In the National Art Gallery of Canada in Ottawa there hangs one of the remarkable paintings of the pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt (1827-1910). Hunt is best known among Christians for his representation of Christ in Revelation 3:20 ("Behold I stand at the door and knock"), a painting that is really entitledThe Light of the World. The Ottawa Hunt painting seems charged by an even more luminous apocalyptic aura: It is a vivid portrait of Henry Wentworth Monk, the charismatic midcentury Victorian evangelist. Monk, who actually came to England from a Canadian village just upriver from the gallery, is unforgettably depicted as a fiery-eyed messianic figure, intent upon some future vision, a Bible clenched in one hand and an issue of the LondonTimesin the other.

En route to the European salons in the same gallery, one passes first through a great, high-vaulted glass atrium that contains a single, much more contemporary exhibit. EntitledTrans Am Apocalypse No. 2, it consists of an actual vintage gm Trans Am (early eighties), painted in dull black finish, upon the surface of which, in irregular but readily legible characters running around and over the car from front to back, the full text of the Book of Revelation has been scratched.

Trying to explain these two exhibits to a visiting professor of literature from China, I found myself more than usually taxed for ways to "translate." Nor was my difficulty mitigated by the fact that this gallery visit occurred during an afternoon in which I had already tried to answer her numerous probing questions about the phenomenal popularity in North America of apocalyptic science fiction, about the depth of the influence of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and about a nonfiction book she had encountered,The Coming Plague, with its predictions of catastrophic worldwide epidemics of immuno-deficiency diseases, Ebola viruses, hepatic diseases, AIDS, and endless mutations of Asian flu. My guest, discontent with my thumbnail-sketching explanations, finally turned to me directly and said: "But do you Westerners-no, do you yourself-actually believe that the world is coming to an end?"

That put the point squarely enough. "Well," I hesitated, plumbing swiftly the shadowed depths of the huge cultural divide that chasmed between us, scarcely three feet apart though we were before an anonymous Renaissance Last Judgment, "actually, yes. We Westerners pretty well all did for many centuries. Some of us-especially, but not only practicing Christians-still do." She was visibly amazed, perplexed, and agitated. More questions followed, in a flurry.

I began, of course, with the biblical view of a finite universe, creation and apocalypse, alpha and omega, beginning and end. We looked again at some triptychs in the medieval and early Renaissance collection of the gallery, illustrations to hand. But as we talked, my mind was racing over the almost unanswerable profundity of her blunt question, not only for Western culture generally, but for contemporary credal Christians especially. We are such a perplexed and perplexing (and also evidently perplexable) lot. All rationalist and naturalist resistance to the contrary, apocalypticism flourishes in theNational Enquirer, in occultish lore, and among televangelical and populist religionists.

Partly because of the tarnish of these often somewhat lurid advertisements, even orthodox, conservative Christians edge away from reflection on that aspect of our declared faith: "And he shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead: Whose kingdom shall have no end." Calvin's scruple not to comment on the last book of the Bible has curiously presaged a disposition among rationalist Christians of his persuasion to turn the conversation in almost any other possible edifying direction. (Though not a Calvinist, that afternoon I was feeling more than usually sympathetic to the reflex.) By default, this has meant that since the radical reformers, with their polemical Protestant tracts demonizing the pope as Antichrist and predicting a soon-to-appear millennium, the left wing of the Reformation has almost cornered the market on apocalyptic speculation.

A major California purveyor of antique books recently issued "A Catalogue for the End of Time," prefaced with ironic disclaimers concerning their own views. Along with fifteenth- to twentieth-century tomes on alchemy, occultism, witchcraft, demonology, symbolism and emblemata, freemasonry, and abnormal psychology are the predictable (but still fascinating) titles on the Lost Tribes of Israel and the Coming Millennium: Thomas Brightman onThe Revelation of St. John (1644); accounts of Joanna Southcott, the Devonshire milkmaid prophetess (1750-1814); theLife and Journalof John Wroe the Christian Israelite (1782-1863), founder of a sabbatarian, kosher-keeping sect of British Israelites; theRevealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times (1798) of Richard Brothers, the Newfoundland-born, sometime Royal Navy lieutenant, and founder of the British Israelites who claimed direct descent from James the brother of the Lord; and many more: the late, great planet Earth has had many such Protestant prophets indeed. Nor, I reflected, ought we to imagine that the often embarrassing hermeneutic extravagances of these folk have failed to win support among readers of some culture and intellectual preoccupation all through the Reformation era: Brothers, though confined for a time as a dangerous lunatic and, for a longer period (11 years), in prison as a more general menace, counted among his converts Richard Brassey Halhed, a reasonably eminent oriental scholar and member of Parliament. Sir William Alexander, author of the colorfulDooms-day, or the Great Day of the Lords Judgement (1637), was Earl of Stirling, governor of Nova Scotia in 1621, and secretary of state of Scotland in 1626. (Is the deprivation of light in winter a factor? I wondered.) But one could multiply these examples.

