The Sack of Rome as painted by Karl Bryullov (ca. 1833). (from Wikimedia). The decline of the Roman Empire was probably one of the root causes of the development of Christian Millennialism. The contrast between a vision of the world based on collapses and one based on gradual changes remains with us today.
In 410 AD, the Visigoths entered Rome and sacked it. The "Eternal City" had fallen. Unthinkable, unexpected, unimaginable. Was it the end of a world? Or maybe the end of the world? So great was the resonance of the event that it generated a book that we are still reading nowadays: the "De Civitate Dei," written by the bishop of Carthage, Augustine.
From the other side of the Mediterranean Sea, Augustine looked at the fall of Rome in light of the Christian scriptures. Was it the embodiment of what the early Christian writers, Saul of Tarsus and John of Patmos, had described? Was it the "Parousia," the second coming? Was it the Apocalypse, when God would punish the wicked and reward the good on the day of universal judgment? Augustine disagreed. He interpreted the prophecies of the scriptures as allegoric. The human Rome, he said, was imperfect and earthbound. It could fall. But the heavenly Rome, the spiritual one, was directly linked to God, and it would never fall.
Augustine's vision became prevalent in Christian thought in later centuries, with only occasional appearances of millennialism in revolutionary and subversive cults. But the contrast between the cyclical and the millenarian view remained deep and radical. It still flares today with the commonly expressed vision of an impending collapse of our civilization. In its most extreme versions, it sees not only the fall of the proud towers of New York but the extinction of humankind and, perhaps, the truly apocalyptic event that goes under the name of the “Venus Effect,” that would transform our planet into a hot hell where nothing could live.
Origins of millennialism
The question of whether the universe would last forever or face an apocalyptic end started being posed much before the fall of Rome in 410 AD. It was part of the gradual human search for the rules of the Universe. In the Sumerian story of the Goddess Inanna (3rd Millennium BCE), perhaps the earliest surviving narrative we have, we read of epic battles among gods and among men but no overarching destiny that moves things in a certain direction. In Homer’s Iliad (early 1st millennium BCE), you hear of people dying and cities falling, but there is no evidence of a direction in which the universe moves. Human destiny is affected by the actions of capricious deities, whose plans are not infallible, just as human ones, thwarted by other deities or just by the nebulous entity called “fate.”
But we also see different views appearing as people started realizing that the world is not always the same. There is a past, a present, and a future. Will the future always be like the past? It is the time of the first attempts to understand the forces that move the universe. We see lists of “omens” — attempts to classify events in function of their future effects. If you see dark clouds, then it will rain. If you see a black cat, then you’ll face bad luck. It was the time of prophecies: prophets and prophetesses heard the voice of the Gods and dispensed their advice to ordinary mortals. It was the time of prayers and sacrifices: the Gods can be spoken to, and maybe they’ll listen to us.
But what is the will of the Gods? What do they have in mind? The universe, clearly, moves up and down in cycles of plenty and cycles of want. But will the cycles end with a final collapse, or will they continue forever? These two views started emerging together in the first millennium before our era. The belief in eternal cycles seems to have been more common in the Eastern side of Eurasia, with its philosophy based on reincarnation. But it existed also on the other side, in Europe, where the idea of reincarnation (“metempsychosis”) appeared already at the time of Pythagoras (fifth century B.C.). For some reason, though, reincarnation was never very popular in the West.
At the time of Zeno, in the third century B.C., Stoics saw souls as returning to the cosmos or the divine fire after death rather than reborn. The Stoics were not millenarians; they saw the world as an eternal series of cycles. Individuals and entire states could fall, but life would continue. For example, Herodotus describes to us in detail the defeat and the disappearance of the kingdom of Lydia that occurred in 546 BC by the Persians, but he does not define it as a collapse. Rather, he sees it as a personal failure of the king of Lydia, Croesus.
The view we call “millennialism” may have originated in the Jewish tradition. Eschatological themes and expectations of future redemption exist in various forms within Jewish lore. Some see the future as an era of global peace, justice, and harmony ushered in by the arrival of the Messiah (Mashiach). Possibly, these views had its origin in the vagaries of the Jewish existence in Palestine, continuously menaced by external and local powers.
The early Christians drew on the Jewish tradition to create their own version of the universe's destiny. According to them, the Messiah had already arrived, but his appearance was only a preliminary event that would precede the second coming when the true end of the world would take place. John of Patmos used the term “Armageddon” for this cataclysmic event, seen as a mythical battle between Good and Evil.
