Borchardt, Frank L. "Restoring the Millennium to Seventeenth-Century Utopias": Richard A. Lima, ed. Studies in Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures (III) Select Proceedings of the Southeastern Conference. Madrid: Origines, 1990, pp. 29-36.

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[29] These ten years since the publication of the magisterial Utopian Thought in the Western World by Frank and Fritzie Manuel ⁽¹⁾ do not suffice wholly to restore confidence that it is possible to present anything on the topic that can be both original and true.

Even the German scene, generally just past the right hand field of vision of most North Atlantic scholars not specifically German or Germanist, receives fair treatment at their hands (pp. 289-331), "fair" insofar as German developments contributed directly to the aspects of their study described by the "Western" in their title. This includes, on the historic side, Valentin Andreae and the foundation documents of Rosicrucianism, Comenius and the Pansophie, Samuel Hartlib and the forerunners of the Royal Society of London, and on the more modern side, "Marx and Counter-Marx" (695-756).

Utopia was the focus of their study, and in consequence, those adjacent ideas that project other kinds of perfect universes quite properly assumed secondary importance, as for example, the pastoral, science fiction, and more pointedly for the present purpose, millennialism. They did not ignore these important matters, but they subordinated them to their greater theme. The following argument seeks to suggest that one of these adjacent ideas, millennialism, is less a variant of "Utopia" than the other way around, and that, millennialism pervasively informs Utopia, certainly the Utopia of seventeenth-century middle-Europe and probably all others as well.

The term "utopian" in modern parlance has a connotative [30] value not far from that of "quixotic." It expresses an idealistic and well-motivated but not altogether rational, or, if rational, not altogether practical or realistic approach to the practical and real problems of present time and place.

The factors of Time and Place critically distinguish "Utopia" and the "utopian" internally and from similar but not identical expressions and do so for several good reasons. These include 1) the self-definition contained in the terms by etymology, 2) the overlap between Utopia and the "Golden Age," and 3) the instability of particulars in utopian programs, that is, the particulars of one era's utopia may be another era's horror or, conversely, another era's social policy, and yet another era's long desired and finally achieved day-to-day reality.

The factor of Place determines Utopia insofar as Utopia is conceived, despite the Morean pun, as occupying a specific geography, the specificity of which often occupies huge stretches of the literary presentations. These descriptions may lay out a symbolic or, on the other hand, a socially pragmatic program, or both. For the purposes of differentiation, it is the spatial setting of Utopia which distinguishes it from other critiques of the here and now, the principal dimension of which is temporal. That is to say, what Utopia is to Place, the Golden Age, for example, is to Time, with the added complexity that the Golden Age resides at either the beginning or the end of time, or both. The Golden Age and Utopia commonly represent a radical alternativity to the state of affairs prevailing in the here and now. They stand for radically "other" time and radically "other" place, the not here and the not now. ⁽²⁾

Verbal representations of the Golden Age, with precious few exceptions, suffer gravely under the "otherness" imperative. One may argue whether the Garden of Eden is chiefly spatial or temporal. The [31] biblical account locates the Garden quite specifically and suggests that it continues to exist, though impossible ever again to enter, after the primordial pair have been banished. Coming as it does at the beginning of the biblical narrative and as a continuation of the creation story, the Garden serves as much a chronological function, which has come to dominate its subsequent conceptualization. Its hopeless inaccessibility and its human habitation only at the beginning of things have finally robbed its spatial dimension of relevance. Let Eden therefore stand for one expression of the "Golden Age."

