Science Fiction and the Coming of the Antichrist
Milosz, Czeslaw
THE LITERARY GENRE called science fiction has been developing for over a hundred years, and its vitality today is surprising. In a narrower sense, a science fiction story is usually a tale...
...The author of a work of science fiction, however, makes no use of tacit references to known surroundings as does an author who places his characters in 1971...
...The materialistic Weltanschauung that conceived of the universe as an infinite series of accidental changes now seems naive SCIENCE FICTION AND THE COMING OF THE ANTICHRIST to man...
...The lie is tantamount to demanding that both what is God's and what Caesar's be rendered unto Caesar...
...Translated by RlcxAxn LouRIE...
...The Emperor of the nations of the earth may remain forever in the sphere of a writer's fantasy...
...he wants to live, but he knows that he must die...
...The monk Pansopheus' manuscript is loaded with enough facts for even the most bizarre novel...
...Pauli at its head, escapes to the desert of Jericho...
...In a narrower sense, a science fiction story is usually a tale of adventure in a world of tomorrow, transformed by technology...
...And, let us stress, he does not know that he is the Antichrist...
...What happened next...
...We also admire the intuition of writers who foresaw the role of drugs as a means of totalitarian control...
...Soloviev, however, did not orient himself by scientific probability but by a mysterious order he sensed in the threads and knots of history...
...This motif reappears today in contemporary lay humanism, with its longing for the end of alienation and thus, in fact, for the fulfillment of time, because that dream cannot be satisfied by anything less than the advent of a political system that SCIENCE FICTION AND THE COMING OF THE ANTICHRIST maintains itself without any restraints and institutions...
...In philosophical reflections about the future everything becomes quite complex, because moralists and satirists turn their passions toward the society in which they are submerged and toward the catastrophes threatening it...
...The exploration of the new dimension, time, begins just as the last blank spots on the map disappear and when the last "island paradise," CZESLAW MILOSZ Tahiti, has only one chance to survive—on the canvases of Gauguin...
...For many centuries Christ was in no way identified with philanthropists or revolutionaries: rather, he was a god-man opposed to the order of Nature, breaking that order with his resurrection—"for the wisdom of the flesh is death," as St...
...They do not limit themselves to naive faith, but put into practice the counsel of Paul the Apostle who advised them not to be children in their understanding...
...We are unable to reduce the present, so full of contradictions, to one common denominator, because we live in it and it lives in us, but perhaps its most unexpected trait is a willful blindness, a rejection of historical experience, as if man had learned too much about his own demonic drives and could no longer bear it...
...Even though the wars of the 20th century will belie the Prince's hopes, there will appear in the 21st century a wise man of genius, a friend of mankind who, first as the president of the United States of Europe, then as an emperor with his capital in Rome, will accomplish everything for which the Prince longs, securing for the inhabitants of the entire earth peace, justice, and wellbeing...
...Best known among his numerous philosophical works are his Lectures Concerning God-Manhood (1877-84), his long Treatise in French written in an ecumenical spirit, La Russie et L'Eglise Universelle (1889), and The Justification of the Good (1898...
...The Mongols fraternize with their new allies, then massacre them with "Chinese thoroughness...
...We lack a term that would also include such novels as those by H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, or George Orwell, and so perhaps we are forced to speak of science fiction in a broader sense as well...
...They are the consequence of the Emperor's decision to proclaim himself the "Anointed One" and the benefactor of all Christians...
...One may further argue that this very concept is deeply reactionary, because it brands in advance as suspect every striving toward terrestrial happiness...
...To be convinced of this, it is sufficient to read attentively the Catechism authorized by the Dutch hierarchy...
...For that purpose it is enough to take any story from a few decades back—for instance something by H. G. Wells or Aldous Huxley —concerning either new machines or the presumable forms of a future technological civilization, and to compare it with what we know today...
...One may object here that science fiction is concerned with space as well, for it often deals with distant planets...
...In the introduction, Soloviev defines the aim of his book as polemical and apologetic...
...The Antichrist is a focus for tendencies already present in the year 1900, and which have only to attain their logical conclusion...
...Nevertheless, Jules Verne had appraised the possibilities correctly...
...The sketchy nature of the last section of the Pansopheus manuscript may create some doubts as to the concept of the "AntiChristian good...
...John...
...Perhaps the current success of science fiction may be explained precisely by its finding ground already prepared, and thus it appeals to old sediments in the subconscious that link it with folklore...
