The Prophet and the Algorithm: Why We Cannot Stop Imagining the End

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Oil on panel, 60 x 84 cm. Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany.

The Paradox of Post-Secular Apocalypse

Picture three scenes from a single week in late 2022. In a glass-walled conference room in San Francisco, artificial intelligence researchers debate “alignment risk” and “existential safety,” the possibility that machine intelligence might soon exceed human control and, in scenarios they map with the sobriety of actuaries, extinguish us. Their PowerPoint presentations feature probability curves trending toward what they call, without irony, “doom scenarios.” In a megachurch outside Dallas, a pastor with twenty thousand congregants preaches on the signs of the End Times—pestilence (COVID-19), rumors of war (Ukraine, Gaza), the gathering of nations against Israel—his sermon live-streamed to millions, the book of Revelation open on the lectern beside his iPad. At a United Nations climate summit in Dubai, scientists present graphs showing atmospheric CO₂ concentrations, planetary temperature anomalies, and the approach of “tipping points,” thresholds beyond which Earth’s biosystems may shift irreversibly, making large portions of the planet uninhabitable within our grandchildren’s lifetimes.

Three different vocabularies: computational, theological, and climatological. Three different institutions: cosmopolitan California, evangelical America, and international scientific consensus. Three different audiences: IT engineers, believers, and diplomats. Yet listen better, and you hear the same temporal grammar, the same apocalyptic syntax. The AI researchers speak of “point of no return” and “existential risk.” The Texan preacher invokes “final judgment” and “the day of reckoning.” The climate scientists warn of “irreversible change” and “planetary boundaries.” All three share a narrative structure older than any of them realizes: This age is ending, and the next will be qualitatively different. The time remaining is short, and what we do now matters absolutely.

We were not supposed to be here. For two centuries, the confident grandchildren of the Enlightenment assured us that apocalyptic thinking belonged to humanity’s superstitious past, that modernity meant the end of such fevered imaginings. August Comte promised the age of positive science would replace theological fantasy. Max Weber spoke of the disenchantment of the world, in which rationalization sweeps away prophetic fervor. By the late twentieth century, secularization theory had become academic orthodoxy: as societies modernize, religion—and with it, eschatological obsession—would fade into private irrelevance, a museum curiosity for historians of belief.

Yet here we are, well into the twenty-first century, and the end of the world has never been more present. What German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, himself a secular inheritor of the Frankfurt School’s critical rationalism, was forced to acknowledge in a startling 2001 lecture: Western societies have entered not a post-religious age but a post-secular condition (Habermas, 2008, 17). Religion has not disappeared; it has not even retreated. Instead, it persists and, more surprisingly, gains public and private significance precisely as global risks intensify and modernity’s promises grow uncertain. This is not the return of religion in its premodern form, nor is it the privatization of religion into personal spirituality—although both elements can be seen in cultural marginalia. It is something stranger in its core: the fusion of religious and secular, theological and technical, prophetic and predictive vocabularies in public discourse about civilizational futures.

Habermas’s diagnosis carries implications we are still learning to see. The post-secular is not simply the coexistence of believers and non-believers in plural societies, a banality that has characterized modernity from the start to the present end. Rather, post-secularity names the breakdown of the confident boundary between religious and secular reasoning, the discovery that secular modernity’s deepest commitments (progress, universal human dignity, historical optimism) rest on unacknowledged theological foundations, and that explicitly theological concepts (judgment, redemption, apocalypse) continue to structure ostensibly secular thought about history’s direction and humanity’s fate (Habermas et al., 2010, 15–17, 72–77). In other words, we thought we had left apocalyptic imagination behind when we left the cathedrals. We were wrong.

Consider our three scenes again. The Silicon Valley researchers calculating machine intelligence risk employ the concept of existential threat—not merely danger to this or that population, but to existence itself, to the continuation of the human story. This is eschatological thinking in computational dress. It assumes, as ancient apocalyptic did, that history can end, that there is a line beyond which meaningful human life cannot continue, that we stand at a hinge point where our choices determine whether the future opens or closes. The megachurch pastor needs no translation. His sermonic tradition—dispensational premillennialism, a nineteenth-century American innovation that reads contemporary geopolitics as the literal fulfillment of biblical prophecy—has mapped current events onto eschatological timetables for over a century (Boyer, 1992, 17ff). Russo-Ukrainian war, Middle Eastern conflicts, pandemic disruptions: these are not random troubles but signs that “the time is short,” that this generation may be the last before Christ’s return. The climate scientists, meanwhile, adopt the grammar of irreversible thresholds and last chances, speaking in language that, however mathematical and empirical its origins, carries unmistakable eschatological weight (Chakrabarty, 2009, 198). We are approaching, they tell us, a point of no return. After that threshold, the story changes, and not for the better.

