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

Things Can Only Get Better

There were those who felt relief. Even by the standards of the previous decades, the years preceding the millennium of Christ’s Passion had been terrible ones: fit, certainly, to give a foretaste of what Antichrist’s coming might actually have meant for the world. Rains had fallen without cease, famine had been universal, rumours of cannibalism too. In the Burgundian town of Tournus, it was said, ready-cooked human flesh had been sold openly in the marketplace. At Cluny, the granaries had stood empty; and Odilo, so as to raise funds for the starving, had been reduced to selling some of the monastery’s most famous treasures, including even the jewel-encrusted orb donated to it by the Emperor Henry II. Only wolves and castellans, both of them preying on the ruined poor, had profited from the horrors of the times. Yet miraculously, with the coming of 1033, everything seemed to improve. Rudolf Glaber, as assiduous as ever in tracing the touch of God’s finger upon the world, marked from his monastery how the violent rainstorms had abruptly ceased. Instead, ‘the happy face of the sky shone and blew with gentle breezes, and with serenity proclaimed the magnanimity of the Creator. The whole surface of the earth began to flourish. The harvests promised to be splendid. Want itself was ended.’

Or so Glaber enthused. In truth, his sudden mood of optimism was no less unbalanced, perhaps, than had been his earlier obsession with terrifying portents of doom. The skies might well have cleared — but on earth there was still violence and lawlessness and oppression. To those who had imagined that the convulsions of the age might spell the imminence of the end days, and who had laboured mightily in the expectation of their coming, the failure of the New Jerusalem to descend could hardly be regarded as a cause for unconfined rejoicing. Profound and desperate emotions had been stirred. The penitents journeying to the Holy Land, the crowds flocking to the peace councils, the heretics retiring to the woods: all had dared to hope that they might see Christ descend in His glory, and set the world to rights. Now that hope was gone. Among the poor, no doubt, whose yearning for a reign of saints the Church had sought to orchestrate as well as to temper, the sense of disappointment was especially devastating. Even Glaber could not help noting how, for all the sunny weather, the menace of knightly violence had, if anything, only darkened. ‘Like dogs returning to their vomit or pigs to wallowing in their mire’, the castellans had not forsaken their taste for robbery, no matter the pious oaths they might have sworn. The Millennium had passed, and the earthly order, by which the strong were set above the weak, had not dissolved. Still, on its rocky outcrop, the castle continued to lower.

Yet if it was the poor who had most cause to feel despair, then they were not alone. Bishops and monks too had yearned to believe in the possibilities of an authentic peace of God: a peace, not of iron, but of love. Now, even if they could not readily admit to it, many found themselves oppressed by a sense of loss. The passage of the years, which previously had struck them as pregnant with mystery and meaning, appeared abruptly leached of both. Time had lost its edge. To a degree unprecedented in the history of the West, the Christian people felt themselves poised on the brink of a new beginning: a sensation that many found disturbing rather than any cause for exhilaration. The past, which had always been valued by them as the surest guide to their future, had suddenly come to appear, in the wake of time’s failure to end, a place remote and alien. In truth, the gulf which separated the new millennium from the wreckage of the old had not opened up overnight. Years, decades, centuries of transformation had served to create a landscape in the West that Charlemagne, let alone Constantine, would have found unrecognisable. Yet the consciousness of this, the consciousness of change, was indeed something new. ‘Such is the dispensation of the Almighty – that many things which once existed be cast aside by those who come in their wake.’

So reflected Arnold of Regensburg: the same monk who, a few years earlier, had seen the great dragon swooping above the plains of Hungary. Evidently a man with a taste for the sensational, Arnold openly disdained the past as a wilderness, one fit to be tamed and cleared, just as the dark forests, with their idol-haunted, corpse-hung groves, had been hacked down by Christian axes to make way for churches and spreading fields. His was a startling perspective, certainly — and yet less exceptional than it might have been only a few decades before. ‘The new should change the old – and the old, if it has no contribution to make to the order of things, should be utterly jettisoned.’ There were many, during the feverish and expectant years of the millennium of Christ’s life, who had come to share in this opinion. Nor had the spirit of reform died in 1033. If anything, indeed, the opposite: for the failure of Christ to establish His kingdom on earth had left many reformers all the more determined to do it for Him.

And this, at its most radical, was a dream of liberty. The example of Cluny, which owed a duty of obedience to no lord save St Peter, continued to serve reformers as the most luminous one of all. There was nothing that more dazzlingly proclaimed the supernatural purity of the monastery than its freedom from the bullying of officious outsiders. And yet, in reality, Cluny was not wholly exempt from mortal supervision. Although St Peter was a mighty patron, his protection could only ever be as effective as that provided by his earthly vicar, the Pope. A not altogether comforting reflection, it might have been thought —