(John was responding to a persistent issue in the first couple generations of Christianity: why, when Jesus had said He was coming back, hadn't He done so yet? Wasn't the sacking of Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70, accompanied by destruction of the Temple, enough to get the Second Coming underway? By the year 100 the Second Coming was moved well into the future and was moving into the spiritual rather than material realm.)
In the Merovingian era (fifth through eighth centuries), the standard template-book on how to write a good letter suggested starting with something like, "We who live in the final days of the world...." The disasters of the sixth century, the outbreak of the Black Death coupled with "years without a summer" (caused by volcanic dust blocking the sun), certainly had an end-of-the-world look to them.
But the world kept stubbornly on. Interestingly, in spite of what they might have told you back in the year 2000, no one worried about the end of the world in 1000. The "millennium" anniversary that got mentioned a lot instead was 1033, the anniversary of the Crucifixion, and here the hope was for a spiritual awakening, not the world ending.
The Albigensian heretics of southern France in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries were expecting the end of the world. They got a Crusade preached against them and were thoroughly beaten by the northern French, but the world overall kept right on.
The big "world ending" moment for the Middle Ages was 1260, as I have discussed previously. The theologian Joachim of Fiore (who died before 1260) had added up the generations in the Old Testament and had come up with the number 1260 as years from Creation to Christ's birth. This was the "age of the Father," to be succeeded for the next 1260 years by the "age of the Son" and then by the "age of the Holy Spirit." People became very upset, and bands of penitents wandered across Europe, whipping themselves and waiting for the end. You can probably guess that they were mistaken.
Medieval Europe's second big outbreak of the Black Death, in 1346-48, was another apocalyptic event. The world didn't end, but it sure got messed up, with maybe a third of the population dead, cities deserted, trade routes abandoned, and society (unsurprisingly) becoming much more morbid.
Fears of the world ending did not stop with the end of the Middle Ages. The year 1666 was approached with trepidation, as it included the number 666, which the book of Revelations called "the number of the Beast." When England experienced first another outbreak of the Black Death and then the great London fire that year, it sure looked apocalyptic. Nonetheless, the world stubbornly persisted.
Apocalyptic predictions continue. Remember how supposedly the ancient Mayans predicted the world would end in 2012? A psychic now getting a lot of attention predicted the outbreak of a pandemic in 2020 (though when she predicted her own death she was off by 11 years).
The response to a failed apocalypse varies. The most common reaction is to laugh it off and say one never believed it in the first place. For true believers, disappointed not to have been caught up in the Rapture or whatever (note: the idea of a Rapture first appeared in the nineteenth century and has nothing to do with John of Patmos), the response is trickier. One can say that the prophecy was right but the date was off (Who forgot to carry the 2?), but then it's hard to be believed next time. One can argue that the prayers of the faithful averted the disaster that would have taken place without them.
Or, best of all, one can assert the world really did end, but only those in the Select Group are spiritual and insightful enough to have noticed. This works within the Select Group but not outside it.
© C. Dale Brittain 2020
For more on medieval society and religion, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.
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