After many years I finally found the time to read Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages first published in 1957. For all the attention this book has received I was quite disappointed.
Cohn's thesis rests on a cobbled together narrative that
confuses popular impulse and superstition with religious conviction. He tries
to argue that various utopian and chiliastic movements of the medieval period were
the cultural and ideological precursors of twentieth century Nazism and
Communism.
I immediately thought of authors like Karl Kautsky who
attempted to read Marxist impulse back into history. Kautsky is not alone and
yet such analogies with the Anabaptists, Waldensians, or Münster are
necessarily limited. Rightly identifying the communistic and communitarian
motivation to some of these groups, he nevertheless is forced to admit that
they did not hold to Marxist orthodoxy and its narratives of class and
historical dialectical process. Reading and interpreting history through the
lens of dialectical materialism and its related economic ideology, Marxist
historians are able to view these groups as precursors, or proto-Marxists in their
time. One of the weaknesses of this view (aside from its pure materialism) has
always been the tendency to discount religious motivation just as many
Christian historians tend to discount social and economic factors and the
strength they possess to shape events and even drive ideology. For Christians,
Providence must also come into play but the ability to interpret it is limited
as a book like Job so clearly demonstrates.
On another level we today have Christo-nationalist writers
who confuse Western Liberalism with New Testament Christianity, some of whom
read history in a highly disingenuous and anachronistic manner and see
proto-patriots, libertarians, and capitalists among the people of the past. One
thinks of older Whig histories committed to notions of progress who want to see
modern Westerners and would-be good Victorian Englishmen in the various figures
associated with Church reform throughout the ages.
With all the hubris and condescension of a modern scholar,
and thus operating from the vantage point of opposition and critique, Cohn wants
to see proto-Nazis and communists among the various groups such as the Brethren
of the Free Spirit, the Flagellants, and some of the tangential crusading
groups. In their pursuit of utopia, they instead produced totalitarian orders
and thus it could be argued they provided the cultural, intellectual, and
ideological seed for these twentieth century regimes.
Popular anti-Semitism and superstitious beliefs regarding
rulers like Charlemagne and Frederick Barbarossa are conflated with genuine
principled religious conviction regarding ecclesiology, and the nature of
Christian ethics (and oftentimes extremism). These questions along with the
religious justification for antinomian behaviour are seamlessly interwoven with
the motivations and conduct of those who were sincere if sometimes misguided.
Cohn clearly despises these dissident groups and religion in
particular and his tone is often mocking. Eager to side with the mainstream
institutions of society he doesn't miss a chance to demean these people and
this comes across as particularly irritating and wearisome as his thesis falls
flat.
In many cases the sentiments and behaviour he cites were not
associated with dissident groups at all but instead exhibited popular impulse
thus defeating the millennial cult angle of his argument. The book is riddled
with errors in fact, association, and interpretation.
He cannot explain all the groups that held similar views in
terms of money and power and yet did not fall into utopian traps. He cannot
explain the existence of groups that were dissenting and even chiliastic in
some cases and yet were not guilty of moral degeneracy, hysteria, or violent
rebellion in their quest to establish utopia. The cultic-fringe argument fails
as many elements he describes were mainstream and the analogy with modern
totalitarian movements fails on multiple points.
He misses the critical reality that the papal dominated
medieval order was in many respects itself a form of totalitarianism and many
of these groups were marginalised and persecuted because they resisted its
authoritarian order and its draconian rule. The persistent episodes and abiding
reality of grief, danger, and persecution opened the doors to fanatical
expression and though ironic it's not unprecedented to see such groups come
full circle and once empowered (in some capacity) become the very kind of
oppressors that they once detested – modern Zionist Israel is the most poignant
example of this.
Finally, the greatest irony is that he resorts to Marxist and
materialist categories to make his case. Because he cannot understand religious
motivation and mocks it and is clearly an enemy to all religious belief, he
instead falls into modern secularist and even Marxist-inspired categories of
interpretation. Everything is economic and sociological. He cannot really see
how people are motivated by anything else because their beliefs are tantamount
to nonsense, fantasy, and superstition. Their beliefs drive them but since they
are irrational expressions he looks for the answers in other sectors such as society
and economics.
