AHR Forum

The Secret

RICHARD K. EMMERSON

We dance around in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

Stanley Fish opens his essay, "Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases," by relating a story reported in the Baltimore Sun about Pat Kelly, an Orioles outfielder who hit two home runs on May 1, 1977. The sports reporter expressed frustration with Kelly because he insisted on understanding his baseball achievement as the result of providential intervention in the national pastime rather than as a mark of athletic prowess. Fish summarizes the report as follows: "Two years previously [Kelly] had experienced a religious conversion. As he reports it, 'I had been like a normal ballplayer. I was an extreme party-er, hanging around in bars and chasing all the women. But then this change came over me, and I have dedicated myself to Him.' The effects of this change are described by the Sun reporter, Michael Janofsky, whose comments betray some understandable exasperation: 'It is not even possible to discuss [with Kelly] the events of yesterday's game—or any game—on strictly a baseball level. He does not view his home runs as merely a part of athletic competition. They are part of his religious existence.'"2 Fish uses this anecdote to exemplify our reliance on the notions of the ordinary or the obvious in everyday talk. These notions, determined by membership in ideologically driven interpretive communities, vary tremendously in what they take for granted. Thus what Kelly took for granted after his conversion—divine intervention in his batting—was simply inconceivable to the baseball reporter, who was frustrated that Kelly insisted on interpreting home runs as "part of his religious existence." Reading through the four essays that comprise this Forum brought to mind this anecdote and made me wonder if it is as difficult for scholars schooled in the discourse of sociological and political analysis to understand the worldview of millenarianism as it is for a sports reporter accustomed to talking to players "on strictly a baseball level" to understand Kelly's supernatural take on Louisville sluggers hitting baseballs.	1
Fish makes an important point worth keeping in mind when studying only partly recorded religious phenomena: if historians are going to understand movements driven by religious ideologies, we must try somehow to enter, at least in part, into the interpretive community of believers. This is crucial when studying millenarian movements, which institutional religion and scholarly training distrust or even caricature. If it is difficult to comprehend what drives contemporary apocalyptic movements, often dismissed as a form of brainwashing, it is even more difficult to comprehend such movements in the past or in other cultures. As a result, there has been a tendency to study them not in their own right but as symptoms of political ills or mass psychosis, evidence of social deviancy or irrationality, predecessors of modern revolutionary or totalitarian movements, or "distant mirrors" reflecting a dim image of present religious fantasies. Certainly, the current curiosity concerning the year 1000—evident in best-selling books and news magazines as well as many sites on the World Wide Web—is due to contemporary fascination with the year 2000 rather than to sudden historical interest in medieval apocalypticism!3	2
Such curiosity is harmless, and, as a scholar who has devoted his career to studying medieval apocalypticism, I welcome its fifteen minutes of fame. Serious problems arise, however, when past apocalyptic movements are studied by unsympathetic scholars or, worse, by those who have axes to grind, for example, who read past millenarian movements in terms of twentieth-century atrocities. Such problems are manifest in Norman Cohn's classic study, The Pursuit of the Millennium, a fascinating yet flawed work.4 It has influenced more than one generation of scholars, many of whom were introduced to millenarian studies through Cohn's groundbreaking book, although medievalists have generally recognized its limitations. Unfortunately, The Pursuit of the Millennium is still cited by many non-medievalists—as is evident in the essays in this issue5—for background on medieval millenarianism or biblical and early Christian apocalypticism, areas much better served by extensive in-depth studies in recent years.6 Yet, as is clear in the subtitle of its second edition, Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements, Cohn viewed medieval religious phenomena through lenses colored by twentieth-century horrors. His conclusion to the Harper Torchbook edition, which attempts to show how Lenin and Hitler looked back to medieval millenarianism, makes his prejudices clear in its first two sentences: "It is not the purpose of this study to offer a general survey of fanaticism, even for the limited period and the limited geographical area it covers. In medieval Europe intolerance was the norm in matters of religious beliefs."7 One unfortunate result of this approach is the tendency to judge religious phenomena from without, leading to unsympathetic and sometimes unreliable accounts of millenarian movements in particular.	3
