eschatology

—eschatological /es'keuh tl oj"i keuhl, e skat'l-/, adj. —eschatologically, adv. —eschatologist, n.

/es'keuh tol"euh jee/, n. Theol.

1. any system of doctrines concerning last, or final, matters, as death, the Judgment, the future state, etc.

2. the branch of theology dealing with such matters.

[1835-45; < Gk éschato(s) last + -LOGY]

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Theological doctrine of the "last things," or the end of the world.

Mythological eschatologies depict an eternal struggle between order and chaos and celebrate the eternity of order and the repeatability of the origin of the world. The most notable expression of mythological eschatology is in Hinduism, which maintains belief in great cycles of the destruction and creation of the universe. Historical eschatologies are grounded in datable events that are perceived as fundamental to the progress of history. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have historical eschatologies. Eschatology in the Hebrew Scriptures sees the catastrophes that beset the people of Israel as due to their disobedience to the laws and will of God and holds that conformity to God's plan will result in renewal and the fulfillment of God's purpose. In Christianity, the end times are thought to have begun with the life and ministry of Jesus, the messiah who will return to establish the Kingdom of God. Millennialism focuses especially on Christ's second coming and the reign of the righteous on earth. In Shīite Islam it is believed that the mahdi, or restorer of the faith, will come to inaugurate the last judgment, in which the good will enter heaven and the evil will fall into hell. In Buddhism, eschatological traditions are associated with the Buddha Maitreya and with Pure Land Buddhism, as well as with individual efforts to achieve nirvana.

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▪ religion

Introduction

  the doctrine of the last things. It was originally a Western term, referring to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim beliefs about the end of history, the resurrection of the dead, the Last Judgment, the messianic era, and the problem of theodicy (the vindication of God's justice). Historians of religion have applied the term to similar themes and concepts in the religions of nonliterate peoples, ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures, and Eastern civilizations. Eschatological archetypes also can be found in various secular liberation movements.

Nature and significance

      In the history of religion, the term eschatology refers to conceptions of the last things: immortality of the soul, rebirth, resurrection, migration of the soul, and the end of time. These concepts also have secular parallels—for example, in the turning points of one's life and in one's understanding of death. Often these notions are contrasted with the experience of suffering in the world. Eschatological themes thrive during crises, serving as consolation for those who hope for a better world or as motivation for a revolutionary transformation of society.

      Shaped by the extent and nature of the believer's involvement in the world, eschatological expectations assume either an individual or a collective form, embracing individual souls, a people or group, humanity, or the whole cosmos. The social implications of the two forms of eschatology are significant. Individual forms tend to foster either apolitical or politically conservative attitudes—predicated on the belief that each person experiences God's judgment upon death and that there is therefore little purpose to changing the world. Some forms of collective eschatology, however, involve political activism and the expectation of the public manifestation of God's justice. Not only do they hope for collective corporeal salvation and a transformation of the world, but they actively prepare for it.

The theme of origins and last things

      Because the origins of biblical eschatology are found in unique “historical” events (such as the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt in the 13th century BC), difficulties occur when eschatological concepts are imposed on the framework of other religions. In religions outside the biblical tradition, there is no “end” but rather a cyclic pattern of cosmic destruction and rebirth. Therefore, a distinction must be made between mythical (myth) and historical (history, philosophy of) eschatologies. The former interprets the human condition in relation to the realm of the sacred and the profane as defined in nontemporal terms and stories, the latter in temporal terms and stories.

      In mythical eschatology the origin of the world is reproduced at the end of the world; that is, the process of creating order out of chaos that occurred at the beginning of time occurs again at the end of time (the “End” or “Endtime”). In the beginning, according to this approach, universal laws and the pure order of things are established, but eventually law and order decay and degenerate. salvation, therefore, is found in a return of the world's origin. Both the mythical actions of the gods and historical actions of humans are seen as representations of an eternal struggle in which the world order is defended against chaos. History thus becomes a cultic drama in which priests and kings play out preordained ritual roles.

      Mythical eschatology, then, can be defined in terms of the “myth of the eternal return,” which posits a cyclic view of history. In religious festivals, the lost time of history is regenerated and eternity is represented. Through the ritualistic repetition of the creation of the cosmos, the impression of transience is proved wrong. Everything is shown to remain in place, hope is inherent in memory, and future salvation is depicted as a return to the primordial origin or to an original golden age. In mythical eschatology, the meaning of history is found in a celebration of the eternity of the cosmos and the repeatability of the origin of the world.

      Historical eschatology, on the contrary, is grounded not in a mythical primal happening but in events in time that provide the structure of history and are essential to its progress. Biblical and biblically influenced eschatologies are historical and directed toward the historical future. In this view, experiences are never universal. Rituals such as Passover and seder are not attempts to repeat events and experiences but are ways to remember them through the telling of history and tradition. Rituals are events in which a novum (a new or extraordinary event or action) is symbolically experienced. Hope is thus grounded in historical remembrance but transcends what is remembered historically.

      The future of history is final because history is unrepeateable. Understood in this context, history is not the arena of the horrors of chaos but the field of danger and salvation. The meaning of history is thus found in its future fulfillment. The divine, or sacred, is not experienced in the ritualistic reenactments of the eternally recurring order of nature and the cosmos; rather, God's freedom of action, faithfulness, and promises for the future can be discerned in the irreversible events of history.

      Historical eschatologies are found in the faith of Israel and Judaism, which is grounded in the Exodus and which has focused increasingly on the expected revelation of the glory of God in all lands. Historical eschatologies are also found in Christianity, which is based on the life of Jesus (Jesus Christ) and his Resurrection from the dead. Christian hopes focus on the kingdom of God, through which history is to end and be fulfilled. In Judaism and Christianity the unique occurrence of a historical event serves as a basis for belief in a long-desired future. A historically occurring novum offers hope for a new existence that will be more than the reproduction of the primordial condition.

The forms of eschatology

      Historical eschatology appears in one of three distinct forms— messianism, millennialism, or apocalypticism. Messianic hopes are directed toward a single redemptive figure who, it is believed, will lead the people of God, now suffering and oppressed, into a better historical future. Messianism sometimes promotes visions of the vengeance and justice that befall tyrannical political and religious leaders. In these instances, local historical expectations shape the belief in the fulfillment of history before its end. Apocalypticism, on the other hand, promises a sudden, cataclysmic intervention by God on the side of a faithful minority. According to this view, "this world," unable to bear the "justice of God," will be destroyed and replaced by a new world founded on God's righteousness. Millenarian, or chiliastic, hope is directed toward the 1,000-year earthly kingdom of peace, fellowship, and prosperity over which Christ and his saints will reign following the destruction of the forces of evil and before the final end of history.

Messianism

      The term messiah, or mashiah (Hebrew: "anointed"), has been applied to a variety of “redeemers,” and many movements with an eschatological or utopian (utopia)-revolutionary message have been termed messianic. Although messianic movements have occurred throughout the world, they seem to be especially characteristic of the Jewish and Christian traditions. Therefore, many of the terms used to describe messianic phenomena are derived from the Bible and from Judeo-Christian beliefs—prophetic, millenarian, and chiliastic movements. Moreover, the scientific study of messianic beliefs and movements—originating in the Western theological and academic tradition—initially concerned phenomena that occurred mainly in Christian history or in cultures exposed to Western colonial and missionary influences. Because the Western origins of messianic terms and concepts give discussions of messianism an almost unavoidable Judeo-Christian slant, sociologists and anthropologists prefer more neutral terminology—nativistic, renewal, or revitalization movements and crisis cults. Many of these terms, however, fail to convey the essential features of the phenomena. Thus, recent scholarship has preferred the term millennial (used by Church Fathers (Church Father) and anthropologists alike) to describe movements of collective redemption.

apocalypticism

 Apocalypticism refers to Western eschatological views and movements that focus on cryptic revelations about a sudden, dramatic, and cataclysmic intervention by God in history, the judgment of all men, and the rule of the elect with God in a renewed heaven and earth. The archetypal apocalyptic work in the Judeo-Christian tradition, The Book of Daniel (Daniel, The Book of), is the only apocalyptic book to be admitted to the canon of the Hebrew Bible, just as the Revelation to John is the only apocalypse included in the canon of the New Testament. There are many noncanonical apocalyptic works from both Jewish and Christian authors, including the three Books of Enoch, the Second Book of Esdras, the Ascension of Isaiah, and the Apocalypse of Peter. Nonetheless, all the apocalyptic works written during the first efflorescence of millennialism, including the Revelation to John, owe much of their shape and style to Daniel.

millennialism

      Millennialism (from the Latin word for “1,000 years”) is the branch of eschatology concerned with the earthly prospects of the human community, rather than the worldly and eternal prospects of the individual. Millennialism focuses on collective, public salvation and asserts that humanity will endure the great cataclysms of the coming Endtime before fulfilling the age-old dream of dwelling in an earthly paradise. The term is derived from a passage in the Revelation to John (Revelation 20) that describes a vision of Satan bound and thrown into a bottomless pit and of Christian martyrs raised from the dead to reign with Christ for a 1,000-year period, the millennium.