These are not isolated examples. They represent a broader phenomenon: apocalyptic imaginaries circulating simultaneously in religious communities, secular expert cultures, and the hybrid spaces where prophecy and policy, theological judgment and techno-scientific prognosis, echo and distort one another (Amanat & Bernhardsson, 2002). The Christian pastor quotes Revelation; the policy analyst quotes the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; both employ the rhetoric of urgency, finality, and imminent transformation. This is the interpretive challenge of our moment: how do we read a world where the language of ends saturates discourse across the religious-secular divide, where apocalyptic thinking appears not as marginal enthusiasm but as the dominant temporal framework through which we imagine—or fail to imagine—collective futures?

The challenge is not merely academic. I write from a particular position: a philosopher working between the post-Soviet space and Western Europe, between Orthodox Christianity’s eschatological imagination and secular modernity’s developmental narratives, between Ukrainian experiences of real catastrophes (Chernobyl’s apocalypse, Russia’s aggression) and Brussels conference rooms where technocrats imagine managing “crisis scenarios.” From this vantage, the Western debate over secularization looks quaint, even willfully blind. In Eastern Europe, religious and secular apocalyptic narratives never separated as cleanly as in the West. Soviet communism was itself a secularized eschatology, the withering away of the state as the Kingdom of God on earth, History as judge, the Party as bearer of salvific knowledge. Its collapse in 1991 was experienced eschatologically, as the end not merely of a political system but of historical meaning itself. What rushed into the vacuum? On one side, liberal promises of democratic convergence and market prosperity—another secularized eschatology, Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” (Fukuyama, 1992). On the other hand, the return of explicitly religious apocalypticism: reinvented Orthodox civilizational discourse, often fused with imperialism, casts Russia as the katechon, the restrainer holding back the Antichrist of Western left-liberalism (Dugin, 2012).

To watch these competing apocalyptic narratives weaponized in the geopolitical conflicts and alliances is to see with terrible clarity what Western theorists of secularization missed: apocalyptic and eschatological imagination does not fade with modernity. It adapts, mutates, secularizes its surface while maintaining its deep structure, and returns with renewed force precisely when civilizational crises intensify. The Russian state justifies its war in explicitly eschatological terms: defending Orthodox civilization against the apocalyptic threat of Western decadence. Supported by the West Ukrainian resisters, meanwhile, deploy their own apocalyptic rhetoric: the final battle for Europe’s democratic soul, the last stand against authoritarian darkness from the East. As both sides have nuclear arsenals, the apocalypse they imagine could become the apocalypse they enact.

This is why the question of how we imagine the end is not abstract. The forms our apocalyptic imagination takes—whether religious or secular, violent or pacific, open or closed—determine what we, humans, do with our freedom, how we structure our institutions, whom we define as enemies, what sacrifices we demand, which futures we foreclose, and which we hold open. The Silicon Valley researcher calculating AI risk, the Dallas preacher reading Revelation, the UN climate scientist modeling change—each imagines an end, and in imagining it, helps create the conditions for its arrival or prevention. We cannot stop imagining the end. The question is whether we can learn to imagine it without hastening it, whether apocalyptic urgency can coexist with democratic humility, and whether we can face genuine catastrophic possibilities without succumbing to the totalizing logic that makes catastrophe more likely.

Three Questions for a Post-Secular Age

If we accept that we inhabit a post-secular condition and that apocalyptic imagination has not been overcome but only transformed, secularized, and recoded into apparently neutral technical language, then three questions demand answers. They are ancient questions, asked in every generation that has faced its own potential ending, but our moment gives them particular urgency and a strange new form. We ask them not from within a single religious tradition that might provide confident answers, nor from within a secular framework that dismisses them as superstition, but from a position of epistemological vertigo: simultaneously inside and outside religious meaning, capable of neither pure belief nor pure skepticism.

First, why do human cultures, across millennia and continents, return obsessively to visions of an ultimate end of time?

The historical record is overwhelming. Ancient Zoroastrianism, emerging in what is now Iran around 1500 BCE, may have developed the first fully articulated eschatology: frashokereti, the final renovation in which the forces of good would definitively defeat evil, the dead would be resurrected, and the world would be restored to its original perfection (Kreyenbroek, 2002). Jewish apocalyptic literature, written under the pressure of imperial domination—Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman—imagined a coming “Day of the Lord” in which empires would fall and God’s justice would be established on earth (Collins, 2016, 4–6). The Book of Daniel, composed during the Seleucid persecution in the second century BCE, gave Western civilization one of its most enduring apocalyptic images: four kingdoms rising and falling, culminating in the establishment of an eternal divine kingdom that would never be destroyed. Early Christianity inherited and intensified this expectation: Jesus proclaimed that “the kingdom of God is at hand,” and the Apostle Paul wrote to his congregations as though he expected Christ’s return within his lifetime. When the end did not arrive on schedule, Christian theology developed increasingly complex systems to explain the delay while maintaining urgency, a two-thousand-year theological project of living in permanent expectation.

