Heaven’s Gate

With the advent of the second millennium now safely behind us (that is, unless one accepts the more correct dating of the new era from 2001), perhaps the salient fact about the great moment was its insignificance. Not only was there no sign of millennial panic, but the most notable indication of fixation on the transition was not spiritual but carnal: All the world’s best restaurants had been booked solid for years for the evening of Dec. 31. But this is (perhaps) less surprising than that date’s awesome reputation would lead us to believe: Nothing happened at the time of the first millennium, either. The panic of the year 1000 is a myth concocted by early 19th century historians to illustrate medieval superstition, as early 20th century researchers have demonstrated.

The prosaic facts behind the mystique of the millennium are these: Counting the years from the birth of Christ was proposed only in the 6th century and first became general in the Western church after the 9th century, under the Carolingians. Yet two centuries later, the new calendar--indeed the idea of a formal calendar of any sort--was too unfamiliar to the illiterate masses to give 1000 an ominous aura. It was only slowly, with the papal jubilee in the year 1300, that Europeans began to think in centuries; and it was only in the 18th and 19th centuries that they attributed to each such unit a distinctive zeitgeist, a word coined in the 1780s. Thus, the 19th century was the first to experience fin de siecle weariness, an ennui our own century seems to have escaped. Less poetically, the 20th century closed amid angst about a Y2K computer breakdown. But even this fizzled; so the world woke up on Jan. 1, 2000, to nothing more than a case of indigestion and a hangover.

But this does not mean that belief in the millennium as the earthly reign of divine justice at the end of time is not an important phenomenon in Western history. It is integral to what until the 18th century Enlightenment was at the core of Western culture, and which permeates it still: namely, Christianity viewed not as an ethic of fellowship but as the divinely revealed means of mankind’s salvation. Usually heterodox and sectarian in form, millenarianism offered a catastrophic way to redemption. In the present century, such groups have been only marginal, appearing indeed as a lunatic fringe. Until the end of the 17th century, however, millenarianism was a central presence in European life, informing the worldview of such movers and shakers of history as Columbus, Luther, Cromwell and Newton. Even in the mid-19th century, Mormon millenarianism had the faith to make the Utah deserts bloom. Accordingly, two eminent historians, Richard Popkin and Eugen Weber, both it happens from UCLA, as their contribution to the Y2K commemoration, have given us synoptic histories of the subject treated with the intellectual seriousness it deserves.

As demonstrated in “Messianic Revolution” and “Apocalypses,” Christianity began with a strong millenarian component. Both the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles anticipated the imminent Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world. The Revelation, or Apocalypse (which is Greek for “revelation”), of St. John, drawing on the earlier prophecies of Daniel and others, is the most detailed and powerful expression of this expectation. Revelation’s vision of the End of Times foresees first the triumph of the Beast and then his defeat. “And I saw an angel come down from heaven . . . and he laid hold on . . . that old serpent which is . . . Satan, and bound him a thousand years.” Christ then returns to Earth, and all those who “had not worshiped the beast . . . lived and reigned with [Him] a thousand years”--whence the term “millennium.” Yet once that age had “expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison . . . to deceive the nations,” thereby precipitating the Last Judgment: All those Satan had deceived are then “cast into the lake of fire and brimstone,” while the just are gathered to God. “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away. . . . And I John saw the holy city; new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven. . . . And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying. . . .”

When the world did not end, although John thought the appointed time was “nigh,” and when Christianity indeed became the official religion of the Roman Empire, his Revelation came to be interpreted symbolically. Thus, for St. Augustine, Christ’s reign had already begun with the Incarnation and was thereafter embodied in the church, which was destined to endure until the Last Judgment. And so the clergy emphasized that speculation regarding the date and form of the Final Days was futile, indeed noxious, because, as the Gospels warn, it is not given to man “to know the hour or the day” of such mysteries. Instead, the faithful should seek their salvation in the sacraments of the church, a position that has defined orthodoxy ever after.

This position came under challenge when heresy, quiescent since late antiquity, reemerged in the 12th century (and rejection of the church in the name of its own values is paradoxically a sign that society is taking religion with increasing seriousness). One symptom of this change was the prophetic system designed by the Cistercian abbot, Joachim of Fiore (1131-1202), to further church reform: This theory offered an elaborate set of correspondences among scriptural passages to demonstrate that after the age of the Father (the Old Testament and the reign of the Law) and the age of the Son (the New Testament and the dispensation of Grace) would come the age of the Holy Spirit, in which a new monastic order would perfect the church as a prelude to the Final Days.

Joachim’s tradition first became heretical when the Spiritual Franciscans, in the mid-13th century, escalated their founder’s noble but impossible principle of absolute clerical poverty into a revolutionary assault on the church and set an imminent date, 1260, for the Second Coming. Henceforth, precise apocalyptic prediction was a permanent feature of ever new movements for reform turned revolutionary and millenarian.

