Politics and Apocalypse

An Introductory Essay

By Robert Hamerton-Kelly

 

“Where the corpse is, there will the vultures flock ”

--Matthew 24:28/ Luke 17:37

 

“Leave the dead to bury the dead, and, ‘ Come! Follow me!’”

--Matthew 8:22/ Luke 9:60

 

The conference that produced these papers was planned by Peter Thiel and me and held at Stanford in the week of July 12, 2004. We wanted to discuss current affairs with Rene Girard in a leisurely and thorough way and so invited only eight participants and scheduled the meeting for six full days. As his essay shows, Thiel believes that the event of 9/11 reveals that our Western political philosophy can no longer deal with our world of emerging global violence - “the brute facts of September 11 demand re-examination of the foundations of modern politics[1].” In refining the topic we consulted Wolfgang Palaver, who, not surprisingly suggested the title, “Politics and Apocalyptic,” not surprisingly because Palaver is the clearest of us all on the apocalyptic nature of Girard’s thought in general, and mimetic theory in particular.[2] I changed the title to “Politics and Apocalypse” because “apocalyptic” is an adjective, and to use an adjective as a substantive is still a solecism in English. The change did not, however, solve all problems, because the substantive, “Apocalypse,” is a piece of literature, as in the opening of the book of Revelation in the New Testament, from which 19^th century scholars took the term “apocalypse” in the first place and used it to classify a type of literature, “The apocalypse of Jesus Christ which God gave him, to show to his servants what must soon take place… (Revelation 1:1).” However, since the documents called “apocalypses” are classified by their content more than their form, we might use the term to describe the type of visionary material they contain, and then by further extension, the whole apocalyptic phenomenon – thought, method, form, imagery.

 

The root meaning of the Greek term “apokalypsis” is “unveiling” or “disclosure;” and the background of all the papers here is the assumption that something is being revealed about our world’s order, whether by divine grace or human reason, and that the revelation not only documents the threat to order but also causes its increasing instability. How does Girard’s theory help us to interpret the apocalypse of world history in general, and the period after 9/11 in particular? We can only suggest an approach to an answer but in any case we must be clear about how the term “apocalypse” is currently used and what its trajectory or line of meaning through history has been and will be.[3]

 

What is an Apocalypse?[4]

 

Some Current Examples:

 

Recently, the English actress Gillian Hanna described the last public performance of actor and playwright Harold Pinter as an apocalypse.  The cancer-stricken Pinter had just performed his friend, Samuel Becket’s, “Krapp’s Last Tape” and Hanna, speaking to Alan Cowell the critic said, “It is beyond acting. There is something about the coming together of this particular piece and this performance that took me somewhere else.” Cowell continues, “That place, she said, with a bleakness that might be expected, was ‘an icy steppe’ or an apocalypse.”[5] So an apocalypse is a bleak and ravaged place, where death reigns; an after-the-battle scene of cold corpses, dead horses, and splintered guns.

 

Paul Krugman, the economist and Bush nemesis – I have read him closely for the last six years and can testify that he has called the president a liar early and often – upon hearing former Speaker of the House Hastert blame George Soros for the public revulsion at Representative Mark Foley’s sexually driven misuse of public office, recalled a 1964 essay by Richard Hofstadter, itself provoked by the Goldwater movement, whose heirs have controlled the Federal Government in all its branches for the last decade, and entitled  “The Paranoid Style in America Politics.” Hofstadter describes political paranoia as “the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” – compare Hastert on Soros, “You know I don’t know where George Soros gets his money. I don’t know where…if it comes from overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from.” Hofstader continues: the “paranoid spokesman” sees things, “in apocalyptic terms…He is always manning the barricades of civilization…what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil…the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated...The demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals…and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration.” Krugman adds that this facet of the apocalyptic paranoia easily leads to the conclusion that the failure to achieve goals is the result not of poor planning and execution but of treachery and the “stab in the back.” One need hardly quote the president and vice president here, to document their paranoid style and rhetoric; documentation is on every front page and can in any case be found in Krugman’s article[6]. So apocalypse is an attitude of paranoid grandiosity.

 

David Brooks, the conservative columnist, has recently traveled widely in the country asking for opinions on the current scene. He reports that the US “street” thinks the Pope raised precisely the right question when he asked whether or not Islam encourages irrationality and violence. “What these Americans see is fanatical violence, a rampant culture of victimology and grievance, a tendency by many Arabs to blame anyone other than themselves for the problems they create…The Muslim millenarians posses a habit of mind that causes them to escalate conflicts. They seem confident they can prevail, owing to their willingness to die for their truth. They don’t seem marginalized, but look down on us as weak, and doubt our ability to strike back.” So the Muslims too have a paranoid style of politics, millenarians who think they can take over the world because of their willingness to die[7]. One might also note that the atmosphere of Brooks’ article is “responsibly alarmist,” hinting that we must take the threat seriously and act accordingly, which attitude itself can slip easily into “responsible paranoia.” So apocalypse is an attitude of quasi-paranoid self-righteousness.

 

Tim LaHaye, a Christian fundamentalist, has written a series of novels, some with Jerry Jenkins, called the “Left Behind” novels[8]. This title refers to the Bible’s apocalyptic expectation that the believers in Jesus will be snatched from the earth and taken to heaven – “raptured” is the jargon word – while those left behind will incur horrible torture, which God will bring to unbelievers when He wraps up the world. Reading the final volume of the series one can only conclude that this text was written by sadists for masochists. It paints a pornography of resentful violence. One might dismiss this phenomenon with a murmured de gustibus, but the novels have sold in the scores of millions, and spawned games, workbooks, kiddies’ books, conferences, clubs, periodicals and web sites. The monthly newsletter is called, “Interpreting the Signs,” and currently frets that the “avian” influenza might be a harbinger of the end. Its practitioners call this mode of interpretation “prophecy,” and contrast it with the “historical” interpretation of more mainline churches. So the Muslims and the politicians are not the only groups infected by apocalyptic contagion; religious circles too include millions of sufferers. Apocalypse to them is a worldview that sees into the future and prophesies the glorious vindication of the in-group and the cruel punishment of those outside.

