Apocalypse 45

[Trisha Quercioli]

Eschatologyfrom Greek eschatos, last, concerns expectations of the end of the present age,[7] and apocalyptic eschatology is the application of the apocalyptic world-view to the end of the world, when God will bring judgment to the world and save his followers.[8] An apocalypse will often contain much eschatological material like the epiphany of Paul the Apostle, but need not: the baptism of Jesus in Matthew's gospel, for example, can be considered apocalyptic in that the heavens open for the presence of a divine mediator (the dove representing the spirit of God) and a voice communicates supernatural information, but there is no eschatological element.[9]

Scholars have identified examples of the genre ranging from the mid-2nd century BCE to the 2nd century CE,[10] and examples are to be found in Persian and Greco-Roman literature as well as Jewish and Christian.[11] The sole clear case in the Jewish Bible (Old Testament) is chapters 7-12 of the Book of Daniel, but there are many examples from non-canonical Jewish works;[12] the Book of Revelation is the only apocalypse in the New Testament, but passages reflecting the genre are to be found in the gospels and in nearly all the genuine Pauline epistles.[13]

"Apocalypse" has come to be used popularly as a synonym for catastrophe, but the Greek word apoklypsis, from which it is derived, means a revelation.[13] It has been defined by John J Collins as "a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, in that it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world."[14] Collins later refined his definition by adding that apocalypse "is intended to interpret present, earthly circumstances in light of the supernatural world and of the future, and to influence both the understanding and the behaviour of the audience by means of divine authority."[14]

The genre of Jewish and Christian apocalypse flourished c.250 BCE-250 CE, but its antecedents can be traced back much further, in the Jewish prophetic and wisdom traditions (e.g., Ezekiel 1-3 and Zechariah 1-6), and in the mythologies of the Ancient Near East, which have left a legacy of symbology (e.g., the sea as a symbol of chaos in Daniel 7 and Revelation 13:1).[15] Zoroastrian dualism may also have played a role.[10] The reasons for its rise are obscure, but there seems to be a connection to times of crisis, such as the 2nd century BCE persecution of the Jews reflected in Daniel's final vision, or the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE reflected in 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch.[16]

Apocalyptic revelations are typically mediated through such means as dreams and visions (the ancient world did not distinguish between these), angels, and heavenly journeys.[2] These serve to connect two sets of axes, the spatial axis which has God and the heavenly realm above and the human world below, and the temporal axis of the present and the future.[2] The revelation thus demonstrates that God rules the visible world, and that the present days are leading to an end-time in which divine justice will be done and God's rule will become visible.[2] Mythic images with their roots in texts from the Hebrew Bible and rich in symbolic meaning are a significant characteristic of the genre.[3] Further characteristics include transcendentalism, mythology, pessimistic cosmological and historical surveys, dualism (including a doctrine of two ages and the division of time into periods), numerology (e.g., the "number of the beast" in Revelation), claims of ecstasy and inspiration, and esotericism.[4]

With the exception of the Apocalypse of John the authors of apocalyptic works released their books under pseudonyms (false names):[5] the Book of Daniel, for example, was composed during the 2nd century BCE but took the name of the legendary Daniel for its hero.[6] Pseudonymity may have been used to secure acceptance for the new works, to protect the real authors from reprisals, or because the authors had experienced what they believed to be genuine revelations from the famous past figure or identified with him and claimed to write on his behalf.[17]

In April of last year, I was invited by the Call to Unite [1] to share my thoughts about what we might learn from the COVID-19 pandemic. I knew it might be a risk, but I felt a strong urge to speak about the much-misunderstood meaning of biblical apocalypse. Here is a portion of that conversation:

We live in a world on fire. This year the Daily Meditations will explore contemplation as a way to build Radical Resilience so we can stand in solidarity with the world without burning up or burning out. The path ahead may be challenging, but we can walk it together.

Not the dragon stuff, which scans as symbolic to even the dullest seventh-grader, but whatever the evangelicals thought the dragon stuff was a metaphor for. I knew they had notions on the subject, for they had briefly kidnapped me and made me watch a filmstrip about hell in what appeared to be a taco truck. This would have been a few summers earlier, in Salida, Colorado, in a park along the Arkansas River.

