Besides laughing out loud when I read the translation of “Deliri et Insani” to be “insane crazies”, I also realized that it aptly summarized my reaction to Kirsch’s book, but also accurately conveys the human characters involved in forming and evolving apocalyptic thought.
First, I must confess that after finishing Kirsch’s book I felt a little “insane crazy” because I STILL do not understand how the Book of Revelation ended up being the last chapter of the New Testament. I read how it became an enormous influence on books, political thought, pop culture, etc. over the centuries but I also read that many church leaders have rejected it – most famously Martin Luther who prefaced the German edition of the bible with “My spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book [because] … Christ is neither taught in it nor recognized.” So, did I not read carefully enough in Kirsch’s text? Did the Book of Revelation sneak into the New Testament? How exactly did this happen?
Next, I couldn’t help but be numbed by all of the “insane crazies” who held on so tightly to the Book of Revelation. However, I was impressed by the initial cynics who pointed their fingers at the church as a possibility for the antichrist. Clergymen were profiting from church-owned property, sleeping around with other women uncontrollably and people like Hildegard of Bingen could not ignore this hypocrisy. Hildegard’s vivid and gruesome vision of a monster crawling out of a woman’s vagina was, according to Kirsch, a symbol of the antichrist coming out of the church. This vision, although a little “insane crazy” sparked a long series of attacks against the church.
After this initial phase of pointing the finger at the church and finally settling in America, each generation of Christians found someone to label as the antichrist. Mohammad, King George III, the Soviet Union (or as Reagan would call “The Evil Empire”) all have been given a chance at being the antichrist. Of course, lets not forget the countless number of mathematicians and ordinary folk who were and still are trying to find the exact time Jesus is coming back. I may half-jokingly call these fundamentalists “insane crazies”, but in reality I learned that it is a product of severe anxiety. They have, first and foremost, taken the Book of Revelation and every other biblical concept regarding the end of the world as true. So, idea of an apocalypse produces overwhelming feelings of anxiety that some Christians feel they may temporarily quell by believing they have it all figured out.
Kirsch concludes his book following a discussion of American apocalyptic film and current Arab-Israeli relations with a depressing, but realistic vision of the end of the world. As he is ending his book, he also shares his opinion directly and plainly for the first time: “The long, strange and ultimately tragic history of the Book of Revelation – the history of a delusion – proves that it [apocalyptic idea] is always a cruel idea and sometimes a deadly one.” By the conclusion, I honestly couldn’t help but feel a bit “insane crazy” at how this short book has completely taken over the minds of so many people.
Hi Ilirjan,
I think Kirsch is more upfront with his position on the damage done by followers of the Book of Revelation than you suggest in your post. It’s useful to distinguish a given text from its myriad interpretations. On one hand, it’s a powerful text (albeit “insane crazy”) with dramatic tension, vivid imagery, and memorable phrases. On the other hand, it is a text that has been used by numerous individuals and groups over the centuries to justify some of the worst atrocities imaginable. That is not to let John off the hook, since Kirsch shows how morally absolutistic the text is, and how much it advances revenge against perceived enemies. But the historical question about how those elements have been used to condemn others who don’t adhere to certain beliefs is the crucial issue for him.
For class, why don’t you bring up this statement from your post and take the discussion up with Whitney, given what she says about anxiety: “apocalypse produces overwhelming feelings of anxiety that some Christians feel they may temporarily quell by believing they have it all figured out.”
As readers, it is somewhat challenging to distance ourselves from the dramatic elements of the text and its effects on the public, and somehow assess the historical influence of the Book of Revelation on social and cultural beliefs/trends. This holds true even when we consider the Church which, as you point out, was rendered as the Antichrist at one point by certain believers. On the one hand, the Church papacy was guilty of corruption, lasciviousness, and crime. However, would it be a stretch to claim that the illegitimate clergy were the equivalent of the Antichrist as imagined in the Book of Revelation? This correlation and connection resonated with many other ideas of the Antichrist proposed by fundamentalists of the time. I would say that this exemplifies the “freedom and power to manipulate data in order to achieve the desired consonance”. (Kermode,9) It seems more difficult to judge the adequacy of these associations that it is to understand how they came about and the role they played in apocalyptic culture.