Almost twenty five years later, it’s interesting to contemplate the role that fundamentalist Christian apocalyptic eschatology played in the political discourse of the time. Let’s take a look.

Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth

Back in 1970, fundamentalist Christian author Hal Lindsey published a book that earned him world-wide fame and millions of dollars: The Late Great Planet Earth. This book popularized a strain of fundamentalist eschatology that had a long history, but which had never been articulated plainly to a mass audience. Lindsey argued, among other things, that the world would probably end before 1988 (40 years after the foundation of the state of Israel). Lindsey believed that there would be a single government of Europe consisting of 10 states (there are now 27 member states), and that it would be led by the Antichrist, who would initiate World War III. Weaving together a decidedly non-literal interpretation of Iron Age prophecies from Ezekiel 38-39, Zechariah 13, and many other texts, he predicted that final war would begin after the Soviet Union and China invaded Israel. This would force the U.S. to intervene, leading to nuclear war. At last, Jesus Christ himself would appear in military splendor at the valley of Megiddo in Israel (Har Megiddo = Armageddon), where he would wipe out the commie hordes in a spectacular final showdown. By 1978, the book had run through 66 printings (my copy is from 1978). To date, more than 30 million copies of this book, which was reissued in a revised (and updated) version in 1998, have been sold.

Evangelicals and Armageddon in the 1980’s

In 1980 Lindsey published another book called The 1980’s: Countdown to Armageddon. By now, Lindsey was world famous, and he was interviewed by members of the press and received wide publicity for his book in the popular press. (See, for example, a syndicated article on Lindsey by AP religion journalist George W. Cornell, printed in many local papers such as the Klingman Daily Miner, in May 1981).

Fed in part by Lindsey and the media attention he drew, in the 1980’s the fires of fundamentalist eschatology burned brightly in popular evangelicalism in America. People were especially worked up by interpretations that suggested the involvement of the cold-war superpowers and nuclear weapons. It turns out, Americans liked to see that, in His holy word, God himself had already declared victory against the godless communist evil empires. Who wouldn’t?

The U.S. President and the End of the World

But things changed when this politico-theological complex reared its head in the White House. In 1984, while President Ronald Reagan was running for re-election, he admitted during the October presidential debates that he accepted the popular fundamentalist doctrines concerning Armageddon, although he discounted the idea that one could plan political policy around them. This caused a storm of bad publicity and controversy. Liberals attacked the President, while even the evangelicals (at least, the academic ones) publicly backed away from Lindsey and his doctrines (as New York Times journalist Walter Goodman reported at the time). Hand-wringing editorials were printed (such as this one by George Plagenz), and academic Biblical scholars found themselves talking to reporters a bit more frequently than they normally do.

Academic and popular books were written and conferences held, attacking the eschatological beliefs of premillennial dispensationalism. One author charged that American fundamentalists were actually praying for nuclear war. Scholars of popular religion in America now noted with concern the widespread belief in a nuclear Armageddon. Many people feared that a fundamentalist theology could influence public policy in a way that might turn prophecy into self-fulfilling prophecy.

The End (of the Hysteria)

As Lindsey’s predicted deadline for the tribulation approached, the year 1988, many people remained extremely concerned that a fundamentalist mindset was influencing foreign policy. Yet, at the same time, Lindsey’s 18 year old predictions were already looking a bit dated. There was no progress towards a unified Europe led by the Antichrist, no revival of the Roman empire, and no sign of war between the Soviet Union and Israel.

In 1987, Dinesh D’Souza, then a fairly young and little known conservative writer (but now a rather more famous public intellectual), wrote an interesting editorial in which he argued, rather unconvincingly I think, that there was no good reason to fear fundamentalist eschatology in the halls of power. “Evangelicals and fundamentalists realize,” D’Souza wrote, “as most secularists do not, that eschatological prophecies cannot be speeded up or altered to suit human timetables.” He goes on to quote Pat Robertson (remember: he was a presidential candidate in the 1988 campaign season) denying that he had any intention of trying to speed the plow of Armageddon. Whew!

The Aftermath

The cold war is over, but Hal Lindsey is still with us, maintaining a website, and writing books. Unchastened by his failure to visualize the future from 1988 to 2010, he has realigned his interpretation of Biblical prophecy to fit the changing political landscape of post 9/11 America. Whereas, in 1970, the Arabs were minor players in his vision of Armageddon, in the past decade Lindsey has embraced Islam as a better and more likely eschatological enemy of the people of God.

How long can one man continue to profit from such willful misreadings and misunderstandings of the Biblical prophetic books?

