History clearly affirms this logical verdict. Hardly any question has yielded a greater variety of answers, following calculation by disparate rationales under different assumptions, than the forthcoming inception of the millennium (which did not arrive, as initially promised, during Jesus’ own generation). Millennial expectations throughout the ages have been generated from all manner of systems, some numerical, some hermeneutic, some visionary, some supposedly empirical and scientific, and some downright hallucinatory. Cyclical theories of repetitive time have been favored, with the millennium following the completion of a cycle. Thomas Burnet defended the partisans of cyclicity in his millennial treatise of the early 1690s, The Sacred Theory of the Earth: “Their revolution to the same state again, in a great circle of Time, seems to be according to the methods of Providence; which loves to recover what was lost or decayed, after certain periods: and what was originally good and happy, to make it so again.”
Almost any possible numerical basis has been advocated for determining the length of a worldly cycle and the subsequent initiation of the millennium. Many adepts favored a division by two, as the birth of Jesus initiated a second age that would repeat (symbolically) all the events of the Old Testament until the completion of the rerun marked the end of earthly time, and the dawn of the Second Coming. The theory of the Third Disposition, promoted by the most famous millenarian thinker of medieval times, the twelfth-century Italian mystic and biblical philosopher Joachim of Fiore, provided a prototype for popular theories of threefold cycles based on the trinity. (Joachim divided earthly history into a cycle of three “dispositions” representing ages of the father, son, and holy spirit.) Many other thinkers preferred a fourfold cycle based on the Four Empires of the apocalyptic chapters of the Book of Daniel. Still others advocated a fivefold division based on the five sequential political societies of Plato’s Great Year. The most potent and secular of quasi-apocalyptic movements in our own times, the earthly millennium of communism promised by Marx’s theory of ineluctable stages in the history of social organization, promoted a division by six—primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and communism (with the last stage read as an improved return to an original blessing). Saint Augustine preferred a Great Week of seven historical phases, all of different but predictable length.
Obviously, with such diversity in the bases of judgment, intervals of a thousand years could enjoy no inherently favored status. Thus, the millennium has been predicted and expected at almost any time, depending on the system in favor. Obviously, with Thomas Müntzer advocating 1525; William Miller, 1844; Wovoka, 1890; and John Chilembwe, 1915; the year 1000 or 2000, and intervals of 1000 in general, could claim no special preference.
Why Favor Intervals of One Thousand Years?
Within this maelstrom of diversity, however, a particular argument arose during the earliest days of Christianity and gained strength forever after to grant the number 1,000 a highly preferred status as a favored figure in the history of calendrical calculations for the millennium. This argument did link the thousand-year future duration of the millennium with the passage of thousand-year intervals of earthly history—so the two apparently disparate usages do become fused after all. The millennium as apocalypse does lead to the millennium as calendrics—but only through an argument steeped in symbolism.
The Last Judgment, anonymous, Bologna, fourteenth century. (illustration credit 1.5)
After this long buildup, the classic argument for linking the apocalyptic and calendrical millennium may seem awfully weak and disappointing—for the junction requires a symbolic interpretation that will probably strike most of us today as fatuous and far-fetched. Has so much ever been based on so little? But our secular todays provide no basis for judging the apparent strength and good sense of an argument to our more spiritually inclined forebears—for whom a symbolic link often seemed both brilliantly illuminating and entirely conclusive. Or so they said, at least—and I think we must take them at their word. It may be ours to reason why (as we try to understand); but it is not ours to deny the satisfaction felt by our forebears because we no longer credit a style of argument once equated with our modern regard for empirical science as a pathway to truthful answers about the natural world.
The classic argument is “only” an analogy, and we now tend to regard analogies as, at best, “cute” and, at worst, “misleading.” We certainly judge analogy as the poorest relative (if not an entirely foreign interloper) in a family of useful approaches ruled by the twin monarchs of irrefutable internal logic and ascertainable sensory data. But if we lived in a world where God made every item, from molecule to Milky Way, for a purpose accessible to human ingenuity, then we might develop a different theory of proof and meaning. If all natural objects were created as intended parts of an integrated and completed whole—and if this entirety enfolds a meaning that may be difficult to ascertain (for God works in mysterious ways), but surely holds the secret to joy and understanding if we can only find the key—then a search for “deep significance” in interrelationships among superficially disparate parts may become our method of choice. Analogy may then stand forth as our most valuable tool—for how else can we link the sand grains in the desert to the stars in the sky—and not just as a funny frill for banter at next Saturday’s party (when those ten guests will finally visit).
As divines and scholars searched the New Testament for clues to a revised date for the millennium, they focused upon chapter 3 in the Second Epistle of Peter—a letter to the faithful about current millennial disappointments and future expectations. Peter begins by acknowledging the doubt generated by the nonoccurrence of the apocalypse at the expected time: “There shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.”
