Apocalypse

From Antiquity to the Empire of Modernity

John R. Hall, John R. Hall

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745645094, 9780745645087
• eBook ISBN: 9780745658957
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Winner of the American Sociological Association's 'Distinguished Book Award' in the Religion category.

For most of us, "Apocalypse" suggests the cataclysmic end of the world. Yet in Greek "apocalypse" means "revelation," and the real subject of the Book of Revelation is how the sacred arises in history at a moment of crisis and destiny. With origins in ancient religions, the apocalyptic has been a transformative force from the time of the Crusades, through the Reformation, the French Revolution and modern communism, all the way to the present day "Islamic Jihad" and "War on Terror." In Apocalypse, John R. Hall explores the significance of apocalyptic movements and the role they have played in the rise of the West and "The Empire of Modernity."

This brilliant cross-disciplinary study offers a novel basis for rethinking our social order and its ambivalent relations to sacred history. Apocalypse will attract general readers seeking new understandings of the world in challenging times. Scholars and students will find a compelling synthesis that draws them into conversation with others interested in religion, theology, culture, philosophy, and phenomenology, as well as sociology, social theory, western civilization, and world history.

1

Seeing through the Apocalypse

In 2006, the American cable channel Comedy Central presented spliced-together clips from U.S. television news coverage of “the Apocalypse.” Finally it had come to this, the Apocalypse as news. CNN’s Paula Zahn posed the lead question: “Are we really at the end of the world? We asked CNN’s faith-and-values correspondent Delia Gallagher to do some checking.” Later in the segment, CNN anchor Kyra Phillips reported: “At least a couple of those four horsemen of the Apocalypse are saddling up as we speak.” This prompted the Comedy Central anchor to ask, “Yo, Wolf? Can we get a live shot of that?” Comedy Central’s send-up was amusing to watch, in part because it shows how sober, down-to-earth modern news has been displaced by breathless postmodern coverage. Nevertheless, it gave me pause. Comedy Central zeroed in on the zeitgeist of an epoch. But we need to do more than trivialize American news media’s pseudo-earnest construction of the Apocalypse.

Apocalyptic dramas rarely sweep up significant numbers of people, but they do sometimes. If one measure of an era concerns how widely people embrace any of various apocalyptic meanings, surely we have been experiencing some serious end times, even if we are not agreed about the End of What. The apocalypse is no longer simply the grist of “end of the world” cartoons, “doomsday cults,” or the potentially serious, but ultimately insignificant, Y2K anxieties about computers crashing when their software calendars rolled over to the year 2000. Numerous examples suggest that an apocalyptic mood is no longer confined to cultures of religious fundamentalism. 9/11, the globalized Islamicist movement, and the counterposed “War on Terror” triggered diverse mainstream apocalyptic references. In a 2002 Time/CNN poll, 59% of Americans surveyed believed that the events depicted in the Book of Revelation would come true. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina both fueled religious anticipation of the coming apocalypse and merited news consideration as an apocalyptic event in its own right. A serious non-fiction book entitled The World without Us projects a scenario in which human beings no longer survive on Earth. Only slightly less dismal is The New Yorker story about creating a global seed bank. Called “Sowing for Apocalypse,” the article anticipates possible crop failures that raise the specter of “widespread starvation.” In 2008, Russia’s invasion of Georgia provoked rhetoric about an apocalyptic resurgence of the Cold War, and the New York Times described economic conditions as “sliding from grim to potentially apocalyptic.”¹ We no longer just have an apocalyptic counterculture; there is an apocalyptic culture to boot.

Such apocalyptic invocations concerning imminent or ongoing catastrophes “of biblical proportions,” as the rhetoric goes, signal the seriousness of crises, but they sometimes use the word “apocalypse” loosely, and they thereby blur meanings of the term. This is unfortunate. Yet how might we make sense of such a religiously charged term as “the Apocalypse”? One approach is to “translate” it for purposes of social inquiry.²

What I will call “the apocalyptic” encompasses a broad range of beliefs, events, and social processes centered on cultural disjunctures concerned with “the end of the world” and thereafter.³ As the meaning of the ancient Greek word apokalyptein suggests, an apocalyptic crisis is marked by “disclosure.” In ways that people often read the Bible’s New Testament, disclosure means “revelation” of God’s will, purpose, or plan, either through prophecy or in events themselves. However, apocalypse can be shifted out of its ordinary register by noting that prophecy is divinely inspired speech, and not inherently speech predicting future events. This suggests that even within religion, an apocalyptic text may be something other than an eschatology that describes the final and absolute end of the world. Such texts usually are not about the End, but about the Present Crisis. Theologies often address the question of eschatology, and are thus in some sense apocalyptic, but theologies – and actions – become more centrally apocalyptic when the present historical moment is experienced as the ending of the old order and the passage to a new beginning in a post-apocalyptic era. As the scholar of rhetoric Stephen O’Leary has observed, the central apocalyptic argument can be captured in the formula, “The world is coming to an end.” Yet, he continues, the rhetorical possibilities that emerge from the formula are manifold. For this reason, it is important to give consideration to a range of apocalyptic meanings that are not exclusively religious in the conventional sense.⁴

