Review of Heaven on Earth

John Reilly   Heaven on Earth The Varieties of the Millennial Experience By Richard Landes Oxford University Press, 2011 499 Pages, $35.00 ISBN 978-0-19-975359-8   For more than 1500 years, a conspiracy of clerics and historiographers has worked, with great success, to hide one of the principal features of cultural and political evolution. Now in these latter days it is more important than ever that the truth be revealed, since the failure to take this hidden factor into consideration threatens the survival of civilization, and maybe of the human race itself. Perhaps this summary slightly overstates the thesis of this book by Richard Landes, professor of medieval history at Boston University. (He was also the principal organizer just before the year 2000 of the Center for Millennial Studies, of which your reviewer was a member.) The book attempts a typology of millennial movements and apocalyptic thinking, illuminated by often fascinating cross-cultural and historical case studies. At the same time, the book argues that historiography and anthropology often do not categorize these things correctly when they appear, and even tend to expunge the millennial elements from the textual record. Unlike most conspiracy theories, this one has the advantage of being true in large part. Neither is the evidence far to seek: the book's subtitle is a play on the title of the famous study by William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, a work which somehow manages not to treat endtime excitement, though that is very often a conspicuous feature of religious revivals and personal conversions. "Millennialism" may be taken to be the image of a future state of the world in which there will be peace and prosperity and societal justice, with the sorrowful aspects of the human condition overcome. The term comes from the "millennium," the thousand-year reign of the saints mentioned in the Book of Revelation, though similar notions occur in other religious traditions. In fact, any model of history that forecasts a happy ending can usefully be treated as "millennial," at least for some purposes. "Apocalyptic" can mean the sudden transition from ordinary history to the millennial condition. In some models, this transition can be effected solely through divine intervention, in which case the human role is likely to be rather passive. To the extent that "history" is a deep cause for the change, the human role is more active. The extreme case in the activist direction is pure social revolution. All these possibilities are eschatological, in the sense that they treat of the eschaton ("end"), but they are not the only possible eschatologies. Indeed, as we are repeatedly reminded in this book, the orthodox eschatology for most of Latin Christendom has almost invariably some variation on that of St. Augustine of Hippo (AD 354 - 430). Augustine discouraged, to put it mildly, the unique identification of any historical period or political regime with the fulfillment of eschatological hope. The end, the Second Coming, would not be the product of historical evolution, and it would end history rather than inaugurate a new historical era, however blissful. Augustine, we may note, had a hard job: he spent a large part of his career arguing that "Now is not the time to panic" during an era when a reasonable man might respond, "If not now, when?" Be that as it may, in the typology of this book, he is an "owl," indeed the Great Horned Owl of Western historiography. Owls are a perennial class of commentators who argue, not always persuasively, that current disasters do not mean the world is about to end. They do not argue that an end will not come, or even necessarily that there will be no millennium; they are at their most owlish when they quibble about the date of the endtime. Most annoyingly, from the author's point of view, owls in the aftermath of a millennial moment will retrospectively conclude that there was nothing much to it (the world did not end, did it?) and insist that they themselves were not taken in, not at all. Confusing documents suggesting otherwise tend to go missing. The opposite perennial figure is the "rooster," who crows that the night is nearly over, the time is now, and everyone must cast aside caution in the impending dawn. Roosters often get a hearing. Even casual students of history will have run across episodes like the Great Disappointment of the 1840s, or Savonarola's Florence. On rarer occasions, they take over the barnyard, for a while. Among the case studies in this book are the Taiping Rebellion in China (the biggest war in the 19th century, remember) and the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions. (The author leans toward the view that the Nazis were working from a largely theosophical model of history.) Millennial movements can follow more than one pattern, but the one that interests the author shares the morphology of "The Emperor's New Clothes." In this view, the millennial moment