A History of the End of the World (26 page)

“The glory of all the Saints is to wreak vengeance,” declared one of the royal propagandists. “Revenge without mercy must be taken on all who are not marked with the Sign (of the Anabaptists).”
⁹⁶

The “kingdom of a thousand years,” of course, was doomed from the start. The local bishop called upon the surrounding cities and states to contribute arms, men, horses, and money to mount a campaign against Münster, and the town was blockaded and besieged. Bockelson and his royal court continued to dine on the meat and drink that he had requisitioned from his subjects, but everyone else was reduced to eating dogs and cats, mice and rats, then “grass and moss, old shoes and the whitewash on the walls,” and finally “the bodies of the dead.”
⁹⁷
At last, in 1535, the town was taken by the besieging army in a final surprise attack, and the defenders were put to a general slaughter that lasted several days. Bockelson and his cohorts were tortured at length with red-hot irons, and their broken bodies were put on public display as a warning against any other like-minded readers of Revelation who might be tempted to engage in a similar “horrendous novelty.”

So it was that a sermonizer might seek to set his audience afire with terrors and yearnings and end up in the flames of his own making. Such was the fate of a man who has been called “a martyr of prophecy,” Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498), perhaps the single most famous (or notorious) of the apocalyptic radicals.
⁹⁸
Florence was destined to be the New Jerusalem, or so Savonarola believed and preached, and he saw it as his divine mission to make it so. At a moment in history when Europe was afflicted by “presages, phantoms and astrological conjunctions of dreadful import,” as one contemporary chronicler put it, the Florentines were a ready and willing audience.
⁹⁹

Like the author of Revelation, Savonarola was a self-appointed soldier in a culture war. The Dominican friar detested what he called “the perversities and the extreme evil of these blind peoples amongst whom virtue is reduced to zero and vice triumphs on every hand”
¹⁰⁰
—that is, the worldly ways of life and art that are seen today as the glory of the Renaissance. And, just as John denounced the pleasures and treasures of Roman paganism (“Cargo of gold, silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet…”),
¹⁰¹
Savanarola condemned the opulent lives of the Roman Catholic clergy.

“You have been to Rome,” he declared. “Well, then, you must know something of the lives of these priests. They have courtesans, squires, horses, dogs. Their houses are filled with carpets, silks, perfumes, servants. Their pride fills the world. Their avarice matches their pride. All they do, they do for money.”
¹⁰²

Savonarola, again like the author of Revelation, was a gifted and powerful preacher, and his sermons “ignited a fireball of religious panic that heated even the city’s most urbane minds,” according to cultural historian Robin Barnes.
¹⁰³
His public lectures on the book of Revelation were so popular, in fact, that he was forced to move to ever-larger quarters in order to accommodate the crowds. They took to heart his warning that the end of the world was near: “torrents of blood,” “a terrible famine,” and “a fierce pestilence” awaited the sinners.
¹⁰⁴
And they surely thrilled at the sight of a seer in action: “My reasons for announcing these scourges and calamities are founded on the Word of God,” ranted Savonarola in one of his white-hot sermons. “I have seen a sign in the heavens. Not a cross this time, but a sword. It’s the Lord’s terrible swift sword which will strike the earth!”
¹⁰⁵

Above all, Savonarola commanded his congregation to forgo the pleasures of the flesh in anticipation of the Day of Judgment. “Sodomy is Florence’s besetting sin,” declared Savonarola, who complained that “a young boy cannot walk in the streets without of falling into evil hands.”
¹⁰⁶
But he was no less punishing when it came to the sexual excesses of women, real or imagined. “Big flabby hunks of fat you are with your dyed hair, your high-rouged cheeks and eyelids smeared with charcoal,” he railed. “Your perfumes poison the air of our streets and parks. Not content with being the concubines of laymen and debauching young boys, you are running after priests and monks in order to catch them in your nets and involve them in your filthy intrigues.”
¹⁰⁷
And he laid the same charge against the pope and the clergy: “Come here, you blasphemy of a church!” he sermonized, making good use of the catchphrases of Revelation. “Your lust has made of you a brazenfaced whore. Worse than beasts are you, who have made yourself into an unspeakable monster!”
¹⁰⁸

The most remarkable and enduring moment in Savonarola’s war on the humanism and high art of the Renaissance was the so-called Bonfire of the Vanities, a pyre on which he urged the penitent men and women of Florence to toss their finery and frippery, wigs and gowns, perfumes and face powders, mirrors and rouge pots, dice and playing cards, and “certain musical instruments whose tone was deemed to be of an excitant nature.”
¹⁰⁹
Some of the fuel for the bonfire can be described as pornography or worse—“marble statues of lewd posture, mechanized dolls of impure gesturing, as well as all articles apt or calculated to excite lust”
¹¹⁰
—but paintings by Botticelli and books by Petrarch and Boccaccio were also pitched into the flames.
¹¹¹
The reward for the self-sacrifice of the Florentines, he promised, would be the elevation of the city of Florence to the stature of the New Jerusalem, a model of Christian purity and the capital of the millennial kingdom.