 

Michael Ley of the University Vienna,[9] provides compelling evidence that the medieval apocalypticist Joachim of Floris influenced Adolf Hitler, especially by the prophecy that when the messiah comes to bring in the third kingdom he will exterminate all the enemies of God. According to Joachim history unfolds as three dispensations or divine kingdoms, the first of the Father (Israel), the second of the Son (Jesus) and the third of the Holy Spirit (soon to come). The third is to be inaugurated by the Messiah, and the propaganda of the Third Reich implied that the Fuehrer was this Messiah and thus obliged to exterminate God’s special enemies, the Jews. More important in this regard than the claims of the propaganda was Hitler’s caste of mind; he believed the terms of the drama and accepted his role in it.

 

War is a staple of apocalypse, expressing the deep dichotomy between the two major protagonists, which is a dominant feature of the genre. In the Bible’s apocalyptic world the final battle between Good and Evil, God and the Devil, or Michael archangel and Satan archfiend, is the battle of Armageddon. The name comes from the Hebrew for “the valley (har) of Megiddo,” in Greek, “Armageddon” (Revelation 16:16; 2 Chronicles 35:22; 2 Kings 9:27, 23:28-30, Judges 5:19). Megiddo was a fortress city of the kings of Israel, in the vicinity of present-day Haifa, and significant battles, most notably the one with the Pharaoh Neco in 609 BCE, in which Josiah the monotheistic reformer king of Judah died, to the embarrassment of the biblical authors of his history, for whom good monotheists were not supposed to perish prematurely, were fought before its gates. Today pilgrimages of fundamentalist Christian go to stand on the mound of the excavated city and look over the valley that runs from Haifa to Galilee, while their preachers tell them that this will be the place of the final battle.  It requires imagination to fit so huge an event into the limited space of this charming valley, more suited to placid hiking than war. It is well known that the term Armageddon has slipped in and out of US presidential rhetoric, ever since the days of Ronald Reagan. So apocalypse is fixated on the final solution of the problems of the group, and the final solution must be war and extermination.

 

The Biblical Roots:

 

The term “apocalypse” comes from the Bible (Revelation 1:1). Biblical thinking is historical rather than metaphysical, in the sense that its dominant mode is narrative. From the Bible we learn that apocalypse and politics are intimately connected from the start; indeed, in most cases apocalypse is a narrative interpretation of politics in code.

 

The inaugurator of the apocalyptic worldview is the book of Daniel[10]. All of the four apocalypses we shall be looking at are based on Daniel and some actually quote him. Written in a situation of political stress, probably the Greek oppression of Jewish religious culture in the early 2^nd century BCE, when in 163 Antiochus IV Epiphanes king of Antioch, scion of one of Alexander’s successor generals, took Jerusalem and, by conservative Jewish standards, desecrated the temple, the book of Daniel encourages the “Resistance” by means of an encoded political commentary. The commentary is a clear example of the seamless union of prophecy and politics in the typical apocalypse; once we appreciate how Jewish apocalypse and its worldview came into being as political commentary and propaganda, we shall be able to move freely between politics and apocalypse in our reflections upon the present world situation.

 

The Jewish “Resistance” to Greek oppression took at least two forms. The quietists retreated from the political sphere into closed communities, living together in cities and villages and probably also in a mother house by the Dead Sea, although the identification of the ruins in the Wadi Qumran as a “monastery” is continuously contested. (Most recently they have been seen as a commercial establishment). In any case the scrolls found at Qumran contain a high level of apocalyptic content, and include a scroll that calls itself, “The War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness,” which provides a prophetic vision of that final military denouement, in which the angels participate and the Messiah of David – there were two messiahs for these folk, one of David and one of Aaron, that is, palace and temple respectively - leads to victory the armies of God.

 

The activists, on the other hand, rushed to arms, and the five sons of Mattathias, a priest of the lineage of Hasmon, John, Simon, Judah, Eleazar and Jonathan, became the “Hammers of God,” the Maccabees. They turned out to be gifted generals whose military successes broke the political control of the Syrian Greeks and in 142 BC put in office a High Priest of their own Hasmonean lineage. The traditional account of the exploits of these heroes of Hannukah is in the three books of the Maccabees in the collection that Catholics include in the canon and Protestants marginalize as “apocrypha.”

 

This change of the ruling High Priestly family from Zadokite to Hasmonean, did perhaps more damage to the Jewish polity than the Greeks, because for the old guard followers of Zadok it compromised the temple and invalidated its ritual. The Hasmoneans were not the true high priesthood. The people we have called quietists are also known, following the contemporary historian Josephus, as Essenes, but their name for themselves is “Sons of Zadok,” and in their commentary on Hosea (4QpHosea), they mention a “wicked priest” who persecuted their “Righteous Teacher.” This reference is best interpreted as a description of the origin of the sect in the resistance of Zadokite loyalists to the new Hasmonean High Priest, and the price they paid in power and relevance.

 

So there were two reactions to the Greek assault on Jewish polity and culture, both of which were religious, namely the quietist and the activist, the Zadokites and the Maccabbees. It is of special importance for our theme that the more apocalyptic of the two were the quietists, warranting the speculation that apocalypse is the literature of the resentful, in Nietzsche’s sense, of those whose revenge has failed.  For Nietzsche the best way to deal with wounding is immediate retaliation, absent which the sting of insult sours to self-righteousness and poisons the system, until, growing ever more self-justifying, the victim projects the poison like the cobra onto real or imagined foes. Those who, like the Maccabees, acted successfully to avenge themselves did not produce apocalypses; they had no marinating hatred to be served (cold?) and no humiliation to be rectified, at some future time. 

 

The Sons of Zadok were compensated for their temporary humiliation by two gifts: the gift of the pesher interpretation, and the knowledge of the heavenly secrets (razim). Pesher exegesis is based on the conviction that these are the last days and those who know this also know that the biblical text describes the present final age rather than the past time in which it was written. The biblical writers were prophets who in code wrote of our time rather than their own and of our group’s founding and future. The characteristic phrase of the pesher is, “The meaning of this is (peshro)…” a way of citing the OT well known from the NT.  For these apocalyptic interpreters the OT text was, therefore, a long prophecy in code describing their current historical situation, assumed to be the of the end of history, and interpreting its signs[11].