starts with the appearance of roosters who announce that some marvelous change is about to occur. They gain so large a following that the skeptical owls are drowned out or silenced, or even converted. Then more and more resources are invested in the change occurring; people who see no evidence of this are forced to silence by social pressure. Finally, some event or counter-propaganda makes it obvious that the roosters were wrong and that it is safe to say so. The author expresses surprise that this pattern repeats again and again, often in the same region, despite the fact that every millennial movement ends in the disappointment of the little boy pointing out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. To that might say that it is not at all clear that disappointment is always absolute. As the books notes in passing, the Eastern Zhou period of Chinese history was characterized by what in effect was an elite millennial movement directed at imperial unification; when unification occurred in 221 BC, the relevant story for the imperial ideologues may have been not so much "The Emperor's New Clothes" as "The Monkey's Paw." Less speculatively, we may note that the author suggests that a millennial moment happens when "private transcripts," views that are often common knowledge but rejected by the elite, became "public transcripts" that can be openly discussed. The more oppressive the public regime is, the more vengeful the private transcripts are likely to be. (Fans of Dune may recall Lady Jessica's horror when she learns the particular version of the messiah archetype common on Arrakis: "They have that story here? This must be a terrible place!") At least in the Latin West, however, what may sometimes happen is that perfectly acceptable ideas just shift from type to prophecy. Augustine, after all, did not really dispense with prophecy, but rather turned it into a system of types. These are actually quite useful. Even the most hootfully skeptical owl can still call an oppressive emperor "an antichrist" if not "the Antichrist," for instance, and there are always slacking congregations that can be tarred with the same brush as Revelation's Church of Laodicea. Such uses keep millennial ideas in circulation, no matter how many times they are misused. In any case, the author is particularly interested in two aspects of the Emperor's New Clothes scenario. The first is the tendency of millennial proponents to bet more resources on a prophecy being true as evidence of its disconfirmation accumulates. The point is made with sad clarity in the study of the Xhosa Cattle-Slayings of the 1850s. A prophetess in southern Africa (millennialism is a notably girly phenomenon the world over) predicted that the English would disappear and the Xhosa ancestors would return if the Xhosa slew all their cattle. Not all did, but enough did to cause distress. As the situation worsened, the failure of the ancestors to return was answered by the prophetic insistence that not enough cattle had been slain. This created a famine that resulted in the collapse of Xhosa society. The phenomenon of millennial improvidence is not unfamiliar; the Millerites in America in the 1840s were equally willing to bet their livelihoods on the Parousia, even if they not quite so wholesale about mere destruction. The author argues, however, that a similar pattern characterizes millennial tyrannies when it becomes clear that their political ambitions may have limits. Certainly the famous Anabaptist Munster Commune of the 1530s and the Taiping rebellion became most radical and paranoid as their strategic situation deteriorated. (We may also note that it was only in the closing weeks of the Third Reich that Joseph Goebbels felt liberated enough to implement the Leftist economic policy that has always been dear to his heart.) The issue fades into the book's other principal interest in the evolution of millennial movements: how do societies handle millennial disappointment. Not all of them do this badly. Tom Holland's popular history of the origins of Western civilization, The Forge of Christendom, is based largely on Professor Landes's assessment of the state of millennial enthusiasm around the year 1000. That book concludes that the major political institutions of Christendom arose in large part as preparation for the impending final struggle against Antichrist. The solid institution-building survived the millennial excitement (much of the direct evidence for which, to Professor Landes's continuing frustration, has been lost or glossed by pestilential owls). On the other hand, it is also possible for a millennial regime, if it survives, to simply refuse to acknowledge that it is not Heaven on Earth, and to use extreme measures to ensure that all of its subjects not just say so but think so; this is totalitarian option, which we are given to understand is a system that tries to replace all private transcripts with the Party Line. There is also the possibility of mere nihilism, of a regime