Richard Landes

The Birth of Heresy: A Millennial Phenomenon

This article provides a critical response to R. I. Moores keynote paper for the millennial special issue of the Journal of Religious History. Moore dismisses any connection between the reports of popular heresies in the early eleventh century and millennial concerns, either chronological or prophetic, and argues that the documents tell us almost nothing reliable about popular religiosity at this time. This response suggests that there are many good reasons for interpreting the evidence from a millennial perspective. The religious activity of the period (relic cults, pilgrimage, peace assemblies, penitential processions, apostolic movements, «heresy» and its persecution, anti-Jewish violence) should be viewed as part of a larger interrelated whole, rather than as discrete, unrelated phenomena. The article then focuses on Rodulfus Glabers famous treatment of the peasant heretic Leutard in 1000 as a case study in such an approach. It reads Glaber not as a confused and incomprehensible historian, but a subtle and complex one who believed that the chronological millennium of 1000 marked an apocalyptic turning point, and whose narratives were crafted to convey as much about this transformation as possible.

From Useful Idiot to Useful Infidel: Meditations on the Folly of 21st-Century “Intellectuals”

Lenin allegedly referred to the thinkers and activists ready to cover up for his crimes against his own people as “useful idiots.” Today, some intellectuals sacrifice their integrity as intellectuals not for a professedly progressive egalitarian movement, but in order to protect radical Islam, one of the most regressive and authoritarian movements imaginable. This article refers to such people as “useful infidels,” showing how their excessive self-criticism is exploited by Islamists to incriminate the West in the evils of modernity. The result is a perversion of human rights discourse and a marriage of pre-modern sadism and post-modern masochism.

The Fruitful Error: Reconsidering Millennial Enthusiasm

Apocalyptic hopes for an imminent millenial new age have taken a wide variety of forms in European history, from the earlier religious manifestations to the more secular and, hence, more activist ones of the modern world. Although none of these apocalyptic expectations has been accurate, and many have had disastrous immediate consequences for those involved, they have set in motion powerful social dynamics. Western science and technology, revolutionary politics, dreams of global peace, and the realities of world wars all derive peculiar inspiration from the terrible hopes of the millennial vision.