...From the 16th century on, there were a great number of novels about fantastic countries, islands, societies, existing somewhere on the enormous, still unexplored earth...
...and the prince probably would have died on the spot had anyone been able to convince him that the wars of the 20th century would, in fact, be fought on such a grand scale...
...Imagination, when reaching into the future, must by necessity extrapolate, and extend those lines which in a given moment are considered "lines of development," a procedure that leads to many errors...
...For him the point at which all its threads are joined was Christianity, whose division into Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism CZESLAW MILOSZ he deplored...
...It is an age of syncretism, a blending of beliefs of the West and the East, of neo-Buddhism and Satanic sects...
...To the arguments of the Prince, Mr...
...He invites Catholics (the papacy, long since expelled from Rome, now has its seat in St...
...And we must concede that we recognize in it the contours of our own world, but entangled with notions from the past century and, so to speak, with their proportions shifted...
...But we find the same thing in the Revelation of St...
...A complete renunciation of war on principle, independent of circumstances, would mean that we are able to put the good of our fellowmen over our own...
...From the outset he must make his reality consistent and believable...
...N PANSOPHEUS' manuscript the 20th cen-I tury belongs to Asia...
...An army of 4 million is concentrated in Chinese Turkestan in order to invade India, or so Chinese diplomacy assures the Russians...
...War is a misfortune in which the imperfection of human institutions is most blatantly revealed...
...This, however, would be doing an injustice to Soloviev...
...It did not enter the heads of his listeners that this man was simply crazy: his hatred for existing society and his nostalgia for an ideal society were so strong that he needed to deceive himself by adorning the naked struggle for survival among animals and plants with his slogans of universal love and peace...
...H H ERE I WILL ALLOW myself a personal digression...
...He does not suspect it until the moment when he consciously puts himself above Christ, because Christ was no more than his predecessor, who died and was not resurrected, whereas he will accomplish that which was proclaimed by his predecessor...
...Why do the people gathered on the shore of the Mediterranean in the Three Conversations debate about war and peace...
...the massacre of the Jews and disobedient Christians ordered by the Emperor...
...In Jerusalem, too, in the fourth year of his reign, the superman is revealed as the Antichrist, after which, in a matter of a few days, follow the events foretold in the Apocalypse...
...the other as a liar feigning meekness, a wolf in sheep's clothing...
...Since present civilization is bad, Nature must be good...
...he wants to be happy, but he is not happy...
...In fact, allying science with magic, Apollonius achieves remarkable results...
...CZESLAW MILOSZ that in medieval iconography the Devil is usually represented together with a crematory furnace...
...Expressing himself previously only in treatises, lectures, and poetry, this time Soloviev introduces a few characters...
...But then, in France, a party of revanchists comes to power and a million Frenchmen attack the Germans from the rear (with a typical shifting of circumstances, one can see this as the war of 1914...
...T IS NOW that the Antichrist appears...
...They are still divided into Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox, but mutual hostility and distrust have disappeared...
...A certain rather high level is observed by both believers and -nonbelievers when they discuss religion...
...Moreover, no precise borderline could be traced between the technologically oriented imagination and philosophical reflection...
...The tortures to which the damned are submitted on the canvases of Hieronymus Bosch ceased being the delusions of a sick psyche once men applied the same tortures to millions of other men...
...There is something of the chronicler in him —he is preoccupied with facts and the sequence of events—and that compulsion brings his fantasies close to the models of classical narration...
...From the Three Conversations one may conclude that this will not be possible, since such an organization of society would mean the end of what we are accustomed to call history...
...the resurrection of the monk John and Pope Peter II...
...This awareness, distinguishing him from all other living creatures, is a sad joke if it cannot save him from the fate of the animals...
...During the three evenings they spend together, each of them represents a different attitude toward religious and moral problems...
...The navy of the conquerors, which arrived from the Pacific, is ready to invade England, but the English succeed in buying themselves off with a billion pounds...
...The manuscript of the monk Pansopheus is, formally, nothing but science fiction, if we agree to accept the broader sense of that term...
...the swallowing-up of the Emperor and his troops and the pseudo-Pope by a fiery crater that opens up near the Dead Sea...
...The classic writer in this vein was Jules Verne...
...Were such a superman to step forward, however, promising an end to all alienation, and love and peace, we may be certain that millions of mortals, indifferent to truth and untruth, would pay him divine homage...
