Ideas: Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds

IDEAS: Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds

IDEAS Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds

Edited by

BERNIE LUCHT

Copyright © Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2005.

Introduction copyright © Bernie Lucht, 2005.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Ideas: brilliant thinkers speak their minds / Bernie Lucht, editor.

Interviews and lectures first broadcast on the

CBC radio program Ideas.

ISBN 0-86492-439-9

1. Geopolitics. 2. World history. 3. Social history.

I. Lucht, Bernie, 1944- II. Title.

D20.I34 2005    909    C2005-904975-8

Published with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the

New Brunswick Culture and Sport Secretariat. We acknowledge the financial support

of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development

Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

Goose Lane Editions

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Contents

IDEAS: Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds

The Best Ideas You’ll Hear Tonight

Ideas . . . The Best Ideas You’ll Hear Tonight, intoned CBC announcer Ken Haslam. With those words, spoken in his cultivated baritone voice, Haslam launched the first episode of what was described as the new look in CBC educational broadcasting, an hour-long show of radio for the mind, to be heard each weeknight. It was Monday, October 24, 1965.

The program was the brainchild of two CBC Radio producers, Phyllis Webb and Bill Young. Webb was a West Coast poet who had always wanted to work in radio. She joined the CBC in 1964 and began producing a lecture series called University of the Air. In later years, she would win a Governor General’s award for her collection of poetry, The Vision Tree: Selected Poems. Bill Young was an American who had come to Canada to study. In 1964, while he was doing graduate work in English at the University of Toronto, he was recruited to the CBC. His first job was to produce The Learning Stage, an adult education program with lectures and interviews on such subjects as theatre, film, music, travel and poetry.

Bill Young recalls attending a meeting at which producers were asked to consider amalgamating programs with similar mandates. The CBC needed to save money. Plus ça change. Webb was enthusiastic. She felt the lecture format of her program was too constraining and wanted to try doing something livelier. She and Young worked together on a proposal to merge University of the Air and The Learning Stage to create a new nightly program that would take the best of each series and present adult education on radio using a variety of approaches. They sent the proposal to CBC management, and it was accepted.

The new program was launched under the title The Best Ideas You’ll Hear Tonight, but within months it was shortened to Ideas. Webb and Young hired a third person to work with them, a young woman named Janet Somerville. Somerville had been working on her master’s degree in theology at the University of St. Michael’s College in Toronto when she learned of the vacancy at Ideas. She jumped at the opportunity and applied. She didn’t expect to get the job, and when she did, it was to her absolute astonishment. The program also had a roster of freelance contributors. Among the best known were Timothy Findley, who became the show’s literary editor, and Bill Whitehead, its science editor.

Idea Number One for Monday, Haslam announced briskly, Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, and the show began with a discussion about Darwin’s 1831 trip to the Galapagos. Webb was disappointed with that fi rst show and says the series got off to a horrible start. Janet Somerville says it was class-roomy and text-bookish. But the new series quickly found its feet. The second program was much better and eventually won an award.

What was happening in the world in 1965, the year Ideas went on the air? Lester B. Pearson was Canada’s prime minister. After a bitter debate, the country adopted a new flag with the red maple leaf at its centre. Trans-Canada Airlines was renamed Air Canada. A failure at the Niagara Generating Station caused the Great Northeast Blackout in November, leaving twenty-five million people in Ontario and the eastern United States without power for up to twelve hours. Internationally, the colony of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, after months of threats, made a dramatic Unilateral Declaration of Independence under a white minority government led by Ian Smith. Lyndon Johnson began his second term as US president: he proclaimed the Great Society and committed the first combat troops to Vietnam. As the year progressed, Johnson would escalate the war in Vietnam to unprecedented levels. T.S. Eliot and Somerset Maugham died in 1965. The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Pink Floyd launched their musical careers. The Beatles started shooting their second film, Help!, and released the all-time favourite song, Yesterday. American television premiered Hogan’s Heroes and I Dream of Jeannie. The Sound of Music starring Julie Andrews was released and received an Oscar for Best Picture of the Year. 1965 was a busy year, and, oh yes, there was Ideas.