that, like Denethor, will have naught if it cannot get what it wants. In this the Taiping and the Nazis may not have been of dissimilar mind. In some ways, the most interesting and problematical part of the book is the case study of Akhenaton (1353 - 1336 BC) and the Amarna Period, which the author interprets as a brief and unsuccessful exercise in "iconic millennialism." Millennialism is usually demotic; it is the contemplation by those below of the humbling of those above, whether to replace them or to create a regime of equality (of which more later). It is not unknown, however, for those who are already high and mighty to embrace the view that their situation is not just a happy accident, but an ontological necessity. Thus, it is not out of place to characterize the founding of the Han Dynasty as the establishment of a "millennial empire." Some church historians made an at least analogous argument about the Roman Empire after Constantine. (Augustine agreed that the empire was providential, but he said it was not the City of God; he wrote a book about it.) Heaven on Earth would have it that Akhenaton's solar monotheism was similarly an attempt to bring the divine order permanently to earth, based on a theology too exalted to acknowledge death. Now it is notoriously the case that Egyptian elites after Akhenaton's death did their considerable best to expunge his deeds and name from the historical record. They almost succeeded; it was not until Napoleon's expedition to Egypt that it became possible for archeology to recover Akhenaton, who had been known previously only in an abbreviated and garbled form. If ever there were a golden age of owls, it would have been during the attempted erasure of Akhenaton. Still, that probably is not enough to make the millennialism model fit here. The millennium is a kind of narrative closure. If the Egyptians ever had a story about history that needed such a thing, it has not come to our attention. Not even the largest flock of reactionary owls could have expunged it. What has come to our attention are the hints that Akhenaton, or rather the garbled popular recollection of him, may have had some influence on the Greek-language Hermetic literature of the first few centuries AD. After a fashion, Akhenaton may be Hermes Trismegistus. That is a name to conjure with. As the author points out, there is a direct connection between Hermeticism and the Renaissance, and to the more uppity kinds of monarchical absolutism that followed immediately. ("Sun King"? Versailles?! See, it's all connected!!!) It also, obviously, affected the would-be Hermetic revolutionaries of the stamp of Giordano Bruno of the 16th and 17th centuries. This book does not seem to mention Dame Francis Yates's The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, which deals with that period, but it does discuss her work about the origins of the idea of technological progress. Unlike Egypt, the West does have a story that invites millennial closure, and into that story the Hermetic material, it seems to this reviewer, fit like a key in a lock. Heaven on Earth suggests that the greatest and chiefest of millennial movements is modernity itself. How is modernity different from other millennial movements? For one thing, it promotes a species of demotic millennialism that seeks to dissolve what the author calls the "prime divider" between commons and elites. Modern societies tend to favor equality before the law, universal literacy, respect for manual labor, and personal autonomy. The author traces this insistence back to the casteless law codes of the Torah. That is fair enough. We may also note, though, that authors from Tom Holland to Francis Fukuyama say that what really made civil society possible in the West is that the pope and the emperor started arguing in the 11th century about who had the right to appoint the bishops in southern Germany. They are still at it, and so the space between principle and power is still open. That does not mean it will always be, though. The author notes that there are two important apocalyptic movements in the early 21st century. One is the Global Jihad; the book's explanation of why 1979 AD (1400 AH) was an important apocalyptic date is as good an explanation as you are likely to find for why millennial studies should play a larger role in political science. The other is Anthropogenic Global Warming, which seems to serve some of its adherents as consolation for the collapse of eschatological Marxism. Many people in the West are very interested in or the other, but whoever is interested in one is almost invariably dismissive of the other. In both contexts, postmodernism and its condescension to objective truth (note the lack of "scare quotes") may be to blame, but it is particularly inapposite with regard to the Jihad, since the jihadis are not at all reticent about truth claims. In any case, the millennial structure persists. It's not just a mistake, and it's not something that just applies to other people.

