In Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Galaxy Books), he follows peasant movements from the so- called Middle Ages, to the Reformation.  It has been a long time and I don’t remember if I finished it.  (I think I actually read it from the library in college and then bought it later and have managed to hang onto it ever since.  There is a really depressing story about how many excellent books that I used to own that did not survive my early years in the pastorate, but that must wait for some other time, if ever.)

In any case, because I will be teaching on the anabaptists and the Reformation soon, I thought I should revisit the book.  And I have either re-read (having forgotten it) or read for the first time Chapter 10, “The Egalitarian State of Nature.”

What a bizarre study.

Cohn claims (and has the citations to back him up) that there was, in pagan hellenic thought, the idea that back during the “age of Saturn,” (before Percy Jackson’s parents got in charge–for those who know what I’m talking about) there was an age in which there was no private property or monogamy or government or slavery.  Everything was held in common and everyone was honest and equitable in sharing everything.

Somehow, Christian apologists latched onto this idea in order to defend and/or explain the doctrine of “The Fall,” even though nothing in the Bible actually indicates there was no private property and it is actually the Apostle Paul’s basis for his teaching on monogamy.  Cohn traces this idea, being enmeshed with some scripture passages, such as the description of the early church in Acts, as it is preserved and propagated in Christian literature.  Even the idea of universal “free love”–to use the modern Anglo-American slogan–was kept intact as the theory was advanced through Christendom.  In the middle of the 1200s, a French poet actually wrote about it in a work that was a bestseller (among the literate anyway).  Basically, anyone who could read learned this mythical history as sober history passed on from the authority of antiquity.

This raises several thoughts.

First, it makes me think that Rousseau was actually passing on an ancient idea.  Maybe not.  Maybe he accidentally reconstructed it.  But it is worth further study if I ever have time.

Second, for all the claims that he is secular, it seems to me that John Locke’s theory is a Christian response to this pagan idea infecting the Christian Church.  His claim that property is individual and is acquired through homesteading and then by giving (in exchange or not) looks like a direct common-sense attack on the myth.

Third, Hobbes was doing the same thing to prove that a state was necessary.