Ideas underlie every aspect of our lives. They shape how we think and speak about the world, how we behave, how we see ourselves, individually and in society. Ideas drive imagination; they determine how we conceive the past, the present and the future; they inform our political and social arrangements, our arts and culture, science, technology and religion, our personal relationships and beliefs.

Lister Sinclair, genius and polymath, an icon of Canadian culture and broadcasting, was the much-loved host of Ideas between 1983 and 1999. He described the purpose of the show elegantly and concisely: Ideas, he said, was about helping to locate ourselves in the universe. Locating ourselves in the universe is the work of all of us, as we struggle to understand our individual lives and the world around us. It is an enormous task — vast, complex and never-ending. In forty years of broadcasting, this task has been addressed by the thousands of thinkers who have appeared on Ideas. They have explored an array of subjects that span the range of human thought, imagination, knowledge and experience. They have been presented in documentaries, interviews, lectures, debates, panel discussions and public forums.

Ideas has also been a venue for experimentation. In 1967, as a Centennial project, the show commissioned Glenn Gould to create a documentary called The Idea of North. Gould had long been intrigued by the North, which he described as an incredible tapestry of tundra and taiga which constitutes the arctic and sub-arctic of our country. In 1967, very few Canadians had been there; for most people, the North was a mythical landscape, more dreamed about and imagined than experienced. In The Idea of North, Gould brought together four people who had lived and worked there — a geographer, a sociologist, a government official and a nurse — to talk about the role the North had played in their lives. There was also a fifth character, Wally McLean, whom Gould had met during a train trip from Winnipeg to Fort Churchill. McLean was a surveyor, and as the train travelled north, he and Gould talked in what stretched into a day-long conversation. I began to realize, Gould wrote, that his relation to a craft, which has as its subject the land, enabled him to read the signs of that land, to find in the most minute measurement a suggestion of the infinite, to encompass the universal within the particular. Gould used Wally McLean as the narrator of the documentary.

The Idea of North was the first example of what Gould called contrapuntal radio, in which several people are sometimes heard speaking all at once. Their voices were arranged like the parts for instruments in an orchestra — sometimes playing solos, sometimes duets, sometimes three or more together. Because of the way Gould combined the voices, working with the different timbres and rhythms of speech, you could follow what each person was saying and, through the overlapping voices, hear the interplay of related ideas. According to Lorne Tulk, the brilliant sound engineer who collaborated with Gould on The Idea of North, Gould conceived the technique after discovering that the material he wanted to use was fourteen minutes longer than the hour-long format would permit.

The Idea of North was the first of three contrapuntal radio documentaries Gould produced over the course of a decade that became known as The Solitude Trilogy. The programs explored the theme of isolation — geographic, political, cultural and religious.

Ideas is the home of the annual Massey Lectures series. Named in honour Vincent Massey, the first Canadian Governor General, the Massey Lectures began in 1961, conceived as a venue where prominent thinkers could explore significant contemporary ideas for Canadian audiences. The fi rst Massey lecturer was Lady Barbara Ward Jackson. Her lecture series, The Rich Nations and the Poor The Best Ideas You’ll Hear Tonight Nations, became an early classic in the literature of the relationship between developing and developed countries. From 1961 until 1994, distinguished thinkers from both Canada and abroad delivered the lectures, among them Northrop Frye, John Kenneth Galbraith, Martin Luther King, Jr., R.D. Laing, George Grant, George Steiner, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jane Jacobs, Carlos Fuentes, Doris Lessing, Gregory Baum, Noam Chomsky, Ursula Franklin, Charles Taylor and Conor Cruise O’Brien.

In 1995, we decided to draw exclusively on the Canadian intellectual community for the Massey Lectures. Since then, they have been given by John Ralston Saul, Hugh Kenner, Jean Vanier, Robert Fulford, Michael Ignatieff, Janice Gross Stein, Margaret Visser, Thomas King, Ronald Wright and Stephen Lewis.

