Patristic and medieval millennialism

However creative or successful with theologians these approaches were, they merely delayed the problem. Despite pagan and Christian belief in Roma aeterna (“eternal Rome”), the empire would fall. No matter how far away 6000 am (ad 500) seemed from 5700 (200), it did not seem so far away in the 5900s (400s). Indeed, the Western Roman Empire faltered just as the year 6000 approached, turning the antiapocalyptic sabbatical chronology and imperial “obstacle” to Antichrist exegeses into profoundly apocalyptic ones. At the beginning of the 5th century ad (c. 5900 am), Jerome and Augustine, perceiving the danger of apocalyptic millennialism, developed new and more stringent ways to oppose to it. Jerome introduced a new set of calculations (am II) that placed the Incarnation roughly 300 years earlier, thus allowing Latin chronographers to ignore the advent of the year 6000 am I. At the same time, he heaped ridicule and contempt on millennialists, the believers in foolish tales of earthly delights, gluttony, and sexual promiscuity.

Augustine went still further, arguing that neither history nor chronology can be interpreted apocalyptically and that the millennium was not a future event but one that already had been set in motion by Christ. To explain the continued existence of war, hatred, injustice, and poverty, Augustine used the notion of the “Two Cities.” There was a “heavenly city,” the celestial Jerusalem where the millennium was already manifest, and an “earthly city,” the terrestrial Babylon where the millennium was not visible. These two cities would coexist as a corpus permixtum (“mixed body”) in every man and in every society until the end of time. Thus the empire and the earthly church could not represent the perfection of eschatological fulfillment, and their historical fate had nothing to do with God’s plans for human salvation. This interpretation radically reoriented Christian eschatology and eliminated from Christian theology the belief in a coming kingdom of God on earth.

This ban on millennial thought so dominated the “official” theological writings of the early Middle Ages that most modern historians think that it had disappeared entirely from Latin Christendom. Certainly, standard treatments of millennialism tend to jump from Augustine in the 5th century ad to Joachim of Fiore in the 12th century ad, when the first formal theology that anticipated the millennium reemerged. There also were signs of millennialism, however, in the activity of antiecclesiastical prophets such as the "False Christ” of Bourges, described by Gregory of Tours in Ten Books of Histories, and in the antiapocalyptic chronology used to oppose them. Gregory, for example, published his chronology for "those who despair at the coming end of the world." Writing in the late 5700s am II (6th century ad), he and his colleagues repudiated the legitimacy of the “saints” who emerged after the assassination of the “False Christ” by arguing that the millennium was still more than two centuries away. Of course, even this more remote date eventually drew near, and in the 8th century ad (the 5900s am II) the English monk Bede and his Carolingian followers did for am II what Jerome had done for am I: they shifted the dating system again, this time to anno Domini (ad; “in the year of the Lord”). Consequently, millennial implications were once again shrouded by a new dating system; the year 6000 am II became ad 800.

However, the relative silence in extant documentation does not mean that there was no further discussion of the approaching year 6000. Indeed, as with 6000 am I (ad 500), the approach of 6000 am II brought an acute political crisis—the “obstacle” of 2 Thessalonians had been removed, because the Byzantine (Roman) throne was occupied by a woman, Irene, and thus was technically vacant. Charlemagne’s response, to hold his imperial coronation on Christmas Day, the first day of the new year 801, of the year 6000 am II (ad 800, according to the modern calendar, which starts the new year on January 1), unquestionably held millennial significance, despite the reluctance of the written sources to elaborate. The coronation was, in this sense, like the "emperor’s new clothes": everyone in the court knew of the am II equivalent of the date, but no chronicler mentioned it. Ignorant of this significance, modern historians have analyzed this pivotal moment in Western history without any awareness of its millennial background.