The four essays brought together by this Forum exemplify both the potential for and the difficulties faced by scholars struggling to comprehend millenarianism. The potential is evident in the wide range of peoples and periods encompassed by these studies, which testify to the widespread nature of millennial thought and action. Perhaps the major difficulty epitomized by the essays is the lack of an accepted terminology applied to the study of millenarianism and related religious ideologies and social movements. As will be shown below, a lack of clarity in the use of such terms as "millenarianism" and "apocalypticism" complicates the task of comparing millenarian beliefs and ventures spanning geography and chronology, making it difficult to determine if historians are examining similar phenomena or conflating or even confusing related phenomena that for analytical purposes would be better kept distinct. This essay will thus conclude by arguing for the necessity of terminological clarity and suggesting some distinctions that may help achieve such clarity.	4
The four essays also reflect the preferences of contemporary historical analysis, depending on whether or not the movements under scrutiny are considered ultimately beneficial or potentially threatening; for millenarianism, like other forms of apocalypticism, has positive as well as negative consequences.8 Thus, on the one hand, Alida C. Metcalf's "Millenarian Slaves? The Santidade de Jaguaripe and Slave Resistance in the Americas" is quite sympathetic to its subject. To modern scholars—if not to the Portuguese slaveowners of the late sixteenth-century Recôncavo—slavery is repugnant, so slave resistance, even if driven by "religious frenzy" is a good. On the other hand, David G. Rowley's "'Redeemer Empire': Russian Millenarianism" adopts a somewhat negative and urgent tone when discussing Valerii Khatiushin. It is downright scary to read Khatiushin's prophecies of renewed Russian imperialism, that after a five-year bloodbath Russia in the year 2000 "would be resurrected as the leader of the world." Thus contemporary millenarianism in Russia, with its anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, is considered bad, something against which we must take a stand even while trying to understand it. Susan Juster's "Demagogues or Mystagogues? Gender and the Language of Prophecy in the Age of Democratic Revolutions," in contrast, expresses some surprise that "revolutionary millennialism looks remarkably unrevolutionary," perhaps because scholarship has so often allied millenarianism with the dispossessed and crisis cults, or at least with "charismatic prophets" rather than "ministers and theologians." The American experience instead suggests the rational public sphere we expect of the young republic's "enlightened citizenship," but its gendered discourse is also disappointing, if not unexpected.	5
David Ownby successfully traces the variety and range of past millenarian thought, perhaps because his essay, "Chinese Millenarian Traditions: The Formative Age," allows the early Chinese religious groups to speak for themselves. To understand the interpretive communities of believers we must take what they say seriously. This is crucial, because so much of what we think we know about millenarian groups is what others—usually their opponents—say about them. Such is the case whether we examine Metcalf's reports of a Jesuit inquisitor about slave resistance in Brazil, Nicolas Berdyaev's ruminations in Rowley's essay about Russians as "a people of the End," or Amos Taylor's conspiracy theory in Juster's article about Ann Lee's "infatuating power; some deep, very deep design at bottom." It is thus refreshing to read the texts of apocalyptic Daoism and Buddhism, and it is one of the strengths of Ownby's essay that he examines this rich discourse both in detail and in context. Although Ownby does not appear to know Stephen D. O'Leary's insightful study, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric, his essay exemplifies the fruits of the approach O'Leary recommends. Noting the repeated failure of scholars to understand millenarianism by means of anthropological, economic, political, and sociological approaches, O'Leary argues for a rhetorical analysis of apocalyptic discourse that approaches it "as argument that is intended to persuade, focusing attention on specific interpretive practices."9 Ownby has done exactly that and, as a result, convincingly shows that in early medieval China millenarian "discourse is best understood as a fundamentalist or populist reaction against and from within the mainstream."	6
Rather than searching for an external cause for millenarianism, O'Leary urges an analysis recognizing the internal logic and rationality of this widely attested discourse. He acknowledges that his approach "might seem misplaced to those disposed to view apocalypticism as an outbreak of irrationality or mass hysteria,"10 a disposition widespread in scholarship. This disposition is based in part on the difficulties we face in entering the interpretive communities of believers, but if we could for analytical purposes accept what they take for granted—what is "normal circumstances" for believers—we might recognize and examine open-mindedly the logic of their arguments. As Hillel Schwartz noted more than twenty years ago, "one can no longer type apocalyptic feelings as pre-modern or dysfunctional . . . [O]ne must accept the implication that millenarian behavior and belief are, given the millenarian tradition, normal."11 I thus strongly agree with Rowley that "the millenarian idea of an end of human history and the beginning of an earthly paradise does not entail unrealistic thinking or pathological behavior."	7
