Where are the New Chiliasts?

Wulfstan, Bishop of London and later Archbishop of Worcester and York, was not an optimist.  In a sermon he wrote: "Many portents shall occur throughout the wide world, both heavenly apparitions and terrestrial disturbances, before that great judgement comes for us all.  And verily, just as the flood came once on account of sin, so now comes the fire upon mankind for sin's sake, and it approaches rapidly."  Preaching his famous 'Address to the English' he said: "Dearly beloved, know what is true; this world is in haste, and nears its end; and for this reason as time goes on, the worse things get; and on account of the people's sin it will grow even worse until the advent of the Antichrist.  And verily, at that time it shall be fear and terror throughout the wide world."
 
Wulfstan may have been extreme, but he was not alone.  Like him, many around the turn of the first Christian millennium were convinced that the end was nigh and the Antichrist close to hand.  1000AD was not the only date to fear; 1033, the thousandth anniversary of the crucifixion, was a popular second choice, when the millennium itself passed without incident.  And when in its turn 1033 came and went, 1065 was the next candidate; for in that year the Annunciation coincided with Good Friday for the first time that century.

Such chiliasm seemed natural enough at the time.  For a society touched with an almost childlike wonder at patterns and congruences in numbers, the millennium was clearly a special date.  The harrying of the barbarous Vikings around the coasts of Europe and their audacious forays deep inland only added to the sense that time had grown old and was staggering towards the embrace of the Antichrist.  We, too, teeter on the brink of the millennium.  If we lack the numerological turn of mind of our forebears, surely we have enough portents, surrounded as we are by daily chaos and carnage, and the dissolution of society's most cherished values? Where then are the New Chiliasts, the lashers of an overripe age about to reap its bitter fruits?

Perhaps it is an idea whose time has not yet come.  At the moment we seem to be enjoying a last fool's paradise.  Ceasefires are being announced in long-standing wars, fashionable glasnost is thawing the hardened hearts of both East and West, democracy and capitalism, albeit in truncated forms, sweep all before them, and even the world economy seems to have been kickstarted into some semblance of life. For most of the potential nay-saying Savonarolas, life is good.

And as Breughel's 'Triumph of Time' so graphically showed with its pitiless portrayal of death and dalliance, nothing takes your mind off Doomsday so much as a good party.  Today those 'heavenly apparitions' are likely to be jittering lasers and stuttering strobe lights, while the 'terrestrial disturbances' are simply the subwoofers of the wicked sound system.  How appropriate then, that the imp-like Prince - in any case thought by many to be Beelzebub incarnate - has already provided us with the music for the Last Day's Ultimate Party - called, appropriately enough, '1999'. This is the way the world will go; not with a bang but a boogie.  If only Bishop Wulfstan had known how to bop.

(10.8.88)

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