Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World

The world that the Puritan colonists left behind was still shadowed by all of the old terrors that are given such vivid names, faces, and figures in the book of Revelation. The shattering events of the Civil War in England, when the Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) and the parliamentary army drove King Charles I from the throne and then took off his head, brought the apocalyptic fantasies into even sharper focus. Amid chaos and crisis—war and revolution, torture and execution, witch burning and book burning—the readers of Revelation teetered between the old certainty that the end of the world was nigh and the new conviction that a better world was at hand.

The followers of Cromwell, for example, saw the conflict between the parliamentary and royalist armies as a struggle between Christ and Anti-christ, and they regarded the defeat of King Charles I as a sign that the millennial kingdom of Jesus Christ was soon to begin: “The Eternall and shortly-expected King,” writes poet (and Puritan pamphleteer) John Milton (1608–1674), “shall open the Clouds to judge the severall Kingdomes of the World.” 8And the enemies of Cromwell, too, invoked the book of Revelation. One royalist pamphleteer, who dubbed Cromwell “Rex Oliver Lord Protector,” insisted that the title was an alphanumeric code that added up to the demonic 666, but only if he conveniently dropped the letter “L” from the word “Lord.”

“These are days of shaking,” observed one English preacher in 1643, “and this shaking is universal.” 9

At one precarious moment in 1653, in fact, Parliament nearly fell under the control of the so-called Fifth Monarchy Men, a radical faction of soldiers, clergy, and poor folk whose name refers to the divine kingdom that is predicted to follow the four earthly monarchies described in the book of Daniel. These self-styled “saints” looked forward to an apocalyptic revolution of the kind predicted by Hildegard of Bingen: church and government alike, and the rich and powerful along with them, would be replaced once and for all by a biblical theocracy under King Jesus himself. Cromwell deemed it necessary to suppress the Fifth Monarchy Men by force of arms in 1656: “Lord, appear, now or never,” they cried as a detachment of soldiers broke up one of their public rallies and escorted them to prison. 10Needless to say, the Lord was once again a no-show.

The strict and censorious Puritans and their worldly adversaries had long been engaged in a culture war, too. A Puritan sermonizer, adopting one of the rhetorical quirks of Martin Luther, condemned the Anglican clergy as “the excrement of Antichrist.” 11A bon vivant like playwright and poet Ben Jonson (1572–1637), by contrast, poked fun at the dire apocalyptic expectations of the Puritans when he created a character in Bartholomew Fair called Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy, a self-convinced seer who sees an unfamiliar musical instrument on display at a country fair and promptly leaps to the conclusion that he has spied the Beast of Revelation. The drum of the instrument, according to Jonson, is “the broken belly of Anti-christ, and thy bellows there are his lungs, and these pipes are his throat, those feathers are his tail, and thy rattles the gnashing of his teeth.” 12

The apocalyptic fancies that Jonson found so laughable penetrated even the loftiest circles of the scientific revolution that was already in progress. Scottish mathematician John Napier (1550–1617), originator of the logarithm, applied his arithmetical genius to a treatise on Revelation in which he argued that the seventh and final age of human history had begun in 1541 and would end in 1786. And Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who achieved enduring greatness in mathematics and physics, also found time to engage in his own apocalyptic number-crunching: “Sir Isaac Newton wrote his comment upon the Revelation,” cracks French philosopher Voltaire (1664–1777), “to console mankind for the great superiority he had over them in other respects.” 13

But the apocalyptic idea may have reached its apogee in the Old World just as the Puritans were making their way to the New World. As Voltaire’s joke at the expense of Isaac Newton seems to suggest, the book of Revelation had already started its descent into the netherworld of religious oddities and curiosities. The Great London Fire of 1666, for example, brought a fresh wave of doomsaying, thanks to the appearance of the old demonic number on the calendar: “Every thunderstorm,” wrote George Fox, a leader of the Quakers, “produced expectations of the end.” 14And yet, by 1696, an English scientist named William Whiston was ready to argue that a wholly natural celestial phenomenon like Halley’s Comet may have caused the Great Flood as described in Genesis, and proposed that “the earth’s prophesied destruction by fire would be by the same means.” 15

“Whiston’s end-time drama included no Second Coming, no Last Judgment,” as Perry Miller, a distinguished historian of Puritanism, points out. 16Here was perhaps the earliest stirring of an idea that would take on ever more ominous meanings in our own times—a vision of the end of the world that allowed no role at all for God. And even those Christian true believers who continued to read the book of Revelation with perfect credulity began to see wholly new and unsuspected meanings in the ancient text. Those ideas, too, would move westward to America, where Yankee ingenuity was applied to Holy Writ with revolutionary consequences.

An early example of the Americanization of the Apocalypse is found in the remarkable life and work of Cotton Mather (1663–1728), son of Increase Mather, grandson of John Cotton, and minister of the Old North Church in Boston. He was capable of holding an earnest belief in the efficacy of both witchcraft as supposedly practiced by the women of Salem and the efficacy of the newfangled science of smallpox inoculation. He penned a panic-making treatise on satanic possession that played a role in the witch trials—“Go tell the world what it is these Monsters love to do”—and yet he also arranged for his own young son to be inoculated, an act so controversial in colonial Boston that it prompted one outraged citizen to throw a bomb (or “a Fired Granado,” as Mather himself describes it) through the window of his lodging room. 17

“But, this Night there stood by me the Angel of GOD, ” Mather writes in his journal to explain why the grenade failed to explode, “ whose I am and whom I serve .” 18

The apparent contradictions that coexisted within the heart and mind of Cotton Mather can be readily explained by his conviction that he was beholding, at once, the shuddering death of the old earth and the birth pangs of the new one. “In fact, Mather’s blend of optimism and paranoia is entirely characteristic of the millennial vision,” explains historian Damian Thompson in The End of Time. “Fear of witches is above all evidence of End-time anxiety, since it was believed that the Last Days would see a terrible loosing of the powers of darkness.” At the same time, Mather saw the prosperity of the American colonies—“great increase in the blessings of land and sea”—as a evidence that “God had surely intended ‘some great thing’ when he planted these American heavens and earth.” 19

Indeed, Cotton Mather saw himself as “Herald of the Lord’s Kingdome now approaching,” 20and he shared the conviction of his famous father and grandfather that America was the place where the prophecies of Revelation would be fulfilled. He was so fixated on Revelation, in fact, that he convinced himself that “evil angels,” speaking through a young woman whom he believed to be the victim of demonic possession, once scolded him for neglecting a certain passage from the book of Revelation in his sermons. The demons wanted him to preach on Rev. 13:8 (“All that dwell upon the earth shall worship [the beast]”), but he defied them by choosing Rev. 20:15 instead: “And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.” 21