The other factor complicating scholarly analysis of millenarianism is the commonplace assumption that the motivations of such groups can be explained in terms of economic, political, or social crises and as responses by marginalized or disaffected groups to some sort of disaster or deprivation. Thus, despite showing how apocalyptic discourse "touched emperor and cultural elite, as well as ordinary believers" in early medieval China, Ownby must acknowledge an argument that the apocalyptic tone of the Shangqing and Lingbao texts may have been "the expression of a form of relative deprivation." He rightly suggests other interpretations, but his reference attests to the hegemonic nature of the standard explanatory paradigm. Curiously, Rowley reads this paradigm into Ownby's essay, despite its rather different conclusion that what is important in China "is the shared character of millenarian discourse during the early medieval period, the fact that the 'mainstream' was open and fluid enough to permit the circulation of a variety of apocalyptic currents between both elites and masses."	8
The standard explanatory paradigm is most compellingly set forth by Michael Barkun, whose Disaster and the Millennium has had as much influence on comparative studies of millenarianism as has Cohn's Pursuit of the Millennium on studies of medieval movements. Nevertheless, Barkun's opening assumptions should be questioned: "From the perspective of the scholar who attempts to stand outside events, disaster has another significance: it is the very cause of the millenarian commitment itself. Men cleave to hopes of imminent worldly salvation only when the hammerblows of disaster destroy the world they have known and render them susceptible to ideas which they would earlier have cast aside."12 In my view, we will never understand if we attempt "to stand outside" these groups, if we assume that there is one "cause of the millenarian commitment," and if we focus on particular manifestations of this "cause" rather than on the discourses of millenarianism. For example, some "causes," such as continued enslavement, are not "hammerblows of disaster" but unfortunately normal circumstances for slaves. They joined a millenarian movement because its discourse made sense to them, as Metcalf persuasively shows in her study of the Santidade de Jaguaripe; they became members of an interpretive community in which millenarian expectations were "obvious." Furthermore, although the Indian and African slaves who joined the Santidade were responding to intolerable conditions, recognizing those conditions as one contributing cause of their resistance does not explain why they responded by forming millenarian groups in the 1580s and not before or after or why other slaves responded to similar conditions in dissimilar ways.	9
Simply put, disaster, political crisis, relative deprivation, and other external causes do not explain the internal persuasive power of millenarianism, much less why many oppressed people and others living in crisis do not join millenarian groups. These theories are unhelpful particularly in understanding the long history of American millenarianism, since they neither explain, as Juster notes, why "rather than spiking at specific moments in response to public crises, millennial expectations proved remarkably enduring throughout the ebb and flow of colonial politics" nor why apocalyptic expectations have been shared by many educated and generally well-off middle-class Americans throughout our history. These range from members of long-established institutionalized religions, such as Seventh-day Adventists,13 to the Nike-shod dead who lost their lives in March 1997 awaiting the comet Hale-Bop in the Heaven's Gate sect. Highly influenced by the popular media, this group linked UFO sightings with New Age spirituality and communicated through Internet web sites, hardly the bastion of the dispossessed.14 Despite Metcalf's convincing argument that the Santidade de Jaguaripe "was a millenarian movement of slaves" and her less convincing attempt to link slave resistance in the American South to millenarian beliefs, in the long history of inhumanity only sparse evidence connects slave resistance to millenarianism, as Metcalf acknowledges.	10
More important, there is no particular reason why there should be a connection. It makes just as much sense for authorities to adopt an apocalyptic stance to support the status quo, interpreting resistance by the oppressed as a sign of the end, the world upside-down of the Last Days. The late fourteenth-century English poet John Gower, for example, adopted the guise of his two prophetic namesakes—John the Baptist, the voice crying in the wilderness, and John the Revelator, author of the biblical Apocalypse—to condemn Wat Tyler and others involved in the Rising of 1381 as the apocalyptic armies of Gog and Magog.15 As Bernard McGinn notes, "Most medieval apocalyptic beliefs were employed as ecclesio-political rhetoric in the service of dominant institutions and officeholders (popes and other ecclesiastical leaders; emperors, kings, and their propagandists)."16 A related conclusion is drawn by Ownby, who, though noting the potential danger of apocalyptic rhetoric to church organization in early medieval China, points out its usefulness "in drawing people toward the church."	11