Today the Massey Lectures are the fruit of the collaboration of three institutions: the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Massey College in the University of Toronto, and House of Anansi Press. For most of their history, the Massey Lectures were recorded in the austere confines of a studio in Toronto, broadcast on the radio, and then published as a book. In 2002, hoping to expand their impact, we moved them out of the studio and into the energetic give-and-take of the public world. Since then, the Massey Lectures have been presented each autumn to packed auditoriums on university campuses across Canada. They are broadcast in November by the CBC and published by House of Anansi Press. The book is usually a national best-seller, and the Massey Lectures have become an annual highlight of Canadian intellectual life

The question I am asked most frequently is, Where do you get your ideas? I’m usually at a loss for an answer. Science fiction writer Frederick Pohl said, in an interview recorded for Ideas in the late 1970s, that science fiction writers are often asked the same thing. He said they found this experience so common that a group of them got together to figure out what to say. They decided that whenever someone asked them, Where do you get your ideas? they would all say the same thing: Schenectady.

So where do we get our ideas? Ideas is a production unit of ten full-time people. Nine of us work in Toronto; one works in Edmonton and is responsible for Ideas production from the three prairie provinces. We have half-time producers in Vancouver and Montreal, as well as contributing producers in other cities. We all get together twice a year — in February and June — to discuss what is on our minds, what is going on in the world, and what we think the show should be doing. We also read and discuss approximately two hundred proposals that come to us from freelance contributors all over the country. Taken together, the producers and freelance contributors, as well as the many listeners who give us suggestions, make up a large pool of people. They have diverse lives in different parts of the country. They have their antennae out, they observe the world, and they read the times. They have all kinds of concerns, interests and passions, and they represent both breadth and depth of thought in our country. We get our ideas from them.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what Ideas is trying to do. The first word that comes to mind is eclectic. We try to make the show eclectic, in both the range of topics we choose and the ways we present them on air. A second word is resonant. The best Ideas programs strike a chord. They help us recognize truths that may be felt but not yet articulated, the way good fiction or poetry does. The best Ideas programs draw on the character of our contributors to provide original perspectives and insight. My hope is that, hearing an Ideas show, a listener will say, I never knew that, or, I never thought about it that way before. I have always felt that the show should induce doubt in listeners’ minds — doubt about previously held opinion, doubt about what we claim to know. Our world is constantly creating itself, it is constantly in motion, dynamic and complex, slippery and impossible to grasp.

Making Ideas programs is an exercise in excitement, struggle, frustration, discovery and joy: the excitement of having an idea that compels you to want to share it with others; the struggle of working through the idea, clarifying it, finding out what it is about and how to best express it; the frustration that you can’t seem to get it right; the discovery of new territory as you work on the idea and your understanding of it deepens; and the joy of breakthrough, a Zen-like moment when things become clear, the piece comes together, and you look back and wonder what all the fuss was about.

I have been associated with Ideas for more than thirty years of its forty-year life — as a production assistant, producer and executive producer. I fell in love with the show while I was still at university and nursed an early ambition to work on it, though I was smitten first by television. As a grade ten student, I had watched the production of a television variety show in Montreal, where I grew up. It was a glorious experience: the singers, the music, the cameras, the boom microphones, the cables, the lights, the professional showmanship of performers and crews working together in precise co-ordination to produce an entertainment spectacle — the loud brashness of it all. The next week, I began a persistent campaign to get a job at the CBC. I was seventeen years old. I began to mercilessly harass a personnel officer at the CBC headquarters in Montreal. I went to his office. I filled out an application form. He did a short interview with me. He smiled at me indulgently and promised to call if anything turned up. I called him first. I would call again and again. I would show up at his desk. He must have grown mightily tired of it, but he was kind and put up with me. This went on for a couple of years.

In the summer of 1964, when I was nineteen, the door opened a crack and I got a summer job as a researcher on a CBC television program called The Observer, a nightly half-hour show of current events and commentary. In the years that followed, I made an unsuccessful attempt to do graduate work in political science while working early morning and late night shifts as a producer at Radio Canada International. I spent a year producing Cross-Country Checkup. Then I quit the CBC and went to Nigeria for two years as a CUSO volunteer teacher. While in Africa, I set my sights on Ideas. In the fall of 1971, I returned to Canada and arrived in Toronto at the show’s door, welcomed by the executive producer of the time, a bespectacled and kindly man named Lester Sugarman.

