Despite his austere apocalyptic agnosticism, Augustine threw his support behind a new chronology that put the year 6000 am off for another three centuries. By his day, the approach of the year 6000, according to Hippolytus’s reckoning, supported the apocalyptic arguments that the earlier chronology had been introduced to refute. Indeed, Augustine points to people who, almost a century too soon, associated the fall of Rome (5910) with the advent of 6000. The new calculations, anno mundi II, first proposed by Eusebius in ad 303, rejuvenated the world by some three centuries: the Incarnation occurred not in 5500 am but in 5199, and thus the year 6000 would come in ad 801 rather than 500.
The new chronology of the sabbatical millennium, am II permitted Christians to refer to the calendar without being constantly reminded of the approaching year 6000. This new chronology also offered the same repudiation of apocalyptic fervour that am I had some two centuries earlier. Thus, Augustine could use it to refute the apocalyptic significance of Rome’s fall. Like his Tyconian reading of Revelation, Augustine’s acceptance of the new, nonapocalyptic chronology of am II dominated the writing of theologians.
This shift in chronologies, however, did not happen in the Greek church, whose theological leaders prepared to confront the potential disruptions of the approaching year 6000. The theocratic elements of Christianity developed more solidly in the empire of Constantinople, which was able to sustain a viable political structure even as the Western Empire was collapsing. Thus, imperial millennialism, fortified with imperial prophetic literature, dominated political thought more effectively than in the West. There were particularly strong assertions of imperial millennialism about 6000 am (ad 500) with the emergence of the legend of a “Last Emperor,” a supernatural messiah figure who, it was believed, would rule the world in peace and unity—from once and future messiah to once and future king.
The year ad 500 therefore marks a crucial turning point in the history of millennialism. It was the moment of the victory of imperial millennialism in the East (Byzantine Empire) over the popular, anti-imperial beliefs of the sabbatical millennium, and it was the moment of the victory of popular millennialism in the West over the efforts to link Christianity’s messianism to the new Germanic kingship that replaced imperial authority.
At approximately the same time, a fundamental shift in the locus of the sacred occurred in the East and West. In the East, holiness could inhabit the living: ascetics like the stylites could occupy the liminal space between the corrupt world and the pure one. Like the royal prophets of biblical times, these men would not challenge the hierarchy; they merely chastized its abuse of power. In the West, however, the only good saint was a dead saint, and the locus of “clean power” resided in the relics (the physical remains of the saints, often venerated by Christians). The survival of anti-imperial millennialism in the West often was manifested in radical opposition to the church, a threat as great as acknowledgement of the year 6000. Similarly, the relic cults, whose theology Augustine virtually launched in the last book of the City of God, may have been a popular form of his two-tiered millennium—the relics of the saints offered the faithful on earth a vision of the heavenly city. The immense popularity of relics in the early Middle Ages seems closely linked to ecclesiastically approved manifestations of apocalyptic ardour. Medieval and Reformation millennialism
Augustine’s allegorical millennialism became the official doctrine of the church, and apocalypticism went underground. After Augustine there was a radical split in millennial discourse. On the one hand, the texts all formally endorse Augustine’s position. On the other, the continued use of am II and eventually the practice of “counting down” to the year 6000 indicates that the same “debates” between apocalyptic prophets of the millennium and concerned clergy continued unabated. Gregory of Tours gives a particularly striking example in his treatment of the so-called False Christ of Bourges, a peasant who, in the aftermath of a terrible plague in ad 591, presented himself as Christ and was widely greeted by enthusiastic crowds. Despite his assassination by agents of the bishop of Clermont and the tortured admissions of the woman who had traveled with him as Mary, his disciples continued to spread word of him throughout Gaul. Not surprisingly, Gregory took refuge in the numbers, assuaging the fears of “those who despair at the coming end of the world” by proclaiming in his History of Franks that, if this man came in 5790, then clearly he is a “false Christ.” Similar “false” prophets appeared throughout the centuries to be met with a similar counterargument that the year 6000 was still some distance in the future.
The same uneasiness that had appeared among Augustine and his colleagues in the 5900s with am I emerged as am II entered its 5900s. This time the Venerable Bede played the role of Augustine, publishing the definitive historical and computistical work that corrected am II to the equivalent of am III (Incarnation in 3952, 6000 in ad 2048). His less cumbersome chronology, calculated from the Incarnation, the anno Domini (ad; Latin: “in the year of the Lord”), offered an attractive alternative to the more complex system dating from the beginning of the world. Aimed at silencing questions concerning the date of the end of the millennium, Bede’s masterwork, The Reckoning of Time, concluded with an extensive verbatim quotation of Augustine’s response to Hesychius regarding the proper eschatological attitude. By the mid-5900s Bede’s chronology and Easter Tables were adopted widely, and, at the approach of 6000 am II, with the exception of a few, marginal cases, all the accepted historical narratives were dated anno Domini.
Did this mean that ecclesiastical leaders lost track of the increasingly apocalyptic chronology in the half century before 6000 and that it passed unobserved? Or does it indicate a radical disjuncture between what was said and what was written as the year 6000 approached? Had nothing happened, one might argue the former position; instead, on the first day of the year ad corresponding to 6000 (801; 800 according to the modern calendar, which starts the new year on January 1), Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor in Rome. The tendency toward imperial messianism that marked the Byzantine experience of 6000 seems to have inspired the most dramatic political act of the early Middle Ages.
With the passing of 6000, the failure of the empire to provide stability, much less messianic peace, left the apocalyptic question unresolved, and waves of apocalyptic fears arose with the devastation wrought by the Hungarian, Norse, and Muslim invasions. The only valid answer to the apocalyptic question was found in a crude reading of Augustine’s work that was combined with a retooled sabbatical millennium. According to this interpretation, the millennium was already in full swing and coincided with the establishment of the church. Moreover, it argued that either the year 1000 or the year 1033 would mark the millennium’s end. This view had two distinct advantages: (1) it was not strictly millennial, in that the coming apocalyptic moment was the end rather than the beginning of the terrestrial millennium, and (2) it permitted ecclesiastical leaders of the 8th and 9th centuries to redate the End to the “distant” future of the 11th century.
Thus, when the “pseudoprophetess” Thiota came to Mainz (now in Germany) in 847 announcing that the world would end the next year and attracting believers among both commoners and clerics, one of the few arguments available to opposing clerics was that used by Gregory of Tours: there were still 150 years remaining to wait. This “chronological Augustinianism,” whose use Augustine would have abhorred, was also employed by a Parisian cleric who preached that the “release” of the Antichrist in the year 1000 would be followed shortly thereafter by the Last Judgment.