One of the accomplishments of this Forum is to make clear the complexity of millenarian movements, their vast range and persistence over time, and the need to take diverse and open-minded approaches in analyzing them.17 The essays, however, also pinpoint a problem that has consistently plagued comparative millenarian studies, a certain fuzziness about terminology. Although every scholarly study must be based on detailed analysis of an individual movement in a particular place and time, for comparative purposes we also need some general agreement regarding what "millenarianism" and related terms mean over time and across geography. This need can be exemplified as a question: Do the many differences in era, geography, religion, and other contextual factors account for the paradox that whereas Juster links American millenarianism to "the vision of republican liberty," Rowley links Russian millenarianism to czarist imperialism, or is this paradox due to the authors' differing definitions of the term "millenarianism"?	12
It is difficult to answer this question because Juster never quite defines what she means by "millennial thinking." Although the movements led by Jemima Wilkinson and Ann Lee display features of millenarian groups, such as otherworldliness and refusal to give allegiance to the state, other examples Juster cites of millennial thinking—"intemperate calls for the overthrow of the British monarchy," and prophetic claims appropriating apocalyptic symbols, radical political agendas, David Austin's combination of charismatic prophet and republican publicist, and Samuel Hopkins's "vision of the millennium," in which "learning and print combine to create a universally enlightened society"—may appropriate the language of prophecy, but they are not particularly millenarian. All prophetic claims are not necessarily millenarian, nor do "eschatological narratives" necessarily involve "millenarian fever." Similarly, it is important not to conflate mysticism and millenarianism; although both forms of religious belief are sometimes exotic and difficult to understand, they should be kept distinct even when they overlap. Juster's excellent analysis of the language of female prophets, the gendered nature of literacy, and the crucial role of print culture in American prophetic and political discourses is occasionally undermined by a lack of terminological clarity.	13
In contrast, Rowley directly confronts the problems of definition, discussing, for example, Metcalf's and Ownby's terminology. He insightfully asks, "Do religious and secular expressions of the millenarian vision really express the same idea?" a question Juster should address in her attempt to place both republican male political traditions and "mystical" female prophetic traditions under the category of millenarianism. However, although Rowley acknowledges "an ambiguity in the scholarly use of the term 'millenarian,'" the thrust of his argument is not to show how such ambiguity may result from the misapplication of the term millenarian in secular contexts but to redeem the term from its "associations with religious and fanatical extremism of crisis cults" so that it can apply in a positive sense to secular "millenarian" movements. Thus, although he rightly questions Barkun's interpretation of the Russian Revolution "as a massive crisis cult," he takes for granted the flawed methodology on which such an interpretation rests. He accepts the well-worn notion that religious millenarianism is "a movement of socially marginal and disaffected groups—usually the most downtrodden and miserable—who reveal their millenarianism in what the mainstream considers to be bizarre and antisocial behavior," in order to distinguish such from liberalism and socialism, which "are movements of intellectual and political elites whose millenarianism is revealed through the publication of their ideas."	14
This binary not only prejudges the case but also sets up a false dichotomy. Given the Russian imperialist millenarian tradition he convincingly discusses, can Rowley be certain that Valerii Khatiushin's prophecies are "counter-cultural"? Although they seem deviant to those who do not share his vision of Russian destiny or his religious perspective, to believers they are commonsensical, as they may well be to some non-Russian Christians; for example, just as Khatiushin understood "Mikhail the Marked" in demonic terms, American fundamentalists interpreted Gorbachev's birthmark as the mark of the beast (Revelation 13: 13).18 Furthermore, although mainstream exegetes would disagree with Khatiushin's identification of the apocalyptic "wormwood" (Rev. 8: 10–11) with the Chernobyl meltdown, such interpretations are surely no more "counter-cultural" than were the atrocities of the Russian Revolution perpetuated by the Bolsheviks, who "unlike the leaders of a crisis cult" in Rowley's view "were neither mad (in the sense of being out of touch with reality) nor deviant (in the sense of rejecting mainstream traditions and customs)." Thus, although Rowley helpfully challenges undefined uses of "millenarianism" and its unproblematic application to Marxism,"19 and although he convincingly establishes a Russian tradition of imperialist millenarianism, his collapsing of religious millenarianism into "crisis cult millenarianism" creates new terminological confusions.	15
