On Saturday I led a workshop entitled 'Apocalypse Now' at the excellent Exploring
Spirituality day in St Albans
Diocese,, which began with a wonderful address by Jeffrey John, Dean of St Albans.
In my workshop sessions, we began by exploring popular understandings of the word 'apocalypse'. The first items to come up on a google search for ‘Apocalypse’ map out these popular understandings of Apocalyptic well:
In my workshop sessions, we began by exploring popular understandings of the word 'apocalypse'. The first items to come up on a google search for ‘Apocalypse’ map out these popular understandings of Apocalyptic well:
An Apocalypse (Greek: ἀποκάλυψις apokálypsis; "lifting of the veil" or "revelation ") is a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era ...
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Apocalypse is a fictional character who is an ancient mutant that appears in comic books published by Marvel Comics.
25 Mar 2008 – The real science behind the events predicted in 2012.
Rating: 8.6/10 - 808 reviews
During the on-going Vietnam War, Captain Willard is sent on a dangerous mission into Cambodia
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Starring Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall.
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Starring Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall.
The name given to the last book in the Bible, also called the Book of Revelation.
www.guardian.co.uk/.../apocalypse-not-now-rapture-fails-materialis... - Cached
21 May 2011 – Christian doomsday prophet Harold Camping had predicted the world would end at 6pm on Saturday.
It’s a similar picture when you google images of Apocalypse; you get images of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, apocalyptic cityscapes, and apocalyptic games and films.
“Popular culture is awash with images and narratives of the apocalypse in various forms. These range from war and acts of terrorism involving “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” to religious, science-fiction, horror and fantasy representations of the “End Times,” depicted in a wide range of media including novels, comics, film, television and video games. They include also “biblically based” presentations, notably the Left Behind series of 12 best-selling novels based on a fundamentalist application of millennialist teachings to the contemporary world.”
David Dark writes in ‘Everyday Apocalypse’ that:
“Our ability to recognize apocalyptic is, in our day, often most hindered by the popular, best-selling misunderstandings of biblical witness. Confusing the death-dealing forces that enslave, exploit, and crucify (what our biblical translations sometimes render ‘the world’) for the created world itself, such so-called ‘apocalyptic’ is a negation of this-worldly experience. It tends to view the physical as only fit for burning.”
“In a kind of Gnostic-style-propaganda, creation is deemed a sort of waiting room, irredeemable and best discarded. Confusing redemption for escape, real injustice – political and personal – goes mostly unengaged, and the actual, everyday world gets left behind. In this view, apocalyptic is simply equated with disaster and destruction …”
So, where can we look to find a better understanding of apocalyptic? Leon Morris’ Apocalyptic is a standard work on apocalyptic writings. In this brief introduction to apocalyptic, Morris brings together the results of a great deal of work that has been done on the subject by himself and others. In a clear and lucid style, he addresses himself to the characteristics of apocalyptic writings, the world from which they arose, and their relations to the gospel.
N.T. Wright has written helpfully about apocalyptic in ‘The New Testament and the People of God’:
“In a culture where events concerning Israel were believed to concern the creator god as well, language had to be found which could both refer to events within Israel
“the word … denotes a particular form, that of reported vision and (sometimes) its interpretation. Claims are made for these visions; they are divine revelations, disclosing (hence ‘apocalyptic’, from the Greek for ‘revelation’ or ‘disclosure’) states of affairs not ordinarily made known to humans. Sometimes these visions concern the progress of history, more specifically, the history of Israel
“As a literary genre, ‘apocalyptic’ is a way of investing space-time events with their theological significance; it is actually a way of affirming, not denying, the vital importance of the present continuing space-time order, by denying that evil has the last word in it.”
Slavoj Žižek is a contemporary philosopher who, although an atheist and Marxist, has worked with this understanding of apocalyptic in a recent book ‘Living in the End Times’:
“the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its “four riders of the apocalypse” are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.”
“… the truth hurts, and we desperately try to avoid it … The first reaction is one of ideological denial: there is no fundamental disorder; the second is exemplified by explosions of anger at the injustices of the new world order; the third involves attempts at bargaining (if we change these here and there, life could go on as before”); when the bargaining fails, depression and withdrawal set in; finally, after passing through this zero-point, the subject no longer perceives the situation as a threat, but as the chance of a new beginning …”
Bob Dylan is a contemporary artist for whom the apocalypse is key to understanding his work and who, like Slavoj Žižek uses the apocalypse as a frame for viewing contemporary events. “Dylan's vision is essentially apocalyptic; again and again he tells of an evil world which is soon to be both punished and replaced tomorrow, perhaps, when the ship comes in” writes Frank Davey in "Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan: Poetry and the Popular Song".
Dylan's manifesto for his work is 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall'; a song about walking through a world which is surreal and unjust and singing what he sees:
"I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it,
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin' ..."
This is a song which has been interpreted as dealing with events that were contemporary to the time such as the Cuban missile crisis and, more generally, the threat of a nuclear holocaust. That may well be so, but I think a more straightforward interpretation and one that is closer to what the lyrics actually say is to see it as a statement by Dylan of what he is trying to do in and through his work. In the song he walks through a surreal and unjust world, ahead of him he sees a gathering apocalyptic storm and he resolves to walk in the shadow of the storm and sing out what he sees:
"... 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where the souls are forgotten,
Where black is the colour, where none is the number.