      Millennialism has had broad appeal throughout history. The original Jewish (Judaism) and Christian millennial treatises of the Hellenistic Age (c. 300 BC to c. AD 300), particularly the books of Daniel and Revelation, provided the building blocks from which the successive millennial structures were erected (as they had done for apocalypticism). In constant repetition the motifs, leading characters, symbols, and chronologies of these works have arisen in the teaching of some prophet of the end of the world, each time taking on new significance from associations with contemporaneous events. Jesus (Jesus Christ), according to some scholars, was a millennialist who announced the imminent arrival of the earthly kingdom of God (God, Kingdom of). Millennialism also remains active in a number of modern Protestant groups, including the Adventists (Adventist), the Jehovah's Witnesses (Jehovah's Witness), and certain Evangelical (Evangelical church) and fundamentalist (fundamentalism, Christian) Christian denominations. Anthropologists, historians, and sociologists also have found millennialist currents in non-Western cultures.

Eschatological terminology

      Eschatological language ordinarily uses two elements of style in conjunction: the negation of the negative and the analogy of the future. Objective statements about the future are possible only in the form of the negation of the negative. Revelation 21:4 provides an example of this style: “And death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more.” Thus, the positive aspects of the eschatological future are circumscribed by the negative aspects of the present. If the future is to be meaningfully related to this life, however, corporeal existence must also be capable of foreshadowing the future life. Eschatological imagery and language, therefore, use statements from everyday life (such as "the Kingdom of God is like…" analogies in the New Testament) and from events in history that foreshadow or describe the future.

      The use of negation and analogy poses a problem for eschatological language that leads to either dualism and mysticism or a one-sided belief in progress. In either case, the novum of eschatology becomes inexpressible. To interpret eschatological traditions, one has to discern the outcome of history from the negative and positive signs of the future in history. Eschatology understands history as a growing crisis: good provokes evil, and growing danger makes the action of redemption necessary. Authentic eschatology is neither world-denying pessimism nor unbridled faith in progress; rather, it can be seen as anticipation of freedom in the midst of slavery and of salvation in the midst of directionless alienation.

Eschatology in world religions and nonliterate cultures

Nativistic movements

      Although usually associated with societies in the Judeo-Christian tradition, eschatological and messianic movements have emerged in various societies around the world. For example, the people of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal believe that the Endtime will come when, at the command of the god Puluga, an earthquake will destroy the earth and the bridge of heaven. The souls and spirits of the dead will then arise, and humans and animals will lead happy lives without sickness and death. According to the Andamanese, the impatient spirits of the underworld are already shaking the roots of the palm tree that supports the earth to bring about the end of this world and its resurrection, and someAustralian Aboriginals (Australian Aborigine) claim that the end of the world will come when the moral world order legislated by the gods is no longer upright.

      Several of these societies hold messianic beliefs structured around the myth of the return of the original god or man. The Gabonese of equatorial Africa believe that Kmvum (the original man) once lived among them but that their behaviour brought on the “day of separation.” His return, they believe, will bring joy, abundance, and happiness. Similarly, the Altaic Tatars (Tatar) of Central Asia believe that Tengere Kaira Khan (the "Graceful Emperor of Heaven"), who once lived on earth, will return at the end of the world to judge all people according to their works. Yet another return myth is central to the beliefs of the Salish native peoples of the Pacific Northwest of North America. In this case, before he vanishes, the creator god promises a tribal elder that the chief will return to the world at the Endtime, when the earth will live as a mother among her children and happiness will reign.

      Eschatologies arranged around the origin-fall-return motif have emerged as a result of the encounters of non-Western peoples with Western civilization and Christianity. Many messianic movements in world cultures—even those that are antiwhite and anticolonialist—exhibit markedly Christian features in their symbolism and overall messianic ideology. Some of these movements (e.g., that led by Simon Kimbangu (Kimbangu, Simon) in the former Belgian Congo from 1921, that led by Isaiah Shembe in South Africa from 1911, and several movements in Brazil) appeared as Christian revivalist sects. In fact, Kimbangu's movement appeared to be sufficiently Christian to be admitted to the World Council of Churches.

      Other eschatological movements emerged in world cultures that reveal less Christian influence and more indigenous millennial influences. These movements, often termed “nativisitic,” expect salvation from a revival of native values and customs and a rejection of everything alien. Many of the North American Indian (Native American) movements since the 17th century have been nativistic, including the Pueblo Rebellion led by Popé in 1680, the movement led by an anonymous Delaware prophet and the Ottawa chief Pontiac in 1762–63, the religious revival and revolt led by Tenskwatawa (the Prophet) and Tecumseh in 1807, and the Ghost Dance outbreaks from 1869 to 1890 among Southwestern and Plains Indians. The messianic movements in Melanesia focusing on the arrival—in ships or airplanes—of "cargo" (i.e., the coveted wealth and riches that symbolize power, well-being, and salvation) are referred to as cargo cults (cargo cult).

      As a result of the many types of messianic movements in world cultures, scholars have applied a variety of names to them. Along with terms such as nativisitic, some anthropologists speak of revitalization movements (revitalization movement), whereas others emphasize the connection between acculturation and messianic movements. Many scholars prefer the more neutral and objective term crisis cults because it is not acculturation as such that produces messianism but the crises and dislocations caused by certain forms of interaction between cultures. Other scholars use the term prophetic movements because many movements are started or propagated by prophetlike leaders. There is also a tendency among modern anthropologists to label messianic movements in premodern and world cultures as protonationalist.

Religions of Asia

 In the religions of South Asia, unlike the religions of the Western tradition, there is no historical eschatology, but there are both personal and universal eschatologies. The universal eschatology in Hinduism is best described as a mythical or “relative” eschatology and involves the Hindu creation myth and the myth of the eternal recurrence of the universe, a cosmic drama that, it is believed, can be reenacted or influenced by religious ritual. Although the Hindu eschatological tradition involves no final consummation, it is characterized by great cycles (kalpas) of rise and decline, creation and destruction. The kalpa comprises 2,000 mahayugas, which in turn are each made up of four ages, or yugas, of diminishing length. The current age is the fourth yuga, the kaliyuga, of a mahayuga and is to last 1,200 “cosmic” years (432,000 years). An age of strife and disorder, decadence, and degeneration, the kaliyuga will, according to Hinduism, be brought to a close in a great conflagration. The consummation of the age will be accomplished by Kalki (Kalkin), the final avatar, or incarnation, of Vishnu, and will be followed by the creation of a new age, the Krita yuga, a golden era of righteousness and peace. The yuga cycle of creation and destruction itself is part of a larger cycle involving Brahma (the personification of brahma, the supreme existence and source of all things). This cycle, lasting the lifetime of Brahma (100 of his years), will end in an even greater conflagration that will destroy the cosmos, demons, gods, and Brahma himself. Universal destruction, however, will be followed by an age of chaos and then by the birth of a new Brahma and the creation of a new cycle of birth and death.

      A cyclic view is also found in the personal or individual eschatology of Hinduism with its process of birth, death, and rebirth. Eschatological teachings concern the cycle itself and the attainment of moksha, or release from the cycle. The process is guided by karma (the doctrine that actions have consequences in this life and the next), which determines the fate of individual souls. After death, souls can be assigned to any of several heavens or hells, depending upon their accumulation of virtues and vices, before their transmigration into a new human, animal, insect, or plant body. Some souls, however, may be so irredeemably evil that they are assigned to eternal damnation; others may be assigned to redemption, or devayana (“god's way”).

      Redemption is popularly viewed as entrance into the highest heaven of the god worshiped, where the redeemed await a spiritual reflection of earthly joy. In modern Hinduism the soul that is identical with God is redeemed through a recognition of the organic wholeness that has vanished from consciousness because of the soul's imprisonment in matter. Self-recognition ( atman) then leads to identity with absolute being (brahma). Redemption lies in the accomplishment, or rather recognition, of the atman-brahma identity, for it already frees man from the chains of karma and samsara (cycle of rebirths).