In my view, to use the term "millennium" to identify the goals of a predominantly secular social or political movement is to define the concept so broadly that it risks losing cogency. Although the religious-secular distinction is not always sharp and, as Rowley notes, it is not always clear how strongly religious views are held or if they are held at all, to remove the term "millenarianism" from its association with apocalyptic expectations and religious prophecy is, at best, metaphorical and, at worse, misleading. The religious motivation need not be Christian—as is evident in Jewish messianism and Islamic apocalypticism,20 as well as the Chinese millenarianism Ownby studies—but to retain its usefulness as an analytical tool, millenarianism should imply religious, rather than strictly secular, motivations and goals. It is for this reason that the religious instruction of the Brazilian slaves in Christian apocalyptic belief is crucial to Metcalf's argument. I therefore agree with Rowley that "those scholars who use the term 'millenarian' in a modern secular context employ it in a suggestive and not an analytical sense," but my concern is that this non-analytical sense may lead to genuine confusion. This may not be a serious problem for general surveys taking advantage of the current fascination with "the End,"21 but to know what is compared in rigorous comparative research, we need general agreement on the meaning of our shared terms. I thus conclude this response by briefly suggesting some tentative definitions and what I hope will be useful distinctions.	16
To begin with the term that covers the largest conceptual category, "eschatology" is that branch of theology that studies the last things, whether personal or universal. In Christian theology, these beliefs would include the state of the soul after death, the notion of Purgatory, and the events expected to take place during the Last Days, such as the cosmic signs of doomsday or the persecution of Antichrist. The belief in apocalyptic terrors, the Second Coming of Christ, the violent destruction of the world, and the establishment of a millennial kingdom are all issues studied by Christian eschatology, but it is not limited to these beliefs nor does the adjective "eschatological" necessarily imply any one of these beliefs. Apocalypticism is a category of eschatology, for example, but not all eschatology is apocalyptic. That a belief is eschatological, furthermore, does not mean that it is millenarian. The Jesuit teaching regarding the Day of Judgment that Metcalf discusses, for example, is widely accepted in Christian eschatology, but it is not millenarian. Similarly, that American slaves believed in the eschatological concepts of heaven and the Last Judgment does not necessarily imply "a millenarian outlook."	17
The term "apocalypse" is multivalent. It may refer to a specific biblical text, the Book of Revelation or Apocalypse of John; to a genre of eschatological texts with particular generic markers prominent in Judaism and early Christianity;22 or to an event associated with the Book of Revelation, the end of the world or doomsday. Because this event is conceived as sudden and catastrophic, "apocalypse" in popular metaphoric use may refer to any destructive or disruptive phenomenon, for example, the Vietnam War as depicted in Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now (1979) or the Russian Revolution. A more telling metaphoric use, given the apocalyptic beliefs of the Branch Davidians, is to describe the 1993 conflagration of their compound in Waco as an "apocalypse."23	18
"Apocalypticism" is the belief system, often informed by the Book of Revelation and other apocalypses, that interprets the trajectory of world history from its origins to the present as well as contemporary events and other "signs" as indicators of the imminent end of the world. The adjective "apocalyptic" is particularly tricky, as it may refer to attitudes characteristic of apocalypticism (the world is so evil it will soon be destroyed) or to features of literary apocalypses, such as figures like the seven-headed dragon that populate the Book of Revelation. The transformation of the figure of the woman clothed by the sun "into an allegory of American exceptionalism in the revolutionary era" is therefore "apocalyptic" in that this symbol is central to the Apocalypse of John (Rev. 12). One crucial feature of apocalyptic is the expectation that only a faithful remnant will survive the catastrophes of the Last Days, whether they be the 144,000 of Revelation or the "'seed people,' a Daoist elect saved through the good works of the Celestial Masters church."24	19
Strictly speaking, the millennium is the thousand-year period of peace and justice prophesied in Revelation (Chap. 20) during which the dragon is imprisoned in the abyss and Christ rules on earth before the end of time. The expectation that such a period of literally 1,000 years lies in the near future is sometimes called "chiliasm," a term based on the Greek word for "thousand." More generally, the term "millennium" is used to represent any idealized period of time in the future when present troubles are replaced by a society of justice, peace, and plenty, although when its eschatological sense is lost, the term also loses precision.25 The Santidade conviction that "food crops would grow for them and they would not want for food or drink" is millennial both in the general and the strict senses of the term because this desire for earthly plenty is intertwined in the believers' discourse with strongly eschatological expectations. In popular use, the term simply refers to any period of a thousand years, although sometimes "millennium" is used as a positive variant on the negative "apocalypse" or more generally as a synonym for the events of the Last Days, as in Juster's comment, "Somehow, sometime, the millennium will come: and when it does, Americans as a nation and a people feel relatively confident that they will be among the Elect at the end of time."	20
