Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unraveling, 1700-1834, The

The Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unraveling, 1700-1834. By Christopher Burdon. New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1997. xiv + 251 pp. $49.95 (cloth).

Some years ago I wrote a thesis on the Book of Revelation. As a practicing hypochondriac, I am unsettled to learn from Christopher Burdon just how many students of the Apocalypse have ended their lives insane. The Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unravelling, 1700-1834 is not, however, primarily concerned with tracing wretched expositors to the madhouse but with the deranging effects of Revelation upon the numerous attempts to interpret it. John's vision, argues Dr. Burdon, is conspicuously resistant to hermeneutics; it eludes unveiling, the statement of its meaning. Even identifications of genre are unsettled: breaks, disjunctions, and incoherent sequences question the narrative character; the visions are notoriously unimaginable and demand reading rather than seeing; it might be an aesthetic whole-mathematical or musical-but the particular situation references disrupt the pattern; and, though worship abounds, as liturgy, Revelation is too jumbled and riddling and, besides, it ends in a templeless, liturgy-free Jerusalem. Then there are more disturbing questions. Is the Apocalypse Christian? Are there two (or more?) incompatible theological voices thrashing it out within the text? And if an interpreter cannot help selection, shaping this angular, awkward text, what means John's final, threatening anathema upon all such interference?

Given the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and revolutionary politics, the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are eventful for the history of interpretation. Burdon follows the Apocalypse's escape from a range of the period's hermeneutical strategies. The most familiar in its ingenuity involves decoding the Apocalypse as a complex of predictions. Less familiar is the diversity of motivations that inspired this: from celebrating the rational order of providence to evidencing a doctrine of progress or calling for political allegiance, both revolutionary and reactionary. These schemes of prognostication are vital to Burdon's argument as one pole in tracing the shift from interpreting Revelation to "rewriting" it. Coleridge is the transitional figure here. Whilst insisting that the Apocalypse is a system of "symbols," not predictions, Coleridge's respect for biblical and doctrinal authority leads to strained harmonization and arbitrary application of philosophical concepts to biblical symbols. Faithfulness to an authoritative text and the task of rendering its meaning mark the vocation of the interpreter. Abandoning these inhibitions, however, both Blake and Shelley work to "rewrite" the Apocalypse, plundering its imagery) for deployment against itself, critiquing John's authority and his wrathful God. Burdon's treatment of the Romantics is subtle, lucid, and frequently witty. He pays insufficient attention, however, to the political context of Coleridge's mature biblical hermeneutics. More seriously, his theological concerns effect a somewhat flattened reading of Blake and Shelley. There is a greater dimension of irony in Promtetheus Unbound than Burdon allows. At the least, Shelley's cosmic humanism and its rhetoric of transformation still hearken toward the transcendence that the poet has dethroned but not exorcised. Also, given the variety of theological interpretations of Blake, reading him as a Feuerbach before Feuerbach risks reductionism.

Overall, the historical analysis of The Apocalypse in England is highly successful and enriched by Dr. Burdon's sensitivity to the religious motivation behind even those interpretations least congenial to us today. His theological argument, however, is less satisfactory, partly because it is less clear. The rushed introduction of Derrida in the final chapter leaves Burdon's conclusions as intriguing but frustrating rhetorical gestures. He opposes interpretation, bound to the authoritative text, to the liberations of "rewriting." Through its engagement with the Bible, the latter generates meaning in a freshly produced Scripture of the present, freed from the paralyzing question of what the biblical text "meant" or "means." However, in the ambiguous conditions of an unfulfilled world in which all the Lord's servants are not prophets, such rewriting will surely generate its own oppressions. Blake, as Burdon admits, feared the gravitational pull of authoritarian discourse and also created books that demand the labor of interpretation as the path to freedom of vision. May there not be interpretation under authority that is relatively liberating as well as a "creative freedom" that is decidedly oppressive? Perhaps Coleridge, with all his ambiguities and inconsistency, was right to insist on the difference between vision and redemption.

ALAN P. R. GREGORY

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Winter 1999
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