The Christian vision was consistent with the perception that the life span of the Roman Empire was limited, a view common to many thinkers of the Imperial age. The decline of the Roman Empire was already evident with the civil wars that began in the first century B.C., and it became more evident as the Empire faced troubled times. In fact, the concept of “millennialism” didn’t originate with Christianity, but it appeared with Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 BC). The exact source is not clear, but it is often said that Varro argued that Rome would exist for 10 centuries - one millennium. This view dovetails with the conception of Stoic philosophy at the time, although Varro was not officially a Stoic. In the work of later Stoics, such as Lucius Anneus Seneca, the decline of the Roman Empire is never explicitly expressed, but the perception of individual and personal decline is evident, and it mirrors the social and political problems of the time.
During the European Middle Ages, millennialism remained a fringe idea, revolutionary and radical, often associated with sects and movements preaching the world's imminent end. The Christian church accepted that the second coming was to arrive, one day or another, but also seemed to think that there was no hurry. It is said that people were expecting the second coming in 1000 CE. But nothing special happened in Europe that year; the end of the world had been postponed.
The return of millennialism
The end of the Middle Ages saw Europe facing a decline that was not unlike the earlier one of the Roman Empire. The terrible time of the 30 Years War (1618-1648) was an unmitigated disaster, and not just because of the war; it is said that for every ten men slain by the enemy, pestilence killed thousands. Some regions, such as Pomerania, are said to have lost 50% of their population. Other regions suffered smaller losses, but the overall decline of the European population may have been of the order of 10%. Some of the reactions to the disaster were forms of pure madness, such as the witch hunts of the first half of the 17th century that killed tens of thousands of innocents.
Religious fanaticism was seen as the cause of the 30 Years War, and many intellectuals of the time seemed to conclude that if religion led to this kind of outcome, it was better to find another view of the world. There came the time of the Enlightenment, also helped by the economic expansion generated by overseas trade and the role of coal in the embryonic Industrial Revolution. However, the dark period of the religious wars remained something that needed to be addressed.
It was in 1766 that Edward Gibbon started publishing his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” dedicated to a dark spot in Western history. For the Christians, up to then, the Roman Empire was a mere container that had made the revelation and its diffusion possible. At most, they saw its fall as a deserved divine punishment for the martyrdom of Christians. However, Gibbon was the first to ask the question of the reasons for the fall in secular terms. His view, a typical reflection of the Enlightenment, was that it was mainly a fault of Christianity that had damaged the moral fiber of the Romans.
Gibbon may also have been the first to ask whether our society could decline and fall like the Roman Empire did. He denied this possibility mainly because of our modern technological progress, even though he didn’t express the concept using these terms. He said, “The ancient were destitute of many of the conveniences of life which have been invented or improved by the progress of industry.” New hordes of barbarians couldn't destroy the civilized world because of gunpowder, cannons, modern armies, and the like. In so saying, Gibbon framed the debate in the same terms as it is today: Can technology save us from collapse?
After Gibbon, Western thought moved decisively away from religion and into a completely different frame—that of modern science, which we sometimes call “Galilean.” It is based on the scientific method and is supposed to be superior to anything that the ancients could ever concoct with their primitive theistic beliefs. Maybe. However, the contrast between renewalism and millennialism remains alive and well in modern science.
The question of the natural world's cycles became apparent with geology's development. The founder of modern Geology, Charles Lyell (1797-1875), was as secular as a scientist can be, and he carefully avoided millenaristic tendencies. Yet, he couldn’t avoid noting how the geological record indicated that enormous changes had occurred on Earth in ancient times. He handled this observation in the framework of a concept called “uniformitarianism” (or “gradualism”). According to Lyell, abrupt changes had no place in Earth's geological history, nor were changes irreversible. It was true that dinosaurs had disappeared, but they could well return to live on Earth, if the the conditions that made their appearance possible were to reappear. Lyell’s views were in direct contrast with the earlier ones expressed by George Buffon (1707-1788), who, instead, was one of the first “catastrophists.” Buffon spoke of ancient collapses, taking the great flood as an early example. It was the start of a contrast between catastrophists and gradualists. It is still reverberating today.
Millennialism in modern science
It would be a long story to detail the changes that Western science underwent in the more than two centuries that separate us from the times of Buffon and Lyell. Let’s say that, in geology, science went from uniformitarianism to a view that sees the history of the world as a series of catastrophes. The paradigmatic section of this field is that of the extinction of the dinosaurs. The view of the event became increasingly favoring the hypothesis that it was due to an asteroid hitting Earth (“impact theory”), with the extinction occurring maybe in just a few years. Today, the impact theory is being abandoned in favor of a more gradual disaster, that of the gigantic volcanic eruption that took place in what’s today India. Still an abrupt event compared to the span of the dinosaurs’ era on Earth.
