 B O O K R EV I EW S

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Apocalypse Then: Prophecy and the Making of the Modern World, by Arthur H.
Williamson (Westport, CT: Praeger, ; pp. . .).

This is, in many ways, quite a disappointing book. It seems intended to

accompany—or to have grown out of—a North American university course on
the contribution of apocalyptic culture to Western Civilisation. Nonetheless,
Apocalypse Then falls between two stools: often too sophisticated for its target
audience of undergraduates and general readers, yet at times too superficial to
convince consistently the expert. Consequently it is neither textbook nor
specialist work. Trying too hard on occasions to please students—‘no graduate
students need apply’ (p. ), ‘no sacred Cliff Notes’ (p. ), ‘turn up at seminars,
drop in at academic cocktail parties’ (p. ), ‘music, dancing, and, oh yes
seminars and lectures’ (p. )—Williamson has several deft one-liners that are
almost counterbalanced in equal measure by some jarring turns of phrase.
Thus, on the one hand, he writes that Jesus ‘clearly did not anticipate a new
faith, much less a church’ (p. ); that Protestantism was ‘so resolutely text-
based, so emphatically a religion of the Word’ (p. ); that ‘a world without the
apocalypse remained a world without a master narrative’ (p. ): but, on the
other hand, Charles Stuart’s trial and execution ‘resulted from his bottomless,
truly Nixonian duplicity’ (p. ), allegations of Quaker female public nudity
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are reduced to ‘chicks up front!’ (p. ), the Quaker leader James Nayler’s
female followers are ‘groupies’ (p. ), while even the élite priest-scientists of
Tommaso Campanella’s utopian City of the Sun like to ‘have a good shag’ on
rare occasions (p. ).
Then there are the constant generalisations which appear destined to be cut
and pasted unquestioningly into essays. For it must be said that at the heart of
Williamson’s book are a number of problematic claims emanating from his
central assertion that apocalyptic culture has been the midwife of modernity.
Accordingly, he maintains that the apocalypse underwrote the sixteenth-
century Reformation, the seventeenth-century British Revolution and the
eighteenth-century American Revolution, as well as proving ‘a crucial catalyst
in the emergence of liberal values, political democracy, and even modern
science’ (p. ). This argument is developed in ten chapters, beginning with an
overview of prophecy, eschatology and the apocalypse in ancient Judaism, the

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inter-testamental and medieval period, all the way through to late fifteenth-
century Florence. Here Williamson is at his weakest, and, despite good use of
illustrations, makes several statements that can be considered at best dubious
or at worst bizarre. Chapter Two examines the revival of apocalyptic thought
during the Reformation when, in Williamson’s view, apocalyptic expectations
‘reached into the European mainstream intellectually, socially, culturally’ for
‘the first time in more than a millennium’ (p. ). He is particularly strong on
the Scottish contribution, notably George Buchanan and his humanist
successors. Next, Williamson turns to Habsburg dreams of a Last World
Empire and their counterpoint in English, Scottish and Dutch colonial
projects. Linking commercial republicanism with apocalyptic preoccupations,
he suggests that religious, political and economic liberties ‘melded together as
a common cause’ upon apocalyptic foundations to herald the birth of a new
world (p. ). His fourth chapter on prophecy and nature discusses early
modern utopian writing, particularly Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis and
Campanella’s City of the Sun, together with the scepticism of Michel de
Montaigne, witchcraft—especially in France and Scotland—and demonology.
Underpinning it is the contention that ‘the apocalypse changed magic from an
individual quest for private gnosis to a community quest for open discovery
and the shared integration of multiple insights’ (p. ).
Chapter Five focuses upon the British Revolutions of the mid-seventeenth
century. According to Williamson, ‘modern notions of civil liberty—freedom
of the press, religious toleration, freedom of assembly—largely arose in the
modern world through these events’ (p. ). This is an old and some would say
Whiggish view. What is unusual is Williamson’s belief that the apocalypse
‘proved integral to each of these developments’ and ‘made all of them possible’
(p. ). Moreover, Williamson states that the Digger Gerrard Winstanley was
influenced by the German mystic Jacob Boehme, although this remains
unproven (p. ). Again, in the following chapter on prophecy and science, he
insists that ‘[John] Locke did not share [Isaac] Newton’s religious convictions
at all’ (p. ), which is puzzling, as recent research has demonstrated Locke’s
sympathy for many religious and political views espoused by anti-trinitarians.
The remainder of this chapter concentrates on Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory
of the Earth (–), situating it persuasively as a work of apocalyptic proto-
geology which has parallels with ideas held by modern Creationists. Next,
Williamson turns his attention to Quakers, Jews and ‘other subversives’.
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Contrasting the ‘wholesome, kind-hearted man on the Quaker Oats package’
with the Quakers’ ‘well-founded’ image—at least in the eyes of their critics—as
‘an ecstatic counterculture, a living denial . . . of all order, even civic life’
(p. ), he informs us that they called themselves the Society of Friends,
though this was rare before  (early Quakers generally declared themselves
to be Children of Light). More space is given to Jewish messianic movements,
particularly the exploits of Sabbatai Sevi, together with the Amsterdam Rabbi
Menasseh ben Israel and his attempt in  to secure the readmission of Jews
to England after a supposed absence of  years.
Chapter Eight looks at prominent Enlightenment thinkers such as Diderot,
Voltaire and Condorcet. Undeterred by their apparent lack of interest in the
apocalypse, Williamson nonetheless emphasises Condorcet’s belief in progress,
which is envisaged as a rational substitute. Having touched on the Cambridge
Platonists, but only named ‘bizarre Britons’ such as Richard Brothers and
Joanne Southcott—William Blake is later mentioned only in passing, the

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Swedish polymath and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg omitted entirely—he
asserts that ‘the apocalypse not only created modernity, it also survived it’
(p. ). This contention is justified by pointing towards the development of
‘civil millennialism’ in eighteenth-century North America (p. ), regarded here
as offering an historical vision that reached a crescendo in the s. Though
the French Revolution is treated too briefly, there is an interesting discussion of
Napoleon’s convening of the Grand Jewish Sanhedrin in . Attention is also
given to the second Great Awakening, the American Civil War and, in the last
chapter, the Bolshevik Revolution and the American civil-rights movement—
including Martin Luther King’s memorable  ‘I have a dream’ speech,
which, Williamson believes, drew on Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s
dream (Daniel ).
Williamson therefore advances a bold, provocative and wide-ranging thesis
in Apocalypse Then. Despite concerning himself less with theological aspects of
his subject, more with discerning larger political and cultural patterns (pp. –),
and despite being sometimes wide of the mark, he has nevertheless written a
lively work which will stimulate student discussions.
ARIEL HESSAYON
doi:./ehr/ceq Goldsmiths, University of London

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