Though he basically fails to make the argument I expected him
to pursue and develop some kind of Nietzschean übermensch analogy as many of
these dissenting groups centered on a leader-figure and in some cases this led
to a new or recast morality. And yet perhaps Cohn realised this argument is
also problematic and he would be guilty of the same kind of false argumentation
and leaps in logic that are quick to tie the philosophies of Hegel, Nietzsche,
and others to Nazism and Communism. Operating from within the same cultural
milieu, there are ties of course but they are tenuous and ambiguous and do not
lend to unequivocal comparison and conclusion.
Cohn has missed something even more fundamental. Broken
societies generate crisis and 'pendulum swing'-style correctives. In some cases
shattered orders and societies in crisis produce monsters – in other cases some
groups retreat. One thinks of the warlord culture the developed with the fall
of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of monasticism – and perhaps the cult
of the papacy.
In our own day one can look at places like Iraq, Syria, and
Libya, societies that have been destroyed – leading to the emergence of
monsters, sometimes in the form of death cults.
In medieval Europe there were many crises. The Dark Ages
(500-1000) were centuries of chaos and instability and thus the 'grounding'
figures of Charlemagne and those like him became pillars of stability in the
popular mind and thus ultimately became legendary representations of a golden
age.
With the stability of the High Middle Ages (1000-1500) came a
new set of struggles. There were economic struggles, stagnation, the
devastation of plague, corruption, hypocrisy, and finally internal schism as
kingdoms turned against each other, and pope and emperor battled as did Guelph
and Ghibbelline. The Crusades directed energy and aggression outward but it
also brought change. The Imperial Papacy brought about an oppressive order that
just added to the angst of the suffering commoner who drowned in a world of
sickness, exploitation, and corruption. Later, there were external threats on
the Eastern frontier with the campaigns of the Turks. There was a great deal
happening but some of the ugliest episodes were the peasant revolts. Bound to
fail and thus ultimately suicidal they represented signs of a society askew and
in anguish. Today, we tend to look romantically at the great edifices, the
castles and cathedrals of the era, but we often tend to forget the suffering
and instability of the period and in some cases the sheer numbers of transients
on the roads. For many of the downtrodden and regular folk the castles and cathedrals
were powerful symbols of the authoritarian system and the violence it harnessed.
The Renaissance and its religious and political cousin, the
Magisterial Reformation would drive the death-stakes into this order and
terrible wars were unleashed accompanied by the witchcraft craze which reached
its peak in the period after the Reformation. Once again, we see a society in
tatters and in the Thirty Years War the monsters emerged – some aligning with
the Protestant cause, some with the Catholic, some with France, some with no
real cause at all. In that period we see that epistemological and ethical
collapse (along with rank nihilism) can sometimes hide behind the cloak of
religion.
In other cases we see upheaval of the revolutionary sort, a
society shattered but then further traumatised and destroyed by an episode of
terror – the revolution gone sideways. The French Revolution starts as one
thing but then becomes something quite different as the broken institutions are
utterly shattered and the breaches cannot be repaired.
Once again we can look at overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the
rise of al-Zarqawi and al Qaeda in Iraq, and the later ISIS. In Cambodia, the
chaos, instability and illegitimacy of the coup government and the American
bombing campaign gave rise to the Khmer Rouge. The chaos of the Russia
Revolution gave rise to the Bolsheviks and the collapse of leadership at a
critical time led to their own Robespierre-like terror on a magnified scale –
the epoch of Stalin and Stalinism.
Cohn's arguments are reductionist and his treatment of the
subject is superficial. He rests his argument on sometimes stunning leaps of
logic and frankly after reading his narratives one feels his understanding of
the subject matter is confused.
Cohn's book was miserable in many respects. The subject matter is of a nature that someone like me is instantly drawn to it but his structuring of arguments, and endless expressions of non sequitir became tiresome. The case is ill made throughout the book and instead relies on a concluding chapter which fails all down the line. With an unproven thesis the narrative collapses and the work loses its value.