Charlemagne’s coronation contributed two essential elements to subsequent European millennialism. First, he "transferred" the empire, with all its apocalyptic and millennial freight, to the West, including the notion of the Last Emperor and the idea that the Carolingians were the new “obstacle” to the Antichrist. Numerous European kings claimed this messianic status, but the German emperors—particularly Otto III, Frederick I (Frederick Barbarossa), and Frederick II—proved especially fascinated by the idea of the Last Emperor. Second, the Carolingians shifted chronological hopes for the apocalypse from 6000 am II (ad 800) to ad 1000, a date at once millennial (the end of the sixth age, dawn of the Sabbatical era) and Augustinian (the end of the millennium begun by the Incarnation). Unlike with previous revisions of millennial dates, chronographers were unable to shift the chronology without mentioning the apocalyptic date.

Germany and France in the year ad 1000 illustrate the two tendencies of millennialism: the former manifested the “top-down” imperial version, while the latter displayed a remarkable array of “bottom-up” populist expressions. In Germany, Emperor Otto III, who manipulated every aspect of the imperial variety, proclaimed the renewal of the Roman Empire and revived the “obstacle” to the Antichrist. Moreover, on Pentecost of 1000, he opened Charlemagne’s tomb and urged rulers throughout eastern Europe to convert to Christianity. In France, King Robert II, the second ruler of the dynasty that replaced the Carolingian “obstacle,” presided over a kingdom beset by the anathema of social turmoil in the form of an uncontrollable castellan revolution. French apocalyptic and millennial symbols were generated from below, especially in the earliest popular religious movement of the Middle Ages, the Peace of God. This conciliar movement, which began south of the Loire River and spread throughout France, appeared in two waves, one in the decade before the millennium of the Incarnation (1000) and the other in the decade before the millennium of the Passion, the suffering and death of Jesus on the cross (1033). Mobilizing huge crowds at open-air revivalist gatherings in the pursuit of God’s peace on earth, this millenarian movement may have been the earliest to bring together all levels of society. It thus displayed two key aspects of subsequent millennialism in the West: vast revivalist gatherings and the sense of a social covenant.

Of course, the years 1000 and 1033 passed, and, despite all-encompassing covenants followed by years of peace and abundance, there was still no Parousia, still no millennium. A failure as a popular movement with millennial overtones, the Peace of God became institutionalized as the “king’s peace.” Yet apocalyptic expectations did not disappear in medieval Europe; on the contrary, there was a sea change in millennial hopes. Instead of the predominantly passive expectation of the earlier period, the passing of 1000 seems to have introduced, via the peace movement, a new and more aggressive form of millennialism, postmillennialism. This notion, that Christ would come after a millennial kingdom was wrought by the saints, challenged believers to work toward that kingdom. While popular "messiahs" continued to emerge, the period after the year 1000 gave rise to much larger movements that were often initially approved by ecclesiastical authorities. Among these were the Crusades and the Franciscan and flagellant movements. Some of these movements had popular support and were militant and extremely hostile to ecclesiastical authority, the wealthy, Jews, and intellectuals. They also displayed the anger, paranoia, and violence that would dominate one strain of antimodern Christian millennialism found in the pogroms of the Crusaders to the genocidal persecutions of the Nazis.

But the better-documented, and in some ways more surprising, aspect of medieval millennialism was its use by lay and ecclesiastical elites to support their own authority. Starting with the Gregorian Reform in the 11th century, papal reformers employed apocalyptic imagery both to brand their enemies as Antichrists and to wrap their own efforts in messianic promises. Similarly, royal and even comitial courts used eschatological prophecy as propaganda. William the Conqueror consciously used themes from Revelation, including his crown and Domesday Book, to buttress his conquest of England. Supporters of Thierry of Alsace, the count of Flanders, spread prophecies claiming that his (Carolingian) dynasty was the last barrier to the Antichrist. At the time of the Second Crusade, a French prophet evoked the Tiburtine Sibyl to predict that Louis VII would conquer the Orient in the fashion of the great Persian king Cyrus II.

Millennial hopes and ambitions reached new heights in the late 12th century as a result of the work of Joachim of Fiore, who identified three great ages of history: (1) the age of the Law, which had been characterized by the vesting of righteousness in married persons, (2) the age of the Gospel, during which an order of unmarried clerics served as the guardians of righteousness, and (3) the age of the Holy Spirit—i.e., the period of the Refreshment of the Saints to follow the reign of the Antichrist—during which the order of monks would bring an era of earthly peace and spiritual contemplation. Joachim was the first theologian to reject Augustine and return to a notion of a millennium to come, and his influence on subsequent millennial thought was immense.

