A BRIEF UPDATE ON THE END OF THE WORLD

The very first apocalyptic clock was on the cover of the 1947 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, established by men who regretted their role in the catastrophic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With climate crises and the current conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, the Last Midnight looms.  Only 89 seconds between No Kings Day and Armageddon.

A ray of hope penetrates the gloom, if you close one eye and squint slightly:  the first Doomsday Clock was designed by an artist married to one of the remorseful physicists of the Manhattan Project—a sort of conjugal alliance of art, science, and regret. Martyl Langdorf  lived to be 96.  In her spirited oral history she comments tartly on the ineptness of the intelligence  community’s tracking of her lengthy career as a left-leaning artist. Here empathy served me. Having friends in Eastern Europe and a Berkeley zip code, I used to find my phone tapped primitively, as in an old Czech movie.

Communism is short on images of the end of the world as we know it. The three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all feature a Last Judgement.  In Islam, the road to salvation is rocky unless one dies in a holy war. In Christianity and Judaism, all sinners have at least a fighting chance, so to speak, at redemption.

Estimating the masses slaughtered through the ages in the service of these three great monotheistic faiths is truly daunting.  Not to mention the butcheries among their competing subgroups…Catholics versus Protestants, Protestants versus other Protestants, Shi’ia versus Sunni…  Historians are inclined to give the most numbers to the Christians, especially if the count includes the Second World War and the Holocaust.  The Catholic Church often commissioned a Last Judgement for the exit walls of churches and chapels.  In the basilica on the island of Torcello in the Venetian lagoon is a transfixing twelfth-century mosaic.

Giotto was hired for a large sum to create a magnificent Last Judgement that would better position the Scrovegni family of usurers (bankers) for possible salvation, despite Dante’s condemnation.

Meanwhile, Giotto himself was said to have exacted an outrageous fee for use of his looms by poor Florentine weavers.

A mere two centuries later came Michelangelo’s version in the Sistine Chapel. A Resurrection scene had first been proposed for this wall, but it seemed to Paul III in 1530 that the times demanded a stronger statement.

In the 1990s a restoration transformed the Sistine Chapel. One morning I was allowed on the scaffolding where workers were uncovering the vivid colors under the grime of centuries of candle smoke.  I watched a master restorer swabbing at the wall with one hand, the other holding a smoking cigarette.

Armageddon also echoes in music.  In 1984, as the atomic scientists’ clock was closing in on midnight, Stephen Sondheim was shaping our high anxiety and fear of doomsday into the angry giantess of “Into the Woods.”   Bernadette Peters’ announcement of “The Last Midnight” thrilled Broadway.

A full scale nuclear-powered opera, “Dr. Atomic” by John Adams and Peter Sellers  premiered in San Francisco in 2005, with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller as the troubled scientists. Probably there is a category for apocalyptic musical works?  Faust, Don Giovanni, the Ring, for starters.  Surely someone is working on an opera about Edward Snowden, and maybe his proud mother as well.  Peter Sellers  also has a lovely, proud mother.

In the Qur’an, Allah asks Jesus whether he had claimed that he and his mother were two gods besides Allah, to which Jesus replies that he would never have said such a thing (5:115-117).  Emphasis on the “said”.

In any event, we mustn’t forget the Rapture, still to come, after the latest disappointment in September 2025. It is a happy Judaeo-Christian conjunction that the Rapture and Rosh Hashanah, Jewish New Year, are both lunar-based holidays. Each year, one of them dependably occurs, while the other does not. 

In a not too distant future, at the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, believers expect to be raised from the earth to meet Him in midair. However, some believe that a select group will remain behind on earth for an extended Tribulation period that might be confused—by me at least—with Purgatory.  The Tribulation will be known through its wars, earthquakes and natural disasters, famines, pestilence,  and moral decay. Some believers view the Rapture as an all-inclusive final resurrection, when Christ returns–and does not leave us slackers and skeptics behind.