The year A.D. 2000 has long hovered in an imagined sky like a distant, luminous sign. Generations have used it as a target for their dreams, hopes and fears. Since prophecies usually tell us more about the past than the future, how the millennium was envisioned--and, in a sense, invented--during earlier eras says a great deal about the successive stages of Western history, about the religious as well as secular faith of our ancestors--in short, about how we came to be what we are.
Unlike Eastern religions, Christianity saw history not as an endless cycle but as an ascent to a...
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