My first job was to edit the raw studio recordings of that year’s Massey lecturer, James A. Corry, one of Canada’s most distinguished political scientists and a former principal of Queen’s University. Corry’s topic was The Power of the Law. He was a naturally slow and thoughtful speaker, and as I listened to the tape of him speaking, I wanted him to talk faster. The urge to speed him up became uncontrollable, so I started cutting out pauses — between paragraphs, between sentences, between clauses and phrases within sentences, and sometimes between single words. This was laborious work. It required making thousands of edits on quarter-inch audiotape. These days we edit digitally, on computers, but until the late 1990s, it was all done by hand. This involved physically marking the tape, slicing bits out with a razor blade and sticking the ends back together with a special adhesive tape, making sure the edit was undetectable to the ear. It was a good idea to save the bits that were cut out, including breaths and pauses, just in case you needed to put them back. After Corry’s Massey Lectures were broadcast, the show received comments from many people who said that they had enjoyed the lectures but were a bit puzzled: they had never heard Corry talk so quickly.

Ideas is where I have learned the crafts of radio production and journalism. I am grateful to have found mentors — too numerous to count or name, including many who never thought of themselves as mentors. They guided me — intellectually, professionally and personally — with kindness and toughness. The experience continues to be a privilege; it is a daily joy to work amongst brilliant and talented colleagues, to encounter some of the finest thinkers of our age and to foster intellectual delight in the minds of our listeners.

We have compiled the material for this book, Ideas: Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the show. Most Ideas programs are radio documentaries. Generally, documentaries do not translate well into print: they are made for the ear. So in pondering what to include in this book, we have decided not to use material that originally appeared in documentary form; it would be too fragmented and might not make sense on the page. We have chosen to focus on prominent thinkers who have appeared on the program during its first forty years, drawing primarily on lectures and extended interviews. The selections cluster around three main themes: societal values, how we govern ourselves, and navigating in the international community. These are contentious areas and have been significant amongst the show’s concerns over the decades: democracy, dictatorship, the nature of the nation-state, the public good, ideology, utopianism, secularism, religion, peace and violence. Many of the questions that people were grappling with twenty, thirty and forty years ago are startlingly similar today, even in an environment that has radically changed. And while each thinker speaks from his or her specific experience in time, the themes and concerns still resonate.

The subtitle of this volume is Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds. Ideas has had the privilege of hosting some of the greatest minds in the world, but space allows us to revisit only a small number of them here. In deciding on the selections for this book, a balance between Canadian and international thinkers has been attempted, and each of the four decades that the show has been on the air has been represented as well as possible, given the changing nature of the broadcasts over the years and the varied access to materials. Fidelity to the content of the original broadcasts has remained vitally important; at the same time, it has been necessary to edit the presentations somewhat to offer a satisfying reading experience. Having presented these unique voices over the airwaves, we now present them to your mind’s ear in the hope that they will make you say once again, I never knew that, or, I never thought about it that way before.

I would like to thank Susanne Alexander, Publisher of Goose Lane Editions in Fredericton, for her enthusiasm in embracing this project when she learned that CBC wanted to produce a book marking Ideas’ fortieth anniversary. Particular thanks must go to Laurel Boone, Editorial Director of Goose Lane; she has been the backbone of the project, working many long hours under insanely tight deadlines to pull the book together. I also want to thank the following people at the CBC for their diligence in uncovering material in the archives and helping get it ready for publication: Barbara Brown, Ian Godfrey, Scott Heaney, Brent Michaluk, Alison Moss and Susan Young.

I want to express my special gratitude to all my colleagues at Ideas — the past and present members of the production staff and the freelance contributors who have worked on the show and continue to work on it today; whatever success Ideas has had is the result of their collective talent, imagination and hard work. Thanks also to the many people who have appeared as interviewees on the show over the years; they have generously given of their time and expertise. Ultimately, we do this work for our listeners, so it’s most important to thank them as well: they keep us honest and they keep us going.

