Augustine Conversation: Tradition and Innovation Series Editors: John Doody and Kim Paffenroth This series produces edited volumes that explore Augustine's relationship to a particular discipline or field of study. This "relationship" is considered in several different ways: some contributors consider Augustine's practice of the particular discipline in question; some consider his subsequent influence on the t1eld of study; and others consider how Augustine himself has become an object of study by their discipline. Such variety adds breadth and new perspectives~innovation~to our ongoing conversation with Augustine on topics of lasting import to him and us, while using Augustine as our conversation partner lends focus and a common thread~tradition~to our disparate fields and interests. Titles in Series Augustine and Politics Edited by John Doody, Kevin L. Hughes, and Kim Paffenroth Augustine and Literature Edited by Robert P. Kennedy, Kim Paffenroth, and John Doody Augustine and Apocalyptic Augustine and History Edited by Christopher T. Daly, John Doody, and Kim Paffenroth Edited by John Doody, Kari Kloos, Augustine and Liberal Education Edited by Kim Paffenroth and Kevin L. Hughes and l(iln Paffenroth Augustine and World Religions Edited by Brian Brown, John A. Doody, and Kim Paffenroth Augustine and Philosophy Edited by Phillip Cary, John Doody, and Kim Paffenroth Augustine and Apocalyptic Edited by John Doody, Kari Kloos, and Kim Paffenroth LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK  Chapter Nine The Silenced Millennium and the Fall of Rome' Augustine and the Year 6000 AM I Richard Landes In the conventional history of Christian millennialism, Augustine plays the role of the final and decisive terminator. Already before him, scholars hold, Christian theologians had largely marginalized the belief in a "millennia! kingdom" of peace, plenitude, and fraternity: For the period after 360, the texts that have been transmitted seem unanimous- ly to reject a literal interpretation of the Apocalypse. One should not forget that their composers are men of perf~ct orthodoxy who were, at the same time the most eminent and advanced thinkers of their time. There may have been a secondary zone, of local significance, somewhat diverging in doctrinal issues from these major authors [i.e., millennialists ], constituting in various places some isolated archaic centers. 2 What previous theologians had done piece-meal and largely through denial, Augustine did systematically, completely replacing the theology of a final millennium to come with a millennium already in progress, and forbidding any reading of the Book of Revelation in terms of historical signs of an imminent Apocalypse. The exegetical and theological pirouettes such a ma- neuver necessitated, especially at a time when the "millennia!" project of a Christian empire was coming apart before his very eyes and those of his contemporaries, engaged every aspect of his prodigious talents. After him, most historians hold, millennia! ism disappeared from Latin Christendom un- til the days of Joachim of Fiore, some eight centuries later. 3 151 152 Richard Landes The Silenced Millennium and the Fall of Rome 153 And yet, the seeming victory of the anti-millennialists, I argue, funda- tinople of collective penance led by a barefoot, sackcloth garbed emperor(!), mentally misreads the documentation. What Paschoud and others consider so but it affected the West in a different fashion. Augustine, in his multiple if many evaporating local puddles of residual millennia! ism are actually deep oblique references to the annus magnus of 365 in Constantinople and around and wide-reaching waters of popular belief, and the occasional trace of mil- the Mediterranean does not mention what happened in North Africa that lennia! ism in the texts of subsequent centuries, that scholars view as so much year. His historical amanuensis, Orosius, however, tells us that Augustine's flotsam and jetsam of a ship that Augustine sunk in the early fifth century, region saw a most bizarre rebellion against Rome, led by a rogue imperial actually represent the tip of an iceberg of apocalyptic and millennia! dis- commander named Gil do. 6 The revolt vanished as rapidly as it had appeared. course that pushes up into a medium profoundly hostile to its expression. 4 The following year, Honorius ordered the destruction of pagan shrines The reason that Augustine seems to dominate the textual record (which in throughout his imperium. When Augustine discussed this annus magnus two turn dominates the perceptions of historians) is because he was conect: it decades later, he noted with a certain historical if not also theological satis- was not the end of the world, and the millennium did not come, neither in his faction, that what the heathen anticipated as our (Christian) end proved to be day nor when promised in the year 6000 (AM I= AD 500; AM II= AD 801). their end; not the demise of Christianity but of paganism. The imperial Chris- But just because later ecclesiastical writers and copyists could, ex post defec- tians had turned apocalyptic anxiety into yet greater dominion for the tu (from out of the failure of those expectations) know who got it "right," Church, the supposedly apocalyptic calamities had brought us all closer to does not mean that contemporaries could, nor that they would have sided the hierarchical millennium ofthe Church triumphant. with Augustine against those who announced the imminent apocalyptic pas- In fact, when we examine closely these years at the turn of the century, sage to the earthly millennium. and look at Augustine's writings, we find a mature man fully enthused about One can even observe this dramatic difference in the reading of the histor- Christian victories over pagans, even though they involved the use of force. ical record in Augustine's own day, despite how many major commentators Indeed, as modern but sympathetic observers of Augustine have long, and of Augustine consider his anti-millennia] and anti-apocalyptic work to be as regretfully, noted, the enthusiasm may well have played a role in generating marginal as they estimate the impmi of the belief. This chapter traces the the use of imperial coercion Augustine and his colleagues then directed period in the early fitlh century when Augustine turned decisively and sys- against the internal enemies-the schismatics and rigorists within Christian- tematically against millennialism, largely in response to the apocalyptic pan- ity. 7 Given the volatile mix of apocalyptic and messianic strains that coursed ic set off by the Goths sacking of Rome in August of 410. through the culture of the late antique world at the turn of the 400th year since the Incarnation, and the decisive response that Augustine eventually fashioned in the first third of the following century (the final one of the sixth AUGUSTINE AND THE MILLENARIANS millennium), it seems worthwhile to look at the intermingling of these three AT THE TURN OF THE FIFTH CENTURY themes: apocalyptic phenomena both social and intellectual, ecclesiastical coercion, and the elimination of apocalyptic millennialism from the dis- In his famous response to the "fall of the city of Rome" Augustine tells a course of the Latin West. cautionary tale about a collective panic in the city of Constantinople in 398, a year whose apocalyptic significance-33 + 365-had been noted by many sources, both Christian and non-Christian. 5 Augustine was careful to avoid AUGUSTINE AND TRIUMPHAL CHRISTIANITY any open reference to apocalyptic expectations in his account, but nonethe- less, the framework in which he introduced the tale-the panic at the sack of Augustine triumphantly reports that the foolish pagans were wrong in antici- Rome and what it pmiended (including beliefs that the year 6000 had been pating the end of Christendom after 365 years-in fact it proved the end of reached)--make it clear he intended this as a serious version of "Chicken paganism, since the Christian emperor sent his troops in to destroy all pagan Little." But as far as the calculation of the "End" in terms of years was shrines. Moreover, this phenomenon seems to have occurred all around the concerned, Augustine left that paii out of his discussion. Only much later, in Mediterranean in the later 390s, in some cases with great violence. s Of the late 41 Os did he directly tackle the phenomenon of apocalyptic chronolo- course, the Nmih African coercion occurred with Augustine's encourage- gies. ment and approval, and one cannot help but see in such a coincidence of The advent of the annus magnus of Christianity (365 years since the beliefs and actions, the characteristic response of power to an apocalyptic Resurrection) may have produced a public apocalyptic moment in Constan- challenge. Augustine's enthusiastic, indeed triumphalist response to the  The Silenced Millennium and the Fall ofRome 155 Richard Landes 154 THE AUGUSTINIAN SOLUTION: imperial government's attacks on both pagan shrines and Donatist schismat- RADICAL APOCALYPTIC AGNOSTICISM ics in the aftermath of398 offers up an image of a man possessed by a sense that he witnesses the rapid-va/de ve/ociter-transfonnation of the world In 398_ Augu~tine ~rought to a close a period often years of great intellectual into a kingdom worthy of the one true God: turmoiL Dt~rmg this period ~e started, dropped, and took up again a series of co1~1~1entanes