© 1999 by Eugen Weber All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Originally published in 1999 by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Weber, Eugen, 1925– Apocalypses: prophecies, cults and millennial beliefs through the ages (The Barbara Frum lecture series) eISBN: 978-0-30736618-4 1. Apocalyptic literature – History and criticism. 2. Millennialism – History. 3. Prophecies – History. 4. Cults – History. I. Title. II. Series. BT876.W42 1999a 291.2′3 C99-931176-X v3.1 For Jacqueline My first, last, everlasting day CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication 1 Introduction 2 Chronologies and Fins de Siècle 3 Apocalypses and Millenarianisms 4 In Dark and Bloody Times 5 Revivalists and Antichrists 6 Apocalypse and Science 7 Enlightenment? 8 Apocalypse in Worldly Times 9 Pursuits of the Millennium 10 Time’s Noblest Offspring 11 The Twentieth Century 12 Conclusion Notes 1 INTRODUCTION That day, when sent in glory by the Father, The Prince of Life his best elect shall gather; Millions of angels round about him flying, While all the kindreds of the earth are crying, And he, enthroned above the clouds, shall give His last just sentence, who must die, who live. – HENRY VAUGHN WHEN the University of Toronto invited me to deliver the 1999 Barbara Frum Lecture, I was asked, appropriately enough, to talk about fins de siècle. The more I worried that particular bone, however, the less meat I found on it. Centuries, in our calendric sense, appear to be an esoteric sixteenth-century invention, a hesitant usage of the seventeenth century. The special attention focused on a century’s end, with the halo of references that we associate with the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, was a one-shot affair. Like our own century’s tail end, that of the eighteenth century, and of every other, attracted no endist label; anyone tackling fins de siècle in the plural would have gathered a very sparse harvest. Yet ends and beginnings played a large part in humanity’s experience of itself, not least in that Judeo-Christian tradition that forms the backbone of Western history from Asia Minor to the Pacific’s shores. Hebrew history plunges its roots in the Pentateuch; the history of Christendom is irrigated by the New Testament, which culminates in the book of Revelation. Apocalypse—the revelation or unveiling of the world’s destiny and of mankind’s—has fascinated Jews and their Christian offspring at least for the last 2200 years. Christians and Jews knew, or thought they knew, how the world began, and had a fair idea how it was supposed to end, though precise circumstances remained debatable. Knowledge of the end affects the terms and manner of progression to it. For a long time, Christian history developed in the concurrence of prophecy and interpretation within a destiny that had been foretold. Apocalypse and the thousand-year millennium that would precede Christ’s Second Coming (or in some versions follow it) were major parts of this process, and loomed incommensurably larger than calendric dates. Indeed, the measuring of worldly time was mainly relevant insofar as it served divine timing. The Christian year began with Advent: the weeks that lead up to the Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection of Christ. Liturgically, it does so still. Now, as ever, the first familiar act celebrated at Christmas and at Easter is only an introduction to the climactic conclusion, when the long struggle between satanic darkness and divine light is at last resolved in the triumph of good over evil. Advent may lead up to the birth of Christ, but it culminates in his Second Coming. And that is what the rite, the lessons, and the sermons of the rite are about: the judgment to come, and before it the Son of Man coming in a cloud with great power and glory, and the terrors that precede his coming, and the magic interlude between his preliminary and his final victory over Satan. That is what people were exposed to, one generation after another during hundreds of years; that is what they grew up and grew old regarding as history, and as premonitory history, as real as the seasons were real and as sure. This whole scenario entered the language, the mindset, the store of common references, and aroused great passion and controversy. When, gradually, after the seventeenth century, it began to seep out of educated consciousness, it did so only partially and incompletely. That being so, one may well wonder why a motif and motivating agency so strong and so pervasive was for so long ignored in modern times, especially by historians. Just thirty years ago, Christopher Hill began his Riddell Lectures of 1969 with a similar remark that sheds light on my question. Historians— Hill calls them intellectual snobs—“have ignored the lunatic fringe that believed in the imminence of the end and the necessary preliminary of Antichrist,”1 paying no heed to Milton, Cromwell, Newton, and so many others who shared a belief in the imminent end of the world. Great historian of seventeenth-century England that he is, Hill saw the need to look with attention on beliefs of that time because beliefs influence and inflect action—as they encouraged Cromwell, for instance, to readmit Jews to England in hope of advancing the time of the Lord’s return. Yet Hill’s scholarship characterized, and hence intellectually marginalized, the believers he studied as a lunatic fringe. That was not so until the seventeenth or even the eighteenth century, and many eighteenth-and nineteenth-century reformers would have to be counted among the lunatic fringe: Lord Shaftesbury and his friends, the supporters of Jewish emancipation and of Zionism, and abolitionists who, in England and North America, eventually brought the slave trade to an end. Prophecies make little sense to rational modern scholars and they embarrass advocates of a Christianity that, in the past two hundred years, has learnt to present itself as rational too. Before the eighteenth century ended, The Holy Bible Adapted to the Use of Schools and Private Families (Birmingham, 1783) had omitted most of Paul’s epistles and the whole book of Revelation as too