Finally, I want to thank Susan Crammond, my wife, for her sharp eye and sharp mind, and for being the love of my life.

Bernie Lucht

Toronto, July 2005

Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults and Millennial Beliefs through the Ages

The 1999 Barbara Frum Lecture

EUGEN WEBER

Eugen Weber, a specialist in the history of France, is the author of a dozen books and the writer and narrator of a fifty-two-part PBS series, The Western Tradition. Until his retirement, he held the Chair of Modern European History at the University of California in Los Angeles. Professor Weber says every era has prophesied that the end is nigh. Apocalyptic prophecies are attempts to interpret their times, to console and guide, to suggest the meaning of the present and the future. They relate fear to hope: tribulation and horror will usher in public and private bliss, free of pain and evil.

EUGEN WEBER

When the University of Toronto invited me to deliver the Barbara Frum Lecture of 1999, they asked, appropriately enough, that it should be about fin des siècles, in the plural. The more I worried that particular bone, however, the less meat I found there was on it. Centuries, like the one happily just ending, appear to be a sixteenth century invention, a hesitant usage of the seventeenth century. The special attention focused on a century’s end, with a halo of reference that we associate with the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth — this was a one-shot affair. Like our own century’s tail end, that of the eighteenth century and of every other attracted no endist label, so that anyone tackling fin des siècles in the plural would have gathered a very sparse harvest.

And yet, ends and, along with ends, beginnings have played a large part in humanity’s experience of itself, not least in that Judeo-Christian tradition that forms the backbone of western history, from Asia Minor to the Pacific shore. Hebrew history plunges its roots in the first five books of the Bible. The history of Christendom, in turn, is irrigated by the New Testament, which culminates in the Book of Revelation.

Apocalypse — the revelation or unveiling of the world’s destiny and of mankind’s fate — fascinated Jews and their Christian off-spring for at least the last two thousand two hundred years. And so I turned to this grand and more final version. I turned from fin de siècle to fin du monde, to the end of days. Christians and Jews knew or thought they knew how the world began, and they had a fair idea how it was supposed to end, although precise circumstances remained debatable. Knowledge of the end affects the turns and manner or progression to it. For a long time, Christian history developed along with prophecy, along with interpretation of prophecy within a destiny that had been foretold. Apocalypse, judgment and the thousand-year millennium that would follow Christ’s Second Coming, or in some versions precede it, were major parts of this process, and they loomed vastly larger than calendar dates. Indeed, the measuring of worldly time was mainly relevant insofar as it served divine time. The Christian year began with Advent, the weeks that lead up to the Incarnation, the Passion, the Resurrection of Christ, and liturgically this is what it continues to do. What sometimes escapes notice is that the first familiar act celebrated at Christmas and at Easter is only an introduction to the climactic conclusion, when the long struggle between satanic darkness and divine light is at last resolved in the triumph of good over evil. One tends to think of Advent as leading up to the birth of Christ, but it culminates in his Second Coming, and that is what the rite and the lessons and the sermons of the rite are about: the judgment to come. And before it, the Son of Man coming in a cloud, with great power and glory, and the terrors that precede his coming, and the magic millennial interlude between his preliminary and his final victory over Satan. That is what generations were exposed to, one generation after another during hundreds and hundreds of years. That is what they grew up with, that is what they grew old regarding as history and as premonitory history, as real as the seasons were real and as sure. It entered the language, it entered the mindset, it entered the store of common resonances. It aroused great passion and great controversy, and when, after the seventeenth century, it gradually began to seep out of educated consciousness, it did so only partially and quite incompletely.

Matthew the Apostle recorded the words that Jesus uttered on the Mount of Olives about his Second Coming and the end of the world and the signs that were to announce these events: war and rumours of war, nation rising against nation, kingdom against kingdom, famines, earthquakes, plagues, false prophets, deception, hate, iniquity abounding, love waxing cold. And since very few times are without all or most of these things, Christ had drawn the logical conclusion. This generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled. And he urged his followers to watch and be ready. There was no knowing when the Lord would come, but he would come certainly and he would come very soon. Certainly, though, as the Church of Christ became less embattled and more institutionalized — a little like some universities — imminence seeped out and protraction percolated ecclesiastical thinking. Like death, judgment was only suspended. Judgment was deferred by a variety of interpretations and rationalizations. But a Christian world, however un-Christian it may have been in practice, was a less obvious candidate for closure than its unregenerate, pagan predecessor. It argued less forcefully for a catastrophe, for catastrophic abolition, and more for emendation, reformation, melioration.