on Paul wh1ch eventually led him to reverse radically his Reading his Bible, Augustine had come to see the events around him as part of an ineluctable process, foretold a thousand years before, by David in the positiOn on the freedom of the human will. I4 This paradigm shift in his Psalms, and by the prophets of Israel (Enarr. In Ps. 62.1). The Catholic approach to human psychology and anthropology was so radical and broke Church had spread throughout the world: "it was written; it has come true" so fundamentally with the conceptual norms of his age and his r;ligion that (Ep. 232; Contra Faustum 13.2). It was the same with the Roman Emperors. in a profound sense, it is closest to a modern, secular, approach. At the sam~ They also had learned to "serve the Lord with fear and trembling," by sup- time as_ ~e made this radical shift in exegesis, he also broke with the millenni- 9 pressing the enemies of His Church. a! traditiOn of the Latin church which he had, he later admitted t d ~ ·1 · k' . . , accep e 1a1r y unt1un mgly, at the tnne of h1s early catechism. Is This does not mean Indeed, starting in 398, Augustine embarked upon a road of violent legal ~hat Augustine ~ad learned and accepted the kind of raw, carnal, millennial- repression of both pagans and fellow Christians which has earned him the tsm of a Tertulha~ or a C~mmodian, but that of the philosophically sophisti- dubious title of "architect of the Inquisition." 10 This, as Robert Markus and cated-:-an alle~on~al verswn of the sabbatical millennium in which, at some others have pointed out, posed serious problems precisely because at the unspe~tfiab~e tune 111 the future, the saints would "enjoy some kind of spiritu- same moment as he innovated in his use of force, he expounded a notion of alh dehghts Church and state which would, if anything, suggest the opposite approach. II · · hm that future sabbath through the Lord." At this time , however, ~ at IS 111 t e fi~al decade of the fourth/fifty-ninth century, Augustine turns It has been quite easy for historians of Augustine's thought, even when tm_r~aca~ly aga111st any form of millennia! thinking, even the most benignly noting his interest in rebutting apocalyptic and millennia! thought, to separate spmtuahzed. this aspect of his work from the rest. 12 The most puzzling aspect of Augus- There ~s, I. would ar~ue, a close connection between these two positions, tine's anti-millennia! thought concerns his (later) insistence on the necessari- the one reJectmg free wtll, the other rejecting any kind of millennialisnr and ly fallen nature of any earthly institution, including the Church, and his their matrix is fo~nd in the ~ritings of Tyconius, the Donatist layman' who enthusiastic endorsement of a coercive Church which he saw as fulfilling firs~ ~ave Aug~stme the notwns of the "two cities" in the mid-390s.I6 Both biblical prophecy. l would like to pursue the opposite approach: that is to say positiOns certamly permit Augustine to oppose millennialism of any kind. On that starting in this crucible of apocalyptic expectation that marked the end of the one hand, Tyconius's two cities are explicitly set within the framework of the ~ftftneentury CE-fifty-ninth century Annus Mundi l-one of Augus- an att.ack bot~ o~ apocalyptic chronologies (his typological rules for exegesis tine's principle concerns was to hamstring, if not annihilate, eschatological permit the reJectiO~ of a~y "literal" reading of scriptural numbers, especially beliefs. 13 ofye~rs), and on m11lenmal expectations (the fact that both cities are a corpus This approach does in fact provide a remarkable thread of consistency ferm~xtum of goo~ ~nd_ evil right up to the end of the physical universe throughout Augustine's last thirty years, from his Cm~lessions through his mvahdates any antlctpatwn of a millennia! kingdom on earth). On the other dogmatic debates and his ongoing magnum opus, the de civitate Dei. The hand, the broken, divided will of man, becomes the interiorized site of this distinction between demotic millennialism and hierarchical millennialism corpus permixtum; we individuals are as opaque as history. provides the key to analyzing Augustine's apparent inconsistencies. In the ~ogether, tl:ese two positions provide a powerful indictment of the mil- late fourth century Augustine turned against the egalitarian formula, espe- lenmal mentahty: who can dare announce that they "know" the time has cially in its carnal versions, but only with the "Fall" of Rome in 410 did he ~om~? Who c~n d~re b~lieve that they can, by their will-even divinely turn against even the most hierarchical and spiritualized of millennia! exe~e­ I~sptred-possibly tmagme that they can help bring about the millennia! ses. Ex post defectu, the master theologian made his "Two Cities" teachmg kmgdom here on earth? Who can dare claim that they can see the difference reject both. But, ex ante, before the obvious failure of the hierarchical millen- b~tween the wheat and the chaff? All this is God's task which He will do in nia! project of Christianizing the Roman Empire top down with both state ~Is ~ood time, at the very end of time. Therefore, in the, meantime man m~st coercion and the mobilization of violent enthusiasm, they did not mesh so hve. m a~tlctp~twn · · · not of an earthly millennium, but of a final eschaton; ' and clearly. dunng Ius watt, he must learn to live with the muddied waters of a saeculum  The Silenced Millennium and the Fall of Rome Richard Landes 156 rendered impenetrably opaque by God's inscrutable will. We cannot even know our own selves, much less what lies in the hearts of others. Although we cannot know just how much of the connection between the two positions was clear from the stmi, there is no doubt that by the time he wrote the appropriate passages in the dcD, the two notions worked hand in hand. At this earliest stage, however, his anti-millennia! work seems margi- nal to his most important theological work, and can only be found by allusion in his great psychological works: his (newer) commentaries on Paul, and his Cm?fessions . 17 For this period, then, let us focus on this latter message, and examine its relationship to apocalyptic millennialism. The reversal is most clear in his inversion of the reading of Paul's famous description of a man struggling with the law and with grace in Romans 2: For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that l am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? For most Christian commentators, this passage obviously described the con- dition of man before the workings of grace, before his or her turning to Christ, hence before salvation. 18 Even the obvious lapses of the baptized (e.g., during persecutions) could be explained or dealt with within this exe- getical structure. With the advent of imperial Christianity, however, the pres- sures on such a reading increased: with a vast influx of "tepid" converts concerned with personal advancement in the earlier part of the century, and now, in the wake of a more aggressive policy, reluctant converts filled with resentment at the violent high-handedness of Clu·istian officials, such a trans- formational view of baptism had become increasingly difficult to sustain. Ex post defectu, the totalizing transformation of conversion lost its luster in the perdurance of the saeculum. Augustine was "liberated" from this earlier, and now highly inconvenient exegesis of Paul (who lived his entire life in the white-hot heat of apocalyptic time), by a reading of Tyconius which permitted him to argue that it refers not to a person before grace, but after grace. (lndeed, later he would go on to argue that it referred to Paul specifically.) With this dramatic reversal, and from this point of subjective opacity, in which Christianity-its institutions, its sacraments, its triumphs-has no visible effect on the saeculum, Augus- tine could renounce every form ofmillennialism: This fallen saeculum would continue right up to the end. There was no coming millennium of peace and joy and plenty here on eatih. That, Tyconius and Augustine both argued, had been completely misconceived. More specifically on the issue of the millennium, John's text in Revela- tion did not speak of a thousand earthly years where heavenly justice visibly  Richard Landes The Silenced Millennium and the Fall ofRome 159 !58 than appreciation and understanding of Christianity, fall within the range of sovereignty from which all current political systems derived their legitimacy, legitimate conversions: one can be saved through God's mysterious grace whether Constantinopolitan or Roman, Christian or Philosophical. She was even if one is a reluctant Christian, and even if the process of conversion has the eternal city; from her the imperial pax issued forth.24 Without her what no visible impact on the experience or behavior of the individual (other than could thrive? a certain social and political submissiveness). For gentile philosophers, the sack marked an initial boon to their case: Thus a Church that is a corpus permixtum can force the outsider to enter their attack on Christianity found new and powerful proofs for its case. But in within its precincts precisely because it is not a transforming institution. the long run, it seems to have marked their final disaster: their accusations, Whereas we read the issues from a post-Enlightenment perspective in which no matter