equation.

There are aspects of this offliner future that reflect trends already underway across the West.

First, a disinterest in anything happening outside the physical community or region, much in the same way of a medieval peasant. Events happening halfway across the world will hold no interest for the offline. The more remote or vast an election, the more likely they are to say, "Who cares?"

This self-enclosure would also entail a greater distrust of the outsider. Not just in the physical presence of visitors but an epistemic xenophobia as we have already seen in the Covid era. Intense skepticism toward knowledge or expertise presented by centralized governmental or scientific bodies, and perhaps a general rejection of "scientific truths" that have been deemed valid for at least a century. Instead, the offliners may depend on local "clerics". Those who live with them who are deemed learned and have expressed their opinion on certain manners. Much in the way medieval ecclesiastical servants would have functioned, though without even a Rome to pay lip service to. Congregationally-approved experts then, and the politics that all entails.

And because these systems will invariably evolve into tribal political entities, federal and state governments may proactively block these developments, but that remains to be seen. There is only so much one can do to force consumer to be plugged in before there are compulsory pleasure pods.

Again, the offliner way of life will not predominate American society. This is merely the emergence of dual lifestyles. The hyperreal urbanite versus the post-digital offliner. The two will likely live in relative antagonism toward each other. The offliner will seek independence from a cosmopolitan system which depends in part on the comprehensive totality of its enforcement. In David Fischer's view, this was the fundamental ideological divide underneath the Civil War. But this all remains to be seen.

The offliner will be a new kind of person, a novel atavism. What more this could look like would need to be the subject of future investigation and speculation.




The Easter Controversy (x3)

The quintessence of dust

Calendratics: debt and time

Notes on Gadamer's Truth and Method

Brief thoughts on self-medication

A future is offline