With the emergence of the printing press in the 1450s, millennialism appears to have assumed a new and more vigourous quality. This interpretation, however, rests largely on scholarly reliance on written sources and the relative copiousness of millennial rhetoric from the period that survives in writing. Unquestionably, printing made it easier to disseminate millennial ideas and harder to supress them.
A key catalyst for change in millennial activity was the Protestant Reformation, which played a role akin to that of the year 1000 or of Joachim of Fiore’s work. Although Martin Luther was not a millennialist (he was an Augustinian canon, after all), he was apocalyptic. His confrontational behaviour and radical theology unlocked the floodgates of a more populist millennial fervour—Thomas Müntzer and the Peasants’ Revolt (1525) and the Anabaptists (especially at Münster in 1533–35)—that illustrates all the dangers and excesses of apocalyptic millennialism. Even John Calvin’s very Augustinian teachings were transformed by later Puritans into a millennial doctrine.
In the early modern period the political implications of millennial fervour reached new heights, especially during the English Civil Wars, when an essentially millennial revolution executed a king and attempted to put an end to monarchy for the first time in recorded history. The English Independents (who left the Church of England) hoped to usher in the kingdom of God, and groups such as the Diggers, the Levelers, the Ranters, and the Fifth Monarchy Men believed that revolution was necessary to prepare the way for the reign of Christ and his saints. The revolutionary Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell prevented apocalyptic enthusiasm from dominating the Commonwealth by dissolving the so-called “Parliament of Saints.” The millenarian element was also strong in 17th- and 18th-century German Pietism, and it played a major role in the doctrines of many sects that arose in the 19th century in the United States and Great Britain (e.g., Irvingites, Mormons, Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christadelphians).
Apart from these dissidents, the doctrine of Augustine remained unchallenged until the 17th century. Most Protestant Reformers of the Lutheran and Anglican traditions were not millennialists; instead, they remained firmly attached to Augustine’s theology, for which they felt a particular affinity. But, at the same time, Luther and his successors inherited the late medieval and very un-Augustinian prediliction for an apocalyptic “reading” of history, indentifying the Roman church as the great harlot and the pope as the beast. Each of the three main Protestant traditions of 16th-century Europe (Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anglicanism), however, found support from the secular authorities in Saxony, Switzerland, and England, respectively, and returned, after a relatively brief but stunningly influential apocalyptic moment, to a cooperative relationship with the state (as had the medieval church). In several cases, the rapprochement of Christianity and state powers under the aegis of Protestantism became the seedbed of the “nation-state.” Millennial science, scientific millennialism
The Augustinian millennial worldview survived the Reformation but did not survive the intellectual revolution of the 17th century. The development of science involved the reorientation of Western thought that included the rehabilitation of nature. A part of Augustine’s rejection of the world stemmed from the experience of human and natural disasters in his time. His pessimistic view of human nature also drove his opposition to the idea of progress in human history: we are such deeply imperfect creatures, he believed, that we cannot hope to bring about the millennial kingdom through our own efforts. By 1600, however, Europeans had gained confidence in their own abilities. Francis Bacon and other philosophers announced the dawn of a new day and attacked the Augustinian reluctance to see anything but the work of the Devil in attempts to control or understand natural processes.
This powerful new direction in Western thought had its origins in the Renaissance, which was, in a sense, the first secular millennial movement in Western history. Historians generally aver that the Renaissance abandoned apocalyptic and millennial thinking and the superstitions of medieval Christianity. In some sense this interpretation is accurate, but to focus exclusively on breaks between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance disguises important continuities. Moreover, the Renaissance represents a millennial mutation as great as that of the year 1000. Renaissance historians were uninterested in chronology not because they had abandoned apocalyptic millennialism but because they no longer needed to date the End. It was already happening. The seals of ignorance and restraint had been broken, the superstitious love of the old and fear of the new had been transcended, and the new age had arrived.
This ebullience was, in part, the product of exposure to the Jewish Kabbala and the Hermetic writings (gnostic texts concerning God’s gift of creation to the man of true knowledge). This tradition of the magus whose knowledge permitted him to change nature pervaded the ideology of the participants in this new age. It had particular force among those who, like Francis Bacon, argued that, with the acquisition of God’s special knowledge, Eden could be recreated. In a sense, the Renaissance sought to find this knowledge, a search that helped create “modern science.”
But as science defined itself more and more narrowly, it retained its fascination with and justification in the millennial dream. At the same time, social thinking moved toward a more pragmatic millennialism. Utopian thought shifted the axis of perfection from a temporal and divine one to a geographic and secular one. A new millennial tradition of social utopianism, with “scientific” spin-offs such as social engineering, had been born.
This tendency had a powerful impact on the emergence of a new scientific millennialism. European intellectuals became more interested in measurement and quantification. Allegory fell into disrepute when the medieval interpretation of the nature of the heavenly bodies was proved wrong by the use of the telescope. A new concern with calculation and literalism spread to biblical scholarship and resulted in the creation of the third type of Christian millennialism—progressive millennialism. Early progressive millennialism
Joseph Mead, a 17th-century Anglican biblical scholar, pioneered progressive millennialism. Ignoring the traditional allegorical interpretation, Mead took a fresh look at the Revelation to John and he concluded that it did in fact hold the promise of a literal kingdom of God. Redemption, he believed, would be completed within human history, and Jesus would return after the millennium. Revelation apparently contained a historical record of the progress of this kingdom, and other scholars began speculating about where they were located in the prophetic timetable. Thus far, progressive millennialism appeared to be identical to the apocalyptic millenarianism of the early church and the church historians of the 12th to 13th century, but there the similarity ended. The kingdom would not occur as a dramatic reversal of history, nor would the Second Advent of Christ occur to rescue humanity from destruction. History did not need reversing for these early Enlightenment Christians, who emphasized reason and saw the world on a march of progress that had begun with the Renaissance. They viewed the record of the past as the story of victory over evil and the conquest of Satan. They also rejected traditional apocalyptic assumptions—i.e., that victory would be snatched from the jaws of defeat only by a miraculous deliverance. For them the progress of history was now continuously upward and the kingdom of God ever closer, but it would arrive without struggle.