THE PURSUIT OF THE MILLENNIUM
An important element of each of the great revolutions of Western history was its apocalyptic vision of the future. Each was more than a political program, more even than a passionate struggle to reform the world.
Each also represented a belief in, and a commitment to, an eschatology -- a messianic dream of an end-time, a conviction that history was moving to a final denouement. In the case of the Roman Catholic, the Lutheran, and the Puritan revolutions, the eschatology was expressed in biblical terms. The Christian revolutionaries foresaw "a new heaven and a new earth." They envisioned the fulfillment of the prophecy of a thousand years of peace on earth between the Second Coming and the Last Judgment. "And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven... for the former things are passed away. And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold I make all things new." (Rev. 21:1-5). In the case of the American, French, and Russian revolutions, the eschatology was a secular one: a new and final-25
era of freedom and equality, the end of man's long history of oppression, the dawn of a just society.
In his book The Pursuit of the Millennium, Norman Cohn has written about a different kind of "revolutionary millenarianism," as he calls it. He has focused attention on the numerous chiliastic movements among the "rootless poor" in Western Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century. These included the People's Crusades, the flagellant movements, the heresy of the Free Spirit, some peasant revolts, and the Taborites. Almost all of them were loosely organized, spontaneous, and either anarchistic or communistic or both. "It is characteristic of this kind of movement," Cohn writes, "that its aims and premises are boundless. A social struggle is seen [by the participants] not as a struggle for specific, limited objectives, but as...
a cataclysm from which the world is to emerge totally transformed and redeemed." 18The difference between what Cohn has described and the apocalypticism of the great revolutions -Вthe great successful revolutions -- of Western history is that the latter's aims and premises were both boundless and bounded; their objectives were not only universal and unlimited but also specific and limited. They were millenarian but they were also well organized and politically sophisticated. Cohn's vivid and perceptive portrayal of millenarian movements of a specific type has led him and others to compare them with the modern revolutionary movements both of the left and of the right. 19However, the historical roots of at least some of the modern movements, and especially of the Communist "millenarianism" of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are to be found not in the wildcat movements that Cohn describes but in the successful revolutions on whose fringes they appeared.
The successful revolutions were also based on a Christian eschatology, which in turn was based on the Judaic vision of history as moving toward a final denouement, a climax. In contrast to the other IndoEuropean peoples, including the Greeks, who believed that time moved in ever recurring cycles, the Hebrew people conceived of time as continuous, irreversible, and historical, leading to ultimate redemption at the end. They also believed, however, that time has periods within it. It is not cyclical but may be interrupted or accelerated. It develops. The Old Testament is a story not merely of change but of development, of growth, of movement toward the messianic age -- very uneven movement, to be sure, with much backsliding but nevertheless a movement toward. Christianity, however, added an important element to the Judaic concept of time: that of transformation of the old into the new. The Hebrew Bible became the Old Testament, its meaning transformed by its fulfillment in the New Testament.
In the story of the Resurrection, death was transformed into a new beginning. The times were not only accelerated but regenerated. This introduced a new structure of history, in which there was a fundamental transformation of one age into-26- another. This transformation, it was believed, could only happen once: the life, death, and resurrection of Christ was thought to be the only major interruption in the course of linear time from the creation of the world until it ends altogether.
Thus the Christian concept of renewal is based on the belief in the end of the world. It is also based on the belief that that end is imminent; it is "at hand." "The Christian sense of history," writes Norman O. Brown, "is the sense of living in the last days. Little children, it is the last hour. The whole Christian era is in the last days." "The Christian prayer is for the end of the world: that it may come quickly. The aim is to bring this world to an end; the only question is how. A mistake here might prove quite costly." 20
Rosenstock-Huessy has shown how the belief in an end-time, the end of the world, has influenced the great revolutions of Western history. Each of those revolutions translated the experience of death and regeneration into a different concept of the nation and of the church. 2_When Christian eschatology was discarded by the Enlightenment and by liberal theology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a secular eschatology took its place. "No people," Rosenstock-Huessy writes, "can live without faith in the ultimate victory of something. So while theology slept, the laity betook itself to other sources of Last Things" -- to the eschatology of Karl Marx, on the one hand, and of Friedrich Nietzsche, on the other. 22
Before the great reform movement of the eleventh century, the church, both in the East and in the West, had taught that the end-time is not within this world, the material world, but within the spiritual world -- not in historical time but in eternity.
This was one of the main points of St. Augustine's contrast between the earthly city and the city of God. The earthly city is in perpetual decay. Those who live in the endtime are no longer of this world. For Augustine the same word, saeculum, meant "the world" and "time." The saeculum was without hope of redemption: it could only be abandoned for the realm of the spirit. St. Augustine and the church, generally, in the first ten centuries, were against revolutionary millenarian movements of the kind described by Cohn, which tried to transform the social and political and economic realities of the here and now into a heavenly kingdom of the spirit. The rebirth of the individual Christian believer as well as the regeneration of mankind were understood to refer only to the eternal soul, which experienced such rebirth or regeneration only by "dying to this world" -- above all, through the monastic life.Similarly, when Christianity first came to the Germanic peoples of western Europe, it was presented as an otherworldly faith, concerned with the sacred and the saintly and having relatively little to say to the existing military, political, and economic power structure, except to devalue it.
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In the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries regeneration was for the first time seen as applicable also to the secular society. The reformers put themselves at the beginning and end of a new secular time: they projected backward into the past in order to project forward into the future. They saw themselves at a turning point in history, the beginning of a new age, which they thought would be the final age before the Last Judgment. This was a new interruption within the Christian era; it combined the Greek cyclical idea of a return with the Hebrew idea of linear movement toward a predestined end and the earlier Christian idea of a spiritual birth or a rebirth.
Each of the great revolutions, starting with the Papal Revolution of 1075, made a sharp division between what went before it, "the old," and what came with it and after it, "the new." Each of them also placed the historical old and new within a framework of an original creation, or state of nature, and a final end, an ultimate victory.
Without the belief that this world, these times, the secular institutions of human society, could be regenerated -- and that such regeneration would lead to the fulfillment of man's ultimate destiny -- the great revolutions of Western history could not have occurred.More specifically, the belief in the capacity of man to regenerate the world, and the necessity for him to do so in order to fulfill his ultimate destiny, provided a basis both for a conscious attack upon the existing order and for the conscious establishment of a new order. The sacred was used as a standard by which to measure the secular order. Thus the eleventh-century reformers began to judge emperors and kings and lords according to principles derived from divine and natural law. The papal party denounced the emperor for betraying the office of ruler of the church and charged that he did not have title to it. It was Daniel's challenge to Nebuchadnezzar: "Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin" -- "tekel: thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting" (Dan. 5:25, 27). "Freedom of the church," the slogan of the Papal Revolution, was justified as God's will. So also in all subsequent great revolutionary periods of Western history, transcendent standards have been invoked against the existing power structure. When Karl Marx (quoting Proudhon) said, "Property is theft," he was speaking in the Western millenarian tradition: the whole economic and political system was weighed in the balances of the end-time, the eschaton, and found wanting.