Refreshment of the Saints: The Time after Antichrist as a Station for Earthly Progress in Medieval Thought

Abstract

For St. Augustine the saeculum—the sum total of earthly human existence — was malignant. Not only was it so, he thought, since Adam's fall, but it would remain so until the Last Judgment. Since the Fall this world was no place in which to rejoice; only otherworldly liberation could be had ‘from this life of misery, a kind of hell on earth.’ Historical events, aside from the Incarnation, remained for Augustine ‘a chaos of human sin divided by acts of divine power.’ With Christ, history had entered into its sixth and last earthly age and there was no hope for any greater earthly future. In the City of God (20.7) Augustine rejected as a ‘ridiculous fable’ the view that the thousand-year kingdom of Christ in Revelation (20.1-6) would be a future earthly kingdom, interpreting it instead as a figure for the life of the Church in the present. ‘There are no verbs of historical movement in the City of God,’ Peter Brown assures us, ‘no sense of progress to aims that may be achieved in history.’