Augustine's disavowal, in Book xx of De civitate Dei, of a materialistic understanding of the thousand-year reign of Christ with His saints, as prophesied in Revelation 20:4, is undoubtedly a symbolic gesture in the intellectual history of Western Christendom. ‘He marks…a decisive moment of western thought, in which it frees itself from a paralysing archaism and turns to an autonomous creation’, is the verdict of Jean Daniélou. Nevertheless, the effect of Augustine's change of mind should not be exaggerated. Millenarian eschatological hopes and ideas survived, to find expression in the prophecies ascribed to Joachim of Flora and, later, in the ideology of the Anabaptist movement, thereafter to find their way, in a secular and anti-religious guise, into philosophies like Marxism and anarchism, as a consequence of the apparently ineradicable human longing for a state of perfection to be enjoyed upon this earth by the elect, however the elect may be defined. It is, of course, undeniable, given the influence of Augustine's theology on mediaeval thought, that professional theologians would have followed his lead in rejecting a literal understanding of the thousand-year reign; but a doubt remains. Was Augustine's rejection of millenarianism as uncompromising as is generally assumed?