Friday, January 01, 1999
2000 brings hope, hype
Just why are we so fascinated?
BY MICHAEL E. YOUNG
The Dallas Morning News
Today begins the last year of the 1900s, and with it the final countdown to the year 2000.
While the official beginning of the third millennium is Jan. 1, 2001, the round-numbered 2000 will occupy our minds, media and social calendars.
Why are we so darn fascinated with a simple number? You'd think it was the end of the world or something.
Well, some people DO think that. Others see it as the beginning of the end, with that Y2K bug crawling into our computers, turning clocks back 100 years and dragging the modern world along for the ride.
Then there's everyone else, firmly convinced life will go on when the calendar flips to the year 2000 but still watching the approach of the new millennium with rapt attention and even subconscious anticipation.
Don't worry. It's natural. You can't help yourself.
“Westerners, compared to other cultures, are very concerned about dimensions of time and with smaller units,” said Lawrence Okamura, an associate professor of history at the University of Missouri at Columbia.
Part of that stems from Biblical tradition, Mr. Okamura said, the sense that time is linear from the creation to the 1,000-year reign of Christ to the Last Judgment. And then there is the world of mathematics, handed down by the Greeks, that touched the Western mind.
“There is something very powerful and profound about geometrical figures and numbers,” he said. “From the time of the late Middle Ages, there has been a Western belief that the structure of reality can be expressed through a number.”
Especially when that number is wholly different from the one that came before it. Sure, 2000 follows 1999 just as logically as 1999 succeeds 1998. But that change is a single pen stroke, while 2000 offers four new digits to grasp and a special significance to ponder.
It is regarded as the dawn of a new age, a new millennium, a time to look back and a time to look forward, even if it is based on the faulty calculations of a sixth-century Scythian monk named Dionysius Exiguus, or “Little Dennis.”
Dionysius, distraught at calculating dates for Easter from a calendar created when Emperor Diocletian took the throne of Rome in 284 A.D., instead produced a calendar based on the birth of Jesus.
Rather than being the year 247 anno Diocletiani, Dionysius decided it was really the year 531 anno Domini, the year of Our Lord.
Unfortunately, Bible scholars deduce that Dionysius' reckoning was off by at least a couple of years, and perhaps four or five or more, which means the second millennium since Jesus' birth actually slipped past sometime in the mid- to late 1990s.
Still, the calendar will read “2000.” The Roman Catholic Church will mark the Jubilee of Jesus' birth. And certain conservative Christian groups will use various verses in the Bible to argue that 2000 is the year that Christ will return.
It's a possibility of course, said Charles Dyer, professor of Bible exposition at the Dallas Theological Seminary, though far from a certainty.
There's nothing in the Bible, Mr. Dyer writes in the winter issue of the school's magazine, Kindred Spirits, that gives a specific date for the Second Coming.
Nonetheless, given our fascination with numbers, our need to give modern context to ancient predictions, and our gut-deep feeling that the approach of a new millennium must have some sort of significance, we view 2000 with certain expectations — more, in fact, than the denizens of Western Europe in the year 1000.
The problem then was that very few people had the slightest idea of what year it was.
Dionysius' calendar was still around and had gained official standing in the court of Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman emperor, crowned in 800.
But the common people, almost all of them scratching out a living from the land, had no need or knowledge of the calendar.
But the growth of cities led to an increase in literacy and in business and law, all of which required a calendar. And the easy movement of trade brought an exchange of news and ideas to these new urban settings, and that's where most evidence of millennialism is found.
Writing around the year 1030, French historian Rodulfus Glaber reported considerable excitement about the end of the first millennium of Christ's birth, “a lot of expectation about the Second Coming,” said Blake Beattie, a professor of history at the University of Louisville.
When the year 1000 came and went, those warning of Jesus' return shifted their attention to 1033, the millennium of his death. That passed, too, but in Mr. Glaber's account, there was an impact.
“It was as if the whole world had shaken off the dust of the ages and covered itself in a white mantle of churches,” he said.
And throughout Western Europe, ample evidence remains of that rush of church construction.
“The official record keepers played down a lot of this,” said Jeremy Adams, a history professor at Southern Methodist University, “but I tend to think a lot more (millennial activity) occurred than was recorded.
“I think there was probably a generalized awareness of this notion (that Jesus could return), and some people freaked out, and some people didn't,” said Mr. Adams. “And since nothing happened, the proper authorities said, "We told you so.'”
These days, “there is an undercurrent of expecting some sort of change, even in the political rhetoric, as we enter the 21st century,” Mr. Beattie said, “a suggestion that we've reached a milestone in human history.
“And that, I think, shows the survival of religious expectation.”
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