How's that High-Vibration Light-Worker with Powerful Luminosity Workin' Out for Ya?

How's that High-Vibration Light-Worker with Powerful Luminosity Workin' Out for Ya?

Part two of the previous post has been completely obviated as a result of my encounter with Richard Landes' new book -- required reading for Raccoons -- Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience. It's pretty much the history book I've been looking for my whole life. I only wish it had been around when I was writing my book, since it tracks perhaps the most important vector of mind parasites: millennial and apocalyptic discourse and behavior. 

 

In my view -- and for my purposes -- it presents something like a master key for the interpretation of history. In fact, I would probably push the evidence further than does the more sober Landes. However, at the same time, I am very suspicious of just how much it does explain, for a theory that explains everything has explained nothing. Landes, who is aware of this, recalls presenting a paper, and a participant asking "What does this not explain?" Or, in scientific parlance, "What evidence can falsify your claims?"

 

Most history focuses upon -- and loses itself in -- a mere chronicle of outward events. But I am particularly interested in the invisible interior of history, or what one might call the "collective cosmic interior." 

 

This is ironic, because postmodern multiculturalists like to pretend that this is their bailiwick, but they view the subject in a hopelessly uncritical manner; for the moment one says there are no bad or immoral cultures, one has rendered thinking inoperative. Not only that, but multiculturalists are infamously prone to the spiritual disease of "anti-America right or wrong." 

 

One virtue of Landes' book is that he is an equal-opportunity critic. Somewhat like The Simpsons, everyone is in for ridicule, for it seems that everyone has "millennial tendencies." We all know that religions tend to be built around millennial dreams and fantasies, but even worse are the secular millennialists, since they are under the illusion that they are "rational." 

 

But nothing is more dangerous than the millennial movement that wraps itself in reason, beginning with the French Revolution and then playing out in Marxism, communism, and the ubiquitous liberal Cult of Expertise (consisting of gifted people who have never met you, and yet, Know Better how to run your life). 

 

(Interestingly, Landes notes that the main feature distinguishing communism from fascism is not the results -- which are so similar -- but the fact that the latter rejects modernity and grounds itself in romanticism rather than a pretense of science -- blood, soil, will, volk, etc. Thus, the 60s generation was and is more fascist than communist; its superficial scientism is always in the service of its deep romanticism).

 

One has only to look at the bizarre behavior and apocalyptic rhetoric of Al Gore to see the process in action. Or -- and we will be discussing this in much more detail -- the millennial hopes that rode Obama until that feeble horse collapsed in the dust. In point of fact, it is the other way around: the millennial dream is always in the saddle, and we are being ridden. We are the ones the millennial script is always waiting for.

 

One reason the book will be controversial is that it presents a frontal challenge to "positivist notions about the clear division between secular and religious phenomena" (Landes). 

 

Also, Landes is aware of the fact that any imaginative "lumper" such as himself can and will be picked apart by hyper-critical and anal-obsessive academic "splitters," because that is what splitters do: toss cold water on forest fliers. Such professional myopics habitually confuse the limits of their thinking with the countours of reality, and therefore "objectivize their own limitations" (Schuon). (That's my bobnoxious opinion, not Landes'.)

 

One of the questions we will be addressing in this series of posts is why people seem to be built in this way, foolishly but repeatedly expecting messianic saviors, dramatic transformations in human nature, a new world order in which the powerless become the powerful, and the attainment of paradise on earth. 

 

Surprisingly, nowhere in the book does Landes even speculate on the ultimate source of this odd behavior. Which is actually quite admirable, since he is an historian and doesn't pretend to be a psychologist or anthropologist (although he is insanely well read; I cannot recall reading a book with such a breadth and depth of sources, from left to right and center to fringe). 

 

Landes does, however, present a number of working hypotheses, including the idea "that the emotional drives that underlie perfectionist social thinking, whether secular or religious, whether monotheist or polytheist or a-theist, share important dynamics." 

 

Another important feature is that these movements are by definition doomed to failure, which results in an "apocalyptic curve," from "inebriating acceleration out of, and disorienting free-fall back into, 'normal time.'" But this is the most dangerous moment of the curve, that is, when the leaders must deal with "the terrible disappointment in realizing their expectations [have] failed."

 

For this is when the millennial movement, in order to preserve its newly won power, turns to violence, demonization, and improvisational "apocalyptic mind jazz" in order to keep itself going. In a generally non-violent political culture such as ours, this is when the bullshit really starts flying. "The stimulus wasn't big enough!" "My opponents are terrorists!" "The racists ate my homework!" 

 

As Landes describes them, millennial movements are relatively bloodless as they ascend to power. Even Hitler did so through legitimate channels, and the communist revolution was no more bloody than the average. The real mayhem begins when failure is apparent -- when paradise is not at hand, the eschaton fails to arrive, and human beings are the same greedy, envious, petty, and narcissistic rascals they've always been. More on this dreary pattern later on.

 

Landes doesn't get into it -- perhaps too hot to handle for a member of academia -- but I don't think there's any doubt that Obama rode in on a wave of millennial hopes and dreams. In fact, it is almost as if he were aware of millennial dynamics, and consciously strove to trigger and exploit them in the masses. 