...a million-man strong Jewish army fighting the troops of the Antichrist which advance from Syria...
...In other words, the listener or reader wants to enter a certain reality, forgetting that it is invented...
...It will then be obvious that such works contain astonishingly correct previsions entangled with numerous details bearing the stigma of their own time...
...To one such novel California owes its name...
...The more powerful, the more splendid an ego—in men of destiny, leaders, dictators—the more it must pay homage to itself...
...In any case, the Antichrist of Signorelli proves the persistence of a certain tradition taken over by the Russian philosopher...
...After that critical night he writes his work "The Open Road to Universal Peace and WellBeing," so intellectually and artistically convincing, so clear, that everybody finds the most obvious truth in it...
...The conviction that the earth is a "vale of tears" may have been useful to the strong and the rich, since it contributed to the resignation of the oppressed...
...Today, of course, we know that a very long cannon is unnecessary for launching an interplanetary missile, because the cannon and the missile are one...
...It should be stressed here that Soloviev is not concerned with philosophical materialism, which he considered a transitory phenomenon...
...for imagination can only build with the material at its disposal in the here and now...
...The Emperor moves his residence from Rome to Jerusalem and spreads the news that the aim of his policy is the world dominion of Israel...
...Verne's favorite heroes are lonely scientists whose thoughts range further than those of their contemporaries...
...For the pacifist Prince in the Three Conservations the manuscript of Pansopheus is nonsense...
...20th and 21st centuries are related in the past tense, as in the Revelation of St...
...Peasants would drill a hole in the wall of their huts and pray to it: "My sacred hole, my sacred hut...
...Today we tend too often to forget about that assuaging influence, and as tourists visiting French Gothic churches, we are incredulous to learn that their builders observed an eight-hour workday and a five-day week...
...But Soloviev also writes of educated "hole worshippers" who are similar to these sectarians and whose teachings spread among the intelligentsia...
...THE LITERARY GENRE called science fiction has been developing for over a hundred years, and its vitality today is surprising...
...Material progress, somewhat hampered over half a century, again gathers momentum...
...The characters include the old General, the Politician, Mr...
...The difficulty of judging science fiction is compounded not only by the entangling, the condensation of various elements, but also by the fact that we are confronted with three kinds of time: the time of writing (quite evident in works written several decades ago), the time of the reader, and the time which, in respect to the reader, lies in the future indefinite, somewhere between that SCIENCE FICTION AND THE COMING OF THE ANTICHRIST which we know from our own experiences and that which still may occur...
...In a couple of decades the French are thrown out of Tonkin and Siam, the English out of Burma, and all of Indochina falls under the rule of the Chinese empire...
...Jesus is, for the Prince, a teacher and law-giver, but he considers Jesus only a man who was defeated by death like everyone else...
...and "How completely untrue...
...The revolt of the Jews against the false Messiah...
...In contrast to the conditions in 1900, this transformation is occurring both outside of Christianity and within it...
...Christ descending from Heaven over Jerusalem—all these eschatological images do not precisely fit the polemical goals of the Three Conservations, and probably for this reason are given rather cursory treatment...
...for instance, just by the concentration of his will, he attracts and uses as he wishes the electricity in the atmosphere...
...This superman believes that he acts out of love for man, but in fact he loves only himself...
...Countries, more or less democratically, are organized into the United States of Europe...
...Its authors make acrobatic attempts to sidestep certain inconveniences: Original Sin and the existence of the Devil...
...a citizen may be happy, but only at the price of complete obedience in all his thoughts and deeds...
...it should have been, but cannot be, because grammar itself stands in the way...
...Sometimes, for instance in the works of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, the dimension of the future is nearly as conventional as the dimension of space in Swift...
...The state of mind of the semi-Christians and post-Christians of the 20th century is quite enigmatic since their disbelief in the god-manhood of Christ seems to force them to deify Nature the Good and extol the good, natural man who is unjustly repressed by civilization...
...Because of features peculiar to Russia (e.g., the collusion of the Church with the autocracy), the Russian intelligentsia experienced violently the change that, in Western countries, with their complexity of traditional structures and their freedom of thought, proceeded at a slower pace and was to become only gradually generalized...
...Europe, meanwhile, has to cope one last time with the countries of Islam, and thus its attention is diverted from the menacing East...
...If man is innocent, and depraved and alienated only because of society, by bettering society it will be possible to restore man's innocence...
