Martin, John Jeffries. A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World

Let me begin at the end.That is appropriate for a book about the making of the modern world through the apocalyptic imagination, what John Jeffries Martin calls a "Beautiful Ending." In the acknowledgments at the end of this beautifully produced book, Martin observes the beginnings of the volume and its genesis, how he found in a diffuse draft of "a history of early modern Europe from the age of Columbus to the French Revolution" a narrative that caught his attention: "the role of apocalyptic in the history of Europe and the Mediterranean from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century" (251).The book emerged unconsciously, he writes: "I hadn't self-consciously set out to work on this theme" (251).Then Martin found something that intrigued him: "Nonetheless, once this stratum emerged, I found I couldn't look away" (251).He elaborates on this fascination: "In part, I was fascinated by the hold of the apocalyptic on the imaginations of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the early modern period" (251).This role of the apocalypse took Martin to a typology of then and now: "Moreover, this story seemed also to speak to the present with our own renewed anxieties about the End of History" (251).That anxious zeitgeist was something Francis Fukuyama explored in The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).Martin ends where he began, that is at the end of things in the early modern world from the epochal Columbian landfall to the Revolution of 1789 in France: "Above all, as I came to see, the apocalyptic imagination played not an insignificant role in the making of the modern world" (251).Imagining the end makes the future that becomes our present.Christopher Columbus and Francis Bacon are important for Martin, for the emergence of modernity.The landfall of Columbus changes the view of exploration and knowledge beyond the Pillars of Hercules.Martin says that Bacon saw crossing the Pillars as promising new knowledge of nature and the world, a "shift to modernity itself " (2).The motto Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia derives "from the Book of Daniel, where the phrase 'many will pass through and knowledge will be increased' pointed not to the development of secular knowledge but rather to the End of History and the final sorting of

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