For all that, what must be reckoned with in toting up the exegetical history of prophetic Scripture and more general apocalyptic speculation alike is that, while left-wing Protestant and occult figures dominate the last four centuries in the English-speaking world especially, expectation of the Second Coming, Last Judgment, and apocalyptic finale to history was, of course, a much more visible and universal part of Christian historiography and exegesis-as well as of Christian artistic imagination-from the time of the early church down through the fifteenth century.

Medieval illustrated manuscripts of the Apocalypse are extraordinarily numerous in the treasury of medieval art, as are church portal depictions of the Last Judgment (e.g., Chartres Cathedral); biblical cycle plays that conclude with the Last Judgment, and late medieval altarpieces to the time of Hieronymus Bosch, repeatedly reflect the absolute centrality of the Apocalypse in the pre-Reformation Catholic imagination. These myriad lush examples, some of which were before us on the walls in the gallery and some of which, like the Luca Signorelli Orvieto frescoes of the Antichrist featured in a recent Books & Culture (May/June, 1996), tumbled through my visual memory, almost crowding out awareness of the person standing beside me. But not quite.

"This idea of the Antichrist who overcomes the world, and a last battle where evil is finally defeated and punished-these are the climax and denouement of the Christian idea of history, then?" my guest persisted.

"Yes," I said, somewhat reluctantly.

"And you believe it?"

"Yes."

"And these medieval artists obviously believe it strongly," she mused. "But do the modern artists believe it also, or have they overcome this idea as a relic of the feudal past?"

"For many artists who are not Christian," I replied with a smile, "the only apocalypse is the demise of their own reputation."

"I see you jest. What about Christian artists, now, in the West?"

I looked into her seriousness, slowly taking its measure of me, recalling Orwell, Huxley, C. S. Lewis's ThatHideous Strength.

"No," she replied firmly, "I mean a novelist alive and writing now."

Back at home, after dinner and conversation with the family, I asked if she would like to read a modern apocalypse, just published, a novel of the highest reaches of novelistic and, in my view, spiritual attainment. She would. So I gave her Father Elijah, by Canadian writer and painter Michael O'Brien, a book to my own mind one of the finest novels this country has produced (Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, and Carol Shields included) and the most credible contemporary Christian approach to the apocalypse that I have discovered.

Father Elijahis strikingly unlike anything exposure to the radical Protestant apocalypse would lead one to expect. To begin with, as one might expect from a Catholic novelist, the pope is not to be unmasked as the Antichrist. To the convincing contrary, the instantly recognizable pontiff is preeminently a servant of the servants of God, as humbly self-effacing as he is spiritually discerning, as keenly aware of the "last battle" within the church as of the building conflict without. The novel's protagonist, moreover, is a converted Israeli Jew who, as a child, escaped the Holocaust (barely) in his native Warsaw. After losing his beloved wife to a terrorist bomb, he converts, and though he had been a powerful figure in Israeli (Zionist) political life, he has after his conversion retreated to a Carmelite monastery to live a life of prayerful contemplation, listening for the "still small voice" for 20 years.

Suddenly and unexpectedly, his long-rested but still internationally regarded gifts are called upon by the pope in a crisis of the greatest proportions. This crisis involves the cancerous spread of apostasy into the very heart of the church, even the corridors of the Vatican, and the alliance of that apostasy with forces of world-federalizing macro-business interest, those aggressive masters of technology who can no longer tolerate the irritant of religious objections.

If the plot development of this novel is often brilliant, the characterization is in some respects still more brilliant. It is relatively easy for a competent but spiritually unformed novelist to characterize criminal behavior; it takes a Christian novelist, as Flannery O'Connor was wont to say, to understand sin as sin and to see into the heart of real evil. But it seems to me that only the most exceptionally gifted Christian novelists-artists whose work is superb, both as craftsmanship and also as deep spiritual realism-can in addition credibly and compellingly set before us the living good of a life sacrificed to the way of the Cross. Only such a writer can write convincingly, without affectation and without any sacrifice of realism, about conversion.

