Apocalypse And/Or Metamorphosis

This is a book which seeks a place for humanity in the poetic extremes of intellectual life. Near the end, "Dionysus in 1990," Georges Bataille, author of THE ACCURSED SHARE, gets credit for writing, "Religion is the satisfaction that a society gives to the use of its excess resources, or rather to their destruction." (p. 188). With the thoroughly modern economic ploy of monetary expansion in the late 20th century, the progress of humanity was based largely on the willingness of everyone to engage in deep play, in which "The game that is played with the surplus is gambling, with a built-in risk of self-destruction, a built-in need for competition, and a built-in demand for new goods to replenish the store and be in turn destroyed (as in `planned obsolescence'). A need for hemorrhage is built into the system." (p. 187). This is a culmination of the intellectual approach in these essays, from the years 1960-1990, and, as the Preface puts it, looking back is "partly retrospective, at the end of an era." (p. ix).APOCALYPSE AND/OR METAMORPHOSIS begins with an outstanding Phi Beta Kappa Speech delivered at Columbia University on May 31, 1960. Already on page 2, this book declares, "Resisting madness can be the maddest way of being mad." Religion is considered "the learned ignorance, in which God is better honored and loved by silence than by words, and better seen by closing the eyes to images than by opening them." (p. 3). The second selection in this book is aphoristic. "Daphne, or Metamorphosis." It seems to be about poetry. "Petrarch says that he invented the beautiful name of Laura, but that in reality Laura was nothing but that poetic laurel which he had pursued with incessant labor." (p. 10). Similarly, the next section considers Sir John Falstaff in Shakespeare. "The horn, the horn, the lusty horn, Is not a thing to laugh to scorn." (p. 37).The fifth section of the book, "The Prophetic Tradition," is an attempt at "Ecumenical prophetic history," (p. 47), which is contrasted with "Hegelian triumphalism." (p. 47). Islam is seen as part of the prophetic tradition. "Protestants should be able to see that the need for a Protestant Reformation was there already in the seventh century C.E., to be perceived by prophetic eyes. Blakeans should be able to see that there is no way to accept `Again He speaks' in Blake unless we accept that again He speaks in the Koran." (p. 48). The anti-philosophical attempt by Justinian to purify Christian doctrine by closing the schools of philosophy in the year 529, and Christian opposition to the Gnostic Judaeo-Christian heresy "which struggled to avoid the catastrophic rupture between Christianity and Judaism" (p. 49) is the background for Norman O. Brown's philosophical attempt to conclude, "Islam is to be envisaged as dialectical evolution, or evolutionary mutation, in the prophetic tradition, in response to the limitations built into the structure of orthodox Christianity by its compromise w