The Idolatry of the Year Zero

It is common to the religious mind and, indeed, to the human mind, to harken back to some lost Golden Age, a past time of perfection, from which everything is a story of decline. Christians are not exempt. It is a common temptation of all Christians to try to set a Year 0 somewhere and view their religious mission as restoring this lost Paradise.

Traditionalist Catholics put this Year 0 in 1955, or perhaps 1655 or 1255. Protestant Christians put their Year 0 in 1517, or some imaginary c. 100. If I write that Eastern Orthodox put their Year 0 somewhere around 800, I will get outraged responses, half saying that this is an unfair misrepresentation, and the other half saying that indeed this is so, and this is why Orthodox hold the faith undefiled unlike Western schismatics. Progressive Christians, Protestant and Catholic alike, put their Year 0 in the indeterminate future, right over the edge of an endlessly receding horizon which must be chased at all costs.

The problem with this is that there is no Year 0. This is literally true (look it up, the calendar goes from Year -1 to Year 1, which is why new centuries do not begin on years ending with 0). But it is also theologically true. The Biblical God transcends time, but (therefore) also acts decisively within time. The Medieval calendarists had it right: the only possible “Year 0” is the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. This does not usher in an era of continuous “Progress” in the Whiggish sense, but it still decisively cleaves all of human history into a Before and After, which in turn repudiates natural notions of the cyclicality of time or of lost golden ages. We Christians do not expect a restoration of the Garden of Eden, but a totally new and even better Heavenly Jerusalem.

The Catholic self-understanding of the faith as a “beauty ever ancient and ever new”, in the words of Augustine, at least at its best, prevents the putting of a “Year 0” anywhere else other than where it belongs–on Easter Sunday. The Tradition capaciously accommodates new and interesting ideas, as did the Fathers, the Scholastics, the Jesuits and the <em>Nouvelle théologie</em>, while its antibodies instinctively reject heresy. It takes every thought prisoner and makes it obey the Messiah; whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure…

Of course, along with the idolatry of the Year 0, there is the idolatry of the Fall. Christianity was great, and then Something Happened, and this Something can be blamed for everything bad that happened since. “Hellenization.” “Constantinianism.” “Scholasticism.” “Vatican II.” We only need to cleave, to surgically remove, that Bad Agent, and we will then rediscover Pure Christianity. But when you look closely, you find that the Something was there all along, and that it is impossible to remove it without killing the patient.