Such arguments — that people were indeed gripped by an anticipation of the end days in the build-up to the Millennium, that it inspired in them a convulsive mixture of dread and hope, and that it reached a climax in the one-thousandth anniversary of the Resurrection – have ceased, over the past couple of decades, to rank as quite the heresies they previously were. Medievalists, like everyone else, have their fashions — and debate on the apocalyptic character of the year 1000 has recently been all the rage. No doubt, as critics have pointed out, the controversy owes much to timing: it can hardly be coincidence that it should have picked up such sudden pace over the years that immediately preceded and followed the year 2000. Yet this does not serve to debunk it. Historians will inevitably garner insights from the times in which they work. To live through the turning of a millennium is a chance that does not come along every day. What, then, could be more self-defeating than to close one’s eyes to the perspectives that such a once-in-a-thousand-years experience might provide?
Certainly, it would be vain of me to deny that this study of the first Christian Millennium has not been inspired, to a certain degree, by reflections upon the second. In particular, it has been informed by a dawning realisation that the move into a self-consciously new era is not at all how I had imagined it would be. Nervous as I was, in my more superstitious or dystopian moments, as to what the passage from 1999 to 2000 might bring, I had vaguely assumed that the world of the third millennium would feel brighter, more optimistic — younger even. But it does not.
I can remember, back when I was in my teens, and living in the shadow of the Cold War, praying that I would live to see the twenty- first century, and all of the world with me; but now, having crossed that particular threshold, and looking ahead to the future, I find that I am far more conscious than I ever was before of how infinitely and terrifyingly time stretches, and of how small, by comparison, the span of humanity’s existence is likely to prove. ‘Earth itself may endure, but it will not be humans who cope with the scorching of our planet by the dying sun; nor even, perhaps, with the exhaustion of Earth’s resources.’ So wrote Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, in a jeremiad cheerily titled Our Final Century: Will Civilisation Survive the Twenty- First Century?==
Far from having been inspired by any mood of fin de siecle angst, that book was in fact written in the immediate wake of the new millennium; nor, since its publication in 2003, does the mood of pessimism among leading scientists appear to have grown any lighter. When James Lovelock, the celebrated environmentalist, first read Rees’s book, he took it ‘as no more than a speculation among friends and nothing to lose sleep over’; a bare three years on, and he was gloomily confessing in his own book, The Revenge of Gaia, ‘I was so wrong.’ The current state of alarm about global warming being what it is, even people unfamiliar with Lovelock’s blood-curdling thesis that the world is on the verge of becoming effectively uninhabitable should be able to guess readily enough what prompted his volte-face. ‘Our future’, he has written memorably, if chillingly, ‘is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.’ And Lovelock’s best estimate as to precisely when climate change will send us all over the edge? Within twenty to thirty years: some time around, say, 2033.
More than a thousand years ago, a saintly abbot drew upon a very similar metaphor. The vessel that bore sinful humanity, he warned, was beset all around by a gathering storm surge: ‘perilous times are menacing us, and the world is threatened with its end’. That the abbot proved to be wrong does not offer us any reassurance that James Lovelock and his fellow prophets of calamitous climate change are necessarily wrong as well: for science, no doubt, can offer a more reliable guide to the future than the Bible has tended to do over the years. Though the fretful Christians of the tenth and eleventh centuries may appear remote to us, and remote all their presumptions and expectations, we in the West are never more recognisably their descendants than when we ponder whether our sins will end up the ruin of us. The sheer range of opinions on global warming, from those, like Lovelock, who fear the worst to those who dismiss it altogether; the spectacle of anxious and responsible people, perfectly convinced that the planet is indeed warming, nevertheless filling up their cars, heating their jiouses and taking cheap flights; the widespread popular presumption, often inchoate but
