Books

Apocalyptic now

As the millenium approaches, and visions of a final battle proliferate, one novel offers a unique moral perspective.

By Francis Randolph

Father Elijah, Michael O=Brien, Ignatius Press, 1996.

Apocalyptic is a recurring art form, but a difficult one. Since the time of Ezekiel imaginative writers have turned their pens and their talents to writing Apocalyptic, and the less imaginative among their readers have found food for nightmares in plenty.

So what is Apocalyptic? The masterly commentary on the Apocalypse of St. John by the late Professor George Caird teaches us to see the genre as one that describes present day events, particularly critical ones, in cosmic terms, so as to give us an interpretation not only of the present crisis but also of future ones of a similar nature. The characteristic of an apocalypse is that it is written in symbolic language, usually drawing on a widely understood range of conventional symbols--widely understood, that is, to the writer's contemporaries, but a fruitful source of confusion for later generations.

St. John, for instance, is in the first instance writing to comfort and reassure Christians during the savage persecution of the late first century, but since the pattern of persecution recurs over and over again we can rightly see the message of his Apocalypse fulfilled in the times of Diocletian, of Barbarossa, of Elizabeth I, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Saddam Hussein. Wherever pride and intolerance rise up to oppress the Church, there is the spirit of Antichrist; wherever the faithful few stand firm, there are the Witnesses, the Prophet and Christ incarnate in His Church.

The cosmic language of Apocalyptic is not intended to give us a literal description of the last days of human history on this earth, but to demonstrate that the struggles of human history can be understood as an actualization on an earthly plane of the titanic struggle between good and evil on the cosmic scale. The message, repeated over and over again, is that the struggle is so uneven and biased that the end is to give a chance for as many as possible to repent and find themselves on the winning side.

Having said that, there is a recurrent and rather unhealthy tendency to be so obsessed with the imagery of the Apocalypse that we lose sight of its message. This tends to happen at the end of a century, as men consider the ending of an age, the running down of life in old age. Naturally the end of a millenium sparks off a positive rash of dubious interpretations of the Apocalypse, and spawns innumerable sects and cults devoted to proclaiming the end of the world.

A rich literary history

It is curious, looking back over the history of Christian writing, how this fin de siPcle mood strikes over and over again. For a period everyone seems to be fascinated with the idea of the end of all things, fatalistically determined to see in the events of their own time the unmistakable presagers of the destruction of the world, and (naturally) confident that they themselves are destined to play a significant part in the world-overthrow and be counted among the few who shall be saved.

The selection of apocalyptic writers published in the "Classics of Western Spirituality" series illustrates the recurrent phenomenon. Lactantius, writing in the 3rd century, seems to have been heavily influenced by St. Irenaeus, who saw the end of the 2nd century as the end of time. The arrival of the 3rd century does not seem to have worried Lactantius, for he drew on a rabbinical commonplace to structure world history as a series of thousand-year "ages," each corresponding to a "day" of the first chapter of Genesis, so that the sixth age, that of the Son of Man, would culminate with the birth of Christ, and conclude with the dawning of the seventh Age, the millennium of rest, a preface to the eternal Sabbath. Given that the world was already well over five thousand years old at the time of the birth of Christ, there can not now be long to go before the Seventh Age will dawn.

Hippolytus, it may be mentioned, used the same structure but with a different chronology of the creation of the world, to prove that we still have a few centuries to go.

Once the system of dating from the birth of Christ (however inaccurate) had become the norm, it was obvious that the end of the tenth century would bring about another burst of enthusiasm for the wrapping up of history. Now the calculation was that Christ had been born at the end of the Fifth Age, for the Age of Man could only begin with His birth, so that the next thousand years of the Sixth Age would come to an end n the year 1000 and usher in the Sabbath. Adso of Montier-en-Der is the selected writer of the last generation of the first millennium, and his "Letter on the Origin and Time of the Antichrist" was an immediate best-seller--remaining so, curiously, some two hundred years after the millennium had safely passed. Adso's particular interest was in the political figure of the last Emperor, and the successful overthrow of Islam that was expected of him. It was the background of the age-old struggle of Christianity with Islam that keep the interest of his approach alive.

It is noteworthy that the name Adso was used by Umberto Eco as that of his scribe in that curious novel The Name of the Rose, which is set in the context of that most glamorous of medieval apocalypticists, Joachim of Fiore. Joachim uses a different structure of world history, dividing time into three ages: that of the Father, before the birth of Christ; that the Son, that is, the Christian era; and that of the Spirit, from Joachim's own time on. This is not original to Joachim, of course, nor did it end with him: it has in fact become a favorite ploy of those who want to see an end of historic Christianity by claiming that the Age of the Spirit began in the 1960s, either at Vatican II or at Woodstock. Joachim of Fiore, of course, wrote and was active as the 12th century drew to a close; he barely survived the disappointing safe arrival of the year 1200.