For the purposes of this Forum, the term "millenarianism" and its synonym "millennialism" are most in need of definition. Robert Lerner defines the term as signifying "any hope for impending, supernaturally inspired, marvelous betterment on earth before the End,"26 which distinguishes the hope for a millennial order from secular—rather than supernaturally inspired—utopian and progressive movements. It also distinguishes millenarianism from religious and social reform movements not informed by eschatological expectation, that is, not primarily driven by expectations of the impending End. The Santidade expectation that "God was coming now to free them from their captivity and to make them lords of the white people" typifies millenarian expectations in its emphasis both on divine intervention and revolutionary change in earthly society. Lerner's definition also distinguishes the millennial kingdom from supernatural events to take place after the End, such as orthodox Christian expectations of heaven or the New Jerusalem on earth. To believe that one will be saved at the Last Judgment and taken to heaven is not millenarian.	21
Millenarianism is a specific form of apocalypticism, because strictly speaking it is related to the apocalyptic millennium and, more generally, it is associated with the Last Days and often with the violent and sudden overthrow of the powers and authorities that control the present era. The millennial kingdom may be instituted by a figurative "doomsday" for the status quo, which is why revolutionary movements have been metaphorically described as millennial, even if they are not religiously inspired. In contrast, not all forms of apocalypticism are millenarian, since many apocalypticists think they live in the Last Days and that Christ's Second Advent, rather than a millennial kingdom, is imminent. Those Americans who interpreted the "Dark Day" of 1780 as a sign of the Second Advent were not necessarily millenarian in their thinking. They may not have thought a millennial kingdom was at hand but instead that the world was coming to an end, an expectation they share—if television evangelists are any indication—with millions of worried Americans in 1999 who are neither millenarian nor revolutionary. Finally, it should be noted that secularized forms of apocalypticism are also not necessarily millenarian. For example, the 1983 television film The Day After is apocalyptic in its portrayal of the catastrophic effects of nuclear war on Lawrence, Kansas, as well as in its scene depicting a small band of the remnant reading from the Book of Revelation; it hardly predicts a millennial kingdom to follow nuclear disaster, however.	22
Responses to this much-hyped show suggest that, once we enter into a particular interpretive community, apocalyptic thought becomes acceptable and even logical, the "everyday" supported by mainstream political and scientific theory as well as established religion. For example, the Washington Post described the ABC film as an "unrelentingly bleak . . . picture of a post-apocalyptic world," and in a follow-up article noted that a local bishop identified nuclear weapons as "the ultimate anti-Christ."27 As Earl Rovit asked more than thirty years ago concerning the expectation of the apocalypse, "What other myth do we possess that is as responsive to the major cataclysms of twentieth-century life and death?"28	23
It is thus worth examining our own myths, the dispositions we inherited from our scholarly training, even what we take for granted in our own views of the cosmos and our place in it. The following description of our "leading cosmological model," the Big Bang, may remind us of how very different "normal circumstances" are in our worldview compared to that of the "remnant" who populate millenarian groups:	24
It, too, is a beauty. Tenaciously bourgeois, the universe generated by the big bang is a masterpiece of marketing. With its fiery explosions, wormholes, white dwarfs, red giants and black holes, the big-bang universe satisfies our Lucasfilm sensibilities. It also features an abrupt beginning to appease our Judeo-Christian creation myths, and is constantly expanding, like our economy. It is the biggest-budget universe ever, with mind-boggling numbers to dazzle us . . . We are not at the physical center of the big-bang universe, and there is no God, yet it is an anthropocentric model. The huge numbers—the comparative strengths of the four forces, the surplus of matter over antimatter and so forth—are delicately balanced to result in the evolution of intelligent life (i.e., cosmologists). Once again, a human-constructed universe ends up with humans, at least mathematically, at its center.29
Such an ironic description of the cosmological model that now "goes without saying" may be as unsympathetic to contemporary science as is some scholarship studying millenarian movements. Nevertheless, it reminds us that we should question that which we take for granted when we analyze what others take for granted but which seems incomprehensible to us. Ultimately, developing precise comparative terminology, open-mindedly analyzing the rhetoric of millenarian groups, and letting their discourses speak for themselves rather than imposing theories on them may not be enough to understand them, but it seems the least we should do. We are more likely to be successful if we recognize that our membership in a modern, rationalist interpretive community driven by economic motivations and scientific conceptions of evidence will affect our analyses of movements that see themselves as the remnant forces of the divine in a grand supernaturally ordained scheme. These movements believe they have—to recall Frost's poetic lines opening this essay—the Secret that "knows." Perhaps the best we can do is only "suppose," but if we try to understand, the "dance" will have been worth it.