Like so many other apocalyptic preachers, Savonarola saw no meaningful distinction between religion and politics. Indeed, his vision of the end-times was deeply rooted in the soil of realpolitik. Thus, for example, he condemned the papacy in Rome on moral grounds: “They have turned their churches into stalls for prostitutes,” he declared, “I shall turn them into stalls for hogs and horses because these would be less offensive to God.”
¹¹²
And his moral revulsion prompted him to side with the French king, Charles VIII, who was contesting with the pope for political sovereignty over Italy. Nor was Savonarola troubled by the bloodshed and chaos that he invited and even instigated. When Pope Alexander reportedly tried to make a separate peace with Savonarola by offering to raise him to the rank of cardinal, whose badge of office was a scarlet miter, the pope badly misjudged the temper of the true believer.

“I want nothing but what you, O Lord, have given to your saints, namely death,” Savonarola retorted. “A red hat, yes, but red with blood—that’s what I wish for.”
¹¹³

Savonarola may have won over the guilt-ridden and panic-stricken souls who rallied to his potent sermons, but he also managed to alienate those among the wealthy and powerful of Florence who sided with the pope and who, not incidentally, were offended and embarrassed by Savonarola’s denunciation of their riches and privileges. “Fra Girolamo either sees spooks,” cracked one of his adversaries, referring to him by his title and first name, “or he drinks too much.”
¹¹⁴
Savonarola’s enemies in Florence, acting in concert with the pope in Rome, arranged for his arrest, torture, and trial, and he was condemned on charges of heresy and schism.

“I separate you from the Church Militant and Triumphant,” said the bishop who conducted the formal ritual of excommunication. “From the Church Militant, not from the Church Triumphant,” retorted the defiant Savonarola. “That is not within your competence.”
¹¹⁵

The “proto-messianic republic” that Savonarola founded in Florence lasted only three years.
¹¹⁶
On May 24, 1498, Savonarola was stripped of his monk’s robe, his head was shaved to destroy his tonsure, and he was hanged by the neck from a gibbet. Then his broken body was put to the flames in the same crowded and clamorous public square where he had once kindled his own dangerous fires.

“Prophet,” taunted an ironist in the noisy mob, “now is the time for a miracle!”
¹¹⁷

S
till, the apocalyptic idea is not always or only a matter of gloom and doom. For readers who are so inclined, the book of Revelation—and all of the apocalyptic writings in both Judaism and Christian traditions—can be understood as a story with the happiest of endings. To be sure, John warns that our benighted world will end in fire and brimstone, but he also promises a new heaven and a new earth. “Behold,” says God at the end of Revelation, “I make all things new.”
¹¹⁸
That is why the apocalyptic tradition has been aptly described as “bipolar”: the bad news is that the earth will be destroyed and humankind will be exterminated, but the good news is that the saints will live forever in paradise.
¹¹⁹

At the very moment when Savonarola’s apocalyptic visions (and Savonarola himself) were going up in flames, for example, another celebrated reader of Revelation was looking forward to a much happier fate for himself and all of humankind. Of course, Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) is remembered for his historic voyages of discovery rather than for his apocalyptic speculation. Long before Columbus embarked on the first of his momentous voyages, however, the Admiral of the Ocean Seas had already found his way to the ancient mystical texts, all of which he read with the greatest curiosity and credulity. Between his second and third sailings to America, Columbus compiled his own collection of apocalyptic and prophetic passages that he had extracted from the Bible, the writings of the church fathers, and various medieval commentaries, a work that he titled
The Book of Prophecies.

His goal was to make the case for royal sponsorship of a very different but no less ambitious enterprise. The Holy Land remained under Islamic sovereignty, but Columbus was encouraged by what he had read in the apocalyptic texts to see a role for himself in achieving what the crusaders had repeatedly failed to accomplish—the defeat of the Muslim overlords of Jerusalem. Indeed, he was convinced that God bestowed the gold and silver of the Americas on Christendom in order to finance the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, “the apocalyptic city
par excellence.
”
¹²⁰

Columbus himself witnessed a fresh upwelling of apocalyptic frenzy. His royal patron, Ferdinand of Aragon, was seen as a worthy candidate for the title of Last World Emperor, and the victory of the Spanish crown over the last Islamic kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula was regarded as a sign of the approaching millennial kingdom. And, since the New Jerusalem was a crucial element of the end-times as they were predicted in the book of Revelation, Columbus was inspired to offer his ser vices in bringing it into existence.