“Disclosure” can entail not only prophecy but also the subject that prophecy addresses. Ordinarily, the culture of an established social order, especially its religious legitimations, screens off everyday life from the harsh light of ultimate reality.⁵ However, sometimes the manifestation of powerful forces envelops collective social experience. Apocalypse as disclosure may unveil aspects of the human condition or present historical moment that pierce the protective screen, just as a loved one’s death proves traumatic for those who survive, but on a wider scale. Previously taken-for-granted understandings of “how things are” break down. Historically new possibilities are revealed, so awesome as to foster collective belief that “life as we know it” has been transgressed, never to be the same again. Events or prophecies mark a collective crisis so striking that it undermines normal perceptions of reality for those involved, thereby leading people to act in unprecedented ways, outside their everyday routines. Sociologically, then, the time of the apocalypse encompasses more than the religious end time of God’s final judgment, or some absolute and final battle of Armageddon. Rather than the actual end of the world, the apocalypse is typically “the end of the world as we know it,” an extreme social and cultural disjuncture in which dramatic events reshape the relations of many individuals at once to history.

Life, civilization, and indeed the physical and biological conditions of planetary survival ultimately are precarious, and we live on a tiny planet in an unimaginably immense universe. However, most people would rather hold the awe and anxieties at bay and take the conditions of our everyday existence for granted, pretending them to be durable, even immutable. The apocalypse upsets this contrivance. Under its sign, unfolding history is interrupted. Thus, an apocalyptic episode is a special moment of social time. The German social critic Walter Benjamin alluded to this circumstance when he wrote about how a present historical moment could be shot through with “chips of messianic time.”⁶ Yet Benjamin’s image of messianic time bears unpacking. How does the Messiah come? When, for whom, and to accomplish what? Sociologists like myself cannot answer such questions directly: we are researchers, not prophets. What we can do is to look to diverse historical situations in which apocalyptic times engulf social action, when people in various quarters act out one or another apocalyptic narrative. Such narratives, when they manifest, often arise on multiple fronts. Thus, a generalized climate of apocalyptic expectation sometimes takes hold when people confront natural disasters, social or economic dislocation, or calendrical shifts such as the passage to the third millennium or the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012. More intensely, revolutionary apocalyptic narratives call on people to transcend their everyday lives under special historical circumstances, to undergo a rebirth of self and act collectively in sectarian organizations of true believers. In turn, the actions of such groups can amplify a generalized apocalyptic mood.⁷ In these dialectical processes, apocalyptic imaginaries can give rise to historical times that are themselves apocalyptic.

This, of course, is not the premise of either the apocalyptic news coverage or Comedy Central’s send-up of it. They both invoked a particular religious understanding that treats the apocalypse as a preordained event, already prophesied in intricate detail. Though Comedy Central’s satire may have disabused some among the U.S. public of this kind of apocalyptic thinking, it may also have reassured those who were not predisposed to apocalyptic thinking that there was no real crisis, thus helping sustain the seemingly limitless complacency of some Americans about civic issues and world affairs.

The present book is based on a different premise: if we leave to one side questions about God’s will, thinking about the apocalyptic can move beyond either mystification or amusement. We can still laugh at the apocalyptic joke, but we need not allow historical encounters with “disclosures” to become overwhelmed by awe. Instead, we can consider the apocalyptic directly, in relation to wider social processes, by examining extreme events and the passionate meanings that envelop them. We can thus significantly shift how we make sense of history and the social conditions of our existence.

Although seemingly alien to modern life, the apocalyptic sometimes punctures history in decisive ways that lie beyond the purview of conventional social and historical research. In this book, I trace a history of the apocalyptic from ancient origins in Mesopotamia to increasingly complex manifestations in relation to emergent modern society. By way of this historical analysis, I argue that encounters with the apocalyptic, and ways of “containing” and “harnessing” it, have shifted dramatically at various historical junctures – for example, in early Jewish and Christian apocalyptic movements, in the emergence of Islam, in the Crusades and the Protestant Reformation, and in increasingly secular ways in the French Revolution, other revolutionary movements, and the consolidations of modern states. The latest apocalyptic eruption of world-historical significance is, of course, the globalized jihad of al-Qaida and its allies versus the Bush administration’s counterposed “War on Terror” undertaken from within what I will call the Empire of Modernity – that historically emergent generalized global complex of governing projects and strategic power initiatives centered in the West, and militarily in the U.S.

Containing and harnessing the apocalyptic have not been one-directional initiatives: those confronting the apocalyptic, we will see, changed as well, in part by absorbing apocalyptic features that transform society itself. Most importantly, the violence of the state and of modern insurgent revolutionary movements, now increasingly played out in relation to the Empire of Modernity, has taken on apocalyptic trappings.

