A History of the End of the World

When the Arabella sailed from England in 1630, the little ship carried a contingent of Puritan families who were setting out to colonize the raw North American wilderness. The passengers gathered on deck to hear a sermon delivered by a fiery Puritan minister, John Cotton (1585–1652), who stirringly characterized their destination as “the new promised land,” a place that had been “reserved by God for his elect people as the actual site for a new heaven and a new earth.”¹ Thus transplanted to the rich soil of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Apocalypse flowered in new, remarkable, and enduring ways.

“Christ by a wonderful Providence hath dispossessed Satan, who reigned securely in these Ends of the Earth, for Ages the Lord knoweth how many,” declared another Puritan minister, Increase Mather (1639–1723), after his arrival in America, “and here the Lord has caused as it were New Jerusalem to come down from Heaven.”²

The author of Revelation may have set down his visions on an island off the coast of Asia, but his remarkable little book promptly began to move ever westward. The eastern realm of Christianity, as we have seen, nearly excluded it from the biblical canon, but Revelation earned a place in the earliest biblical lists of western Christendom. The so-called apocalyptic invasion reached its fullest expression in the arts, letters, and architecture of France and Germany. And Revelation worked its strange magic with even greater power in the hearts and minds of the Anglo-Saxons on the far western fringe of Europe. They came to entertain the thrilling idea that Jesus Christ himself once walked “upon England’s mountains green,” as visionary artist and poet William Blake (1757–1827) puts it in the poem “Jerusalem,” and would one day set the New Jerusalem “among these dark satanic mills.”³ Blake himself was an obsessive reader and reinterpreter of Revelation, and his poem later became a British national hymn.

I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.⁴

Still, the most radical of the Protestant reformers, whom we know as the Puritans, refused to sing hymns to England, its church, or its monarch. By their lights, the priestcraft and high ceremonials of the Church of England were as corrupt as those of the Roman Catholic Church. They regarded the kings of England, whose royal titles included “Defender of the Faith,” as the latest and likeliest candidates for the role of Antichrist. And the Puritans found the rich and sometimes ribald culture of England in the seventeenth century—scandalous plays and love poems, hedonistic masques and musicales, high-spirited bouts of feasting and drinking, extravagant fashions and manners, and much else besides—to be as offensive as Roman paganism had been to the author of Revelation and Renaissance humanism had been to Savonarola. That is one reason why the wilderness on the far side of the Atlantic, even though it was occupied by native-dwelling tribes whom they saw as minions of the Devil, struck the Puritans as a much worthier site for the New Jerusalem than those satanic mills of Old England.⁵

So began the next leg of the westward movement of Revelation, a remarkable phenomenon that historian Stephen J. Stein calls “the Americanization of the apocalyptic tradition.”⁶ When the Puritans arrived in the New World—“flying from the Depravations of Europe,” as they saw it, “to the American Strand”—they promptly unpacked and polished up the old apocalyptic texts. John Winthrop (1588–1649), a passenger on the Arabella and the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, famously invoked the New Jerusalem when he likened the Puritan settlement to “a City upon a Hill.” And, significantly, “The Day of Doom,” a poem by Michael Wigglesworth (1631–1705), was “the first best seller in the annals of the American book trade.”⁷

But the Puritans and those who came after them also felt at liberty to tinker with the scenario of Revelation and come up with story lines wholly of their own invention. Indeed, they insisted on accentuating the positive in Revelation, and they gave the apocalyptic idea a uniquely American spin that has persisted into our own anxious age. Remarkably, the end of the world and the destruction of humankind, if viewed in the right way, could be seen as a good thing.

The world that the Puritan colonists left behind was still shadowed by all of the old terrors that are given such vivid names, faces, and figures in the book of Revelation. The shattering events of the Civil War in England, when the Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) and the parliamentary army drove King Charles I from the throne and then took off his head, brought the apocalyptic fantasies into even sharper focus. Amid chaos and crisis—war and revolution, torture and execution, witch burning and book burning—the readers of Revelation teetered between the old certainty that the end of the world was nigh and the new conviction that a better world was at hand.

The followers of Cromwell, for example, saw the conflict between the parliamentary and royalist armies as a struggle between Christ and Anti-christ, and they regarded the defeat of King Charles I as a sign that the millennial kingdom of Jesus Christ was soon to begin: “The Eternall and shortly-expected King,” writes poet (and Puritan pamphleteer) John Milton (1608–1674), “shall open the Clouds to judge the severall Kingdomes of the World.”⁸ And the enemies of Cromwell, too, invoked the book of Revelation. One royalist pamphleteer, who dubbed Cromwell “Rex Oliver Lord Protector,” insisted that the title was an alphanumeric code that added up to the demonic 666, but only if he conveniently dropped the letter “L” from the word “Lord.”

“These are days of shaking,” observed one English preacher in 1643, “and this shaking is universal.”⁹

At one precarious moment in 1653, in fact, Parliament nearly fell under the control of the so-called Fifth Monarchy Men, a radical faction of soldiers, clergy, and poor folk whose name refers to the divine kingdom that is predicted to follow the four earthly monarchies described in the book of Daniel. These self-styled “saints” looked forward to an apocalyptic revolution of the kind predicted by Hildegard of Bingen: church and government alike, and the rich and powerful along with them, would be replaced once and for all by a biblical theocracy under King Jesus himself. Cromwell deemed it necessary to suppress the Fifth Monarchy Men by force of arms in 1656: “Lord, appear, now or never,” they cried as a detachment of soldiers broke up one of their public rallies and escorted them to prison.¹⁰ Needless to say, the Lord was once again a no-show.

The strict and censorious Puritans and their worldly adversaries had long been engaged in a culture war, too. A Puritan sermonizer, adopting one of the rhetorical quirks of Martin Luther, condemned the Anglican clergy as “the excrement of Antichrist.”¹¹ A bon vivant like playwright and poet Ben Jonson (1572–1637), by contrast, poked fun at the dire apocalyptic expectations of the Puritans when he created a character in Bartholomew Fair called Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy, a self-convinced seer who sees an unfamiliar musical instrument on display at a country fair and promptly leaps to the conclusion that he has spied the Beast of Revelation. The drum of the instrument, according to Jonson, is “the broken belly of Anti-christ, and thy bellows there are his lungs, and these pipes are his throat, those feathers are his tail, and thy rattles the gnashing of his teeth.”¹²

The apocalyptic fancies that Jonson found so laughable penetrated even the loftiest circles of the scientific revolution that was already in progress. Scottish mathematician John Napier (1550–1617), originator of the logarithm, applied his arithmetical genius to a treatise on Revelation in which he argued that the seventh and final age of human history had begun in 1541 and would end in 1786. And Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who achieved enduring greatness in mathematics and physics, also found time to engage in his own apocalyptic number- crunching: “Sir Isaac Newton wrote his comment upon the Revelation,” cracks French philosopher Voltaire (1664– 1777), “to console mankind for the great superiority he had over them in other respects.”¹³

But the apocalyptic idea may have reached its apogee in the Old World just as the Puritans were making their way to the New World. As Voltaire’s joke at the expense of Isaac Newton seems to suggest, the book of Revelation had already started its descent into the netherworld of religious oddities and curiosities. The Great London Fire of 1666, for example, brought a fresh wave of doomsaying, thanks to the appearance of the old demonic number on the calendar: “Every thunderstorm,” wrote George Fox, a leader of the Quakers, “produced expectations of the