Borchardt R. Doomsday Speculation as a Strategy of Persuasion. A Study of Apocalypticism as Rhetoric. Doomsday Rhetoric

Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen, 1990. — 257 p. — ISBN10: 0889465061; ISBN13: 9780889465060Speculation about the end of things seems to be about what it says it is about: the end of things-in-general. In fact, such speculation is about a great deal more than that. It speaks to the present and the past as much as it does the future. In so doing, such speculation sooner or later begins to resemble a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. This tory differs from other stories in that it is about time itself: about not just any beginning, middle, and end, but rather about the beginning, the middle, and the end. The story is also about the storyteller, in a special and profound sense. And between these two, the story is about the storyteller's community, specifically about a community in crisis. The story affirms the worth of the storyteller's community, to spite the crisis, by repudiating the world insofar as the world is defined by present time and can be blamed for the crisis. The central importance of time in the story distinguishes it from other reproaches to the world at large, such as mystics, ascetics, or utopians might voice. The “now” in the “here and now” is the target.Speculation about the end of things has a purpose, a goal. Chiefly it is to deal with crisis either by moving an audience to undertake some action to resolve the crisis in its favor or to persuade an audience of the insignificance of the crisis in the grand scheme of things, especially in view of what is yet to come. Speculation about the end of things is therefore a discourse of persuasion and, like all such forms of discourse, it employs a strategy of persuasion— “a rhetoric.”Conclusions in Lieu of IntroductionA Statement of Purpose
Doomsday as a Rhetorical Narrative
The Rhetoric of Imminent Disaster
The Abominable Present World
Golden Ages Surround History
The Fall
The Symmetry of Time
The Pragmatics of the Rhetoric of Doomsday
Rival Systems
History as Comedy
The Unity of the Rhetoric of DoomsdayThe Primordial Golden AgePrimitivism
The Golden Age as “Photo-positive”
The Golden Age as “Photo-negative”
The Extremist Position
The “Other Place”
Primordial Time
Authorizing Myths
SummationThe FallThe Fall as Causal Explanation
Kinds of the Fall
The Fall and the Representation of Evil
The Indeterminacy of the Fall
The Ritual Fall
Gnostics
Manichaeans
Repudiation of the Cosmos
The Fall takes Place on Earth
Graeco-Roman Antiquity
Judaeo-Christian Traditions
The Worldwide Evidence
SummationThe Abominable PresentThe System defines the Present
The Present as Transit
The Contemptible Present defined by Other Times
The Contemptible Present defined by Experience
The Present defined as Contemptible
The Church Fathers on the Present
Alienation from Nature
The Biological Metaphor
The Present viewed from the Golden Age
Responsibility and Repentance
Availability of the Myths
NihilismImpending DisasterWorldwide Distribution of the Myth
The Present undone by the Disaster
The World turned Upside Down
The Signs and the Pattern of Doomsday
Psychiatric Analogues
The Spiritual Biography of Heroes and ProphetsThe Golden Age RestoredThe Worldwide Similarities
The Present as Negative Model
The Extremists
Judaeo-Christian Traditions
Virgil and the Sibyls
Lactantius and the Problem of Duplication
Resurrection
The End and the Beginnings
Analogues Worldwide
SummationSome of the Hard Questions“Stress” as the Source?
The Collapse of the Sacred
The Uses of Magic
The Worldwide Distribution
Recurrence in View of Failure
The Theater of Doomsday
The Advantages of Doomsday
Plausibility by Virtue of Decay
Primitivism
Mythical Biography