Apocalypse now?

Christian Century, Oct 17, 2001 by Walter Wink

FOR THOSE TRAPPED in the Twin Towers or the Pentagon, that fiery hell must have seemed apocalyptic. In the fleeting moments before they leaped from windows or were crushed under melting I-beams, what passed through their minds? For those who watched in horror, on the streets or on television in their homes and offices, it must have looked as if a mini end-of-the-world Apocalypse had descended.

Or did it? In some respects, yes, it was an apocalypse. The word means "unveiling"--specifically, the unveiling of things to come. What was unveiled for us was the prospect of endless acts of terrorism perpetrated by invisible enemies against mostly innocent civilians. In an apocalyptic moment, as it is generally conceived, the future seems to be closed, inevitable and inescapable. Since the future can't be averted, apocalyptic can only call people to personal repentance, so that after the catastrophe they might survive to enjoy heaven or a transfigured earth.

Eschatology, by contrast, regards the future as open, undetermined and capable of being changed if people alter their behavior in time. The urgency of the great prophets of the Old Testament came from their conviction that catastrophe need not happen, that even a small deviation from the course toward doom might avert it.

Eschatology is concerned about the goal of humanity and the world; apocalyptic is consumed with the actual end of the planet earth as it is presently constituted. Prophetic eschatology is ruthlessly realistic, yet incurably hopeful. Apocalyptic has abandoned hope, and looks for divine, miraculous intervention.

Apocalyptic has a foreshortened sense of time. It anticipates a final war between the powers of Good and Evil. By appealing to these absolutes, President Bush has attempted to endow his cause with a kind of ultimacy, in which "those who are not for us are against us." There is no time left; every person, every nation must choose sides.

If that were the whole story about apocalyptic, many of us would want nothing to do with it. That is not the whole story, however. There is a positive role for apocalyptic as well as its better-known negative. The positive power of apocalyptic lies in its capacity to force humanity to face threats of unimaginable proportions in order to galvanize efforts at self and social transcendence. Only such Herculean responses can actually rescue people from the threat and make possible the continuation of humanity on the other side. Paradoxically, the apocalyptic warning is intended to remove the apocalyptic threat by acts of apocalyptic transcendence.

As the philosopher Gunther Anders put it, we move into an apocalyptic mode when we no longer find ourselves asking "How shall we live?" and ask instead, "Will we live?" The normal eschatological situation, which gives life urgency by facing us with the inevitability of our own death, the hunger for meaning, and the fear of suffering and loss, becomes apocalyptic when it appears that there is no longer time for normal urgency. Time collapses. The Time of the End becomes the End of Time. Those who are "not yet nonexisting" must do everything in their power to make the End Time endless. "Since we believe in the possibility of the `End of Time,' we are Apocalyptics," Anders wrote in the midst of the nuclear terror in 1962, "but since we fight against the man-made Apocalypse, we are--and this had never existed before--`Anti-Apocalyptics.'"

The apocalyptic situation dwarfs our human capacity and reduces us to powerlessness. The negative response is passivity and despair; the positive is a superhuman effort and assault on the impossible. The negative version of apocalyptic leaves us feeling that we are smaller than ourselves, incapable of the required response. Positive apocalyptic, by contrast, calls on our every power to avert what seems inevitable. "Nothing can save us that is possible," the poet W. H. Auden intoned over the madness of the nuclear crisis; "we who must die demand a miracle." And the miracle we got came about because people like the physician Helen Caldicott refused to accept nuclear annihilation. But she did it by forcing her hearers to visualize the consequences of their inaction.

Imagination, says Anders, is the sole organ capable of conveying a truth so overwhelming that we cannot take it in. Hence the bizarre imagery that always accompanies apocalyptic. Optimists want to believe that reason will save us. They want to prevent us from becoming really afraid. The anti-apocalyptist, on the contrary, insists that it is our capacity to fear which is too small and which does not correspond to the magnitude of the present danger. Therefore, says Anders, the anti-apocalyptist attempts to increase our capacity to fear. "Don't fear fear, have the courage to be frightened, and to frighten others too. Frighten thy neighbor as thyself." This is no ordinary fear, however; it is a fearless fear, since it dares at last to face the real magnitude of the danger. And it is a loving fear, since it embraces fear in order to save the generations to come. That is why everything the anti-apocalyptist says is said in order not to become true.