Apocalyptic Hearts: Part I
The Pursuit of the Millennium and the apocalyptic cult's role in the development of early capital
In the bowels of the Middle Ages, with the expanding trade networks facilitated by stability in the Mediterranean, the industrial centers of long-sleeping Europe began to expand, the fires of the mills burning brightly, the mines digging deeper, creating populous urban centers with industries and social dynamics that shaped the way we live today. But as the dynamism and culture of capitalism began to take shape, so did the dissent and immiseration that accompanies the uprooting of people. In the Middle Ages, this was seen in the dispossession of peasants by lords or famine or disease, who then congregated around the textile factories of the industrial cities of northern and central Europe, looking for work, relief and revelation.
From this urban strata, in the centuries between the crusades and the Reformation, a progression of cult-like formations contracted and dissolved, under the headings of charismatic leaders who, labelling themselves saviors of one variety or another, led brutal uprisings centered around apocalyptic prophecies distilled from Biblical passages, interpretations and visions.
These groups presented a massive danger to the reigning authorities and their leaders were often put on the chopping block or burnt at the stake after the damage was done. They challenged social formations, and more than anything hated the wealthy and the middle-managing clergy. They venerated idols distilled from royal legend and themselves, creating a model of response to the immiseration of capital that we still see today: cults of personality, apocalyptic language being worked into the political, elitism of the disenfranchised chosen (read red-pilled), purity politics, communistic ownership, free love and megalomania.
Historian Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, a book written over 10 years and completed in 1957, spells the history of these Medieval “millenarian” cults and movements in unsparing detail. Cohn traces their movements from the turn of the first millennium to the mid-1500s, referencing movements that spun off from the Crusades in France up to anarcho-communist movements leading up to the Reformation in Germany.
A sober historian, Cohn is reluctant to make too many assertions that compare these times with the present day. At times, he traces the claims of French and German ethno-Christian purity and its resultant violence against the Jews to the politics of fascist Europe in the 20th century. At other times he notes the survival of beliefs of “free spirit” cults to beliefs that can be seen in the thought of Nietzsche and the hippy movements of the 60s. He shows the early emergence of European communism as a route for the restructuring of society in favor of the workers. However careful he is not to fall into speculation, Cohn did write a book a decade later called Warrant for Genocide that directly connects these beliefs with the eventual mass genocide of Jews in Europe during Hitler’s attempts to usher in the Thousand Year Reich.
In PoM, Cohn outlines five characteristics of the millenarian sects: collectivity, terrestrial, imminent, total, and miraculous. These described a vision of revolution, always spiritual and sometimes political, that asked for heaven on earth now, through a total eclipse of the current society with the help of living saints and even the Christian God himself.
Based on interpretations of the Book of Revelations, millenarians believe that the return of Christ would be a moment in the historical timeline where the wicked would be smitten and the chosen would live in thousand years of peace and plenty (thus the term “millenarian”).
This went against the accepted Church dogma that held, since Augustus, that the return of utopia and the golden age of Christianity would either occur purely spiritually (not political) or had already been realized with the birth of Christ.
Cohn outlines in detail the general trajectory of the “prophets” who would take advantage of the disdain for the Church and the growing number of urban poor. In most instances, a stranger who claimed to be chosen – either by naming himself the resurrected or returned leaders of European myth, a prophet in the style of Christ or Christ himself returned – would come forward, preach asceticism, claim the Pope as the antichrist and the clergy as the servants of the devil, claim a true interpretation and fulfilment of the scripture, point to recent misfortunes as signs of the Second Coming, and then gather large groups around him. Cohn calls this structure the “messianism of the poor.” With success, the prophet would often demand more and more devotion and authority from the followers, who were sometimes disaffected peasants, but mostly the most precarious people from urban centers as well as criminals and others banished to the periphery of society.
Extreme piety and insecurity, and dissolution of connections from urban dislocation played a huge role, but there were also more instinctual and symbolic forces at play, says Cohn. “There were … many who merely acquired new wants without being able to satisfy them; and in them, the spectacle of wealth undreamt-of in earlier centuries provoked a bitter sense of frustration.”
In almost every case, the groups would then take up arms, turning their ire against the clergy, the wealthy and the Jews. The prophets themselves were semi-mystics with hazy origins, often outsiders (A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and among his own relatives and in his own household - Mark 6:4). They were often also often of the upper or merchant classes, lowly clerics, academics or nobility with little chance for promotion. Second sons and knights without causes.
