153
Wrestling with the Millennium
thinker who thought that the year
would see the end of the world!) The
layman Arnold of Villanova, who composed a commentary on the Apocalypse
about
, also read chapter
as predicting an earthly kingdom, in his case
of forty-five years’ duration.
23
The widespread millenarianism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
while never ‘carnal’ in the early Christian sense,
grew increasingly terrestrial,
political and chronologically millennial. While the full explanation of this
shift involves many aspects of late medieval culture, the sad state of the
Church, especially during the Avignon period and the Great Schism, led
many to think that the only hope for reform and betterment of the Church
on earth was through divine intervention at the approach of the End times.
The Franciscan prophet, John of Rupescissa (
d.
), was apparently the
first person in almost a ‘real’ millennium to advance the view that the coming
age of the purified Church on earth would actually extend for a full
,
years – a position he claimed was miraculously revealed to him in
.
24
The
views of Rupescissa and his followers were a complex mix of
pre-
and
post-
Antichrist millenarianism
which incorporated and developed many of the
traditions noted above. What is most significant about these thinkers is not
so much their tendency to return to a literal chronology of considerable
duration, even as much as
,
years, but the fact that their agenda for the
millennial era was no longer Joachim’s contemplative vision of a monastic
utopia, but rather a religio-political millennium involving such things as:
(
) concrete programmes of church reform; (
) restoration of the Eastern
Church to union with Rome; (
) pacification of Italy; (
) conquest of the
Holy Land; (
) conversion of the Jews and Saracens; (
) universal disarma-
ment, etc.
25
This political, and literal, view of the millennium was encouraged
by the fifteenth-century rediscovery of Lactantius, whose elegant Latinity
and millenarianism was influential on a number of apocalyptic propagandists.
In the period
c.
–
millennialism flourished, especially south of
the Alps and Pyrenees. Renaissance fascination with the classical myth of the
returning ‘Golden Age’ (
aetas aurea
) combined with a broad, if vague, millen-
nial wave of Joachite origin to encourage many forms of hope for a final better
time before the End.
26
The preaching of the Dominican friar, Girolamo
Savonarola, between
and
, is the best known example of this form
of millennialism. The fiery reformer identified the purified citizens of Florence
as the harbingers of the new age of history, one that continued to inspire his
followers for decades after his execution.
27
The sheer proliferation of prophets
and treatises in late Quattrocento and early Cinquecento Italy is even more
significant.
28
At the same time, the mingling of apocalyptic prophecies with
astrological predictions, though not exactly a new phenomenon,
reached an
unprecedented pitch, both north and south of the Alps.
154
Medieval and Early Modern Periods
The confluence of Renaissance millennialism and astrology made its mark on
the interpretation of Apocalypse
, as we can see from the case of Savonarola’s
fellow Dominican, Annius of Viterbo, also known as Giovanni Nanni (
c.
–
).
29
Annius is a fascinating character. Although he eventually attained the
high office of ‘Master of the Sacred Palace’ under Pope Alexander VI, he is
most famous as a forger. Annius’s clever invention and judicious ‘editing’ of
ancient texts, which were published in
under the title
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