how convincing, were based on the evidence of their own de- the moral messiness of the church should lead to a cetiain modesty, even mise.25 Boethius, at the turn of the millennium, would epitomize the final timidity about using force in spiritual matters, Augustine read it differently: versions of this world of thought and feeling, but this was a reat·guard action, not concerned with social policy but with membership within the ecclesia and few would adopt his discourse for many centuries. Christianity, con- and hence the possibility of salvation (no matter how slim), Augustine could versely, went through an initially severe setback, from which it slowly and read the situation with inverse policy implications. That such a reading corre- imperfectly recovered in the subsequent centuries, a one-eyed king in the sponded closely with the perceived political needs of both the church and the land of the blind. state at this time seems more than coincidental. Indeed, as we are about to see The response to Rome represents precisely one of those moments that l in his response to the sack of Rome in 410, Augustine's theology is supreme- would identify as public apocalyptic moments-in this case one that was ly responsive to the social and political realities of the day. building for decades, which became particularly powerful in the late OOs, and exploded in 410, burning through the entire Mediterranean frog pond. The textual tradition reflects closely the ultimate results; but our job as historians THE FALL OF ROME, AUGUST 24,410 is to figure out what the score was at half-time, and to try and locate just where half-time was chronologically. 26 How long did public apocalyptic The old narrative has it that when, in 406, the Rhine froze, the hooves of a time dominate discourse? new wave of invaders thundered across, thus sealing the fate of the Western Augustine gives us the most brutally honest account of the public attacks empire, so vulnerable to invasion. These are tales that go back to the time on Christendom in the wake of Rome's sack. On the one hand, tempora they occurred, and they marked, in the minds of Christians, the final wars of Christiana had become a term of abuse in a bitter invective. 27 Gentiles and Gog and Magog.2 2 Here, the evidence is copious. Not only do we have pagans, so recently and so violently beaten with the stick of Christian trium- Augustine and Jerome explicitly forbidding such a reading to any responsible phalism-from the destruction of the altar of victory to those of all non- ecclesiastical writer and sermonizer, but we have a number of such identifi- Christian shrines-now counterattacked with furious scorn. On the other cations throughout the 5900s, even from bishops claiming Augustine as their Christians themselves took the fall as a signal that the end had finally come. ' master. 23 Thus, the final years of the first decade of the new century saw The sack of Rome in 410 catapulted most, if not all Christians (with the speculation about the fall of Rome and the unleashing of the Antichrist ~oss!ble exception of At~gustine and some of his colleagues), into apocalyp- explode. Roosters were crowing everywhere, some urgent and eager, others ttc tune. Open speculatton on the final signs of the final end dominated screeching in panic. discourse. Augustine's sermon on the events of the day cite people exclaim- Then, in 41 0, after a series of woefully stupid and self-destructive maneu- ing: "Behold! From Adam all the years have passed and behold, the 6000 vers by the imperial forces, Alaric, the Visigoth, took Rome and for three years are completed ... and now comes the day of judgment."28 One can days, his troops sacked it, raping women, including the many nuns both imagine that at least rigorist Christians, who still clung to the old, millennia) matrons and virgins who had gathered in this "capital" of Christianity where hopes of pre-imperial days, may have seen such events as a vindication, as a the relics of Peter and Paul lay. The news came swiftly to the rest of the release signal rather than as a sign of the End. empire; although the full impact of the calamity only became apparent when . These then were days of reckoning for imperial Christianity: it had prom- the upper-class refugees began to arrive in places where Latin Romanitas still tsed something on the basis of its success, and now it offered failure. It had prevailed, like Notih Africa. However severe or light the actual sacking-it used the newly Christian empire's eternal endurance as a buttress against was certainly worse than Rome had ever, in her historical memory, experi- ap~calyptic chaos and now the blow to the empire had provoked a particular- enced-the psychological impact was immense. Rome was the symbol of ly mtense and widespread apocalyptic outbreak. It had vaunted its political  The Silenced Millennium and the Fall ofRome 161 Richard Landes 160 dence suggests that already in the early 41 Os, Augustine saw the full range of success as proof of its superiority to both Judaism and pagan philosophies, arguments he planned to use in the course of this massive work. 33 and now it found itself, Phaeton-like, holding the reins of a chariot gone out This move to an "earthly" city condemned by original sin to irredeemable of control. 29 status, forever discontinuous to the carnal eye with the "heavenly city," pro- With both Rome and the Church on the defensive, Augustine stepped into duced a check-mate on at least four different boards: to the radical millenni- the breach with his On the City ofGod against the Pagans. His solution was, alists he argued that the millennium was already invisibly underway; to the as we shall see, radical, brilliant, fiendishly consistent. And it was so far imperial millennialists and their pagan critics, he argued that the empire had above the capacities of his fellow Christians that, for more than a millen- no eschatological significance whatever; to the Donatists (also millennialists) nium, they would more often misrepresent what he said than not. Ev~n those he argued that the efficacy of sacraments cannot be linked to the moral status sympathetic to him as he tried in the years after Rome's ~ack to articulate a of the priest since we are all morally impure and cannot escape our status response, felt uncomfortable. It was, understandably, a top1c they preferred to here below, either as individuals or as institutions, including the Church; and pass over in silence. 30 . . to the Manichaeans he argued that the world is not the embodiment of evil It was in this period that Augustine made the final maJor adjustments to but a neutral zone in which, deep within our divided will, the forces of good his religious thought about history and politics. The key move was to line the and evil thrash about. opacity of the individual up with the opacity of history, from original sin to a This is not the place, and mine is not the expertise, to discuss even a small saeculum that will not be redeemed. No longer could new developments be fraction of the issues this work raises. My concern here is to view this work seen as the fulfillment of eschatological prophecies; history was homoge- in its immediate context, the response to the apparent mortality of Roma nous from the time of Jesus until the eschaton that was outside of history. aeterna. In looking at its arguments against the two major opponents the De This 'saeculum (at once historical time from Adam and the physical world) civitate Dei takes on-Roman "pagan" philosophic patriotism and Christian will never change fundamentally: God's justice is not, will not be of this millennialism, bo.th ~adical and imperial-one is struck by how profoundly world. The Christian era may have brought the possibility of redemption to weak and unconvmcmg these arguments would have sounded. Augustine, the all mankind, but it did not change the nature of this saeculum. Not only is author of the de civitate Dei, has been varyingly depicted as the undertaker of there a historical continuity with past ages, but no distinctions mark post- paga~ism and- millennia! ism, "hammering home the final nails in [their re- incarnational time. Prophecy is fulfilled in historical time in the "heavenly spectlve] coffin[ s]" or a deft surgeon, anesthetizing the patient [Christen- city" invisible to the rude and sightless gaze of men prisoners of the "earthly" ~ot~] and remov.ing the malignancies. 