BOOKS

It's nigh or never

David Sexton THE END OF TIME by Damian Thompson Sinclair-Stevenson, L16.99, pp. 365 Being stood up is always embarrassing, especially in public. What do you say? What can you do? Waiting for Godot gives a few pointers. 'We could do our exercises.' The historical part of Damian Thomp- son's study of millenarianism — even the very recently historical part — is necessari- ly a long recital of those who have been stood up on a cosmic scale. In every case, so far, the apocalypse has failed to arrive on time or at all. Many have taken their disappointment rather badly. Some have gone off in a huff or taken the initiative of self-immolation. Others are waiting still.

On the evening of 22 October 1844, thousands of American `Millerites' gathered on hillsides to await the Lord. As one of them wrote (later, of course), `Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before.' The day became known as the Great Disappointment. But there have been plenty of other let-downs. On 28 October 1992, 20,000 members of the Korean `Tami Church' waited for 'the Rapture', in which they would be raised into the air to meet the Lord, while the Earth underwent seven years of 'Great Tribulation'. They too were — it hardly needs saying — disappointed, the more so when it was discovered that the church's pastor had pocketed church funds, including bonds which would not mature until 1995.

It's a field of human endeavour in which the whirligig of time brings in his revenges with plenty of topspin. Yet millenarians are nothing discouraged. The End of Time remains always just round the corner.

Perhaps the feeling that you have waited for such a long time already only makes you all the,more certain that the bus must be about to come? 'There is little doubt that the early Christians — and possibly Jesus himself — lived in daily expectation of the End of the World', says Thompson, no enemy to the upper case. Matthew xvi 28 and Luke ix 27 are handsomely unambiguous. 'Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming into his kingdom.' Verily?

Although apocalypse had been preached by Zoroaster around 1400 BC, and subsequently in the Book of Daniel, early Christianity was 'the first religion to offer Its adherents the possibility of escaping the flames in which the rest of the world will Perish', Thompson claims. The Lord's Prayer, though few realise it now, is precisely a plea for such deliverance. 'Most Christians have no idea that when they say it they are praying for the End of the World.'

The repeated injunction in the Gospels not to try to calculate the time and the hour of this event testifies to the intense curiosity this naturally aroused among the first Christians. Before long, however, it seems that this curiosity was replaced by disappointment and the need for an explanation for Christ's non- appearance.

Enter the Book of Revelation, composed towards the end of the first century, as, presumably, it became apparent that Christ had failed to keep his appointment.

One wonders whether the author intended to keep successive generations of Christians in a state of apocalyptic expectation, and there- fore created images with a certain reusable quality. If so, he succeeded brilliantly,

says Thompson, whose fascinating material is marred by an unnecessarily cumbersome de ivery (It has been suggested ... But it would be wrong to imagine ... The point of these experiences, however, was perhaps

'Martin won't be in today . . . says he slipped on a banana skin walking to work, somer- saulted through the air, crashed into a ladder which caused a tin of paint to fall on his head; he then sta;cered about unable to see where he was going and fell down a manhole.'

not so much... ') In Revelation it is announced that, after Satan has been cast into the bottomless pit, Christ and his saints will reign on earth for 1,000 years. This, strictly, is the Millennium, not the turning of the calendar into a new 1,000-year era. The 'Millennium Commission', with its folly in Greenwich, is loosely named.

Millennial count-downs have occurred at many different dates, for although, thanks to our fingers and thumbs, groups of ten, 100 and 1,000 have power over us, there has been no consensus about where to start counting from. Apocalypse was expected in 410 and again in 500 (6,000 years from Adam). Only in 525 did the monk Diony- sius the Exiguous begin dating Anno Domini — probably postdating the birth of Jesus by 'between four and seven years', so that the true second millennium of Christ's birth may have already passed us by.