Russia will play a momentous role, in the last day prophesies. As a matter of fact, Russia is featured in three of the most important prophecies of the players at the battle of Armageddon. Russia is featured in Ezekiel, chapters 38 and 39, Joel chapter 2, verse 20, and Daniel, Chapter 11 verses 40 through 45, which all talk about the beginning of the battle of Armageddon. And it’s Russia, leading a Muslim confederacy, that’s under Iran, that will start the last war of the world, that we call the war of Armageddon. — Hal Lindsey, in the Hal Lindsey Report January 15th, 2010.

I have just finished reading the quite entertaining book Rumo and His Miraculous Adventures by German author Walter Moers. It is doubtful whether I ever would have purchased this book for myself — it being both outside of my typical choice of genres and relatively obscure — yet I did read it because it was given to me by one of my most intellectually distinguished friends, the anthropologist Alexander Mawyer (an old U of C buddy, now a professor at Lake Forest College). And because Alex is both a cultivated student of fine literature and a voracious consumer of culture both popular and fringe, and also has so often recommended fine reads to me in the past, I trusted his guidance, even though this dauntingly sized 600+ page trade-paperback promised to suck up many long hours of my precious and limited reading time.

After reading the book, I remain unsure as to how to categorize it. It is tempting to classify it as children’s literature. Moers is both a writer and an illustrator, and his book is animated in both words and pictures by a fanciful and delightful wit and whimsy that many people would associate with Juvenile fiction. A blurb from the Washington Post on the cover of my copy shows that its critic so classified it; the writer describes Rumo as “Equal parts J.K. Rowling, Douglas Adams, and Shel Silverstein … a work of monumental silliness.” In truth, that’s an inept and pathetic description, a failure of critical imagination. The only thing Moers has in common with Silverstein is that they are both self-illustrating writers. And while there could be many points of comparison with J. K. Rowling (a male central character, a school, a struggle with the forces of Evil, a prevalence of strange and inventive names and fantastic creatures), it is doubtful whether any of these comparisons would prove particularly fruitful, I think, since Rowling’s fantastic parallel world of English schoolchildren has an entirely different generic feel, literary purpose, intended audience, and, most importantly, stylistic level. Rowling is a writer whose simple style and schoolchildren’s theme is meant to ensnare the minds of (our inner) ten year olds longing to grow up. Her whimsical side is mere color; the humor found in her books has the stale feel of adolescent television programming, and the focus throughout is on the drama of coming of age. Whatever else Rumo may be, it is not really a “coming of age” story. The writing style could be argued to come closer to Adams, I suppose, whose central character in the Hitchhiker’s Guide books also wanders through a series of unfamiliar and fantastic adventures set in a twisted and humorous imaginary universe. But again, the comparison is fruitful only if one highlights the differences. Adams uses extremely economical language, tells a straightforward adventure story, and employs his humor in a satirical and critical fashion entertaining to both young readres and adults. His novels are short and uproariously, bitingly funny. That isn’t Moers at all. Rumo is sprawling, epic in scope, and, while it is occasionally quite funny, humor seems not to be its central purpose. Adams is a humorist; Moers is more like a dungeon master.

Seting apart the German Moers from these English authors, the Juvenile Rowling and the Adolescent Adams, is a literary fascination and preoccupation with violence, bloodshed, warfare, and destruction. Moers’ mixes a dead serious, Homerically clinical poetry of bloody violence with his madcap literary hallucination. In my view, this moves the book out of the category of Juvenile and adolescent fiction and into the domain of geek lit. He is a comic-book Tolkein. The story takes place in a completely fantastic imaginary world (Zamonia). This world doesn’t seem unfamiliar. In literary terms, Rumo seems rather to be a lampoon, or a lark, constructed from an unlikely literary composite of familiar epics, fairy tales, legends, fantasy novels, horror pictures, biology and physics textbooks, and natural history museum exhibits.

As a writer, Moers’ greatest gifts lie in two areas; the first is “the fantastic synthesis of unlikely juxtapositions” (for example, one of the main characters is an amphibious creature called a “Shark Grub”) and the second, even greater gift, is his talent for world-creation through composition of lists.

