Tip-toeing to the Apocalypse: Herbert, Milton, and the Modern Sense of Time

Tip-toeing to the Apocalypse: Herbert, Milton, and the Modern Sense of Time by Robert Appelbaum So far, despite predictions to the contrary, and something of a cottage industry in the production of what might be called "endist" texts, lamenting phenomena like the "end of history," the "end of science," and the inevitability of environmental and political catastrophe, the coming of the year 2000 has excited little genuine apocalyptical fervor.1 The next millennium has already been ritualized as a media event; and there is little evidence that the public in the United States or elsewhere is going to respond to the coming of the next millennium as anything except as a media event, an institutionalized simulacrum. After all, the occasion lacks the support of science, as well as religious conviction. There is nothing really at stake here except a change in numbers, and for all intents and purposes numerology is dead. Nevertheless, even a lack of meaning can mean something. "Time," the philosopher Christoph Wulf writes, "is the medium that binds a man's view of the world with his view of himself." "Worldview and self-image are indissolubly intertwinedwith each other. The way man sees the world is the way man sees himself; the way he conceives himself is the way he conceives the world."2 It matters that we see ourselves in a world where momentous changes are configured as media events, and where markers for the spaces of time yawning before us don't have any particular meaning for us apart from the simulations of meaning that they occasion. We know that there is to be a future, a vast future perhaps; but we cannot connect our conventional concepts of the passage of time either to the future that gapes ahead of us or to the ethical imperatives of day-to-day living. We can only connect them to simulations of connection.3 Our own dilemma with regard to temporality and futurity, however , may at least have something to tell us about the early modern period, and the life work of individuals like George Herbert andJohn Milton, when the situation of world-views, self-images, and their temporality was rather different than it is today. When we look at the world of the seventeenth century we see a world that may have been larger than ours from a spatial point of view, since distances had 28Robert Appelbaum a vastness which was all but non-negotiable, but that was considerably smaller than ours from a temporal point of view: a world whose beginning could be reckoned by a handful of historical documents, counted out by a recitation of the genealogical record since the time of Adam and Eve, and whose conclusion was always close, always drawing nigh: a matter of a few centuries, a few decades, or even only a few years. The result of the narrowness of time in the seventeenth century as indiviudals understood and experienced it was not only a common preoccupation with biblical history and the origins of societies, but that proliferation of discourses concerned with prophetic history, apocalypticism, and millenarianism which many historians and critics have been turning their attention to lately, a proliferation of discourses which wouldn't finally lose their appeal to the English public until the early eighteenth century.4 The traditional Augustinian position, to be sure, dismissed the importance of prophetic, apocalyptical, and millenarian speculation, holding that the narrowness of time and the coming of the end of the world didn't have any immediate moral or scientificimplications. The date of the end of the world was entirely unknowable, according to Augustine, although what it would be like when the world endedwas not; and therefore, if a person ought to live as if the end of the world might come at any moment, a person also ought to live as if it might not come at all.5 The Augustinian individual hovered between temporal finality and temporal indefiniteness; it was precisely in that alienated space between the finite and the infinite that temporality itself was experienced, and one's devotion to God and personal salvation was to be engaged.6 This alienated space was a common feature of...