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

Bewilderingly diverse in their origins and their social backgrounds the men who experienced these visions may have been – and yet all had been inspired by a similar shocking notion: ‘They did not believe that there was such a thing as the Church,’ it was said of the clerics of Orleans. So it was likewise reported of Leutard, who had set himself to vandalising shrines, and of Vilgard, who had claimed that poets were the only source of wisdom. All of them, inspired by their supernatural interlocutors, had come to scorn the rituals and the doctrines of the Church, its ancient hierarchy, its sumptuous adornments, its aids to prayer, its tithes: everything, in short, of its massy order which had been constructed with such labour over the long millennium since the life of Christ.

Where had they sprung from, these heretics? Just as bishops had never thought to harry the Jews until the dawning of the new millennium, so similarly had it never before crossed their minds to root around for heresy. Only during the end days, after all, so Christ had admonished, were the weeds to be sorted out from the wheat, ‘and burned with fire’. Yet now the Millennium was here — and suddenly, it appeared to jumpy churchmen, there were weeds sprouting up everywhere. Ademar, for instance, nervously marking the times from the watchtower of his monastery, described the fields and forests of Aquitaine as teeming with heretics; and the more he sought to keep track of them, the more obsessed by them he became. Like the ‘wickedness and pride’ that he dreaded were coming to infect the souls of the faithful everywhere, ‘the endless warfare, and the famine, and the pestilence, the terrors seen in the heavens, and all the other signs’, they were self-evidently a fateful portent: ‘messengers of Antichrist’. And yet in truth, to a man such as Ademar, the heresy being preached on his very doorstep must have appeared a uniquely devilish menace. Unlike the Jews, who were at least open in their hostility to the Christian faith, it was the perverse and subtle cunning of heretics that they scorned the Church for not being Christian enough. Their ideal was an existence of rough-hewn simplicity, such as the original disciples had known. In their beginning was to be their end: for the heretics, by attempting to found the primitive Church anew in Aquitaine, aimed at nothing less than the hastening of the return of Christ. ‘They affect to lead their lives as the apostles did,’ it was reported of communities in the Perigord, a bare fifty miles south of Limoges. An accusation fit to chill the soul of Ademar, certainly—for how could it not have served to awaken a dark and unnerving suspicion in him? The rolling back of the Millennium to its starting point, the annihilation of time: was this not precisely what his own revelation had accomplished, by showing him Christ nailed and bloody upon the Cross?

These were treacherous waters indeed. No wonder that Ademar hesitated for years to confess his vision. No wonder either that he should have noted with a particular alarm how the heretics, even as they preached their pestilential doctrines in the woods and villages beyond the walls of his monastery, sought to set themselves apart from the common run of sinful humanity – ‘precisely as though they were monks’. One eccentricity in particular stood out: their vegetarianism. Indeed, a repugnance for eating meat appeared a characteristic of heretics wherever they were found. In Saxony, for instance, suspicions would immediately be aroused if a peasant showed himself reluctant to kill a chicken – for squeamishness had come to be regarded as a certain symptom of heresy. So too, in France, had ‘a pale complexion’: the inevitable consequence of only ever nibbling on turnips. In Milan, the archbishop himself stepped in to try to persuade a group of heretics, a countess among them, that it was no sin to be a carnivore—but in vain. Back came the defiant reply: ‘We do not eat meat.’

Here, in this bold statement, was something more than merely the articulation of a dietary fad. For if it were true, as all the signs suggested, that the end time was fast approaching, and the New Jerusalem about to descend, then how better could humanity prepare itself, so the heretics appear to have concluded, than by aspiring to a literally fleshless state? To fast – and if not to fast, then to subsist on vegetables — was the closest that a mortal could hope to come to the incorporeal condition of an angel. Well might this serve to make a bishop nervous – for what role did it leave to him? Yet if there was any order of the Church likely to feel threatened by the sudden mushrooming of heretics, and by their ambitions to live like angels, then it was – just as Ademar had noted – the monks. And specifically, the monks of Cluny. For they too conceived of themselves as beings set apart from the polluted world of flesh and dirt and sin; and they too, as befitted soldiers of God, did not eat meat. Any monk who presumed to break this prohibition, so Abbot Odo had warned, would find himself choking on the offending morsel to death. Even the use of lard, on those regrettable occasions when oil ran short, required a special dispensation. Not for warrior monks the more robust appetites of a bishop such as Henry of Lund, the keeper of Canute’s treasure in Denmark, who ‘revelled and stuffed his belly so full that at last he suffocated and burst’;’’ nor of a king such as Sancho of Leon, who ended up so stupefyingly fat that he could barely walk, let alone climb on to a horse, and had to be put on a crash diet by a Jewish physician summoned all the way