       Buddhism, which emerged first in India but had greater impact outside the subcontinent, is, in many ways, an ethical philosophy and a “salvationist” eschatology. Buddhist teachings are rooted in the notion that all is suffering and impermanence: the material world is nothing but illusion, and the pursuit of worldly gain will bring only suffering. These notions form the core of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, which include the truth of liberation from the sufferings of the world. To overcome suffering and the transitory nature of existence and gain liberation from it, the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, devised the Eightfold Path of ethical and purifying behaviour. The purpose of these teachings is to lead the adherent to the state of nirvana (Sanskrit: “extinction,” or “blowing out”), the release from the sufferings of the world and, especially, release from the cycle of birth and rebirth. The Buddhist's goal is, therefore, eschatological in the sense that it concerns the final destiny, or salvation, of the individual.

 There are other manifestations of eschatological, even millennial thought in Buddhism. The bodhisattvas (who vow to follow the path to become a buddha) in Mahayana Buddhism are saviour figures who postpone entrance to nirvana and return to help others attain that state. The Maitreya Buddha, the final Buddha, also is the focus of eschatological and millenarian thought. It is said that the Maitreya will eventually descend from his place in heaven to realize his full potential as a buddha and preside over a kingdom of peace and enlightenment. For more orthodox Buddhists, the Maitreya is a figure who can help them when the “true teaching” is fading. For others, especially those in China, where Buddhism mixed with Daoist (Daoism) millennial tendencies, the Maitreya is already present or will come soon. This belief led to the formation of secret societies that would challenge the established political order in China and elsewhere.

Religions of ancient civilizations

       time is understood as both irreversible and linear in Western religions, and therefore the End is thought to occur once and for all. Accordingly, it is believed the final judgment will be followed by the creation of a new and sacred world that is eternal. Ancient Egyptian (Egyptian religion) texts such as the Shipwrecked Sailor and the Conversation Between Atum and Osiris contain the earliest expressions of this kind of eschatological thought and present a highly developed sense of the idea of the final judgment of the dead. Ancient Greek and Roman eschatological views depict a shadow life for the individual departed soul in Hades and also express the concept of the cyclic destruction and renewal of the world. (See Egyptian religion.)

Eschatology in religions of the West

Zoroastrianism

       Zoroastrianism is a religion with a highly developed eschatology: world history is a battlefield on which the forces of light and good fight the powers of darkness and evil. Along with this cosmic eschatological battle, Zoroastrianism developed messianic traditions focused on its founder, the Iranian prophet Zoroaster, whose ministry (which scholars date as late as the 6th century BC or as early as c. 1500–1200 BC) is said to have opened the last of the history of the world's four periods of 3,000 years each. He is followed, at intervals of 1,000 years, by three "saviours," considered to be his sons. The last of these, the Saoshyans (or Saoshyant), will appear, according to Zoroastrianism, at the Endtime, and God will entrust to him the final rehabilitation of the world and the resurrection of the dead. Moreover, Zoroaster's own writings, the Gathas, express many eschatological themes, including a radically egalitarian ethic and morality, respect for manual labour (e.g., the life of the herdsman), and disdain for the violence and self-aggrandizement of the powerful. As time passed and the Endtime did not materialize, Zoroastrianism developed into a dualistic faith that became the official religion of the Persian empire.

Islam (Islām)

      According to traditional historiography, Islam (Islām) is not a messianic religion. Some scholars, however, have suggested that, like Christianity, Islam was intensely apocalyptic at its origins and that Muhammad was the herald of the "day of the Lord.” Certainly apocalyptic themes—the Day of Judgment (Yawm al-Dīn), the Day of Resurrection (Yawm al-Qiyāma), the return of Jesus and his fight against al-Dajjāl (the Antichrist), and the wars of Gog (Gog and Magog) and Magog—appear throughout the Qurʾān. Although they are only now drawing scholarly attention, numerous apocalyptic hadith (Ḥadīth) (major sources of Islamic law, based on the sayings or traditions of the Prophet Muhammad) have appeared throughout the history of Islam. Furthermore, Shīʾite (Shīʿite) teaching openly embraces an eschatology that is “this-worldly” (i.e., millennial and messianic), and, although Sunnite theology tends to downplay millennialism, it does promote the notion of a line of messianic emperors.

      Fairly early on—probably under Christian influence—the notion emerged of an eschatological restorer of the faith; identified as a descendant of the Prophet or as the returning ʿĪsa (Jesus), he is usually referred to as the mahdi (mahdī) (the "divinely guided one"). Muslims believe that after the appearance of ʿĪsa, the Last Judgment will occur: the good will enter paradise and the evil will fall into hell. The period before the End is regarded as a dark time when God himself will abandon the world. The Kaʿbah (the great pilgrimage sanctuary of the Muslim world) will vanish, the copies of the Qurʾān will become empty paper, and its words will disappear from memory. Then the End will draw near.

 Although all orthodox Muslims believe in the coming of a final restorer of the faith, in Sunnite Islam the mahdi is part of folklore rather than dogma. In times of crisis and of political or religious ferment, mahdistic expectations have increased and given rise to many self-styled mahdis. The best-known, Muḥammad Aḥmad (al-Mahdī (Mahdī, al-)), the mahdi of the Sudan, revolted against the Egyptian administration in 1881 and, after several spectacular victories, established the mahdist state that was defeated by the British military leader Horatio Herbert Kitchener (Kitchener, Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl) at Omdurman (in the Sudan) in 1898.

      The doctrine of the mahdi is an essential part of the creed of Shīʿite Islam (which recognizes the transference of spiritual leadership through the family of ʿAlī, Muḥammad's cousin and son-in-law). The Twelvers ( Ithnā ʿAsharīyah), the main Shīʿite group, identify 12 visible imams, descendants of ʿAlī who are the only legitimate rulers of the Muslim community; the last imam disappeared in AD 847. The Twelvers believe the mahdi is that 12th imam, who will reappear from his place of occultation (or ghaybah, meaning “concealment by God”). Some mahdist movements began as Shīʿite movements but eventually broke away from Islam to form new religions. The Fatimid caliph of Egypt, al-Ḥākim (Ḥākim, al-), destroyed the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in AD 1009 (AH 400) and claimed to be the final prophet and the divine incarnation. After the caliph's assassination (probably by one his many enemies), his most devoted followers formed the Druze religion, which teaches that he will return to establish his rule at the Endtime (1,000 years after his disappearance). Other messianic figures from the Islamic tradition include the founder of the Indian Aḥmadīyah sect, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (Ghulam Ahmad, Mirza), who in the late 19th century declared himself to be the Christ and the mahdi, and the founder of the Bahāʾi (Bahāʾī faith) faith, the Iranian Mirzā ʿAlī Moḥammad of Shīrāz (Bāb, the), who proclaimed himself to be the Bāb ("Gate") in 1844 (AH 1260) on the 1,000th anniversary of the disappearance of the 12th imam.

      As early as AH 200, belief emerged in another messianic figure, the mujaddid (a divinely inspired reformer who was to restore the Islamic community to its original purity). Unlike that of the mahdi, the return of the mujaddin was thought to be cyclic and was associated with the century's end. Indeed, at the end of every century since AH 200, powerful religious movements with strong apocalyptic tendencies have emerged in the Islamic world. These cyclic apocalyptic episodes are now regarded as revitalization movements and as times of renewal of religious commitment and enthusiasm. But in every case where evidence of belief in the mujaddid exists (e.g., with al-Maʾmūn (Maʾmūn, al-) in AH 200, al-Ḥākim in 400, Akbar, the emperor of Mughal India, in 1000, and al-Mahdī in the Sudan in 1300), the millennial, messianic tendencies of the actors is clear.

Judaism

Ancient times

      Ancient Israel's historical experience and faith in the guidance and the promises (covenant) of God provide the foundation of the Western tradition of historical eschatology. The basic structure of this faith is found in the law of promise and fulfillment, and the eschatology of the Hebrew Bible is grounded in faith in God and hope in the future (Genesis 12:1–3). Jewish eschatology has its beginning in the biblical promise to Abraham that, through him, all nations would be blessed and that his descendants would receive a "good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey" (Exodus 3:8). In the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible), the promise includes the increase of people and possessions, as well as the blessing and triumphant presence of God (Genesis 49:8–12; Numbers 23; Deuteronomy 33:13–17; Numbers 23:21). The Jews interpreted their defeats at the hands of Israel's enemies ( Assyria in the 7th century BC, Babylon in the 6th) not as the result of the might of great empires but as punishment for their own disobedience of the laws of God. The concept of the “day of the Lord” arose from this view of history, which holds that the empire will fall and the remnant of the Lord's faithful will receive salvation and victory. This new idea and Israel's political history—both the recent disasters and the memory of the great Davidic kingdom—led to the hope in the future messiah from the house of David (II Samuel 7).

