2. APOCALYPTICISM 2800 BC

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

If you are like us, you have probably seen more cartoons of men bearing placards that read REPENT FOR THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH than you have seen actual people doing so. But such apocalyptic visions are nonetheless ingrained in the human cultural experience—and evidently have been at least since people first began recording their beliefs about their place in the world around them, and about their fears for their own fate and that of humankind in general. An Assyrian clay tablet dating from 2800 BC is gloomily inscribed: “Our Earth is degenerate in these later days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end.”

Such perceptions were eagerly adopted by early Christians, who seized upon Jesus’s repeated proclamations that the current world was about to end, to be replaced by the coming Kingdom of God. Initially they seem to have expected that catastrophe was just around the corner, although by the end of the first century doubts evidently set in: “But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only” (Matthew 24:36, English Standard Version).

Later theologians seem to have taken this wavering as a challenge. For whereas in AD 365 the theologian Hilary of Poitiers returned to the original proposal that the end of the world was imminent, a whole host of his successors soon stepped up to the plate and predicted that the world would end on a specific date in the future: January 1, 1000, the Christian millennium. Despite the disenchantment that must have followed when the magic date passed uneventfully, specific dates remained in vogue.

This Assyrian clay tablet bearing the Epic of Gilgamesh, dated to 2800 BC, reads in part: “Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.”

Even the iconoclastic Martin Luther—who rejected the Book of Revelation, a favorite source of such apocalyptic embellishments as the Rapture, as “neither apostolic nor prophetic”—expected that the world would end on October 9, 1538. When that failed to occur, he revised the date to 1600, by which time he was comfortably dead and immune from disappointment.

Given the amazing variety of the things that people are manifestly prepared to believe, it is maybe not too surprising that ancient Assyrians and medieval theologians should have bought into apocalyptic predictions. Who knows? They might in the long run even be right, though we shall have to wait and see. More disconcerting is that Sir Isaac Newton, the very embodiment of the Age of Reason that saw the birth of modern science, stood right there alongside them. For it seems that the inventor of celestial mechanics and calculus, the author of the magisterial Principia Mathematica, was also a very literal believer, convinced that biblical prophecy was “no matter of indifferency, but a duty of the greatest moment.”

For Newton, scriptural prophecies were “histories of things to come,” albeit written in arcane symbolic language requiring expert interpretation that he was happy to supply. After years of effort he calculated that the world would end some 1,260 years after the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire, a period that would see us through to AD 2060. “It may,” he wrote in 1704, “end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner.” So by the calculations of one of the most outstanding scientists of all time, many of us, at least, can rest easy.

Interestingly, Newton made his conjecture “not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting [it], and by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail.”

Not that this sage objective was achieved. For example, closer to our own times, the radio evangelist Harold Camping predicted in 1992 that the Rapture (when, roughly at the time of Christ’s Second Coming, believers living and dead would be raised up to join the Lord in the clouds, while the rest of us would be consumed by earthquakes and plagues: blame Revelation again) would probably occur on September 6, 1994. Undeterred by the failure of this happening to take place on schedule, he revised his prediction for the Rapture to May 21, 2011, with the actual end of the world to follow five months later, on October 21.

On his Family Radio network, Harold Camping predicted Jesus would return to Earth on May 21, 2011, followed by five months of fire, brimstone, and plagues that would culminate in the end of the entire universe on October 21, 2011. At age ninety-two, Camping met his own end on December 15, 2013, with Earth still intact.

Events, or the lack thereof, eventually forced Camping to “humbly acknowledge we were wrong about the timing.” But meanwhile, he and his associates had pocketed millions of dollars in donations to his Family Radio stations. Camping declined to return these donations after his prognostications failed to turn out as advertised, allegedly remarking, “We’re not at the end. Why would we return it?” Sadly, aggressive publicity directed at the 200 million souls he had expected to save incurred significant cost overruns, eventually forcing his network to sell off stations and lay off staff.

This discouraging experience is unlikely to end such predictions, especially in an age when an all-too-probable meltdown of the Internet could potentially have even more disastrous consequences for humankind than any number of apocalyptic Horsemen. But why, after so many disappointments, do so many people continue to devour them?

The theologian Lorenzo DiTommaso suggests that such beliefs flourish when problems loom in the material world (as they almost invariably do) and people feel pressured by circumstances. They come, he suggests, from the desire to reconcile two conflicting beliefs: that there is something disquietingly wrong with modern human existence, and that there are nonetheless grounds for hope. The idea that we are hurtling toward some kind of “cosmic correction” is balanced by the promise of salvation, so that “the God of apocalypticism is a God of order, not chaos.” And if DiTommaso is correct, the belief in apocalypse is as good an example as you will find of the cognitive dissonance that seems to characterize the human condition so profoundly.