As one of the most tumultuous years in recent memory fades into wintry darkness, we face the giant black wall of 2012—The Year It’s All Supposed to End (again).
An Indian guru prognosticates that 2012 will usher in Kali Yuga’s degeneracy, space cadet Terence McKenna prophesied that 2012 would take us to “Timewave Zero,” and a popular interpretation of the Maya calendar says the curtains will forever fall at 11:11AM on December 21, 2012.
Well, well, may I share some historical perspective on doomsday prophecies with you?
The Pope and his two pupils, Robert the Pious of France and the Emperor Otto III, were of one mind. The year 1000 would very likely mean the end of the world, the Day of Days, Christ's return as Judge, long predicted for this fateful date. Pope Sylvester II, the famous Gerbert of Aurillac, the leading scholar of the age and the first Frenchman to occupy the Papal See, was awaiting the New Year in Rome. Otto III, great-grandson of the founder of the ruling house of Saxony, son of the Byzantine princess Theophano, scanned the heavens for portents of terror this same New Year's Eve in Ravenna.
The masses, too, had spent the year in great fear. There had been famine, pestilence, and the horrors of war. Terrible things had happened in Rome and the Papal Palace before Gerbert ascended St. Peter's throne in February, 999. Now men hoped for miracles. Heavenly signs had been seen in many monasteries. Many people had made over their worldly goods to the Church, in order to be able to appear before the Eternal Judge in a proper state. Others had become hermits, or had entered one of the many new monasteries that had arisen in the wake of the movement of monastic revival and reform which had originated at the Monastery of Cluny in France.
A Dijon monk, Radulph Glaber, repeated predictions that had been on people's lips for centuries: "Satan sera bientot deschaine, les mille ans elant accomplis" (Satan shall straight be loosed when the thousand years have run their course). A terrible meteor had appeared in the heavens and men saw fiery armies battling above the clouds.
"Men's belief in the end of the world was aroused by the approach of the fateful date and stimulated by prodigies," concluded Henry Focillon in his book, The Year 1000. "A nameless fear took hold of mankind."
The terror that many had expected of this New Year's Day failed to come about. Some people merely decided to wait for Easter Sunday instead: this year it would be March 25th-at once Annunciation and Whitsuntide. But Doomsday did not come.
The year 1000 was not crucial to world history, and people realized that they had prepared themselves for paradise unnecessarily.
People began to find their way about on Earth again. If God had not annihilated the 1,000 year Reign of Sin during the night of December 31, 999, then He was unlikely to decide on a new date in the foreseeable future. That same Dijon monk, Radulph Glaber, now recorded in his History of the World that "some three years after the year, the earth was covered with a white mantle of churches."
The white mantle of churches grew grey with age. Only their stones remained as witness to the aspirations of a mankind that believed itself redeemed once again. But none who had lived through it ever forgot the fear of those last minutes before the bells tolled midnight on New Year's Eve, the expectation of an implacable Judgment which would find every man hopelessly mired in sin. For in the fifty-ninth minute of December 31, 999, men were afraid -mortally afraid.
All Ages of Man are periods marked by faith and by a guilty conscience. Ergo, doomsday prognostications always spur the will to repent and quench every other impulse of the human heart.