 

In order to know the deeper meaning of the biblical text one had also to be privy to the celestial secrets (razim) hidden from the foundation of the world. The “right teacher” demonstrates this necessity as he closely combines the two components of revelation, disclosing the secrets by means of the exegesis and guiding the exegesis by means of the secrets. Thus we see that apocalyptic activity was mainly the literary activity of “scribes,” the writers and interpreters of texts, and thus warrants, if that is at all needed, our mimetic method, which emerged from literary interpretation and rose to become a ”principle of historical intelligibility (Bailie),” and a revealer of hidden things. 

 

The secrets were units of special knowledge of God’s plan for history, also called in the N T, the “wisdom of God.” 1Corinthians 2:7-9 is a good example of how Paul the Apostle uses this concept. He writes, “…yet among the mature we do impart a wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory.” Girard makes much of this Pauline text as showing how the powers of this age destroyed themselves when they crucified Christ, because the Cross revealed their violence and showed this world to be a structure of sacred violence. Had the powers known the secret wisdom they would not have served God’s plan so well by disclosing their own surrogate victim ruse. In their ignorance they damaged themselves fatally.

 

We turn now to the contents of some representative biblical apocalypses to register the nature of the original apocalypses in the Western tradition, and we begin with the seventh chapter of Daniel. The original is in Aramaic rather than Hebrew indicating that it is relatively late in the canon, stemming, as we have already remarked, from the 2^nd century BCE. It is the product of people in circumstances of crisis, who deal with their situation by locating themselves in history by means of an apocalyptic historiography that makes them the goal of an unfolding divine providence on the way to post history and transcendence.

 

Chapter 7 is set in the first year of the reign of Belshazzar of Babylon, 554 BCE, but this dating is fictional since the whole work is pseudepigraphical and actually written about 400 years later. Daniel dreams of four great beasts that symbolize four great empires, the first is “like a lion” with eagle’s wings, the second is “like a bear” with three ribs in its mouth, the third is “like a leopard” with four wings and four heads, and the fourth is not compared to anything else but simply described as unlike the previous three – “terrible, dreadful and exceedingly strong,” having “great iron teeth,” with which it chewed up most everything in sight, and what it missed with its teeth it stomped with its feet. Its most remarkable feature, however, is its ten horns, in the midst of which, as he watched, Daniel saw a little horn sprout and lay low three of its predecessors. It had human eyes and a mouth “speaking great things.”

 

The climax of this procession of horrors is the appearance of and old man whose hair and garment are dazzlingly white, seated on a throne in the midst of a glorious court. Books are opened and judgment is pronounced on the basis of the records they contain. The last appearing beast is slaughtered and burned while the prior four are deprived of dominion but allowed to live. Then appears “one like a human being (“son of man” in Aramaic idiom) who approaches the throne of the glittering old man (“ancient of days”) who in turn gives him  “...dominion, glory and royal power, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed (7:14).”

 

Daniel the dreamer now asks one of the courtiers to explain the meaning of all that has transpired and the courtier tells him that the four beasts represent four kingdoms –which we know to be respectively, the Chaldeans (Babylonians), the Medes, the Persians, and the Greeks of Alexander, precisely the empires that impinged on the Jews from the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE to the desecration of Jerusalem in 163. Thus we know that this is prophecy ex eventu, the wisdom of hindsight tricked out as foresight, but in any case the wisdom of insight, in narrative guise.  The “Human Being” (“Son Of Man”) represents “the Kingdom of the Saints of the Most High,” clearly the name of a religious group like the “Sons of Zadok,” a sect perhaps also at odds with the Hasmonean priesthood of the temple.

 

From this account we glean all the formal characteristics of the content of apocalypse, as well as its general  significance as the origin of universal history. The stable elements of the content are the heavenly world, the interpreting angel, the special group, the books of secret records, the war and final judgment, and the seer or, as the Mormons would say, “revelator,” who is the earthly counterpart of the angelic interpreter. Enoch is the archetype of the revelator; in Genesis 5, deep in one of those numbing recitations of “begats,” we read that Jared begat Enoch, Enoch begat Methuselah, and that “Enoch walked with God; and he was not, because God took him (Genesis 5:24).” The apocalyptic tradition interpreted this enigmatic statement to mean that God hoisted Enoch bodily to the realm of the angels, to the heavenly archives, and even to the outskirts of the holy place where stands the throne of God Himself. Since Enoch had been elevated bodily he could later return to earth and record what he had seen for our edification and warning. From Enoch’s records, extant in three books, we learn, amongst other marvelous things, that there are seven heavens, five archangels, and a massa damnata of fallen angels in the third heaven.

 

Universal history ends in universal judgment, and at that trial of trials the litigants, both prosecution and defense, consult the books of record, which describe not only the deeds of individuals but also of nations, and thus present  an account of the history of the world to the end of time. Whoever gains access to those records can foretell, and this is the priceless knowledge a Daniel or an Enoch brings to us. Here, then, we have a universal history of the world from beginning to end, with the “human being” at the climax.

 

Because the purpose or end of universal history is human, apocalypse emphatically uses the principle of moral responsibility to interpret its trajectory. The final judgment is a moral rectification of the order of history. Rectification is the best translation of the term used so much by the Apostle Paul, namely, “justification.” The rectification or justification achieved in Daniel 7 is the restoration of human beings to their original hegemony over the beasts. In Genesis God made Adam ruler of the beasts, but as a result of his sin, Adam became subject to the beasts and endured a long and humiliating servitude. When the “Son of Man” comes with his “Kingdom of the Saints of the Most High” humanity returns to mastery of the beasts and the disorder of the creation is rectified. “The authentic human being” (“Son of Man”) is the vanguard of this rectification, and at this point it is worth noting that of all the titles the Gospel traditions use to describes Jesus’ status, “Son of Man” is the only one he seems historically to have accepted.

