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 magnificent goal. The special significance of the year 2000 emerged from prophecies about Christ's Second Coming. By the reckoning of early Christian scholars, human history would end after 6,000 years, each thousand years corresponding to one day of creation. Some believed that there were 2,000 years between Adam and Abraham and 2,000 between Abraham and Jesus, and that after 2,000 more (constituting the Christian era) Jesus would return and reign in glory for 1,000 years--hence the millennium.
For centuries such calculations were confined to a few learned theorists. In the minds of most people, time was vague; the future was tomorrow's sunrise, the next harvest, the coming winter or the inevitability of death. The more distant future belonged to the realm of religion. The modern concept of the future did not begin to develop until the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, with the gradual consolidation of calendars, the spread of clocks and the stirrings of new forces. Both science and commerce needed to anticipate things, whether a chemical reaction or the expiration of contracts.
But visions of the future still mixed science with superstition, as was demonstrated by Nostradamus. A successful physician in 16th century France (for years he ministered to victims of the plague), he managed to believe both in scientific Copernican astronomy and in astrology. Eventually he turned to the occult. In seven volumes he foretold "the future events of the entire world" (according to his epitaph). In one of his obscure quatrains, he prophesied that in 1999, "from the sky there will come a great King of terror." Nobody knows what that was supposed to mean, but in recent decades many would-be prophets have used those lines to predict all manner of cataclysms, from nuclear war to global warming to the end of the world. This suggests that centuries of science have not displaced--and perhaps have even reinforced--people's desire for mystical clues to their fate.
A contemporary of Nostradamus was Sir Thomas More, whose Utopia was not so much a vision of the future as a vision of a better society and thus a reproach to present evils. But henceforth, Utopian dreams of reform invariably mingled with anticipation of tomorrow. This was particularly true in the 18th century, with the Age of Reason's belief in the perfectibility of human nature and the near inevitability of progress. Revolution was in the air, and revolution itself is a kind of prophecy--a violent prediction.