Richard K. Emmerson is the executive director of the Medieval Academy of America and the editor of Speculum. He has chaired the Department of English at Western Washington University, taught at Georgetown University and Walla Walla College, and served as deputy director of the Division of Fellowships and Seminars, National Endowment for the Humanities. His publications include Antichrist in the Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Apocalypticism, Art, and Literature (1981), Approaches to Teaching Medieval English Drama (1990), The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (with Bernard McGinn, 1992), The Apocalyptic Imagination in Medieval Literature (with Ronald Herzman, 1992), and Antichrist and Doomsday: The Middle French Jour du Jugement (with David Hult, 1998). Notes 1 Robert Frost, "The Secret Sits," Edward Connery Lathem, ed., The Poetry of Robert Frost (New York, 1969), 362. 2 Stanley Fish, "Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases," in Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 268–92, quotation p. 270. 3 See, for example, James Reston, Jr., The Last Apocalypse: Europe at the Year 1000 (New York, 1998); the special section of the August 16, 1999, issue of U.S. News and World Report (vol. 127, no. 7) titled "The Year 1000: The Way We Were" (32–94); and the web site of the Center for Millennial Studies (http://www.mille.org), which debates the so-called "Terrors of the Year 1000." The center's guiding light, Richard Landes, has been largely responsible for the historical re-analysis of apocalyptic behavior near the turn of the last millennium. The classroom text, The Year 2000: Essays on the End, Charles B. Strozier and Michael Flynn, eds. (New York, 1997), begins with a helpful essay by Landes, "The Apocalyptic Year 1000: Millennial Fever and the Origins of the Modern West," 13–29. For the opposing side of this debate, see Sylvain Gouguenheim, Les fausses terreurs de l'an mil: Attente de la fin des temps ou approfondissement de la foi? (Paris, 1999). Landes sets forth his argument more systematically in "The Fear of an Apocalyptic Year 1000: Augustinian Historiography, Medieval and Modern," forthcoming in Speculum (January 2000). Even a book that sets out to debunk the present fascination with Y2K, Stephen Jay Gould's Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist's Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown (New York, 1997), seems compelled to discuss the year 1000 (83–87). 4 Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements, 2d edn. (New York, 1961). Later editions changed the subtitle to Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (New York, 1970), suggesting a more "objective" perspective, but these editions remain unreliable as general surveys of medieval millenarianism. For more balanced discussions, see Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford, 1969); Roberto Rusconi, L'attesa della fine: Crisi della società, profezia ed Apocalisse in Italia al tempo del grande scisma d'Occidente (1378–1417) (Rome, 1979); and several studies by Robert E. Lerner: "Refreshment of the Saints: The Time after Antichrist as a Station for Earthly Progress in Medieval Thought," Traditio 32 (1976): 97–144; The Powers of Prophecy: The Cedar of Lebanon Vision from the Mongol Onslaught to the Dawn of the Enlightenment (Berkeley, Calif., 1983); "Joachim of Fiore's Breakthrough to Chiliasm," Cristianesimo nella storia 6 (1985): 489–512; and "The Medieval Return to the Thousand-Year Sabbath," in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn, eds. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), 51–88. 5 David G. Rowley's analysis of millenarianism is misled by reliance on Cohn; it is simply not the case, for example, that after Augustine "literal belief in an imminent apocalypse appeared only in movements that deviated sharply from mainstream culture"; Rowley, "'Redeemer Empire': Russian Millenarianism," AHR 104 (December 1999): 1582–1602, 1586. For studies of apocalypticism in mainstream medieval and Renaissance culture, see my Antichrist in the Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Apocalypticism, Art, and Literature (Seattle, 1981); and "Apocalyptic Themes and Imagery in Medieval and Renaissance Literature," The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, Vol. 2, Apocalypticism in Western History and Culture, Bernard McGinn, ed. (New York, 1998), 402–41. 6 See the excellent bibliographies concluding the essays in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, Vol. 1, The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity, John J. Collins, ed. (New York, 1998). 