Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults, and Millennial Beliefs Through the Ages, by Eugen Weber. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1999. 294 pp. $26.50 U.S. (cloth), $17.95 U.S. (paper). It is not easy to get this book under control. Weber's apocalypses, so many and so varied, are impossible to arrange chronologically, theologically, or socially on a single spectrum. At numerous points in the book the question arose: Should this really be included as an apocalypse or millennial vision? But again and again the author convinces. Weber begins with a discussion of chronologies, how in various human societies time was reckoned, a survey of how we inherited the Western system of time, and with reflections on why, for instance, millennial years and the 33rd year of the century have been important apocalyptic points of time. Chapters Three to Eleven are an eloquent verbal tour of the great variety of religious, social, secular and scientific apocalyptic and millennial exhibits from the first to the twentieth century. The author works with a broad but clear definition of his subject. Apocalypse is about the world's progress to an appointed end. The expected consummation implies a new beginning (p. 232). Weber goes against the stream of much modern writing on western civilization by underscoring the importance of the Bible as the source of apocalyptic and millennial visions, not only for the fundamentalist right, but for virtually the whole story he tells. Even the secular romantic writers of the nineteenth century found their inspiration there. Today's tendency is to deny the Bible its role as an important cultural catalyst because it is not quite intellectually decent to acknowledge that religion has been and continues to be a cultural power to be reckoned with. A salient feature of Weber's treatment is that, contrary to Norman Cohn, apocalyptic and millennial visions were developed and promoted not by the oppressed and disinherited of the earth, but by elites in every period. In early Christianity there were educated leaders like Irenaeus and Lactantius, in the Middle Ages bishops and scholars in the universities, during the Reformation the Reformers (exceptions were Zwingli and Calvin), church leaders of all stripes during the Puritan revolution, and the same thing was true in the Enlightenment. The year 1484 was an acknowledged axial apocalyptic year because of a major planetary conjunction. Philip Melanchthon, humanist reformer, made the attempt to show astrologically that Luther was born in that year rather than in 1483, which was in fact Luther's birth year. A horoscope for 1484 would indisputably have made of Luther an apocalyptic figure. Weber makes a special point of insisting that Isaac Newton, scientific luminary, had a life-long interest in end-time lore, and particularly that he pursued it in his prime and not in his dotage. All the major literary figures of the nineteenth century were persuaded of the senescence of the world and that its days were numbered. Robert Owen and his fellow utopians in Britain and America are included by Weber because of their millennial belief that they were working toward a perfect society. The religious as well as the secular scientific apocalypse from Paracelsus to the Silent Spring of Rachel Carson and the doomsday clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists are Weber's evidence of how deep the apocalyptic mindset has gone into the consciousness of the West. The author does not neglect the more exotic apocalyptic and millenarian episodes. The Montanists of the second century, the movement of Cola di Rienzo in fourteenth-century Rome, the Anabaptist Kingdom of Muenster in the 1530s, the apocalyptic preoccupations of the Emperor Alexander I of Russia, the millennial visions of the Metis leader Louis Riel, and the twentieth-century People's Temple of Jim Jones and the Branch Davidians of Waco, Texas, and many more are described. …
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Mar 17, 2022
Domenico Agostini 
Open Access