34 But this approach privileges Augus- one. tme s eventual victory and reads it back into the events at the time. In arguing that neither Rome's conversion nor her fall held an~ f~m~a- Far fr~m working, however, the anesthetic that Augustine applied to mental religious significance, he had, with one blow, both freed Chnstlamty apocalyptic terrors and pagan accusations would have had no effect, and the from its now fatal association with Rome, 31 and thrown a wet blanket over 32 millennia) patient continued (as we shall see) to thrash around on the table the millennia! believers who awaited a redeemed saeculum. Augustine had shifted the ecclesiastical idiom from any kind ofmillennial scenario-demot- while the pagan patient died of wounds inflicted by Christian barbarians. If we wish to understand what went on back then, we need to override our ic or hierarchical-to a purely eschatological one, reached by an apocalypse retrospective knowledge, to make an imaginative leap back to a time before so cosmic that only God could bring it about-passive, cataclysmic, apoca- t?e failure. "W_e need to imagine a time when the participants in an apocalyp- lypticism leading to a-millennia! eschatology. . Augustine pursued what he felt was his new theological strat~gy w1t~1 tic moment d1d not, as we do, know that their expectations-whether eager vigor: he spoke and wrote often on Rome's fall, and, ~nth~ pron:ptmg ofl~ts ones filled with hope of redemption or terrified ones filled with fears of damnation-were false, before the unthinkable for them became the inevita- friend and political ally, the fervent Catholic Marcelhnus, tm~et:tal. cot~mts­ ble for us. Only then can we look forward into an unknown (but for them sioner in Carthage, he began his systematic defense of Chnstmmty m the t~istakenly certain) future, and have a sense of the power these beliefs exer- wake of the disaster-the author-entitled de civitate Dei contra paganos. The cised, ho:vever briefly, over the minds of men and women of an apocalyptic book is deservedly famous as one of the most towering exegetical accom- plishments in history, a text which, like the Confessions, broke n~w gro.und ~oment m an age long past. For it is only in the calmer waters of normal tnnes-:-which he did not inhabit-that Augustine's arguments could have in the world of literary genres, and sustained a series of debates wtth van~us opponents like a chess-master conducting simultaneous games, over a peno~ prevmled, and even then, primarily in the world of written texts. Only ex post , . Tl VI of twenty-five years and some one-thousand pages of manuscnpt. 1e e - 162 Richard Landes The Silenced Millennium and the Fall ofRome 163 defectu, with the retrospective perspective of over a millennium, can Augus- against Antichrist). Since the primary preservers and interpreters of the texts tine's work seem to have been effective at the time. were in fact Christian ruling elites, it makes a great deal of sense that these passages were read as masterful responses to the challenge. As for the pagans, Augustine apparently had little concern to answer THE ARGUMENT "CONTRA PAGANOS" them; to the contrary they are his foil in a bigger battle about Christian eschatology. They had been dealt a mortal blow by the invading barbarians Despite historians' constant repeating that this was Augustine's intent-he for whom Christian romanitas was at once more accessible and sympathetic put it in the title-Augustine's actual arguments, it seems to me, do not in than the high culture of Roman philosophy. Augustine could afford to infuri- any way blunt or turn aside the aristocratic pagan attack on Christianity. On ate the pagan patient because he was bleeding to death on the table: his the contrary, any pagan lawyer, seeking an indictment of Christianity at the impotent fury could only hasten his demise. bar of international public opinion, could ask for no better document than The dcD, as a number of commentators have noted, is addressed to a Augustine's "defense." For each accusation Augustine provides a defense Christian audience, and one of his principal foes is precisely the apocalyptic that proves the point of his opponents: millennialists. By the time we reach the final books of the dcD, the pagans Christians are not patriotic. Response: Rome is not in any way special or have completely dropped from the picture. Books 18-22 focus almost exclu- privileged; scripture predicted its fall (Daniel!); we should shed no sively on the attack on millennialism and its replacement with a belief struc- tears for the product, however impressive, of libido dominandi. ture suited to the enduring presence of a Catholic Church run by men who Christians have no fighting spirit. Response: let us not exaggerate the operate from above the prime divider in a world of unredeemed and unjust calamity here, it is a test from God which we must bear with peniten- societies. tial meekness; temporal success is a mirage to which we should not be attached. THE ARGUMENT AGAINST CHRISTIAN APOCALYPTICISTS The christiana tempora have brought unprecedented disaster upon Rome. Response: bad things have happened before, indeed worse things! At The real crisis of Rome's sack was the eschatological one it posed to all least in this case, the sackers were Christians(!) who spared churches. Christians. For Rome was not merely the "symbol of stability" 35 but an From the point of view of a Roman, pagan aristocracy, these arguments eschatological bulwark against the bursting forth of Antichrist. 36 And not essentially revealed Christians, in the words of their own greatest spokesman, only do various theologians' responses indicate the shock and fear of such a as a fifth column of traitors. All their previous pretenses to caring about the reaction, 37 but Augustine and Jerome give voice to the popular reaction. 38 Roman empire have been stripped away; all their triumphalism dropped We have already seen one of the major reactions to this current in Augus- when it no longer "worked;" Christianity had used the Roman empire to rise tine's treatment of the events at Constantinople in 398. More generally, his to power and now, having sucked it dry, was ready to discard it by the approach to the subject was unequivocal: because the time of the saeculum wayside. Augustine's argument is really the equivalent of "heads I win was homogenous and opaque, no historical event could have visible apoca- [Rome and Christianity are meant for each other], tails you lose [Rome falls, lyptic significance. Calculations, signs and wonders, wars and other calam- we have nothing to do with her]." Far from "convincing" Roman patriots ities, none of these could be "read" in terms of apocalyptic prophecy (in who fled to Carthage from Italy, far from dousing the flames of their outrage, particular those of Revelation); the invading Goths and Visigoths could not Augustine's counterargument would have poured fat on the fire. be identified with Gog and Magog; the sack of Rome was not the collapse of The question arises, then, what did Augustine think he was doing in that "obstacle" to Antichrist of which Paul spoke in II Thessalonians. laying out such arguments? Why did he not make a more plausible c~se In this context, we can appreciate the value of an argument that seemed so against his pagan foes? And the answer is, l think, that he was not addressmg provocative to pagans: Rome's sack was not a calamity; far worse had hap- pagans but Christians. These arguments carried far more weight in the con- pened; we must see it as God's punitive hand chastising us. 39 Each of these text of both schools of Christian millennialism, at once supporting the owls statements has a specific anti-apocalyptic motive: Rome is not special; its fall who oppose apocalyptic alarms (now, both disoriented and in disarray at the has no cosmic significance; these are not the calamitous inaudita of the "little fall of their symbol of stability) and attacking the roosters who crow at the Apocalypse" or of Revelation. On the contrary, the threat is prophetic, Nine- dawn of apocalyptic days (now galvanized by the fall of the last bulwark vite, cautionary, not apocalyptic, not final. As Augustine later states so clear-  Richard Landes The Silenced Millennium and the Fall ofRome 165 164 HESYCHIUS AND AUGUSTINE: ON OWLS, ROOSTERS, AND ly to Hesychius: "People will laugh at us if they hear us saying, these are APOCALYPTIC DISCOURSE AMONG BISHOPS unheard of calamities, never before seen." 40 Thus the same argument-it is not that bad, worse has happened-serves to counter both pagan and apoca- lyptic responses. But what was fat on the fire of pagan indignation was water One of the most startling figures in the history of Christian apocalyptic enters on the flames of apocalyptic panic and excitation. Augustine apparently into a public exchange with Augustine over the exegesis of the times. Hesy- chius of Salonika on the Dalmatian coast, wrote a letter to Augustine some- knew who the real enemy was. Again we must ask: Did the arguments against apocalyptic reactions work time in 418 inquiring about how Augustine interpreted what Augustine re- any better than those against paganism? The general answer, explicitly or ferred to as "the prophetic words, often uttered," and which turns out to be implicitly answered is, yes. The terms used by Augustine's correspondents, those apocalyptic texts savory to roosters and especially the chronological including Orosius, testify to the immediately favorable reception of the material in Daniel. 45 books of the dcD as they rolled out of Augustine's scriptorium. 41 The most Augustine's response is telling: consult the holy man Jerome (Augustine common approach among modern historians, then, admits (perhaps) an initial sends him copies o~ the relevant material), whose effmis-chronological, apocalyptic response to Rome's fall, and then assumes the rapid dominance historiographical, and exegetical-have worked out the now-standard eccle- of Augustine's response, allowing one to drop the subject of apocalypticism siastical discourse on these texts. Then Augustine runs through the standard and millennialism from that point onward. In so doing-with appropriate collection of anti-apocalyptic teachings: it is not for us to know, the numbers mentions of the immediate apocalyptic reaction to the sack of Rome-histo- in Daniel refer to the first not the second coming, it cannot happen until the rians replicate and advance the work of the owls, eager to shroud these Gospel is preached to the ends of the world, which might happen "not in the matters in silence. Here we encounter Augustine the "moral compass" of his days of us elders, but certainly in that of young men." age, the shepherd who brought his flock through a momentary panic. 