...The book, which is translated into a multitude of languages, SCIENCE FICTION AND THE COMING OF THE ANTICHRIST brings him such fame that he is unanimously elected first president of Europe and soon emperor of the nations of the earth...
...There are rumors that he is capable of bringing fire down from Heaven...
...Z. (the voice of Soloviev himself) answers by reading the manuscript of the monk Pansopheus...
...Another Russian army, cut off in Siberia, vainly attempts to 636 strike at China from the north...
...How is it then, by what paradox, that Soloviev's 21st century, though perhaps not sanguinary enough for our macabre tastes, does not seem entirely alien to us...
...The collapse of realistic prose is a phenomenon simultaneous with the waning of figurative painting, and the causes are the same...
...it is subject to the same rules, though it derives from a different tradition...
...It can be compared to a column of print in which the lines are composed correctly, but whose sequence has been jumbled, so that we do not always know what should follow upon what...
...2 I once heard an American activist describe, during a dinner, his favorite sport, skin-diving, and what he usually feels when he swims underwater among the multitude of sea life...
...An intermediary zone extends from forebodings of "vengeance," in which the creations of the human mind turn against man (for instance, rebelling robots), to sketches of some hypothetical civilizations, where the stress is not on technology, but on human relationships...
...Had he oriented himself by probability, he would not have introduced a Jewish state with Jerusalem as its capital and with a Jewish army a million strong when the budding Zionist movement had but few followers...
...A novel in which reality explodes into fragments, glimpses, signals, and whose reader is zealously reminded that everything is happening only in the narrator's mind does not conform to the basic rules...
...Otherwise we expose ourselves to the "vengeance" of institutions too ideally conceived...
...Although he ended his life as a faithful believer in the Eastern Orthodox Church, he gravitated toward Catholicism, and not only theoretically, as he once had received Communion in a Catholic church ("prisoiedinil'sia") . He considered the unification of all Christians and theocracy the only way out for Europe...
...Soloviev is one of those pessimistic philosophers who hold that every ego repeats the act of the fallen angel...
...The Chinese army and navy, trained by Japanese instructors, quickly makes use of the huge human reserves of Manchuria, China, Mongolia, and Tibet...
...The Politician maintains that cultural progress makes war more and more loathsome to people, so that it probably will, in time, disappear...
...Z. reads aloud a manuscript allegedly written by the monk Pansopheus...
...We would include here any narrative that pretends to be written in the past tense, whereas it should have been written in the futur accompli...
...Though explosive devices were being rapidly perfected in the 19th century, Jules Verne's contemporaries, in general, did not believe that such devices could land a man on the moon, and they read novels on that subject as amusing fables...
...He detected a hidden logic and a moral meaning in history...
...John: what is said will occur, is told as something that has already occurred—in a vision on the island of Patmos...
...The small group of the faithful, with Dr...
...A number of monographs were published on Soloviev in various languages...
...We are now witnessing the gradual mutation of Churches into clubs of friends of mankind, into assemblies of guitar-playing and handclapping boy scouts...
...A cycle, short when compared to the entire history of mankind, which begins with the birth of a child from the tribe of David, closes in Israel...
...these were images of societies from the day after tomorrow, and in the 20th century they were mostly pessimistic images...
...A conspiratorial network, carefully woven over a long period of time and aided clandestinely by European governments that manage to fool their Asiatic overlords, finally erupts in a simultaneous uprising in all European countries, and the Mongols are expelled...
...He often places his action in the present, but that present is visited by the future in the guise of inventions created by minds of genius (Captain Nemo's submarine, television in the Carpathian Castle...
...Events that "will have happened" lack sufficient probability, and a hero who "will have done," "will have seen," "will have gone" is not sufficiently real for us...
...Men in 1900 were not trained in history on a worldwide scale...
...It is a choice between a thing observed by man, a thing possessing its own objective existence, and an observer freely interpreting: impressionist painters opted for the second, and since that time everything has moved quickly...
...for where else, if not in a hypothetical future return to the state of nature, could we seek solace and the promise of an earthly paradise...
...Here Soloviev is in complete accord with apocalyptic folklore, which saw the cause of evil in the universe as the rebellion of an angel of great wisdom and beauty: that angel preferred himself to God...
...Although the laboratories of 19th-century scientists spawned a new literary genre, Christian folklore for centuries had been gathering evidence concerning the approach of a crucial event: the Second Coming, preceded by the coming of the Antichrist, the millennium, the end of time...
