A Doomsday Reader: Prophets, Predictors, and Hucksters of Salvation

PART I. Enlightenment and Secular Millenarianism

• p a r t i • Enlightenment and Secular Millenarianism w e c a n a l r e a d y see in Gnosticism the emphasis on individual thought that was to come into its fullest expression in the views of the secular Enlightenment, and eventually in modernism. Gnosticism’s reliance on individual effort and exploration, rather than acceptance of dogma and submission to authority, also appears forcefully in Enlightenment rhetoric. Enlightenment ideals included a version of the Gnostic emphasis on salvation through knowledge, although Enlightenment thinkers saw salvation as collective rather than individual. They promoted the belief that the increase of knowledge would lead the world to perfection through a slow but inevitable progress, which is a basic principle of Gnosticism. In fact, Enlightenment thinkers proclaimed the battle already half won. With their superior insight it was already possible, they thought, for humanity to begin to control nature, that is, ultimately, to moralize it. The Golden Age of a rational, ordered society was at hand. However, the Enlightenment’s reliance on reason was quite alien to Gnosticism. That thread first entered Western thought in Greek philosophy and was taken up by the Church in its theological disputations, though here it was always subordinate to Scripture. This created a degree of tension in the system, because a good deal of Scripture does not accord with observed reality. Columbus’s discovery of America was a crucial precursor to the Enlightenment . Colonialism provided an outlet and a field of play for the enormous new energies fueled by the emerging capitalist system. Catherine Keller notes of apocalyptic colonialism (a pun, she points out, on Columbus’s name: Colón in Spanish) in general and Columbus’s in particular that it was an explosion of patriarchal organization into a new and paradisal field of operation, where the conquerors, by virtue of their 53 military domination over the indigenes, did no work. Eden’s curse was lifted, and a New World was presented for Europe’s rape: conquest was womanless.1 It is significant that the first major successes of Enlightenment thought appeared in cosmology. Isaac Newton’s work in particular demonstrated the human capacity to understand the order of the universe; at the same time, it seriously subverted ideas of a personal God and individual redemption . Parallel discoveries in other areas, especially Charles Lyell’s in geology and, above all, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, seemed to condemn religious cosmology to defeat. Naturally there was serious and widespread opposition to Darwin’s ideas from theologians and other believers, but Rationalists proclaimed, much too soon, the death of religions and faith. Rationalist thought about the nature of humanity and society led to reformist and revolutionary movements throughout Europe and America. A prime source of this thought was the French philosopher and Christian communist Auguste Comte (1798–1857). His positivist system of thought proclaimed that society obeyed precise and knowable laws, exactly as Johannes Kepler, Newton, and Galileo had shown the planets and stars to do. Comte’s thought had a profound and enduring influence, especially on Karl Marx and G. W. F. Hegel. He based his theories of inevitable progress on a scientific trinitarianism that owed a lot to Joachim of Fiore (see chapter 1). Like Joachim, Comte supposed there would be three world ages, the last of which, a Golden Age, was about to dawn.2 In the process he secularized Joachim’s millenarian struggle. What had been a churchly and mystically peaceful progression of the ages became under Comte’s system a secular class war. Comte believed that the acquisition of knowledge would inevitably transform society into a “perfectly ordered [and] egalitarian” organization.3 Hegel followed Comte by proposing that the “spirit” of an age determined its political structure. Hegel’s system also included historical ages, each with its own spirit or “archetype.” These ages progressed through a dialectical process: harmony would be disrupted by contradictions inherent in the system, giving rise to an antithesis. The struggle between antithesis and the first principle or thesis would lead to a synthesis, which resolved the conflict at a new and higher level. This new ideal of progressivism reversed • ENLIGHTENMENT AND SECULAR MILLENARIANISM • 54 the ancient historical process whereby the world, in an organic model, inevitably decayed from its original Golden Age into corruption, metaphorical illness, and eventual moral decrepitude, requiring a divine regeneration and rebirth...