 

Thus Jesus is the inaugurator of the New Creation, which is a world of equal status for all human beings, and the theme that the Apostle Paul makes central to his own understanding of the significance of Jesus. Universalism is the dominant note of earliest Christianity; Paul celebrates it when he realizes that his narrow religiosity had made him a persecutor (Galatians 2:19-21), and eventually proclaims, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female, for you are all one and the same in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28).” At the COVR meeting of 2004 held at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, Michel Serres claimed that Paul is the thinker for our time because he participated uniquely and knowingly in the death of one culture and the birth of another, and we are currently again at such a hinge of history. Serres’ address on that occasion might itself be taken as an apocalypse. Paul could do what he did because he thought in apocalyptic terms of a universal history and an event of universal significance, the Resurrection of Jesus, in that history. The end of all history, the Resurrection of the dead and the New Creation, has happened in the course of human history, so “then at the end,” has become “now in the midst.”

 

This identification of the center of history with the end, is the identification of a spatial with a temporal concept, “here and now” with “then and there.” For most of us the promise of “then and there” is enough. Time attests our human frailty with respect to the appropriation of reality. We must, because of that frailty, be content to receive reality in “coffee spoonfuls” as TS Eliot puts it, dribs and drabs from time to time, because we cannot bear too much. We are time bound and reality comes to us along the trajectory of that bondage. Ultimately when the timeline ends, we go “face to face” (1 Corinthians 13:12), but in the mean time we, like the old time “remittance man”, receive our periodic allowance. The mystic, or revelator, or prophet, on the other hand, has episodes of direct contact with the really real, and is thus able to keep the rest of us informed and encouraged. The Incarnation of God as the authentically human gives us all a glimpse of the real, enables us to anticipate and enjoy, and therefore is the apocalyptic event par excellence, the end of history. Since it has occurred in the midst of time, it has the proleptic status, of the “already but not yet,” already in substance but not yet in durance.

 

The effect of compounding the symbolism of time and space, the “then” and the “there,” in the portrayal of transcendence, might be most clearly seen in the Gospel of John. “Truly, truly, I say to you, the hour is coming and now is when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live (John 5:25).” The future consummation of all earthly things is already present in the heavenly realm says John, and then adds the revolutionary and essential Christian claim, that they are present also on earth, in the midst of time, as the person of Jesus himself (“I am the Resurrection and the Life” 11:25). The final judgment takes place now as we judge ourselves in the choice we make to accept or reject Jesus (5: 21-24; 3:16-21). So the Incarnation of God is the entry of “there” into “now” and the time of this is the eschatological moment.[12] In Jesus we encounter the end of the world, in both senses of end, namely, the purpose and the finish.

 

Reading the signs of the times is prominent in the apocalyptic sayings attributed to Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). In turning to the Jesus of the Synoptics we begin with one of the epigraphs to this essay, “Where the corpse is, there the vultures will flock.” In Matthew it is the climax of that gospel’s apocalyptic discourse, while in Luke it is part of the buildup to the apocalypse. To be sure it is a sinister injunction full of the negative freight of catastrophe, evoking the scene of evening on a  battlefield. Could Jesus be as sardonic as this?  Let’s assume that he could, and that this aphorism, hardly to be remembered for its cheerfulness, is from him. It suggests a weary reluctance to enter into the eager discussion of the signs of the time, beyond urging wakefulness and attention. “Don’t be so eager to walk with the vultures among corpses,” he says to those who wish the day of their vindication would make haste to come. 

 

The so-called “Synoptic Apocalypse” is in Mark 13:1-37; it is the basis on which Matthew and Luke built their apocalypses by adding to it from the hypothetical source Q. The narrative begins with Jesus prophesying the destruction of the temple, and the disciples asking when this will happen and what will be the signs of its imminence. Jesus refuses to specify signs, but rather warns of persecution and general tribulation, urging discrimination and sobriety. When he does advert to signs, the prophecy has already been fulfilled, the “desolating sacrilege” is already there in the Holy of Holies of the temple, and the reader is prodded to interpret correctly. (“But when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be [let the reader understand] , then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains…” {Mark 13:14 / Matthew 24/15, Daniel 9:27,11:31,12:11, 1 Maccabees 1:57} “). The phrase “desolating sacrilege” is quoted from Daniel and the little hint to the reader confirms that we are reading an encoded history, probably of the actual rape of the temple by the Romans under Titus in 70 CE, and shows that not only the apocalyptic type of  historiography from Daniel is operating, but also that the writer is interpreting the actual text of Daniel by means of the pesher exegesis. The evangelists use the method and the actual imagery of Daniel to tell us that the desecration of the temple by the Romans is prophesied in a document that presents itself as a 6^th century BCE message from Babylon, but in fact is a second century account of Antiochus’ defiling of the temple, now presented as if it were a 70 CE account of Titus’ atrocity in the first Jewish war. Thus they discover and reapply the constant elements in their history, saying that Daniel wrote of our times, even in Babylon. The “desolating sacrilege” set up in the temple is probably the standards of the Legion that captured Jerusalem[13]. So the synoptic apocalypse is also a prophecy after the event attributed to Jesus who by the time of these happenings had been gone from this world for 30 plus years.

 

The master message that emerges form of these synoptic apocalypses is that since no one knows when these final events will come to pass the proper attitude is not curiosity but sobriety and attentiveness (Mark 10:32-33: “But of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Take heed, watch; for you do not know when the time will come.”).

 

The last book of the Bible, known as the Revelation, calls itself “ The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ (Revelation 1:1),” and since it is the archetypal apocalypse in literary history we must take a brief look at it. We need not dwell because we have already seen all the characteristics of the apocalyptic genre in both thought and technique. Written sometime during the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian (81-96 CE), who had persecuted Christians and confined the author of this book to a labor camp on the island of Patmos, the Apocalypse of John bears the marks of its provenance in crisis and suffering. It is for the most part an account of happenings in heaven that impinge upon earth at the end of history, relayed through a revelator to those still here.

 

Chapter 13 begins as a paraphrase of Daniel 7 and goes on to become a new composition as the beastly visions receive a new and extended interpretation. The beast from the sea combines the powers of the four beasts of Daniel and indicates the Roman Empire. This is another example of  the pesher exegesis of Qumran (c.f. “He is (encoded) wisdom: let him who has understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is the number of a human being, and his number is six hundred and sixty-six” 13:18).

