The Millennium
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 29 July 2003
Abstract
Apostolic Hopes
The simple Christianity of the first two centuries after the crucifixion had been bypassed by the Christianity that was adopted by Constantine and the emperors. But it did not go away. The illiterate masses stuck with it, especially in places that were relatively outlying direct Roman influence—Spain, Gaul and Germany in the West and Armenia and Syria in the East, and among travelling craftsmen and tinkers. It became Paulicianism and Bogomilism in the East and Catharism in the West. The Roman Church was not concerned too much with the heretical practices of the ignorant, so long as they paid their tithes, and the wealthy and noble patronised their grand churches and basilicas.
Glaber’s accounts of the “heresies of the year 1000” can be read as a “perverse doctrine” of popular Christianity breaking with the Church in favour of an egalitarian apostolic life.
Many, throughout Italy at this time were found to be tainted with this perverse doctrine, and they too perished, by the sword or by fire. At this very same time more emerged from Sardinia, an island that generally abounds in heresy. They managed to corrupt some of the people of Spain, but they too were exterminated by the orthodox.
Sardinia would have been just one of the places where primitive Christianity might have survived unmolested and untainted by the established Church. The primitive form of Christianity would have had closer links with classical Paganism, and especially solar religion. Glaber implies that already the established Church was murderously lashing out, even in the early eleventh century.
The heresy alluded to—the worship of the classics, Landes assures us—seems to date to the episcopacy of Peter VI (927-71) which was over a half a century past, and hardly seems worthy of extermination by fire and sword. Landes notes with amazement, Augustine had explicitly banned the interpretation of current events in terms of apocalyptic prophecy of any kind, and especially those drawn from Revelation, yet Glaber not only openly invoked the most dangerous book of the Bible, but went straight to the most dangerous passage in the book, the textual source of all millennial beliefs, the passage Augustine had worked so hard to cage up.
The millennium year should have been the end of apocalyptic hopes. Millennial movements should proliferate before the millennium, in expectation of it. The protests and movements came after 1000. The clergy had promised something at the millennium, and people were happy to wait for it more or less resignedly. Their horror was that nothing happened. Everything would continue as before. They were not going to be saved. Christ could no longer be expected at all, let alone “soon”. In 1011, an Anglo-Saxon monk used the uneventful passing of the year 1000 in an anti-apocalyptic argument.
But believers in the coming End, have no trouble in excusing its failure to arrive. Christianity is based on the excusing of the non-event that Jesus expected—the splitting apart of the Mount of Olives, followed by the arrival of Michael and the hosts of heaven. No matter what happens, as long as events continue to be sufficiently uncertain and horrific, believers sustain their belief. They simply revise their hopes or their chronology, just as the Essenes did. Glaber says in Book IV, written in the later 1030s, that the believers had redated the millennium to 1033, just as the earliest Christians did after Jesus was caught and hanged. Jesus had expected the apocalypse while he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, but his followers re-calculated that the death and resurrection of Jesus had signified the beginning of forty years of cosmic conflict before his return at the revised apocalypse. The End was delayed by a Jewish generation of 40 years, after which Jesus would return personally in the place of the anchangel Michael. No Parousia occurred forty years on, and so the bishops again revised their dates, claiming, like Zoroastrianism, there would be a millennium before the return.
The bishops were again ready to revise their date, but not a lot of the poor. They turned to the alternative, those who said the Church was wrong and corrupt—the heretics. After the eleventh century, dissent was more apostolic than apocalyptic. The first apostolic community was exactly the response to disappointed apocalyptic expectations—the Crucifixion. The resulting Christian community was at once post-apocalyptic in the sense of being after the first Coming, and pre-apocalyptic in that it awaited the second Coming (Acts 1:7)).
The failure of the prophesy of the millennial Parousia led to mass skepticism with the established Church. The poor increasingly favoured the primitive Christianity of provincial craftsmen, and often preached by prophetae, an early order of the Church that the establishment had banned. The peasant prophet was the clerics’ worst nightmare, and just what the millennium had been meant to avoid. The failure of the millennium to bring about the return of Christ as promised caused the revival of the primitive Christianity of the smiths, carpenters, weavers and dyers—people who considered themselves like the Jesus the carpenter of the gospels.
It took a thousand years for some Christians to realise that their own bishops and cardinals were as vicious and as avaricious for temporal power as the Roman emperors, indeed, more so—they willingly sacrificed their own disciples. It was the failure of the second coming that jolted them awake. Then it was that they noticed the difference between the Church of the establishment and the simple spirituality of a neglected Church at the base of society claiming the true inheritance of the apostles. The established Church called them heretics as soon as they began to be significant, but it was the established Church that had changed moct from the original Christianity of the Gentile Romans. The Catholic Church was the heretical one, in fact. If change was satanic, then Satan had infected the Catholic bishops, not the primitive Christianity that emerged as Catharism.