 

Consider his '08 campaign speeches, which were otherwise content free, and yet, had a hypnotic effect which his supporters were not shy in acknowledging. Deepak described Obama in literally messianic terms, as a "quantum leap" in human evolution, and a columnist in San Francisco described him as a wondrous "light worker." 

 

And Obama wasn't the least bit hesitant to accept the messianic mantle. People have ascribed this to his narcissism, but if Landes is correct -- and I believe he is -- there was something much deeper going on, i.e., much deeper than garden variety clinical pathology. After all, it really doesn't explain anything to point out that Mao, or Castro, or Lenin were narcissists, especially since Churchill and Roosevelt were probably narcissists as well. 

 

Here is an example of straight up millennialism: "generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth." 

 

To track down that quote, I stumbled upon this interesting looking blog which is quite to the point: Is Barack Obama the Messiah? Look at some of the quotes in the sidebar: Obama is 

 

"A Lightworker -- An Attuned Being with Powerful Luminosity and High-Vibration Integrity who will actually help usher in a New Way of Being" (that was from the above-noted SF columnist).

 

--"We're here to evolve to a higher plane... he is an evolved leader... [he] has an ear for eloquence and a Tongue dipped in the Unvarnished Truth" (Oprah Winfrey). 

 

--"Barack Obama is our collective representation of our purest hopes, our highest visions and our deepest knowings.... He's our product out of the all-knowing quantum field of intelligence" (Eve Konstantine). 

 

--"He is not operating on the same plane as ordinary politicians... the agent of transformation in an age of revolution, as a figure uniquely qualified to open the door to the 21st century" (Gary Hart). 

 

--"This is bigger than Kennedy.... This is the New Testament" (Tingles Matthews). 

 

--"Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate.... He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh.... Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves" (Ezra Klein).

 

The question is, what makes people believe and say such crazy things? What is the nature of this insanity? Are they "just" crazy, or stupid, or drunk? Again, such explanations, although emotionally satisfying, are far too facile. This is a different kind of madness, and it seems to be part of our standard equipment. 

The Millennial Psychosis

Daryl McCann

The customary bookends of human existence are the golden age or paradise of childhood and the private apocalypse that marks every individual’s End of Time. The intervening period, which comprises the balance of our lives, allows us to be productive and responsible adults. For the most part we muddle through life in a matter-of-fact way with our alarm clock switched to what Richard Landes calls Normal Time. In the midst of modernity, says Landes, Normal Time frequently allows for “the bourgeois joys of earned financial success, unpretentious love and family intimacy”. All solid and even worthy attainments, no doubt, but lacking the exhilaration of life experienced on Apocalyptic Time, in which “everything quickens, enlivens, coheres”. Appearing at the most extreme point in Landes’s millennialist continuum are the active cataclysmic agitators with their taste for both “sacred joy” and “sacred violence”, seeking right here and right now both paradise and the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it.

The term millennialism has conventionally been used in the context of Jewish and Christian notions of a thousand-year Messiah-linked golden age. A premillennial Christian view locates the second coming immediately prior to a thousand years of peace and righteousness, a period of time when Satan, according to John of the Apocalypse, will be locked away for a thousand years. Conversely, postmillennialism has Christ’s return taking place at the culmination of the Great Peace. Traditional or mainstream Christian denominations, including Roman Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy, Lutheranism, Calvinism and Anglicanism, are often described as amillennial. St Augustine (354–430 AD) famously made the amillennial case. While acknowledging John of the Apocalypse’s notion of “a new heaven and a new earth”, Augustine considered it neither prudent nor productive to speculate on the timing of Judgment Day. As Landes summarises: 

He rejects the two most common options: neither say soon, for it can lead to disappointment and loss of faith; nor say later, for it discourages the faithful. Augustine’s solution: it can happen any time, and we cannot know when; live with the apocalypse at your shoulder. 

