To the early Puritan writers and thinkers, Apocalypse was a matter of survival, a crucial concern that immediately affected the community – the day of doom was coming in any way, and people needed to be prepared for it. That was all the more true as the Puritan settlements were founded into an outstanding position – as John Winthrop puts it in his 1630 sermon:
For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken...we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God...We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us til we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.
Even to Winthrop, the colonies were in an exposed historical position – they were a role model for the world. Note that he is still talking about this world, planet earth – he is not reaching out to a world beyond, to salvation or damnation. When he fears that the Puritan settlers may be “consumed out of the good land whither we are going”, he refers to the Atlantic sea board, not to paradise, and the dangers there were very material and physical: starvation, epidemics, the opposition of Native Americans and French. There were many ways for Puritan settlers to be involved in life-threatening circumstances – but then, of course, they also dealt out blows to their new homeland in a way that made it clear that they were there to stay, and hopefully – to prosper. The first 20-30 years after the landing of the Mayflower in 1620 were a time of harsh dogma and rigor – these Puritans really meant business and tried to curb and stop short any danger that might pose a threat to the Puritan community. We already heard about the Pequot war of 1637, during which the Pequot nation was virtually annihilated – and importantly, this was more about politics and power, and less about a more or less symbolic fight against evil Indians – in their fight against the Pequot nation, the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonists were not above collaborating with Indian allies of tribes other than the Pequot.
More dangerous for the survival of the group as it came to the Americas – as a Protestant elite community – was the resistance from within: Indians could, with any amount of bad will, be degraded to barbaric savages in the way of Christian history, that is: they could be removed and disposed of, if necessary. What, however, could you do with Puritan believers who went renegade and broke the tight community spirit? These heretics had to be kicked out of and expelled from the community – and in a country just barely yet colonized, this was a serious punishment, of course. We heard about the case of Anne Hutchinson, the female renegade preacher who held enormously successful bible classes in her home – and who finally had to go into exile. She may have fallen from the grace of the Puritan fathers, because she was an uncommonly powerful woman, and as such a danger to established male and female spheres: women were not exactly liberated in Puritan society. More importantly, however, she was a heretic – a threat to the dogmatic unity that the Puritans wanted to have preserved: one community of believers linked in a firm opposition against Anglican and Roman Catholic churches who had come to the new world to spread the Protestant gospel.
The appeal to a sense of community surfaces again and again in writings of that early colonial period – it is almost desperately fought for in Michael Wigglesworth’s Day of Doom, parts of which we read: he goes to some length to gather every Puritan of the colonies under his umbrella of sin and damnation, stresses that each sinful settler was obliged to the welfare of the colonies and therefore in a need of reformation..and that included the smallest of the small.
You sinners are, and such a share
as sinners may expect,
Such you shall have; for I do save
none but mine own Elect.
Yet to compare your sin with their,
who liv'd a longer time,
I do confess yours is much less,
though every sins's a crime.
A crime it is, therefore in bliss
you may not hope to dwell;
But unto you I shall allow
the easiest room in Hell.
The glorious King thus answering,
they cease, and plead no longer;
Their Consciences must needs confess
his Reasons are the stronger. (stanzas 180-181)
While the Puritans practiced infant baptism, as Christian Crouch had the good grace to explain, they became genuine Puritans and full community members when they entered their church - a public confession to all the other members included. Only in the church was provided for the baptism they would need to be saved.
The enemy within was more threatening than the enemy without. This was even more so when the Puritan settlers finally discovered the social phenomenon that witch hunts had been in the old world for centuries: it would certainly be wrong to blame it all on Cotton Mather, but still, his case for the whole witch industry is a strong one. Witches existed and had to be found out, which required reflection but also strength and rigor: after all, their masquerades were many, they could easily pretend even to innocence, and before you knew it, they had bedevilled your cattle or sheep! In a way the witch craze, not restricted to Salem, though linked most prominently with it, was a mode of auto-aggression – and now that auto-aggression was no longer executed merely in a rhetorical way, but also in a physical way that included fires, pyres, and stakes.
You always get the feeling that thinkers like Cotton Mather were living under a very conspicuous and forceful impression of an immanent end – the end of all was always only just a step away, and you therefore had to choose your path in a most careful manner.
