-
PART II. Millennial Evil
- NYU Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
p a r t i i Millennial Evil a n a p o c a l y p t i c r h e t o r i c drove the Manhattan Project. Its director, General Leslie Groves, said of the project that it was an accomplishment to equal Columbus’s millennial discovery of America.1 The comparison with Columbus is apt, in view of the Admiral’s own apocalyptic agenda: Columbus declared himself “the messenger” of the New Jerusalem, guided by God to find it.2 Groves and President Harry Truman alike regarded the bomb “as a gift of God, confirming a symbolic mandate that would make the United States the leader among nations.”3 Almost since its first discovery, nuclear radiation seems to have held for scientists a millennial hope. Michael Ortiz Hill quotes Frederick Soddy, codiscoverer of a particular form of nuclear decay, on his dreams of this philosopher’s stone: “A race that would transmute matter would have little need to earn its bread by the sweat of its brow.”4 The curse of Eden would lift; we would be on our way to Paradise. Soddy could not have foreseen that the road would take us to hell first. Modern apocalyptic rhetoric is influenced to a great extent by fiction. Hill informs us that H. G. Wells gave us the name “atomic bomb,” and wrote the first nuclear holocaust, in his The World Set Free.5 Nuclear physicist Leo Szilard, who cowrote the Einstein letter to President Franklin Roosevelt urging him to undertake the Manhattan Project, professed himself deeply affected by Wells’s writings, and “wanted to save the world.”6 After the first atomic test, called Trinity, which took place near a spot called Jornada del Muerto, or “death trip,” most witnesses described the experience in tones reminiscent of apocalypse. They all spoke of the bomb’s light; some likened it to the ascension of Jesus or the Second Coming. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the technical head of the Manhattan 93 Project, recalled the Hindu god Vishnu in the Bhavagad Gita, who, appearing to the hero Arjuna in his full and terrible divinity, with a bomblike “radiance of a thousand suns,” says, “Now I am become death, who conquers worlds.”7 The creators of the bomb vied with one another for the title of its “father .” This was an odd procreation, though, for there was no mother. Hill likens their imagery to the masculine birth of Athene, the war goddess. Modernity opened in Columbus’s masculine apocalypse at San Salvador in 1492. It began in subjection and slavery, characterized as rape, and ended at Trinity in another masculine apocalypse of horror and hope whose direction and boundaries we still can barely glimpse. Promise expands with each new epoch, as does the corresponding terror. Every prophecy is, in a sense, unreal. That is, the events it describes are not actual but potential. This is prophecy’s great secret, an admission it can never afford to make. It is of the essence of prophecy that it must be believed —taken to describe events that really will happen. This is why writers of prophecy go to great lengths to garner authenticity for their predictions . As Stephen O’Leary points out, authority is one of the great topics of all apocalypses, the cornerstone of their persuasion.8 Lacking authority, all of them are viewed as mere nonsense. But even if we accept their authority at full and face value, sooner or later we must come to terms with the fact that what apocalypse describes is not (yet) history. One of the more interesting developments in the contemporary apocalyptic literature is the extent to which it has come to rely, even overtly on occasion, on material expressly composed as fiction. But before moving directly to consideration of some texts of this kind, it is necessary to introduce in more detail the figure of the great antagonist, the dramatistically necessary and morally essential human force of absolute evil whose competition with Christ drives the drama of apocalypse. Briefly, Antichrist’s story goes as follows: According to prophecy he will appear only when the gospel has been preached to the entire world and the Jews are gathered once again in Israel.9 There will be a great “falling away” of Christians before he is revealed, which some commentators take to refer to the rapture, the snatching up into heaven of the elect to preserve them from the terrors of the tribulation.10 Antichrist...