Longing for the End: A History of Millennialism in Western Civilization (review)

Longing for the End: A History of Millennialism in Western Civilization. By FREDERIC J. BAUMGARTNER. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999 . Pp. xi + 286 . $26 .95 .

The discovery of nearly a thousand buried or burned members of the Ugandan Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God underscores the perpetual relevance of millennialism as a focus of scholarly and public inquiry. For Baumgartner, "the best way to protect society from the destructive acts of zealots like Jim Jones or David Koresh . . . is through a serious inquiry into the history of millennialism" (p. 8 ). In Longing for the End, millennialism is shorthand for a wide variety of apocalyptic texts, eschatological beliefs, and utopian, doomsday, or end-time scenarios and groups.

To an audience seeking an introductory survey of the persistence of millennialism in Western history, Frederic Baumgartner (Louis XII: France in the Sixteenth Century; and Henry II: King of France) offers a compact enumeration of the religious and secular groups whose eschatology can or has lead to violent acts or suicide. This volume grew out of an undergraduate seminar on millennial cults at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and from Baumgartner's scholarly interest in religion and politics in sixteenth-century France, "an era as loaded with apocalyptic anxiety as the current one" (p. vii).

Longing for the End is restricted to Christian groups and those heavily influenced by Christianity. Baumgartner's blueprint for millennial groups is a messianic cult within Judaism: Jesus and his disciples and apostles. His explanatory model for the recurrence of millennial groups interprets stress or deprivation (of nearly any sort: economic, political, religious, and even personal) as the catalyst between a susceptible person or group and the millennial traditions captured in biblical texts. Personal or group aspirations or frustrations can spiral upward in this context and ultimately lead to violence. This model is not particularly probative but Baumgartner does not set out to systematically evaluate the rhetorical attraction or persuasiveness of either the texts or the presentation of millennial ideas, such as O'Leary did in his 1994 Arguing the Apocalypse.

This book is designed for the non-specialist. It includes a glossary of terms, a helpful index, endnotes for some of the quotations in the text, a list of sources not cited in the endnotes, and several Internet-accessible resources. The Principal Sources section is not a free-standing bibliography; most sources listed in the notes are not repeated there (exceptions are Zimdars-Swartz 1991 , Barkun 1994 , and St. Clair 1992 which are listed in both places for reasons unclear to me). Although this book is written for students and non-specialists, there were places where citations were warranted but omitted. So, for example, on page 115 , speaking of the Raskolniki, there is no citation for what seems a direct quote: "The solution to these problems was suicide: 'Let us baffle the Antichrist.' To die by one's own hand in defense of the true faith . . ." [emphasis added].

The Useful Web Sites list has already fallen prey to the impermanence of the Internet. Only eight of fourteen links were functional as of this writing. One of the more unfortunate broken links is to the Center for Millennial Studies directed by Richard Landes. This site can still be accessed at www.mille.org but not through the address listed (www. mille.org/indexA.html) which leads you to a non-referring page. A very useful site on non-canonical apocalypses will not be found as listed (www.wesley.nnc.edu/noncanon.htm) but can be accessed by dropping the initial www.

A rare substantive typographical error is on p. 98 where Daniel 8 :25 is cited in place of the intended Daniel 7 :25 . On matters of fact, Baumgartner's description of the Jewish revolts in Roman times cites the widely held opinion that the final band of rebels were driven by their eschatological beliefs...