One of the most important concepts in the second half of this book is interpretation. Kirsch shows numerous examples of people throughout history that argued over whether the Book of Revelations should be read “spiritually” or “carnally”. Whichever way one chooses to read it, however, the result will amount to an interpretation of the text. People from different places, and different times, in different situations have been able to apply Revelations to their own lives. When the Christians were being persecuted, Revelations was a story of overcoming tribulations and being rewarded. When Christianity was powerful and militant, Revelations was the justification for it. Revelations was interpreted and reinterpreted a dozen times by Americans who based their drive to build the country in the belief that they were building the New Jerusalem or that they were destined to expand. Both sides of the Civil War and both sides of WWII used Revelations to defend their goals. Revelations is so powerful and possibly dangerous because, unlike phrases such as “love thy neighbor”, there are hundreds of ways to read it.
Another concept in the second half of the book that I found very interesting is that of a “Godless Apocalypse” simply because the idea is so prevalent in the imaginations of people today. The ability to destroy the Earth, or at least the human race, is a very new power for humans and power can be intoxicating. It is terrifying but also, perhaps on some level, intriguing to imagine a human creation as the catalyst for the end times.
Ultimately, I believe humans have a need for an ending. Humans are able to witness, learn of, and understand the beginning and end of every other Earthly phenomenon. Therefore they need to create an ending for the Earth so that it fits with their understanding of everything else. Furthermore, they are self centered enough to believe that the end times will happen for them or by them.
Hi Anastassia,
Thanks for leading the responses this week. A quick reminder–Revelation has no s on it. The issue of whether one can avoid interpretation is a really interesting one and in the past half century, there is a strong view that we can’t, as you suggest. This goes along with the idea of language as metaphor and the relativity of ideas based on one’s culture and personal experiences.
But many people do not adhere to such a view and over time, as you point out from your reading of Kirsch, it has not been the most accepted perspective. Even when the issue was between a symbolic or literal meaning, for Augustine’s defense of the symbolic, there was still a belief that scripture was the word of God, so that one needed to be very careful about getting the symbolic meaning right. The 20th century brought forward a questioning of that view, with theories of language rejecting the notion that the “word was one with the thing” as Emerson assumed in the 19th century. Einstein’s theory of relativity and literary modernism’s net of doubts about unified truth have contributed to the view that you express about interpretation as unavoidable.
With this sense of history in mind, then, how might you revise your statement about how one reads “love thy neighbor”?
Hey Tasha,
Your statement “humans have a need for an ending” really resonated with me, because It’s something I’ve been thinking about for awhile now. We’re a narrative culture–to reference Joan Didion, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Stories, by nature, have a beginning, middle, and end. With medical technology extending our lifespans, and our great database of external memory in the forms of books and now digital memory, we’re afforded the extraordinary opportunity to witness longer chunks of time and think in incredibly large terms when it comes to time. With these in mind, I think it’s only natural for people to imagine the end of the word, be it millennia from now, or this December.