The problem for the historian, argues Landes, is that Augustinian-influenced scholars have obscured reality on the ground. A medievalist by training, Landes can recount the outbreak of any number of millennial incidents down through the ages. Although he agrees that St Augustine’s “radical agnostic” position on the proximity of the End of Time was “intellectually responsible”, the dominance of his position has created a scholastic impediment to uncovering the truth about our tumultuous past: “My quarrel with Augustine comes not with how he wants us to read the apocalyptic future, but how he and those who accept his approach read the Apocalypse-driven past.”                                

St Augustine, in the somewhat over-simplified terminology of Heaven on Earth, is an owl, a conservative creature “anxious of if not hostile to rapid change, suspicious of radical new ideas and approaches”. Owls, according to Landes, are frequently wise and yet there are times when their “reflexive” defence of the old order amounts to nothing more than a lack of imagination and “an unwillingness to question the prevailing paradigm”. Roosters, on the other hand, embody qualities that are the very antithesis of owls. Their underlying temperament is delusional optimism about the transformative capacity of human beings and terrestrial existence in general. Though he does not claim to be the first to introduce the expression “cognitive dissonance” into millennial studies, Landes acknowledges it as essential to understanding the horror that ensues when a millennial movement, especially an active cataclysmic one, collides (as it inexorably does) with reality: “Behind the exuberant embrace of the rooster lies a profound and deeply worrisome capability for violent intolerance.”

The extent of millennial-driven movements in history is little known to us, contends Landes, because such entities inevitably crash and burn. Moreover, the official story of their rise and fall has almost always been left to the roosters’ arch-enemies, the owls, to record. Owls are perfectly within their rights to depict the misery inflicted by their nemesis, but posterity is the loser when the (transient) persuasiveness and appeal of millennialists fail to appear in our archives. Landes labels much of our written history as vesperian; that is, blind-sided historians (bats) “working with owls’ documents”. Apart from the most blatant and obvious cases—for instance, the Xhosa Cattle-Slaying, the Melanesian Cargo Cults and the Chinese Taiping—“scholarly consensus” remains reluctant to recognise the millennial dimension of historical events.

That being the case, Heaven on Earth signifies a most astonishing slap in the face to “scholarly consensus”. Landes’s interpretation of the French Revolution is as good an example as any: 

For the French Revolution, the millennial hope lay not in scripture, but in Rousseau’s theories of freedom and the general will. The popular voice, once freed, would express the “general will”, the desire of all … It was a religious belief that the people, once freed, were incorruptible.[emphasis added]  

The Reign of Reason degenerated into a Reign of Terror not least because the revolutionaries assumed their anti-Christian secularism (that is to say, their so-called rationalism) safeguarded them from millennial madness. This faith in “reason” was unfounded. For example, Immanuel Kant’s belief that a paradise of sorts would be “almost inevitable” with the advent of “freedom” was not only a religious sentiment, but also clearly irrational. More irrational, it might be argued, than the Laws of Moses and the Christian notion of Original Sin that the revolutionaries vainly attempted to lay to rest. During the exhilaration, panic, paranoia and disillusionment of the revolutionary moment, Robespierre entered Apocalyptic Time. As a result, the “moral genius” of 1789, whilst attempting to bludgeon into existence a Golden Age of Reason, became the “moral monster” of 1794. Landes reminds us that this whole bloodthirsty spectacle followed a similar pattern of behaviour exhibited during the more explicitly millennial Münster Rebellion of 1534–35.     

Landes’s exposé on Karl Marx’s millennialism also resonates. For Marx and every other young soul on fire, 1848 was supposed to be a cataclysmic moment in which “the whole destiny of humanity was at stake”. The young revolutionaries of Europe were charged with the crazy belief that the French Revolution failed not because it had “become a victim of excess and self-destructive paranoia”, but rather that it did not go far enough and abolish private property: “No longer did the key to bliss lie in the breaking of aristocratic bondage and inaugurating an egalitarian law code, but in ridding everyone of the wretched behaviour that comes with property ownership.” Landes contends that Marx’s success as a radical journalist and author in those dispiriting post-1848 years owed much to his talent for conveniently discovering the secret laws of history and, as a result, sustaining the faith of his traumatised comrades. Marx’s “breakthrough” kept the apocalyptic fantasy of the Forty-Eighters alive even when all and sundry had re-entered Normal Time. Thus, Marx’s malicious (and incessant) derision of “utopian socialism” amounted to nothing more than the pot calling the kettle black.                     