In contrast, Jonathan Edwards – though only a few decades away from Mather in time – presents an outlook on history that seemed way more promising and optimistic. This was the age of radical progress, and he was writing on the eve of the American and French Revolutions and during the heyday of Enlightenment philosophy: something great was going on, rational, scientific methods seemed like a promise for civilization and Edwards argued that religion would be able to go hand in hand with it. The world would move down an successful road into bliss, and Puritan religion would still be a part of it. Edwards is really creating an outlook on the world and on world history, he’s looking into the future – whereas Mather seemed just barely able to peer behind the colony borders, if at all, and barely able to go beyond that tight and snug and almost at times cozy colonial world that the Puritans had fought for so hard.
Edwards died in 1757.
19 years later, the Declaration of Independence was drafted. 30 years later, the US Constitution was ratified. 32 years later, the French Revolution kicked off: all of these major events are, in their own respective ways, closely linked with the development of American apocalypses.
The Declaration of Independence of The United States of America
IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
[it's unanimous: the colonial community still expressed its unity, but now it is unity on a democratic cause that would require a violent struggle - the War of Independence - but against very material political forces, not, say, against witches. The supernatural no longer has the importance for creating a community spirit it still had for Mather]
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God [laws of nature and of nature's god: rational thought and religion go together here] entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, [for example: by means of a vote. When Puritans disagreed with their community's overall direction, the choices open to them all somehow led into exile] and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.—Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. [out with thee! - King of Britain: French and Indians had lost the privilege of being the most important carriers of evil, as they had been to the Puritans, now action was also taken against the British king and his servants]
To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
What did all this mean to the concept of apocalypse?
To begin with, it became smaller in scope: the survival of the community was now in the caring hands of a government chartered under a democratic constitution – apocalypses received a more individual face, there was no longer what you might call one coherent apocalyptic movement united in the belief that certain steps were necessary in preparation of and for the end. At the same time, the community was enlarged – there was no way to depend on Puritans alone to colonize that giant and vast land: people of all creeds and non-creeds had to be recruited as settlers to still largely empty land. As population became more diverse, apocalypses became more diverse, as well.
And with Melville apocalypse is finally entering the realm of the humorous...
First, the case for Moby Dick as an apocalyptic story...
The story follows the whaling voyage of a ship name – tadaa! – the Pequod. Driven by mad-eccentric-choleric Captain Ahab, who had a leg severed by Moby Dick, the infamous white whale, the crew finally launch a battle royal against the monster whale – and everyone dies in the attempt, except of course – the narrator, Ishmael.
The novel is more than a bit drawn out in allegorical terms – no dates are given, all crew members have symbolic names – but it is also unmistakably American. Melville describes the whaling voyage at length as an American enterprise, the whaling industry as an American sphere of influence, and he also gives us all kind of quaint details on the impact the whaling trade has on coastal communities like Nantucket Island, off the coast of Massachusetts. Also, the ship is home to an American microcosmos - with all ethnicities (black, white, Indian) gathered into one confined space: the Pequod stands in as a symbol for the US, and its final destruction - is an apocalyptic turnabout of the world into destruction.
There are some points to follow if one wants to draw out the apocalypse the novel is presenting –
The Individual, Ishmael
The sense of community will come only as an afterthought. At the beginning, the narrator Ishmael is on his own, following his impulses in a Romantic manner:
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago- never mind how long precisely- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
The Apocalyptic Beast
The narrator is at pains to show that Moby Dick is not just a whale, but a beast – taken from some fable or, rather, straight out of the Bible. His common byname throughout the novel is Leviathan - that name is applied to all whales in the book, but our whale, Moby Dick, has some extra special powers: to begin with, he is able to reside at several places all over the world – at one and the same time, like a fabled beast, or like a New England witch. Also, these Leviathans are a big issue in world literature, as Melville presents it - and that one special whale has a massive novel all of his own, thank Melville.
The whale no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler? Who wrote the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job? And who composed the first narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than Alfred the Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from Other, the Norwegian whale-hunter of those times! And who pronounced our glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke!
The Apocalyptic Community, finally
I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge.
Finally, Captain Ahab manages to swear the ship's crew in on the fight against the beast - and it doesn't come easily. They are far from enthusiastic at first: it takes a charismatic man/preacher like Ahab to do the trick. Once, however, they have entered the apocalyptic movement, they follow through with it to the bitter end. All men go down. Moby Dick is alive.
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