Still, preparations for the Second Coming also involved defensive aggression against the forces of darkness. Stiff-necked Jews were cohorts of Antichrist who, in some versions, was to be born of the Tribe of Dan. The followers of Mohammed were the embodiment of Antichrist. Mongols, Tartars were the hosts of Gog and Magog, and interpretations of this order inspired the Crusades, which were not, or not only, about conquest and trade but about getting to Jerusalem in time for the Second Coming, or else to help these last days and the judgment along — conversion of the heathen, return of the Jews to Palestine preliminary to their conversion in the world’s dusk, restoration of those holy places where the heavenly Jerusalem would logically replace its biblical and its present-day successor.

But, as you well know, the Jews did not play their part, which was to go back to Palestine, convert to the True Faith, rebuild the Temple and welcome the Messiah whom they once rejected. And this stubborn blindness of unregenerate Jews was going to exasperate true believers through the ages, was going to contribute to what we now call anti-Semitism, which persisted into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for all sorts of reasons, but not least because the Jewish conspiracy was part of Antichrist’s campaign against Christ and against God.

Jews or not, however, the Crusades stumbled. The Temple was not rebuilt and Jerusalem substitutes proved carnal — all too carnal. Petrarch, like his contemporaries, identified papal Avignon with Babylon, and Rome was similarly identified. Popes and anti-popes denounced each other as Antichrists. Emperors and princes were similarly designated. You can see the Jews had a lot of competitors. There was little clarity and much menace about inter-Christian relations.

Dante assigns a conspicuous place in his Paradise to a visionary friar patronized by three popes in his twelfth-century lifetime and condemned by a fourth pope in the Lateran Council of 1215. That’s Joachim of Fiore. Joachim argued from the corruption of the world around him to the imminence of Antichrist and of Armageddon and the final reign of the saints. Not Mary but the Great Whore ruled over the kings of the earth. At the end of the twelfth century, Richard the Lionhearted, on his way to the Third Crusade, asked to see Abbott Joachim and inquired about Antichrist. The holy abbot told him that the Son of Perdition had already been born in Rome and was now living in Paris and waiting to become pope. Not long after this, Joachim’s younger contemporary, St. Francis of Assisi, would be identified with the angel of the Sixth Seal, of Revelations VI, when the sun became black, when the moon became red as blood and the stars of heaven fell onto the earth, for the great day of wrath was come, just before the servants of God were sealed and led before His throne.

Thomas of Solano was the first Franciscan to compose a biography of St. Francis, and it was also Thomas who rewrote the Church’s Prayer for the Dead into the classic Dies Irae, Day of wrath, of doom impending/David’s word with Sybille’s blending/Heaven and earth in ashes ending. One more instance of how, from William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book, from The Divine Comedy to Piers Ploughman and Chaucer, apocalyptic references and apocalyptic images rerun through the Middle Ages, which is not surprising since so much of these times felt like the last times. Not least the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which were clearly cut out for the deadly apocalyptic Horsemen — war, famine, plague and death — and hell on earth and their retinue of visionaries and scourging flagellants, massacres, flaming pyres, mass burnings of beggars and vagabonds and witches like Joan of Arc and especially of Jews, who obstinately refused to see the light. What people said, noted a Norman priest, was that the world was ending.

And people were right, of course. The world kept right on ending. The art and the literature of the Renaissance — because I’ve now come to the Renaissance, being a very modern historian — bulge with reminders and predictions of apocalyptic prophecy, much as did those of the centuries preceding, which the Renaissance, of course, relegated to middle status — the Middle Ages. The fresco of Anti-christ that Luca Signorelli painted at Orvieto and the nativity that Botticelli painted, with its explicit reference to apocalypse — works like these and others testify to the familiarity, to the popularity, of the theme. Even in the Sistine Chapel, pagan prophetesses rubbed elbows with their male Old Testament counterparts. In the Borgia apartments that Pinturicchio decorated, the mysteries of Osiris prefaced the mysteries of Christ. Clearly, the abomination of desolation stood in the holy place once again.

