The Apocalyptic Year 1000: Religious Expectation and Social Change, 950-1050

377 Pages·2003·23.43 MB·English

by  Richard Landes

The Apocalyptic Year 1000
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The Apocalyptic
Year 1000
Religious Expectation and
Social Change, 950-1050
EDITED BY
RICHARD LANDES
ANDREW GOW
DAVID C. VAN METER
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
2003
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Copyright © 2003 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The apocalyptic year 1000 : religious expectation and social change, 950-1050 / edited by
Richard Landes, Andrew Gow, and David C. Van Meter.
p. cm.
Papers delivered at a conference held at the end of 1996.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-511191-5; 0-19-516162-9 (pbk.)
1. Second Advent—History of doctrines—Middle Ages, 600-1500—Congresses.
2. Christianity and culture—Europe—History—To 1500—Congresses. 3. One thousand,
A.D.—Congresses. I. Landes, Richard Allen. II. Gow, Andrew Colin. III. Van Meter,
David C.
BT886.3 .A66 2003
940.1'46—dc2i 2002042550
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on avid-free papetr
Preface
The "Terrors" of the Year 1000:
Une Question Mal Posee
The theme of this volume, the apocalyptic climate around the year
1000 in Europe, is one of the oldest and most well-worn topics of
debate among medievalists. The passions and the intransigence on
both sides of the debate concerning "les terreurs de 1'an mil" are
astounding. The traditional Augustinian position on the Last Days
and their advent counsels patient watchfulness rather than excited
expectation and interpretation of "signs" and portents—in line with
Jesus' admonition in the Gospel of Matthew. In the course of
refuting the Romantic myth of a Europe paralyzed by fear at the
approach of the year 1000 (Michelet), historians since Burr have
made a fatal error by assuming that the attitude of their learned
counterparts in the distant past was not only correct but also repre-
sentative of contemporary opinion. Cultural historians in the third
millennium will not, one hopes, take twentieth-century scholars'
healthy skepticism about the existence of UFOs as representative of
common beliefs in Western society as a whole.
The question as to whether or not large numbers of European
Christians were panicked by the approach of the year 1000 as a
millennial anniversary, as the end of the thousand years of Satan's
bondage as mentioned in the Book of Revelation, is almost precisely
analogous in its original functions and in its contemporary persis-
tence to the obsolete question that animated another hoary historical
debate, that concerning the nature of the Protestant Reformation:
was it or was it not the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of
modernity? Almost no Reformation scholar alive today would agree
to debate the significance or import of the Reformation in those
terms. The question itself is gravely misleading.
VI PREFACE
Similarly, the question as to whether or not the broad masses in western
Europe were afflicted by fear or terror at the approach of the year 1000 is an
irrelevant artifact of nineteenth-century debates. Richard Landes, Johannes Fried,
and others show very clearly in their essays in this volume that the debate over
"les terreurs de 1'an mil" (see, most recently, the rather facile polemic by Sylvain
Gouguenheim) has become a waste of time. If, however, we ask about the apoca-
lyptic, even chiliastic hopes and expectations of western Europeans in the years
leading up to and after 1000, we will come much closer, as Johannes Fried ar-
gues, to making sense of the dozens of sources that point unambiguously to a
heightened and tense apocalyptic climate in the half century or so on either side
of the turn of the millennium. We are so used to understanding the end of the
world, its Last Judgment, as its destruction that we are blind to the strong tradi-
tion that focused both on the persecution of the true Church by Antichrist and
on the rewards and cessation of suffering to be enjoyed just beyond the end of
earthly time.
