The third millennium is likely to be the post-Christian millennium in the same way as the last thousand years, according to many, amounted to the Christian millennium. With all the celebrations, parties and bugs, we are in danger of forgetting that the mathematical symbolism of the year 2000 is a calendrical coincidence of significance only to numerate Christians and post-Christians, without relevance to the way calendars and dates have been calculated for centuries, if not millenniums, by Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and many others.
The celebrations may not be linked accurately either to the beginning of a new millennium or to the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Christ in the year 4 BC, but they do mark a new stage for Christianity as it begins its third millennium. It is probable that over the next 1,000 years, Christians may find it difficult to grasp the way the previous thousand years have been shaped culturally by the symbiotic relationship between Christianity and civilisation.
In his contribution to the newly-published APCK collection of essays, A Time to Build, the Bishop of Meath and Kildare, Dr Richard Clarke, points to Chartres Cathedral and the Mozart Requiem as two supreme examples of the artistic glory of Christendom.
It is said that during a visit to England Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought about Christian civilisation, and replied: "I think it would be a very good idea." But the relationship between Christianity and culture and politics has been so close that the words Christian and civilisation have seemed almost inseparable and the word Christendom came to represent what was perceived as the civilised political order. It may be too brash to call those collective experiences over the past thousand years either "Christian" or "civilised", but during the past millennium Christianity has shaped our civilisation and our every expression of it - politics, painting and poetry, art, architecture and music, our language and even our sense of humour and our very thought processes - in ways that we might say nothing has influenced us so much since classical Greece.
If architecture gives shape and form to a civilisation, then classical Greece and, even more so, the religious impulses of Christianity inspired, shaped and formed the building of our present civilisation. For most of the last millennium, two powers alone, the Church and the State, could afford to make grand architectural statements in the splendour and beauty of cathedrals and palaces. From the Gothic triumphs of Chartres Cathedral and Notre Dame in the twelfth and thirteenth century to the innovations of Basil Spence's Coventry Cathedral in the 1950s and 1960s, church architecture has elevated bricks and stones to lofty spiritual heights beyond the muscle-flexing symbolised in the architecture of castles and palaces, to provide a reminder of eternal truths beyond the passing whims and fashions of the politics of the day.
Gothic architecture would leave a more lasting mark on the Irish landscape than the Celtic monasteries and round towers. While palaces, castles and courts were closed to all but the privileged few, cathedrals and castles gave the unpaying masses access not only to architecture as an art form, but to most other expressions of art too. The Church alone could commission the great stained glass windows, the mosaic and tiled floors, the frescoes and sculptures of a Michelangelo, and masterpieces in music. In principle, the cathedrals were open to be inspected and savoured by all of Christendom, to be viewed, enjoyed and to be enriching.
If church music at the beginning of the millennium was essentially Benedictine and Gregorian plainchant, inspired by the monastery and the abbey, then as music developed it was the Church that became the first major patron of choristers and composers. The history of western music is totally in debt to the patronage of the church: the earliest attempts at musical notation are to be found in the Latin texts of Gregorian chant, with the four-line stave first found in the eleventh century; and modern music is impossible to imagine without the work of Leonin and Perotin of Notre Dame, the original masters of polyphony.
Music enjoyed secular patronage after the Reformation and with the dawn of the Renaissance, but it was still from Christianity and the message of the Gospel that succeeding composers drew inspiration: Mozart's Requiem, Haydn's Masses, Handel's Messiah, Mendlessohn's Elijah, Faure's Requiem, Bach's cantatas, Allegri's Miserere, Vivaldi's Gloria and Gounod's Ave Maria. It is no surprise to find that when Virgin Records came to selecting the recordings for its three-CD hit, The Best Classical Album Of The Millennium . . . Ever!, over half the tracks on the vocal CD had a Biblical or liturgical theme.
Modern painting and sculpture are totally indebted to the patronage of the Church and the inspiration provided by religious themes. Filippo Brunelleschi's dome of Florence Cathedral marks the discovery of perspective. His contemporaries included the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti Donatello. Later, in the High Renaissance, Raphael produced some of his most famous works for Pope Julius II, a contemporary of Michelangelo who was responsible for major developments in painting, sculpture and architecture. Michelangelo's legacy would include his statue of David (1501-1504) and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (15081512). With the Reformation and Renaissance, art began to shift to more secular themes in northern Europe. But the Church continued to provide patronage for the great artists and sculptors, including Caravaggio and Bernini.
THE language we use today has been shaped and influenced by Christian thoughts and concepts to a degree that it would be impossible to talk about the next millennium and all the ideas it may produce, without using a language that has been inspired, shaped and driven by our Christian heritage. Modern English emerges as a separate, identifiable language as Geoffrey Chaucer writes his Canterbury Tales, the story of Christian pilgrims making their way to the shrine of Thomas a Becket at the beginning of the millennium. Language and thought became popularly accessible through the printed word, made possible by the impulse to have the Bible available to all. And so it is no accident that the revolution in printing is marked by the arrival of Johann Gutenberg's Bible in 1456 or that the English language may have been shaped in the two following centuries less by Shakespeare than by his contemporaries engaged in the King James translation of the Bible into English.