Heaven on Earth gainfully re-defines Lenin as a Bakunist. Landes persuasively argues that Lenin did not seize power in October 1917 simply to spark an international revolution. From the moment he arrived at the Finland Station in April, Lenin was gripped by a cataclysmic mania. It is in the light of this that the economic and political policy of War Communism (1918–21), along with the Red Terror, need to be re-evaluated. Lenin and his apologists have always explained away the fanaticism and barbarism of the Bolshevik regime as reactive and temporary measures intended only to defend the victory of October, and yet there is more than enough proof to suggest this was not the case at all. Landes quotes Trotsky from 1924: “I recall very clearly that in the first period, at Smolnyi, at meetings of the Council of People’s Commissars, Lenin invariably repeated that we shall have socialism in half a year and become the mightiest state.” Having been to the mountain, metaphorically speaking, and spied “the egalitarian messianic world to come”, Lenin was willing and able “to sacrifice rivers of blood” to protect his delusion, becoming in the process something more terrifying than a madman on the loose. He possessed, as Landes says, all the best reasons to do all the worst things.

The harrowing tale of Maoism, especially with regards to the Great Leap Forward (1958–61) and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–76), has a similar configuration. As with the case of Hong Xiuquan and the Taiping Rebellion a century earlier, Mao Zedong remained intent on establishing his own version of the “Great Peace”. The popular energy and brilliance of a peasantry unshackled by the Great Leap Forward were supposed to deliver to China a thousand-year golden age. Instead they resulted in the deaths of 30 to 40 million innocents, eclipsing the 20 to 35 million who died on account of Hong Xiuquan’s millennial war. Unlike Hong, Mao never claimed the messianic title of “God’s Chinese Son” or “Jesus’s Younger Brother”, although the song “The East is Red”, the de facto anthem of the People’s Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution, does refer to Mao as “the people’s great saviour”. Landes has every right to admonish the reluctance of critics to countenance a connection between modern revolutionary movements and millennialism on the say-so of revolutionaries who define themselves as “secular”. Accordingly, for Landes the terms “millenarianism” and “millennialism” are interchangeable. The phenomenon is not just Christian or Jewish but pan-religious and secular as well, and the refusal to appreciate that on the part of scholars can have disastrous consequences.                                         

The Third Reich represents one more episode of millennial psychosis. Somehow the Little Corporal managed to persuade the German people experiencing an “unbearable disappointment” in the aftermath of the Great War that he was their Messianic Führer. The hard part was not so much Hitler convincing them they were in the midst of apocalyptic times, but that he understood “the apocalyptic scenario” by which they would “come out triumphant”. And the millennial nature of that triumph was crystal clear to every German: 

Hence in the German language, Tausendjähriges Reich means literally “millennial kingdom,” and all earlier uses of the term referred to Christian millennial movements, as in the considerable literature on “chiliasmus” at the turn of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries in Germany. And when the Nazi ideologues developed their notions of the Third Reich as a millennial kingdom, they knew precisely to what they referred. 

Landes notes that only “the rare few go the distance, and acknowledge Nazism as a millennial religion”. Marxists and other materialists, for instance, are fundamentally incapable of making sense of history driven by religion. Christians, on the other hand, are understandably sensitive to the accusation that Nazism has its roots in their religion, even if Hitler’s idea of Jesus Christ—“the warrior on horseback with a sword issuing from his mouth, slaughtering the enemies of the Lord”—is somewhat at variance with what Landes terms “the more familiar forms of Christianity”.  

Perhaps the most contentious claim in Heaven on Earth is Landes’s assertion that the current global jihad is an apocalyptical millennial movement. What until very recently was “marginal discourse” has taken hold “at the centre of a major religious culture”. According to Landes, the owls of Islam have customarily downplayed the apocalyptic or messianic aspects of the faith, in much the same way St Augustine and his intellectual descendants have done with Christianity. In the chapter titled “Enraged Millennialism”, Landes explains the genesis of modern-day Islamic millennialism, a development that most Western academics and politicians have been totally incapable of decoding. For instance, Hamas, born out of the Muslin Brotherhood, is intent on something more globally ambitious than the destruction of Israel, however preposterous that might sound:           

Who among the founders of Hamas in 1988, as they penned their genocidal charter, would imagine that Christian pacifists would come to their defence, and crowds of infidels would march with their banners in the streets of European capitals in 2009 shouting “Allah Akhbar” and carrying signs reading “We are Hamas”? 