42 Hesychius was not convinced: in response he sent Augustine a statement of his beliefs which ranks among the most astonishingly open expressions of When Alaric captured Rome in 410 many people asked themselves whether the apocalyptic mind in apocalyptic time ever recorded in that hostile me- the ruin of Rome was not the sign that Christianity was bad for the empire. The dium, writing. 46 That it survived the winnowing process of archival preserva- Christian answer to these doubts prevailed. It opened a new epoch in the tion at all is due to the colossal rebuttal Augustine wrote to it, and to which it philosophy of history. The political disaster was real enough, but more real serves as the introduction and setup. This response, to which Augustine was the faith which inwardly transformed the lives of the multitudes and refers as his "definitive answer to these questions" in Book XVIII of the City which was now given its intellectual justification by St. Augustine in his City ofGod, proved a key text, reproduced frequently (as had Jerome's work by ofGod. 43 Augustine), and even cited at length in the Chronica maim·a of Bed e. Framed nicely by Augustine's two letters of response, Hesychius's letter has largely But in terms of the dynamics this study examines, we must ask ourselves at been perceived by historians as the master's foil, and, when not ignored, has what point in the apocalyptic wave the blow to Rome came: was Augustine cleaning up a mess that contemporaries already recognized as an incorrect served as a platform to expound Augustine's message about apocalypti- cism.47 (failed) apocalyptic expectation? Or was he still howling in the apocalyptic wind? We have, in the reaction of contemporaries unhappy with how often Presumably, this understanding of the correspondence reflects the situa- he speaks of the tragedy at Rome, clear evidence that the Christian elite tion in the 41 Os and 420s, where Hesychius's apocalyptic beliefs played as preferred not to dwell on such matters, 44 an understandable response given small a role in the public discourse as they do in Augustine's letter collec- . 48 But that would be to reckon ex post defectu, to grant a posthumous t Jon. how radically it undermined the arguments with which they had risen to power. Augustine, largely alone, faced the crisis fully and openly, and in the victory won by Augustine who was right: it was indeed not the end of the process he developed the most consistently owlish theology of political pow- world. And without doubt, that is precisely how Augustine's followers, who er that a theologian could, within the constraints of Christian eschatology. knew what neither the master nor Hesychius could have known at the time, Later cleanup crews would obviously resort to Augustine and this post-apoc- have framed the latter's letter for us. Thus, while we must be grateful to these scribes for preserving a text alyptic value would give Augustine a central place in the public record of which otherwise would have been destroyed (even by Hesychius's follow- Latin Christian eschatology over the next millennium and a half. But how ers), we need not read it as they would have us read it. Let us take this letter effective was this teaching at the time? out of its owlish framework, and put it back into the turbulent decades of the 166 Richard Landes The Silenced Millennium and the Fall ofRome 167 late fourth and early fourth centuries, in the years since Rome's sack, when existing signs of the coming, it befits me to hope for it and to distribute this wealthy refugees from Italy spread throughout the Mediterranean bearing food to believers that they may hope for and love the coming of Him who tales of woe and accusation, when Jewish and Christian communities in said; "When you shall see all these things, now ye that it is nigh, even at the Minorca broke out in violent apocalyptic confrontations, 49 monks and Chris- doors." In other words, Bishop Hesychius considered it his holy task to teach tian mobs in Egypt exploded in violence, 50 when an earthquake in Palestine his flock to await eagerly the coming End and to look for signs of its coming produced a vision of the Resurrected Christ in Jerusalem that led to the mass in their day. baptism of 2,000 people of both sexes, all ages, pagans, Jews, and lapsed As to whether the Day of the Lord has come, there seems no doubt in the Christians, 5 1 and prompted the bishop to send letters to the churches through- good bishop's mind: after citing various passages from the Little Apocalypse out the whole world about the signs and terrors perpetrated by God. 52 on the End time, he comments, Rather than see these scattered mentions of a time of intense anxiety, signs, wonders, and collective visions that prompted mass conversions, as so Our very suffering forces us to admit, if our will refuses, that we are suffering these things, for it is well known that at one and the same time signs are seen much tlotsam and jetsam of an apocalyptic expectation that may have ani- by men in heaven and distress of nations is suffered on earth. And Luke goes mated early Christians, but had faded over time, it may behoove the historian on, "Men withering away for fear and expectation of what will come upon the to see the literary remains as the tip of an iceberg of a Mediterranean-wide whole world (Lk 21 :24-26)." It is plain that there is no country, no place in our apocalyptic moment, a time when no one, not even Augustine, could know time which is not harassed or humbled according to these words, and all the with the certainty they would later have, that Augustine and the naysayers signs which the Gospel describes in the earlier verses have in large measure were right. To the historian who wishes to reconstruct the situation, rather been accomplished. than the theologian who wishes to determine the more responsible and pro- found position, 53 the letter becomes one of the most arrestingly detailed As for Augustine's invocation of the necessary precondition that the Gospel insights into the apocalyptic mentality of the Christian episcopacy. must first spread throughout the world (Mt 24:14), Hesychius points to the Hesychius begins with thanks to Augustine for asking his opinion, and rapid acceleration of conversion as a result of Christian emperors as the then, with a modest protestation of his own mediocrity and limited under- accomplishment of this sign. Here Augustine is hoist with the petard of those standing, he lays out his view of cosmic history and current events. He first tempora christiana over which he had only recently enthused. dismisses outright Augustine's use of the owl's classic citation-"No one In other words, Hesychius the rooster is completely unconvinced by the can know the times which the Father has put in his own hands ... "-with a owls' arguments: he has no trouble with those passages that owls so often stunning counterargument. This, he points out was originally, "It is not for cite with a decisive air about how man cannot know; he shrugs off their you to know," and referred to the apostles who were, as we all now know, exegetical pirouettes; he aggressively assetts near and far that only a fool not to be witness to the end of the world. He then cites passages which could not recognize that now is the time. Hesychius was wrong, of course, as implicitly or explicitly expect that, when the time comes, good Christians all roosters have been so far. But our job as historians of the early fifth will be able to recognize it, while others, misreading the nature of the time, century is not to hand out those kinds of brownie points, 54 but to judge who will say "Peace and security, then shall sudden destruction come upon them." dominated the public discourse, whose words had the greater impact on their Note how this offers a rather apt description of Orosius's account of current audiences. Viewed from this angle, Augustine's response takes on a some- events. Indeed, notes Hesychius, "as the Lord reproached the Jews for their what different complexion. blindness, so he will reproach us ours," a direct blow aimed at Augustine's Augustine opens with a restatement of the crucial principle of eschatolog- radical agnosticism. ical agnosticism, even referring to a school-" I am speaking for myself and He then turns to the true Christian's approach to the end: it is neither to be for those who share this lack of knowledge with me." One need not, he feared nor ignored, "but greatly to be loved and expected." Now granted, insists, know the time in order both to distribute the food of apocalyptic Hesychius concedes, we cannot know the hour, the day, even the year (i.e., expectation to the flock and to maintain high moral standards. Moreover, the chronological calculations), nonetheless one can know by watching for the command to watch, could not have been directed at all Christians unless it signs. The Christian is thus a rooster watching the horizon closely for all meant that "that Day will come to every single one when the day