Global Requiem: The Apocalyptic Moment in Religion, Science, and Art

Cross Currents, Fall, 2000 by Jack Miles

Humans might become extinct sooner than anyone imagines. Think of the prospect as an opportunity for spiritual and artistic growth.

The title of Ernest Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, came from the King James Version of the Bible, more exactly from the opening of the Book of Ecclesiastes:

The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.... The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:1--9)

The Book of Ecclesiastes is an example of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament or Tanakh. Biblical wisdom differs from biblical prophecy in that God, who sometimes promises through his prophets that he will indeed do something new under the sun, is expected in wisdom literature to do no such thing. Unlike prophecy, wisdom envisions the future of the natural world as the continuation without change of the past. Vain illusion is overcome and relative peace achieved when the striving of human beings, each with just a brief lifetime to live, is seen against this backdrop of natural eternity: "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever."

The title that Hemingway borrowed from Ecclesiastes for his novel was well-borrowed, for The Sun Also Rises does indeed present a picture of hectic, hedonistic striving. Its characters, a "lost generation" of expatriate Americans and Englishmen in the Paris of the 1920s, do not achieve resignation but only, on a few wistful occasions, aspire to it. The novel's title is not a description of its contents but, by allusion, the author's judgment on the vanity he is portraying. The central character, Jake Barnes, has been rendered sexually impotent by a war wound. It is he who comes closest to the inner peace that can only come, Hemingway suggests, in accepting the larger impotence of the human being pitted against nature in the cruel and unequal contest that he sees best ritualized in the Spanish bull ring.

Not all great literature and by no means all major religious traditions teach a wisdom that entails this kind of resignation to death as a part of the human condition. There are religious traditions, especially in the West, that promise victory over death, and there are works of imaginative literature that celebrate a reckless defiance of death that verges on outright denial of its reality. Within the Bible, the voice of prophecy -- exulting with St. Paul "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" (I Corinthians 15:55) -- is much louder than the voice of wisdom, and even secular art in the West often aspires to immortality through the undying fame of the artist or through the durability of the art itself. Thus, death can be defeated if, as Shakespeare's sixty-fifth sonnet conventionally puts it,

...this miracle have might,

That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Even in the Bible, however, and even in secular Western tradition, the voice of resignation to death is never entirely silenced; and particularly if we recall that the wisdom that links the Book of Ecclesiastes to The Sun Also Rises also links it to the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, this tradition may be regarded as a virtually perennial, virtually universal wisdom.

Within this universal wisdom, the typical function of the imagination has been to find ever more telling ways to contrast the brevity and vulnerability of human life and therefore the folly of human desire with the immemorial indifference of nature. You and I may grieve at our own passing or the passing of a loved one. We may ask, like King Lear with the dead Cordelia in his arms,

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life

And thou no breath at all?

Yet we may be consoled that, though we pass away, the sun rises, and the sun sets, and the earth abides forever. We may bring ourselves, by a spiritual discipline, into harmony with this whole. There are different paths to this harmony, some more ancient, some more modern, but the essential psychological mechanism at work here is older than Ecclesiastes, older than the Epic of Gilgamesh, as old, perhaps, as fully human speech.

In our own day, however, this ancient wisdom, this primeval therapy, is being undercut by processes that are both spiritual and physical. We have been in possession since Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin of a disturbing new awareness that nature too has a history. It does not abide forever. This alone is enough to undercut the age-old contrast between the temporality of mankind and the eternity of nature. But more recently that disruption has acquired a corollary. If the first generations that assimilated Darwin's thought were concerned with the origin of species, our own is concerned in an unprecedented way with the extinction of species and, above all, with the threat of extinction that faces the human species. During the 1850s, while Darwin was concluding The Origin of Species, the rate of extinction is believed to have been one every five years. Today, the rate of extinction is estimated at one every nine minutes.