incendiary. In the following century, textual criticism cleared most of the supernatural out of Christian beliefs, or explained it away. In 1925, Wilhelm Bousset, a great student of Antichrist, authoritatively declared that Antichrist’s legend “is now to be found only among the lower classes of the Christian community, among sects, eccentric individualists, and fanatics.”2 In 1957, another serious scholar, Norman Cohn, memorably assigned the apocalyptic tradition to the “obscure underworld of popular religion.”3 Christianity was being recast. It has been through the ages, but now its supernatural foundations were being meddled with. Reconstruction can shore up or help to weaken structures. Subtract one aspect of the supernatural, and the edifice may crumble. Within a few years, a distinguished theologian like Karl Tillich dismissed belief even in the afterlife as “a corrupt form of theological expression, disseminated among the relatively poor and uneducated.”4 If some people don’t think as we, the educated, think, it must be because they are uneducated, poor, or crackpots. They may, on the other hand, be sociologically all right and simply mistaken. Or they may not be mistaken at all. Condescension is not the right approach. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church arrived at that conclusion. Conceived before the Second World War, its first edition consigned millenarianism to the dustbin of history. Published in 1997, on the millennium’s eve, the third edition reveals the luxuriant growth of millenarianism in Asia, Africa, and South America. History, Hill reminds us, is not an exclusively rational process and, in any case, one man’s reason is another man’s nonsense. I have always been interested in the reasons of unreason, or of what others denounce as unreason. So, when the University of Toronto suggested fins de siècle, I turned to apocalypses. I had little apprehension of the topic before I looked into it, and no scholarly acquaintance with it. But if curiosity kills cats, it nourishes historians. I went back to the Bible, I read hundreds of the thousands of books bearing on the subject, and the more I read the more fascinating the topic looked. I hope that the following pages convey some of the excitement of the chase and of discovery. They do not reflect, as my other books do, research in original sources; only curiosity and empathy, not uncritical, but aware of the limits both of my scholarship and of human understanding. The treatment is not exhaustive, the approach is subjective, and the coverage reflects not models or reductive theories but what caught my attention and answered some of my questions. My adventure, like most adventures, was generated by chance and curiosity. This book—an account of my journey through apocalypses, millenarianisms, their prophets and their believers—is like a travel book. It offers more narrative than interpretation, more description than explanation, and it is addressed not to specialists but to those curious to learn about beliefs and attitudes that have metastasized both throughout our culture and far beyond the Western world. Apocalypse long furnished the key to human history. Even if today it provides only a plain folks’ gloss on history, it deserves serious attention. It might be useful at this point to provide a précis of that contentious account of what the last times will be like. Steeped in Old Testament imagery and terminology, John’s revelations come in a series of eschatological visions. The first is of Jesus Christ, his head and hair white like wool, as white as snow, his eyes as a flame of fire, in his right hand seven stars, and out of his mouth a sharp two- edged sword. The Risen Lord commands John to write what he sees and send it to seven Asian churches: “I stand at the door and knock … He that hath an ear, let him hear what the spirit saith unto the churches.” Handel explained that he wrote the Messiah after he “saw the heavens opened and God upon his great white throne.” For John, too, a door opened in heaven before his second vision—of God seated on his throne in dazzling majesty amid a heavenly entourage, in his right hand a scroll (in our versions, a book) sealed with seven seals containing his secret plans for the universe. John weeps because no one, it seems, is fit to unseal the book, but he soon dries his tears. “The Lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David … prevails to open the book and loose its seven seals.” The Lion of Judah turns out to be a Lamb with seven horns (representing omnipotence), and seven eyes (representing omniscience), all perfect because the number seven is a symbol of perfection. As the Lamb begins to open seals, he brings forth four horses and their riders, all agents of destruction; reveals the souls of those who had been slain for bearing witness to the word of God; and, with the sixth seal, shatters the universe as a token of the great day of God’s wrath. Chapter 7 provide a respite, while 144,000 servants of God are sealed—their seal in this case the token of a divine pledge: for them there shall be neither hunger nor thirst, “and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.” The opening of the seventh seal ushers in angels and trumpet blasts that amplify terror, torment and great woes presented in unnerving detail. The seventh and last trumpet calls forth great voices that proclaim the kingdom of God and of his Christ. One would think the matter settled, but there is much still to come. Two garish interludes evoke the perils of a woman clothed with the sun pursued by a great red dragon, the machinations of dreadful beasts, prototypes of Antichrist, penultimately a scenario of downfall and liquidation involving further beasts, doomed unbelievers, Babylon and its great whore, and war between diabolic swarms and the hosts of heavens. Satan, bound only to rise again after a thousand years, will be finally disposed of in a lake of fire, along with death and hell. The closing chapters promise and describe a new heaven, a new earth, and the holy city of Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven, while God (once again) wipes tears from survivors’ eyes, and John is