comes for indications that dawn approaches. Thus, he notes in a passage that says more him to die, such as he is, to be judged on the last day." about the social dimension of Christian apocalyptic than all the surviving Like the allegorists before him, Augustine here interiorizes the Apoca- commentaries on the book of Revelation, "by noticing and believing the lypse within the soul of each individual: from the collective and public to the  The Silenced Mitlennium and the Fall ofRome 169 168 Richard Landes interior and hidden. "ln whatever state his own last day find each one, in that more sense to us than it would to Hesychius and his fellow roosters of the state the last day of the world will ovetiake him; such as he is on the day of early fifth century. The core of the argument, of course, lies in the question I have defined as his death such each one will be judged on that last day." Augu~tine then attacks Hesychius's interpretation of"it is not for you [the apocalyptic, that is, the question oftiming~when will the end occur? In his apostles] to know the [end] times," which he insists cann~t be so~how ~oul,d response, Augustine becomes one of the first Christians to openly adopt a we so inferior to the apostles, have knowledge they dtd not? Augustme s "boy who cried wolf' position: co~clusion: "It is better to believe, not that God was unwilling to make If we had been alive then and had heard [John the Evangelist declare '·H is the known what he wished to have preached, but that He did not wish to have last hour"], how could we have believed that so many years would pass after it, preached what He saw was not useful for us to. kn~w" (5). Th~ weakness of and would not have hoped that the Lord would come while John was still such an argument~that knowledge of the end tm~e ts usele~s~ts so apparent present in the body. that Augustine immediately addresses it. The pomt (to whtch he shall return repeatedly), is that we should be ready at all times,. and not just at the end (6). This is a brilliant reading of history, with a deep empathy for the psychology We shall address its effectiveness in a pastoral settmg below. of the rooster: for Augustine it solves the problem (John did not mean what He then deals with Hesychius's use of Paul's remark on those who pro- he and his contemporaries thought); 56 for the historian it poses a terribly claim "peace and security" as a proof of the end: But "':"'e d~ not see the vexing problem (how to write the history of a movement in which the prime lovers of this world [e.g., the pagans], on whom destruct10n will come sud- movers were repeatedly wrong about timing). Augustine provides not a solu- denly, now saying 'peace and securit(" (8). Of ~ourse if.Hesychiu~ me~nt tion but an escape: by focusing on his brilliant and, from our vantage, correct Orosi us, Augustine has completely missed the pomt; and. smce, at tht: p~mt, analysis, we can attribute his enlightened attitude to all the major figures. the upholders of the pa)c romana are restricted primanly to ecclestastlcal With Augustine's insistence that when John said "hour," he meant "time" hierarchy, he probably has. (saeculum ), he obviously had to confront the place of honor this passage held Augustine then attacks one of the most sensitive passages: II Thessalo- in the sabbatical millennium. Proponents ofthis teaching used the last hour nians 2:5-8 on the "obstacle to Antichrist" (10). Here he challenges Hesy- of John to argue that, dividing the 6000 years of world history into twelve chius to be more explicit about his reading of this passage "s.o obscure an~ so hours, the last hour was the five-hundred years from Jesus to the end. Augus- mystical in meaning" in which the apostle made no allus10n to a spectfic tine, after playing around with the weakness of the exegetical base here~ time. This would be, to a contemporary observer, a ludicrously n~i_ve readi.ng why not twenty-four hours and 250 years?~makes an unusually literal of these words. For more than two centuries ecclesiastical authontJ~s specifi- move, one that brings him on to Orosian terrain. He points out that "if we cally interpreted the obstacle here mentioned as Rome, and the tssue was, look carefully at Church history, we find that the Apostle John died long what the sacking of Rome meant. Augustine's agnosticism here could only before the completion of 5500 years from the beginning of the human race." strike a contemporary rooster as an act of bad faith: as lo~g as Rome was What he means here is that a careful look means abandoning the prevalent strong, the meaning was clear (and favorable to owl:); wtth Rome on the chronology (AM I) in which the Incarnation occurred (conveniently) in 5500; ropes (and the meaning favors the roo:ter~) its meanmg becomes ~bscure. and shifting to the calculations of Eusebius (AM II), in which it occurred The parallel with millennia! chronologtes IS stron~: as ~ong as theu target (conveniently) in 5199. The comment sheds important light on one of the date of 6000 was far away, ecclesiastics suppmied tt; as tt approached, they (several) uses that Orosius's History against the Pagans offered Augustine: scrambled for alternatives. not willing to openly identify with any chronology, our theologian could, But this emphasis on the obscurity of these texts lies at the core of Aug~s- nonetheless, anonymously invoke the new, nonapocalyptic chronology of- tine's attack on apocalyptic thinking; and he repeatedly challenges HesychtL~~ fered up by Eusebius and Jerome and, until Orosius, not yet adopted by to explain how he can derive certainty from such passages (13, 1~· 19, 54)." historians. The fact that after Orosius, every serious Latin historian would Again, our sympathy lies with Augustine: so often these prophetic passages now use AM II suggests that Augustine's considerable weight stands behind have been used to announce an end that did not come, that we naturally stand this new chronology. Did Hesychius? Most likely he tossed it aside the way back from them and pronounce them obscure if not impenetrable. But to the he tossed aside Jerome's Daniel Commentary. rooster, especially the one who has worked out the corresponden~~s down t~ In fact Augustine then turns to Hesychius's reading of Daniel's weeks the most minute detail, these are not obscure, they are exquiSitely clea. (the same text which produced Judas the chronographer's apocalyptic text ca. indications of how to "read" current events. Augustine's argument makes fat  Richard Landes The Silenced Millennium and the Fall of Rome 171 170 200 to which Hippolytus responded with the sabbatical millennium. If one present happenings as if they were the ultimate and extreme of all things ... takes the 490 years of Daniel, 57 and takes either the Incarnation or the Resur- [and he] be laughed at by those who have read of more and worse things in rection as a starting point, one gets either 490 or 520, thus another one the history of the world" (39). hundred years at most. Augustine is surprisingly mild in his criticism of these Here we have a core anti-apocalyptic argument: don't be a Chicken Little. dates; instead he goes over the logic of the computist, who, in saying that Of course, Chicken Littles are only clear in retrospect. Heyschius's far more God can foreshorten the years, covers himself should it occur earlier, and can evangelic response would be: "Do not be a foolish virgin. Wake up!" invoke the very passage Augustine would use to hush him-"no one knows." In Augustine's response to that challenge-the culmination of his letter- Augustine finishes the chapter (20) with no criticism; were it to stand alone, he reveals himself a timeless rooster. How should we deal with the end of the reader might not realize that he disapproved. And although he rejects this time? What is the proper apocalyptic attitude of a Christian? There are three calculation in the next chapter, he does so with an argumentation that any opinions: serious student of apocalyptic thought could invalidate on its own terms. Is it a coincidence that the only calculations not to receive explicit condemnation 1. It is soon (roosters), a position fraught with dangers since, were the are those "with a future?" Is this perhaps Augustine's silent affirmation of end not to come (and it has not for centuries now [millennia for us]), the same kinds of calculations Hilarianus and those Jerome denounced who believers would lose their faith in the Lord's coming ever occurring. added 430 years to the Passion. Better these screech owls than crowing 2. It is not for a while (owls), a position also problematic since it can bishops and panicked farmyards. discourage believers and leave them open to the taunts of the faithless. Augustine then attacks the issue of imminence, by showing how immi- 3. It can be at any time. nent the language of the Gospels and the Epistles is. Using the same argu- mentation already deployed against a literal reading of John's "the last hour," This final response is obviously the right formula with which any Christian he points out how Paul uses the present tense in speaking of "the last times." must resolve the tension between imminence and immanence, between the What can this mean about our relationship to the apostles? Some, in their urgency of Scripture and the ever-larger Middle Age that stretches indefinite- pride, might say that we are privileged as to both knowledge and