      During the political catastrophes of the 8th century BC, the great prophets took up the concept of the "day of the Lord," proclaimed it as a day of judgment (Amos 5:18), and made it the focus of eschatological hopes. Isaiah also adopted the eschatological view that salvation occurred only after the universal judgment (Isaiah 4:3; 6:13; 11:11; 37:31) and, in some passages, combined it with the presence of a messianic (messiah) mediator of salvation (Isaiah 7–12). In another passage (2:1–3), Isaiah offered the most striking expression of nonmessianic millennialism in the prophetic texts, declaring, “and he shall judge between nations, and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, neither will they study war anymore.” This is a vision of universal redemption and also a profoundly subversive vision of the political order in which the weapons of aristocratic dominance are transformed into the tools of manual labour.

      Prophetic hopes kept the idea of Israel alive after the destruction of the kingdoms of Israel (8th century BC) and Judah (6th century BC). In some formulations, this prophetic hope sought to restore the exiled Jews to the land of Israel, and in others it sought the redemption of the righteous in all nations of the earth. It was conceived of as a new creation, a new heart, a new covenant (Jeremiah 31; Ezekiel 36; Isaiah 41; Isaiah 51).

      The Book of Daniel (Daniel, The Book of) (2 and 7) contains the first use of symbolic language and the mysteriously precise numbers that formed the core of subsequent apocalyptic speculation in both Judaism and Christianity. His apocalyptic hope anticipated the "kingdom of the Son of Man" following the consummation of evil in the fourth and final kingdom of the world. Daniel offers the first expression of hope in a messiah and in a Son of Man, an eschatology that unites the fulfillment of the history of Israel with the end of world history. Daniel's vision of the four empires also reveals the hostility of Jewish (and early Christian) apocalyptic thought to imperial power.

      Reacting to a threat to the existence of the Jewish faith and the desecration of the First Temple of Jerusalem in 167 BC, the Maccabees revolted against the occupation forces of the Seleucid monarch of Syria, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, and against those of their Jewish countrymen who favoured assimilation. The anonymous author of Daniel wrote his work, which describes the forced resettlement of the Jews to Babylon in the 6th century BC, in support of these rebels, particularly assuring them that God was aiding them, that the end of their struggles was in sight, and that a new golden age was dawning. In two passages he depicts visions of a series of four world kingdoms, represented in the first passage by parts of a giant statue and in the second by mythological beasts, each kingdom embodying evil to a greater extent than the last. Man's kingdoms, according to Daniel, will end with the fourth kingdom, crushed by a "stone…cut out by no human hand," symbolizing that the destruction of the kingdom and the ensuing order are supernatural events. The Son of Man, however, will institute a fifth, entirely righteous, just, and eternal kingdom.

      Daniel, like the previous prophets, made predictions, but, unlike other prophets' predictions, the outcome anticipated by Daniel was to be the product not of historical development but of divine intervention that completely reverses the expected historical outcome. The reversal of worldly expectations through divine intervention is one of the most characteristic features of apocalypticism and contrasts with the older prophetic style. The apocalyptic view also shifts the focus of future expectations from predictions of punishment lest people change their ways to predictions of events that must occur, regardless of human actions. This new tradition acknowledged that evil was so dominant on earth that only God's cataclysmic intervention could free the world from its grip. Also essential to Daniel and subsequent apocalypticism is the immediacy of the message and the promise of salvation. Descriptions of this imminent cosmic salvation included vivid representations of historical figures who depicted the progressive growth of evil and decline of goodness from the past to the present.

      Along with the ideas of the imminent intervention of God in history and the reversal of the irresistible progress of evil and declension of good, Daniel's apocalypse introduced other influential ideas. numerology, mythological (myth) figures, and angelology were probably introduced by Daniel as a result of the influence of Iranian thought. Although likely the result of the unique problems the author faced in presenting his views as a 6th-century-BC prophet to a 2nd-century-BC audience, other characteristics of The Book of Daniel, especially its pseudonymous authorship and emphasis on esoteric truths, remain essential components of apocalyptic writings. Numerous references to the number of days before the fulfillment of the apocalyptic promises have also proved very important. Despite the passage of millennia since its composition, the book inspired apocalyptic expectations as late as 1843, in both the United States (William Miller (Miller, William)) and Persia (the Bāb).

Hellenistic Judaism

      During the period of Seleucid (Seleucid kingdom) rule in Palestine (c. 200–165 BC) and later Roman and Byzantine rule (63 BC–AD 638), the expectation of a personal messiah acquired increasing prominence and became the centre of a number of other eschatological concepts. The Qumrān sects, Jewish monastic groups known in modern times for their preservation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, believed in a messianic pair: a priestly messiah from the house of Aaron (the brother of Moses) and a royal messiah from the house of David. These messiahs were not thought of as saviours—as in later Christian thought—but rather as ideal leaders who would preside over a divinely willed and "messianic" socioreligious order. The "Son of David" messianism, with its political implications, was overshadowed by apocalyptic notions of a more mystical and mythological character. Thus it was believed that a heavenly being called the "Son of Man" (the term is derived from Daniel 7:13) would descend to earth to save his people. The messianic ferment of the period was attested by contemporary Jewish-Hellenistic literature, including the writings of Flavius Josephus (Josephus, Flavius) and the New Testament, as well as by the appearance of prophets such as John the Baptist (John the Baptist, Saint) and Jesus.

 This ferment came to a climax in the First Jewish Revolt (Jewish Revolt, First) against Rome (AD 66–70), when various currents of anti-imperial millennial ideology culminated in a major uprising against the Roman occupation of Judea and Galilee. The destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem by the Romans (AD 70), exile, and persecution intensified Jewish messianism but also drove it underground, as a generation of rabbis under the guidance of Johanan ben Zakkai at Jamnia downplayed the more apocalyptic elements of the tradition. After the failure of the Second Jewish Revolt (Jewish Revolt, Second) ( Bar Kokhba's messianic uprising in AD 132–135) and the execution of several rabbis who supported it, the antiapocalyptic approach gained the upper hand. There is no mention of a millennial kingdom in the Mishna (c. AD 200), the first major textual production of this “normative” tradition.

      Popular apocalyptic literature, however, continued, and in this tradition the warrior-messiah gained prominence. The belief spread that a messiah from the house of Joseph (or Ephraim) would precede the triumphant messiah from the house of David but would himself fall in the battle against Gog (Gog and Magog) and Magog, two legendary powers who served Satan (Ezekiel 38:2; Revelation 20:8). Developed toward the end of the 2nd century, after the failure of Bar Kokhba's revolt, this conception is connected with a more basic notion of apocalyptic messianism—the belief that the messianic advent is preceded by suffering and catastrophe. In some versions of apocalyptic messianism, the messianic age merges with the Endtime and Last Judgment, and the "new heaven and new earth" are ushered in amid destruction and catastrophe.

Medieval and modern Judaism

      Messianic faith, often based on calculations from The Book of Daniel (Daniel, The Book of) and other biblical passages, tended to foster mass enthusiasm. Almost every generation had its messianic figures—e.g., Abū ʿĪsā al-Iṣfahānī and his disciple Yudghan in the 8th century and David Alroy in the 12th century in Persia, the propagandists of the messianic agitation in the Jewish communities of western Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries, and the pseudomessiah Shabbetai Tzevi (Sabbatai Zevi) of Smyrna in the 17th century. Messianic beliefs became firmly established tenets of Judaism and are included among the great Jewish medieval philosopher Maimonides (Maimonides, Moses)' Thirteen Articles of Faith. There was great variety in the elaboration of the doctrine—from the early apocalyptic visionaries and later Kabbalistic (Kabbala) (Jewish esoteric) mystics at one end of the scale to the rationalist theologians on the other.

      Modernist movements in Judaism maintain the traditional faith in an ultimately redeemed world and a messianic future for mankind without insisting on a personal messiah. Undoubtedly, Judaism owes its survival, to a considerable extent, to its steadfast faith in the messianic promise. In spite of its spiritual and mystical connotations, Jewish messianism never relinquished its understanding of the messianic order in historical, social, and political terms. Hence, many writers consider the participation of Jews in so many secular reform, liberation, and revolutionary movements as a secularized version of traditional Jewish messianism. The ideology of Zionism, as a movement for Jewish national emancipation and liberation, is not devoid of messianic or millennial features.

      Individual eschatology, on the other hand, emerges only on the periphery of the Hebrew Bible. Amazingly, in Israel there were neither known death cults nor vivid conceptions of life after death. The late expectation of resurrection to judgment (Daniel 12:2) is not a yearning for salvation but hope in the victorious righteousness of God and the ability of the righteous who have died to enjoy the fruits of the millennial kingdom. Rabbinical messianism continued this same line of thought.