The primitive Christianity, which had been tolerated at the grass roots of European society, only emerged as a trouble around the end of the first millennium. No notion is more subversive than apocalypse. People think that the final transformation is about to happen, and lose all fear of earthly consequences. People who hate their current situation hope that they would be beneficially transfigured, and that evil people, who have abused their power to seize unjustly what is not rightfully theirs, would be punished. When the millennium has been a promise of the established Church for the whole of its thousand year duration, what would happen when the promise failed to be fulfilled?
When the millennium came and nothing changed, poor people had a clear reason to be disillusioned. The new demand for apostolic Christianity meant equality, poverty and evangelizing. The sources tell of apostolic heresies across western Europe. These could have been independent movements simply based on what Acts related about apostolic life, but bibles were written in Latin that only the educated could understand, bibles were not freely available to be read, few peasants could read anyway, and most important, the movements had many common beliefs that were not apostolic anyway—they were Gnostic!
The poor in the country and the growing towns saw the millennium pass with no End of the World or appearance of Christ, and many realised for the first time since the Jewish war that they had been fooled. Their answer, it seems, was to turn to the more sincere religion of the heretics that had been tolerated at the grass roots as powerless and inconsequential. A Jewish writer, like Cohn, apparently fearful of laying the enormity of the Church on too thick, joins the ranks of apologists by claiming that the Church taught a humane way of life, tending the poor and the sick. If there were any Churchmen intent on this, they were a despised minority. Cohn cites the monks and friars, but he knows fully that the mendicant orders were a response to the popularity of the heresy and its apostolic poverty. The voluntary poverty of these monks was meant to match the voluntary poverty of the Parfaits and the Cathar and Waldensian missionaries who wandered around in pairs emulating the life of Christ and his apostles.
Cohn speaks of the capacity of the Church to face up to its own shortcomings, but that is what it did not do. It hid behind the initial enthusiasm of the monks and friars while not changing itself in any important way. Indeed, within a generation or so, the monasteries had been given such a wealth of property that they had already started to degenerate into the same state as the rest of the clergy. As for the peripatetic friars, copying the Waldensian missionaries, they quickly degenerated into travelling mountebanks and lechers. The Church was not wholly black, Cohn hopefully pleads. Indeed not, but there were too few exceptions to test the general rule. Doubtless, there were always sincere people with a genuine calling among the ranks of the corrupt medieval clergy, and some tried to introduce reform, but there was no living model for it within the Church itself.
Where did this ideal of primitive Christianity come from? The living model was that of the heretical Perfecti who practised the simple lives of the Essenes whence Christianity emerged. Like the Essenian monks, the Cathar Perfects aimed to be living Christs. Sincere Churchmen could read their Latin bibles, something the ordinary people could not do, and were not permitted to do—the Church copied the bible only in Latin that only literate clerics could read—and could see that the heretics really behaved like the man in the gospels the established Christians considered as God. A peasant preacher had to get hold of a bible in the vernacular, and also had to have been taught to read it.
None of this was legally possible within the Church. It follows that the strand of primitive Christianity must have been kept alive despite the established Church. The motivation for clerical reform was heresy. Those persuaded of the need for reform by seeing the Perfects, were brought via the New Testament to realise the real hypocrisy of the Church. The Church did not face up to its own shortcomings, but had no choice but to respond to the abandonment by the masses of the corruption of material Christianity for the spiritual apostolic Christianity of the heretics.
The poor, who listened to sermons about them being blessed, and so on, were no longer fooled when the millennium came and went without the promised return of Christ to save them. When the chroniclers themselves at the time linked the eleventh century revival with apocalypse and the coming of the millennium, then it is churlish and unscholarly to dismiss such events as illusions. Yet historians have often tried desperately to dismiss such movements in this facile manner. They fear that the Christian religion will be shown never to have been monolithic, even after its establishment.
The passing of the millennium with no Parousia was, for the poor, the Great Revelation. Thereafter, Catholic Christianity was up against the constant accusation of fraud, and its reaction was that of the trapped animal—to turn on its enemies and rivals and murder them all in the cruellest possible way, to deter the others. Even so, they could not kill off the example the Primitives had set and the basic theology they had taught—living humbly and simply, with the conviction that ordinary people could aspire to God with no need of magical sacraments, but through their own efforts to do what is Godly. It took a half-millennium more of strife before part of this was achieved.
The beginning of the revival increased the zealotry of both Cathars and Catholics alike. The Cathar religion had been defensive and waning as the established Church spread to all social levels, but Catholicism still had not become monolithic by the time of the millennium. That is when Catharism experienced a turn of fortunes. As Cohn puts it:
By the end of the eleventh century newly awakened religious energies were beginning to escape from ecclesiastical control and to turn against the Church. It was now widely felt that the test of the true priest lay not in the fact of ordination but in his fidelity to the apostolic way of life.
On the face of it, in the Apostolic Movement, the Church was against a lot of ecclesiastical volunteers stirring up religious enthusiasm. It ought not to have been, but the lay preachers were not teaching what the Church wanted taught. They were teaching Catharism. When the Church finally responded, an arms race of zealotry began, then a hot war, but the Church always had the big battalions, and when they were turned loose on the Cathars, there was only going to be one outcome. It is proof of the power of the simpler Christianity, that it was never utterly wiped out.
