The Terrors of the Year Two Thousand

(R^CONSIDERATIONS Etienne Gilson The Terrors of the Year Two Thousand Of old, children were taught to hold as certain that around the year One Thousand a great terror took possession of people. We were told so, at any rate, and we believed it, and the really amazing thing is that all was not completely false in this story. The scholars oftoday make fun ofit and treat it as a legend. Nowhere, they say, can we find trace of this so-called panic which is supposed to have then paralyzed whole populations in die expectation of the approaching end ofthe world. These historians are right, at least to a degree, but even ifthey were wrong, we would probably smile as we read today, in the Chronicle ofthe good monk Raoul Glaber, the report of all sorts of wonders which marked the last years of the tenth century. A war, a pestilence, a famine, a fiery dragon and a Reprinted with permission of the University of St. Michael's College, Toronto, Ontario. Copyright © 1949, 1984 University of St. Michael's College. LOGOS 3:1 WINTER 2000 THE TERRORS OF THE YEAR TWO THOUSAND2l whale die size of an island? We have witnessed much better! This time the enemy of mankind has got an earlier start; he has even improved his methods considerably, and if the terrors of the year One Thousand are not a certainty for today's historians, those ofthe year Two Thousand will surely be so for future historians. From 1 9 14 to 1 9 1 8, the world was ravaged by a war which had known no parallel. A mighty people broke through its boundaries and spread over Europe, leaving in its wake ruins past numbering, dead by the millions, and historical materialism, master of Holy Russia, whence later we have seen it menacing the whole earth. Even during that armistice oftwenty years which we took for peace, what tragic bloodshed! China in perpetual war seems a little far away for us to worry about what happens tiiere, buthave we already forgotten what took place during that barbarous civil war in Most Christian Spain, where man was so cruel to man that those who saw it lower their voices to speak of it, and murmur: "Anything, rather than see that again!" The tenüi-century famine? But I have only to shut my eyes for a moment to see once more, in the villages of the Ukraine and on the banks of die Volga, the dead children in 1922, whose little corpses lay abandoned in their emptied schools; or again, wandering along die railways, diose bands ofchildren reduced to savagery who later were to be mowed down with machine guns. At the beginning of the twentieth century, as at the end of the tenth—official documents bear witness to the fact—parents devoured their offspring. Fathers and mothers like our own, like ourselves , but who knew the meaning ofthat frightful word: hunger. That, however was but a modest beginning. We saw die German army hurled upon Europe a second time, like a great tidal wave; Poland vanquished, plundered, butchered; nations falling one after the other under the blows of an irresistible conqueror. France in agony, her very honour wounded. Paris crumbles in its turn, and the echo of its downfall reverberates in the silence of an astonished world. A Raoul Glaber ofthe year Two Thousand would never stop 22LOGOS multiplying the chapters of this woeful tale. He would have to describe the prodigious series of disasters which now swoop down upon the entire world and to which we ourselves, who witnessed them, can scarcely bear testimony. The sky everywhere furrowed by fiery dragons much more formidable than fhose which, on the threshold ofthe year OneThousand, crossed from northto south the sky ofFrance; in Japan, in the South Sea Islands, in China, in Russia, in Germany, in France, in Italy—in diatvery England which believed itself sheltered behind our army, its fleet and the depths of its surrounding seas — a heap ofruins which has not yet been cleared away and which is there for us to see; the numbers of dead increase and they are still in our...