Christianity

The New Testament period

 Although an older tradition contends that apocalyptic beliefs were a later addition, it is generally held that the preaching and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth (Jesus Christ) and the activities of his followers in the 1st century AD can be properly understood only in the context of contemporaneous Jewish apocalyptic beliefs. The precise nature of Jesus' beliefs about himself and his "messianic" task remains a matter of scholarly controversy, but there is little doubt that at an early date his followers saw him as the Lord's "anointed one" (Greek christos, whence the English name Christ), the Son of David, who would either accompany the advent of or inaugurate the messianic kingdom. This view is evident in the Gospel accounts that attempt to trace the ancestry of Jesus back to David. The Gospel According to Luke (Luke, Gospel According to) (2:11) states that the angels proclaimed Jesus the messiah at his birth. Yet the Gospels present Jesus rejecting the term messiah, possibly because of its political implications—either for him or for the Evangelists—in favour of other eschatological titles (e.g., the "Son of Man"). Believing in his Resurrection after the crucifixion, however, his early followers felt that the term messiah best expressed the role and function that they attributed to their master and "Lord" (Greek kyrios). In due course the title ("Jesus, the Christ") became synonymous with the proper name, and the word Christ was used by believers as the name of the risen Jesus (compare Galatians 1:6; Hebrews 9:11).

      There is much controversy surrounding the textual traces of the lively apocalyptic and millennial discourse. Many historians, including those who study other millennial movements, read the Gospel accounts as retrospective narratives that try to make sense of the profound apocalyptic disappointment in the “failure” of their leader to produce the kingdom of heaven. For these scholars, later documents reveal a process of reinterpretation, as moment after apocalyptic moment passed, bringing further apocalyptic disappointment.

      This pattern reappears throughout the history of the early movement, and Christianity is unique among religions for the duration of its apocalyptic commitment, sustained by a constantly evolving tradition of redating the expectation. The delay in the return of Jesus had other consequences for the early church, including a rearticulation of the message and the identity of the messiah (the kingdom of heaven within, Jesus as part of the Godhead).

      The movement's single most important response to the delay of the End was to take it as a sign that the message had to be spread to all the nations of the world. Thus, rather than retreat into the desert to await the final day as other Jewish apocalyptic groups had done in their disappointment, the disciples of Jesus, especially under the impetus provided by Paul (Paul, the Apostle, Saint), translated their religious beliefs into a universal message. The result was that, by the time the Temple had been destroyed, Christianity had created a spiritual teaching that enabled it to survive tremendous disappointment and to thrive independent of its original Jewish matrix.

      The adoption of the word Christ by the church of the Gentiles (non-Jewish believers) permitted the new movement to avoid the nationalist and political implications of the term messiah, which then vanished from the written texts of Christianity. In its place emerged a politically neutral and religiously original messianic conception based on the “Son of David,” “Son of Man,” and the “Suffering Servant” (Isaiah 52–53). This political shift was further advanced by the interpretation of the Roman Empire as the “obstacle” to Antichrist (II Thessalonians 2:6). Indeed, Christians were encouraged to pray for the health of the empire. In the process, the revolutionary apocalyptic millennialism of the early movement transformed into an apolitical Christology that could spread throughout the empire without threatening Roman rule. Thus the doctrine of the messiahship of Jesus (Christology) developed in response to other features of evolving Christian dogma (the messiah as the Son of God; the Trinity of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and the incarnation of the Word), eventually asserting that Jesus, as the Messiah, Saviour, and Redeemer, was essentially divine. In time the concept of salvation was radically spiritualized, and Jesus, through his sacrificial death, was viewed as delivering humankind from the bondage of sin and restoring it to communion with God.

      According to this theology, the saving event had already occurred, but in the spiritual rather than the material world. It had strong supporters from a broad range of theologians, including Origen and Augustine (Augustine, Saint), who articulated a completely nonmillennial form of Christian theology. Meanwhile, other early Christians, dissatisfied with this immanent eschatology, articulated a belief in the provisional nature of the world, which would continue only until the imminent Second Coming (the Parousia) of Christ in power and glory to judge the living and the dead.

      In the centuries immediately following the writing of Daniel, the apocalyptic worldview significantly influenced Jewish culture: the audiences whom Jesus addressed were acquainted with it, and the early Christian church embraced it. It included the idea of a world ruled by an evil empire (the world's last and the worst) whose collapse would be announced by signs, wonders, and the appearance of a saviour. The apostle Paul frequently expressed similar expectations (I Thessalonians 4), and a passage often called “the little (or synoptic) apocalypse” (Mark 13; compare Matthew 24 and Luke 21) reflects the early Christian community's belief in the imminent return of Christ following the destruction of the Second Temple (AD 70), one of the most intense moments of apocalyptic anticipation on record for both Jews and Christians.

      The Christian church in the 1st century wrestled with a difficult problem. Jesus had promised the inauguration of a new age—the kingdom of God—but the Romans continued to rule; wars, injustice, oppression, and violence continued unabated, the evildoers continued to flourish, and the meek and poor continued to suffer. Indeed, the situation was worse, because now Christians suffered severe persecution for their faith. The primitive church solved this problem by redating the Endtime and changing the nature of apocalyptic hope with the notion of the Parousia. According to this belief, Christ had come the first time with a message for all humanity, a warning to evildoers and a promise to their victims. When he returns—“coming on the clouds in triumph and glory” (Matthew 24:30)—he will complete the messianic task, striking the final blow against evil.

      Like The Book of Daniel, the Revelation to John (or Revelation) was composed during a period of persecution. Probably written during the last decade of the 1st century AD, it reflects the persecutions initiated by the emperor Nero (37–68)—seemingly portrayed as the Antichrist, the beast whose symbolic number is 666 (Revelation 13)—and continued under the emperor Domitian (81–96). After addressing letters to the seven churches of Asia Minor, the author of Revelation presents his vision of a series of judgments (Last Judgment): seven seals opened, seven trumpets blown, seven bowls poured out. Identifying the fourth beast of Daniel as Rome, Revelation attacks the empire, referred to cryptically as Babylon and as the great harlot. Christ, the executor of God's judgment, appears not as Jesus the man but as an omnipotent king riding a white horse with eyes like a flame of fire and a mouth like a sharp sword "with which to smite the nations" (Revelation 19).

      Revelation completed Christianity's assimilation of Jewish apocalypticism. Daniel's Son of Man was replaced by Christ, many of the numerological formulas found in the earlier text were repeated, and the dualistic universe of good and evil was provided with a new and unforgettable set of characters. Moreover, the essence of the apocalypse in Revelation remained as it had been in Daniel: God's direct aid was imminent and would cause the dramatic reversal of history that the believers' desperate state demanded.

      Although other apocalypses were written at roughly the same time (e.g., Revelations of Peter, Paul, Thomas), the Revelation to John was the only one to enter the Christian canon. A very popular text, intensely dramatic and emotional, it was meant for reading aloud (Revelation 1:3). It at once aroused the ardour of the apocalyptic hopeful and made it possible for the faithful to survive their apocalyptic disappointment.

      Unfortunately for both the Christian movement and those around it, Revelation also conveys a profoundly paranoid and violent attitude toward the apocalyptic “other.” It warns against a great evil deceiver who will lead all but a tiny fraction astray (Matthew 24:4; II Thessalonians 2:9–12; Revelation 13) and foretells staggering violence against the enemies of the Lord (Revelation 19). The promise of this avenging violence was, at least for the author of Revelation, the reward for the “faith and patience of the saints.” In this vision of the Parousia (Revelation 13:10), Christ wears a radically different face, complementing (or, for some, contradicting) the meek and mild one of the first coming.

      The authorship of Revelation was disputed from the 2nd century onward. The earliest, and clearly millennial, tradition presents Revelation as the final work of the youngest disciple, John, author of both the Fourth Gospel and two letters. Hostile ecclesiastical writers argued that Revelation could not have been written by the author who wrote the Gospel, because the language and conception of eschatology of the two works are profoundly different. Tellingly, in the Greek church, this millennial book was excluded from many Bibles from the 4th to the 12th century.