Some of them were dreamers

And some of them were fools

Who were making plans and thinking of the future

With the energy of the innocent

They were gathering the tools

They would need to make their journey back to nature

When I stayed with my mother growing up, I spent time with people who lived in school buses and people who claimed to be witches and people who followed the Dead and a guy who got free drinks in Leadville by passing for Bob Seger. They threw the I Ching and talked about ESP and smoked copious amounts of marijuana. They seemed ready to take off at any moment for just about any reason, and many of them did.

So, contrary to what Norman Cohn believes he has demonstrated in The Pursuit of the Millennium, modern revolutionary hopes are not an irrational sequel to the religious passion of millenarianism. The exact opposite is true: millenarianism, the expression of a revolutionary class struggle speaking the language of religion for the last time, was already a modern revolutionary tendency, lacking only the consciousness of being historical and nothing more.

like the early Christians, most pre-1914 socialists were believers in the great apocalyptic change which would abolish all that was evil and bring about a society without unhappiness, oppression, inequality and injustice.

As a synecdoche for the tragedy of our historical moment, consider a news item about the murder of nineteen schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas. One victim, ten-year-old Maite Rodriguez, was identifiable only by the green Converse sneakers she wore. She had drawn a heart on her right shoe. After the actor Matthew McConaughey, for some reason delivering a press briefing at the White House, made this detail known to the public, the shoes sold out as appalled consumers ordered them online.

Or perhaps the people left behind after climate apocalypse will have learned from our mistakes. I think of a scene from the television adaptation of Station Eleven. Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) is fielding questions from Alex (Philippine Velge), a young thespian born after a pandemic that erased civilization, about what smartphones were like:

The IPCC has projected five future warming possibilities; I ignore the most optimistic, which assumes that global carbon dioxide emissions will be cut to net zero by 2050. Barring an extinction-level cataclysm, this will not happen.

Whatever we call it, knowing there is an apocalypse (or multiple) we can also hope for a better post-apocalyptic world. adatole is correct that so many good things happened this year to temper the bad. There will always be ups and downs, and I feel 2020 has been a year of lower lows than normal for most. This leaves room for higher highs though, so let's have hope for our post-apocalyptic times to be to have less lows and more highs.

I think jeremymayfield has the right of it, using "pocolypse" as a hyphenated suffix to add to anything that makes a big impression on someone, as long as that thing doesn't cause the literal destruction of the Earth.

Tacopocalypse was a restaurant in Des Moines. Although, now that I think of it, and given the stereotypical results people complain of from eating at fast-food Taco "restaurants", a "Taco-Apocolypse" might be a personal and embarrassing disaster. Maybe that's why the restaurant is listed as "Closed Permanently" in Google?

But everything I've come up with that includes "apocalypse" in its name (so far) isn't describing the end of the world. It's describing getting on with life after a life-altering event. Even a post-dystopian environment still has the Earth present. So these graphics/memes, while cute or mentally stimulating, truly aren't appropriate uses of the word. In all cases, the world still exists. It's just different.

Did we ever consider the A, so rather than Apocalypse, could the plural be two-pocalypse or somepocalypse. Regardless, like Atypical is the opposite of typical maybe apocalypse is the opposite of just pocalypse. Although it isn't true, how cool would it be if it was. We could say 2021 the Pocalypse year.

I will not even try to outdo adatole's comment. Buffy, perspective from someone who survived a really apocalyptic event, and wrapping up the who month's challenge? You get big kudos for that entry, Leon.

We overuse the word, since a true apocalypse is world-ending. It's common to use the word for dramatic effect, but we really ought to use smaller words, focused on a more individual or personal scale. For example:

The Doomsday Clock is ticking down and emotions run high as you and your team of DIVISION agents struggle to find the Keys before the villainous Harbingers unlock the Doors of Power and bring about the apocalypse.

My students chuckled nervously. Maybe the joke was that it was day one of the fall semester, and who really wanted to be in a required advanced poetic form class? Or maybe it was my way of cutting the tension of our gathering, united by the sole purpose of discussing poetry in a time that, back then, felt newly apocalyptic to some.

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