Islam, too, developed rich eschatological traditions: the coming of the Mahdi, the descent of Jesus to fight the Dajjal (the Deceiver), the signs of the Hour, the Day of Judgment when every soul would be weighed and assigned to paradise or hellfire (Amanat & Bernhardsson, 2002, 17). In medieval Europe, apocalyptic expectation intensified periodically—around the year 1000, during the Crusades, in the wake of the Black Death, during the Protestant Reformation—each crisis provoking renewed certainty that this generation would see the end (Cohn, 1970; McGinn, 1998). When European colonizers brought Christianity to Africa, indigenous communities reinterpreted the imported apocalyptic texts through their own cosmologies, creating syncretic millennial movements that promised the expulsion of colonizers and the return of ancestors (Sanneh, 2002, 234–236). In nineteenth-century China, a failed civil service candidate named Hong Xiuquan, reading Christian missionary tracts, had visions that he was Jesus’s younger brother sent to establish the “Heavenly Kingdom” on earth, a conviction that launched the Taiping Rebellion and killed perhaps twenty million people (Ownby, 2002, 262). In the antebellum American South, the enslaved preacher Nat Turner read the Bible and saw signs in the sky—a solar eclipse, an atmospheric phenomenon—and led a rebellion that briefly imagined the apocalypse as a slave revolt, God’s judgment on the slaveholding world (Brodhead, 2002, 212–13).

Then came modernity’s ostensibly secular apocalypses. The French Revolution reimagined the Last Judgment as a political rupture—Year Zero, the old world swept away, humanity reborn in reason and virtue. Hegel’s philosophy of history culminated in the Prussian state as the realization of Absolute Spirit. Marx transformed Christian and Judaic eschatology into historical materialism: capitalism would collapse under its internal contradictions, the proletariat would seize power, class conflict would end, and the state would wither away into communist abundance—paradise regained without God (Löwith, 1949, 33–50; Ansorge, 2025, 97). The twentieth century weaponized these secular eschatologies with industrial efficiency: Soviet communism promised the end of exploitation; Nazism the thousand-year Reich of racial purity; American democracy the monopolar peace of global capitalism. Each claimed to know history’s direction, each demanded absolute commitment, and each, in the name of paradise, produced mountains of corpses.

And now, in the twenty-first century, when all the great ideological narratives lie in ruins, we find apocalyptic thinking metastasizing across domains we imagined were purely technical. Climate scientists speak of “hothouse earth” scenarios and “extinction events.” AI researchers calculate the probability of “intelligence explosion” scenarios that could render humanity obsolete or extinct within decades. Epidemiologists model pandemic pathogens that could kill millions or billions. Nuclear strategists, who never stopped their apocalyptic calculations during the supposed end of history, now factor in new nuclear powers and the erosion of arms control regimes. Ecologists document the “sixth extinction,” the fastest loss of biodiversity in 65 million years, the unraveling of planetary life-support systems. Financial analysts speak of “systemic risk” and “contagion” in global markets, using the language of pandemic to describe economic collapse (Anders, 2022; Chakrabarty, 2009).

The question gnaws: Why? Why does every civilization we know of develop narratives about time’s ending? Why does every historical crisis trigger renewed certainty that this is the final crisis? Why do we keep predicting the end, generation after generation, even as earlier predictions have failed? The pattern suggests something deeper than religious doctrine or ideological fashion. It points toward a structural feature of human consciousness, a peculiar relationship to time, mortality, and meaning that generates apocalyptic imagination with the regularity of a cultural constant. We will propose an answer in later essays, but here we must first acknowledge the breadth and persistence of the phenomenon: from Zoroaster to Zuckerberg, from Daniel to the IPCC, humans cannot stop imagining the end.

Second, how have these images of the end shaped collective agency and freedom, empowering the oppressed to imagine otherwise, yet also licensing crusades, purges, and authoritarian mobilization?

This is the political question, and it cuts both ways with equal sharpness. On one edge: apocalyptic imagination has repeatedly served as the language of the powerless, the vocabulary through which dominated peoples name systematic injustice as intolerable and imagine its overthrow. When Judean scribes, living under the heel of Hellenistic empires, wrote the Book of Daniel, they were not primarily making theological arguments. They were doing something more urgent: sustaining dignity and hope under conditions that empirically promised only continued oppression (Collins, 2016, 68ff). The apocalyptic vision—God will intervene, empires will fall, the righteous will be vindicated, a kingdom will come that cannot be shaken—functioned as what philosopher Ernst Bloch called the “principle of hope” (Prinzip Hoffnung), the insistence that the present order is not ultimate, that another world is possible (Bloch, 1986).

