Varieties of Apocalypse

Richard Landes’s Heaven on Earth is a study of millennial apocalyptic movements, that is, movements that share a belief in “a millennial vision of the world transformed, and an apocalyptic belief in that transformation’s imminence” (22). Though the movement he explores share a belief in the transformation of this world, within history, and an excitement that the expected change is just around the corner, they are not all the same.

Some are “hierarchical” or “imperial,” offering a “top-down model of the ‘perfect’ society.” In these movements, “the cosmic battle for humanity pits chaos (evil) against order (good) and calls for the establishment of justice and peace imposed by a hierarchy on earth that mirrors the hierarchy in heaven. Some tradition of a messianic ‘world conqueror’ who inaugurates the golden age appears in many world historical traditions, and one finds current expressions in both Maitreya Buddhism and Hinduism. Perhaps the earliest manifestation of this form of millennialism came under the rule of the ‘heretic’ pharaoh, Akhenaten” (22).

Imperial millennialism is often expressed iconically: “we find a wide range of monumental sculptural programs, including the iconic depiction of the emperor (and the empress). The advent of the imperial Roman style in the first century bce generated at once a massive iconic program featuring a salvific ruler and his relationship to the forces of the universe. This kind of thinking also has an affinity with bee imagery and sun-king imagery, the divinization as it were, of Hobbes’ Leviathan, as the all-nurturing center. Akhenaten believed that God was the sun, and that he, the pharaoh, was his incarnation on earth who poured the rays of his beneficence out upon all his subjects” (22).

Some of these movements are decidedly monotheistic: “Monotheistic variants of this theory favor the political formula: One God, one emperor, and, quite often, one religion. The emperor-messiah represents God on earth and constitutes the image or icon of God on earth. Hence, iconic millennialism. Here heaven’s order becomes a model for that of earth, and just as the one God rules in heaven, so on earth, the one king rules over a numerous, obedient, and grateful population of people, saved by the beneficent conqueror’s pax” (23).

By contrast, there are millennial movements that are democratic, egalitarian, and iconoclastic: “Demotic millennialism embraces the opposite conception of the universe to the iconic one: where the latter sees chaos and popular movements as the problem, the former sees imposed order and elites as the problem; where the latter seeks to perfect dominion, the former wants to replace top-down order with holy anarchy. . . . For these visionaries, freedom and justice in the messianic age will abolish all dominion of people over each other; the ‘saved’ behave justly not from fear but from love. ‘No king but God!’ was the political formula of monotheism according the apocalyptic millennial Zealots of Jesus’ time, and the rabbinical tradition that survived them enshrined that formula in its prayers.” Not all these movements are religions: “Marx appealed to the same vision with his ‘withering away of the state’” (26).

In shattering the icons of powerful elites, these movements also shatter the boundaries of standard moral behavior: “Part of their iconoclasm involves shattering taboos, in particular about sex. The antinomian claim that the believers stand above the law represents the view of those who believe they have already, proleptically, reached the other side of the apocalyptic transformation. Looking back at the laws governing behavior on the unjust side of the apocalyptic divide, such restraints are useless or worse. Laws of adultery do not apply since the new humans stand so far above the petty jealousies that make free love so destructive” (26).

In addition to a vertical axis running between top-down and bottom-up movements, Landes points to a temporal axis that runs from paradise restored (a recovery movement) to new paradise (futuristic). Some movements are “restorative” and others “innovative”: “The restorative variety appeals to conservative sentiments and relies largely on magical thinking. The Ghost Dancers in the American northwest believed that their dancing would lead the earth to shed the whites and their technology like a snake sheds its skin and return the world to its pristine condition, when the buffalo roamed free; the Xhosa believed that if they killed their cattle, the ancestors would bring new, healthy cattle and sweep the white man away like a broom sweeps dust. The most powerful current form of restorative millennialism today is Salafism, the drive to return to the original purity of Islam, to join the seventh-century followers of Muhammad and restore the Sharia law they established” (27).

Many secular millennialists are innovative millennialists: “forms of secular millennialism—especially communism—anticipate a world of perfection never before realized, indeed never before possible. In many such cases, the advent of new technology, often communications technology, marks the dawn of the new era” (28).

Landes also distinguishes between “cataclysmic” and “transformative” millennialism; the former expects a violent upheaval of the natural and social world, the latter a smoother translation into a more perfect state. Alongside this distinction, he categorizes different millennial systems as “passive” or “active.” A passive cataclysmic faith will wait for divine intervention, but an active one will provoke the cataclysm; active transformationists are prophets announcing doom on street corners, while passive transformationists may withdraw to monasteries to pray for the renewal of all things (31-36). And Landes is also interested in the post-millennium and how “the failure of those expectations” affects the form that the movement takes: “one might venture a preliminary possibility that the inevitable disapointment of any apocalyptic group’s hopes will act as a toggle-switch to flip back and forth between active and passive, demotic and hierarchic, cataclysmic and transformational. And in this paradoxical volatility we may find some of the keys to the strange relationship between millennial vision and violence” (35).