It should suffice to remember that the young Marxists of the 1970s, who read Marcuse at Berkeley and Stanford have since joined Hinduist sects and can now be found among the partisans of apocalyptical and
millenarist movements, awaiting the end of the world.
(12) The first colonists' dreams and phantasms were so intense that after crossing the ocean this experience actually confirmed all their eschatological expectations and
millenarist ideas: "the most popular religious doctrine in the Colonies was that America had been chosen among all the nations of the earth as the place of the Second Coming of Christ, and the millennium, though essentially of a spiritual nature, would be accompanied by a paradisiacal transformation of the earth, as an outer sign of an inner perfection" (Eliade 264).
It is a pity that Simonetti, while including the Letter of Barnabas in his survey did not point to the existence of an opposite, anti-Platonic trend among Egyptian Christians, represented by the discovery of fragments of the Didache, by the Shepherd of Hermas and by the
millenarist ideas of Nepos of Arsinoe as late as the 260s.
Mannheim further identifies four main periods of utopian thought, extending from the chiliastic, or
millenarist ideal of the sixteenth century, through the liberal-humanitarian (and bourgeois) concepts of the enlightenment, a pietist re-emergence of the chiliastic ideal in the early nineteenth century, and finally to a new communist utopianism whose firm foundations in economic realities are a guarantee of its validity (Mannheim, 190-222).
Thus, Vieira's view of eschatology on earth culminates with the emergence of the elected king, and is supported by several implicit and explicit references to the famous New Testament dictum "unum ovile et unum Pastor" (one flock, one shepherd) (John 10: 16), popularized by Joachimist
millenarists. Vieira represents the restoration of Portuguese identity as the emergence of a new empire, whose power he believes to have been covered up since the disappearance of Sebastian: "whoever considers the Portuguese kingdom in the times past, present and future, shall see it born in the past, resuscitated in the present, glorious in the future".
Millenarians,
millenarists, latter day utopians, nationalists, socialists, Marxists, ecologists preaching ecocide--Weber's prophets of last days are myriad.
