The Real History of the End of the World Read Online Free PDF

the interpretation of the others, even though we take pains; and this difficulty is increased by the repetition of the same things, in forms so different, that the things referred to seem to be different, although in fact they are only differently stated.” dx
    I find it comforting that someone as brilliant and devout as Augustine couldn’t make sense of the book, either.
    Augustine agrees with the by then established belief that the dead shall rise bodily at the end, that the saints and sinners shall be judged, and that there shall be a blissful eternity for the elect.
    By the time he finished the City of God , about 426, Augustine was nearly seventy. He had witnessed cataclysmic changes in the Roman Empire. However, instead of looking for omens of the end in earthquakes and wars, he insisted that the real battles were spiritual.
    He was also irritated by people who constantly tried to figure out when the Second Advent would be. “A most unreasonable question,” he tells them. “For if it were good for us to know the answer, the Master, God himself, would have told His disciples when they asked him.” dy
    Augustine was not the first or the last to say this, but he was one of the most eloquent. His books, Confessions, The City of God, and On Christian Doctrine were tremendously influential in setting the policy of the Roman Church for the next thousand years. While people still tried to figure out the end time, since humans naturally have a need to know and control events, there were few real millennial movements until the early fourteenth century.
    Augustine also considered astrology to be nonsense and did not believe that Jews should be persecuted because their ancestors had a role in the death of Christ. These ideas were too much for most of his contemporaries and later readers to accept. However, his reading of the Apocalypse helped hold down doomsday panic throughout the Middle Ages.
    Then came the Reformation, and all hell broke loose, so to speak.

PART THREE:
    The Middle Ages

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    The Calm between the Panics
    Just before the third year after the millennium, throughout the
whole world . . . men began to reconstruct churches. . . . It was
as if the whole world were shaking itself free, shrugging off the
burden of the past and cladding itself everywhere in a white
mantle of churches.
    â€”Radolphus Glaber, Historia Libri Quinque, book III, part 13
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    T he image of the European Middle Ages in popular fiction and film is generally one of dirt, superstition, and religious fanaticism. Thus people who have only that impression of the time from, say, 900 to 1450 would expect it to be full of millennial and apocalyptic movements. That isn’t the case, at least not for medieval Europe.
    By the Middle Ages, people in Western Christendom had become used to the idea of the Second Coming, Armageddon, and the Last Judgment. Scenes of them were in art everywhere one looked. But, for most people, the end of the world was rather like background radiation or Muzak. They knew it was there but didn’t pay much attention to it. The monk Robert of Flavigny found this distressing. “Such is the state of the Church today that you see people of perfect faith, with whom, if you have a conversation about the final persecution and the coming of Antichrist, it seems as if they hardly believe it will come, or, if they believe it, in a dreamy way will attempt to demonstrate that it will happen after many centuries.” dz
    Of course, an earthquake or a particularly nasty invasion might jolt people into wondering if this were the Big One, rather like Californians who know a monster quake is coming but assume it won’t be right now. Still, whenever there’s a tremor, it crosses their minds that they might have been wrong.
    The years between about 1000 and 1350 were a time of expansion. The climate was mild and harvests abundant. This allowed peasants, who usually paid a