The Transformation of Early Christianity from an Eschatological to a Socialized Movement. Lyford P. Edwards

The two men are very comparable as regards extent and variety of knowledge, intellectual power, and philosophic insight. They are very unlike however, in their treatment of the subject. Origen simply explains away the whole Chiliastic concept or rather so spiritualizes it that nothing resembling the original idea is left. His whole insistence is that it must be taken figuratively, and without the least warrant he asserts that his interpretation is "according to the understanding of the apostles."[31] He makes the whole subject so subjective, so intellectual, so metaphysical that there is left no content for the ordinary man to hold to in place of that which is demolished. In the overthrow of Eastern Chiliasm Origen holds as conspicuous a position as Augustine in the overthrow of Western. He did away with a doctrine, too carnal perhaps, but at any rate concrete and comforting, and he substituted an intellectual abstraction. For instance in explaining, or better explaining away, the Chiliastic feasts in the New Jerusalem he says:[32] "The rational nature growing by each individual step, enlarged in understanding and in power of perception is increased in intellectual growth; and ever gazing purely on the causes of things it attains perfection, firstly, viz., that by which it ascends to the truth, and secondly that by which it abides in it, having problems and the understanding of things and the causes of things as the food on which it may feast. And in all things this food is to be understood as the contemplation and understanding of God, which is of a measure appropriate and suitable to this nature, which was made and created, etc."

      This kind of thing is the intellectual equivalent of the process in physics by which the scientist takes some tangible solid body and proceeds first to liquify it, then to volitilize it and finally to blow it entirely away. We strongly suspect that the Eastern Chiliasts felt that the whole thing was a kleptistic legerdemain by which they were deprived of a favorite doctrine without receiving anything in place of it.

      Augustine's method differs toto caelo from this. While Origen handles the subject like a metaphysician, Augustine handles it like a statesman. His doctrine is just as concrete as the one he displaces. He takes nothing away without giving something equally tangible and of better quality in its place. The transition from Chiliasm to the Origenistic conception of the future, would be, for the ordinary person, an incredible and almost impossible intellectual feat. The transition from Chiliasm to the Augustinian conception of the future is natural, easy, and perfectly within the power of a very ordinary and commonplace mentality. As a matter of fact it made its way without the smallest difficulty into the religious consciousness of the whole of western Christianity. Any person who aims at changing the theological opinions of others can find no better manual of method than the twentieth book of the City of God. Augustine was very careful to keep all the symbols, catch words, and paraphernalia of Chiliasm. He was careful not only to keep them all but to keep them all in their literal sense. He explains away none of them and allegorizes none of them. By carefully preserving the ancient shibboleths he was easily able to empty them of their former content. He holds to the millennium, the idea that is, of thousand years, as firmly as any Chiliast but he says the thousand years is to be reckoned as dating from the establishment of the Church on earth i.e., the first coming of Christ. So he is careful to preserve the phrase: "The Reign of the Saints"; he merely substitutes for the Chiliastic content of that phase the very comfortable and plausable doctrine that the saints are his own Christian contemporaries. He is very skillful, not to say flattering, in his method of 'putting this across.' So he retains similarly the old formula about the two resurrections—but makes the first resurrection out to be the marvelous transformation and participation in the resurrection of Christ which the Christian experiences by virtue of the sacrament of baptism. More important still is his new content for the phrase "Kingdom of Heaven." This instead of a state of future blessedness becomes the already existing church on earth. Finally he indulges in a long and apparently straight faced discussion as to whether the reign of anti-Christ—which he preserves in its most literal form with the regulation duration of three years and a half—whether this is to be reckoned as part of the thousand years or not. This inconsequential detail is labored at length in such a manner as to delight the soul of any good Bible reading Chiliast. By preserving till the last this single element of Chiliasm which he leaves untouched and then treating it in the good, old, religious fashion of Irenaeus or some other primitive worthy, he very skillfully disarms criticism and it is only by a strong effort that the reader realizes what a tremendous blow has been struck at the original Chiliastic doctrine.

      Let us see what the changes of Augustine amount to. It is not less than the total destruction of Chiliasm, or at the very least the postponement of the end of the world till the year 1000 A.D. Augustine's doctrine is essentially that of the ordinary, orthodox, Bible Christian today. Sometime in the future—Augustine said possibly in the year 1000 A.D.—Christ was to come again to the earth. Then follows the resurrection of the dead, the final judgment, and heaven and hell. The questions about the three years and a half of anti-Christ, together with Gog and Magog—great favorites with the Chiliasts—are held to be insoluble as to the time of their appearance; whether to be reckoned as part of the thousand years or immediately succeeding it.

      It is commonly said that Augustine is responsible for the belief that the world was to come to an end in the year 1000 A.D. This is not strictly correct. Augustine nowhere makes that direct assertion. He nowhere—so far as the writer is aware—even implies it. What he does is to offer it as a possible alternative hypothesis to the idea that the thousand years, (since 1000 is the cube of 10,) is to be taken as a statement of the total duration of the world. As the matter is of some interest we give the original passage in Dod's translation:[33] "Now the thousand years may be understood in two ways so far as occurs to me: either because these things happen in the sixth thousand of years or sixth millennium (the latter part of which is now passing) as if during the sixth day, which is to be followed by a sabbath which has no evening, the endless rest of the saints, so that, speaking of a part under the name of the whole, he calls the last part of the millennium—the part that is which had yet to expire before the end of the world—a thousand years; or he used the thousand years as an equivalent for the whole duration of this world, employing the number of perfection to mark the fullness of time. For a thousand is the cube of ten.... For the same reason we cannot better interpret the words of the psalm. "The word which he commanded to a thousand generations," than by understanding it to mean, "to all generations."

      The above sketch summarizes essentially all that has survived about the Chiliasm of the early Church. The Chiliastic passages in the Church literature up to and including Augustine, though rather widely scattered, are not great in bulk. If printed together they would make only a moderate sized pamphlet. But their importance is by no means to be measured by their size. Chiliasm, better than any other movement of the early period, serves as a standard for measuring the degree of the socialization of Christianity. It comprises the only body of doctrine which passed from practically universal acceptance to practically universal repudiation during the period when the Church changed from a small esoteric cult to a dominant factor of society. Considered from this point of view, the causes of the decline of Chiliasm possess a historical importance out of all proportion to the importance of Chiliasm itself. More than any other religious movement of the time Chiliasm was free from the direct pressure of distinctly religious influences. Its declension was more nearly a case of unconscious social and psychological determinism than any other contemporary theological phenomenon. Its chief supporters and opponents are not to be regarded so much as factors in its history, as points where the socializing forces operating in the early Church become for the moment visible.

      Certain facts stand out even in the short epitome we have given. Chiliasm never became powerful in the great cities. It survived longest and was most popular in regions[34] comparatively cut off from the great centers of civilization. Hellenizing influences were unfavorable to it, Romanizing influences indifferent to it.

      The reasons for this are numerous and most of them have been treated sufficiently by previous investigators, but in the writer's judgment certain other important influences have been either slighted or entirely ignored. We shall consider one or two.

      The supremely important fact in early Christian history is the development of the concept of "The Church" as an independent, self-existing, metaphysical entity. This metaphysical entity was conceived as embodying itself in the whole body of believers; living, dead, and yet to be born. The entity was eternal, indestructible, and in its essence