7 Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium (1961), 307. 8 For a thoughtful and nuanced appraisal of the beneficial as well as destructive consequences of apocalypticism, see Bernard McGinn, "Apocalyptic Spirituality: Approaching the Third Millennium," in Strozier and Flynn, The Year 2000, 73–80. 9 Stephen D. O'Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric (New York, 1994), 15. 10 O'Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse, 15. 11 Hillel Schwartz, "The End of the Beginning: Millenarian Studies, 1969–1975," Religious Studies Review 2 (1976): 6. 12 Michael Barkun, Disaster and the Millennium (New Haven, Conn., 1974), 1. 13 Although Seventh-day Adventists grew from the Millerite movement and were disappointed that Christ did not return in 1843–1844, they were not particularly dispossessed nor responding to a disaster in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, they built a multimillion-dollar hierarchical organization operating hospitals and universities, while maintaining apocalyptic expectations. On their origins, see Bryan W. Ball, The English Connection: The Puritan Roots of Seventh-day Adventist Belief (Cambridge, 1981); and The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century, Ronald L. Numbers and Jonathan M. Butler, eds. (Bloomington, Ind., 1987). 14 On Heaven's Gate and its relationship to the discourse of the popular media, see Stephen D. O'Leary, "Apocalypticism in American Popular Culture: From the Dawn of the Nuclear Age to the End of the American Century," The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, Vol. 3, Apocalypticism in the Modern Period and the Contemporary Age, Stephen J. Stein, ed. (New York, 1998), 392–426. 15 See Gower's Vox Clamantis, 1.10.765–68, Eric W. Stockton, trans., The Major Latin Works of John Gower (Seattle, 1962), 67. For this and other mainstream cultural uses of apocalyptic imagery, see Richard K. Emmerson, "The Apocalypse in Medieval Culture," in Emmerson and McGinn, Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, 293–332. 16 Bernard McGinn, "Apocalypticism and Church Reform," Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, 2: 78. 17 For scholarship on millenarianism and related areas, see Ted Daniels, Millennialism: An International Bibliography (New York, 1992). 18 See Art Levine, "The Devil in Gorbachev: Would Congress Balk at Deals with the Antichrist?" Washington Post (June 5, 1988): C1, C4. 19 For an example of such easy, but unhelpful, comparisons, see Ernest L. Tuveson, "The Millenarian Structure of The Communist Manifesto," in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents, and Repercussions, C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich, eds. (Manchester, 1984), 323–41. For a critique, see my "Apocalypse Now and Then," Modern Language Quarterly 46 (1985): 435. 20 See Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays (New York, 1971); and Abbas Amanat, "The Resurgence of Apocalyptic in Modern Islam," Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, 3: 230–64. 21 A good example is Eugen Weber, Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults, and Millennial Beliefs through the Ages (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). 22 On apocalypse as a genre, see John J. Collins, Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre, Semeia 14 (Missoula, Mont., 1979). 23 James D. Talbot and Eugene V. Gallagher, Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), is helpful but published too early to take into consideration the effects of Waco and recent revelations of a government cover-up in its investigation. 24 David Ownby, "Chinese Millenarian Traditions: The Formative Age," AHR 104 (December 1999): 1518. 25 For such approaches, see Sylvia L. Thrupp, ed., Millennial Dreams in Action: Studies in Revolutionary Religious Movements (New York, 1970). The uneven nature of some essays in this influential collection is in part due to its open-ended definition of "millennium," which in Thrupp's figurative use "may be an age to last indefinitely, with no doom ahead" (p. 12). 26 Lerner, "Medieval Return to the Thousand-Year Sabbath," 51. 27 Tom Shales, "The Day After," Washington Post (November 18, 1983): C8; and "The Night of 'The Day After,'" Washington Post (November 21, 1983): B1. 28 Earl Rovit, "On the Contemporary Apocalyptic Imagination," American Scholar 37 (1968): 463. 29 Dick Teresi, review of The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity, by Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin, in New York Times Book Review (August 8, 1999): 6.

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