There was of course an important reason for such calculation. Could you calculate when the world would end? Many theologians said no. Mankind couldn’t try to second-guess the Almighty’s divine plan. St Augustine was one who forcefully said that you should stop your counting. Some people thought that the world would last 6,000 years, so when 6,000 years since Creation were up the world would end. Or maybe 600 years since Christ’s passion. This, as various writers said, was all theologically dubious but it didn’t stop people thinking that way.
Indeed, as long as the Roman Empire was standing and secure then there was no reason to worry that the 6th age was ending. Of course in the 5th century some people did start to worry. The chronicler Hydatius, writing in north-west Iberia in the 460s, was sure the world was ending. But not everyone thought like that and by the end of the fifth century such apocalyptic thinking had faded. The world hadn’t ended just because there was no western Emperor.
As ever, what really made a difference was Justinian declaring the western Empire to have been lost. People in the West now were living after the Roman Empire. Had, therefore, the 6th age ended? For a short period in the late sixth century it does seem that people thought the end of times was near: the fact that, as Gregory of Tours calculated, it was about 6,000 years since creation (and also about 600 years since Christ’s birth or passion) didn’t help matters. Apocalyptic thinking is very common in late 6th-century western thought. You can see it very clearly in the writings of the two Gregories: Gregory of Tours and Gregory the Great (more or less exact contemporaries). With the Great Persian War and then the Arabs this sort of idea, of living after the Empire, became common in the East as well. It is very likely that these ideas played a big part in the ascetic invasion mentioned in [a previous packge of lectures].
What if you were living at a moment beyond linear time, after the end of the last of the 6 ages of the world, when the last days were about to begin? One effect of this was probably the increase in ‘typological’ thinking. Typological thinking saw everything in the world as a ‘type’ of something from the Bible or Christian history. A prince who rebelled against his father – a new Absalom. A wise king: a new Solomon. A sinful man? A new Herod. And so on. This went beyond mere simile. It meant that particular actions or sets of actions could be expected to bring a particular outcome, based upon biblical precedent. Causation no longer worked horizontally, as the sequence of causes and effects of mankind’s actions. It came vertically, direct from God, according to the type of situation. You can see this very clearly in Gregory of Tours’ Histories, which, infamously, are a jumble of short stories with little attempt to follow a narrative thread. Gregory sees things as self-contained units where people do something and there is a consequence in terms of reward or punishment – miracles and anti-miracles if you like – and then moves on to the next story, all for the education and instruction of his readers. The moment passed, of course. These worries are not so clear in the next generation, but nonetheless the fact that one was living after the end of Rome was in place. One was now living in a time when, even if you couldn’t calculate the timing of its arrival, the apocalypse could come at any time, maybe soon but maybe not. This remained a fixture for the rest of the Middle Ages.