If the social dislocation came from the changing political economy of growing capitalism, which Cohn notes was largely considered a force for liberation from the Church for those who could take part, the actual aggression was often channeled towards the Church. It didn’t help that the clergy had largely adopted the lifestyles of the rich and the famous. (In an interesting aside, Cohn notes that the desire for ascetic sensibilities and a more Christ-like life for clergy led to the founding of the Dominican and Franciscan orders).
The apocalyptic spirituality that theologians and institutions tried to make “spiritual” or a matter of identity was constantly demanded as a political reality. Yet, it was always symbolic victims or easy marks that met the violence of the poorly-armed millenarians. Sometimes having specific centers based around one individual and sometimes taking place over a large area under many different minor prophets, the movements were in constant response to the times, forming the extreme wings of various political and religious movements, from the errant politics of the crusade to the anti-authoritarianism of Ultraquism and Lutheranism.
While Cohn writes accounts of dozens of minor movements, it is helpful to dwell on just a few that occurred at various times in various conditions. He begins by noting a group of poor crusaders who survived the doomed Peoples Crusade. Among their ranks were several people who had streamed into the crusading armies at the behest of certain prophets. With a leader named King Tafur, who may have been a lowly knight who took up leadership of the bands of poor who marched off to the crusades, the Tafur were known for being zealots who slaughtered and plundered the unchosen Muslims and Jews in the holy land with no regard for the official sanctions of the barons who controlled the Holy Land during the Christian occupation. While not as directly Utopian as the cults to follow, this group prefigured the purity and armed violence of the later chapters and inspired the format and tradition for armed poor Europeans, who looked for figures to become the Emperor of the Last days that would usher in the millennium.
From the crusades, other figures would be born, such as Bertrand of Ray and Jacob (known as the Master of Hungary), who styled themselves as hermits and were then accepted as resurrected versions of heroes like Count Baldwin, a flemish nobleman who was crowned the Empire of Byzantium before being killed by Bulgarians. These men were accepted by the local leaders, capitalists and laypeople. Cohn supposes that the general acceptance was driven both by the prophetic utterances of the hermits as well as by a desire to throw off the yoke of the growing power of the French crown. Both of these men were able to claim lordship over vast swathes of land, killing clergy and Jews, before ultimately being brutally put down by alliances of Catholic Bishops and secular rulers.
In Germany from the 1200s onwards, a different set of influences beyond the Crusades mixed with the dissatisfaction of the urban people. First were the prophecies of Joachim of Fiore, a devout man and “inventor of the new prophetic system, which was to be the most influential one known to Europe until the appearance of Marxism”. Joachim categorized the world into a series of ages, with the third age being an “Age of the Spirit” similar to the millennium which had already been foretold in the Book of Revelations and in a series of texts called the Sibylline Oracles, which had so animated the poor of France.
“Horrified though the unworldly mystic [Joachim] would have been to see it happen, it is unmistakably the Joachite phantasy of historical evolution expounded by the German Idealist philosophers Lessing, Schelling, Fichte, and to some extent Hegel; in Auguste Comte’s idea of history as an ascent from the theological up to the scientific phase; and again in the Marxian dialectic of the three stages of primitive communism.”
These teachings coupled with the growing animosity between the German people and the Pope led to a series of violent sects that became true valences of revolutionary power in the lead-up to the Reformation. Cohn points to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II as a figure that would animate repeatedly this opposition, with prophecies of his resurrection inspiring generations of millenarians including the revolutionary flagellants, who marched from town to town whipping themselves to atone for the past and to usher in utopia, even whipping babies from the crib to baptize them into the sect.
These traditions mixed with another tendency that Cohn delves into with a certain degree of horror: the followers of the Doctrine of the Free Spirit. These Brethren of the Free Spirit believed that some could place themselves above sin by denying its existence and living a life completely in line with their wills.
“The Heresy of the Free Spirit therefore demands a place in any survey of revolutionary eschatology – and this is still true even though its adherents were not social revolutionaries and did find their followers amongst the turbulent masses of the urban poor,” Cohn writes.
“They were in fact gnostics intent upon their own individual salvation; but the gnosis at which they arrived was a quasi-mystical – an affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified that it amounted to a total denial of every kind of restraint and limitation. These people could be regarded as remote precursors of Bakunin and Nietzsche – or rather of that bohemian intelligentsia which during the last half-century has been living from ideas once expressed by Bakunin and Nietzsche in their wilder moments.”
