Norman Cohn - The Pursuit of the Millennium, Revolutionary Messianism in medieval and Reformation Europe and its bearing on modern Totalitarian Movements
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Norman Cohn - The Pursuit of the Millennium, Revolutionary Messianism in medieval and Reformation Europe and its bearing on modern Totalitarian Movements
[Mercury Books 1962] Between the close of the eleventh century and the first half of the sixteenth century it repeatedly happened in Europe that the desire of the poor to improve the material conditions of their lives became transfused with phantasies of a new Paradise on earth, a world purged of suffering and sin, a Kingdom of the Saints. The history of those centuries was of course sprinkled with innumerable struggles between the privileged and the less privileged, risings of towns against their overlords, of artisans against merchant capitalists, of peasants against nobles. Usually those risings had strictly limited aims - the securing of specific rights, the removal of specific grievances - or else (like the famous Jacquerie) were mere outbreaks of destructive rage provoked by sheer misery. But risings could also occur which had quite a different scope. The Middle Ages had inherited from Antiquity - from the Jews and early Christians - a tradition of prophecy which during those same centuries took on a fresh and exuberant vitality. In the language of theology - which seems here the most appropriate language - there existed an eschatology, or body of doctrine concerning the final state of the world, which was chiliastic in the most general sense of the term - meaning that it foretold a Millennium, not necessarily limited to a thousand years and indeed not necessarily limited at all, in which the world would be inhabited by a humanity at once perfectly good and perfectly happy. Offering so much solace of a kind which the official teachings of the medieval Church witheld, this eschatology came to exercise a powerful and enduring fascination. Generation after generation was seized at least intermittently by a tense expectation of some sudden, miraculous event in which the world would be utterly transformed, some prodigious final struggle between the hosts of Christ and the hosts of Antichrist through which history would attain its fulfilment and justification. Although it would be a gross over-simplification to identify the world of chiliastic exaltation with the world of social unrest, there were many times when needy and discontented masses were captured by some millennial prophet. And when that happened movements were apt to arise which, though relatively small and short-lived, can be seen in retrospect to bear a startling resemblance to the great totalitarian movements of our own day. Such a comparison is bound arouse misgivings. Is it more than a mere retrojecting on to a vanished civilisation of preoccupations which in reality belong to today alone? If I think so, that is not because I would deny that in the unpredictable kaleidoscope which we call history each transient constellation has its unique and irreductible peculiarity. But in the history of social behaviour there certainly are some patterns which in their main outlines recur again and again, revealing as they do so similarities which become ever more recognisable. And this is nowhere more evident than in the case of highly emotional mass movements such as form the subject-matter of this book. It has happened countless times that people have grouped themselves in millennial movements of one kind or another. It has happened at many different periods of history, in many different parts of the world and in societies which have differed greatly in their technologies and institutions, values and beliefs. These movements have varied in tone from the most violent aggressiveness to the mildest pacifism and in aim from the most ethereal spirtuality to the most earthbound materialism; there is no counting the possible ways of imagining the Millennium and the route to it. But similarities can present themselves as well as differences; and the more carefully one compares the outbreaks of militant social chiliasm during the later Middle Ages with modern totalitarian movements the more remarkable the similarities appear. The old symbols and the old slogans have indeed disappeared, to be replaced by new ones; but the structure of the basic phantasies seems to have changed scarcely at all.
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