What characterizes the primordial human condition in the Hebrew scriptures is the mastery of man over nature in Genesis 1; the same motif is carried over into the creation of Adam in Genesis 2, where "life" in the Garden is specified as innocent and seems occupied mostly by the naming of the animals. Only in Genesis 3, when pain, labor, the obstinacy of the earth, and death are inflicted on the primordial pair is it clear what they have lost. The Garden is not, in fact, fully defined until the expulsion, that is, in terms of a negation of what is generally known about the human condition. ⁽³⁾

The fundamentally negative representation of the first times is somewhat more obviously portrayed in Hesiod's description of the Time of the Golden Race, "when Cronos was king of heaven ... like gods they lived with hearts free from sorrow and remote from toil and grief ... nor was miserable age their lot, but always unwearied in feet and hands they made merry in feasting, beyond the reach of all evils ... the fertile earth spontaneously bore them abundant fruits ... and they lived in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things, rich in flocks and beloved of the blessed gods." The negations of the first part of the description declare frankly what the positive succeeding descriptions barely conceal: that life among the Golden Generation was the opposite of ordinary life in the world.

The elements of the descriptions of the primordial condition do not chiefly refer to one another but rather to their opposites in another composition altogether in which the relationships are experiential and autonomous, human life in the world as it is.

In both these descriptions and many others from around the world, the easy, want-free, struggle-free primordial time shares this quality of a photonegative and, like a [32] photonegative, when processed, reveals something about what the myth-makers really objected to in their lives.

Golden Ages from around the world share another quality, and that is the risk of sliding into Cockaigne, Schlaraffenland, and right down the Big Rock Candy Mountain. One attribute alone wards off the high risk of the ridiculous, and that is the presence of the deity or a surrogate, without whom all this licence, ease, and abundance becomes absurd.

For a Golden Age to be serious, it must have a close relationship with some divine or transcendent force. It lacks autonomy, that is, it acts as a negative allegory of the present. Furthermore, a primordial Golden Age, by definition, must come to an end. As the dependencies and limitations accumulate around the concept of the Golden Age, its true nature begins to reveal itself. It is not an independent model of a perfect condition but only one small part of a process, which includes 1) its inevitable decay or catastrophic conclusion, 2) the present woefully inadequate world, which is not just in bad condition but is daily getting worse, 3) an imminent catastrophe resulting from the degeneration of the present condition (and corresponding to the event or process which ended the primordial Golden Age in the first place), and 4) a restoration of the Golden Age, however, without the implicit defect that led to its original demise. ⁽⁴⁾

In this context, the Golden Age reveals itself as a fragmentary manifestation of the apocalyptic worldview, the distribution of which around the world frankly dwarfs the literary Utopia and all its permutations. The same may be said of the concrete social manifestations of these ideas: in the case of apocalypticism, millennial outbreaks, which across history greatly outnumber utopian experiments, although both incline to end "by bringing great suffering upon their members." ⁽⁵⁾

The seventeenth-century West, which is here a net loosely cast to snag Russia and the Jewish Middle East as well as the rest of Europe and America, witnessed a great variety of millennial outbreaks, the most dramatic of which are probably [33] the appearance of the Fifth Monarchy Men in England, ⁽⁶⁾ of the schismatic Old Believers in Russia, ⁽⁷⁾ and of the "mystical messiah," Sabbatai Sevi, among the Jews of the Old and New Worlds. ⁽⁸⁾ The full impact of these movements was felt in the second half of the century, approaching and succeeding the millennial (plus Triumphant Beast) year of 1666.

Their simultaneous appearance is largely or entirely coincidental, that is to say, none can be causally related to the other, although news travelled fast along the trade routes, and what happened in Smyrna would soon be published in Amsterdam, touch colonists in the West Indies, and provide Increase Mather with materials for sermons in Boston. ⁽⁹⁾

The apparent absence of a similarly dramatic outbreak among Christians of Middle Europe should not be disturbing, since millennialism was pervasively available to them in their literature (e.g, Moscherosch, Grimmelshausen) and among countless sects, of whom the Moravians are perhaps the best known. Furthermore, recent historical digging has unearthed a large and important eschatological literature written by the very hands of those who were shaping Lutheran orthodoxy and, at least superficially, condemning the sectarians who sought to establish God's kingdom on earth. These hands include Luther's own, who despaired of history and, like many others, tried, late in life, to calculate the years remaining before the Second Coming. ⁽¹⁰⁾

Even without this context, Andreae's early and repeated disavowal of the Rosicrucian fiction and of the millennial in the Christianopolis would indicate that there was a problem, that there were those who would read his constructs as plans [34] for imminent realization and not, as the old Andreae would have it, a paradigma irrelevant to life in this vale of tears (Manuel, p. 308).

