Welcome to the first video interview of the International Research Consortium,

FATE, Freedom and Prognostication in Erlangen, and welcome to Professor Richard Landis from

Boston University.

The consortium invites visiting fellows for up to one year to present and carry out their

research together in a spirit of interdisciplinary cooperation and comparison.

Professor Landis has been a visiting fellow at the consortium for over two months now.

Professor Landis, could you tell us a bit about why you're here?

Well, you know, it's interesting.

I got a letter inviting me to come.

I hadn't applied, you know, I could imagine that because I work on apocalyptic prognostication,

that might have been one of the reasons they wanted to invite me.

But it wasn't clear to me, it was a wonderful invitation, but I didn't understand why.

And it's only since I've come that I've come to understand how relevant this formulation

of fate, freedom and prognostication is for my own work.

Your specialty is the study of millennialism in the Middle Ages.

Could you say something to introduce briefly what you mean by this term, millennialism?

Well, millennialism is in some senses the opposite of eschatology.

Eschatology is the end of everything.

It's the end of history, it's the end of time, what Augustine called the cyclone.

It's the end of that.

Afterwards, if you're religious, a monotheist for example, you believe that God comes and

he judges the good and the bad, the good go to heaven and the bad go to hell.

So the problem of injustice in the world is solved by the end of the world.

Now millennialism is the opposite in the sense that justice is incarnate in history.

There is a perfect society on earth, a just society on earth.

So can you distinguish between different types of millennialism?

Yes, no, that's really the crucial thing is the distinction between what I call demotic

or egalitarian millennialism, kingdom of the saints where you need no government because

everybody behaves well.

They're saints, they don't do injustice.

And then the opposite is the hierarchical vision of sort of a last world emperor who

conquers the entire world and inaugurates an era of peace in which everybody lives in

harmony and justice.

Were people expecting the millennium to happen at particular times or was the millennium

something that could happen at any time?

Yeah, no, that's it.

The millennium as I'm defining it, it doesn't even have to be religious.

For instance, communism and Nazism and UFO beliefs about spaceships that are going to

land and sort of bring technology that will make the world a peaceful place.

All of those are forms of millennial thinking.

And it can happen at any time.

But in the Christian tradition in particular, there was a belief that very early on you

get articulated the belief in the sabbatical millennium.

So God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh.

A thousand years is a day in the sight of the Lord according to one of the Psalms.

And therefore there will be 6,000 years of travail and a sabbatical millennium of peace.

And that's where the millennium gets its name and is referred to in the Latin canonical

book of Revelation, which was not canonical in the Greek East.

How widespread was millennial belief in the Middle Ages?

Well there's a lot of disagreement on this.