...For instance, we cannot be certain that technological progress, after a sudden leap, might not stop or even recede, as has happened more than once in history, and in such a case those who foresee its unlimited continuation will look a trifle naive in the eyes of posterity...
...The action of Three Conversations takes place both contemporaneously with the author and in the future...
...SOON AFTER SOLOVIEV'S DEATH, mankind entered a cycle of experience so much negating all the notions at which the 19th century had clutched, that imagination, struggling with a terrifying, unnamed reality, turned to the much older archetypes which had been preserved in folklore...
...It can reach into the future only to the extent that it is able to grasp potentially promising omens in the present and to separate them from omens that are promising only in appearance but are, in fact, illusory...
...This man of destiny accomplishes what he promised, and his concern is not only with peace and bread but also with the spiritual needs of mankind...
...We may here leave the question open whether a moderate pessimism can accord with lay humanism, or, as Soloviev maintains, only religion can provide a brake upon excessive optimism...
...After leaving some of their forces in Russia to fight the guerrillas, the unified Mongols cross over the borders into Germany with their three armies...
...In the 21st century, Palestine, with its capital in Jerusalem, is governed, and inhabited predominantly, by Jews who now number around 30 million...
...Though there was much talk about the "yellow peril" (some 15 years after Soloviev it preoccupied Oswald Spengler), it took quite a leap of the imagination to visualize the conquest of China by Japan and its indirect effects: the victory of the revolutionary army and the military power of China...
...Death is sufficient proof of universal corruption: it is the stigma of the Devil in the universe...
...Let us consider that science fiction appears precisely when the dimension of space ceases to stimulate the human imagination and is supplanted in this respect by the dimension of time...
...So a prediction (since we are dealing with predictions) is disguised grammatically: a hero living in the year 3000 "did," and "went...
...There is no reason to be ashamed of that most normal impulse to curious gossip which, when we chance upon an old prophecy, compels us to ask, Did it come true or didn't it...
...it contains a warning and a prophecy...
...Science fiction, however, soon became enriched with new contents...
...Besides, the Chinese need their navy for actions against America and Australia...
...Jules Verne intuited the hidden potentials of the scientific discoveries of his time, and so his heroes travel to the center of the earth or to the moon...
...The number of believing Christians is insignificant: on the entire planet they number only 45 million, since they no longer include those who had once considered themselves Christians merely out of social inertia...
...And their eagerness to serve all noble causes, from the struggle against colonialism to the saving of bears in Alaska, is related to the theology of the death of God, even if they themselves are reluctant to admit this...
...V V LADIMIR SOLOVIEV WROTE Three Conversations at the end of 1899 and at the beginning of 1900, shortly before his death, thus concluding his literary output, which was quite abundant, though he lived only 47 years.' The full title of the book, published in 1900, is Three Conversations on War, Progress and the End of World History, Including a Short Tale of the Antichrist and Supplements...
...Thus armed, it undertakes the conquest of China and establishes a Japanese dynasty there, effectively convincing the Chinese that they should modernize themselves and, together with the Japanese, turn against the white race...
...Mankind has grown out of it as a child grows out of clothes...
...C C OMPARING THE MANUSCRIPT OF PANSOPHEUS with science fiction allows us to treat the time of writing as a set of possibilities that are appraised by the writer...
...Man wants to be good, but he is not good...
...What that future will be we learn in the third and final conversation, when Mr...
...In creating this character, Soloviev drew both upon the New Testament and the copious Christian writings stemming from it, as well as upon his own meditations about his contemporaries...
...At the same time a multitude of new discoveries in physiology and psychology shows the insoluble enigmas of life and death, the destinies of the world and of man, in a new light...
...the unification of the true churches in the desert...
...Thus arose their unlimited ethical demands, addressed, however, not to an individual but to a social milieu that was responsible for the pollution of an inherently good human nature...
...In his introduction to the Three Conversa tions, Soloviev speaks of a strange sect of "hole worshippers" which, as the newspapers reported, arose in the remote provinces of Russia...
...The Prince, however, who is a pacifist-activist, deeply believes that the evangelic love of one's fellowman and nonviolent resistance to injustice will not only put an end to wars, but will transform a suffering humanity into a humanity wise CZESLAW MILOSZ and happy...
...Soloviev, as Luca Signorelli before him, adopted the second tradition, modifying it in his own way...