Among the texts that he consulted were the writings of Joachim of Fiore, and he recognized himself in the prophesies that he found there. “Jerusalem and Mount Zion are to be rebuilt by the hand of a Christian, [and] Abbot Joachim said that he was to come from Spain,” writes Columbus in an account of his final voyage to America in the opening years of the sixteenth century. “Who will offer himself for this work? If our Lord brings me back to Spain, I pledge myself, in the name of God, to bring him there in safety.”
¹²¹

Columbus, like Savonarola, lived in a state of “psychological imminence”—that is, “the conviction that the final events of history are already under way even though we cannot determine how near or far off the last judgment may actually be.”
¹²²
Both men, of course, died without seeing the fulfillment of their apocalyptic visions, but it turns out that Columbus had a far better sense of “future history.” Fatefully, the next generation of visionaries took it upon themselves to create the millennial kingdom that is promised in the book of Revelation, not in the Holy Land but on the new continent that Columbus had found when he sailed westward in search of a faster route to India. And when Revelation took its next quantum leap, from the benighted shores of Europe to the raw wilderness of North America, the apocalyptic idea was fully and fatefully transformed.

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” writes the author of Revelation at the climax of his apocalyptic visions. “God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John,” affirms Columbus, “and he showed me the spot where to find it.”
¹²³

Notably, the phrase that is rendered as “the new earth” in most English translations of the Bible—and as “the new land” in the writings of Columbus—appears in the Vulgate as
terra nova.
But the most familiar translation of the same Latin phrase is “New World.” And, as we shall see, it is only in America that the book of Revelation would reach its richest, strangest, and most enduring expression.
¹²⁴

We are the pioneers of the world, the advance guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the new World that is ours.

H
ERMAN
M
ELVILLE,
White Jacket
(1850)

W
hen the
Arabella
sailed from England in 1630, the little ship carried a contingent of Puritan families who were setting out to colonize the raw North American wilderness. The passengers gathered on deck to hear a sermon delivered by a fiery Puritan minister, John Cotton (1585–1652), who stirringly characterized their destination as “the new promised land,” a place that had been “reserved by God for his elect people as the actual site for a new heaven and a new earth.”
¹
Thus transplanted to the rich soil of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Apocalypse flowered in new, remarkable, and enduring ways.

“Christ by a wonderful Providence hath dispossessed Satan, who reigned securely in these Ends of the Earth, for Ages the Lord knoweth how many,” declared another Puritan minister, Increase Mather (1639–1723), after his arrival in America, “and here the Lord has caused as it were
New Jerusalem
to come down from Heaven.”
²

The author of Revelation may have set down his visions on an island off the coast of Asia, but his remarkable little book promptly began to move ever westward. The eastern realm of Christian ity, as we have seen, nearly excluded it from the biblical canon, but Revelation earned a place in the earliest biblical lists of western Christendom. The so-called apocalyptic invasion reached its fullest expression in the arts, letters, and architecture of France and Germany. And Revelation worked its strange magic with even greater power in the hearts and minds of the Anglo-Saxons on the far western fringe of Europe. They came to entertain the thrilling idea that Jesus Christ himself once walked “upon England’s mountains green,” as visionary artist and poet William Blake (1757–1827) puts it in the poem “Jerusalem,” and would one day set the New Jerusalem “among these dark satanic mills.”
³
Blake himself was an obsessive reader and reinterpreter of Revelation, and his poem later became a British national hymn.

Still, the most radical of the Protestant reformers, whom we know as the Puritans, refused to sing hymns to England, its church, or its monarch. By their lights, the priestcraft and high ceremonials of the Church of England were as corrupt as those of the Roman Catholic Church. They regarded the kings of England, whose royal titles included “Defender of the Faith,” as the latest and likeliest candidates for the role of Antichrist. And the Puritans found the rich and sometimes ribald culture of England in the seventeenth century—scandalous plays and love poems, hedonistic masques and musicales, high-spirited bouts of feasting and drinking, extravagant fashions and manners, and much else besides—to be as offensive as Roman paganism had been to the author of Revelation and Renaissance humanism had been to Savonarola. That is one reason why the wilderness on the far side of the Atlantic, even though it was occupied by native-dwelling tribes whom they saw as minions of the Devil, struck the Puritans as a much worthier site for the New Jerusalem than those satanic mills of Old England.
⁵

