Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

hope, had proclaimed the start of the Millennium imminent. Augustine, however, in a typically innovative manoeuvre, had looked, not to the future, but to the past for the true solution. The rule of saints, he had argued, was already begun. It had been inaugurated by Christ Himself, after His death upon the Cross, when He had descended into the depths of hell and there bound up Satan, in witness of His victory over sin. Within the City of God, where Christ had ascended to reign in splendour, the saints and the martyrs already sat about Him upon their thrones. The Church too, earthly though it was, and therefore unavoidably tainted, was shot through with the radiance of their glory.

St John’s vision, Augustine had argued, contained no road map of what was to come. Rather, it offered guidance on what it meant to be a Christian in the here and now. To speculate when the world would end on the basis of Revelation was pointless. Why, not even St John’s allusions to a millennium were to be taken literally. ‘For he intended his mention of “a thousand years” to stand for the whole span of our world’s history. How else, after all, is one to convey an immensity of time save by deploying a perfectly round number?’

The centuries passed. Kingdoms rose and fell. Christians who marked the times felt themselves to be living in an age of shadow. ‘Cities are destroyed, proud strongholds stormed, fair provinces emptied of people, and the whole earth become a solitude.’ Yet though they mourned, those content to submit themselves to the inscrutable will of God did not despair: for still, proof against the breaking of the world, and illumined, however flickeringly, by the splendour of Christ in His undimmed glory, the Church continued to prosper. And so it seemed increasingly to its leaders that Augustine had been right: that the Millennium spoken of by St John had indeed begun. Those who disagreed, turning to Revelation in the hunt for their own answers, were deluding themselves – or worse. Wild talk of saints ruling upon earth could not help but undermine those already charged with the task of’governing souls – which is the art to end all arts’. What bishops in Constantinople claimed for their embattled empire, a role as the vehicle for divine providence, even to the very end of days, when Christ would at last return to rule the living and the dead, bishops in the West claimed for themselves. A sense of urgency gnawed at them. ‘Once the world held us by its delights,’ wrote one, gazing mournfully about him at the desolation of an emptied and crumbling Rome. ‘Now it is so full of disasters that the world itself seems to be summoning us to God.’ Yet precisely for that reason — precisely because the end of times did indeed appear close at hand—so was it all the more essential that the Church not speculate as to the date. Those entrusted with the shepherding of fallen humanity could not risk infecting their flocks with extravagant terrors and enthusiasms. The sheep who in nervous anticipation of the Second Coming broke free of the fold might prove sheep forever lost. Only through the Church could the New Jerusalem be attained. Only through the Church could there be found a path to the rapture of Christ’s return.

No wonder, then, that its leaders should have felt, often to a dizzying degree, a sense of their own elevation above the common run of things. Some bishops, man’s sinful nature being what it was, duly succumbed to the temptations of pride and greed; others, burdened by the cares of office, found themselves gazing anxiously into their souls and yearning for solitude; but not one ever doubted that he was possessed of a sacred charge. Those same blessed hands that Roman soldiers had centuries earlier nailed to the Cross had once touched the heads of the apostles; and the apostles in turn had laid their hands upon the heads of their successors; and so it had continued, without break, down to the present. A bishop at his consecration, in witness of the awful trust being placed upon him, would be anointed with an unguent of prodigious holiness, blended of oil and a fabulously sweet- smelling, fabulously expensive resin, balsam. Chrism, this concoction was called: a mixture of such remarkable power that it needed only to be sprinkled on a sea to purge its depths of demons, and on a field to bless its soil with fertility. Upon flesh and blood too, its effects were transformative: for as it passed through a man’s pores, penetrating his body, seeping deep into his soul, so did it serve to suffuse him with an eerie and numinous potency. A bishop adorned upon his head and hands with holy oil could know himself fitted to handle the very profoundest mysteries of his faith: to officiate at a Mass, transforming bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ; to confront and banish demons; to intercede with God. Anointed of the Lord, he was touched by the divine.

And even the humblest priest, consecrated in his own turn by a bishop, could be brought to share in the magic. Once, before the Church had begun its great labour of erecting a boundary between the sacred and the profane, the two had seemed interfused. Streams and trees had been celebrated as holy; laymen had laid claim to visions; prophets had read the future in ox dung; mourners had brought offerings of food and drink to tombs. Increasingly, however, the clergy had succeeded in identifying the dimensions of the supernatural as exclusively their own. By the eighth century, Christians uninitiated into the priesthood were losing confidence in their ability to communicate with the invisible. It was not only over the splendours of the City of God, after all, that the Church claimed to stand guard. )ust as awesomely, its clergy patrolled the gateway that opened up