 

One important feature of apocalyptic historiography that we have not yet emphasized is the principle, “as in heaven so on earth,” the parallel course of events and the parallel existence of institutions in heaven and on earth.[14] For example, war in heaven becomes war on earth (12:7-9), the rituals of heaven are archetypes of the ritual in the temple on earth, and the heavenly Jerusalem is archetype of the earthly (21:1ff). At the climax of history the heavenly city descends to earth and replaces the earthly. There is no temple in this city because God himself is present in all its districts, that is, the heavenly liturgy, so lovingly described, replaces its erstwhile earthly approximation, but need no longer be confined to a temple because the temple and the city have become one and heaven itself, of which the temple was a sign and an anticipation, is now with us on earth. From this Apocalypse we also get most of the conventional components of popular apocalyptic eschatology, like the millennium or thousand years of joy when Satan is locked up, the fire in which the devil and his angels, and all the humans who served them will burn eternally, the tribulations of the end times, and the reward of the righteous. 

 

Finally we turn to a Pauline apocalypse in 2 Thessalonians 2: 1-12, which is the background of Carl Schmitt’s important figure of the  “katechon.” Some members of the Thessalonian congregation believe the “Day of the Lord” has already come and are stirred up. Paul explains why the Day has not come and why they should settle down. In this explanation he sets out his understanding of what must happen, and as in all the other examples we have seen, the apocalypse he writes draws on Daniel. He might indeed be reciting an already existing piece rather than composing de novo, which if true would show that this apocalypse was the general property in the early church and not a composition of the Apostle. It plays an important role in Schmitt’s thought and Palaver’s essay.

 

“First must come “the apostasy,” then the appearance of the “man of lawlessness, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God; but now you know what is holding him back (the katechon =”the thing that restrains”) until he is revealed in his proper time. For the mystery of lawlessness is working now, only he who now restrains him (the katechon) will continue to do so until he disappears from the scene and the wicked man is revealed whom the Lord Jesus shall destroy with the breath of his mouth when he comes (2: 4-8, c.f. Revelation 19:15).”

 

The wicked man in this drama acts with the power of Satan, and works fraudulent miracles; he is the “mystery of lawlessness, the opponent of the will of God (2:9).” In the Letters of John this is the Anti-Christ (1John 2:18-25).  As the “Son of Man”(Christ) is the representative human being so “the man of lawlessness” is the representative enemy of human being (Anti-Christ). He is not Satan but the son of Satan, so to speak, as Jesus is the Son of God.  This antichrist in our apocalypse resembles Antiochus IV Epiphanes in Daniel, and so this is probably a literary reference rather than a symbolic presentation of a current historical figure. Nevertheless, the idea that it might refer symbolically to the emperor Gaius Caligula is worth attention. Josephus tells us that Gaius, in the winter  of CE 39/40, believing himself to have been insulted by the Jewish citizens of the Judean village Jamnia, ordered a statue of himself to be set up in the temple in Jerusalem. The statue came by sea from Sidon and landed at Ptolemais, where the governor of Syria, Petronius, delayed the offloading again and again because he was moved by massive public protests. While this delay was in effect Caligula was murdered and so the crisis passed. Decoding our apocalypse by the light of this history we might read that the wicked man who thought he was God and sat in the temple is Caligula, and the restraining force or katechon  is the power behind the wisdom of Petronius and the demise of Gaius[15].

 

Be that as it may, the action here is controlled by the apocalyptic idea of the “right time,” and the restraining historical power is there to keep events from happening prematurely. It does not prevent them from happening at all but serves only to ensure that the apocalyptic calendar is kept. To the Thessalonians who thought the day of the Lord had already come, Paul says that the katechon will assure that the end will come “at its proper time” (2 Thessalonians 2:6).

 

These apocalypses give content to the term and illustrate important details. Apocalypse describes what “is” eternally and what “shall be” temporally when the history of this world ends and becomes the eternity of that world.  We have cataloged some current uses of the term,  - the “icy steppe” of “somewhere else” where the dying actor plays the dying character and death kisses death; the paranoid politician’s intolerably grandiose self justification of the in-group and reckless damnation of the “outs;” the Bible’s violent imaginings of the condign punishment of opponents, seen through the lens of sadistic novelists. “Apocalyptic” today has all its traditional meaning: the final justification of the precious group by means of a final cataclysmic act of universal punishment, as well as a newer secular meaning of simple catastrophe.

 

Mimetic Theory as Apocalypse

 

Girard’s contribution to our volume is a good example of the apocalyptic nature of mimetic theory. Here in a hitherto unpublished work from what he calls “my creative period,” we encounter all the basic insights that make up the double guile that bests the guile of violence and reveals its ruse, still with the freshness of  discovery on them.

 

From the first, Girard’s mimetic theory was an apocalyptic theory. He entitles the penultimate chapter of his early work, Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1966)[16], “The Dostoyevskian Apocalypse,” and in it summarizes the achievement of Dostoyevsky in disclosing what at that time Girard was calling  “metaphysical desire.” At this early stage of the idea of mimetic desire Girard was concerned to expound how the great novelists reveal the way desire imitates desire and operates as a triangle of “desire, desired, and model or mediator of desire.”  He called this desire, “metaphysical,” because it is essentially a desire to gain being from the other. The self feels deprived of being and in its need thinks that the model has a fullness of being that I, the desirer, might acquire by desiring the same objects as the model, and eventually the being of the model himself. Desire’s dearth of being is the result of its deviation from the true source of being in the divine, to the human other, by way of pride.  Pride claims self-sufficiency for the desirer, who in fact, all unawares, is humiliated rather than exalted because he depends now for being on the equally exiguous other. Desire has deviated and down this detour the blind lead the blind into the empty mimetic ditch[17]. 