The early church

      During the first 100 years of Christian history, the church taught some form of millenarianism, or chiliasm (from the Greek word for “1,000”), the belief that the Parousia would bring about a 1,000-year kingdom of fellowship, justice, peace, and abundance here on earth. The coincidence of occasional episodes of millennial exultation and persecution (e.g., about AD 200) suggests the existence of a relationship between apocalyptic expectations and imperial persecutions. Certainly, Revelation viewed martyrdom and millennial promises as two aspects of the same eschatological resolution. But apocalyptic zeal waned because the End never came and the pressure of persecution was intermittent. Moreover, in the aftermath of apocalyptic outbreaks, more responsible and well-connected members of the church pursued a policy of accommodation, insisting that Christians were not hostile to Rome and downplaying both the apocalyptic and millennial dimensions of their tradition. Christian missionaries converted large numbers of Roman citizens, and worldly success and the failure of apocalyptic expectation reduced Christian antagonism toward the empire.

      Although millenarian thought lost favour with the clerical elite, it remained popular and appealed to Montanists (Montanism) and other heretics. In characteristic apocalyptic fashion, Montanus, the founder of the movement, was fascinated with the idea of dividing past and future into units of prophetic calculation. In AD 156, according to the 4th-century Christian antiheretical writer Epiphanius, Montanus declared himself the prophet of a third testament, a new age of the Holy Spirit. Phrygia (now in Turkey) became the centre of this movement, whose leaders claimed divine inspiration for their visions and utterances and believed in the imminent descent of the heavenly Jerusalem to the small Phrygian town of Pepuza.

      This concept of a third age, the new day of the spirit of God, is one of the most consistently repeated features of millenarian history, reappearing, for example, in Joachim Of Fiore's philosophy of history during the 12th century, in views of the Quakers (Quaker) (Society of Friends) in the 17th century, and in the apocalyptic speculations of the Seventh-day Adventists of the 19th and 20th centuries. In every case, it carries with it an implicit rejection of the contemporary church as an archaic and hierarchical organization that is about to be surpassed.

      About AD 200, apocalyptic expectations seem to have reached unusual levels. Montanism spread outside Asia Minor and found converts throughout the Roman Empire, including Tertullian, a North African lawyer and theologian. Apocalyptic prophets, some including bishops, roused their flocks with visions of the imminent End and led them into the desert to meet Christ returning on the clouds. In response to these disastrous errors, a nonapocalyptic version of millennialism, the “sabbatical millennium,” emerged. This argument, recorded about AD 110 in the Epistle of Barnabas, held that because God had created the world in six days and rested on the seventh (Genesis 1) and because 1,000 years is a day in God's sight (Psalm 89/90), the world must labour 6,000 years before the sabbatical millennium of peace, abundance, and joyful rest for the Lord's weary would begin. It offered a quiescent alternative to the radical millennialism of the apocalyptic prophets, and it would become more plausible with the passing of each failed apocalyptic episode.

      Hippolytus (Hippolytus of Rome, Saint), responding to the irresponsible apocalypticism of his day, connected the sabbatical millennium to a chronology that explicitly dated the arrival of the messianic millennium. By dating Jesus' Incarnation (God's assumption of the flesh in the person of Jesus) to 5500 anno mundi (AM; Latin: “in the year of the world”—i.e., from the Creation), he could argue in 5700 AM (AD 200) that there were still some 300 years left before the Parousia. This tradition was valuable for the same reasons it was dangerous: it reaffirmed millennialism as dogma and offered a concrete date. For at least two centuries, its teachings offered a solution to the problem of apocalyptic millennialism.

      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 (Constantine I) 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 (Eusebius of Caesarea), Jerome (Jerome, Saint), Ambrose (Ambrose, Saint), 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 (Donatist), 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 (Augustine, Saint)

 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.

      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 (Goth) and Visigoths (Visigoth) 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 418–19 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.

      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 (stylite) 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 (relic) (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 (Middle Ages) 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 (Gregory of Tours, Saint) 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 (Bede the Venerable, Saint) 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 (Leo III, Saint) 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.

      The years AD 1000 and 1033 represent the climax of the sabbatical millennium. Unlike the two previous climactic dates, these could not be avoided. No other year in Western historiography receives as much attention from historians and computists alike. Much like Byzantium in 6000 AM I (AD 500), there was a wide range of apocalyptic behaviour, from the hierarchical to the egalitarian. The split is most obvious in the difference between the eastern and western Frankish kingdoms—Germany and France, respectively.

 In Germany, where a powerful imperial dynasty dominated the political and cultural scene, the young and passionate emperor Otto III deployed apocalyptic symbols and undertook projects from above such as the “Bamberg Apocalypse” (an illuminated manuscript copy of the book of Revelation), the renovatio imperii romani (Latin: “renewal of the Roman Empire”), and the conversion of eastern European paganism. He also attempted to demonstrate imperial millennialism by visiting Charlemagne's tomb on Pentecost of 1000 and through his alliance with Pope Sylvester II.

      In France the Capetian (Capetian dynasty) dynasty replaced the Carolingian line in 987 under unfortunate circumstances (civil war and treason), and, where various regions were in social upheaval, the initiatives came from below. A variety of movements—the Peace of God (God, Peace of), relic cults and pilgrimages, penitential processions, apostolic communities and popular heresies, and the rise of popular charismatic preachers—occurred at the local and regional levels. In particular, the Peace of God movement represented the first major popular expression of millennialism that was not only approved but encouraged by the clerical and lay elite. Despite the differences between France and Germany, historians of the early 11th century use unusually optimistic language to describe a “new dawn” or a vast renewal for both regions—just the kind of revitalization that apocalyptic moments often produce.

      When the final drama did not come in 1000, the evidence suggests that many millennialists “redated” to 1033. This gave the entire generation between 1000 and 1033 an apocalyptic tenor. In the year 1009 (400 AH), al-Ḥākim, the messianic caliph of Cairo, destroyed the Holy Sepulchre and forced Christians to convert to his Ismāʿīlī Shīʿite Islam. When the news came to France, the region most influenced by apocalyptic expectations erupted in a wave of anti-Jewish violence. By 1022 concern over the spread of heresy was so great among the French clergy that heretics were executed for the first time in European history. Finally, with the advent of 1033, France experienced a second climactic wave of peace assemblies and pilgrimages to Jerusalem. The Cluniac historian Radulfus Glaber described the vast assembled masses at these peace councils as shouting “Peace! Peace! Peace!” and believing that they had formed a covenant with God.

      Of course, the years 1000 and 1033 passed without the arrival of the Parousia, but, rather than disappearing, apocalyptic expectations in western Europe underwent profound transformation. Instead of the passive expectation of the earlier period, the Peace of God movement and related movements at the turn of the millennium (AD) introduced a new and more creative millennialism, partly spurred by the remarkable innovation of the peace councils: the cooperation of the aristocratic elite (bishops and counts, abbots and kings) in a popular millennial movement. With its social covenantism, the Peace of God (God, Peace of) was the first successful postmillennial movement, meaning that for the first time adherents believed that the dramatic improvement of the world could come about not only as a result of Jesus' appearance but through the work of good people. This notion of a new spirit spreading to all people and of the appearance of the new millennial age would lie at the heart of the most enduring and powerful wave of millennial thinking in the High Middle Ages.

      While popular "messiahs" continued to appear, the period after the year 1000 was characterized by vaster movements, often approved by ecclesiastical authorities. The First Crusade (Crusades) revived the popular enthusiasm for both the peace and pilgrimage movements of 1033 in new and more aggressive forms: from peace in Christendom to war against the infidel, from penitential pilgrimage to armed Crusade. Peter the Hermit, whose miracles aroused much popular adulation, represented most aptly this new attitude. In an earlier age he would have been killed or imprisoned; in the late 11th century he managed to win approval from the church hiearchy for his millennial enthusiasm. Over time, however, some of these popular movements developed a militantly hostile attitude toward ecclesiastical authority, intellectuals, the wealthy, Jews, and others, thus engendering the most violent and revolutionary elements of millennialism.

      Millennial hopes and ambitions reached new levels as a result of the work of Joachim Of Fiore. The first officially approved theologian to reject Augustine and return to a notion of a future millennium, he postulated that there were three great ages of history: (1) that of the Law, (2) that of the Gospel, and (3) that of the Holy Spirit. His eschatology revitalized medieval millennialism, and, soon after his death at the beginning of the 13th century, prophecies attributed to him were linked to current events and were believed to predict imminent apocalypse.

      The Hundred Years' War, the Black Death, and other 14th-century catastrophes further fueled the desire for final divine intervention. In 1356 the Franciscan John of Roquetaillade (Rupescissa) prophesied that plagues, a revolt by the poor, and the appearance of Antichrists in Rome and Jerusalem would be followed in 1367 by the ascendence of a reforming pope, the election of a king of France as the Holy Roman emperor, and the onset of a millennial reign of peace and prosperity.

