Though I don’t have the pedigree to write voluminously on hopeful apocalypses, a friend of mine earned his doctorate in ancient apocalyptic literature from the University of Edinburgh and, with luck, we’ll get him on here sometime in the future to write a series entitled either Age of Apocalypse or Apocalypse Now, we haven’t really decided. The series will focus on how we still write in this genre often in pop novels and TV shows and what those films mean. For now you’re stuck with your friendly neighborhood Lancelot. But with the Coronavirus upon us, I wanted to point out five stories that end WELL — four novels and one film. And two of them deal with a flu-like mutation. We’ll start with the hopeful ending I agree with the least and move towards the one I agree with the most — I’m indebted to Fr. Boniface of St. Joe’s in the Village for riffing on this idea initially: I hope to flesh out further what he suggested to me last month.

Quick primer: the word “apocalypse” means “an unveiling.” And really what it’s all about is throwing the curtain back on the world to show what’s really underneath everything — beyond its façade and its fleshy fatty bits, what bones really hold up the world? What does it all mean, man? Apocalyptic literature like Hunger Games talks in symbols to deal with issues we’re dealing with today.

But in a scenario where the world actually does shut down, a good and proper disaster or catastrophe does what both words mean: it removes (or at least hides) our stars, our guiding lights, our ways of navigation. Dis-aster. Cata-strophe. And with nothing but our internal compass to guide us — the deep light of Ilúvatar within — we really see what we’re right and truly made of. So here are five hopeful ending to five hopeful apocalypses and what they believe, ultimately, about the world, ranked in order of what I agree with:

The Road

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, is both a novel and a film. It’s about a father and a son walking on a sort of nihilistic Pilgrim’s Progress (or Piers Plowman) through the wasteland of civil society. It ends positively, I won’t spoil the ending, but thematically it’s all about survival. And, ultimately, the next generation. And in McCarthy’s mind, the survival of the gene pool is enough. It’s barely — barely — hopeful in the way only an atheistic nihilist can be. It’s the sort of hope that someone like a Richard Dawkins, who fundamentally misunderstands contingency and ontology (even though his degree has “philosophy” in the title), might cling to: that we’re the lucky ones to have survived our brutal climb out of this primordial slime and murder hole. And passing on our survival genes is… hope? I guess it’s as good a place as any to start out our list of hopeful apocalypses?

Mandel responds that survival is insufficient:

Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel, contributor to The Millions and serial novelist, argues along with Star Trek that “survival is insufficient.” In her chronologically disjointed narrative somewhat focused thematically on Camelot via the actor named Arthur who plays a king, society collapses via flu… and personal betrayal… but mostly the flu. And she shows, methodically (I originally misspelled it “mythodically,” which is also apropriate), how civil society is built-up by the secular humanism manifested in the arts and sciences:

A troupe of former performers hitch horses to the frame and chassis of an old Ford truck and pull their post-apocalyptic theater troupe tent through the new American wilderness, frontier-like, spreading the good news of Shakespeare, classical music, and sundry other art forms. She ends with a clean apologetic for science fiction and comics arguing, essentially, that the very idea of America is predicated on science fiction. America is one among many hopeful apocalypses. It’s a very, very hopeful ending to a flu pandemic, as things go. She’s not wrong. But she’s only focuses on minor rights. As an apologetic for sci fi — particularly in the literary world — it’s remarkable. But it amounts to little more than the giggling version of the worldview McCarthy offers: they both, more or less, deny the supernatural. And the only people who believe in the supernatural are religious extremists who tear the world apart. 

Of course, it’s sort of even more hypocritical for Mandel because all of the mythos she appeals to — Arthur, comics, Shakespeare, etc. — are predicated on deep faith in the supernatural. At least McCarthy admits the inherent brutality of his assumptions. She doesn’t. It’s entirely naïve and ignorant to pretend as if beauty and morality have their roots in matter. How can rational order come from irrational causes? If the causes are irrational, from whence comes rationality? There is no adjudication between beauty and horror, between good and evil within sans-aesthetic, sans-moral materials and agents. 

Which is where the King of blue collar comes in with his contribution to hopeful apocalypses:

The Stand

A great cinderblock of a paperback, particularly in the unabridged director’s cut version, The Stand took me two years of intermittent reading to finish. It made me laugh, bite my nails (which, admittedly, is terribly difficult to stop during the pandemic), and weep — particularly the Christmas imagery I read on winter break the year I read it. It’s the most horrific of those listed, particularly considering the flu pandemic, but it’s honest about the spiritual realities. It moves from pre-apocalypse to apocalypse to post-apocalypse into pre-apocalypse to yet another apocalypse and the BIG question as to whether it’ll continue ad infinitum. It’s awful and beautiful at once. He calls it a tale of Dark Christianity. And perhaps he’s all too unaware of how much of the occult he’s pulling on — Christianity as a sort of mechanism to unlock the spiritual realm, for better or worse. It does have hope in it. After all, as King himself has testified: even the title — THE STAND — is based on the Ephesians verse:

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all of this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. And pray in the Sprit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep praying for all the saints.