 

The master revelator of deviated desire and the Romantic myth of self-sufficiency is Dostoyevsky, initially in Notes from the Underground and climactically in The Demons (earlier translated as The Possessed)[18]. The penultimate chapter of the latter describes the death of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, who “constantly played a certain special and so to speak civic role among us”.[19] In this role he instigated the metaphysical rivalry of the young men around Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin, his protector’s only son, and now lies on his deathbed confessing to a stranger, a woman seller of Bibles. She reads to him three biblical passages that are crucial to an understanding of the novel as a whole and especially its proper novelistic ending in conversion. She chooses and reads the Sermon on the Mount first, and then when he asks her to open the Bible at random and read the first thing she sees, she reads the letter to the church in Laodicea from the third chapter of the Apocalypse. (Revelation 3:14-22), which warns the congregation that because they are neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm, God will spit them out of his mouth like bad coffee. Thus the Apocalypse discloses Stepan Trofimovich’s lifelong lack of seriousness[20]. The third and final passage she reads is at his request, and is the account of the Gadarene demoniac in Luke 8:32-36, which, the narrator reminds us, is one of the epigraphs of the whole novel [21]. Noteworthy too is that while the two gospel passages are deliberately chosen the one from the Apocalypse presents itself at random; apocalypse is always there, under the surface, ready to pop out when least expected.

 

Placed at the beginning of the novel and at its end, the story of the madman and the swine is the key to the novel as a journey from madness to sanity, from deviated desire to divine fulfillment, from the emptiness of being to the plenitude of love, from sin to grace, from hell to heaven by way of apocalypse and conversion. The conversion includes the two classic elements, confession and turning to God:

 

Thus he confesses his sin:   “My friend, when I understood …that turned cheek, I…right then also understood something else…J’ai menti toute ma vie, (I have lied all my life), all my life!”[22]

 

Thus he turns to God: “My immortality is necessary if only because God will not want to do an injustice and utterly extinguish the fire of love for him once kindled in my heart. And what is more precious than love? Love is higher than being, love is the crown of being, and is it possible for being not to bow before it? If I have come to love him and rejoice in my love – is it possible that he should extinguish both me, and my joy, and turn us to naught? If there is a God, then I am immortal! Voila, ma profession de foi.” (There is my profession of faith).[23] (Thus we see the transformation of the goal of life from being to love, for “God is Love” – 1 John 4:8).

 

Conversion is metaphorically an exorcism, but empirically it is an apocalypse, and in 1961 Girard proposed that it also describes the experience of the great novelist who eventually gains insight into the mimetic dynamics of himself and his narrative characters and then rewrites the narrative from the point of view of the unveiled. Every great novel is written twice, once as concealment and once as apocalypse. Last month Milan Kundera wrote: “If you imagine the genesis of a novelist in the form of an exemplary tale, a myth, that genesis looks to me like a conversion story  (his italics); Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born from the ruins of his lyrical (“romantic”- RG) world. Did Kundera read Girard? I doubt it. Kundera is a great novelist so it is no surprise that he discovered in and by himself this important part of the mimetic truth[24].  

 

A Legion of demons leaves the demoniac and goes into a group of swine, which rushes over a cliff and drowns in the lake. The man sits at Jesus’ feet, restored to life and peace. This is the individual experience; but there is a group experience too. Girard points out that the demons are both one and many, Legion and legion, and Stepan Trofimovich compares the demoniac to Russia as a whole, possessed but soon to be purified. Girard made a similar move in his thinking; farther along his intellectual trajectory he turned from Legion to legion, from the individual to the group.

 

The dying man says, “…it’s exactly like our Russia. These demons who come out of a sick man and enter into swine – it’s all the sores, all the miasmas, all the uncleanness, all the big and little demons accumulated in our great, dear, sick man, Russia, for centuries and centuries!…but the sick man will be healed and sit at the feet of Jesus…and everyone will look in amazement…”[25]  Since this sick man is Russia as a whole we might use the image as a segue from mimetic theory as a theory of the individual in the group to a theory of groups in relationship with each other and of the institutions that give  stability to groups.

 

In Violence and the Sacred [26]and Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World [27], Girard discerned how mimetic desire gives structure to groups and maintains public order. At this stage the theory becomes an apocalyptic anthropology. As apocalypse entails a universal historiography so mimetic theory entails a universal anthropology. The analysis by means of mimetic rivalry and the “scapegoat” leads to the vision of this world as a structure of Sacred Violence, erected by the three powers of the surrogate victim, namely, ritual, myth and prohibition. Ritual makes institutions, myth makes identity, and prohibition makes law. The sacred structure of “this world” thus emanates from the surrogate victims as a series of differences whose first and foundational difference is the gap between the profane and the sacred, that is, the difference between the living and the dead, the lynch mob and its victim. The victim, which conducts violence out of the social system, founds the sacred structure on the far side of the gap between its self and the selves of its victimizers, by creating for them the solidarity of the lynch mob. Thus the surrogate victim mechanism gives stability to the group normally wracked by mimetic rivalry and competing violence, but this stability is unstable.

 

Ritual sacrifice renews the stability, myth hides it, and law enforces it, but each of these agents is disingenuous. The ruse’s effectiveness depends on its being hidden from view and immune from understanding, and if this is so then the last thing the ruse can tolerate is an apocalypse, or unveiling of the hidden secrets. In as much as the Crucifixion of Jesus unveils the victim slain from the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8) it is the decisive apocalypse, nothing less than the arrival of the end of time in the midst of history. Therefore, the Crucified is the “Son of Man,” our liberator from the sacrificial crisis in which monsters appear. When Daniel dreams of monsters and links them to imperial structures of violence he begins the unveiling (apocalypse) that culminates in the revelation of the Son of Man as the victim slain from the foundation of the world. In this sense the mimetic theory shows how the Cross demythifies the world, that is, tells the truth about the world’s origin and survival as an ever renewed structure of sacred violence dependent on the rituals of sacrifice, the myths of origins, and the laws of prohibition and enforcement. “World” in this usage then is the world of human being organized by the ruse of the surrogate, around the mound of the idolized victim. The foundation of this world is the moment of the first successful surrogate ruse, when life was made possible by death and the two natural states were distinguished culturally and symbolically.

 

The effect of the preaching of the Gospel in Western culture has been to unveil the secret of society’s survival through the ritual of the victim and thus to put that survival in jeopardy. The better we know the ruse the worse it works to sustain the structures of the sacred within which we secure ourselves somewhat from violent disorder. Currently, globalization is eroding cultural distinctions, self-victimization is becoming a cultural industry, and most significant of all, violence is erasing even the existential distinction between life and death.  In the cults of the suicide killers, the desire for mass destruction, contained during the Cold War in the sacred structure of deterrence, is now leaking to more and more minor players. The suicide fighter erases the lines of deterrence which map a common world in which everyone concerned values his/her life. Suicidal antagonists cannot be deterred on the old assumptions; the distinction crucial to the cultural control of violence, between the mob and the victim (the living and the dead), is finally eroding entirely and the sacrificial crisis is conjuring monsters once again.

