Arthur Krystal: Apocalypse and the Shaping of the World

Arthur Krystal, “What We Learn about Our World by Imagining Its End” (1.27.25), newyorker.com.

Although not intended to be part of history, the Apocalypse helped shape it. Millenarian prophets associated it with empire, persecution, and decadence, often fomenting social unrest and rebellion. Apocalyptic thinking fuelled the Crusades, stoked the English Civil Wars, and gave rise to seventeenth-century religious movements like the Fifth Monarchists. But it was in America, Jonathan Kirsch writes, that “the Book of Revelation would reach its richest, strangest, and most enduring expression,” one prophesied by a certain Italian explorer. “God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John,” Christopher Columbus wrote, in 1500, “and he showed me the spot where to find it.”

Columbus was an adherent of the twelfth-century Italian monk Joachim of Fiore, whose chronological template of God’s plan for humankind progressed in three stages of spiritual development. His ideas impressed both Dante and Hegel, but not Martin Luther, who was suspicious of the original work. “My spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book,” Luther wrote, in 1522, noting that “Christ is neither taught in it nor recognized.” Despite his misgivings, though, Revelation appealed to those who condemned the Papacy and couldn’t wait for the millennium to begin.