After the middle of the 2nd century these expectations were gradually thrust into the background. They would never have died out, however, had not circumstances altered, and a new mental attitude been taken up. The spirit of philosophical and theological speculation and of ethical reflection, which began to spread through the Churches, did not know what to make of the old hopes of the future. To a new generation they seemed paltry, earthly and fantastic, and far-seeing men had good reason to regard them as a source of political danger. But more than this, these wild dreams about the glorious kingdom of Christ began to disturb the organization which the Churches had seen fit to intro duce. In the interests of self-preservation against the world, the State and the heretics, the Christian communities had formed themselves into compact societies with a definite creed and con stitution, and they felt that their existence was threatened by the white heat of religious subjectivity. So early as the year 17o, a Church party in Asia Minor—the so-called Alogi—rejected the whole body of the apocalyptic writings and denounced the book of Revelation as a book of fables. All the more powerful was the reaction. In the so-called Montanistic controversy (c. 16o-22o) one of the principal issues involved was the continuance of the chiliastic expectations in the Churches. The Montanists of Asia Minor defended them in their integrity, with one slight modifica tion: they announced that Pepuza, the city of Montanus, would be the site of the New Jerusalem and the millennial kingdom. After the Montanistic controversy chiliastic views were more and more discredited in the Greek Church; they were, in fact, stigma tized as "Jewish" and therefore "heretical." Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, succeeded in healing the schism and asserting the allegorical interpretation of the prophets as the only legitimate exegesis. During this controversy Dionysius became convinced that the victory of mystical theology over "Jewish" chiliasm would never be secure so long as the book of Revelation passed for an apostolic writing and kept its place among the homolo goumena of the canon. He accordingly raised the question of its apostolic origin; and by reviving old difficulties, with in genious new arguments, he carried his point. The Greek Church kept Revelation out of its canon, and consequently chiliasm remained in its grave. It was considered a sufficient safeguard against the spiritualizing eschatology of Origen and his school to have rescued the main doctrines of the creed and the regula fidei (the visible advent of Christ ; eternal misery and hell-fire for the wicked). Anything going beyond this was held to be Jewish. In the Semitic churches of the East (the Syrian, Arabian and Ethiopian), and in that of Armenia, the apocalyptic literature was preserved much longer than in the Greek Church. They were very conservative of ancient traditions in general, and hence chiliasm survived amongst them to a later date than in Alexandria or Constantinople.
But the Western Church was also more conservative than the Greek. Her theologians had, to begin with, little turn for mystical speculation ; their tendency was rather to reduce the gospel to a system of morals. Now for the moralists chiliasm had a special significance as the one distinguishing feature of the gospel, and the only thing that gave a specifically Christian character to their system. This, however, holds good of the Western the ologians only after the middle of the 3rd century. The earlier fathers, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian, believed in chiliasm simply because it was a part of the tradition of the Church and because Marcion and the Gnostics would have nothing to do with this conception. It is the same all through the 3rd and 4th centuries with those Latin theologians who escaped the in fluence of Greek speculation. Commodian, Vktorinus Pettavensis, Lactantius and Sulpicius Severus were all pronounced millen narians, holding by the very details of the primitive Christian expectations. As to the canonicity and the apostolic authorship of the Johannine Apocalypse no doubts were ever entertained in the West ; indeed an Apocalypse of Peter was still retained in the canon in the 3rd century. That of Ezra, in its Latin trans lation, must have been all but a canonical book—the numbers of extant manuscripts of the so-called 4 Ezra being incredibly great, while several of them are found in copies of the Latin Bible at the beginning of the 16th century. These facts show how
vigorously the early hopes of the future maintained themselves in the West. In the hands of moralistic theologians, like Lactan tius, they certainly assume a somewhat grotesque form, but the fact that these men clung to them is the clearest evidence that in the West millennarianism was still a point of "orthodoxy" in the 4th century.
This state of matters, however, gradually disappeared after the end of the 4th century. The change was brought about by two causes—first, Greek theology, which reached the West chiefly through Jerome, Rufinus and Ambrose, and, second, the new idea of the Church wrought out by Augustine on the basis of the altered political situation of the Church. Augustine was the first who ventured to teach that the Catholic Church, in its empirical form, was the kingdom of Christ, that the millennial kingdom had commenced with the appearing of Christ, and was therefore an accomplished fact. By this doctrine of Augustine's, the old millennarianism, though not completely extirpated, was at least banished from the official theology. It still lived on, however, in the lower strata of Christian society; and in certain undercurrents of tradition it was transmitted from century to century. At various periods in the history of the middle ages we encounter sudden outbreaks of millennarianism, sometimes as the tenet of a small sect, sometimes as a far-reaching move ment. And, since it had been suppressed, not, as in the East, by mystical speculation, its mightiest antagonist, but by the political church of the hierarchy, we find that wherever chiliasm appears in the middle ages it makes common cause with all enemies of the secularized Church. It strengthened the hands of Church democracy; it formed an alliance with the pure souls who held up to the Church the ideal of apostolic poverty; it united itself for a time even with mysticism in a common opposition to the supremacy of the Church; nay, it lent the strength of its convic tions to the support of States and princes in their efforts to break the political power of the Church. It is sufficient to recall the well-known names of Joachim of Floris, of all the numerous Franciscan spiritualists, of the leading sectaries from the 13th to the 15th century who assailed the papacy and the secularism of the Church-above all, the name of Occam. In these men the millennarianism of the ancient Church came to life again; and in the revolutionary movements of the 15th and 16th centuries especially in the Anabaptist movements-it appears with all its old uncompromising energy. If the Church, and not the State, was regarded as Babylon, and the pope declared to be the Anti christ, these were legitimate inferences from the ancient traditions and the actual position of the Church.
The German and Swiss reformers also believed that the end of the world was near, but they had different aims in view from those of the Anabaptists. It was not from poverty and apoca lypticism that they hoped for a reformation of the Church. In contrast to the fanatics, after a brief hesitation they threw millen narianism overboard, and along with it all other "opiniones Judaicae." They took up the same ground in this respect which the Roman Catholic Church had occupied since the time of Augustine. How millennarianism nevertheless found its way, with the help of apocalyptic mysticism and Anabaptist influences into the Churches of the Reformation, chiefly among the Re formed sects, but afterwards also in the Lutheran Church, how it became incorporated with Pietism, how in more recent times an exceedingly mild type of "academic" chiliasm has been de veloped from a belief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible, how finally new sects are still springing up here and there with apocalyptic and chiliastic expectations-these are matters which cannot be fully entered upon here.