Alas, such writers are exceedingly rare, so rare that I am inclined to see their exceptional ability as evidence of vocation in the classic Christian sense-spiritual vocation. That is, their work bears evidence (in the biblical rather than the popular sense) of "prophetic" charism. To this truly exalted class of novelists, along with Fyodor Dostoevsky and François Mauriac, I now would unhesitatingly add Michael O'Brien. (None of these three, I have thoughtfully to reflect, proceeds from any wing of the Reformation tradition.)

I do not mean to suggest that O'Brien's work resembles Dostoevsky's or Mauriac's too closely; it doesn't.Nor do I mean thatFather Elijahis sui generis, a work without precedent. Robert Hugh Benson's The Lord of the World (1907) and Vladimir Soloviev's "Short Story of the Antichrist," appended to War, Progress, and the End of History(1900), have found some resonance in O'Brien's vision. What I do mean to suggest is that Father Elijah is authentically rooted in the scriptural tradition of the early and medieval church and that, perhaps accordingly, it sounds few, if any, false notes to the postmodern Christian ear. One gets in this novel a rich sense of communion with the early martyrs huddled for a funeral or Eucharist in the catacombs, as with persecuted Christians holding underground worship in Turkey, and some perspective on the self-satisfied and culturally accommodated North American Christians just beginning, at last and with horror, to realize that their long party is over.

O'Brien's novel is at one level an electrifying page-turner. Though reading in her second language, my Chinese friend raced through its 600 pages in less than 24 hours, with a four- or five-hour recess for sleep-thus almost duplicating my own and my wife's first-language pace over three consecutive evenings. On the other hand, theologically we understood much more, and the intense spiritual realism of the novel and the searing plausibility O'Brien achieves in his ca. 1996-98 setting for the action made us need more often to put the book down just to take things in, to let our hearts settle, to offer a silent prayer.

At its deepest reach, however,Father Elijahis a wake-up call-perhaps even (let me venture it) a last days' wake-up call-to the church. What O'Brien is asking his readers to do is evident from the novel's epigraph: "Awake, and strengthen what remains and is on the point of death" (Rev. 3:2). O'Brien's own reflection on the message of the angel to the church at Sardis was powerfully stimulated by his seeing an illustrated commentary on the Apocalypse (Revelation) by an eighth-century monk, Saint Beatus of Liebana, illustrated in turn by a tenth-century monastic artist (see his "Historical Imagination and the Renewal of Culture," Proceedings of the Conference on Catholicism and History, Westminister College, Oxford, 1995). But his concern as a novelist-under-obligation is to call the church at the end of the Western era to repentance and self-sacrificing ministry to those cast in doubt or shaken by betrayal from within the church as well as by enmity and scorn from without. Accordingly, in his own words at the close of his introduction, Father Elijahis "a novel of ideas." As he promises, it does not "offer simplistic solutions and false piety. It offers the Cross." Then, in a last sentence, he adds, "It bears witness, I hope, to the ultimate victory of Light." O'Brien's hopes, I think, have been amply realized.

I forbear to say anything more about the plot, the rich tapestry of evolved spiritual wisdom, the penetrating insight of contemporary cultural, political, and religious developments. Nor will I reveal the brilliant ending-which, for its sheer power of closure, rivals anything I have read. But I want to add one more observation.

As a non-Christian, our house-guest found some details of spiritual realism (evocative of Charles Williams's doctrine of substitution) hard to square with the psychological realism and naturalism of the novel generally. And disquieting. "Yes," I confessed, "such things actually happen, and among Christians in times of adversity always have. But I find them disquieting too." That our wake-up call might well be to an embrace of the Cross, that the way of the Cross might be singularly the preparation for a crown of victory, our people have always, at bottom, claimed to believe. But we have found much harder to admit openly to this belief or to live it. O'Brien both admits to his belief and, I can attest, lives it as the power of God unto salvation. No Christian reader who desires a spiritually realistic encouragement concerning the power of God for any time of our common life, especially apocalyptic times, can afford to pass over the rich and beautifully wrought clarion call he offers.

David Lyle Jeffrey is professor of English Literature at the University of Ottawa, Ontario Canada. He is the author of People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literacy Culture (Eerdmans).

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books & Culture Magazine.

Mar/Apr 1997, Vol. 3, No. 2, Page 18

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