Rather than conceiving of apocalyptic expectation as a fear that paralyzed
(see Ferdinand Lot's attempt to refute the Terrors thesis—they cannot have been
all that afraid, because they were clearly not prevented from effective action, such
as instituting the Peace of God, by fear), Fried sees it as a spur to action, to re-
pentance, to belief and hope in a final end to suffering and misery. This refor-
mulation helps refocus the question in terms of Landes's shift of emphasis away
from fear and toward hopes for a final, lasting, peaceful transformation of this
world into a more perfect one. As many readers of this volume will know, Landes
has long argued that the Peace of God movement was intimately connected with
hopeful, meliorist, even millenarian apocalypticism. If, as Guy Lobrichon and
others have argued, the tenth century was the watershed that divided the rela-
tive stagnation of the early Middle Ages from a new, meliorist mentality that
spread from the monasteries and then the cathedral schools to western Euro-
pean society, along with new forms of clerical learning and the basis of a rela-
tively orderly, peaceful civil society, parallel to the rise of towns and urban culture,
then hopeful apocalyptic beliefs may be of crucial import in deciphering the
processes whereby rural, baronial Carolingian Europe gradually gave way to an
urban, civic, and finally "civil" Europe. Fried argues that a new system of ratio-
nal inquiry developed in the ninth and tenth centuries in the monasteries of the
West Prankish Kingdom, and he argues implicitly that this system helped to
conquer apocalyptic fear and convert it into an impetus to concrete, even social
action.
Learned contemporaries were well aware of the inexactitude of current year
reckoning, and thus we must broaden the search for millennial dates, which
contemporary preachers and theologians did not scruple to set, even in defiance
of the injunctions of Jesus and St. Augustine not to seek to know the day or the
hour, to the period 979 to 1033/34, and perhaps even into the 1040s. As Fried
points out, Adso's famous letter to Queen Gerberga in response to a number of
lost questions was used extensively during this period for homiletic purposes.
In numerous copies, extracts, and versions, it penetrated the porous divide be-
tween clerks and layfolk, such that "the tenth century belonged, not to the learned
PREFACE vii
exegetes, but to the frightened and worried shepherds of souls." The mass of
evidence adduced by Fried and the other contributors to this volume must now
be taken seriously by all those who dismiss or downplay apocalyptic hope and
fear as the exclusive province of those few intellectuals wayward enough to ig-
nore injunctions not to speculate, and learned or influential enough for their
writings to have survived. The traditional Augustinian perspective may well have
been "correct," but it is now clear that it was not at all unanimous and may have
been much less effective than the antiTerrors school maintains.
The public consensus projected by the senior professoriate now—for ex-
ample, Jacques Le Coffin the December 1998 issue of En Route, Air Canada's
inflight magazine, or Thomas Bisson at the Harvard History colloquium of
1999—is that a few learned exceptions and fanatics were frightened of the year
1000, but it was not a widespread concern. Not only do such statements repli-
cate the conceptual flaws of the Terrors debate, but they are clearly made in
ignorance of much of the material presented in this volume, from sources and
genres as diverse as imperial documents, chronicles, histories, exegetical and
pastoral writings, liturgical texts, episcopal and royal correspondence, wall paint-
ings, imperial visual propaganda, drama, poetry, legal and constitutional theory,
and, of course, apocalyptic prophecy and commentary. A particularly important
example can be drawn from three separate essays printed here that come to
parallel conclusions, from a multitude of different sources, regarding the apoca-
lyptic beliefs, activities, self-image, self-representation, and plans of Emperor
Otto III.
The main conclusions to be drawn from this volume are that in the later
ninth and early tenth centuries, large numbers of learned people lived in a height-
ened atmosphere of mingled hope and fear; that their ideas both influenced and
reflected the concerns of larger circles; and that the traditional Augustinian
position (the eschatological position which is to await the final events in patience)
of many other learned commentators was a deliberate and active response to
the imminentist hopes of a large and vocal millenarian party.
Such millenarian voices do not bulk as large in our sources, but their ech-
oes can be heard constantly, for example, in Abbo of Fleury's famous comment
that he had in his youth heard a sermon in a Paris church foretelling the arrival
of Antichrist when a thousand years had passed, which he resisted, citing Daniel
and Revelation; he also relates how a rumor had filled "almost the entire world"
that when the Annunciation fell on Good Friday, it would be the end of the world.
