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Authors: Tom Holland

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BOOK: Millenium
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And as evidence for this, Augustine had turned, as had so many questers after divine secrets before him, to the vision of St John. Specifically, he had turned to a passage controversial even by the vertiginous standards of Revelation. 'Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven,' St John had written, 'holding in his hand the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thou­sand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years were ended.'
26
And for the thousand years of Satan's imprison­ment, until he should again 'be loosed for a little while', to fight the last battle that would see evil defeated once and for all, there would be a rule of saints. But when? Theories as to that, over the centuries, had come thick and fast. Most, feverish with mingled dread and 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?'
27

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.'
28
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'.
29
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.'
10
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 to the realm of the dead, where angels or demons, heaven or hell, awaited the soul. No longer did people trust themselves to aid their departed kin as they embarked on this last dread journey. Only through the celebration of the Holy Mass, the Church had pronounced, could there be any hope of helping souls in the other world - and only a priest could conduct a Holy Mass.

Why, even the words he spoke while performing this miraculous ritual served to elevate him as a man apart; for in the West, unlike the East, whose missionaries thought nothing of translating their holy texts into any number of barbarous tongues, there was but a single sacred language. This was Latin; and its use was no less incumbent upon the clergy in Ireland or in the lands beyond the Rhine, where Roman rule had never penetrated, than it was upon their brethren in the former heartlands of the empire. For all the babel of jabberings spoken on the outer limits of forest or ocean, yet even Northumbrians or Thuringians or Frisians, if they had been properly consecrated to the service of Christ, could share in the common language that marked them out as priests.

Indeed, scholars from England who crossed the Channel were shocked to discover that the Latin spoken in Gaul appeared vulgar and decayed compared with the exquisitely frozen language that they had imbibed with such care from their school books. Even to those who had always fancied themselves native speakers of the 'Roman tongue', the antique Latin penned by Church fathers such as Augustine was becoming something dead. This, among priests who had the oppor­tunity to learn it, only added to its appeal. A tongue unmangled by laymen could be reckoned all the more satisfyingly holy. As a result, even as the use of Latin as a spoken language declined in Italy, in Gaul, in Spain, to be replaced by bastard dialects, so the study of it by church­men continued to flourish and spread. For the first time since the fall of Rome, an elite deployed across a vast extent of Europe could share in a common vocabulary of power. The Church in the West was becoming a Latin Church.

But not by any means a Roman one. True, Christian lands were formed of an immense patchwork of dioceses - and the boundaries of these dioceses, in the old imperial heartlands at any rate, dated all the way back to the time of the Caesars. It was true as well that when bishoprics were established in newly converted territories, beyond the borders of the ancient empire, it had become the custom to look to Rome for permission to establish supremos - 'arch-bishops' - capable of co-ordinating them. Yet the Bishop of Rome himself, although widely acknowledged as the most senior churchman in the West, was no Constantine. He might command the respect of kings, but not their obedience; he might send them letters of guidance or advice or solace, but not instruction. Even had he aspired to impose his authority on Christendom, he lacked the means. 'When all things are good,' Augustine had once written, 'the question of order does not arise.'
51
But shadow lay everywhere across the fallen world, even across dominions ruled by Christian kings — and so the question of order was one that the Church could hardly avoid. Chaos in a soul and chaos in a kingdom both sprang from the same self-evident cause: human evil. Robbery and oppression of the weak were bred of anar­chy; and anarchy was bred of Satan, whose other name was Belial, a word which meant, learned doctors taught, 'without a yoke'.
32
Only at sword point, in a society collapsing into violence, could Satan be restrained, and the yoke of the law be restored.

Beyond all doubt, then, the trampling down of malefactors was to be reckoned a Christian duty - and yet it was still, even so, one hardly befitting a man of God. A bishop presided over his diocese as its father, not its constable. That role had to be shouldered instead by another, one better qualified to handle sword and spear - as indeed had been the case since the very earliest days of the Church. That Rome's empire had splintered into nothingness did not diminish this regrettable truth. If anything, indeed, it made it more pressing. For centuries, the Church had been obliged to accommodate itself to a bewildering array of warlords. The more rulers it had converted, the more it had mutated in response to their various styles of rule. Though it claimed to be universal, it was the very opposite of a monolith. Like the West itself, it constituted instead a kaleidoscope of differing peoples, tradi­tions and beliefs.

Even in Rome herself, the very mother of the Church, the pressures of worldly circumstance never ceased to weigh upon the city's bishop. Back in the sixth century, armies dispatched from Constantinople had invaded Italy and restored to the empire its ances­tral heartland. 'The ancient and lesser Rome' had been incorporated into the dominion of 'the later, more powerful city',
33
and her bishop had humbly acknowledged himself the subject of the far-off emperor. A Byzantine governor had moved into the city of Ravenna, on the Adriatic coast, administering as a province the emperor's conquests in northern Italy, the Eternal City included; Byzantine titles and gew­gaws had been lavished upon the Roman aristocracy; Byzantine fashions had become all the rage. The bishop himself, every time he celebrated a Mass, would pray for his absent master in Constantinople. Every time he wrote a letter, he would date it by an emperor's regnal year.

And yet a sense of his own dignity never left him. Although exces­sive uppitiness might on occasion be punished by exile or threats of execution, the pre-eminence of Rome's bishop as 'the head of all Churches' was something that had been long and ringingly pro­claimed by Byzantine law.
34
Despite his best efforts, not even the Patriarch of Constantinople, leader of the Church in the empire's very capital, had been able convincingly to rival it. Small wonder, then, that this authority should increasingly have tempted ambitious bishops in Rome to set themselves up as masters in their own city. They were, after all, at a gratifyingly distant remove from the emperor's actual person - and the same crisis that in the seventh century had inspired Methodius's prophecies of a last Roman emperor had served only to widen that remove. Greece had been infiltrated by savage barbarians from the North; the sea lanes preyed upon by corsairs; communica­tions between Italy and Constantinople rendered perilous in the extreme. Byzantine officials in Rome, turning ever more native by the year, had fallen into the habit of obeying their bishop rather than the governor in Ravenna - and the bishop himself into the habit of issu­ing them with commands.

Perhaps a measure of imperiousness would have come naturally to any man who dwelt in a palace, the Lateran, that had originally been a grant from the Emperor Constantine, and who ruled as the effective master of the former mistress of the world. Early in the eighth century, indeed, plans were being drawn up - although never completed - to build him a second residence on the Palatine Hill: a site so associated with the age of the emperors that the very word 'palace' echoed it. Yet the bishops of Rome did not derive their authority merely from the legacy of the imperial past. Their patri­mony was something infinitely more awesome - indeed, so they proudly asserted, the most awesome of all time. Christ Himself, in naming Peter as His rock, had given to him the keys of heaven, with the power of binding and loosing souls everywhere on earth - and Peter, before his martyrdom, had ruled as the very first bishop of Rome.
35
A trust more mystical and dreadful could hardly have been imagined. Peter's successors, proclaiming themselves the apostle's
'vicarii’,
or 'deputies', had long since laid claim to it as their own. In Constantinople, where it was the emperor who believed himself entrusted by God with the leadership of the Church, this cut pre­dictably little ice: by the early eighth century, doctrines were being laid down by imperial fiat in the teeth of howls of protest from Rome.

BOOK: Millenium
4.18Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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