A similar trajectory toward more dramatic changes has affected the theory of evolution by natural selection. Initially assumed to be a series of small changes, it is now more often seen as the result of periods of rapid change. Stephen Jay Gould called this view “punctuated evolution.” We can also cite astronomy and cosmology, where we moved from the “harmony of the spheres” of early times to the modern view of the “Big Bang” as the universe's origin. An event that could lead to a symmetrically apocalyptic “Big Crunch” or a less dramatic but just as apocalyptic “heat death” of the universe. More generally, we saw the development of a series of mathematical and physical theories that could describe collapse. Concepts such as “deterministic chaos,” “critical points,” “black swan,” “dragon kings,” “Self-Organized Complexity,” and the “Seneca Cliff” are becoming commonplace in the current scientific discourse.
Geology and cosmology are sciences that have modest importance in people’s lives, and the same is true for the sophisticated mathematical models that describe collapses. But the question of collapse is becoming paramount about the life expectancy of our civilization and what science is telling us is not reassuring. The human civilization is squeezed between at least three factors that collaborate to destroy it: climate change, pollution, and resource depletion. As long as the economy continues to grow, these three problems become more and more important, and the damage being done to the ecosystem that supports humans is becoming irreversible. Humans have already caused the collapse of a large fraction of the biosphere. The large herbivores existing during the Pleistocene, the epoch that preceded the current one, were efficiently exterminated even with the simple weapons of our Stone Age ancestors. Today, the fraction of wild mammal biomass is reduced to 4% of the total, with many species going extinct right now (21 species were officially declared extinct in 2023). In terms of biomass, the homo sapiens maintains a hefty level of some 36% of the total of mammals. But that doesn’t mean that humans couldn’t go extinct in a short time.
The current millennialism debate
A strong streak of apocalyptic thought is reappearing in our troubled times. At the same time, though, uniformitarianism is alive and well in its support for the future supposed to be like the past. Since the past two centuries have seen continuous economic growth, the idea that modern civilization will continue growing for the foreseeable future (i.e., “forever”) remains alive and well, supported by an optimistic view of technological progress. This idea is epitomized in the “Solow-Swan” model, an equation that purports to describe both the past and the future using a mathematical expression that admits no collapse when a non-measurable entity called “total factor productivity” is assumed to take certain values. A good illustration of the concept of “hubris,” defined by the ancients as the excess of faith in human capabilities.
We are close nowadays to a situation similar to that of the decline of the Roman Empire, which was stubbornly denied as long as it was possible to do so (as long as the Empire existed). At the time of Emperor Gaius Decius, in 251 CE, refusing to sacrifice to the gods carried the death penalty. In our time, fortunately, doubting the divine authority of entities such as the CDC or the WHO doesn’t imply being executed. But it can lead to being erased from the public discourse on the Web — a sort of virtual death.
But don’t think that this attitude is characteristic of just one side of the debate. On the collapsniks’ side, expressing doubts about the reality of the impending collapse easily leads to symmetric exclusion from the discussion. Just as the debate on unicorns can only end when someone actually produces evidence that unicorns exist, a debate on the end of the world can only end when the world actually ends. But, by then, it will not be important anymore.
When Seneca writes to Licilius (letter 91) in the middle of the first century CE that "growth is slow, but decline is rapid" (incrementa lente exeunt sed festinatur in damnum), he seems to foreshadow the collapse of the empire that would become impossible to deny two centuries later. But Seneca was not a millenarian, as evident from his work, steeped in the Classical tradition. He showed that it is possible to take a middle way between millennialism and uniformitarianism.
The Stoic view of life is that we must know our limits. We may face misfortune; in the end, we all face death as individuals and collapse as a society. But, as Marcus Aurelius Verus said, the only thing we possess is the moment in which we live. Past and present don’t belong to us. Maybe they belong to the Gods, or maybe the Gods are as limited as we are. It doesn’t matter. We keep moving toward the future, and the future surely knows where it is going. What’s left to us is to remain human, even though that seems to be becoming increasingly difficult in these troubled times.
Human population rose very fast, quadrupling in one century. Could it go down faster? A model that includes ecosystem collapse suggests that it can fall faster, predicting a decline to 2 billion by 2050, one-third of a century.
according to erik michaels it will by a long decline I thinks that mean gradual decline so if it is a decline like the Roman empire it's mean slow the Roman empire the decline lasted a few centuries ?