Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World

But there is quite another way to experience the book of Revelation. Some men and women across the ages, as we shall see, find Revelation to be a stimulant that fills them with frantic energy. They are fully awake and alert to the workings of the Devil, and they find themselves compelled to do something to hasten the final victory of God. Some are moved to preach and prophesy, some are inspired to go in search of the new world that God has promised to bestow on humankind, and some are willing to pick up “the sharp two-edged sword” in willful imitation of Jesus as he is depicted in the book of Revelation and nowhere else in the New Testament. 111

One cherished idea about the Apocalypse holds that the hopes and fears for the end of the world spiked in the year 1000. The turn of the first millennium of the Christian calendar, we are invited to imagine, was the occasion for extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, all inspired by the sure belief that the end was near—“The Terrors of the Year 1000,” according to the phrase embraced by a few overexcited historians. 1

The scene is memorably suggested in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, a motion picture whose title alludes to the end-times as depicted the book of Revelation. The Lamb of God is ready to break the seventh seal over a plague-ridden, corpse-strewn, and omen-haunted landscape peopled with penitents and flagellants, doomsaying preachers, and knights on crusade. But the idea of a millennial panic in the year 1000, like so much of the conventional wisdom about the Apocalypse, is wrong. 2

To be sure, more than a few medieval preachers thrilled at the notion that a thousand years had passed since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and they were convinced that something remarkable would surely happen. But they did not even agree among themselves whether the momentous year would be 1000, the anniversary of the birth of Jesus, or 1033, the anniversary of the crucifixion of Jesus, or somewhere in between. Indeed, the whole exercise of counting down the end of the world in units of one thousand years was (and is) fundamentally flawed by an error in the calculations of Dionysius Exiguus, the sixth-century monk who devised the calendar system that uses the markers B.C. (“Before Christ”) and A.D. (“ Anno Domini ,” or “In the Year of Our Lord”). Dionysius, according to modern scholarship, “got the year of Christ’s birth wrong by at least four and possibly as much as six years.” 3As a result, the end of the first millennium had probably passed unnoticed a few years before the calendar year 1000.

Christians who heeded the cautions of Jesus, Paul, and Augustine about such speculation, as it happened, were capable of remaining calm as the year 1000 approached and passed without incident. So did the Bible readers who knew that the book of Revelation does not regard the passage of one thousand years from the birth or death of Jesus as a significant benchmark. Jesus Christ’s reign on earth would last one thousand years, of course, but the starting date of the millennial kingdom is not mentioned at all in Revelation. And the church itself continued to insist on a “spiritual” rather than a “carnal” reading of Revelation, a doctrine that tamped down the hotter fires of apocalyptic yearning among compliant Christians.

“When I was a young man I heard a sermon about the End of the world preached before the people in the cathedral of Paris,” writes a monk called Abbo of Fleury (d. 1004) about an experience of his own during the countdown to the year 1000. “According to this, as soon as the number of a thousand years was completed, the Antichrist would come and the Last Judgment would follow in a brief time.” Abbo, a careful reader of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, was unimpressed by all the doomsaying: “I opposed this idea with what force I could from passages in the Gospels, Revelation, and the Book of Daniel.” 4

Abbo, in fact, is the only contemporary observer who links the year 1000 to the end-time prophecies in the Bible—and he “does so only to dismiss the notion.” 5Still, the good monk fully expected the world to end even if he piously refused to speculate on the precise date. Indeed, the apocalyptic fever in medieval Christendom was chronic rather than acute, and the church had never really been successful in turning back the so-called apocalyptic invasion of the fourth century. The men and women of medieval Christendom, especially in western Europe, were exposed to apocalyptic imagery in the ornamentation and decoration of churches, the monumental architecture and inscription of public buildings, the illuminated manuscripts of holy books, the pronouncements of preachers and pamphleteers, and the secular arts and letters that flourished in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

“The Apocalypse is ubiquitous,” write Bernard McGinn and his colleague Richard K. Emmerson, a fellow specialist in apocalypticism during the Middle Ages. “John’s powerful revelation seeped into almost every aspect of medieval life.” 6

For people who lived their lives in the precarious world of medieval Europe, a world that teetered between hope and despair, Revelation turned out to be an inspiring and even intoxicating text. The opening of the seven seals, the sounding of the seven trumpets, and the pouring of the seven bowls of God’s wrath, for example, offered a way of understanding and enduring the catastrophic events that afflicted Christendom—invasion and conquest, war and revolution, famine and plague, earthquakes and floods. And, at the same time, John’s sublime vision of “a new heaven and a new earth” held out a shining promise of redemption and reward that sustained the readers of Revelation even (and especially) in the moments of greatest tumult.

Once imprinted on the Western imagination during the Middle Ages, the iconography and “language arsenal” of Revelation—and its terrifying but also thrilling fantasies of the end-times—would never be wholly erased. Indeed, an obsessive concern with when and how and why the world will come to an end can be seen as a dominant habit of the Western mind, no less in the third millennium than in the first, and no less in popular culture of the twenty-first century than in the religious art and letters of medieval Europe. And the obsession begins here and now.

The thousand-year reign of Jesus Christ on earth, as we have noted, was understood by Augustine and other Christian authors as a purely symbolic reference to the sovereignty of the church itself. “The Church Militant and Triumphant,” according to its glorious self-description, was the millennial kingdom. One early theologian, for example, fixed 326 as the year when the emperor Constantine raised the church to earthly power and glory in Rome—and so he calculated that the end of the world would come in 1326, exactly one thousand years later, thus fulfilling the prophecy of Revelation.

Other medieval Christians, however, were not so convinced that the Church Militant and Triumphant deserved to be compared to the kingdom of saints and martyrs that is described in Revelation. Rather, they saw something satanic at work in the excesses and abuses of the church, now so rich and so powerful. Priests, bishops, and even popes, for example, took wives or concubines or both—a practice that came to be condemned as “Nicolaitanism.” (The term is borrowed from the book of Revelation, where it is used by John to condemn a rival faction in the early church.) Clerical marriage had been commonplace for centuries, of course, even if one church directive of the eighth century restricted a priest to a single wife only. Now, however, the purifiers of the church argued for a strict rule of celibacy.