This pattern repeats across centuries and continents. Early Christians, facing periodic Roman persecution, clung to Revelation’s vision of Babylon’s fall and the New Jerusalem’s descent: Rome would not endure forever; the martyrs would be avenged. Medieval peasants, ground down by feudal exactions, followed charismatic prophets who promised imminent transformation: the mighty would be cast down, the humble exalted, property held in common, and the earth made paradise (Cohn, 1970, 29ff). African communities under colonial subjugation reinterpreted imported Christianity as liberation theology: the colonizers were Pharaoh, the colonized were God’s chosen people, and exodus was coming (Sanneh, 2002, 235ff). Nat Turner, reading his Bible in Virginia in 1831, found in its apocalyptic texts not a justification for slavery—though slaveowners preached it as such—but a call to insurrection: the Lord would raise up the lowly and cast down the oppressor, beginning with Turner’s own hands (Brodhead, 2002, 212ff).

The empowering dimension of apocalyptic imagination cannot be dismissed as false consciousness or ideological mystification. It is real power: the power to name systematic violence as violence, to refuse reconciliation with injustice, to imagine and therefore make possible radical alternatives. When Martin Luther King, Jr., stood before the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 and said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” he was making an eschatological claim—history has a direction, and that direction is toward the vindication of the oppressed (King, 1986, 252). This is why power regimes—whether authoritarian or democratic—fear apocalyptic movements among subject populations: such movements refuse the permanence of existing power and delegitimize the present order by insisting that it is temporary, penultimate, and doomed.

But the other edge is equally sharp and soaked in blood. The same apocalyptic imagination that empowers the oppressed can license the oppressor, can transform liberation theology into totalitarian fury. Consider the Taiping Rebellion again: what began as a Christian-inflected vision of egalitarian transformation—communal property, gender equality, the Heavenly Kingdom on earth—became one of history’s bloodiest civil wars, with Hong Xiuquan’s theocratic state executing thousands for violations of its millennial discipline (Ownby, 2002). The French Revolution’s apocalyptic Year Zero gave way to the Terror, with Robespierre declaring that “terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible”—the guillotine as God’s sword, purifying the world for the new age (Robespierre, 1794/2007, 127). Soviet Bolshevism’s promise of a workers’ paradise justified Lenin’s Proletarian Dictatorship’s terror, as well as Stalin’s purges and the Gulag: you cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs, and if History demands the elimination of class enemies, then eliminating them is revolutionary virtue, not murder. The Nazi apocalypse of racial purity led directly to Auschwitz: the thousand-year Reich required cleansing Europe of those who contaminated it (Arendt, 1951, 458ff).

Nor is this only a problem of past totalitarianisms. Contemporary apocalyptic imagination continues to authorize violence. Islamic State justified its beheadings and sexual slavery by claiming to enact prophesied scenarios of the end times: they even named their magazine Dabiq after the Syrian town where Muslim tradition places a final battle between Muslims and “Rome” (McCants, 2014). White nationalist movements in the United States and Europe increasingly adopt apocalyptic rhetoric about demographic “replacement” and civilizational “last stands,” rhetoric that has motivated multiple mass shootings (Belew, 2018, 3–6). Eco-extremists justify sabotage and occasionally terrorism as necessary responses to planetary emergency: if the apocalypse is coming anyway, normal moral constraints dissolve (Loadenthal, 2017, 61ff). And states use apocalyptic threats—terrorism, migration, pandemic, climate chaos—to justify emergency powers that never expire, to suspend rights in the name of security, to redefine democracy itself as a luxury we can no longer afford.

The pattern is this: apocalyptic imagination both empowers resistance to domination and licenses domination in the name of salvation. It can make the oppressed stand up and the free kneel down. It energizes movements for justice and movements for purification, liberation theology and inquisitorial terror, Martin Luther King’s dream, and Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. The question is whether these opposing potentials can be separated: whether we can retain apocalyptic imagination’s critical edge, its refusal to accept injustice as final, while blunting its totalizing temptation, its seduction by the fantasy of violent closure, final solutions, and purified worlds.

Third, what does the persistence and transformation of end-time narratives—through religious, secular, and now post-secular forms—reveal about the structure of human responsibility and our difficulty in enduring open, unfinished history?

This is the deepest question, the one that will occupy us through this and the seven following essays. It asks not merely what people believe about the end or how those beliefs function politically, but why apocalyptic imagination persists with such stubbornness across every attempt to overcome it. Why, after the Enlightenment supposedly taught us that history has no predetermined end, do we keep acting as though it does? Why, after twentieth-century totalitarianisms demonstrated the catastrophic consequences of political eschatology, do we continue to generate new versions? Why can we not simply accept that history is open-ended, that there is no final judgment, no ultimate reckoning, no guaranteed meaning—and get on with the pragmatic work of making things incrementally better?

