Imagining the End: Visions of
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, the third era of the Holy Spirit. 9 Augustine and Joachim illustrate opposite approaches to the complex mixture of pessimism and optimism about the coming last events of Christian apocalypticism. In the New Testament, pessimistic passages about the last times outnumber optimistic ones, as can be seen by a quick perusal of Jesus’s sermon about the End found in the synoptic gospels (Matthew :
– : ; Mark : – ; Luke : – ), the accounts of the final judgment found in the epistles ascribed to Paul, and most of the Johannine Apocalypse. While the prayer Jesus taught his disciples does contain a petition for the coming of God’s kingdom
(see Matthew :
, Luke : ), it is only in the twentieth chapter of the Apocalypse that we find a description of an earthly kingdom to reward the saints who have suffered in the crisis of this age. Almost from the start, the terrestrial and material (i.e. carnal) nature of this millenarian expectation created problems for a religion that asserted its dis- tinctiveness in large part by insisting on its spiritual superiority to paganism and Judaism. Millennialism has been a bone of contention and even an embarrassment throughout the history of Christianity, but it is a belief that has proven itself very difficult to expunge totally, both because of its place in scripture and also, it seems, because of the way in which it responds to human hopes for the future. What Augustine called carnal millenarianism was strong in the second century.
10 While not all agreed with Cerinthus ( c.
), later condemned as a heretic, who advanced a very ‘carnal’ view of ,
years of immoderate feasting and begetting of children, such orthodox teachers as Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Tertullian all believed in the existence of a coming terrestrial millennium. By about
, however, mounting opposition to literal millennialism had begun to cast doubt on the canonicity of the 151 Wrestling with the Millennium Apocalypse itself. It was only the development of spiritualizing interpretations of the book, especially chapter , in the third century that allowed the Apocalypse a place in the canon. Foremost among these interpreters was the great exegete, Origen of Alexandria. 11 Even those who continued to hold to belief in a future , -year reign of Christ and the saints on earth, such as Methodius of Olympus and Victorinus of Pettau, emphasized a less carnal reading of the millennium than had been typical in the second century. 12 Of
course, literal, and even carnal, understandings of the millennium were not totally abandoned, as we can see in such fourth-century examples as that of Lactantius in the West, 13 and of Apollinaris of Laodicea in the East. By about
, however, the tide had definitely turned against a carnal, and even a futurist, interpretation of Apocalypse through the efforts of Augustine, Jerome, 14 and the Donatist exegete Tyconius, who wrote an influential com- mentary on the last book of the Bible. 15 The authority of these Fathers of the Church effectively squashed any crudely literal interpretation of the millennium of Apocalypse for much of the next , years. It also meant that most mainstream apocalypticism of the early Middle Ages, well represented by Pope Gregory I (d.
), was monotonously pessimistic in its fear of the imminence of Antichrist and the coming of the Doomsday that even the righteous had reason to be nervous about. Nevertheless, if we take millenarianism in a broad sense of hope for some period of coming earthly bliss before the end of time, there was millen- arianism a-plenty, at least from the eleventh century on. Two basic varieties can be discerned, as the research of Robert E. Lerner and others has shown, though neither was connected to Apocalypse until the time of Joachim. 16 The first of these was the Yüklə 4,01 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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