By Victor Greto
History can be as cruel as teasing siblings.
Take an intelligent man from the sixth century who changed how we look at time, a man known to history as Dionysius Exiguus. That’s Dennis the Short to you and me.
On orders from Pope John I, Dennis created the template for the calendar we use today, dividing years between B.C. (before Christ) and A.D. (anno domini — the year of our Lord.)
Previously, those who kept the calendars during the Roman Empire — as well as those intellectuals who survived the fall of the Empire in the west in the fifth century — used the founding of Rome (753 B.C.) as their dividing point.
It was hard work, but the Gospels had enough clues for Dennis to create something manageable enough to last, so far, more than 1,400 years.
Manageable but not ideal. For what this vertically challenged monk inadvertently helped create was millennia fever, which is about to hit the world again.
Millennia fever is commonly explained in two ways: One derives from the New Testament’s Book of Revelation, which predicted a millennium or one thousand years of peace before a final battle between Satan and the forces of good and the Last Judgment; the other lies within our inherent fascination with numbers, especially numbers ending in zeroes.
Dennis miscalculated, however; his B.C.-A.D. mark was, well, short.
Most scholars now agree that Jesus was born just before 4 B.C., because two of the Gospels report that Herod the Great was alive when Jesus was born, and Herod died in 750 A.U.C. (ab urbe condita or from the birth of Rome). Dennis assumed Jesus was born four years later, according to his calculations based on the Gospel of Luke.
It also didn’t help that Dennis’ calendar went from 1 B.C. to 1 A.D., because Europe didn’t recognize zero as a number at the time. Thus, after Europe adopted the zero from the Arabs in the eighth or ninth century, Jesus became impossibly born in a non-year. Now, nit-pickers have a heck of a time convincing others that the new millennium doesn’t really start until 2001, because, if we celebrate in 2000, we’re actually, well, short.
“There should be a year 0, but there isn’t,” says Alexander Soifer, professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. “The current confusion stems from the admiration for round numbers. 2000 just sounds great. I catch myself watching the odometer for round numbers. We have a built-in love for round numbers.”
To further confuse the issue, both understandings of millennia fever have crossbred over the centuries.
Popular culture, at least, has forgotten details from the Book of Revelation, which predicts 1,000 years of peace under Christ’s rule before the final, inevitably victorious battle against Satan.
But, somehow, especially since about the 16th century, we’ve confused Revelations with our fascination with end-of-the-world prophecies that usually appear toward the end of each century.
This sort of millenarianism (the only word, incidentally, where you can spell a variation of millennia with only one “n”) has its roots in an ancient Persian religion called Zoroastrianism. That faith pitted the universe starkly between a good god and a bad one, measuring their battles against each other as well as the ultimate victory of the good, in thousand-year intervals.
The most famous Christian reckoning of history into thousand-year chunks was done by Irish Archbishop James Ussher in 1650.
Ussher saw Dennis’ short mistake right away, tacking on four years to his own calculation of Earth’s age. The world was created, Ussher wrote, at 9 a.m. on Oct. 23, 4004 B.C. He achieved that number by adding, among other things, the ages of the patriarchs of the Bible, such as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Why 4,000 years? Christian mystics and intellectuals had, for centuries, equated the six days of creation from Genesis with thousand-year intervals, taking their cue from a verse in Psalm 90, which says in part that a “thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday …”
That means the big one is due in the year 2000.
Even so, all this may be beside the point. Why people have millenarian expectations is perhaps even more interesting.
At least on the lower-class level before the 19th century, millenarianism expressed a wish to overthrow the upper classes. It was a “cry for social justice when it cannot be had by normal means,” says Richard Wunderli, professor of history at CU-Springs and author of a book about a 15th-century German “millenarian” movement.
Actually, Wunderli says, he’s never found evidence that most of the population throughout history has ever understood end-of-the-world expectations in terms of calculating thousand-year intervals.
The division of time into millennia was always, Wunderli says, an upper-class idea that only gradually filtered to the rest of the culture during and after the 19th century, when we all began to read and write.
Now that numerology has fused with Christian apocalyptics, trickling down to become part of our own thinking, millennia fever may more than ever reveal our own anxieties about God, destiny and the nature of faith.
The Guardian of London estimates that 1,500 millennial American cults exist, and nearly 21 million Americans feel a pressing need to convert others to Christianity before the new millennium arrives.
Even that old prediction guru Nostradamus, a 16th-century French astrologer and physician, predicted that 1999 will inaugurate the rule of “a Great King of Terror,” and “pestilence, war and famine shall fall upon the earth.”
Still, Nostradamus predicted the world wouldn’t really end until about 3900 A.D.
Despite these more glamorously absurd aspects of millennia fever, the year 2000 probably will see dramatically powerful individual expressions of anxiety about the turn of the calendar that transcend both numerology and traditional Christian apocalyptics.
Perhaps it will be an expression as powerful as Michelangelo’s about anxiety and faith in his famous and tortured “Last Judgment,” painted in the 16th century in the Sistine Chapel.
If you look closely, just to the right of Christ, you’ll see the martyr St. Bartholomew looking up at his judge. In the saint’s left hand is a flayed skin, with the ragged and drooping face of Michelangelo himself.
Unsure about his ultimate fate, filled with guilt and self-doubt, the husk of Michelangelo sags precariously between heaven and hell.
Like any human idea, millennia fever is only as foolish — or as profound — as its expression. In the hands of a master, it can become the ultimate expression of human self-doubt, anxiety and faith.