The German-Jewish philosopher Karl Löwith, writing in exile from Nazi Germany, proposed a provocative answer: modern Western thought, despite its secular self-image, remains structurally dependent on Christian eschatology (Löwith, 1949, 2). The idea that history is going somewhere, that it has direction and potential culmination, that present suffering might be justified by future redemption—these are not empirical observations about how societies actually change. They are articles of faith, secularized theological commitments. Remove them, and you are left with what the ancient world believed: history as a cyclical rise and fall; civilizations as organisms that are born, mature, and die; and the cosmos as eternal recurrence without progress or regress. The modern mind, Löwith argued, “still lives by the Christian belief in redemption and consummation” even when faith in Christ has faded (Löwith, 1949, 18). We cannot imagine history without telos because we inherited our sense of historical time from Christianity and earlier religious traditions, which gave time an eschatological arc.

However, the reason may run deeper than religious influence. Perhaps apocalyptic imagination responds to existential structures inherent in human consciousness: our unique awareness of mortality (we know we will die, even if we tend to forget about it sometimes), our capacity to recognize injustice (we can imagine how things ought to be otherwise), our narrative self-understanding (we experience life as story requiring meaningful conclusion), and our burden of temporary freedom (while alive, we must choose how to act without knowing whether our actions ultimately matter). These four features—mortality consciousness, justice consciousness, narrative consciousness, and the burden of freedom—create an intolerable tension. We see injustice that we cannot fully rectify within any lifetime. We build civilizations that we know will perish. We act without assurance that our actions matter beyond the immediate moment. The apocalyptic imagination offers relief from this tension: it promises that someone or something—God(s), History, Nature, Evolution—will deliver a final verdict, will ensure that good and evil do not simply cancel out, and will give the story a conclusion that makes sense of what came before.

If this is right, then we cannot simply decide to stop imagining the end. The impulse is too deeply embedded in the structure of our relation to time, justice, and meaning. What we can do—what these essays will attempt—is learn to configure apocalyptic imagination in forms that preserve its critical urgency while disarming its totalizing violence. We can learn to live with the tension rather than resolving it through fantasy. We can accept that history may have no guaranteed conclusion while still insisting that our choices matter. We can face genuine catastrophic possibilities—climate collapse, nuclear war, technological dysgenics—without succumbing to the apocalyptic intoxication that makes catastrophe more likely.

This is what we mean by post-secular apocalyptic consciousness. Not the abandonment of eschatological thinking—that proved impossible. Not its uncritical embrace—that proved catastrophic. But it’s a transformation into something weaker, more modest, more involving: an apocalyptic imagination that keeps urgency while refusing certainty, that judges without claiming sovereignty, that transforms without purifying, that hopes without guarantees. Whether such a thing is possible is the wager of these essays.

Apocalyptic Imagination as Double-Edged Cultural Technology

Here, then, is the thesis that will guide these essays: Apocalyptic imagination is not a marginal superstition that modernity somehow failed to fully eradicate, nor a specialized theological doctrine confined to particular religious traditions. It is a cultural technology, a tool, a technique, and an intellectual apparatus that human societies have developed for thinking about limits. The limits of injustice: how much oppression can be endured before the social fabric tears? The limits of meaning: what makes historical suffering bearable, what would make it unbearable? The limits of planetary habitability: how far can ecosystems be stressed before they collapse? The limits of time itself: is history endless repetition, or does it have direction, and if direction, then also destination?

To call apocalyptic imagination with a modernist word, “technology,” emphasizes three points. First, it is constructed—made, not given; shaped by historical circumstances, cultural materials, and human choices rather than revealed whole from heaven or discovered ready-made in nature. Second, it is functional—it does things, accomplishes work, enables certain actions, and forecloses others. And third, it is transmissible—it can be learned, taught, adapted, translated across contexts. Like any technology, apocalyptic imagination can be used well or badly, carefully or recklessly, for liberation or for domination. And like any powerful technology, it is inherently ambivalent, carrying both creative and destructive potential within the same mechanism.