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect from the mountain so that all souls can see it ...".
What we have in the best of Dylan is a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey, undertaken in the eye of the Apocalypse, to stand with the damned at the heart of the darkness that is twentieth century culture.
"I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it,
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin' ..."
This is a song which has been interpreted as dealing with events that were contemporary to the time such as the Cuban missile crisis and, more generally, the threat of a nuclear holocaust. That may well be so, but I think a more straightforward interpretation and one that is closer to what the lyrics actually say is to see it as a statement by Dylan of what he is trying to do in and through his work. In the song he walks through a surreal and unjust world, ahead of him he sees a gathering apocalyptic storm and he resolves to walk in the shadow of the storm and sing out what he sees:
"... 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where the souls are forgotten,
Where black is the colour, where none is the number.
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect from the mountain so that all souls can see it ...".
What we have in the best of Dylan is a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey, undertaken in the eye of the Apocalypse, to stand with the damned at the heart of the darkness that is twentieth century culture.
Over the course of his career Dylan has travelled the paths of political protest, urban surrealism, country contentment, gospel conversion and world weary blues. On his journey he: sees "seven breezes a-blowin'" all around the cabin door where victims despair ('Ballad of Hollis Brown'); sees lightning flashing "For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse" ('Chimes of Freedom'); surveys 'Desolation Road'; talks truth with a thief as the wind begins to howl ('All Along the Watchtower'); comes in “from the wilderness” to receive shelter from the storm from a woman with “silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair" ('Shelter from the Storm'); feels the Idiot Wind blowing through the buttons on his coat, recognises himself as an idiot and feels so sorry ('Idiot Wind'); finds a pathway to the stars, can't believe he's survived and is still alive ('Where Are You Tonight? Journey Through Deep Heat'); rides the slow train up around the bend ('Slow Train'); is driven out of town into the driving rain because of belief ('I Believe in You'); hears the ancient footsteps join him on his path ('Every Grain of Sand'); feels the Caribbean Winds, fanning desire, bringing him nearer to the fire ('Caribbean Wind'); betrays his commitment, feels the breath of the storm and goes searching for his first love ('Tight Connection to My Heart'); then at the final moment, it's not quite dark yet but:
"The air is getting hotter, there's a rumbling in the skies
I've been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes.
Everyday your memory grows dimmer.
It don't haunt me, like it did before.
I been walking through the middle of nowhere
Tryin' to get to heaven before they close the door." ('Tryin' To Get To Heaven')."
"The air is getting hotter, there's a rumbling in the skies
I've been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes.
Everyday your memory grows dimmer.
It don't haunt me, like it did before.
I been walking through the middle of nowhere
Tryin' to get to heaven before they close the door." ('Tryin' To Get To Heaven')."
Apocalyptic change in Dylan's work can be understood as generational confict, Cold War conflicts, nuclear holocaust, Civil Rights struggles, the imminent return of Christ, and more. The generic message throughout is that apocalyptic change is coming and we need to think where we stand in relation to it. That message is as relevant today in terms of economic meltdown, climate change or peak oil, as to the Second Coming, whether imminent or not.
David Dark, drawing on the writings of N. T. Wright, argues in ‘Everyday Apocalypse’ that:
"We apparently have the word "apocalypse" all wrong. In its root meaning, it's not about destruction or fortune-telling; it's about revealing. It's what James Joyce calls an epiphany - the moment you realize that all your so-called love for the young lady, all your professions, all your dreams, and all your efforts to get her to notice you were the exercise of an unkind and obsessive vanity. It wasn't about her at all. It was all about you. The real world, within which you've lived and moved and had your being, has unveiled itself. It's starting to come to you. You aren't who you made yourself out to be. An apocalypse has just occurred, or a revelation, if you prefer."
“Joyce … said that he intended Dubliners "to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city “... Joyce therefore conceived this work as a sequence of fifteen epiphanies “… which were written to let Irish people take “one good look at themselves in his nicely polished looking-glass.”
Similarly, Walker Percy wrote about there being two stages in non-Christian audiences becoming aware of grace. First, an experience of awakening in which a character in a novel (and through that character, the audience) sees the inadequacy of the life that he or she has been leading. This is a moment of epiphany or revelation about themselves; an everyday apocalypse in which they either realise their depravity or their potential for grace.
Thinking along similar lines Flannery O’Connor wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” Such an experience may then lead on to the second stage of hearing and responding to the grace of God in Christ.
In the American South, there is a tradition of Appalachian country death songs; gothic backwoods ballads of mortality and disaster. The Violent Femmes took that tradition and used it in Country Death Song to confront their audience with an epiphany of the reality, ugliness and consequences of sin.
This song leads us to a place of realization about the abhorrence and reality of sin and its consequences. Possibly, even to a place of acknowledging that the story could be about us. We all have that potential in us; for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.
Flannery O’Conner wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” In that situation she said, you have to make your vision apparent by shock and that is what the Violent Femmes did.
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Violent Femmes - Country Death Song.
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Violent Femmes - Country Death Song.
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