Through the succeeding generations, Christianity informed and shaped the poets, including Milton in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Wordsworth and Coleridge. More than any other, the poet who exemplifies modernism and the spirit of the age at the end of the millennium must be T.S. Eliot. The Waste Land (1922) wrestles with the devastation of the post-war world and the spiritual barren-ness of 20th-century society, and returns to the early verities surrounding loss, death and salvation, moving from disintegration to hope. Eliot's Anglo-Catholic brand of Christianity found expression in his other poems, including Journey of the Magi (1927), A Song for Simeon (1928) and Ash Wednesday (1930), and in poetic dramas such as Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and the Cocktail Party (1950). In his Four Quartets (1943), he brought together his thoughts on artistic creativity, religious faith, time and eternity.
But if the influence of Christianity on culture has been creative, history may be less kind in passing judgment relationship between Christianity and politics over the past thousand years. The last millennium opened, almost, with the Crusades, reached maturity with the Inquisition, and closed under the shadow of the smoke stacks of Auschwitz. The Crusades have left a bitter legacy of a 1,000-year antagonism between Islam and Christianity, that was hard if not impossible to identify in the first few centuries of Islam. The treatment of Christians when Jerusalem first fell to the Muslims contrasted sharply with the bloody behaviour of the Crusaders when they entered the Holy City. The Inquisition marked the formalisation and institutionalisation of sectarianism among Christians. Auschwitz and the concentration camps can be said to be the most horrifying consequences of the Church's failure, over the centuries, to root out anti-Semitism from Christianity; an anti-Semitism that could be said to have its origins in the New Testament and in some interpretations of passages in Saint John's Gospel, paradoxically providing excuses for those who blamed Jews in general for the death of one Jew. Prejudice and politics were a poisonous cocktail once they had a flavour of Christianity added.
But if Christianity and the Church had failed for 1,000 years to recognise the dire consequences of identifying the interests of Church and State, of fusing religion, politics and culture in "Christendom", the second World War put an end to it. Despite the American and French revolutions and their ideals of separating religion and politics, Christianity and the Church in most countries where Christians were a majority remained fused together in the dominant order until the second World War.
If the Church had been tamed over the centuries by kings and rulers, the challenges to the ruling order came mainly from movements that had their roots in Christianity and the life of the Church. The revolutionary ideals of the United Irishmen in 1798 may have been informed by the French and American revolutions, but they were inspired equally by millennarian idealists who hoped the new and fashionable revolutionary spirit would herald a new 1,000-year era marked by the return of Christ to reign on earth and to bring justice to all. Thomas Russell, who was jailed as a United Irishman and fought in Robert Emmet's abortive rebellion of 1803, went to his death having completed his translation from his Greek New Testament of the beatific vision of a new millennium that would usher in a new heaven and a new earth (Revelation 21: 1).
NO ONE can deny the links between early English socialism and trade unionism and the rise of Methodism at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, with the Tolpuddle Martyrs fulfilling the dual role of Methodist martyrs and working-class heroes. Marxism too could be seen as a Christian heresy in which alienation took place of sin, redemption gave way to the promise of communism, the second coming would now be the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the new reign of Christ found a substitute in the withering away of the state and a truly egalitarian society. But sadly, the Eastern European experiment in Marxism would see instead the Church replaced by the State, the clergy replaced by party officials, and the people remained in darkness.
Perhaps it was not the Christian heresy of Marxism but two other political codes inspired by thoughtful Christians - Christian Democracy and Social Democracy - that reshaped politics for the next century and for a world that has moved beyond needing "Christendom". In Nazi Germany, when state power was at its absolute, the discredited relationship received its death blow. The theologians of the Confessing Church, most notably Dietrich Bonhoeffer, provided the lasting challenge to the accepted link between Christianity and the State, in which the Church had blessed the political order and the state tolerated Christianity so long as it was quiescent. Their challenge ensured that post-war Christianity could never again bless a political system without the danger of being accused of being heretical.
And in those post-war decades, while Marxism was tried and failed in half of Europe in the span of half a century, a consensus was emerging in western European societies on a system that may be called social democracy, social partnership or even the "Third Way". It is a political consensus that was first shaped in the 1930s and 1940s by church leaders such as Archbishop William Temple, who, having seen the Jarrow marchers and the poverty of the 1920s, insisted that if members of the working class were going to be called on to make the major sacrifices and be bled in another world war, they must reap visible benefits from a new social order.
The turn of the millennium may mark the final phase of the transition from Christendom to the post-Christian society. According to the Irish theologian, Dr Andrew Pierce, in his essay in A Time to Build, the churches in Europe are facing a greater challenge to their self-understanding than they did at either the Reformation or the Renaissance. In the new millennium, the majority of Europeans may not know the words of scripture that inspired Christian civilisation, including our art, architecture, painting, poetry and music, except through the eyes of painters such as El Greco or the words written by Charles Jennens, the librettist of Handel's Messiah.
At the beginning of the passing millennium, mapmakers saw Jerusalem as the navel of the world. As our focus shifted east and west, the new world was indelibly marked by the lines drawn on the map by a Pope who divided Latin America between the competing imperial interests of Portugal and Spain. As we move into a post-Christian millennium, our world view, how we see the world, and how we talk about it, sing about it, paint it and marvel at it may be impossible in any other frame of mind because of the birth of a child miscalculated as having taken place 2,000 years ago.
Patrick Comerford is an Irish Times journalist and a writer on theology and church history. He can be contacted at theology@ireland.com