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For those who saw the piece in last Saturday's NYT on millennial 1000, in which Bernie McGinn dismisses the apocalyptic year 1000 as a "figment of my imagination" i offer you the draft of my letter that the Times will almost surely not publish: Comments welcome. Peter Steinfels makes a good point in his column on "Millennial Fears in 1000" (7-17-99), when he notes that my reading of the documentation depicts an ecclesiastical community deeply troubled by the year 1000 rather than, as the "Romantics" had it, systematically manipulating apocalyptic fears to milk the laity. Any millennial date - Jewish, Christian, Muslim, even technological secular - brings out roosters and owls. Roosters, the apocalyptic enthusiasts and alarmists, crow loudly to wake believers to prepare for doom and, perhaps, enter the new age; owls, conservative authorities, hoot that the night is still long and, with the master asleep and the foxes afoot, we should not wake the barnyard prematurely. For centuries before 1000 clerical owls had been telling the roosters: "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 owls liked the argument fine. But in doing so, they bequeathed to those who greeted the mn, a balloon mortgage payment on millennial promises. This offers eerie parallels with our early programmers leaving us with a huge pricetag on the Y2K "bug." Both problems arose from a long-term, collective procrastination. 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 (a gentle rooster) sees in 2000 a great opportunity to arouse faith in an age without it, sees it as a potential turning point in history. The pope of 1000 - an owl of the highest order - had to keep the lid on faith in an age when, by the church's very own reckoning, the time of the roosters had come. Do you really think that if the pope and the emperor of 1000 - two of the great political and religious entrepreneurs of history - were not afraid of outbreaks of millennial fervor as a result of 1000, they would have passed up such powerful rhetoric? Do you really think that when Otto III secretly visited the grave of Charlemagne on the night of Pentecost of 1000, that he had no thought of the date's significance, just because the texts don't openly discuss that? These are cases where the silence of the texts is eloquent, like the dog that didn't bark. Unfortunately Mr. Steinfels only made one of my points while spending most of the article repeating old arguments - the clerics didn't know, the peasants didn't care, there is no evidence - that don't stand up to scrutiny: · of course the AD calendar was set by 1000 - you couldn't figure out when Easter was without knowing the year AD, and any commoner who wanted to, could find it out. · of course commoners cared - millennialism is and has been a favorite form of religious belief among commoners the world over, including the early Middle Ages. Why would the peasants and townsmen of 1000 be especially indifferent? How bovine a peasantry must we imagine in order to tell ourselves they didn't notice? Certainly the peasantry that carried out the agricultural, technological, and urban revolutions of the eleventh century was hardly bovine. · of course we have documents indicating powerful and widespread millennial activities - mass penitential gatherings, peace assemblies, bizarre relic cults, huge pilgrimages, attacks of "holy fire," popular heresies - it's just that only a dozen or so texts are neatly labeled by their composers: "apocalyptic year 1000." The old anti-terrors position was argued by positivist historians with no more love for millennial zeal than that of the scribes and copyists of 1000, and it was based on an almost complete lack of scholarly knowledge of millennialism. If they didn't find any evidence, it's because they didn't know how to look for and didn't want to find the evidence. It is, therefore, unfortunate to see a scholar of Prof. McGinn's stature, whose contributions to the study of millennial literary traditions of later Middle Ages are so valuable, venture into two fields where he has so little expertise - social manifestations of millennialism and early-eleventh century history - and be so simplistic as to dismiss the apocalyptic year 1000 as a figment of my imagination. Aside from ignoring a growing literature by scholars around the world, the remark is a bit like a 16th century Ptolemeian dismissing heliocentrism as a defective mental construct. I don't think it pays to ignore non-explicit evidence in cases where our sources have every reason to play down the phenomenon: denial makes us stupid, and so does pretending denial doesn't exist. It's like writing a history of American politics with the principle that if it's not "on the record" it has no significance. My point is not that there was a conspiracy of silence, but a consensus of denial, one that includes the historians who overvalue the explicit meaning of texts produced within this consensus. Indeed, I think that we, today, would do well to pay attention to such consensus of denial and the simplistic rhetoric that accompanies them. I know plenty of people who already believe that we are engaged in one about Y2K right now. 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) [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask] http://www.mille.org %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%