      Popular, often revolutionary millennialism continued in the 14th century as well. The Jacquerie in France in 1358 may have been inspired by apocalyptic prophecies. The thousands of peasants, or Pastoureaux (“Shepherds”), who swept through the French countryside in 1251 emerged again in 1320, believing they could bring about the Parousia by freeing the Holy Land.

      In the late medieval period, after the Black Death had changed the social dynamic by creating a restricted supply of labour that gave commoners an economic advantage, the aristocracy responded by instituting authoritarian labour laws and wage restrictions. This resulted in a new urban proletariat, often inspired by apocalyptic preachers such as John Ball (Ball, John), who led the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Other millennial groups appeared on the fringes of Latin Christendom, forming powerful and enduring countercultures such as the Hussites (Hussite) in 15th-century Bohemia, whose violent Taborite wing of true believers was intent on bringing about the millennial kingdom at any cost.

      The presence and strength of popular and revolutionary millennialism are difficult to assess, however, because of the paucity of contemporary sources (limited to hostile clerics and later spokespersons eager to downplay the movement's origins). As a result, modern historical analyses tend to emphasize the political, or “imperial,” millennialism that is more prevalent in the sources.

      Chronology offers one neglected source of evidence for understanding the extent of millennialism in the Middle Ages. There would have been no need in the 5900s AM I (AD 400s) or again in the 5900s AM II (AD 700s) to change the chronology if 6000 were not a date to be reckoned with. The historiographical convention that the centuries after Augustine had no significant millennial impulses fails to explain why the chronologies shifted with such regularity in the final century before the millennial date. In fact, competition between conservative nonapocalyptic calculations and the apocalyptic calculations of messianic preachers continued throughout the Middle Ages. At the beginning of the 14th century, Arnold of Villanova identified a date some 70 years in the future as the millennial moment, which the pope must have found far more favourable than the more immediate prophecies of Fra Dolcino, a member of the Apostolic Brethren who preached the imminent fall of the religious and political order. Similarly, given how threatening even pro-imperial millennialism could be to the status quo, the prominence of conservative millennialism in medieval thought may testify to the ineradicable nature of the appeal of apocalyptic thought to the populace at large, rather than to some calm and measured conservatism. In short, millennial beliefs and aspirations are among the most profound and versatile of medieval ideologies of social change.

      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 (Reformation), which played a role akin to that of the year 1000 or of Joachim of Fiore's work. Although Martin Luther (Luther, Martin) 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 (Müntzer, Thomas) and the Peasants' Revolt (1525) and the Anabaptists (Anabaptist) (especially at Münster in 1533–35)—that illustrates all the dangers and excesses of apocalyptic millennialism. Even John Calvin (Calvin, John)'s very Augustinian teachings were transformed by later Puritans (Puritanism) 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 (Separatist) (who left the Church of England) hoped to usher in the kingdom of God, and groups such as the Diggers (Digger), 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 (Cromwell, Oliver) 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 (Mormon), Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Christadelphians (Christadelphian)).

      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 (papacy) 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 (Bacon, Francis Thomas) 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 (utopia) 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 (God, Kingdom of). 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 (Second Coming) 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.

      The teachings of the progressive millennialists became dominant in many Protestant churches in the 18th century. In his Paraphrase and Commentary on the New Testament (1703), the Anglican polemicist and commentator Daniel Whitby provided such convincing support for the progressive argument that he has often been credited with creating it. American Puritans were also interested in the millennium, especially Jonathan Edwards (Edwards, Jonathan), who adopted progressive millennialism and discussed it at length in his uncompleted History of the Work of Redemption. Edwards believed the discovery and settlement of the New World had millennial implications, and he anticipated the establishment of Christ's kingdom sometime near the end of the 20th century. His work also triggered the First Great Awakening, a revivalist movement that manifested many of the millennialist traits of the medieval peace assemblies. The millennialism of the Great Awakening was also part of the general trend in American history that originated with the Puritans and would influence the American Revolution. In fact, while the standard rhetoric that characterizes the Revolution is that of Greek and Roman politics, the rabble-rousing sermons that were preached from the pulpits of colonial America in the 1770s were grounded in apocalyptic millennialism.

Later progressive millennialism

      In the 19th century the association of the millennium with the role of the United States in history proved to be a volatile mixture in the hands of Protestant ministers, and for much of that period millennialism fed the fires of nationalism and Manifest Destiny. In a typical utterance, a leading Presbyterian minister of the 1840s, Samuel H. Cox, told an English audience that "in America, the state of society is without parallel in universal history.…I really believe that God has got America within anchorage, and that upon that arena, He intends to display his prodigies for the millennium." The Social Gospel movement of the late 19th century demonstrated most clearly the continuing influence of progressive millennialism.

      The advocates of optimistic millennialism were confident of their ultimate triumph but did not take evil lightly. God's kingdom would advance, they argued, but not without difficulty. Although they were not apocalyptic, their view of history included the cataclysmic. During the American Civil War, for example, in "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" antislavery writer Julia Ward Howe (Howe, Julia Ward) described God's truth as "marching on” and “trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." The same idea is central to President Woodrow Wilson's crusade to make the world "safe for democracy" through the entry of the United States into World War I. According to the progressive millennialists, Christ's Second Advent would occur at the close of the millennium as its crowning event, and, as a result, their position has been called postmillennialism.

      By accepting the progress of science, however, progressive millennialism-postmillennialism “watered down” its commitment to the Bible. Theories of geologic and biological evolution—which called into question the validity of the Bible's account of creation—further weakened the biblical foundation of postmillennialism. Scientific progress also called into question chronological millennialism, which, since Anglican Bishop James Ussher's work in the 17th century, had identified Jesus' birth as 4004 AM and therefore expected the sabbatical millennium to occur at the end of the second Christian millennium, in AD 2000.

      In response to the dilution of biblical postmillennialism, English and American Protestants, led by the 19th-century theologian John Nelson Darby and the Plymouth Brethren, elaborated a series of “dispensations,” or periods of time during which God interacts with humanity according to an evolving set of rules. The most recent dispensation, they believed, had begun in the aftermath of the Crucifixion and would end with the Rapture, that moment when God bodily “takes up” his chosen before visiting upon the world his long-withheld wrath—the seven-year Tribulation described in Revelation—during which the Antichrist would come to tempt, if possible, even the saints. The Battle of Armageddon would follow, resulting in the victory of the celestial forces, the return of Jesus (Parousia), and the establishment of the millennial kingdom.

      This premillennialism avoids political involvement by asserting that the world is too pervaded with evil to carry out, even with divine guidance, a plan for the millennial kingdom on earth. Only divinely wrought catastrophe and the direct intervention of Jesus could bring the victory of God's truth. As a result, premillennial dispensationalism rejects progress as a snare of the Devil and calls for a return to the fundamentals of true religion, belief in the inerrancy of scripture, and the necessity of believers to maintain their faith and morals. Premillennialists await the catastrophic hand of God and seek to win as many people to the side of the Lord before the Rapture as they can.

      In a sense, premillennialism and postmillennialism have coexisted since the earliest church, each succeeding the other in the aftermath of its disappointed apocalyptic hopes. Thus, after the triumph of postmillennialism in the mid-19th century, premillennialism came to the fore at the end of the century. The rise of postmillennial optimism in the activist Christian movements of the early 20th century (e.g., prohibition and suffrage) brought about a wave of millennialism in the wake of World War I.

Eschatology in modern times

Influences on modern ideologies

 Western civilization, even in its modern secularized forms, is heir to a long tradition of Christian thought. Thus, it is not surprising that many social reform movements as well as utopian ideologies bear traces of Christian influence. Enlightenment and Romantic (Romanticism) thinkers proposed ideas of human progress toward peace and harmony that reveal messianic-millenarian origins. The 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant (Kant, Immanuel) described the ideal state of eternal peace as a "philosophical chiliasm." The debt of presocialist utopian (utopia) thinkers—such as Henri de Saint-Simon (Saint-Simon, Henri de), Robert Owen (Owen, Robert), and Charles Fourier (Fourier, Charles)—to Christian millenarianism was recognized by Karl Marx (Marx, Karl) and Friedrich Engels (Engels, Friedrich), who, in their Communist Manifesto (1848), contemptuously referred to the utopias of these writers as "duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem." Some early socialist movements exhibited messianic features, and Marxist (Marxism) communism has a markedly messianic structure and message. In describing some of the similarities between Marxism and traditional Christian eschatology, the English philosopher Bertrand Russell (Russell, Bertrand) noted, ironically, that Marx adapted the Jewish messianic pattern of history to socialism in the same way that the philosopher-theologian Augustine adapted it to Christianity. According to Russell, the Marxist materialist dialectic that governs historical development corresponds to the biblical God, the proletariat to the elect, the Communist Party to the church, the revolution to the Second Coming, and the communist commonwealth to the millennium.

