The problem for the Christians of the early centuries is whether the 1,000 years of the Messiah’s reign were still to come or whether they were the years that they themselves were living. If the first interpretation was correct they had to wait for a Second Coming of the Messiah and a kind of golden age (which had also been promised by a number of ancient religions), followed by a return of the Devil and his false prophet the Antichrist (as the tradition will gradually come to call him, although the Apocalypse itself speaks only in fact of a false prophet). And finally, the Last Judgment and the end of time. This is the dominant reading, with some fluctuation, down to Augustine.
In the fourth century the Donatist heresy gained a footing. True, it targeted the unworthy ministers of the cult, insisting that the sacraments that they administered were invalid; but to deny validity to the liturgical actions of a considerable portion of the official Church, and to set against it the purity of a rigoristically virtuous community illuminated by the Holy Spirit, was tantamount in the last analysis to setting against a Heavenly Jerusalem (yet to come) the new Babylon represented by the current Church.
Augustine’s response (De Civitate Dei XX) is that neither the City of God nor the millennium are historical events that will be realized in this world; they are mystical events. The millennium John speaks of represents the period that stretches from the Incarnation to the end of history, therefore it is the period we are already living, the period in progress, completely realized in the living Church. It does not occur to Augustine to separate in day-to-day history the perfect members of the perfect city from the reprobates; he is well aware that human history is riddled with sin and error, even the history of the just who seek salvation in the body of the Church. Earthly history, then, will not be the site of a battle for the supremacy of the heavenly city—Armageddon is not of this world.10
With this solution, however, Augustine leaves the way open for two magnificent suggestions. The first concerns the earthly possibility of that City of God that he had already demonstrated was not of this world. What happened in Augustine’s case was what happens with many polemists who, thinking to refute an argument, write a book that turns out to be such a success that the argument in question is, if not bolstered, at least brought into the public eye. Accordingly, we will see how, in the course of subsequent history, the idea of the two cities will fascinate reformers and revolutionaries alike, all of them convinced that the City of God must be realized forthwith by the elect; what is needed, then, is a great battle, an Armageddon on earth, a revolution.
The second suggestion concerns the immediate advent of the Day of Judgment, and hence the expectation of the year 1000. If the millennium is not a promise for the future, but is going on here and now, if we are to interpret the Apocalypse correctly, the first thing that must come to pass is the end of the world. The fact that the interpreters were divided over doing the math—whether 1,000 years was to be taken as an approximate or precise figure, whether it was to be calculated from the year of Christ’s birth, from his Passion, from the beginning or end of the persecutions: whether in other words the years were 1,000, 1,400 or 1,033—did not affect the fact that the end of the world must come sooner or later.
The history of the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages oscillates between these two possible interpretations, accompanied by alternate euphoria and dysphoria, as well as a perennial sense of expectation and tension. Because, either Christ must still be coming to reign for 1,000 years on earth or he has already come, in which case it won’t be long before the Devil returns and with him the end of the world.
This is the context in which Beatus writes his commentary. History informs us that he wrote it for precise theological reasons. Elipandus, archbishop of Toledo, and Felix, bishop of Urgel, had resuscitated an old heresy, adoptionism, which denied the divinity of the Word, relegated to the role of adopted son of the Father. Spanish adoptionism was a “mitigated” form of the heresy and, while they accepted the fact that the Word was the natural son of the Father, they saw Christ in his human nature as merely an adopted son.
Beatus finds in the Apocalypse a text apt to display a Christ in his full consubstantial divinity and sonship, and he employs his commentary as a weapon. And he proves to be a winner, since later Charlemagne will convene two whole councils and a synod, in Germany and Italy, in the course of which the adoptionists will be condemned—and this may explain why the commentary created such a furor at the time.
Beatus lingers with lyric ardor, in a dazzling display of high medieval rhetoric, over the phrase “ab eo qui est, et qui erat, et qui venturus est” (“from Him who is, and who was, and who is to come”) from which, with something of a non sequitur, he draws the proof of the divinity of Christ. But what fascinates him most is that Christ is coming as judge (venturus ad iudicandum)—and when he arrives at chapter 20 of the Apocalypse, in other words at the ambiguous prophecy of the millennium, he goes so far as to open with an invocation imploring God not to let him fall into error. He is aware that he is dealing with a fundamental issue.
The text of John tells him first of all that the angel casts the Devil into the abyss “till the thousand years should be fulfilled” (Apoc. 20:3). Then it says that “the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast … lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years” (20:4). John goes on to specify that this reign is the “first resurrection,” which is baptism, and concludes: “but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years” (20:6). Beatus admits that these 1,000 years are to be calculated from the passion of Our Lord and are therefore those of the earthly reign of the Church, which had been the opinion of Augustine. He repeats several times that the millennium spoken of, both for the Devil and the blessed, is the one in which he and his readers are living: “they will reign with the Lord now and in the future … when speaking of 1,000 years he meant of this world.…” And so on and so forth.
In order that there should be no misunderstanding, he conducts a subtle analysis of the verb tenses, since John says at a certain point that the blessed “have reigned” for 1,000 years, and elsewhere that they “will reign for a thousand years.” Beatus, however, knows how to handle Holy Scripture and reminds us that the prophets, speaking of what will happen to Christ, often use the past perfect tense (“et diviserunt vestimenta mea” [“they parted my garments among them”]) when they are obviously talking about something that is destined to happen in the future. Secondly, he states more than once that the use of 1,000 years is certainly an example of synecdoche in the manner of Tyconius, and probably means a longer period of time, at the same time he makes it quite clear that, though it may be a perfect number that indicates a longer period, 1,000 is still a number that implies closure and does not allude to the “perpetuum saeculum” or eternity.
Therefore, Beatus insists, John is speaking of the current millennium and the end of this world. Psychologically speaking, Beatus was, as Camón Aznar describes him, an author obsessed with the millennium and at the same time a rationalist, in the sense that he wanted at all costs to reduce the visionary suggestions of his favorite text to a series of comprehensible messages. And someone obsessed with the millennium is not so much interested in the fact that we are living it as that it is approaching its end.