The influence of Greek thought upon Christian theology offered church leaders an alternative to the millenarian worldview. The theology of Origen, the great 3rd-century Alexandrian Christian thinker, emphasized the manifestation of the kingdom in the soul of the believer rather than in the world, a significant shift from the historical toward the metaphysical or the spiritual. The association of apocalyptic millenarianism with the Montanist heresy and other troubling antiauthoritarian beliefs and practices discredited it, especially among the clerical supporters of the “monarchical episcopacy” of the 3rd century, who laid the groundwork for the revolutionary notion in Christianity of a sacred empire. This strain of antimillennial political theology climaxed with the conversion of Constantine the Great and the adoption of Christianity as the favoured, and eventually sole, religion of the empire. The theologians of the imperial period either ignored millennial doctrines or in some cases—e.g., Eusebius, Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine—violently attacked them as carnal, Judaizing, and crude forms of belief.
Traditional historiography holds that as a result of developments, millennialism was discredited for centuries. But millennialism actually survived at two levels. First, it survived among the clergy in the form of a “top-down” millennialism whereby the Christian empire became the fulfillment of the messianic promise. This theocratic identification of the pax romana Christiana (Latin: “peace of the Christian Roman Empire”) with Isaiah’s vision of the peace of the nations (2:1–3) would become one of the most important elements of political Christianity until the end of the Wars of Religion (late 16th century). In the 4th and 5th centuries, imperial Christianity absorbed the messianic symbols of pagan Rome: Rome’s dominion kept the Antichrist at bay (II Thessalonnians 2:3), and Roma aeterna (Latin: “eternal Rome”) became a symbol of the longevity of the new millennial kingdom (just as God rules over all in heaven, so the emperor rules on earth).
Millennialism also survived among the populace that still viewed empire—Christian or not—as the enemy, that still honoured and sought martyrdom, and that emphasized still more insistently the tradition of Revelation. This popular millennialism, best seen in the North African Donatists, periodically emerged at times of apocalyptic expectation, such as the sack of Rome in 410. It probably also inspired many missionaries to spread. Despite having been banished at the highest levels of the clerical elite (who dominate our textual record), millennialism survived in this popular, oral form, especially in the Western, Latin church, until the present.
The year 6000 am grew in significance with each apocalyptic failure. By the 5900s am, however, the millennial chronology would shift from antiapocalyptic to apocalyptic. If, at this point, the chronology bore no connotations of danger for Christians, then they would have greeted the year 6000 with large public commemorations and celebrations, as the Romans did in ad 248 when they reached their 1,000th year. This date carried so much dangerous apocalyptic and millennial freight, however, that the theologians of the Latin West found this millennial chronology unacceptable. The views of Augustine
From about ad 400 onward, Augustine attacked not only the popular, anarchistic variety of millennialism that his fellow Church Fathers reviled but also the hierarchical, authoritarian kind that Eusebius and others so ardently embraced. He did so by presenting history as operating in two different realms—the heavenly and the terrestrial. The heavenly city, the expression of spiritual perfection and union with God, was not visible to those still in the terrestrial city, where good and evil continued to coexist in a single body. Millennial perfection could not be achieved in this world. Only at God’s promised climax to history, at the very end of the terrestrial world of time and space, would good and evil be separated. Until that unknowable time, humanity lived in the saeculum (Latin: “age”), an opaque world of time and space in which humans could not know anything about the End—not when it would happen, not how it would happen, not who would be saved.
St. Augustine, fresco by Sandro Botticelli, 1480; in the church of Ognissanti, Florence.Alinari/Art Resource, New York
This theology of history, adopted from the Donatist theologian Tyconius, offered Augustine a means to attack both of eschatology’s most troublesome aspects. He could refute the notion that the signs of the End can be “read” in the people and events of history (e.g., the Goths and Visigoths as Gog and Magog). He could also remove Christianity from its theocratic identity with the Roman Empire—no earthly institution could be “pure” in the terrestrial city. (This was a particularly important argument to make after the sack of Rome in 410, when, at least in its Western region, many believed that the empire had collapsed). At the same time, he could decouple millennialism from future expectations because the millennium was not a future time of perfect peace on earth but rather a time already begun—with the establishment of the church—a time of perfect peace in the heavenly city. This stupendous exegetical achievement would dominate ecclesiastical commentaries on Revelation for the next eight centuries and most formal theological discourse through the Reformation.
In response to the prevalent this-worldly apocalypticism of his contemporaries, Augustine developed an eschatology that seemed almost oblivious of time. Indeed, his notion of saeculum (whence comes the English word secular) radically desanctified history, presaging modern thought on time by almost 1,500 years. Augustine anticipated no imminent supernatural intervention in history. His immanent, or “realized,” millennium at once acknowledged and embraced history, but it also argued that the battle that really mattered had already been fought on the spiritual plane, where God had triumphed. Satan has been reduced to lordship in this world. The City of the World and the City of God had been forced to coexist. Eventually, even that “small” patrimony that Satan claimed would be taken from him, and God would triumph.
The grandeur, depth, and subtlety of Augustine’s vision has long inspired readers. His refusal to panic at Alaric’s sack of the “Eternal City” in 410 and, like others, shout the news of its apocalyptic “fall,” and his understanding of a sacred and secular universe that could endure even the collapse of empire, earned him an extraordinarily high reputation among theologians and scholars. But we cannot be as certain of the contemporary success of his work. Part of what makes Augustine so compelling to every succeeding generation is that he was right and the apocalyptic prophets were wrong: the world did not end. Augustine’s historiographical millennialism continues to inspire people with its rigorous agnosticism about where history meets its end. Humankind just cannot know. According to this Augustinian approach, we must be prepared at all times, but we must not abandon our daily tasks. As both Jewish and Christian antiapocalyptic lore holds: “If word comes that the messiah has arrived, go on planting trees.”
But these are theological issues, and historians have yet to explore the historical question, How convincing was Augustine to his contemporaries? His debate with the openly apocalyptic Dalmatian bishop Hesychius in 418–419 indicates that ecclesiastical leaders, almost a decade after Rome’s sack, remained intensely apocalyptic in their reading of contemporary history. Thus, Augustine may not provide the best measure for gauging the attitudes that characterized the late Roman Empire, an age in which some bishops believed that their vocation was to “nourish their flocks” with apocalyptic fervour and who viewed the collapse of the Roman Empire as an apocalyptic event.