Today, the Millenium. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
All this millennium foofaraw
has sent me back to my old 1911 Encyclopaedia
Britannica. It has a long article under the
word millennium. In Christian eschatology
the word has been used to designate some vague time
in the future when, and I quote,
"all human flaws will have vanished, and perfect goodness and happiness prevail."
It's the time of readiness for
the Second Coming.
Christian theologians used the word Chiliasm
for this kind of thinking. That comes from the
Greek word chilias, which means any group of
one thousand items -- years in this case. The idea
of a future time when we've been perfected isn't
unique to Christianity. Other religions also look
for that future.
One thousand was chosen, not so much on a
Scriptural basis, as a way to suggest a large
number. Our familiar algorithms of arithmetic were
unknown when the idea arose. We didn't have means
for expressing a thousand in terms of the tens and
hundreds that make it up. When the Romans used the
symbol M for a thousand, they revealed none
of the number's structure.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Chiliasm is
that it doesn't refer to the date when the
Messiah is to come but, rather, to the
duration of His reign on Earth. And the idea
that the Messiah will come and reign for a thousand
years isn't a Christian notion at all. It comes
from late Hebrew scriptures, many of which don't
even appear in the Old Testament of the Christian
Church.
Early Christians expected this thousand-year era to
arrive soon, but the millenium became a theological
football in fourth-century Church politics. Finally
the Church half-heartedly embraced an idea that St.
Augustine had advanced when he was young. He'd
argued that we were already living in the
millenium. We had been since Christ's resurrection.
But that was a side road. The established Church
soon laid it aside, and the year 1000 came and went
without great significance. Chiliasm gained energy
during the Reformation, however. For
sixteenth-century Protestants, the Catholic Church
was the Antichrist, and the millenium was just
around the corner. Then, as Protestants gained a
firm footing, they too quit talking about
milleniums.
Milleniumism (or Chiliasm) resurfaced whenever
society was torn by unrest. It turned up again
during the Industrial Revolution. And we see a lot
of it on this last day of 1999. That's not because
of the round number 2000, for the millenium can
supposedly start any time. Rather, it's because we
live in times of immense social unrest. Wars,
genocide, religious contention, and technological
change have all reached a fever pitch.
The sad fact is, the year 2000 won't sort out our
troubles for us. We'll still have to do the
sorting. When we wake up Saturday morning, hard
work and intelligent problem-solving will still be
our lot. So I wish us all a Happy New Year as we
settle in to deal with a world that will still be
in ferment -- tomorrow morning.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