The ambivalence is structural, not accidental. On the one hand, apocalyptic imagination radicalizes freedom by rendering other worlds and other orders of justice imaginable and urgent, especially for those at the margins of empires and systems. If you are enslaved, colonized, occupied, or dominated, if every empirical indicator suggests your oppression will continue indefinitely, then the apocalyptic promise—that this world is not ultimate, that another order is coming, that the mighty will fall and the humble be exalted—is not opium but oxygen. It is the insistence, against all evidence, that the present arrangement of power is temporary, penultimate, subject to a higher court’s judgment. This is what the Jewish apocalyptic writers offered their communities under Hellenistic and Roman domination: not practical advice for negotiating with empire (there was none to be had), but a vision that made resistance thinkable. It is what Christian apocalyptic offered the enslaved in the Americas: the same Bible that slaveholders weaponized to preach obedience could be read against the grain as a promise that Pharaoh’s chariots would drown, that Babylon would fall, and that the first would be last and the last first. It is what Nikolai Berdyaev, my fellow Kievite philosopher writing in the catastrophic years after the Bolshevik Revolution, meant by “active eschatology”: the idea that awareness of ultimate endings should intensify rather than diminish freedom, should liberate consciousness from idolatry of nation, class, or state, should remind us that all earthly powers are temporary and only spiritual liberty endures (Berdyaev, 2009, 203–210).

But the other side of apocalyptic imagination is equally powerful and far more dangerous. It tempts us with closure. It scripts the future in advance, tells us we already know how the story ends, divides humanity into the saved and the damned, and arms political projects—from total revolutions to civilizational wars—with the weight of sacred or historical necessity. If you know that History is on your side, that God has decreed your victory, that Evolution or Progress or the Dialectic guarantees your triumph, then what are a few million corpses along the way? They are regrettable necessities, birth pangs of the new world, the pruning required for the garden to flourish. Robespierre knew this. Stalin knew it. Pol Pot knew it. And many contemporary radical leaders know it still: apocalyptic rhetoric transforms ordinary political struggles into cosmic warfare, making compromise seem like treason and violence seem like virtue.

The twentieth century demonstrated this danger with industrial efficiency. When Norman Cohn traced the genealogy of modern totalitarianism back through medieval millenarian movements—the chiliastic sects expecting imminent transformation, the prophets promising earthly paradise, the revolutionary brotherhoods preparing for the Kingdom through purifying violence—he was not making a merely historical argument (Cohn, 1970). He was exposing a pattern: apocalyptic imagination, once mobilized by political movements, tends toward totalization. It cannot tolerate plurality, compromise, or incremental reform because these appear as betrayals of the coming order. It demands now what it has promised for then: the new heaven and new earth, the classless society, the racially pure Reich, the global caliphate. And when reality refuses to conform—as reality always does—apocalyptic movements can either admit failure or escalate the violence. They escalate.

This is the double-edged sword I mentioned earlier, and it cuts through every case we will examine. Zoroastrian eschatology gave history moral weight by insisting that human choices contribute to the cosmic struggle between good and evil. But also introduced the dualistic logic that divides the world into absolute camps, rendering those on the wrong side metaphysically, rather than merely politically, opposed. Jewish apocalyptic sustained hope under the empire. But also developed the concept of holy war and the obligation to destroy rather than merely defeat enemies. Christian apocalyptic universalized human dignity and historical meaning. But also, as René Girard observed, by revealing the innocence of victims and delegitimizing sacrificial violence, it removed traditional restraints on mimetic rivalry, leading to what he called “escalation to extremes,” conflicts that can now spiral toward species-level catastrophe (Girard & Chantre, 2010, 3–6). Islamic eschatology provided a framework for judging unjust rulers—but also sacralizes certain political projects as implementing divine will in history’s final phase.

Secular modernity inherited these structures wholesale, even while claiming to have overcome them. Hegel’s philosophy of history—Absolute Spirit realizing itself through dialectical struggle, culminating in the rational state—is Christian eschatology with the supernatural removed and the Prussian bureaucracy substituted for the New Jerusalem (Löwith, 1949, 52ff). Marxists’ vision of communism—the end of class struggle, the withering away of the state, abundance for all—is the Kingdom of God rewritten in the grammar of political economy, complete with chosen people of proletariat, original sin of private property, apocalypse of revolution, and millennium of communist society. Even liberal visions of perpetual democratic peace or technological singularity—Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” or Ray Kurzweil’s “rapture of the nerds”—maintain eschatological structure: history moving toward a final stable state, present struggles justified by future culmination, meaning secured by telos (Fukuyama, 1992, xi–xii; Kurzweil, 2005, 7ff).

The philosopher Hans Blumenberg objected to Löwith’s account, arguing that modernity is not mere secularization but a genuine rupture, a new self-assertion of human reason that legitimately grounds itself without appeal to theology (Blumenberg, 1985, 3–7). Yet even Blumenberg had to acknowledge that modernity remains haunted by eschatological questions: Where is history going? What gives it meaning? How do we orient ourselves in time? The substitution of Progress for Providence does not eliminate these questions; it only changes the answers. And in our moment, when Progress itself has become questionable, the eschatological structure resurfaces in its nakedness. We see it was there all along, underneath the secular costume.

