millenarianism

millenarianism, a version of the Christian belief that history will end with the establishment of a 1,000‐year reign of the kingdom of God on earth, to be established by means of a cataclysmic struggle between the forces of good and evil. Such beliefs, implying the imminent transformation of the world by direct supernatural intervention, were widespread among the common people of medieval and early modern Europe, particularly at times of social or political crisis. Their most notable appearance in Ireland was in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. While some Ulster Presbyterians found in the radicalism of the United Irish movement a political outlook that matched their New Light religious views (see old light and new light), others were theological conservatives, for whom the French Revolution was to be interpreted in millenarian terms, as the defeat of Antichrist in the form of the absolutist and popish Bourbon monarchy. The circulation among both Catholics and Protestants of political prophecies added further to the sense of impending crisis in the years before the insurrection of 1798. During 1822–4 the prophecies of Pastorini, in which the Book of Revelation was interpreted as foretelling the violent destruction in 1825 of the forces of Protestantism, gave the Rockite movement in Munster and Leinster a tone of revolutionary excitement, and a sectarian edge, not seen in other agrarian movements.