So began the next leg of the westward movement of Revelation, a remarkable phenomenon that historian Stephen J. Stein calls “the Americanization of the apocalyptic tradition.”
⁶
When the Puritans arrived in the New World—“flying from the Depravations of Europe,” as they saw it, “to the American Strand”—they promptly unpacked and polished up the old apocalyptic texts. John Winthrop (1588–1649), a passenger on the
Arabella
and the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, famously invoked the New Jerusalem when he likened the Puritan settlement to “a City upon a Hill.” And, significantly, “The Day of Doom,” a poem by Michael Wigglesworth (1631–1705), was “the first best seller in the annals of the American book trade.”
⁷

But the Puritans and those who came after them also felt at liberty to tinker with the scenario of Revelation and come up with story lines wholly of their own invention. Indeed, they insisted on accentuating the positive in Revelation, and they gave the apocalyptic idea a uniquely American spin that has persisted into our own anxious age. Remarkably, the end of the world and the destruction of humankind, if viewed in the right way, could be seen as a
good
thing.

T
he world that the Puritan colonists left behind was still shadowed by all of the old terrors that are given such vivid names, faces, and figures in the book of Revelation. The shattering events of the Civil War in England, when the Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) and the parliamentary army drove King Charles I from the throne and then took off his head, brought the apocalyptic fantasies into even sharper focus. Amid chaos and crisis—war and revolution, torture and execution, witch burning and book burning—the readers of Revelation teetered between the old certainty that the end of the world was nigh and the new conviction that a better world was at hand.

The followers of Cromwell, for example, saw the conflict between the parliamentary and royalist armies as a struggle between Christ and Anti-christ, and they regarded the defeat of King Charles I as a sign that the millennial kingdom of Jesus Christ was soon to begin: “The Eternall and shortly-expected King,” writes poet (and Puritan pamphleteer) John Milton (1608–1674), “shall open the Clouds to judge the severall Kingdomes of the World.”
⁸
And the enemies of Cromwell, too, invoked the book of Revelation. One royalist pamphleteer, who dubbed Cromwell “Rex Oliver Lord Protector,” insisted that the title was an alphanumeric code that added up to the demonic 666, but only if he conveniently dropped the letter “L” from the word “Lord.”

“These are days of shaking,” observed one English preacher in 1643, “and this shaking is universal.”
⁹

At one precarious moment in 1653, in fact, Parliament nearly fell under the control of the so-called Fifth Monarchy Men, a radical faction of soldiers, clergy, and poor folk whose name refers to the divine kingdom that is predicted to follow the four earthly monarchies described in the book of Daniel. These self-styled “saints” looked forward to an apocalyptic revolution of the kind predicted by Hildegard of Bingen: church and government alike, and the rich and powerful along with them, would be replaced once and for all by a biblical theocracy under King Jesus himself. Cromwell deemed it necessary to suppress the Fifth Monarchy Men by force of arms in 1656: “Lord, appear, now or never,” they cried as a detachment of soldiers broke up one of their public rallies and escorted them to prison.
¹⁰
Needless to say, the Lord was once again a no-show.

The strict and censorious Puritans and their worldly adversaries had long been engaged in a culture war, too. A Puritan sermonizer, adopting one of the rhetorical quirks of Martin Luther, condemned the Anglican clergy as “the excrement of Antichrist.”
¹¹
A bon vivant like playwright and poet Ben Jonson (1572–1637), by contrast, poked fun at the dire apocalyptic expectations of the Puritans when he created a character in
Bartholomew Fair
called Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy, a self-convinced seer who sees an unfamiliar musical instrument on display at a country fair and promptly leaps to the conclusion that he has spied the Beast of Revelation. The drum of the instrument, according to Jonson, is “the broken belly of Anti-christ, and thy bellows there are his lungs, and these pipes are his throat, those feathers are his tail, and thy rattles the gnashing of his teeth.”
¹²

The apocalyptic fancies that Jonson found so laughable penetrated even the loftiest circles of the scientific revolution that was already in progress. Scottish mathematician John Napier (1550–1617), originator of the logarithm, applied his arithmetical genius to a treatise on Revelation in which he argued that the seventh and final age of human history had begun in 1541 and would end in 1786. And Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who achieved enduring greatness in mathematics and physics, also found time to engage in his own apocalyptic number-crunching: “Sir Isaac Newton wrote his comment upon the Revelation,” cracks French philosopher Voltaire (1664–1777), “to console mankind for the great superiority he had over them in other respects.”
¹³