Hardly a page of this novel goes by without one of Moers’ fabulous lists. Moers uses lists to create and describe scenes, rooms, persons or creatures, histories, landscapes, events… you name it. For an example, consider this scene in which the main character, Rumo, a kind of bipedal horned talking swashbuckling dog called a Wolperting, visits a fairground:

Rumo pricked up his ears. The air was throbbing with sounds that were never to be heard on other occasions: singing saws, glockenspiels, demonic cries, Vulphead madrigals, wooden rattles, mouth drums, foot bells. Laughter rang out on all sides, mingled with shrill cries of terror from the ghost trains and the squeal of bagpipes. Hordes of musicians playing curious instruments competed for the public’s attention and strove to drown each other. Bassophonists made the ground shake, a Bufadista soprano sang of unrequited love in old Zamonian, stallholders did their best to outshout one another, rockets soard hissing into the air, paper ducks quacked, tin drums beat a tattoo (283).

The next paragraph lists the amazing sights that Rumo’s eyes beheld, and then, on the same page, comes this paragraph:

Then there were the smells: cinnamon, honey, saffron, grilled sausages, roast marsh hog, dried cod, mulled wine, smoked eel, baked apples, onion soup, incense, tobacco smoke, goose dripping. Outside most of the booths that sold food were small braziers in which garlic and onion bulbs were burnt to lend the night air an appetising aroma. Goose, chicken and turkey legs encased in clay cooked slowly in pits filled with glowing charcoal. A thick, fragrant soup of pigs’ trotters and peas simmered in a massive cast-iron cauldron. Potatoes and onions were sautéed in thyme-flavored oil, quail fried in lard, trout grilled on sticks. Legs of lamb sizzled over open fires, corn cobs and loaves of bread were baked in clay ovens. A whole ostrich revolved on a spit while ravenous Montanic Dwarfs sat round it clattering their knives and forks. Myrrh was burnt, joss sticks smouldered, masked Moomies tossed curry powder into the air. Rumo continued to cling to Urs.

This is an ancient and epic literary technique, found as early as the Illiad, where Homer makes frequent use of lists, both to sketch vast tableaux of actions and events, and also to describe ornate objects, such as Achilles’ shield. Moers uses and abuses the technique marvelously, transforming it into a style rococo, and in the process giving himself free reign to sketch in and invent the fascinating details of his imagined world. One can flip almost randomly through the book and find scores of them: “Saponic Leeches, Oilsnakes, Dungworms, Suckerfoot Spiders, Bateriomorphs, Plauge Frogs, Trogloticks, Speleovampires — those were the true masters of this dark damp domain” (521).

And his lists aren’t the only thing that remind me of Homer. Rumo’s adventures seem to be modeled after the Odyssey right from the start. When the Wolperting begins his adventures as a prisoner and potential food source, held captive in a floating cave by terrifying but incompetent one eyed “Demonicles,” one is hard pressed not to recall Odysseus and the Cyclops.

Rumo is self-consciously modeled on the form of a saga, retold in the world of the comic-fan convention. Near the end of the novel, Rumo’s telepathically talking sword Dandelion admonishes him for failing to speak up during a campfire session of storytelling:

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Dandelion demanded. “Our own experiences would surely have made the best story of all. The fight in Nurn Forest! Yggdra Syl! The casket! The Icemaggogs! The Vrahoks! General Ticktock’s innards! Ideal subjects for inclusion in lessons on the heroic sagas!”

“I’m no good at telling stories,” Rumo protested.

Rumo may not be a great Bard, but Moers is more than up to the task, the Arrian to Rumo’s Alexander.

I don’t have anything much profound to say about this book. I just want to indicate my appreciation for the imaginative impulse that brought this world to life. It’s a good read, and worthy of your attention, if you like macabre and bloody action stories set in improbable landscapes peopled by talking horned dogs and five-brained absent minded professors. Thanks Alex!

Walter Moers, Rumo and His Miraculous Adventures (trans. John Brownjohn; New York: Overlook Press, 2004; Paperback edition 2007) 688 pages; $16.95; ISBN-10: 1-58567-936-4 / ISBN-13 978-1-58567-936-2.

See Philip Hallie, “Magda and the Great Virtues”.

The phrase “banality of evil” has been so widely appropriated, reimagined, and reappropriated into new contexts that it has completely lost its original bite. Not to mention the fact that it has repeatedly been called into question; both Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann’s psychology and the wider application of the notion to human activity in general have been criticized. But perhaps critics are missing the essential insight of the phrase. The philosopher invents the phrase as a phenomenological description of the facts in a particular case. In so doing she calls into question the common practice of understanding atrocities as somehow transcendentally other in origin. We go out to see the monster, and find only the man. In Eichmann’s case one cannot detect “any diabolical or demonic profundity.” His participation in evil can not be said to be accidental, unintentional or even “commonplace;” but it is mundane.