The apocalyptic thus has a history not because it is a single, coherent social force or reified “thing,” but because the interactions between alternative kinds of apocalyptic manifestations and broader social developments have had relatively durable configurational consequences, both for subsequent apocalyptic eruptions and for society more broadly.

The history I trace here is only one of many narratives that could be offered.⁸ It focuses predominantly, though not exclusively, on the West, where apocalyptic visions arose early, and with profound repercussions.⁹ The apocalyptic has also surfaced outside the West, sometimes through diffusion from the West, sometimes through largely independent developments. Today, it has a global significance. The persistence and renewed importance of the apocalyptic in modern times confronts us with the puzzle of a phenomenon that seems neither modern nor non-modern, or perhaps a hybrid of both.¹⁰ But we can go beyond simply acknowledging this heterogeneous complexity. Viewing history “in the long run” through the lens of the apocalypse allows us to reach new understandings of the character of modern society, the forces structuring our historical situation, and the prospects for our world. This book is dedicated to that end.

To understand modern society in a new way requires us to become agnostic about any teleology that assumes the movement of history as “progress” toward some end point of utopian perfection. Indeed, such an assumption is now empirically in doubt. For much the same reason, we need to avoid any “totalizing” assumption that “Modernity” constitutes a coherent whole. As S. N. Eisenstadt has argued, there are “multiple modernities” rather than a single, overarching reality.¹¹ Under these historical circumstances, we can no longer rely on modern social theory as our interpretive guide. We need a fresh alternative strategy that avoids complacently employing any of the conventional modern lenses.

A “phenomenology of history” offers such a strategy. This strategy, daunting enough as a term, involves an even more challenging shift in how we think about history. Social phenomenology seeks to identify the most basic ways in which each of us is situated in the “lifeworld” – the everyday realm of the temporally unfolding here-and-now within which we live our lives, connecting to other people and media, social groups and institutions, culture and history.¹² By addressing how different kinds of social time become elaborated in the here-and-now, phenomenology moves away from the conventional modern assumption that there is one, objective world time. It thus disrupts any ordinary sense of “history” as a set of sequenced events located on a line of past objective time. Thus, a broader phenomenological “history of times” becomes integrated with the narrower “time of history.”¹³

My central concern is with times that are apocalyptic. However, apocalyptic times, eruptions that they are, arise in relation to diverse other kinds of social time: the synchronic time centered in the here-and-now, the diachronic time of the calendar and clock, and other social elaborations of time – history (itself an invention of social self-understanding, as we will see), strategic time, social constructions of “eternity,” and so forth. Thus, a history of multiple social times helps establish a level playing field in which the calendar and “clock time” so important to modern society are no longer privileged in relation to other kinds of social time with which they become intermingled. And different kinds of social time, as we will see, are mediums through which the organization of social life and the exercise of power take quite different forms. The time through which bureaucracy operates, for example, is radically different from the time experienced within a community, different again from the time of war. Piecing together how different kinds of social time emerge and become interrelated in different historical epochs yields a first pass at a phenomenology of history.

With this approach, we can consider how the apocalyptic, along with other seemingly alien, non-modern social forms, articulates with diverse modernizing developments. A phenomenology of history centered on the apocalyptic thus offers a new way of understanding society. With it, we can look to the world as it is becoming. Rather than looking backward to the twentieth-century theories of society developed when high modernity seemed more than just ideology, phenomenology promises a (but not “the”) social theoretical description of historical reality.

The chapters that follow pursue a genealogical account of how and why possibilities of the apocalyptic have shifted over the long run, and with what consequences for modern society.

• Chapter 2 describes alternative ways that social time can be orchestrated, and then explores the dawn and historical emergences in the ancient world of both the modern sense of history and the apocalyptic.
• In chapter 3, I show how key transformations of the apocalyptic in Western Christendom from the Crusades through the initial phases of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century reorganized sacred powers in relation to the powers of increasingly powerful “absolutist” states.
• Chapter 4 focuses first on the rise of objective, diachronic time, and then on the containment and harnessing of religious apocalypticism by both Protestant and Catholic European states from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century and, in a decisive new way, in the French Revolution.
• Chapter 5 explores nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments of both religious apocalypticism and secularization of the apocalyptic – in state-initiated war, revolutionary movements, and terrorism that played out in a world increasing structured as the Empire of Modernity.
• In chapter 6, the emergence of the global apocalypti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Epigraph
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Seeing through the Apocalypse
• 2 The Ancient Origins of History and the Apocalypse
• 3 Medieval Christendom and Its Others
• 4 Apocalypse Re-formed
• 5 Modernity and the Apocalyptic
• 6 Radical Islam and the Globalized Apocalypse
• 7 The Last Apocalypse?
• Bibliography
• Index