To the Editor:
Peter Steinfels makes an excellent point in his column on "Millennial
Fears in 1000" (7-17-99). He notes that my reading of the documentation
depicts an ecclesiastical community deeply troubled -- at once frightened
and fascinated -- by the year 1000 rather than, as the "Romantics" had it,
a church systematically manipulating apocalyptic fears to milk the laity.
For centuries before the year 1000 conservative clerics had been telling
the faithful: "Wait till the end of the millennium for the world of peace
and fellowship, justice and plenty." As long as that millennium was
centuries away, the clergy liked that argument just fine. But in doing so,
somewhat like our programmers with Y2K, they left a balloon mortgage
payment for those who would greet millennium's end.
Contrast Sylvester II, pope of 1000, who never mentioned the year 1000,
with John Paul II, who does not cease to invoke the year 2000. The
current pope seeks to arouse faith in an age without it; the pope of 1000
had to keep the lid on faith in an age when, by the church's very own
reckoning, the time had come. Do you really think that Sylvester didn't
know when 1000 came? Or that he wouldn't have made a huge deal of it, were
he not afraid, as are our Y2K policy-makers, about unleashing
uncontrollable social forces? These are cases where the silence of the
texts is eloquent, like the dog that didn't bark.
The anti-terrors position was first argued by positivist historians with
no scholarly knowledge of millennialism. Their contentiously dismissive
reading of the texts is therefore full of erroneous claims: the clerics
didn't know; the peasants didn't care; there is no evidence. Nonesense.
People had to know the date AD -- without knowing, you couldn't find out
when Easter fell. Naturally commoners found millennial rhetoric appealing
-- when have they not? Of course we have a rich and varied body of
evidence for popular religious enthusiasm on a mass scale -- but only [sic]
a dozen or so texts actually *label* their material "Apocalyptic Year 1000".
It is, therefore, unfortunate to see a scholar of Prof. McGinn's stature,
whose contributions to the study of literary traditions of later medieval
millennialism are so valuable, come up with so simplistic a judgment as he
ventures into two fields where he has so little expertise -- social
manifestations of millennialism and early-eleventh century history. To
dismiss the apocalyptic year 1000 as a figment of my imagination, aside
from ignoring a growing multi-lingual literature to the contrary, is a bit
like a 16th-century Ptolemeian dismissing heliocentrism. It's also doing
history with no "off the record", like retelling the story of the Emperor's
New Clothes from court documents and discounting the hearsay in the taverns.
My point is not that there was a vast "conspiracy of silence," but rather
a very imperfect "consensus of denial," accompanied by a highly-developed
split between public pronouncement and private conversation. Such a
situation obviously affects what gets written down and preserved (public
record), but even the preserved textual record cannot conceal from a
discerning eye the presence of other, unrecorded conversations. That should
encourage us to, not disccourage us from learning how to read between our
texts' lines.
By the way, this consensus of denial is a cultural phenomenon perhaps more
common than we imagine. It *is* the subject of the *Emperor's New
Clothes*, and I know plenty of smart people who believe that we are engaged
in one about Y2K right now. This, I presume, was the unnamed subject of
Mr. Steinfels remarks about the possibly greater "fears and hysteria
surrounding the coming... of the year 2000." Interesting point, faulty
contrast to a dull year 1000.
Richard Landes,
Director, Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University
http://www.mille.org
Richard Landes
Department of History Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University
Boston University Boston University
226 Bay State Road 704 Commonwealth Ave. Suite 205
Boston MA 02215 Boston MA 02215
617-353-2558 (of) 617-358-0226 (tel)
617-353-2781 (fax) 617-358-0225 (fax)
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http://www.mille.org
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