Having set out these 'roots of the apoca- lypse', Thompson (a 'former religious affairs correspondent of the Daily Tele- graph' in his thirties) goes into survey mode, running swiftly through the notori- ous cases: the year 1000, the Taborites, the Miinster Anabaptists, the Fifth Monar- chists. Inevitably, for the mediaeval period, he draws on Norman Cohn's classic, The Pursuit of the Millennium (and Cohn has kindly provided an encomium for the cover of his book).

Perhaps the most superbly barmy of all millennial movements, in a hotly contested arena, remains that created by Antonio Conseheiro in Brazil, in the 1890s, who told his thousands of fanatical followers that in 1898 'hats would increase in size and heads grow smaller', in 1899 'the rivers would run red and a new planet would circle through space', and then that in 1900 the stars would rain down. In the event, as Mario Vargas Llosa tells so well in The War at the End of the World, the millenarians' citadel, Canudos, was destroyed by the Brazilian army in 1897 and all the believers killed.

Thompson follows Cohn in identifying Nazism and Stalinism as millenarian move- ments. In the second half of the century, our sense of living at the End of Time has been strengthened by both 'the foundation of the State of Israel and the development of nuclear weapons', he says breezily. Not perhaps attending quite carefully enough to his language, he explains that Hiroshima and Nagasaki 'put flesh on the bones of biblical prophecies of fire from heaven'. After this historical canter, he devotes the second half of his book to current, or at least recent, outbreaks. American funda-

mentalists have had especially bad luck so far, many, for example, having pinned their hopes on 1988. Edgar Whisenant's influen- tial booklet, 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will be in 1988, has plainly passed its sell-by date. The Pope, it appears from Crossing the Threshold of Hope, has hardly less firm a date in mind, somehow connected with the undisclosed `third prophecy of Fatima'. In the apostolic letter, Tertio Millennio Adveniente, published last year, John Paul II alarmingly announced that 'preparing for the year 2000 has become, as it were, the hermeneutical key to my pontificate'. We can only wish him the best of luck. As Thompson notes: A sense of accelerating time is common to both apocalyptic believers and old men; and this is one old man for whom it cannot accel- erate fast enough.

With New Age millennialism (`UF0s, Nostradamus, crop circles and pyramids'), Thompson is admirably brisk (although he should not have allowed himself to quote the never located Chesterton chestnut to the effect that :When people cease to believe in something, they do not believe in nothing — they believe in anything.') Other instances he discusses — the Aum cult's poison-gas attacks, the mishandled Waco siege, the Solar Temple murders and suicides — are less laughable.

Only at the very end of The End of Time (perhaps having learnt the advantages of keeping people hanging on) does Thompson suddenly give his explanation of the persistence of apocalyptic belief: Its prophecies of the End resonate with the human consciousness of death ... And it has grasped a crucial point about the human understanding of time, which is that it is always distorted by the prospect of death. The belief that mankind has reached the crucial moment in its history reflects an unwillingness to come to terms with the tran- sience of human life and achievements.

He's surely right. Most of those who fore- cast the End see it coming before their own end. Rather than face our individual ends, we will hope for all creation to stop.

The End of Time is perfectly timely, but it's frustratingly unimaginative and some- times under-researched. The index is inept and there's no bibliography either. There is nothing here, for example, about Blair's implicit millenarianism. Thompson seems not to know Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending. He ignores the most powerful artistic expression of millenarianism in our time, the performances Bob Dylan gave in his Saved! phase. Nor does he mention our most prominent literary end-timer, Martin Amis. In London Fields, Amis tried to take the world with him as he turned 40. In his essay, `Thinkability', he announced that after nuclear apocalypse I.shall be obliged (and it's the last thing I'll feel like doing) to retrace that long mile home, through the firestorm, the remains of the thousand-mile-an-hour winds, the warped atoms, the grovelling dead. Then

— God willing, if I still have the strength, and, of course, if they are still alive — I must find my wife and children and I must kill them.

It's still in print, this millenarian fantasy.

To order a copy of this book at the special discount price of £13.99, call The Spectator Bookshop on 0181 964 9640.