The approach of the half-millennium 1500 naturally triggered off more apocalyptic. Perhaps this was the fatal flaw in the character of that otherwise great firebrand Jerome Savonarola. He seems to have dated the beginning of the Christian millennium from the fall of the Roman empire in the 5th century, after which Christianity did indeed become the standard by which a significantly large part of the world was governed. Hence the late fifteenth century, Savonarola's time, was an appropriate time to look for the end of the dominance of Christianity, and the unbinding of Satan preparatory to the final end. One must admit he had a point: the revival of blatant paganism under the guise of the "renaissance" and the breaking up of Europe into the new nation-states did in fact bring about the end of the unified Christendom. But the political leaders he cast in the role of champions of the faith were to prove a great disappointment.

And so the story continues. The 17th century saw a great outburst of apocalyptic, particularly in the context of the English Civil War, though in this case not coinciding with the end of a century. The cataclysmic events of the French Revolution and the world war that followed understandably gave rise to a confident identification of Napoleon with the Antichrist. Less understandably, Soloviov saw the end at hand as the world approached the fateful year 1900. But it was the approach of the year 2000 that really boosted the apocalyptic industry. After all, since a well-known Protestant reckoning of the Age of the World gave 4004 B.C. as the date of creation, the six thousand years will be up in 1996 and we can all go home.

Facing the millenium

You wait: once the new century gets under way people will cheer up enormously and get back to the business of living real life and trying to put god's commandments into practice on this earth instead of giving up on humanity altogether and waiting smugly for the end! It happened very satisfactorily after the year 1000, when Europe "put on a white robe of churches;" when the Gregorian reforms brought new life and vigor to the Church, and the brilliant flowering of monastic spirituality and learning made the 11th and 12th centuries a galaxy of saints. The 16th century, too--though it did indeed see sad disruption--also saw the glorious counter-reformation, great reforms led by more saintly popes, and the blossoming of the new religious orders and congregations bringing a new spirituality into the lives of the laity. Why shouldn't the 21st century be as good?

But meanwhile we have a few more years of apocalyptic to live through. A curious feature of American publishing, which has not, so far as I know, yet appeared on this side of the herring-pond, is the Apocalyptic Christian novel. Many seem to be in the familiar type of "disaster-novel" but set in spiritual terms, with a characteristically Christian hero who relying on his faith is able either to defeat the evil, or to be accepted into the New Jerusalem, abandoning Earth to its fate. The focus of cosmic wrath is naturally to be found in the United States. Well, that is fair enough--earlier examples of the genre, such as R.H. Benson's The Lord of the World or Charles Williams' Shadows of Ecstasy set the cosmic showdown in London. If the purpose of apocalyptic is to make us see contemporary events and crises in cosmic terms, we must start with the familiar. C.S. Lewis, in discussing his own apocalyptic novel That Hideous Strength, explains that he set it in an English collegiate university simply because that is where he himself felt most at home--but you could choose any setting, and any place, for the cosmic struggle between good and evil manifests itself at all times and in all places. The problems the Church has faced are also a temporal manifestation of the age-old cosmic conflict, but the eternal message of apocalyptic remains that God is in control, He and His angels do know what they are doing, and in the end we shall win. Or rather, we have already won--the decisive battle was over 1,963 years ago and all we need do now is mop up the stragglers.

The particular example of the apocalyptic genre lying before me is the newly-published Father Elijah by Michael O'Brien. It is different from most, not the least in being set neither in America nor in England, but in Rome, Poland, and the Middle East. The antichrist figure, rather curiously, is none other than the President of the European Commission. (Well, I thought that was a little hard on poor Mr. Santer, until I realized with something of a sense of shock that if you write the name J. Santer in Greek characters, and give each character its usual numerical value, you do get a rather interesting result: 666. This should not be taken too seriously.)

The real struggle, of course, has nothing to do with European integration; it is the much more important one between traditional Catholicism and Monism, and this is something that Michael O'Brien sees very clearly and describes accurately. The Monist philosophy teaches that there is really no difference between Creator and Creation, between male and female, between good and evil. "The Many are One" is its watchword, and in that name we have seen the growth of what Newman called "liberalism" and we nowadays call "ecumenism," the idea that there is no such thing as truth in matters of religion, but that all religions are really one. There may no longer be any difference to be assigned between the sexes, for they are all one; not only professions but even biological roles become open to both male and female, and any distinction is abhorred as a contradiction of the fundamental oneness of all things. "God" as a word has no meaning other than as the spiritual dimension of the totality of creation, Gaia, the World-Soul, call her what you will.

