A Beautiful Ending by John Jeffries Martin — on the bright side

Illustration by Cristoforo de Predis from ‘Stories of Saint Joachim, Saint Anne, Virgin Mary, Jesus, the Baptist and the End of the World’ by Galeazzo Maria Sforza, 1476 © Universal Images Group via Getty ImagesThe world is coming to an end. The fact isn’t controversial; just the timetable. As Bertrand Russell said about nuclear annihilation: “some of us think that might be rather a pity”. So our ambition nowadays is to chart a course between various environmental, biological and military apocalypses. In Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s 1990 novel Good Omens, a rogue angel and demon conspire to thwart God’s plan to end the world: their recipe for a happy ending is keep on keeping on. This was not, John Jeffries Martin’s book reminds us, the way our forebears thought about the world’s end. They, too, knew it was coming, maybe imminently, but unlike us they were quite keen on it. Martin’s point is that apocalypticism — or, at least, religious apocalypticism — isn’t suicidal or monstrous. It’s optimistic. It’s the faith that the grim and painful story of this world might have a beautiful ending: that soon the curtain will fall on the whole wretched show and something better will follow. A Beautiful Ending traces this theme in European thought from Columbus to the French Revolution, arguing that apocalypticism, mostly of the religious kind, is “a fundamental feature” of the modern age — and he does mean a feature, not a bug. True, weirdos and obscurantists were intensely interested in the world’s imminent end but so was just about everyone else. And for a good reason: they were focused on what would come next.

The really original part of this book is where Martin, a professor of history at Duke University, traces this same mood of impatient excitement across the Jewish, Christian and Muslim worlds, varied as they all were. Savonarola’s “bonfire of the vanities” in 1490s Florence might be familiar; not many of us know about his contemporary in nearby Izola, the rabbi Asher Lemlein, whose promise of an imminent Messiah had Jews smashing their matzo ovens, ready for the return to Jerusalem. Those two apocalypses self-destructed in the end, but others fared better. The conquests of the 16th-century Ottoman emperor Suleiman the Magnificent were spurred on by astrologers and Koranic scholars who believed he might be, or at least foreshadow, the Mahdi, the conqueror who would establish a millennial kingdom of justice.All three faiths had cherished such hopes for centuries, on and off, but Martin insists that something changed at the close of the Middle Ages. He cites Francis Bacon (1561-1626), that saturnine prophet of modernity, who took three innovations as signs of a new (final?) age: gunpowder, print and the compass. Gunpowder underpinned vast new empires such as Suleiman’s or his Spanish rivals, whose astonishing conquests felt like harbingers of a new age. Print released apocalypticism from scholarly obscurity: the very first text Johannes Gutenberg printed in 1452-53 was an apocalyptic poem, and later printers enthusiastically followed his example. The end of the world sells well.Most transformative of all was the global opening in the age of the compass. “World’s end” is a geographical as well as a historical expression. Columbus himself came to believe that the world is not round but pear-shaped, with a raised portion “like a woman’s nipple” in the New World, reaching towards heaven. Thomas More put the first Utopia on an undiscovered island. Maybe the future was already here, just unevenly distributed.

Martin’s case that the apocalypse is the midwife of modernity seems self-evidently right to me. My main frustration is that we need a second volume, on how the apocalypse has fared since 1800. He does argue that during the 18th century catastrophism fell out of fashion, replaced by more gradualist, progressive visions of a “beautiful ending”. You can see the same spirit, secularised, in Hegel and then in Marx. Stalin and Mao’s visions of the future cost millions of lives but Khrushchev’s faith that Communism would in the end bury its opponents gave him the strategic patience that saved the world in 1962. By contrast, fascists’ preference has always been for a cleansing apotheosis of blood and fire.But what of us beleaguered western liberals, unpersuaded by apocalypticism of either kind? Martin simply asks “whether we can hold it at bay”. But should we? Martin’s book shows that believing things can only get better is world-changing. Yet modern liberalism is oddly devoid of optimism. Averting catastrophe so we can have a bit more of the same is as high as our ambitions run — and we wonder why the world loses faith, or interest. My lesson from this book is that we need, collectively, to recover some actual hope. Martin is plainly correct that apocalyptic optimism is threaded through our culture. In which case, we’re unlikely to stamp it out. The point must surely be to do it, but to do it right.A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World by John Jeffries Martin, Yale University Press £26/$35, 336 pagesAlec Ryrie is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham UniversityJoin our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café