It clearly ends with a stand-off between spiritual forces. And in this way, King responds to the atheistic nihilism of other apocalyptic novels like McCarthy’s and Mandell’s. The Stand is, at once, darker and brighter than anyone’s because it admits that world-ending forces are more-than-phyiscal realities. And the proper way to fight them is not as if we’re fighting people — or even mere microbes — but as if we’re fighting the minds behind the madness. Strip it all down, says King, and it’s a battle of good and evil where the better magic wins, as Lewis might say: the older, deeper magic. But King makes this occultist, even Wiccan: white magic verses dark magic. And gnostic spiritual secret knowledge — and humanism — is also insufficient. I agree with Chesterton — dualism is a manful philosophy (for you Buddhists and occult members out there). But it’s insufficient because there is such a thing as grey in the world. We need a way to navigate folks who have both inside of them — a third way, a terbium quid. And that terbium quid really needs to be rational. Even a person: a guide to navigate the grey of our hopeful apocalypses.

One film tried to do this with a book:

The Book of Eli

The Book of Eli is a film starring Denzel Washington and, true to form, is probably the most Evangelical of plots. It agrees with King — that the spiritual forces behind world-ending scenarios are real. But it also acts as if the only solution is a book. Ironically, the interpretation of the book matters as well. The blind man gets it right. The spiritually blind man gets it wrong. And the perspective on the book matters. So nuance and grey exist, but the book is the world-ending and world-beginning cornerstone. And therefore the book must be preserved at all costs — and preserved in the right hands. 

If that’s not evangelical, I don’t know what is. But it also reminds me of another Chesterton quote:

What is any man who has been in the real outer world, for instance, to make of the everlasting cry that Catholic traditions re condemned by the Bible? It indicates a jumble of topsy-turvy tests and tail-foremost arguments, of which I never could at any time see the sense. The ordinary sensible sceptic or pagan is standing in the street (in the supreme character of the man in the street) and he sees a procession go by of the priest of some strange cult, carrying their object of worship under a canopy, staffs, others carrying scrolls and sacred records, others carrying sacred images and lighted candles before them, others sacred relics in caskets or cases, and so on. I can understand the spectator saying, “This is all hocus-pocus”; I can even understand him, in moments of irritation, breaking up the procession, throwing down the images, tearing up the scrolls, dancing on the priests and anything else that might express that general view. I can understand his saying, “Your croziers are bosh, your candles are bosh, your statues and scrolls and relics and all the rest of it are bosh.” But in what conceivable frame of mind does he rush in to select one particular scroll of the scriptures of this one particular group (a scroll which had always belonged to them and been a part of their hocus-pocus, if it was hocus-pocus); why in the world should the man in the street say that one particular scroll was not bosh, but was the one and only truth by which all the other things were to be condemned? Why should it not be as superstitious to worship the scrolls as the statues, of that one particular procession? Why should it not be as reasonable to preserve the statues as the scrolls, by the tenets of that particular creed? To say to the priests, “Your statues and scrolls are condemned by our common sense,” is sensible. To say, “Your statues are condemned by your scrolls, and we are going to worship one part of your procession and wreck the rest,” is not sensible from any standpoint, least of all that of the man in the street.

Yes, in apocalypse we must survive. And yes, in apocalypse survival is in sufficient: we must thrive by making moral culture in the arts and sciences and imagine and dream again. And yes, those moral realities are not physical, but part of a very fleshless, bloodless war of good and evil. And yes, that good and evil can take two sides of the same objective book. 

But the book alone won’t save us because it depends on how you read the book — to whom does the book really belong? We need a guide from everything: as God made Eve from the bone in Adam’s side, so God made Second Eve of the blood and water of Second Adam’s side. And Second Eve leads us into everything: and we need everything saved from the shipwreck, the spoon to become a shovel, the steering wheel to become the wheel of time, the rigging to become pulleys and the sails to become shelter. Something universal that touches everything in macro and everything in micro and everyone that touches either. Something… what was the Latin word for universal?

Canticle for Leibowitz

If in an apocalyptic scenario we must survive. And not just survive, but thrive. And not just thrive, but thrive knowing we get the capacity to do so from nonphysical and rational means. And not just getting that capacity, but navigating the nuance with a guide through the truth and life and beauty behind all rational means. And not dead in some book, but a living guide…

Then what does that look like?

Well. 

It looks like Second Eve taking our hand and leading us into Everything.

And that’s what happens in every apocalypse and every end, according to Miller, author of Canticle for Leibowitz. The world ends like four times in this book much like the book of Revelation, which speaks over the rise and fall of countless empires in history. Canticle the most beautiful, heartbreaking, and joyfully hopeful piece of fiction I’ve ever read. It’s one of my top-ten favorite novels of all time, I think, certainly top twenty. I almost started it over the moment I finished — absolute must-read for everyone of any fictional taste. 

The book starts after the end of our world. Like three hundred years from now, post-apocalypse. A dumb, annoying monk stumbles on an underground bunker full of things from this era of history — schematics and blueprints and equipment, all with confusing notes about things. And through studying these relics, the monks and friars rebuild civil society from scratch.

And it collapses.

And they do it again.

And it collapses.

And they do it again. Hopeful Apocalypses.

And Miller throws his conclusion right in the face of the McCarthy’s of the world: survival is insufficient. But so is secret knowledge, whether physical (Mandel) or spiritual (King) or religious (Eli). And so we need wisdom. And the way we do that is with the proper guide of Second Eve. 

It’s the most hopeful of the hopeful apocalypses and where I recommend you begin reading in the midst of our own.