Thietland of Einsiedeln

Thietland was the second abbot of Einsiedeln, the monastery in the forested hills of what is now central Switzerland. He held the office from about 943 until he resigned in 964, and he died about 965.

Einsiedeln was young when he took it. It had grown up around the cell of the hermit Meinrad, who had been murdered there in 861, and had been formally established as an abbey only in 934. Thietland's abbacy is the period in which it became a serious house, with land, a school, a library, and the imperial connections that came from the patronage of the Ottonian court. He was in correspondence with the ruling family of Saxony, and his monastery sat on the road between Germany and Italy at the moment the Holy Roman Empire was being put together.

What he left is a commentary on the two letters to the Thessalonians, one of the earliest medieval expositions of those books to survive.

Most of it is careful, pastoral, ordinary explanation, Paul comforting a young church about the dead in Christ, telling them to work with their hands and mind their own affairs. Then he reaches the second chapter of 2 Thessalonians, and the man of sin who takes his seat in the temple of God, and Thietland stops and writes at length.

He is writing in the middle of the tenth century, within living memory of Magyar and Viking raids, in a Europe that had good reason to think the world was old. His digressions on the Antichrist and on the thousand years of Revelation 20 are among the fullest statements of what educated Christians of that generation actually expected. He worked out the restrainer, the timing, the sequence, and he is one of the primary witnesses historians use when arguing about whether Europe feared the year 1000.

His reading is not sensational. He follows Augustine in refusing to date the end, and he treats the millennium as the present age of the church rather than a coming golden kingdom. But he takes the man of sin as a real figure still to come, and he tells his monks what to watch for.

Also attributed to him is a commentary on Revelation. His Thessalonians commentary long circulated anonymously and among other men's works, and was only firmly restored to him by twentieth-century scholarship.

Sources: Thietland of Einsiedeln, Commentary on Second Thessalonians, trans. Steven R. Cartwright and Kevin L. Hughes; Richard Landes, Andrew Gow, and David C. Van Meter, eds., The Apocalyptic Year 1000; Kevin L. Hughes, Constructing Antichrist.