Milton described a tragic rebel Satan, a being who purely refuses to serve the Good, who would storm heaven with his minions. Augustine claimed that, as a youth he stole some pears because he “loved to perish.” Freud hypothesized the existence of an inner thanatos, a drive towards death that is everywhere alloyed with our other motives. But Arendt described a mediocre functionary whose evil is contextualized by his participation in a system. Perhaps she means not to say what evil is, but only what it can be. In some cases of evil, when you open the box, nothing is there. There is no great scheme, no army of rebel angels, no dark concupiscence of the flesh, no inner impulse towards self-negation. And this is in some ways the most frightening account of evil we can imagine.

I recently finished reading Philip K. Dick’s wonderful novel Dr. Bloodmoney, which is perhaps the least read deeply influential masterpiece in twentieth century science fiction. The characters and situation of the novel could only emerge from the mind of Dick. Dick unfolds a tangled story set in post-nuclear holocaust Marin county. The characters include a schizophrenic expat German nuclear physicist who just might have brought on the war with his mind; a hostile telekinetic phocomelus mimic for whom the disaster is the key to personal power; an insouciant psychic fetus in fetu, the unlikely hero of the story; a plucky “negro” TV repairman, who survives by eating rats and sellin traps; a secretive and conniving nymphomaniac housewife, and a preternaturally charming celebrity astronaut who, stranded in orbit, runs a radio show for the end of the world. From this motley assemblage Dick constructs a eerie story of American culture, fear, transformation and redemption. That the plot of the novel is implausible, impossible, and bizarre stands not at all in the way of its greatness. Dick’s creation is a collective fever-dream hallucination, an uncanny exploration of post-nuclear insanity, a space-age cultural freakshow, a novel of race and infirmity, of hatred, stupidity, community, and desire, of madness, politics, and economics. Its imprint is everywhere in the fringes of literature. Highly recommended.

Further Reading

Wikipedia entry on Dr. Bloodmoney

A few days ago I finished reading After Life in Roman Paganism by legendary French historian of religion Franz Cumont. The book publishes lectures originally delivered in English at Yale University in 1921.

My copy, a Dover Publications paperback edition from 1959, originally cost $1.35, was designed to last for a long time in a library, and is “an unabridged and unaltered republication of the first edition published by Yale University Press in 1922.” There is a stamp on the cover page which reads “The University of Chicago / Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion.” And the volume is signed J. M. Kitagawa / U of Chicago in blue pencil. Kitagawa is still a legendary name around the University of Chicago, although he is not very well known.

Back to the volume itself. There are no annotations in the book… at all. Nor was there sign of a lot of reading. Now, I don’t think that means Kitagawa didn’t read it, because my reading of it, which occurred on two coasts and included quite a few nights that ended with dropping the copy on the floor of a beach house, left very little trace as well, and I also did not make marginal notes. It’s a sturdy book, designed to be clothbound and reside on a dusty shelf (unread) for generations.

Concerning the contents of the book, I found Cumont an ingenuously knowing historian, but also a friend to knowledge. He offers discussion of a treasure trove of evidences taken from the Roman era of the broader Mediterranean world, and thus his purview encompasses Greece, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and even further afield. He loves the subject and conveys his love quite vividly. For instance: long flights of fanciful dreamlike prose extol astronomical immortality as the ultimate achievement of pagan eschatological thought. Other passages convey his own deep fascination with the existential problem of human life, namely, it’s apparent end. But such follies of a brilliant scholar are more than matched by the immense learning he brings to the task. Here is a teacher who will for years continue to master many of us students of religion. Cumont gives a variety of learned citations to ancient authors, monuments, and inscriptions from a spectrum of traditions and geographical regions. One could learn a great deal, chasing down the sources cited by Cumont.

Ultimately, Cumont’s approach is the problem. The variety itself cannot be sustained. Cumont uses a safely vague (and so totally implausible) tissue of statements implying causal and actual connection between his scores of points of evidence. He cites so many modes of piety, varieties of belief, common practices, popular expressions, poetic and dramatic utterances, epitaphs, myths and prayers that he apparently has no time left for offering a plausible case that the words things and images he discusses all properly relate to one another, or a common subject, historically. Which is not to say that they don’t — often they clearly do. For example, in the first half of the book, the Pythagoreans appear to have enormous and far reaching influence on many thinkers, and much of his exposition is at least plausible. But the details of the relationship remain unclear in his exposition. So, this book is untamed and speculative, but sometimes right.

More about this book on strata.

Read it on Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=VC4VAAAAYAAJ.