Apocalypse Now

Article by Liz Goodwin. Edited by Amy Calladine.

And so, the end is near. As we reach the end of another University year, for some of us our last, New Histories also draws to a close for the summer. As we’re all in a reflective and, if it is your last year, probably pretty miserable mood, I’m not going to say something trite like ‘It’s not the end, it’s only the beginning,’ because that sounds so obvious and pathetic. From a historical perspective, people have always feared the end and the beginning of the unknown, as apocalyptic potential has inspired intense feelings regardless of the period. As we stand on the edge of a change, then, I wonder what we can learn about ourselves in other’s reactions to Armageddon, using the belief in the Terrors of the Year 1000 from the eleventh century in contrast to more modern apocalyptic belief.

Apocalyptic expectations are, on the face of it, a very Medieval thing. Around 1044, the French monk Ralph Glaber predicted that the end of the world was near, on seeing plagues, famines, heresies and natural disasters sully the earth. ‘The whole human race,’ he exclaimed, was sliding ‘willing down into the gulf of primeval chaos.’ The day of judgement never came for Glaber, yet this belief was arguably responsible for some of the greatest and most important changes throughout the Middle Ages.

Church alterations, in the shape of Gregorian Reform, were worked constantly in a race against time. Pope Gregory VII saw his mission of the ‘Holy Church [coming again] into her own splendour,’ as a constant eschatological battle, as ‘the nearer the day of the Antichrist approaches, the harder he fights to crush out the Christian faith.’ The crusades famously took on an apocalyptic significance, demonstrating a Day of Judgement-esque battle between good and evil in its rhetoric. As Jerusalem became a central motif in the apocalyptic anticipations of crusaders, a slew of heretical accusations covered Europe. Men in power – kings, bishops, abbots, dukes – produced great public acts of piety after seemingly uncharitable lives.

What conclusions, then, can we draw? It suggests that when facing the end, the hope that one is going to be allowed into heaven is a massive incentive to change. The fears and actions provoked by the Terrors of the Year 1000 imply that, by correcting ones form of belief, fighting against non-believers and acting in a more Christian way, one could answer the Weberian central and defining question facing humanity: am I saved? 

Some historians have often argued that the Terrors of the Year 1000 are dramatically over-exaggerated, and that to think of little Medieval peasants cowering with fear is naive at best, blatantly absurd at worst. Yet as a Medievalist knows, the mentality of a person from a different period can be utterly alien to our own. We must not de-dramatise the Middle Ages because they appear so dissimilar and remote, but embrace the differences as something to be further understood. Yet even then, some types of behaviour are not as different as they first appear. When we look at apocalyptic expectations, one would think that in a secular, largely irreligious society, we could find no parallels, but that is plainly not the case.

Nearly a thousand, enlightened years later, author Hal Lindsey would write, in the era of the Cold War and nuclear threat, that we should all await the apocalypse ‘with optimism, with anticipation, with excitement,’ mirroring St Vaast from the eleventh century: ‘it comes, it comes, like a thief in the night!’ For both men, the apocalypse could bring about great, almost revolutionary, social change – on entering heaven, the subjugated and downtrodden would inherit greatness. Yet there is something more prominent in both accounts: their excitement.

A love of the macabre and the bizarre excitement of being frightened can be seen nowhere more clearly than in twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular culture. Apocalytpic language and imagery are an incredibly common theme, in Cold War paranoia-filled works like Day of the Triffids to the billion dollar box office successes of Armageddon themed blockbusters – Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, War of the Worlds and 2012, to name only a few.

In almost all these works, the protagonist is a stereotypical ‘everyman’ character, fighting to save his often broken nuclear family in the wake of insurmountable odds. In every case above, they succeed. We relate to Will Smith, Dennis Quaid, Tom Cruise and John Cussack in these roles because they’re playing characters motivated by the things that motivate us – love, hope and survival instinct. Furthermore, we see ourselves surviving with them. They might face aliens attempting to exterminate all life on earth or horrendous natural disasters, but each is ‘saved,’ from the death of their Day of Judgement. They go on to form a better world. St Vaast might have believed this better world to be heaven, but the parallels remain remarkable in their similarity. We question our ‘saved,’ status through these blockbusters, feeling excited as we reveal something deeply significant about our humanity.

Responses to the apocalypse, therefore, rarely vary dramatically. Medieval societies approached the end in reforming their religious life; modern ones watch as their filmic representations reform their family life. Medieval peoples felt excited at the possibility of social change in the afterlife; modern film goers watch as ‘they’ make a better life and world for themselves after the ‘end.’ Perhaps we should focus less on de-dramatising the Middle Ages, and more on our own responses to similar themes: our reactions are not hugely different. Human nature never really alters all that much when facing something as broadly dramatic as the end of days.

So cheer up. It’s really not the end of the world.

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