A clear instance of this problem is Jan Comenius, who wrote his first Utopia (in Czech), lifted from Andreae's Peregrinus, just around the time Andreae was trying to shake off responsibility for the Rosicrucian fiction (1623). Comenius's Labyrinth of the World qualifies as a negative Utopia. The explicit criticism of the world he visits guided by Searchall Ubiquitous, servant of Queen Vanity, and in the company of Delusion, refers to the world as it is, and chiefly by magnification, holds it up to criticism. ⁽¹¹⁾ The surface of the work shows a radically repudiating posture over against the misery, dishonesty, and violence of the world. The evidence for millennialism is at best indirect: a certain conformity with the "signs" predicting the imminent end of all this evil and a disturbing epiphany of Seven Wise Men, awakened by God to restore the true alchemy. ⁽¹²⁾ The degree to which the world is rejected allows only two exits: one vertical, into mysticism; one horizontal, into a time when these conditions no longer prevail.

That Comenius awaited the moment of the second exit is indisputable. He pursued every chiliastic prophet he could find on his wanderings (Peuckert, p. 180). Early in his life, he came under the influence of Mikulas Drabik, a visionary and "prophet" whom he never repudiated, even when Drabik had become more than an embarrassment. Anticipating the millennial year by a decade, Drabik proclaimed the coming of the thousand-year reign for the year 1656, which is the year also in which Comenius fled his home in ravaged Lezno for Amsterdam, and there prepared the sum of his pedagogical works for publication.

In the context of Drabik, the apparently innocent Opera Didactica were plans meant for immediate realization in a world soon to be wonderfully transformed. ⁽¹³⁾

[35 ] Comenius had long been at the center of visionary reforms and, as early as 1630 he met a counterpart in Samuel Hartlib to whom later Milton would dedicate his essay Of Education (1644). ⁽¹⁴⁾ Hartlib had already become acquainted with all the foundation documents of the Rosicrucians and sought out Comenius for a manifesto. Comenius delivered the Didactica Magna instead, far too practical to qualify as an introduction to the great Pansophia or to satisfy the circle around Hartlib, though, in Comenius's own terms it was probably meant as a map for education in the millennium. At the core of Hartlib's utopian plans (partly his own, partly those of his soul mate, John Drury) were the creation of a universal academy, the restoration of one faith (at least among Protestants), and the introduction of a universal language. ⁽¹⁵⁾ This has been an apocalyptic expectation for almost as long as there have been apocalyptic expectations: one common law will prevail over the world, one eternal government, one sacrifice, one worship, one people, and one language on the face of the earth. ⁽¹⁶⁾ At least one of Hartlib's plans was realized after the Restoration (and his discreet retirement) in the establishment of the Royal Society, in which his friends, among them Robert Boyle, played important roles.

The History of Science has, with some incredulity on the part of practicing scientists, restored the importance of magic, the occult, and the esoteric to the story of the beginnings of modern science. Newton was, after all, an alchemist (and apocalypticist) before, during, and after the composition of the Principia Mathematica, and Newton, Locke, and Boyle (who banned alchemy from the agenda of the Royal Society), exchanged a serious alchemical correspondence, swearing one another to secrecy. ⁽¹⁷⁾ It would probably be well for the [36] historians and critics of Utopia similarly to remember the apocalyptic environment, both theoretical and practical, from which the modern Utopia sprang. It continues to inform Utopia in all its manifestations, even, or especially, those which most assiduously avoid or vociferously repudiate transcendent forces, those which alone would keep their envisioned paradises from turning in Big Rock Candy Mountains (or into nightmares).