But Peter then reminds us that all has not been calm and uneventful since the beginning, for God had destroyed the early earth by water in Noah’s flood: “For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished.” Moreover, several biblical prophecies suggest that the next destruction shall be by fire: “But the heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.”
But when shall this day of judgment arrive, and when shall the promised millennium begin? Peter does not give a direct answer, but rather, in the next verse of chapter 3, makes the symbolic argument by analogy that would set the course of millennial debate forever after: “But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8).
Peter therefore gives an oracular answer rather than a particular date, but at least he cites the familiar symbol of a friendly oracle, not an idiosyncratic and novel voice—for the equation of our thousand with God’s unity sets a common theme in the Old Testament, particularly in the celebrated words of Psalm 90: “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.” (The same psalm also contains the classic line for a linkage between counting and understanding: “Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”)
With this guiding equation, we can reason our way to a duration for earthly time that must herald the millennium. The Book of Revelation says that the first age of postapocalyptic bliss (the millennium) will last for a thousand years. We know that any period of a thousand years represents only a day for God. We also know that God created the world in six days, and then rested on the subsequent seventh. Therefore, by symbolic comparison, the world’s history will unfold for six thousand years to a point of completion for ordinary earthly time (comparable with God’s fulfillment of the initial creation), and will then enter
the seventh and final thousand-year period of millennial bliss (comparable with God’s day of well-deserved rest following his Herculean labors). The history of the earth, therefore, must span exactly seven thousand years—symbolizing God’s seven days of creation (six of work and one of rest, corresponding with six thousand years of human pain followed by one thousand years of millennial harmony)—before Tuba mirabilis (the wondrous trumpet) of the Last Judgment announces a true and ultimate finale.
The future thousand-year duration of the millennium does therefore specify a calendrical count by thousands for the appointed length of human history, and for knowing the crucial moment of termination by the Second Coming of Christ. This standard argument—surely the most familiar, and most widely accepted, calendrical theory for the millennium throughout Christian history—dates at least to the early fourth-century writings of the church father Lactantius, who stated in his principal work, the Divinae institutiones (Divine Precepts):
Plato and many others of the philosophers, since they were ignorant of the origin of all things, and of that primal period at which the world was made, said that many thousands of ages had passed since this beautiful arrangement of the world was completed; … But we, whom the Holy Scriptures instruct to the knowledge of the truth, know the beginning and the end of the world.… Therefore let the philosophers, who enumerate thousands of ages from the beginning of the world, know that the six thousandth year is not yet completed, and that when this number is completed the consummation must take place, and the condition of human affairs be remodelled for the better, the proof of which must first be related, that the matter itself may be plain. God completed the world and this admirable work of nature in the space of six days, as is contained in the secrets of Holy Scripture, and consecrated the seventh day, on which He had rested from His works.…
Therefore, since all the works of God were completed in six days, the world must continue in its present state through six ages, that is, six thousand years. For the great day of God is limited by a circle of a thousand years, as the prophet shows, who says, “In Thy sight, O Lord, a thousand years are as one day.”
At the end of the seventeenth century, almost 1,300 years later, the Reverend Thomas Burnet presented the same argument in his millenarian treatise on both human and geological history, The Sacred Theory of the Earth:
It is necessary to show how the Fathers grounded this comparison of six thousand years upon scripture. ’Twas chiefly upon the Hexameron, or the Creation finished in six days, and the Sabbath ensuing. The Sabbath, they said, was a type [symbol] of the Sabbatism [the Millennium], that was to follow at the end of the world; and then by analogy and consequence, the six days preceding the Sabbath must note the space and duration of the world. If therefore they could discover how much a day is reckoned for, in this mystical computation, the sum of the six days would be easily found out. And they think, that according to the Psalmist and St. Peter, a day may be estimated a thousand years; and consequently six days must be counted six thousand years for the duration of the world. This is their interpretation, and their inference.
Burnet then acknowledged the “essential weakness” in principle for all such arguments by allegory and analogy. (He was, after all, a contemporary and pal of Newton, and the modern age, with new criteria for the validity of arguments, was dawning.) Yet Burnet could find no factual problem with this traditional view, and he therefore offered his warm support: “We may be bold to say, that nothing yet appears, either in nature, or scripture, or human affairs, repugnant to this supposition of six thousand years, which hath antiquity and the authority of the Fathers on its side.”