revelations ly longer with the passage of each year, decade, generation, century, millen- which God denied them, that "the last times" have, at last, come. For Augus- nium. It accords with the gospels-"Take heed, watch and pray, for you tine, however, the apostles articulated a sense of time, of apocalyptic urgen- know not when the time is" (Mk 13 :33); and it embodies Augustine's way: cy, which must be sustained unrelated to historical time: it is as true now as it Thus for those who love the manifestation ofthe Lord, it is sweeter to listen to was then, and no more true now than it was then. the first (the rooster), safer to believe the second (the owl). But the one who admits that he does not know which ofthese views is true, hopes for the one, is We do know that we, like the Apostles, are living in the last times, last days, a resigned to the other, is wrong in neither of them. I beg you do not despise me last hour, and this is much more so of those who lived after them and before for being such a one ... us. and much more of those who will come after us than of us, until the time co-mes, so to speak of the last and finally of that every last moment which the Lord referred to when He said: "And I will raise him up in the last day." But Here is Augustine's eschatological wisdom in its essence-earnest, intense, how far off that is cannot be known. prudent, passionate poise. It is a message for the ages, the position of a man at once profoundly resigned to the durability of the saeculum and intensely Truer words were never spoken, even if contemporaries could not know that. sensitive to the spiritual aspirations of his fellow Christians. It is a timeless "What of the signs and prodigies?" Augustine asks in reference to Hesy- message, one of profound wisdom and commitment. And it has enthralled chius's use of the Little Apocalypse. Here Augustine does for the synoptic not only theologians and pastoralists (as it should) but historians (as it should Gospels what he had done for Matthew, but with a neat Ticonian spin: the not). prophecies have been fulfilled in the history of the Church; they were not The issue is not who was right, but to whom did contemporaries listen- eschatological but ecclesial (26-30, 38-39). But Augustine's trump card lies then, and later? And the answer is, I think: the center of public discourse in in the task to which he set Orosius: "If we read the history of the nations, are the Mediterranean in these years (indeed in these generations that go from not such portents found to have happened in heaven and on earth . . . ?" the late 5800s to the early 5900s) is apocalyptic; that screech owls like (34ff). Thus when Hesychius states that "our very sufferings force us to Orosius represent the farthest reaches of successful anti-apocalyptic dis- admit that the end is at hand," he must beware lest he "fall into a panic over 172 Richard Landes The Silenced Millennium and the Fall ofRome 173 5. On 398, see Augustine's own reflections: on the events in Constantinople in 398 in de course; that Augustine's profundities passed far over the heads of most excidio Urbis, 7-8, ed. and tr. Marie O'Reilly (Catholic University of America, Patristic Series, Christians, only making headway among those elites whose position made 89; Washington DC: Catholic University Press, 1955), 68-70; and on the prophecy of 365 them sympathetic to the political and social implications of the position years in the de civitate Dei, 18.53.2. Discussion in Jean Hubaux, "Saint Augustin et Ia crise eschatologique de Ia fin du lYe siecle," Acadbnie royale de Belgique, Bulletin de Ia classe des Augustine enunciated. lettres et des sciences morct!es et politiques 40 (1954): 688-73; Theodore de Bruyn, "Ambiva- But this is only the first of two key observations to be made from the lence within a '"Totalizing Discourse:' Augustine's Sermons on the Sack of Rome," Journal of above analysis of this exchange. By far the most significant point worth Early Christian Studies, I, 4 (1993): 405-21. 6. Claudian, De bello Gi!donico, ed. Elzbieta M. Olechowska (Turnhout: Brill Archive, making concerns the later impact of this exchange on the written record. I 978); also discussed by Orosi us, Septem libri historiarum, 7.35. Roosters carry the day in the oral world of apocalyptic time; and owls win a 7. Herbe1i Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia post-apocalyptic victory, one engraved in writing. So regardless of how University Press, 1962); Peter Brown, "St. Augustine's Attitude to Religious Coercion," The many or few ecclesiastical figures sided with Augustine at the time, one can Journal of Roman Studies 54 ( 1964 ): 107-116; Robert Markus, Saeculum: HistOJy and Society in the Theology ofSt. Augustine (Cambridge University Press, 1989). assume a posthumous victory for Augustine's position which, we have seen, 8. See Ramsey MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire: AD 100-400 (New Haven: has dominated both the theological and the historical treatment of the ex- Yale University Press, 1986), 86-101; see in particular the case of Porphyry's Gaza and the change. Indeed this forms the foundation of the historiographical consensus torture and execution of anyone who refused to convert, Mark the Deacon, Life of Porph:p:v, Bishop of Gaza, trans. G. F. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913 ), 63-65; Christianizing, that after Augustine millennialism died and apocalypticism moved to the 86-90; on Antioch, see Peter Brown, The Bodyand Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunci- margins of Christian culture. Not only does a close examination of the rele- ation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 305-22. vant documents indicate the contrary for Augustine's day, but a fortiori, for 9. Peter Brown, Augustine ofHippo, 231-32; Markus, Saeculum, chap. 2. 10. "Le prince et patriarche des persecuteurs ... "E. Lamirande, "Un siecle et demi d'etudes the coming centuries. sur l'ecclesiologie de S. Augustin: Essai bibliographique," Revue des etudes augustiniennes 8 (1962): 1-124; Brown, "St. Augustine's Attitude to Religious Coercion"; Deane, Political and Socia! Ideas ofSt. Augustine, 178-81; Robert Markus, Saeculum, 133-54. NOTES 11. Markus, Saeculum, 22-44. 12. Brown pays virtually no attention to millennialism, from his early Augustine ofHippo, 1. N B: This chapter is adapted tl·om a chapter in a longer book on millennialism in the first to his later The Rise of Christianity to his most recent Through the Eye of a Needle. Alone Christian millennium: While God Tarried: Disappointed J'vlil/ennia!ismji·om Jesus to the Peace Markus addresses the issue directly, and tends, by the end of his book, to apologize rather than of God, 33--1033 (forthcoming). Some of the principles of orientation when dealing with analyze the contradictions (Saeculum chap. 6). 1~1illennialism (expectation of a messianic era on earth) and apocalypticism (belief that the 13. On the ages of the world and the apocalyptic countdown to the seventh (messianic) transfonnation of the world is imminent, whether into a millennia! kingdom on earth or an millennium begim1ing in 6000 Annus Mundi, see Landes, "Lest the Millennium Be FuiJilled," eschatological end of the material world) are laid out in Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the 137-211. Millennia/ Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). In particular, I refer to 14. Paula Fredriksen, "Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Traditions, roosters as apocalyptic believers crowing at the break of the Day of the Lord, and owls as anti- and the Retrospective Self," Journal ofTheological Studies, 37 ( 1986): 324-331. apocalyptic teachers insisting that it is still night and warning against ro~sing the beli~v~rs 15. dcD, 20.7.1. For the best survey of his early writing on millennialism (389-401), see G. before the riaht time. Much of the argument revolves around the attempt ot many early Chns- Folliet, "La typologie du sabat chez saint Augustin," Revue d'etudes augustiniennes 2 (1956): tians to date 7he advent of the millennium to the year 6000 since creation, and the chronological 371-90. Folliet and most commentators have taken this at face value and considered Augustine shifts that the advent of that date provoked in the ecclesiastical literature. The first era mundi a millennialist in his youth (398); but J. Kevin Coyle has argued that a close reading of dated the Incarnation to 5500 annus mundi (AM I), introduced by owls at the beginning of the Augustine indicates that he never espoused the classic millennialism of earthly kingdom for second century CE (i.e., ca. 5700 AM I) and, at the approach of the year 6000 AM I in 500 CE, 1,000 years: "Augustine's 'Millennialism' Reconsidered," Augustinus 37 (1993): 155-64. another generation ~of owls shifted to a chronology tlrst proposed by Eusebius in which the 16. Historians have dated Augustine's first (and enthusiastic) reading of Tyconius to the Incarnation occurred in 5199 AM II. Augustine and Jerome played a critical role in the adop- mid-390s: in 396, Augustine asks bishop Aurelius of Carthage what he thinks of Tyconius; tion of AM ll in the tina! century of AM I (i.e., the early fifth century CE. See a preliminary Fredriksen, on the basis of an analysis of the Pauline material, sees a Tyconian influence as discussion ofthese issues in Richard Landes, "Lest the Millennium Be Fulf111ed." early as 394: "Beyond the Body/Soul Dichotomy. Augustine on Paul against the Manichees 2. Fran9ois Paschoud, "La doctrine chretienne et l'ideologie imperiale romaine," in and Pelagians," Recherches augustiniennes 23 (1988): 87-1 14, at p. 99. L 'Apocalypse de Jean: 1/·aditions exegetiques et iconographiques (Geneva: Droz, 1979), 17. Paula Fredriksen, "Paul and Augustine. Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Traditions, 31-72. and the Retrospective Self," Journal ofTheological Studies N.S. 37 (1986): 3-34. 3. For a standard view, see D. H. Kromminga, The Millennium in the Church: Studies in 18. Hence the following passage: "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So Christian Chiliasm (Grand Rapids, Ml: Eerdmans, 1945). then, I of myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. 4. Richard Landes, "Lest the Millennium Be Fulfilled: Apocalyptic Expectations and the There is therefore now no condemnation lor those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Pattern of Western Chronography, 100--800 CE," The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Spirit oflife in Jesus has set me free fi·om the law of sin and death" (Romans 7:22-8:2). Middle Ages, ed. W. Verbeke, D. Verhelst, and A. Welkenhuysen (Katholieke U., Leuven, 19. "These years of crisis following the active intervention of the authorities in Africa 1988), 137-211; "Millenarismus absconditus: L'historiographie augustinienne et I' An Mil," Le (principally in Carthage) were the time of Augustine's most uncritical endorsement of the Moyen Age 98, 3-4 (1992): 355-77; and "Surles traces du Millennium: La via negativa,"Le Theodosian ideology and of his most enthusiastic approval of the official enforcement of Moyen Age, 99 ( 1993) 5-26. Christian orthodoxy" (Markus, End of Ancient Christianizv, 117). Markus notes that with 174 Richard Landes The Silenced Millennium and the Fall ofRome 175 Augustine's eventual renunciation of such triumphal ism, the amazing thing is not that others 42. "Qu' Augustin rut vraiment Ia conscience de Ia chretiente d'Occident, jamais on ne le did not see things Augustine's way, but that Augustine broke the net at all (Saeculum, pp. senti! mieux qu'au lendemain de Ia prise de Rome par Alaric," De Labriolle, L 'Histoire de 22-44). L 'Eglise jusqu 'a nos }ours, ed. Fliche and Martin, vol. 4, p. 52. Modern scholars echo the 20. On Eusebius, Constantine, and the hierarchical millennialism of the "Christian Roman sentiments: O'Reilly, De excidio urbis romae (p. 2 and n. 9); Coyle, "Augustine and Apocalyp- Empire," see Drake, Landes, "The Millennia! Oxymoron, Christian Empire," in While God tic," 20-21. Tarried, chap. 5. 43. Arnoldo Momigliano, "Christianity and the Decline of the Roman Empire," in The 21. Deane, Social and Political; Markus, Saeculum. Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, ed. A. Momigliano (Ox- 22. Courcelle, His to ire litteraire. ford: Clarendon, 1963), 10. 23. Quodvultdeus, Liber de promissionibus IV, 13, 22; ed. Braun, CCSL 60 (Tumhout, 44. Above, n. 32. 1976) 207; tr. Braun, Sources Chretiennes, 102 (Paris, 1964), p. 633ff. See, P. F. Landes, 45. The following discussion deals with Letters 197-99 in the collection of Augustine, '1[198 "Tyconius and the End of the World," Revue des etudes augustiniennes, 28 (1982): 67-68, esp. being Hesychius's response. See PL, 33: 899-925; tr. Wilfrid Parsons, Saint Augustine, Letters n.43. vol. IV (165-203) Fathers of the Church (Washington: Catholic University of America, 1955) 24. Fran((ois Paschoud, Roma aeterna: etudes sur le patriotisme romain dans /'Occident 347~97. a latin l'epoque des grandes invasions (Geneve: Droz, 1967); Jean Lamotte, "Le mythe de 46. On the relationship between writing and apocalyptic expectation, see Landes, Heaven on Rome 'Ville Eternelle' et saint Augustin," Augustiniana 11 (1961 ): 258-259. Earth, chap. 3. 25. One is reminded of Ptince I lumperdink in The Princess Bride shouting triumphantly, "l 47. Lamotte, "Saint Augustin et Ia fin du monde," Augustiniana 12 (1962); Bouhot, "Hesy- knew he was bluffing," when Wesley collapses after bluffing him into allowing himself to be chius et Saint Augustin," ( 1984). tied to a chair. 48. Note that neither Brown nor O'Donnell discusses this apparently insignificant exchange 26. See discussion in Landes, Heaven on Earth, 59-61. (O'Donnell, Augustine; Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle). Even Coyle, whose subject 27. Markus notes that after 410 Augustine only uses the tem1 tempora christiana in para- would seem to demand it, does not ("Augustine and Apocalyptic"). phrasing the attacks of the Philosophers, Saeculum, 37-40. 49. Scott Bradbury, Severus of Minorca, Letter on the Conversion of the Jews (Oxford, 28. Sel'lno 93.8; PL 38:576. Delivered in Carthage in 411 or 412. Augustine does not link Clarendon Press, 1996). See especially his extensive treatment of the apocalyptic background this directly to the "Fall of Rome," but he does speak of what people are saying. Note that it is to these events (pp. 43-53). not likely that those citing the advent of6000 spoke of the Day of Judgment, but rather ofthe 50. Under ilie incitement of Bishop Cyril of Alexandria in 415, see Pierre Chauvin, A coming o'f Antichrist and, after his defeat, the beginning of the sabbatical millennium. Chronicle ofthe Last Pagans (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 85-90. 29. For a good review of the issues involved, see J. Kevin Coyle, "Augustine and Apocalyp- 51. The account is reported by Marcellinus about a century later (ad an. 419), and the editor tic," 3-6. considers it an otherwise unreported event (and does not connect it to the earthquakes that 30. In a complimentary letter to Augustine written four years after the sack of Rome, preceded the collective vision). But Augustine himself gives us a repmi in a sennon that the Macedonius, the Christian governor of Africa noted: "You have used the powerful example of news had reached North Africa (Senna 19, 6; PL 38:136f); noted by Kotting, "Endzeitprogno- our recent misfortune. Still, despite the powerful proofs that you have drawn in favor of our sen zwischen Lactantius und Augustinus," Historisches Jahrbuch, 77 (1958): 138. cause, 1 would have preterred that you not speak at all, had it been possible" (Letters, ep. 154). 52. "His conss. [Monaxio et Pienta, 419] Sanctus lohannes Hierosolimaorum episcopus, qui In a sem1on around tl1e same time, Augustine admits that some of his colleagues and listeners supra epistolam dirigit per eccleesias orbis terrarium, quae habetur, de signis terroribusque are unhappy with his discourse: "0 si taceat!" (Serm. 105, 9.12; ed. PL 38.624). See Coyle, divinitus perpetrates" (Consularia Constantinopolitana, MGH AA, 11.246. Signs, prodigies, "Augustine and Apocalyptic," 5. eclipse, and earthquakes also reported in Hydatius (Chronicon, 23), and Marcellinus (Chroni- 31. Edward Cranz, "Kingdom and Polity in Eusebius of Caesaria," Harvard Theological cle, MGH AA, 11.73-74). Would iliat we had those letters, a classic example of apocalyptic Review, 45 ( 1952): 57-66; Coyle, "Augustine and Apocalyptic." writings that did not survive. 32. Markus, Saeculurn. 53. The several articles (cited above) on this subject limit their inquiry to a mise en point of 33. James O'Donnell, Augustine: A New Biography (Harper-Collins: New York, 2005). Augustine's argument. 34. Kromminga, The Aiillennium in the Church, pp. I 02-24; Coyle, "Augustine and Apoca- 54. "The profound difference between the two bishops of Salonika and Hippo comes fi·om lyptic." their very conception of Scripture: Hesychius wants an answer to the anguish created by the 35. Coyle, ibid., 4. times he lived in; Augustine opens himself to the light of faith whereby the Lord will permit 36. See Pierre Courcelle, Histoire litteraires des invasions barbares him to overcome the trials of earthy life," Bouhot, "Hesychius de Salone et Augustin," 250. 37. Cf O'Donnell: "Yet when Rome is sacked by hostile armies in 410, leaving other 55. These, and countless others where Augustine presents his reading in response to a sometime residents (like Jerome) shaken to their core, Augustine is remarkably phlegmatic," question would have invited a dissenting response from Hesychius. Only ilie historian who Augustine (Kindle Locations 2562-2564). Harper Perennial. Kindle Edition. imagines Hesychius convinced [i.e., silenced] by Augustine could assume that there was no 38. Jean Doignon, "Oracles, propheties, le «nn-dit» sur Ia chute de Rome (395-410). Les response. reactions de Jerome et d'Augustin," Revue d'hudes augustiniennes 36 (1990): 120-46, esp. 56. It was already a problem at John's deaili, as tl1e final chapter in his gospel, written 132-43. posthumously attests (John 21: 1~25). 39. Brown notes how closely this understanding corresponds to his willingness to use force 57. Based on the 70 weeks= 490 days/years (Daniel 9:20-27). against the Donatists (Augustine of Hippo, 293 ). 40. On this epistolary exchange, see below. 41. "Especially since your reverence was at work completing an eleventh book against these same pagans, the earlier ten of which, rising rays which rapidly shone over the whole world as they were raised to the height of ecclesiastical light," (Orosi us, Septem libri, l.Prologue.ll, ed., p.8). For the passage in which these lines appear, see below.