The Apocalyptic Imagination
For millennia, apocalyptic belief—also called doomsday or end of time belief– has been a predominant way for people to express what they mean by truth, what they see as powerful, how they envision time, their anxieties about death, and their hope for something beyond life on earth. Historically, what John J. Collins has called the “apocalyptic imagination” took its earliest form in ancient Semitic mythologies; these were later reflected in the works of the Hebrew prophets and then took full shape in the “Book of Revelation,” the last book of the Christian New Testament. Apocalyptic stories of a cosmic struggle of good versus evil remain vital today, and not only for the large number of Fundamentalist members of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam around the world who adhere strictly to it as a revelation of truth from God. As Frank Kermode observed in The Sense of An Ending, apocalypse is “perpetually open to history, to reinterpretation.”
The apocalyptic imagination’s facility for renewal gives it a remarkable ability to shape religion, visual and literary works of art, politics, and science, and how we actually think of history itself. Over the centuries, it has been integral to some of the best and the worst events of human existence, precisely because it can and has been used to stir desire to overcome persecution but also to justify wholesale slaughter in the name of righteousness. At times, these goals have become virtually indistinguishable. It is thus worthy of our study in order to grasp its continuing capacity to instill urgency and fear as well as hope and aspiration and to better discern when these are expressed in inordinate ways.
Suggested Readings:
PBS Frontline Special Edition on “Apocalypticism”:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/
For a generalist overview with a critical perspective, see Jonathan Kirsch, A History of the End of the World, HarperOne, 2007.
For historical treatments, see John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination, New York Crossroad, 1984, on the ancient to early Christian era. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, Oxford UP, 1957 (revised ed. 1970), focuses on the Middle Ages. And Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, Harvard UP, 1992, provides an overview of American apocalypticism.
Frank Kermode, The Sense of An Ending, Oxford UP, 1967 (reissued 2000), provides a theory of fiction through apocalypticism and Catherine Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then, Beacon Press, 1996, analyzes apocalyptic belief from the perspective of a feminist theologian.