Renewed interest in eschatology

      Since the exegetical works of Johannes Weiss (Weiss, Johannes) and Albert Schweitzer (Schweitzer, Albert) at the beginning of the 20th century (the school of "consistent eschatology") and the dialectic theology of Karl Barth (Barth, Karl) and Rudolf Bultmann (Bultmann, Rudolf) in the mid-20th century, eschatology has again become a principal theme of academic Christian theology. Crises in the West have also led to a renewal of eschatological hopes. Within the church there has been a struggle between Christianity as a state religion and congregations with eschatological orientations. Initial attempts to combine eschatology and philosophy, hope, and social practice and thus overcome the differences between the church and the sects—as well as those between the church and the modern age—are found in Ernst Bloch (Bloch, Ernst)'s philosophy of hope (The Principle of Hope, 1959), the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre), and the "theology of hope.”

      These millennial philosophies spread in the aftermath of World War II, leading in the late 1950s and early '60s to a new wave of radical progressive reform. This was especially evident in the United States, where the civil rights movement strove to fulfill the millennial promises of equality. This idealism was further fueled by antiwar activism, interest in liberation theologies drawn from both Western psychology and East Asian religion, psychedelic drugs, rock music, and a “back-to-nature” communal movement. Christened “the Age of Aquarius,” this postmillennial movement peaked in 1968–69 with a series of (largely student) uprisings around the world, from Los Angeles to Paris, that culminated in the Woodstock Festival in upstate New York in the summer of 1969. At the same time, the assassinations in the United States during the mid- to late 1960s (Robert F. Kennedy (Kennedy, Robert F.), Martin Luther King, Jr. (King, Martin Luther, Jr.), and Malcolm X) brought more violent forces to the fore, including the Weathermen faction of the Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers (Black Panther Party). The movement rapidly lost its consensual momentum, fragmenting into a wide range of postapocalyptic and premillennial sects ( Heaven's Gate in California, the worldwide Unification Church, Jim Jones's Peoples Temple in Guyana) and leading to the rise of the Rapture premillennial scenario described in Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) and reflected in the first of a series of Rapture movies, Thief in the Night (1972). In the 1980s and '90s other millennial, sometimes violent, sects emerged, including the Order of the Solar Temple (Solar Temple, Order of the) in Canada, France, and Switzerland and AUM Shinrikyo in Japan.

      Starting in the late 1980s with Edgar Whisenant's 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Happen in 1988 (significantly, 40 years after the creation of the State of Israel), the premillennial dispensationalism became increasingly prominent in the United States and Latin America. Led by such figures as Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, and Hal Lindsey, premillennial dipsensationalists became more excited about an imminent Rapture. This group created an unprecedented alliance of millennial currents in Judaism and Christianity when it linked up with the messianic religious Zionism that wanted to build a “Third Temple.” This action triggered apocalyptic prophecy among Muslims who saw their Dome of the Rock (the oldest existing Muslim shrine) threatened by such an alliance. The natural tendency for Christian apocalyptic prophecy to intensify with the approach of a millennial date was further stimulated by the Y2K computer problem, which, ironically, created an apocalyptic prophecy for 2000 based not on scripture but on the computer technology on which the entire world had become increasingly dependent in the previous two decades.

      Thus, at the approach of 2000 (and 2001—the actual millennial year by the Common Era and anno Domini calendars), millennial expectations intensified around the world, not only in Christianity but in Judaism, Islam, and non-Western religions. The global spread of modernity had created ideal conditions for the emergence of a new wave of millennial movements. Whether these will be radical or reactionary, jubilaic or authoritarian, more akin to a civil rights movement or to the tausandjahriger Reich (“thousand-year empire”) of Nazi ideology—this remains to be seen.

Richard Landes

Additional Reading

General works

Valuable general studies of eschatology and related topics include Michael Barkun, Disaster and the Millennium (1974, reprinted 1986); Frederic J. Baumgartner, Longing for the End: A History of Millennialism in Western Civilization (1999); Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (1981, reissued 1983); Rudolf Bultmann, The Presence of Eternity: History and Eschatology (1957, reprinted 1975; also published as History and Eschatology, 1957, reissued 1975); Kenelm Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth: A Study of Millenarian Activities (1969, reissued 1986); Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954; originally published in French, 1949); Stephen Jay Gould, Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist's Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown, rev. ed. (1999); R.A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine, rev. ed. (1988); Arthur P. Mendel, Vision and Violence (1992, reissued 1999); Stephen D. O'Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric (1994, reissued 1998); Jeffrey Burton Russell, A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence (1997); Michael J. St. Clair, Millenarian Movements in Historical Context (1992); Eugen Weber, Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults, and Millennial Beliefs Through the Ages (1999); Wilson D. Wallis, Messiahs: Their Role in Civilization (1943); and Gayraud S. Wilmore, Last Things First (1982).

Eschatology in world religions

For influence of eschatological thought in religions outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, see Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements Against the European Colonial Order (1979, reissued 1987); David Cook, “Moral Apocalyptic in Islam,” Studia Islamica, 86(2):37–69 (August 1997); Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977, reissued 1980); S. Insler, The Gathas of Zarathustra (1974); Weston La Barre, The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion (1970, reissued, 1990); Vittorio Lanternari, The Religions of the Oppressed: A Study of Modern Messianic Cults (1963; originally published in Italian, 1960); Susan Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (1976); and Jonathan D. Spence, God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (1996).

Jewish and early Christian eschatology

Jewish and early Christian eschatological thought are discussed in Albert I. Baumgarten, The Flourishing of Jewish Sects in the Maccabean Era: An Interpretation (1997); R.H. Charles, A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life in Israel, Judaism, and in Christianity (1899, reissued as Eschatology: The Doctrine of a Future Life in Israel, Judaism, and Christianity, 1963); Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (1993, reissued 1995); John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, 2nd ed. (1998); Oscar Cullman, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time, rev. ed. (1964; originally published in German, 1946); John G. Gager, Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Chrisitanity (1975); P.S. Minear, The Christian Hope and the Second Coming (1954); Jacob Neusner, The Mishnah: A New Translation, (1988); and R.J. Zwi Werblowsky, “Messianism in Jewish History,” Journal of World History, 11(1–2):30–45 (1968).

Eschatology in the Middle Ages

Eschatology and related topics have received much attention by students of the Middle Ages, and among the more important studies are Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman (eds.), Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (2000); Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, rev. and expanded ed. (1970, reissued 1993); Richard Kenneth Emmerson, Antichrist in the Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Apocalypticism, Art, and Literature (1981); Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (eds.), The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (1992); Richard Landes, “Lest the Millennium Be Fulfilled: Apocalyptic Expectations and the Pattern of Western Chronography, 100–800 C.E.,” in Werner Verbeke, Daniel Verhelst, and Andries Welkenhuysen (eds.), The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages (1988), pp. 137–211; Robert E. Lerner, “Refreshment of the Saints: The Time After Antichrist as a Station for Earthly Progress in Medieval Thought,” Traditio, 32:97–144 (1967); Robert E. Lerner, The Powers of Prophecy: The Cedar of Lebanon Vision from the Mongol Onslaught to the Dawn of the Enlightenment (1983); Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore & the Prophetic Future, new rev. ed. (1999); and Ann Williams (ed.), Prophecy and Millenarianism: Essays in Honour of Marjorie Reeves (1980). On the controversial matter of the existence of eschatological fervour around the year 1000 see the essays in Richard Landes, Andrew Gow, and David C. Van Meter (eds.), The Apocalyptic Year 1000: Religious Expectations and Social Change, 950–1050 (2003); and Michael Frassetto (ed.), The Year 1000: Religious and Social Response to the Turning of the First Millennium (2003).

Eschatology in the early modern and modern world

Eschatological thinking and its importance for the early modern and modern world is discussed in Nicolas Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End (1952, reprinted 1976; originally published in Russian, 1947); Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (1985, reissued 1988); Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (1990); Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (1993); David S. Katz and Richard H. Popkin, Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium (1999); Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology (1967, reissued 1993; originally published in German, 1964); John A.T. Robinson, In the End, God (1968); Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (1969, reissued 1995); Gershom Gerhard Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676 (1973, reissued with corrections 1975; originally published in Hebrew); Hillel Schwartz, Century's End: An Orientation Manual Toward the Year 2000, rev. and abridged ed. (1996); J.L. Talmon, The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy (1952, reissued 1986; also published as The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, 1952); P. Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, rev. ed. (1970, reissued 1975; originally published in French, 1955); Daniel Wojcik, The End of the World as We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America (1997); and Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964, reissued 1999).Richard Landes

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