 

Suicidal murder is an advanced symptom of the collapse of the surrogate victim system and it is now a component of our global culture. The surrogate victim ruse operates by killing someone else, suicidal murder operates by killing the self as well as someone else, and thus erases the distinction between killer and victim, and confuses the principle distinction in the culture, namely, the one between the sacred and the profane, between the dead victim on the one hand and the live perpetrators on the other, out of which ritual, myth and law emerge as generators of further distinctions, and stabilizer of all the other cultural distinctions. The Muslim radicals probably believe that their deaths enable others of their group to live, and thus they strengthen it by underlining the distinctions between insiders and outsiders, but in fact they break out of the system of distinctions, which rests on the difference between life and death, and reenter the world of monsters, the world of the living dead and the undead, and the demoniac who lives among the tombs.

 

Ironically, the sacred violence of jihadist Islam, which believes it is strengthening its sacral foundation, is in fact sawing at the branch on which the religion sits. Suicidal violence no longer confirms the fundamental distinction but rather erases it, and deals crippling blows to the system of good violence that is supposed to control bad violence. The violence that no longer heeds the distinction between life and death might indeed be fatal to the sacrificial mechanism, which like an ancient automobile is shaking itself to bits on rocky roads. The beginning of the apocalyptic end might be upon us, and a gigantic sacrificial crisis breaking out.

 

 So mimetic theory leaves us with a vision of a long lasting, universal social and cultural structure of sacred violence, based on the working of the surrogate victim ruse, now re-entering the great sacrificial crisis of the original period and thus disintegrating into cultural and social confusion and more and more uncontrolled violence. The fact that Islam is the current vanguard of this crack up can be no surprise, since monotheism is the first and most effective blow against the pagan sacrificial order, and every great religion is great to the extent that it decodes its own mythology of sacred violence. In doing this, the great religions disclose the ruse and render it progressively ineffectual, thus weakening the traditional religious control of violence. Islam has reached a new extreme of this process and by destroying itself as a religion is ultimately saving itself as a faith, if indeed it is the true faith. If not it is simply destroying itself.

 

Islam in the throes of an advancing sacrificial crisis, indicated by the emergence in it of suicide as a virtue where it has traditionally been a sin, makes the world wait in vain for a representative and authoritative condemnation of murder by suicide. When will the leadership, however fragmented, emphatically and repeatedly announce that those who do such things are not Muslims but pagans and are going not to paradise but to hell? We wait in vain for such transparency and cannot shake the suspicion that Islam does not speak out because it affirms the violence of the sacred and is by mimetic standards nothing but a mode of pagan sacrifice, blaming the scapegoat and purchasing internal unity with the blood of the external enemy. This last, desperate attempt to make the mechanism work is already uniquely undermined by the suicidal, self-sacrificial erasure of the first distinction between the mob and the victim, between life and death. Where the mob kills itself for the sake of itself, the logic of the ruse has entered a stage of terminal decay, and sacrificial structure will soon be utterly unable to control violence. This is the sign that the latter days of the present world are upon us.

 

I do not mean that soon the stars will fall from the night sky and the moon be washed in blood, the dragon arise from the lake of fire and the wicked be tortured by God; no, I mean simply that the present global order is in a process of deep transformation and the outcome is uncertain. The old order is collapsing and sacrifice can no longer stop the crisis of disorder or hold it up. The USA with all its military power, which I regard as a prime instance of good violence, cannot bring order in Iraq, which is a sign of this historical stage of advanced sacrificial failure, an apocalypse indeed. 

 

Reading the Signs of the Times

 

The conference, of which these papers are a record, convened to assess the competence of mimetic theory to disclose the structure and dynamics of human history and by this theoretic light to “read the signs” of our especially violent times, that is, to spot the vultures and find the corpse.  One can only test a theory by application; mimetic theory’s success at interpreting events attests its adequacy as a theory, but there is another, less useful to be sure, way of testing a theory, and that is by comparing it with other comparably significant theories. Our competence and interest led us to three 20^th century savants, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, and to the further question whether philosophy as such can be a reliable guide to the human situation or whether mimetic theory should replace it. Our participants deal with these topics, and I do not intend by way of introduction to summarize their work; rather I shall take up only some salient features of their arguments that dovetail with the apocalyptic background of the reflection as a whole. If mimetic theory is an apocalyptic theory then how do the theories of these major 20^th century thinkers, themselves apocalyptic in significant ways, impinge on it, and how does it fare in comparison with them?  

 

Carl Schmitt

 

Schmitt serves to introduce the other pole of our title, namely, Politics, and along with politics he introduces War. Clausewitz famously said that war is politics by other means, while Schmitt reverses direction and holds that politics is war by other means. The distinction between friend and enemy and the struggle for power between these two antagonists is the essence of politics. One might compare this with the opening paragraph of Clausewitz’s “On War,” in which he says that war is essentially a combat between two antagonists, (ein Zweikampf, usually translated as a “duel,”) and that the Zweikampf is more like a wrestling match (ringen) than “pistols for two at dawn.” Schmitt’s marvelously clarifying definition is an apocalyptic description of politics, using the characteristic theme of the dichotomy. The ur-dichotomy is that between the surrogate victim and the mob and classic apocalypse is structured by this distinction. The very fact that the definition is so clarifying shows that the friend/foe distinction is mimetic and apocalyptic, and incidentally, that mimetic theory and apocalyptic theory are barely distinguishable.[28] 

 

Palaver shows clearly that Schmitt’s idea of politics and his social vision are based on the surrogate victim mechanism. In it the structure of sacred violence exercises the power that restrains history (katechon) in its accelerating drift towards world revolution (sacrificial crisis). The “katechon” is Schmitt’s apocalyptic term, taken, as we have seen, from the Bible, to name a phenomenon very like Girard’s order of the Sacred in its effect of holding back history and warding off chaos. To the extent that Schmitt’s thought is a theology, as in Political Theology, the title of one of his better-known books, it is a pagan version of Christianity, an adaptation of Christian theology to the service of sacred violence. So despite his confusion of theology with mythology Schmitt is a reader of the signs whose reading confirms the insight of mimetic theory.