So no wonder that Savonarola, in Florence, identified the Borgia pope with Antichrist and preached about the world’s ending being very close, with a French invasion of Italy compared to a second Deluge. But Savonarola did not get very far or last very long. Luther, who was fi fteen when Savonarola sizzled at the stake, did much better. Whatever else the Reformation contributed to our history, it reaffi rmed this coming end, and it etched two apocalyptic images very firmly into Protestant law: the pope as Antichrist and the Church as the Whore of Babylon. They and other evil powers were going to be overthrown by heavenly armies that would install the City of God on earth.

Now, some took this as a promise of divine realization, where the great horseman called Faithful and True comes to smite the nations and rule them with a rod of iron. Others saw it as an invitation to advance His coming and the binding of the great beast, the Devil, and the millennium to follow. One way or another, St. Paul had declared that in God’s kingdom every rule and every authority and power would be destroyed. The end, or the millennium, or the new earth that followed the Second Coming, and the end of death and the end of hell, these would have no room for property or principalities and powers. And this was a vision that inspired not only millenarian rebels in the Middle and early Modern ages but pietists and cultists, religious or secular, Christian and socialist, to our own day. You can find it in hundreds of sects like that of the Doukhobors in Russia and in Canada, with their vegetarianism and pacifism and rejection of ungodly state and society, including schools and man-made laws. But you can also find it in violent and non-violent secularized eschatologies that mobilized millennial terminology to preach the passage from the era of necessity into the realm of freedom: the abolition of conflict — including class conflict — the end of oppression, the end of oppressors and of oppressed, the Kingdom of God without a god.

Prophecies of this sort have always been around, and prophecies tend to destabilize, and so princes and prelates, ready enough to use them when convenient, legislated against them. But another kind of prophecy just as enticing, just as destabilizing, also persisted. Whatever the warnings, first of Jesus and then of his church, men could not forebear from trying to discover the time of his return. Old Testament and New furnished intimations: there were signs to be found, there were lengths of time to be computed, all sorts of evidence for seekers to identify, to calculate the timetable of God’s plan for the world and for its ending.

The missionaries whom Pope Gregory the Great sent to convert England at the end of the sixth century were part of Gregory’s preparations for the coming end. The voyages that Isabella of Castille and Ferdinand of Aragon financed nine centuries later had a similar scope. Columbus was fascinated by the prospect of the end of the world approaching, but first, as explained in Matthew, the gospel had to be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations and then shall the end come. It was up to Columbus to help God’s work along by carrying the message of salvation to those as yet unsaved and by providing the means, the goad, to free Jerusalem and to rebuild the Temple.

And it was up to his masters, too. Like other contemporary princes, Ferdinand and Isabella had been hailed as messiahs, and messianic expectations encouraged them to harry Jews and Muslims, trying to convert them, as they hoped to teach the heathen overseas, so as to create or to accelerate conditions for a Second Coming, and the gold of the Indies would finance the ultimate Crusade.

Now, that was one way in which fervent eschatological calculations affected the history of the world, but if you want to calculate right, you need to perfect your observations and your estimations. The coming of Arabic numerals and especially of the zero in the thirteenth century made calculation easier. You could promote yourself from counting on your fingers. And calculation could address itself, not to biblical clues alone, but to astrological clues as well.

Heaven was a screen where signs appeared by which God forewarned mankind. This orderly activity in the heavens anticipated greater or lesser disorder down on earth, and in 1572, when the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe discovered a new star, he presented it as heralding the Second Coming. His near-contemporary, John Napier, of Merchiston, near Edinburgh, devised logarithms in order to simplify the complicated calculations needed for astronomy, but he valued logs chiefly because they speeded up his calculations of the number of the Beast.

Newton died in 1727, having written more than two million words about alchemy and hermetic law. We remember him as the patron saint of