...It was a fairy tale, in which the customary frolicking elves, friendly to each other and to mankind, were replaced by fish of various sizes and colors...
...The book is a polemic with Tolstoy and, indirectly, with Rousseau, but it preserves its timeliness because of the importance of its central dilemma...
...Science fiction is particularly useful for assessing the scope of the human imagination...
...When painting his Preaching of the Antichrist, right after the turn of the 16th century, Luca Signorelli was most likely inspired by folk woodcuts of a somewhat earlier date...
...Moreover, someone has also noticed z Today this is described in language borrowed from Freud, which does not change the fact that such language is used to mask theological problems and theological options...
...The General, one of those modest and pure-hearted soldiers so loved by Russian writers, declares himself in favor of the ideal of the Christian knight and just wars waged in the defense of the oppressed...
...In one year, all of Europe becomes a vassal of Asia and now will live under occupation for 50 years...
...The Prince of the Three Conversations, a meek Tolstoyan character who does not claim to be a materialist at all, is an unconscious precursor of the Antichrist...
...His superman deserves admiration CZESLAW MILOSZ precisely as a benefactor of man, and if he is the Antichrist, it is in spite of that...
...Thus these were no more than exhortations to pray to a hole, a void...
...Unfortunately, he will also be the Antichrist...
...Europe in the 21st century is different from what it was before the invasion...
...Pauli...
...We should remember here that one certainty— death—was central to Soloviev's thought...
...The Devil, seemingly chased off into the realm of leprechauns and mermaids, suddenly proved to be a personality not in the least funny...
...Signorelli's Antichrist looks exactly like the Christ known from iconography, and is even shown with his heart bursting with flames of love for man, though he listens to what a demon is whispering in his ear...
...The non-Christian majority also devotes itself to fervent religious quests...
...This essay on Soloviev probably would never have been written, were it not for Signorelli's frescoes in the Cathedral of Orvieto, which I saw long ago in my youth...
...However, in their thinking, in their manners and dress they remain the loyal children of the 19th century...
...For centuries the historic role of Christianity consisted of reminding people of the tragic quality of human existence...
...Paul says...
...We will leave reflections on the life and works of Soloviev and on the relationship between the Three Conversations and his other pronouncements to more competent people...
...His rule is based upon a lie that must provoke the worst possible effects, and the terror initiated by him would probably have been increasingly cruel had he not been swallowed up by the earth...
...Soloviev's superman, in a moment of doubt, attempts to commit suicide, but he is saved by the Prince of This World, whose voice he hears (this scene is an exact reversal of Jesus' baptism in Jordan...
...Quite different from these characters is the young Prince...
...We are interested here in something that, though not necessarily simple, nonetheless concerns us directly...
...his own idea was the Antichrist who strives for and attains much good, deceiving not only others, but himself as well...
...Japan not only takes over technology from Europe but also the ideas known as Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism, elaborating its own idea of PanMongolism...
...what they lost in quantity, the Christians gained in both moral and intellectual quality...
...It seems that the Russian intelligentsia of 1900 was able to provide an attentive observer with good premises for making predictions...
...Apollonius is venerated by the neo-Buddhists...
...He did not agree with those who, wishing to assuage the cruelty of biological laws, invoked eternal rebirth in Nature: there is no rebirth in Nature, because this particular ant, this particular bird, this particular flower lives only once and gives a new beginning not to itself, but to other individuals...
...But if Christianity exerted an assuaging influence upon the barbaric European peoples, it was due primarily to the images of the Totentanz, in which the most lowly and the highest, peasants and kings, are united...
...It is a kind of dream in which, here and there, we distinguish the features of our own world...
...His adviser and friend is a magician, Apollonius, half Asiatic, half European, a Catholic bishop in partibus infidelium (later a cardinal), who is as familiar with the most modern methods of Western science as with everything most precious in Oriental mysticism...
...The international solidarity that had been developed in common resistance against the conquerors has now contributed to a weakening of nationalism, and the sovereignty of particular countries has lost its previous importance...
...Petersburg), Orthodox, and Protestants to Jerusalem for a huge ecumenical council which declares itself for him, except for a small group led by Pope Peter II, the pious Orthodox monk John, and the German theologian Dr...
...Elected pope, Apollonius accomplishes the unification of the Churches, which should be interpreted as the submission of the spiritual kingdom to secular power, a power offering bothterrestrial happiness and performing scientific-magic miracles...
