The Meaning of the Millennium: The Ideas of Christopher Dawson

Christopher Dawson at Harvard in 19Ç9. Christina Scott The Meaning ofthe Millennium: The Ideas of Christopher Dawson The idea for the title of this article, The Meaning ofthe Millennium , came to me after I had seen an article by Herman Goodden, an American journalist, in a magazine called Challenge. After commenting on the abysmal depths to which proposals for celebrating this great milestone in human history have sunk, he went on to say that he had found one modern historian who had helped him to put together some "Christ-centered"historical reading: the name ofthat historian was Christopher Dawson. We live in a secular age that is non-Christian and even antiChristian , much more so than in the first half of this century when Dawson was writing, and for many people the only meaning ofthe year 2,000 is purely social and material. Here, still clinging on, and apparently as strong as ever, is the old belief in the Doctrine of Progress, a belief, born ofthe Enlightenment and thriving since the eighteenth century, that "every day and in every way the world gets better and better." It follows that as we enter the third millennium we shall be celebrating the great steps in material progress that have taken place over the last two thousand years and no one can deny that they are logos 2:2 spring 1999 66logos many and impressive—science and technology have gone ahead by leaps and bounds, medicine and psychology, the conquest of space which at the beginning ofthe century was a mere prediction in the futuristic novels of H. G.Wells, and, of course economic prosperity , at least in the Western world. Such celebrations promise to be something like a mammothWorldTrade Fair, the greatest showcase of human achievement the world has ever seen. Another view was put forward by a correspondent in the London Times who claimed that the practice ofcounting in numbers often— or metrication—is the reason we are celebrating the year 2000 and it has nothing to do with religion.The most obvious objection to this theory is, ofcourse, that it fails to answer this question, two hundred times ten years since what? a.D. means Anno Domini, in the year of Our Lord, and ifthat doesn't have some connection with religion it would be hard to know what does. In religion, the concept of a thousand years is bound up with eternity. To quote the hymn writer: A diousand ages in diy sight Are like an evening gone. And it is easy to see how the idea ofa millennium—the importance ofthis time span—became associated with the apocalyptic belief in a sudden manifestation or world-shattering event. From the time of the Christian Millenniarists, who held that at the Second Coming, which they believed to be imminent, Christ would return to reign in triumph for a thousand years before the final judgment, to later sects who have associated the millennium with the end ofthe world, this belief has held. Every world catastrophe has evoked fears of Armageddon, at the end of the world. The Russian Revolution, the two world wars with the figures of either Hitler or Stalin or both, cast in the role ofAnti-Christ, and the ever present threat of atomic warfare, have all played their part in millennial theories. THE IDEAS OF CHRISTOPHER DAWSON The collapse or disintegration ofWestern civilization was certainly a persistent theme in all Dawson's writings, even at the beginning ofhis career when he wrote, in 1928: All the events of the last few years have convinced me what a fragile thing civilisation is, and how near we are to losing the whole inheritance, which our age might have acquired. And again after the Second World War he continued on the same theme in his Gifford Lectures on Religion and Culture: The events of the last few years portend eitiier the end of human history or a turning point in it.They have warned us in letters of fire that our civilisation has been tried in die balance and found wanting—that there is an absolute limit to the progress that can be achieved by the perfection of scientific techniques...