The earliest historians of millennialism believed that Joachim was the first millennial thinker since Augustine’s ban of such ideas. He now appears to be the first formal thinker whose millennialism survived in writing. Instead of being a lone millenarian presence, Joachim’s work stands as written expression of an oral discourse that had never ceased, despite its sudden ups and long downs, since well before Augustine. The spectacular success of the movements inspired by Joachite “age of the Spirit” rhetoric illustrates the broad social and religious appeal of this postmillennial discourse.

Joachim revitalized every aspect of medieval millennialism. Within decades of his death in 1201/02, prophecies attributed to him circulated that were identified (in profoundly un-Augustinian fashion) with current events: Franciscans and Dominicans, Holy Roman emperors, and popes all figured in grand, ever-shifting predictions of imminent apocalypse. Chronological calculations fixed 1250, then 1260, as the beginning of the new age, producing new and fearsome forms of spirituality. The Franciscan order split over interpretations of Joachite prophecy, one branch becoming inquisitors, the other becoming revolutionary millenarians. Angelic popes and messianic emperors (some to return from death) were seen by lay and clerical constituencies as part of Joachim’s plan. By the end of the 13th century, millennialism had reached a fevered pitch, especially among the Spiritual Franciscans and their lay counterparts, the Apostolic Brethren, as well as among the more mystical elements of the Beguines and Beghards. The execution in 1300 of the founder of the Apostolic Brethren, Gerard Segarelli, by Pope Boniface VIII set the stage for a particularly violent round of millennialism under the leadership of Fra Dolcino in the early 14th century.

In France the imagery of millennialism continued to influence political discourse throughout the remainder of the Middle Ages, and the catastrophes of the 14th century renewed fervour for the final, divine intervention. The Franciscan John of Roquetaillade (Rupescissa), writing immediately after the humiliating rout of the French knighthood and the capture of the French king John II at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, prophesied that plagues would cut down the populace like the harvest in the fields, the poor would rise up against tyrants and the rich, the church would be stripped of its wealth, and Antichrists would arise in Rome and Jerusalem. At least one contemporary observer, Villehardouin, seems to have thought that Roquetaillade’s prophecies inspired the Jacquerie, a French peasants’ revolt in 1358. However, according to Roquetaillade, the agony of the world would end by 1367, for a great reforming pope would come to power and the king of France would again be elected the Holy Roman emperor. Fulfilling his glorious role as a second Charlemagne, this worthy king would conquer the entire world and establish a millennial reign of peace and prosperity. Indeed, French kings bearing the name Charles were the subjects of particularly intense millennial prophecies throughout the late Middle Ages. A prophecy of 1380 pertaining to Charles VI was subsequently applied to Charles VII and Charles VIII in the late 14th and 15th centuries, respectively, as well as to England’s Charles II while in exile in France in the 17th century.

Despite such fundamentally conservative applications of millennial prophecies, the hopes and expectations of the Christian Apocalypse still offered the peasants and the urban poor of France in the latter Middle Ages the outline of a powerful, if ultimately impractical, ideology of social revolution. The Pastoureaux, thousands of shepherds who swept across the French countryside in 1251 and again in 1320, believed that they were God’s chosen instrument to free the Holy Land and thus bring about the Parousia. While none ever reached the Holy Land, they traveled in bands throughout France, amazing some with their piety but slaughtering clerics, Jews, and academics. Other popular insurrections were motivated by similar apocalyptic ideas regarding the election of the poor to usher in God’s kingdom, either by participating in a Crusade or by rescuing a king in his hour of need.

Modern historians tend to emphasize the "political" or imperial millennialism that found significant expression in the sources. The presence and strength of popular, revolutionary millennialism, rarely reported except by hostile clerical sources, are more difficult to assess. Consequently, modern scholars have downplayed the extent of millennialist thought and activity in the Middle Ages.