This brings us to the post-secular present and the possibility—still only possibility—of reconfiguring apocalyptic imagination in less totalizing forms. Contemporary thinkers like Giorgio Agamben, John Caputo, Gianni Vattimo, and Catherine Keller have been attempting exactly this: to retrieve apocalyptic urgency while disarming apocalyptic violence, to maintain eschatological consciousness without eschatological certainty, to keep the critical edge that delegitimates false ultimates while blunting the temptation toward violent closure (Vattimo, 2002; Keller, 1996, 2021; Agamben, 2005; Caputo, 2006).

Agamben reads Paul’s letters to excavate a concept of “messianic time” that is not the end of time but the time of the end—time contracted, intensified, made urgent not because we know when it will stop but because we live as if under ultimate judgment, holding every present moment open to radical transformation (Agamben, 2005). Caputo develops a “weak theology” in which God appears not as sovereign power imposing order but as fragile event calling for justice—the Kingdom “insists” but does not command, making apocalyptic hope a perpetual perhaps rather than a guaranteed outcome (Caputo, 2006). Vattimo interprets Christianity itself as the religion of kenosis, divine self-emptying, which inaugurates the “weakening” of all strong metaphysical and political authorities—apocalypse as the slow historical dissolution of violence rather than its dramatic climax (Vattimo, 2002). And Keller, writing explicitly about climate catastrophe, calls for a “counter-apocalyptic” politics that faces a genuine emergency without apocalyptic fantasy, acknowledging that we live in “last chances” without claiming to know the final script, acting with urgency while refusing the purification logic that divides humanity into saved and damned (Keller, 2021).

These are the resources we will draw upon in the essays that follow. They point toward eschatological sobriety: a way of inhabiting apocalyptic consciousness that keeps its moral urgency, its refusal to accept injustice as final, its insistence that we face genuine catastrophic possibilities, while disarming its totalizing temptation, its division of humanity, its authorization of violence in the name of salvation. Whether such a stance is achievable, whether it can be institutionalized in democratic forms rather than remaining an intellectual’s private dialectic, whether it can shape how elites in Brussels and Washington actually respond to climate breakdown and authoritarian resurgence—these are open questions. But they are the right questions, more urgent than most of what occupies our think tanks and editorial pages.

Method, Scope, and Architecture of the Essay Series

A word, then, about how we will proceed—and, equally important, what we will not attempt. The question of why and how humanity imagines its end is vast enough to swallow entire academic careers, and this series of essays makes no claim to encyclopedic coverage. We will not survey every apocalyptic tradition, nor trace every historical instance of millennial expectation, nor adjudicate theological disputes about which apocalypse, if any, is “true.” Our aim is more modest and, I hope, more useful: to trace a pattern across diverse cases, to excavate the deep structure beneath surface variations, and to ask what this pattern reveals about the human condition, about human freedom and limitation.

Methodologically, the approach is threefold: historical, comparative, and philosophical. Historical, because apocalyptic imagination has a history—it was invented at a particular moment (or several moments), evolved through contact and conflict between cultures, adapted to new political circumstances, and mutated in response to modernity’s challenges. We cannot understand contemporary climate apocalypticism or AI doom scenarios without knowing that they inherit conceptual structures forged in ancient Iran and crystallized in Jewish exile. Comparative, because only by setting cases side by side—Zoroastrian frashokereti next to Marxist dialectic, Christian Second Coming next to nuclear annihilation, African prophetic movements next to Silicon Valley singularitarians—do the common patterns emerge clearly. And philosophical, because the ultimate question is not merely descriptive (what do people believe?) but normative (what should we do with our freedom given that we cannot help imagining ends?).

The architecture unfolds in three large movements, each building on the previous.

First, the genealogy of apocalyptic imagination.

We begin at the beginning, or as near to it as the historical record allows. In Essay Two, I examine the ancient Near East, where catastrophe narratives existed but within essentially cyclical time, and the Zoroastrian innovation that transformed catastrophe into eschatology by giving time a direction and a definitive conclusion. This is the conceptual revolution that makes everything else possible: the idea that history is not eternal recurrence but an arrow, that good and evil are locked in temporal struggle heading toward final resolution, that human choices accumulate toward an ultimate reckoning. From Iran, this template spreads—through cultural contact, imperial conquest, exile communities—into Jewish apocalyptic literature written under Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman dominations.

Essay Three traces apocalyptic themes across the three great monotheisms. Jewish apocalyptic, exemplified in Daniel and Enoch, envisions a future “Day of the Lord” in which empires fall and God establishes justice. Christian apocalyptic, centered on Revelation but elaborated over two millennia of commentary, transforms Jesus’s announcement of the Kingdom into scenarios of judgment, tribulation, the millennium, and new creation. Islamic traditions develop rich eschatologies around the Hour, the Mahdi, and final judgment. In each case, we’ll examine both the theological content and the political function: how apocalyptic serves simultaneously as a language of resistance for the oppressed and as an instrument of power for those who claim to implement God’s will.