But the apocalyptic idea may have reached its apogee in the Old World just as the Puritans were making their way to the New World. As Voltaire’s joke at the expense of Isaac Newton seems to suggest, the book of Revelation had already started its descent into the netherworld of religious oddities and curiosities. The Great London Fire of 1666, for example, brought a fresh wave of doomsaying, thanks to the appearance of the old demonic number on the calendar: “Every thunderstorm,” wrote George Fox, a leader of the Quakers, “produced expectations of the end.”
¹⁴
And yet, by 1696, an English scientist named William Whiston was ready to argue that a wholly natural celestial phenomenon like Halley’s Comet may have caused the Great Flood as described in Genesis, and proposed that “the earth’s prophesied destruction by fire would be by the same means.”
¹⁵

“Whiston’s end-time drama included no Second Coming, no Last Judgment,” as Perry Miller, a distinguished historian of Puritanism, points out.
¹⁶
Here was perhaps the earliest stirring of an idea that would take on ever more ominous meanings in our own times—a vision of the end of the world that allowed no role at all for God. And even those Christian true believers who continued to read the book of Revelation with perfect credulity began to see wholly new and unsuspected meanings in the ancient text. Those ideas, too, would move westward to America, where Yankee ingenuity was applied to Holy Writ with revolutionary consequences.

An early example of the Americanization of the Apocalypse is found in the remarkable life and work of Cotton Mather (1663–1728), son of Increase Mather, grandson of John Cotton, and minister of the Old North Church in Boston. He was capable of holding an earnest belief in the efficacy of both witchcraft as supposedly practiced by the women of Salem
and
the efficacy of the newfangled science of smallpox inoculation. He penned a panic-making treatise on satanic possession that played a role in the witch trials—“Go tell the world what it is these Monsters love to do”—and yet he also arranged for his own young son to be inoculated, an act so controversial in colonial Boston that it prompted one outraged citizen to throw a bomb (or “a Fired Granado,” as Mather himself describes it) through the window of his lodging room.
¹⁷

“But,
this Night there stood by me the Angel of GOD,
” Mather writes in his journal to explain why the grenade failed to explode, “
whose I am and whom I serve
.”
¹⁸

The apparent contradictions that coexisted within the heart and mind of Cotton Mather can be readily explained by his conviction that he was beholding, at once, the shuddering death of the old earth and the birth pangs of the new one. “In fact, Mather’s blend of optimism and paranoia is entirely characteristic of the millennial vision,” explains historian Damian Thompson in
The End of Time.
“Fear of witches is above all evidence of End-time anxiety, since it was believed that the Last Days would see a terrible loosing of the powers of darkness.” At the same time, Mather saw the prosperity of the American colonies—“great increase in the blessings of land and sea”—as a evidence that “God had surely intended ‘some great thing’ when he planted these American heavens and earth.”
¹⁹

Indeed, Cotton Mather saw himself as “Herald of the Lord’s Kingdome now approaching,”
²⁰
and he shared the conviction of his famous father and grandfather that America was the place where the prophecies of Revelation would be fulfilled. He was so fixated on Revelation, in fact, that he convinced himself that “evil angels,” speaking through a young woman whom he believed to be the victim of demonic possession, once scolded him for neglecting a certain passage from the book of Revelation in his sermons. The demons wanted him to preach on Rev. 13:8 (“All that dwell upon the earth shall worship [the beast]”), but he defied them by choosing Rev. 20:15 instead: “And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.”
²¹

On the subject of doomsday, Mather was inspired by both religion and science. He conceded that the New Jerusalem would appear in North America only after the world was destroyed in a vast conflagration, just as John had predicted in Revelation, but he was also mindful of the latest discoveries of the earth sciences when he described the end-times. Volcanoes, he suggested, will be the instrument of the divine will: “Subterraneous
Combustions,
and such Amassments of
Igneous Particles,
” he writes, “which are an
Eternal Fire.
”
²²
And, significantly, he looked beyond the days of terror and tribulation to the shining moment when the New Jerusalem floats down from the heavens.

“[O]ur glorious LORD will have an Holy city in AMERICA,” Mather declares in 1709, adopting a phrase that became (and remains) an American credo, “a
City,
the Street whereof will be
Pure
Gold.”
²³

A century or so after Mather uttered these words, men, women, and children by the millions would begin to arrive in America—“huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” according to the poem by Emma Lazarus that is famously inscribed on the Statue of Liberty—and they, too, came in search of streets paved with gold.
²⁴
Even if they were wholly ignorant of the book of Revelation, they were following in the footsteps of the Puritan fathers who failed to foresee what would become of their apocalyptic fancies.