In the course of time, this tradition fused with other intellectual currents and with a rich variety of movements and causes. As is emphasized in “Messianic Revolution” by Popkin, aided by his Israeli colleague David S. Katz, millenarianism borrows from the “hermetic,” or occult, wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus and later from the mysticism of the Jewish kabbala. During the supposedly secular Renaissance, the resulting syncretic messianism was integral to the thought of the Platonist Marsilio Ficino and of Pico della Mirandola, usually deemed the high priest of secular humanism for his “Dignity of Man.” A kindred messianic amalgam inspired the Dominican friar, Savonarola, to lead a revolution, predicated on the imminent end of the world, in the 1490s in Florence. And, in the same years, Christopher Columbus believed that by expanding Christianity overseas, its final fulfillment and the end of the world would be hastened.

Revolutionary messianism was even more prominent in the 16th century Reformation and the 17th century wars of religion. Behind the “magisterial reformation” of Luther, Zwingli and Calvin there always lurked a “radical reformation.” And, here, of course, the great examples are Luther’s antagonist, Thomas Muntzer, and the Munster Anabaptists, who from 1534 to 1536 turned their city into a radically egalitarian New Jerusalem: These cases from Engels onward have been regarded as the quintessence of millenarianism as proto-social revolution. A similar communalism was expressed in Cromwell’s England by the revolutionary Fifth Monarchy Men, who aimed to establish the final world monarchy prophesied in the Book of Daniel. Indeed, such mainstream reformers as Luther and Cromwell also believed that their renewal of religion was only a prelude to the Final Days. Thus, Cromwell readmitted the Jews to England to hasten that consummation because the conversion of the Jews was regarded as a necessary ingredient of the millennial moment (as readers of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” will doubtless recall).

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Nor did millenarian messianism fade with the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. Isaac Newton’s “Thoughts on the Apocalypse” sought to underpin the coming apocalypse with precise astronomical calculation, thereby adopting it to the standards of a more secular culture. Similarly, the French Revolution was incorporated into the millenarian tradition in Protestant countries: England’s Joanna Southcott saw in it the overthrow of the Beast of popery and hence the herald of the Second Coming. Even the enlightened chemist and protege of Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Priestley, cherished similar expectations, for he was also a Presbyterian minister. Earlier in the century, Emmanuel Swedenborg gave a mystic rendition of the Enlightenment’s ideal of progress. Combining his message with constitutional liberalism, Madame de Krudener persuaded Czar Alexander I in 1815 to attempt to moralize international affairs through a Holy Alliance of sovereigns.

But after that date, millenarianism became predominantly an Anglo-American affair, and at this point the two books diverge in their emphases. Eugen Weber in “Apocalypses” focuses on how millenarianism changed and moderated over time, after the 18th century turning increasingly toward improving this world and thus overlapping with Enlightenment humanitarianism. Indeed, the process began with the 17th century Quakers, pioneers in promoting pacifism and the abolition of slavery. Even so, until well into the 19th century, humanitarian causes were more often than not still related to religion. A stark example is John Brown’s crusade against slavery, and Weber plausibly claims the American Civil War as millenarianism’s greatest triumph: Witness the apocalyptic strains of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In the increasingly secular 20th century, however, American millenarianism in truth evolved toward the lunatic fringe.

Popkin takes a more somber view of this same period. He emphasizes millenarian currents anticipating “rapture” into heaven: The inevitable ensuing disappointments generated the Seventh Day Adventists and ultimately those Branch Davidians who ended so gruesomely in Waco. He also details variants of belief in the Jews’ central role in millenarianism, a current that in Britain claimed Anglo-Saxon descent from the 10 lost tribes of Israel and that in America degenerated over the last 20 years into the rabidly racist Aryan Nation. Finally, he notes the huge success of Hal Lindsey’s “Late Great Planet Earth,” which saw the end of the world coming after 1970 and which had a presumed influence on former President Ronald Reagan--although the record indicates that the Gipper preferred to avoid nuclear Armageddon and graciously accept the Red Beast’s peaceful surrender.

So how to account for millenarianism’s remarkable persistence? For Popkin, the cause is the enduring appeal of scriptural literal-mindedness to the disoriented. For Weber, it is this in conjunction with the equally enduring enigma of human mortality.

But is Hal Lindsey really the last word in modern millenarianism? Or might a better choice be Karl Marx together with his most successful disciple, Lenin? Neither author really confronts this possibility, although Weber touches on it briefly. Of course, one can argue that this is a separate topic because Marxist Socialism does not draw on biblical apocalyptics. Even so, the violent destruction of existing society in order to realize such a far-fetched proposition as a classless, stateless world plausibly suggests a secular projection of millenarian expectations. And, in fact, it is quite possible to relate Marx, through German philosophy and Hegel, to religious messianism, as such philosophers as Karl Lowith in “From Hegel to Nietzsche” and Leszek Kolakowski in his magisterial “Main Currents of Marxism” have done.

And if millenarianism is thus prolonged into secular modernity, we should expect that the new millennium, whatever else it brings, will continue existing forms of apocalyptic expectation and perhaps invent a few new ones as well.