We have ample evidence for widespread rumors and beliefs concerning the
imminent end—in the testimony of learned clerics who rejected them. These
examples (and most of the others) do not, of course, show that tenth-century
Christians lived in paralytic dread of the year 1000, only that they were acutely
aware of the coming end, and of 1000 (along with many others, including 1033)
as its potential date. William Prideaux-Collins argues that, in Anglo-Saxon En-
gland, learned, elite refutation of apocalyptic imminentism, chiliasm, and
millenarianism suggests the existence of strong popular belief in just these
things. As Richard Landes notes, when the bishop of Auxerre wrote to the bishop
of Verdun in the late tenth century to decry the apocalyptic fervor of the masses
viii PREFACE
who saw in the Northmen and Magyars the legendary apocalyptic destroyers
Gog and Magog, he was not trying to persuade his ecclesiastical colleague to
follow Jerome's injunction not to identify Gog and Magog with particular peoples
(Jerome saw them as code for the collective body of all evil in the world); rather,
the bishop of Auxerre was pointing to a widespread and dangerous error and
urging his colleague to do his best to suppress it.
As many contributors to this volume believe, it is apposite to cite Stephen
O'Leary's work on apocalyptic rhetoric. He argues that such rhetoric is neither
hysterical nor the result of panic but rather is a discourse of action, one that
urges specific kinds of action, depending on the context, in response to belief
in the imminent end. In our schemes of explanation, concrete goals and actions
seem to call out for "rational" explanation. But apocalyptic movements and ac-
tion defy rational explanation, because when such actions are motivated by rea-
sons that lie outside the observer's worldview, only analysis that is both very
detailed and highly imaginative can unite actions with motivations, by an in-
depth examination of the sources, mentalities, beliefs, and circumstances that
produced first the ideas, then their expression. The anti-Terrors party's rejec-
tion of so-called hysteria, that is, of les terreurs, is therefore, on the one hand, a
serious attempt to come to grips with medieval sources on their own terms and,
on the other, a rationalist attempt to make sense of apocalyptic belief in
nonapocalyptic terms. It misses the point. If we turn away from the Terrors
thesis, we might be spared further aggravation by the Romantic/rationalist di-
chotomy that has hindered, for most of the twentieth century and for the first
years of the twenty-first, serious research into the fraught climate of apocalyp-
tic ideas, beliefs, hopes, and action around the year 1000.
The reader should know that this volume began as a book project that eventu-
ally evolved into a conference (held in Boston on November 4-6,1996). Most
of the contributors, having already written papers suitable for publication, came
to the conference extraordinarily well prepared to debate the merits of arguments
for an apocalyptic or not-too-apocalyptic year 1000. For this reason, the panel
discussions were unusually dense and well prepared. The real surprise for many
of us, however, was the way in which our very hermeneutic was challenged by
the international assembly of scholars representing a great many disciplines,
ranging from history to musicology to literature to semiotics. It is customary to
revise conference papers for publication; in this case, many of our contributors
remarked that the vibrant discussions of the conference prompted substantial
rethinking of methods and findings, not to mention a reweighing of a great many
of the facts.
We acknowledge with gratitude Umberto Eco's keynote address to the con-
ference. He delighted the audience with his extraordinary ability to present great
insights with charming wit. More significantly still, he also challenged those
present—and now the reader—to enter the dizzying, labyrinthine, interlaced
hermeneutic by which the intellectuals of the year 1000 perforce approached
both the Apocalypse and the prospect of an apocalyptic reconfiguration of their
own world. Even though this address touches cursorily upon ideas and events
PREFACE IX
that are sometimes far removed from the year 1000, the reader will be none the
worse for it. Indeed, the buzz of excitement that ensued from Professor Eco's
challenge to immerse oneself fully in the symbolical discourse of early medi-
eval exegesis contributed immensely to the creativity of the conference panel
discussions. We are confident that, as an orientation to the problem of thinking
in terms of the richly symbolic hopes (and fears!) of the medieval understand-
ing of the Apocalypse, the reader will find the text of his address, reprinted here
with only minor changes as chapter 6, to be a sure gate by which to enter the
multifaceted debate on the year 1000 contained in the present volume.