As a final point, this allegorical comparison of divine days and human ages also secured a special status for calendrical millennia as preferred units of division and counting. If human history had a fixed duration of six thousand years, and if each millennium of this totality symbolically replayed a discrete day of God’s creative work at the inception of time, then millennia became “atoms” of historical time—the basic and indivisible units of our reckoning. Any good and comprehensive theory designates a basic unit by the logic of its explanatory structure—and such units are therefore “theory-bound,” and not entirely (sometimes not even substantially) matters of objective observation. Atomic theory gives us the periodic table for units, or elements, of matter. Particle physics gives us quarks, charms, flavors, or whatever comes next in a changing field, for building blocks at the smallest scale. Evolution gives us species for the natural parsing of organisms. And the allegory of God’s days gives us millennia for the fundamental divisions of sequential time.
On the same theme, since theories represent such interesting and complex mixtures of empirical reality and human preference, and since theories are often so historically contingent and so remarkably wrong, I must also remind readers (as the introduction to this book stresses) that nature’s genuine astronomical cycles (days, lunations, and years) recognize no division by thousands at all, however much our religious history, and decimal mathematics, may legitimately choose to favor such a criterion of counting.
Detail from The Last Judgement (1443), Rogier van der Weyden. Altarpiece, center panel. (illustration credit 1.6)
Why Grant Significance to “Even” Years with Three Zeros?
The allegorical comparison of God’s days with human millennia only provides half an answer to the burning practical question that inspired this entire exercise: Just when, exactly, will the apocalypse unfold and the millennium begin? We can ascertain that this big bang in earthly time will occur after the completion of six thousand years, marked as six ages of one thousand years each. But we cannot tell when the six thousand years will finish until we also know when time began! Give me a beginning point and a duration—and I can specify the end with precision.
If the idea of a six thousand year duration won majority support (and could at least be easily understood by those who favored different systems for calculating the length of historical time), the second essential ingredient—the fixation of a starting date—provoked no end of dispute and never led to any consensus. Various prophets of the millennium could therefore continue to hawk their different moments.
Sextus Julius Africanus (ca. 180–250), a Roman official and early Christian scholar, developed the first popular system for time’s ending based on the twin precepts of a specified beginning and a six thousand year duration. In the first universal chronology written from a Christian perspective, the extensive Chronographiai of 221, Sextus argued that five thousand years had passed from the creation to the Babylonian captivity of the Jews, and an additional five hundred from then to the birth of Christ. This countdown left only five hundred years until the appointed end of time. Sextus therefore announced that the millennium would begin in A.D. 500—a date sufficiently distant to preclude any embarrassing disproof during his own earthly existence, but soon to fail in the ultimate court of appeal, as the year 500 passed without any cataclysm worthy of note.
The Christian world then got all het up over an alternative calculation that foresaw the millennium in 800 or 801. The specified year did become a milestone in European history, but the coronation of even so regal a figure as Charlemagne must rank as small potatoes to the anticipated, but unfulfilled, inauguration of the Kingdom of Christ.
Much later now, as the year 2000 approaches, thoughts turn once again to the apocalypse—though mainly with wry amusement or scholarly interest in our unabashedly secular age, rather than with quaking fear or fervent anticipation. The popular impression that apocalyptic yearnings should peak in years with three zeros will—if substantiated—forge a strong and final bond between the millennium as apocalypse and the millennium as calendrics. We must therefore ask whether the old belief in a six thousand year duration of ordinary earthly time, followed by an additional thousand years of millennial bliss before the Last Judgment, also included any preference for years with three zeros as points of transition between millennial ages—particularly for
the cardinal moment of the Second Coming and cataclysmic passage from secular to divine government.
As an empirically minded scientist, let me back into this key issue with the single source of testable information that limited time has made available to us. The theory of a six thousand year duration arose early in the history of Christianity, and only one millennial transition has occurred since then: the year 1000. As many people already know—and as many more will soon learn from the growing literature inspired by our forthcoming millennial moment—the issue of whether a so-called “panic terror” swept Christian Europe in the year 1000 has provoked a major debate among professional historians for quite some time.
This subject has spawned an enormous literature, both technical and popular, and spanning the full range of opinion from virtually complete denial (Hillel Schwartz, Century’s End, Doubleday, 1990) to absurdly uncritical acceptance (Richard Erdoes, AD 1000, Harper and Row, 1988), all balanced by the nuanced intermediacy of a consummate professional (Henri Foçillon, The Year 1000, Frederick Ungar, 1969).
Foçillon allows that apocalyptic stirring certainly occurred, at least locally, in France, Lorraine, and Thuringia, toward the middle of the tenth century. But he finds strikingly little evidence for any general fear surrounding the year 1000 itself—nothing in any papal bull, nothing from any pope, ruler, or king.
On the plus side, one prolific monk named Raoul Glaber certainly spoke of millennial terrors, stating that “Satan will soon be unleashed because the thousand years have been completed.” He also claimed, though no documentary or archaeological support has been forthcoming, that a wave of new church-building began just a few years after 1000, when folks finally realized that Armageddon had been postponed: “About three years after the year 1000,” wrote Glaber, “the world put on the pure white robe of churches.”