...it cannot be otherwise in the order of Nature—except through the intervention of Grace...
...The Russian army, hurriedly transferred from the West—from Poland, Lithuania, Finland, the Ukraine—suffers heavy losses in hopeless battles with the Chinese...
...Man is confronted with one all-important either/or: either Christ was resurrected and thus victorious over the powers of Hell, or he was not resurrected...
...The end of the times" and the beginning of the millennium are faintly sketched in the Three Conversations...
...He considers his vocation the organizing of society so that the commands of the Gospel are implemented...
...It is worthwhile to recall some of Soloviev's basic premises...
...A group of Russians meets by chance on the Mediterranean shore, at the foot of the Alps...
...Their exhortations for universal goodness, justice, and fraternity mean the acceptance of the ethical principles of Christianity along with a rejection of its metaphysical basis...
...Practically all of them display views that are shared, at least in part, by the author...
...One may argue here that to feed the hungry, to rescue the oppressed from their degradation, and to secure peace for the nations of the earth is a great deal, and that it is better to leave metaphysical anxieties to Soloviev and his Christians of the 21st century...
...This trend also has spread to the Catholic Church which tries, at any price, to be accessible to the lay mentality...
...The disobedience of the Christians is, for Soloviev, a test, thanks to which the ruler of genius reveals who he really is...
...Of the two Christian traditions concerning the Antichrist, one conceives of him as an incarnation of pure, unconcealed evil...
...Soloviev's Japanese dynasty that establishes itself in Peking is, of course, nothing other than Verne's long cannon shooting a vehicle to the moon...
...Soloviev counsels those who choose the latter to become Buddhists, instead of constantly quoting the Gospels...
...Thus they meditate upon "what this will lead to...
...yet those are planets of the future, that is, they are supposed to be reached some day by man who is separated from them less by space than by the time required by his gradually progressing technology...
...Yet, when reading them now, one exclaims both: "How true...
...Whether the chief cause of this attitude is the sterilization of the tragic elements in religion, the attitude exemplified in the Three Conversations by Tolstoy (or, if you prefer, by the Prince), or whether there are other causes present, all those who recommend a return to primeval nakedness and primeval innocence already constitute a great movement of new Adamites in the countries of the West...
...Acknowledging their homelessness, the Russian intelligentsia sought compensation in a religion of humanity...
...The sudden entrance of that army into the Russian part of Asia is accompanied by an uprising of the entire native population, and the pace of the march is so fast that soon the Asiatic troops cross the Ural mountains...
...In it the events of the 'Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900) was a Russian religious philosopher and poet, indebted in some of his ideas to Plato—but also to Dostoevsky...
...Revolutionary Paris, in control of workers sans patrie, joyously greets the masters from the East...
...Leaving painting aside, we should simply affirm that narration—whether in the folk tale, the heroic epic, or the novel—has its permanent rules, and one of them is to satisfy the curiosity expressed in the questions, What happened...
...His books show particularly clearly the origin of the genre: the 19th century's breakthroughs in science, which created the belief that technological progress would have no limits...
...Here preparations have been made, and one of the three armies is completely routed...
...Soloviev's superman of the 21st century combines fantastic intellectual capacities with impeccable ethical standards...
...Though most science fiction is no more than vulgar trash, the genre seems to be increasingly victorious in its competition with the so-called contemporary novel...
...The Emperor himself, a Free Mason and an honorary doctor of theology of the University of Tuebingen, is considered a Messiah by the Jews...
...that is, he performs extraordinary deeds to glorify himself in his own eyes...
...When we read Soloviev, we often have the impression that the spiritual makeup of his 21st century is quite close to our own...
...Soloviev influenced the generation of Russian symbolists...
...Z., and the Lady...
...If, however, "the world dwells in evil," and evil grows out of man's very ego, that lack of innocence should be taken into account in any strivings for social improvement...
...Those works underwent a mutation similar to the one we are witnessing today in fantasies about the future—from simple tales of adventures to utopias and philosophical satire Swift's Gulliver's Travels was the fruit of such a mutation...
...In his reasoning there are signs of a spiritual illness which, according to the author, will contaminate the majority of all people in the future...
...Whether Soloviev had ever been in Orvieto, I cannot say...
...John and Peter II unmask the Emperor as the Antichrist, for which they are killed with "fire from Heaven" by Cardinal Apollonius, and their corpses are exposed to public view...
Vol. 18 • December 1971 • No. 6