Loosely speaking all this is called the "New Age," and although there is a welter of different opinions within the New Age movement, the common link is the root philosophical error of Monism. O'Brien sees this manifest in a thousand different ways, but most perilously indeed within the bosom of the Church. Here, in his description of liberal clergy, nuns, and prelates (can we begin to call them "Monists," which is what they are, rather than "Modernists" which gives them a spurious air of being up to date and relevant?) we recognize many of the most disruptive tendencies in liberal Western Catholicism, the tendencies which have, since 1962, brought once flourishing Catholic communities near to extinction.

The Russian mystic Vladimir Solovyov, in that curious little passage "A Short Story of Antichrist" also imagines an European leader in the role of antichrist, giving voice to the same sort of unifying Monist doctrine. In the same way R.H. Benson presents a world statesman called Felsenburgh, who arises from a vaguely Masonic background in America, but is clearly in the same Monist pantheist mold, and who is eventually manifest as the antichrist. Obviously Benson knew Solovyov's work, and Michael O'Brien is acquainted with both.

Who is winning?

Michael O'Brien's hero is a Jewish Carmelite, Father Elijah himself, who is chosen by the Pope to be the Church's agent against the antichrist, the President of the European Commission, who is carrying all before him as the champion of peace, unity and a new world order. Evil, as so often, begins by looking so attractive and dazzlingly beautiful that we fail to see where its roots lie. St. Gregory the Great used the metaphor of the pagan "satyr," a creature whose top half is that of an attractive human being, but which degenerates into the goat below. Sin begins with the so-civilized, so-alluring seduction of the beautiful, and ends in sordid beastliness. The rise of the Nazi party began with good looking blond youths singing stirring songs on the beer terraces of mountain gasthahser, and yet already there were brown shirted arms flailing truncheons and Jewish blood spattered over squalid alleys. In Father Elijah, the publicity-hungry glamour of the President's Unity Conference in Warsaw promised universal peace and goodwill, but behind the scenes Elijah's friends and family died horribly. In the same way Benson's Felsenburgh appeared as the champion of peace and sweet reason, but resorted to the nuclear bombing of Rome, while Solovyev's great leader calls on magic to smite down the Pope and the Russian Elder who dare to refuse his seductive offers.

As a novel, perhaps Father Elijah is overloaded with theological comment--some of the passages of dialogue, necessary perhaps to explain the problem, are heavy going, just as much of Lewis' Perelandra reads more like spirituality than fiction. And certain parts of the plot lack credibility-- coincidences perhaps too frequent, implausible episodes, and quite a lot of trivial inaccuracies. But how difficult it must be to write about places and countries not your own! (For the record, not even the Archangel Gabriel would be allowed to hitchhike on a British motor way between service stations, and if Msgr. Bill was looking for loyal Catholics up the M40 he should have turned off at Junction 8, and saved himself the extra hour or so before Birmingham.) But these are slight matters; fundamentally on all the points that matter O'Brien is accurate. There is indeed a crisis facing the Church, and the liberalized West in general, and Monism is indeed at the heart of it. And yes, there are and have been high-up members of the Roman Curia infected with the disease. To see the present crisis in cosmic terms is valid, for every attack on the Church is the work of our Enemy, while her defence is in the very capable hands of the Archangel Michael.

But perhaps it is worth pointing out that monism or liberalism is actually losing ground at present. The astonishing rise of born again Protestantism, irritating though it may be, is a revolt against monism. So is the even more dramatic resurgence of Islam, despite all the threats which that poses to orthodox Christianity. (It is worth remembering that the Muslims began their new century sixteen years ago, and have been confidently thriving ever since. If Christians react like that to the beginning of our coming century we are in for some exciting times.) Within the Church the movement for sound doctrine, genuine morals, and reverent liturgy is well under way, and is unstoppable. We are winning, and the gloomy prognostications of world-wide apostasy which we find in Father Elijah are far from being fulfilled.

That does not invalidate the thesis of the book, for it is fiction, and it does show us a contemporary scenario that might have happened. We owe it to the prayers of the faithful and the vigilance of the angelic hosts that this scenario has not in fact come about, and that the European Union, for all its faults, is, if anything, rather more sympathetic to Catholicism than some of the separate member states. Indeed it may be no accident that the new flag now rising over Europe is blue, and upon it is a crown of twelve stars.