 

Palaver calls him anti-apocalyptic ranking him with Strauss and Voegelin as thinkers who fear the potential for chaos in Christianity’s vision and energy. For this reason one must suppose that Schmitt’s use of  katechon  is ironic, in the sense that it is an apocalyptic idea used against the apocalypse. One might ask whether Schmitt does not misuse the idea because he misreads the text. The text says that the katechon is a temporary phenomenon serving the apocalyptic calendar, concerned only that the antichrist appears at his proper time and not before, not something that can hold back forever history hurtling to its end.  Palaver’s discussion of the katecon is nicely nuanced, pointing out how it resembles the Sacred in having two valences, chaos on the one hand and order on the other, bad violence and good violence, and referring to Bonhoeffer’s view of it as the force within history that sets limits to violence. In any case Schmitt compares it to the Roman Empire and in so doing shares the Apostle Paul’s view of the empire’s service to the divine will as set out in the little apocalypse of Romans 13.

 

Leo Strauss

 

Strauss had early contact with Schmitt, and found him compatible. Strauss might be seen as another anti-apocalyptic thinker, but as a segue from Schmitt we would like to ask whether the two of them do not in fact use some apocalyptic ideas to nullify others, and so might be called, semi-apocalyptic thinkers.  It seems that they have two important apocalyptic ideas in common, one negation and one affirmation; that is, on the one hand they oppose the messianic, universal side of apocalypse and on the other hand cherish the centrality of the chosen group, like  “the saints of the most high” or the “Sons of Zadok,” for Schmitt the German people and their homeland, and for Strauss the Jewish people and Zion. Thus in the Bible Strauss favors the Kings of Israel and Judah who struggled to manage history in the present, above the Prophets who railed at them in the name of a future judgment and a final utopia; and he counsels the Jews, scions of these Kings, to find their dignity and significance not in a messianic hope but in the dignified endurance of their present humiliation.

 

Another apocalyptic and mimetic point they have in common is that since the opposition from outside strengthens the centripetal forces inside the group, it is not altogether negative. The group needs its enemies for the sake of its coherence.

 

Strauss, however, is thoroughly apocalyptic in his contention that the wise man conceals rather than reveals his wisdom. He points to a tradition of such occlusion in the Greek philosophers, and practices it himself. For this reason he is famously difficult to read, reserving his hidden wisdom for those who have the energy to search and struggle. The apocalypse, as we have seen, is a hidden wisdom, now revealed, but revealed in code and demanding effort to understand. (“Let the reader understand”).

 

Eric Voegelin

 

Voegelin shares the apocalyptic view of a universal history and the exegesis by which the symbols that history throws up are made to open like windows onto its meaning and direction. He leaves his work unfinished because his projects run into insoluble difficulties and he is too honest to force the interpretation, and because, as Rossbach argues, he is prevented by his stance as a philosopher from ever reaching a conclusion or end. Voegelin shares with Schmitt and Strauss the negative attitude towards messianic or utopian expectation. He calls the messianic stance “Gnostic,” in so far as it claims to be privy to the divine secrets, and so to have “secret knowledge,” and thus to be able to act with a certainty that belies arrogance and risks nemesis. Such enthusiasm is both “gnostic,” and “apocalyptic,” in so far as secret wisdom is an organizing principle in the composition of both kinds of view.

 

Rossbach wisely refuses to accept “Gnosticim” as a stable historical category and calls it rather a “line of meaning.”[29] I prefer the term “trajectory” to the rather clunky “line of meaning” but nonetheless welcome his insight, which holds, of course, for all other classifying categories of traditional scholarship as well. It has always been very difficult formally to distinguish the categories of “Apocalypse” and “Gnosis” from one another, and now it is no longer necessary since they are both positions plotted on a trajectory and moving towards and away from each other as different positions are entered on the graph of history. Distinctions between the two may now be ad hoc and provisional.

 

Apocalypse is much concerned with “ending,” that is, with the end of history or the end of this world. Rossbach meditates on Voegelin’s late statements in the light of Girard’s early insight into the ending of a great novel.[30] The hero of the novel and the author of the book are both enslaved to metaphysical desire; the author portrays the hero in such a way as to exempt himself from the desire he represents, until the moment when he sees himself in his hero and owns his own enslavement to desire. At this point he can begin to break free, and thus sees the hero anew, rewrites him accordingly and lifts his narrative from mediocrity to greatness. The moment of this insight is the moment of conversion. According to Rossbach, Voegelin did not attain to it; like Stavrogin he merely died.

 

Mimetic Theory and Philosophy

 

So we arrive at a concluding unscientific post-script, having to do with philosophy and theology, reason and revelation, observation and apocalypse. For Girard the philosopher is the author who never repents and so can never end. I recall at this point the saying of that third century Patristic extremist, Tertullian, to the effect that the Greeks make a virtue of endless seeking, which makes no sense at all, because when he has found what he is looking for the sensible man stops looking. Philosophy makes a virtue of seeking and no one more than Voegelin, who was allergic to dogma of any kind. For him the truth is in the honest and endless search for the light whose shadows alone we can see in the cave of this world. For him conversion is the Platonic turning from the shadows on the back wall to the luminescence at cave’s mouth that causes them, and eventually to the light itself.

 

Gil Bailie shows the passion with which mimetic unveiling opposes philosophic travailing. When asked what the mimetic objection to philosophy is, Girard, in one of the conference sessions, said that the philosopher never includes himself in his analyses, but stands outside in the place of the self-sufficient observer. In terms of the ending of The Demons, the philosopher is Stavrogin, who simply dies, while Stepan Trofimovich, who had been, to be sure a bad philosopher, all his empty, lying life, goes from earth to heaven on the wings of apocalyptic angels and his own late won truth that he had been a liar all his life.

 

So we end with the second epigraph of this essay, which is a summons to the good apocalypse in the midst of the accelerating shudder of the bad:

 

“Leave the dead to bury the dead. Come! Follow me!”

--Matthew 8:22/Luke 9:60