Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)
STUDIES - Zsolt K. Virágos: The American Brand of the Myth of Apocalypse
God's promise to his chosen people, and in 1727 Samuel Sewall proposed, in his Phaenomena quaedam apocalyptica..., America as the site of the triumphant culmination of world history. To illustrate the nature and flavor of traditional apocalyptic discourse, I am going to quote a short passage, which will perhaps demonstrate some of the basic components and the Bible-ispired verbal ritualization of the traditional millennial conception. The author is David Austin (1760— 1831), one of the most important successors in the New England millennial convention to Jonathan Edwards (1703—1758), whose disciple he actually was. The time is the end of the 18th century, the period of Revolutionary trial then underway. The title of the book is The Downfall of Mystical Babylon; or Key to the Providence of God, in the Political Operations of 1793—94} Behold, then, this hero of America, wielding the standard of civil and religious liberty over these United States! —Follow him , in his strides , across the Atlantic!— See him, with his spear already in the heart of the beast! —See tyranny, civil and ecclesiastical, bleeding at every pore! See the votaries of the tyrants; of the beasts; of the false prophets, and serpents of the earth , ranged in battle array, to withstand the progress and dominion of him, who has commission to break down the usurpation of tyranny —to let the prisoner out of the prisonhouse; and to set the vassal in bondage free from his chains — to level the mountains —to raise the valleys, and to prepare an highway for the Lord! (34) For the sake of observing the meeting-points of the symbolic imagery of apocalyptic discourse used for quite different purposes, it may be instructive to compare Austin's text, applied with a few historical variations to the 18th-century American scene, with a much more recent, and secularized, passage from a 1970s source on the radical temper: 4 Elizabethtown, 1794. 124
