Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Donald E. Morse: The End of the World in American History and Fantasy: The Trumpet of the Last Judgement

heading straight for the Heavenly City. And, even more important, the fact that time's arrow followed such a progressive line also meant that that line could and must have a stop in apocalypse.

9 Apocalypse requires, by definition, that time be viewed as finite, linear, and directional. If time were to continue into infinity, then there could be no Last Things, no Last Judgment, obviously, no End of the World, and certainly no "Rapture." To be credible, therefore, Apocalypse depends upon time being finite. Time must also be linear rather than an unending circle, spiral, or whatever.

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0 Time's arrow thus becomes is a string of unique events between the two fixed points of creation and termination. Moreover, time must proceed in the direction of a Day of Judgment. This last requirement of directionality derives from the belief that the Other World will occur only with the Eschaton rather than being always present upon death. F. Crawford Burkitt in the Schweich Lectures of 1913 delineates the necessary difference between this pre- or non-apocalyptic notion of the Other World as a place and time as continuous with the apocalyptic notion of the Other World not as a place but as a time to come

, that is, coming into existence only at the end-stopped line. He illustrates this difference by contrasting the non-apocalyptic Other World as seen in Dante's Commedia with the apocalyptic one pictured in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. In Dante's vision, as people die, they enter serially the Other World, much as they entered the Underworld of Greek and Egyptian mythology. There is no waiting.

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1 Death, or his surrogate, ushers the person before the Judgment Seat where the deity consigns him or her to the Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, or Limbo. '' "Time for Christians began with the Creation and would end with Christ's Second Coming. World history was bounded by these two events. [...] our modern concept of history, however rationalized and secularized it may be, still rests on the concept of historical time which was inaugurated by Christianity" (Whitrow 65). 1

0 A striking exception to the linearity of most apocalyptic thinking is Bishop Burnett who postulated time as circular beginning with the Creation and returning via the Eschaton. See Sacred Theory of the Earth (1680) the frontispiece of which Stephen Jay Gould analyses in some detail in Time's Arrow (see especially 20-59). 1

1 The continuous movement of the dead to the Other World provides a staple of literature from Homer to the present. See, for example, Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love (1998) or Michael Frayne, Copenhagen (1998). The latter is discussed in detail by Nick Ruddick in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (4153 I

, see especially 423-26). 223