The First Day of the Rest of Our Life

Natural History, April, 2000 by Stephen Jay Gould

Or, What I Did on January 1, 2000

The comparison of the human body with the universe--the microcosm with the macrocosm--has provided a standard device for explicating both the factuality and the meaning of nature throughout most of Western history. When Leonardo da Vinci, for example, likened our bodily heat, breath, blood, and bones to the lavas of volcanic eruptions, the effusions of interior air during earthquakes, the emergence of streams from underground springs, and the rocks that build the Earth's framework--and then interpreted both sequences as particular expressions of the four Greek elements of fire, air, water, and earth--he did not view his argument as an excursion into poetry or metaphorical suggestion but as his best understanding of nature's actual construction.

We now take a more cynical, or at least a more bemused, view of such analogistic reveries, for we recognize that the cosmos, in all its grandness, does not exist for us or as a mirror of our centrality in the scheme of universal things. We would now freely admit that most attempts to understand such geological or astronomical scales of size and time in terms of comfortable regularities noted in our short life spans or puny dimensions can only represent, in the most flattering interpretation, an honorable "best try" within our own mental and perceptual limits or, at worst, yet another manifestation of the ancient sin of pride.

As a striking example, however unrecognized by most people who could scarcely avoid both walking the walk and talking the talk, the recent fuss over our millennial transition cannot be entirely ascribed to modern commercial hype, because the taproot of concern draws upon one of the oldest surviving arguments about deep and meaningful coincidence between the human microcosm and the surrounding macrocosm of universal time and space--in this case, an explicit comparison of human secular calendars to the full sweep of the creation and subsequent history of Earth and life.

By this reckoning, January 1, 2000, should have marked the termination of the old order and the inception of something new and at least potentially glorious. This momentous turning of calendrical dials should therefore have inspired our attention for reasons almost immeasurably deeper than the simple visual attraction of changing all four markers from 1999 to 2000--the "odometer rationale," if you will. (Of course, the vast majority of people in our secular and technological age have forgotten this old, and factually discarded, Christian argument for the significance of millennial turnings. But vestiges of these historical claims still affect both our calendars and our discourse. Moreover, and with potentially tragic results, these vestiges persist as literal portents for a few "true believers" leading in the most extreme case to the suicide of thirty-nine members of the Heaven's Gate cult in 1997.)

The traditional linkage of human calendrical microcosms to universal historical macrocosms followed an argument in five stages:

1. The original millennium, as expressed in the famous biblical prophecy of Revelation, chapter 20, referred to a future 1,000-year period of bliss following the return of Jesus and the binding of Satan, not to a secular passage of 1,000 years in recorded human history. How, then, did the primary meaning of "millennium" change from the duration of a future epoch to the ticking of current calendars?

2. The earliest Christians expected an imminent inception of the millennium, as Jesus had apparently stated in foreseeing his quick return after bodily death: "Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom" (Matt. 16:28). The failure of this expectation unleashed an extended discussion among early Christians on the meaning of the millennium and the true timing of the Second Coming of Christ.

3. Opinions varied widely, but the most popular claim rested upon several biblical passages suggesting an equation of God's days with a thousand human years, as in the admonition of 2 Peter 3:8, "But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."

4. The link between human calendars and the inception of the true millennium then rested upon an analogistic argument that we, by modern standards, would tend to regard as fuzzy, indefinite, and metaphorical but that seemed quite satisfactory to many of our forebears (who used their equally powerful brains in different conceptual contexts): If God created the Earth in six days and rested on a seventh, and if each of God's days equals 1,000 human years, then Earth's full history must mirror God's complete span of creation by enduring for 6,000 years, while God's seventh day of rest must correspond to the forthcoming, blissful millennium of 1,000 additional years. If, therefore, we can count Earth's history in millennia (periods of 1,000 years representing God's days), we will know, with precision, the end of the current order and the time of inception for the true millennium, for this transition will occur exactly 6,000 years after Earth's beginning.