Reviled by the Church, these people lived in clandestine communities, operated in an occult-like fraternity with adepts and novices, disdained property, believing everything was theirs for the taking, as the elect; and prioritized nakedness as a return to the State of Nature, a time before the fall that had reentered the European imagination through translated texts of the ancient stoics. In their philosophy, the chosen of Christian millenarianism mixed with the natural state of anarchism of the stoics and became a lifestyle of force that appealed to learned people inside cities. Above all, the most famous of this sect gained renown through their “voluntary poverty”, which signaled spiritual purity and a life lived in line with the saints, and, to a certain extent, with Adam himself before the fall. Where the Church believed that the fall could not be undone, The Free Spirit thought that this Edenic state could be achieved through lifestyle and adherence to their own will, which was, naturally the will of the creator.
On its own, this sect of intelligentsia and mystics did not amount to any sort of mass revolutionary tendency, but Cohn notes that it “became a revolutionary myth as soon as it was presented to the turbulent poor and fused with the phantasies of popular eschatology.”
Nowhere was this more apparent that in the Taborites. After the Czech people gained some independence from the Church, a radical sect broke off and took up arms, dislodging nobles from a castle where they set up a new society that was then supposed to radiate out and usher in a new world. These people lived in the manner of Adam (and are sometimes called Adamintes), forsaking the rituals of the Church and trying to live in a communistic way before they were stamped out by a coalition of less-radical reformers and Catholics exterminated them.
During the Reformation proper, fringe groups continued to group around ideas of the millennium that figured the Pope as antichrist. Luther, famously, condemned these movements that crystallized in the well-known Peasants War and the revolt of Thomas Müntzer, who rejected the Church structure outright. Again, the Taborite pattern was repeated in the city of Münster in northwestern Germany, where a sect of Anabaptists, extreme Protestants, preached a complete rejection of Catholicism. The Anabaptists in Münster overthrew the Catholics and Lutherans and established their commune. Eventually, a man named tailor-turned-actor named John of Leyden declared himself king, instituted polygamy, installed a brutal regime and said that an empire of the chosen would expand out from the city. Eventually, all of the Anabaptists there and throughout France and Germany were slaughtered.
This is, of course, a distillation of hundreds of pages of historical accounts into a small space, and my summaries hardly do justice to the mind-blowing tendencies, battles and beliefs that Cohn relates. While Cohn only gestures to nascent capitalism, focusing more on the response of the nobles and the priests, it's clear that this tendency of apocalyptic sects to form and consolidate and then be exterminated is in a dialectic relationship with the changing social patterns of capitalist society. Like today, cults form with changing social norms, dislocation and the increased exposure of everyday people to extreme wealth. Cult leaders are charismatic, and often fail sons of the upper classes, who, after gaining power exercise their fantasies by first reclaiming the power and vice they see in successful nobles.
Often the greatest fears of society are embodied in their beliefs. The invading Turks, environmental disasters and plague animated people to violence, full of the belief that ancient, prophetic scriptures are surely soon to come. In this way, the most neurotic elements of capitalist society are crystallized and then exterminated in rituals of social sacrifice. The cages where John of Leyden’s broken body was kept for all to see still hang off the cathedral at Münster.
While they can be read as rebellions against religion, in reality, the social elements of the movement should be read in relationship to modern society, as reinforcing elements, with the beliefs popping up ever so often, whether it be in the tendencies of massive modern political movements, the American apocalypse cults or in the lifestyles of libertarians and bohemians.
Some questions raised by these groups remain in our cultural imagination, as anxieties, animate dystopian and utopian visions. Is heaven a place on Earth? Is it achievable? Is there a possibility of return to a golden age before hierarchy, an anarcho-communist past? Should all these things be read as spiritual allegories as Augustine supposed? Are social hierarchy and allotted roles and poverty a necessity of society as Luther and Thomas Aquinas before him supposed? Are apocalyptic sects in this tradition a feature or a bug of capitalism? Do they simply reinforce it by acting as relief valves? If the dissatisfaction from capitalism ultimately leads to communist revolts, can these take place without the tyrannical rule of a megalomaniacal fail son? Or does it lead to ever-increasingly niche identities, beliefs and failed attempts to exit the system?