A History of the End of the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

partakes of the pleasures and rewards of classical civilization at the peak of its enduring achievements in art, letters, and philosophy. When Savonarola called upon his parishioners to cast their paintings and pretty things on the Bonfire of the Vanities—and to thereby turn Florence into the “New Jerusalem” that is promised in Revelation—he was fighting a culture war against what he called paganism and we call the Renaissance. And modern readers of Revelation who inject the Bible into the rancorous public debate over the role of religion in American democracy are fighting the same war all over again.
    “It’s not a shooting war, but it is a war,” declared one recent appointee to a federal judgeship, a religious fundamentalist whose nomination sparked a crisis in Congress. “These are perilous times for people of faith, not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives, but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud.” 53
    So the book of Revelation cannot be dismissed as a biblical oddity that belongs only to professional theologians, media-savvy preachers, and a few religious crackpots. The fact is that Revelation has come to be regarded by certain men and women in positions of power and influence as a source of inspiration, if not a divine handbook, for the conduct of war, diplomacy, and statecraft in the real world. When Ronald Reagan moved into a house whose street number was 666, he insisted on changing the address to a less satanic number, and he readily interpreted an otherwise unremarkable coup in Libya as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy:
    “That’s a sign that the day of Armageddon isn’t far off,” he declared. “Everything’s falling into place. It can’t be long now.” 54
    Such beliefs are especially alarming in a man with the power to inflict a nuclear Armageddon on the enemy he dubbed “the evil empire,” yet another oblique reference to the book of Revelation. Yet Reagan is hardly the only American politician to hold such beliefs. All occupants of the White House since Reagan—and many of their most trusted counselors and confidantes—have declared themselves to be “born again,” a phrase that identifies them with a strain of religious fundamentalism that assumes the accuracy and inevitability of biblical prophecy, including the end-time prophecies of Revelation. Such literalism in the reading of the Bible was regarded as a problem by the earliest Christian authorities in late antiquity, and it is no less problematic in the culture war that is being fought in American today.
    Indeed, as we shall shortly see, Revelation has served as a “language arsenal” in a great many of the social, cultural, and political conflicts in Western history. 55 Again and again, Revelation has stirred some dangerous men and women to act out their own private apocalypses. Above all, the moral calculus of Revelation—the demonization of one’s enemies, the sanctification of revenge taking, and the notion that history must end in catastrophe—can be detected in some of the worst atrocities and excesses of every age, including our own.
    For all of these reasons, the rest of us ignore the book of Revelation only at our impoverishment and, more to the point, at our own peril.

Spooky Knowledge and Last Things
     
    What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?
    W ILLIAM S HAKESPEARE, Macbeth
     
    A pocalypse” is derived from the Greek word that means “unveiling,” and “Revelation” is its Latin equivalent. Both words suggest the disclosure of something that has been kept secret. Both carry the sense that the secret being revealed is not merely arcane but also deeply mysterious and perhaps even dangerous—“spooky knowledge,” as pop philosopher Alan Watts laughingly puts it. 1 And nothing else in the scriptures of Judaism or Christianity is quite so spooky as the book of