The idiocy of political correctness continues to encourage the murderous fantasies of active cataclysmic agents throughout the world, when all the time the West should be meeting their millennial madness with hard reality.     

One of the unanticipated twists in Heaven on Earth appears almost at the end. Landes correctly—and not unexpectedly given the subject of his work—identifies the Anthropogenic Global Warming movement as millennial in character. But then, to the astonishment of this reader, he rates it as more worthy than most. He is right, of course, to insist that Al Gore’s 2006 Inconvenient Truth “swept away all but the most dogged sceptics” but appears unaware that the “now-marginalized owls” are not so marginalised in 2011, and that Al Gore’s status as an apocalyptic prophet continues to diminish. The wave of credulity that once “consecrated” Gore and the IPCC with the joint Nobel Peace Prize is crashing. Perhaps Landes would profit from reading Donna Laframboise’s new book on the IPCC, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert. Then again, maybe the failure of judgment by a man who is expert at illuminating human folly corroborates the wider thesis pursued in Heaven on Earth. We are all capable of magical thinking.                             

Richard Landes’s book, with all its impressive if disquieting insights into the human condition, has the power to unsettle. Religion, as depicted in Heaven on Earth, frequently misleads and agitates those seeking deliverance from the fear, absurdity and futility that haunt our mortal existence. Unfortunately, the price for attaining a condition in which “everything quickens, enlivens, coheres” is too often heightened delusion and much, much worse. That said, all of the political movements that have forsworn conventional religion, the Jacobins, the communists, and the Nazis, turn out to be no less religious—and in their own way far more irrational—than those they so bitterly oppose.

Where to from here? Heaven on Earth has left me with an urge to reacquaint myself with the works of Augustine of Hippo. Part of his legacy might be a tradition of owlish scholarship that has critically underplayed the role of irrationality and psychosis in our history. Nevertheless, Augustine’s personal journey could hardly be described as owlish in the Landes sense of “suspicious of radical new ideas” or an “an unwillingness to question the prevailing paradigm”. After all, he did not live his entire life as a Christian. In a book drowning in the shrill voices of the unhinged and the damned, St Augustine strikes me as magnificently sane.       

Daryl McCann wrote on Mark Steyn’s After America in the November issue.

Review by William Collins, Library Journal

Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience
Richard Allen Landes
Library Journal (07/01/2011)

In a significant contribution to the study of millennialist movements, Landes (history, Boston Univ.; “Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements”) studies the varieties of such movements across the centuries, movements that hope for a human society made perfect via an apocalypse creating heaven on earth. Landes points to apocalyptic arcs in secular history that have led us out of and back into normal time. Such movements can be dangerous when believers gain authority, whether in the founding of new religions, in secular revolutions, or in holocausts.

Landes contrasts “owls”—recorders of normal time in history—with the “roosters” of apocalyptic time who voice the hidden transcript. He carefully analyzes common elements in tribal, agrarian, modern secular, and postmodern apocalyptic movements and warns that today’s mutually reinforcing apocalyptic threats—”anthropogenic global warming” and “global jihad”—are subject to dichotomous left-right political posturing rather than sober reflection and action, amplifying the dangers of both.

VERDICT This work places Landes high among millennialism historians such as Michael Barkun (“A Culture of Conspiracy”) and Catherine Wessinger (“Millennialism, Persecution, and Violence”). Addressed to educated readers interested in religious, political, and social apocalyptic movements, it succeeds in both analyzing past catastrophic millennialist movements and predicting what the future may hold.

—William P. Collins, Library of Congress Copyright 2011 Reed Business Information.

ISBN: 0199753598 | EAN: 9780199753598
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA  | Publication Date: August, 2011