Apocalyptic Humanism Refined

Reconciliation with one's personal mortality (i.e., one's humanity) as in the Gilgamesh epic need not be conflated with capitulation to the prevailing social order (i.e., the status quo). In the Ancient Near Eastern city-state--a social order that displayed the hierarchical pyramid structure paradigmatic for Western civilization ever since--the humanism of the Gilgamesh epic was enlisted for precisely this purpose. But, in the Axial Age, figures arose who questioned this structure on ethical grounds (e.g., the Near Eastern prophetic tradition) and in the post-Axial period of Hellenistic ascendency, this mode of cultural critique cultivated new utopian tropes of intensity which we call today "apocalypticism."

There is an implied threat of violence involved when State authority calls upon one to remember her mortality: "We are bigger and more powerful than you; don't resist us; remember that you are mortal--the State is not."

Go along to get along: or suffer the consequences.

Apocalyptic utopianism replied to this threat by denying humanism: "We may be mortal in the present round, but we shall be immortal in the next. We may be sown a natural body, but we shall be raised a spiritual one." The often inhumane humanism of the Imperial state was answered with a fearlessness founded in a new mythological structure: the hope of the resurrection. Insurrection was now possible.

One wonders if Constantine the Great, shrewd politician that he was, did not recognize in the willingness of the followers of Christos to face martyrdom rather than bow to the assertion of Roman power an untapped source of new Imperial potential--a source that he was determined to domesticate and harness. Men and women unafraid to die can change the course of history.

As it turns out, there is more than one way to accept one's mortality.

Apocalyptic humanism accepts the limitations that mortality imposes upon a given individual life, but retains enough utopian intensity to refuse victory to the prevailing State [of Affairs]. This "great refusal" is but the stubbornness of humanity to assert its worth in the face of those forces that seek to deny human dignity and worth. I think that this is what Paul Tillich may have intended when he argued that "courage is an ethical reality, but it is rooted in the whole breadth of human existence and ultimately in the structure of being itself. It must be considered ontologically in order to be understood ethically" [Tillich, The Courage To Be, 1].

Ontology is an extremely problematic science. For it to be useful at all, it must be carefully and deliberately construed. In my view, Tillich made some progress in this direction, but there is much more work to be done. There is something quite suggestive, however, in his view of human self-affirmation as an "ontological act" [Tillich, 15]. Tillich may well have been one the last great theoreticians of apocalyptic humanism in the previous century--alongside Northrop Frye and Norman O. Brown.