Essay Four moves to millennial margins: places where imported apocalyptic met indigenous cosmologies and colonial violence, producing explosive syntheses. African millennial movements reimagined biblical apocalyptic as anti-colonial resistance; the Taiping Rebellion in China fused Christian eschatology with Confucian concepts to launch a revolution that killed twenty million; and in enslaved America, preachers like Nat Turner read the same Bible used to justify bondage as a script for insurrection. These cases reveal apocalyptic imagination’s ambivalence at its sharpest: the line between liberation theology and totalitarian violence proves catastrophically thin.

Second, secular and anti-secular transformations.

Essay Five examines how modernity claimed to overcome apocalyptic thinking while actually secularizing it. We’ll trace the argument between Karl Löwith, who saw modern philosophies of history (Hegel, Marx, liberalism) as Christian eschatology in secular dress, and Hans Blumenberg, who defended modernity’s legitimacy against this charge. The essay then turns to revolutionary millenarianism, and devotes substantial space to Russian religious philosophy’s distinctive engagement with eschatology, from Nikolai Fedorov’s vision of humanity’s duty to resurrect the dead through technology, through Vladimir Solovyov’s warning about the Antichrist as great reformer, to Nikolai Berdyaev’s “active eschatology” that treats ultimate questions as intensifying rather than negating freedom. We’ll examine how contemporary Russian philosophers, from Aleksandr Dugin to Pavel Shchelin, deploy eschatological language—the former to sacralize imperial violence, the latter to propose “eschatological optimism” as an acceptance of finitude. The essay concludes with nuclear apocalypse and Anthropocene endings, showing how even our most “scientific” apocalypses carry theological structures.

Third, understanding and reconfiguring.

Essay Six asks the anthropological question: Why do we imagine ends? Drawing on the previous essays’ evidence, it proposes that four existential structures generate apocalyptic imagination: mortality consciousness (we know we die), justice consciousness (we recognize injustice but cannot fully remedy it within history), narrative consciousness (we require stories with endings), and freedom consciousness (choices must matter ultimately yet we must remain free to choose). The essay examines how these structures create intolerable tension that apocalyptic imagination promises to resolve—and how that very promise becomes politically dangerous.

Essay Seven maps post-secular reconstructions. Here we examine thinkers attempting to reconfigure apocalyptic in “weak,” non-sovereign forms: Giorgio Agamben’s “messianic time” that lives in permanent urgency without predicting dates; John Caputo’s and Gianni Vattimo’s “weak theologies” where God insists but doesn’t command; Catherine Keller’s “counter-apocalyptic” response to climate crisis that keeps urgency while refusing purification logic; and the tradition from Maurice Blanchot through Jean-Luc Nancy of “disappointed apocalypses” that acknowledge catastrophe without revelation.

Finally, Essay Eight offers normative counsel. Writing as a philosopher who has advised European and American policymakers, I will address the practical question: How should elites—those who must make decisions about climate policy, nuclear strategy, democratic resilience, technological governance—think and act given that we live under genuine catastrophic threats but cannot claim sovereign knowledge of how the story ends? The essay develops my concept of “eschatological sobriety”: urgency without certainty, judgment without sovereignty, transformation without violence, and hope without guarantees.

Throughout, the aim is not to adjudicate which eschatology is “true”—that is theology’s task, not philosophy’s—but to show how the ways we imagine the end shape what we do with our freedom. The series title—The Apocalyptic Animal—expresses this doubled temporality: we live after the death of naive progressivism that promised a secular paradise, after the failure of religious and revolutionary apocalypses that promised to force history’s conclusion, yet we still live under apocalyptic possibilities we can neither fully control nor fully escape. The time that remains is the only time we have. The question is how to inhabit it responsibly.

Why can we not stop imagining the end?

So, we return to the question with which we began: Why can’t we stop imagining the end? The answer matters because the stakes, immediate and existential, could hardly be higher.

The immediate political stakes are visible in every conference room where decisions about our collective future are made. Watch how Western elites oscillate between two equally inadequate responses to genuine civilizational threats. On one side: technocratic denial, the treatment of nuclear arsenals, climate breakdown, and democratic erosion as mere “management problems” soluble through better algorithms, more efficient markets, optimized policies. This is Günther Anders’s “apocalypse-blindness” institutionalized—the inability of institutions designed for incremental adjustment to grasp existential risk, the gap between our technical capacity to destroy ourselves and our imaginative capacity to comprehend that destruction (Anders, 2022). When European Union officials discuss climate policy in the language of “carbon pricing mechanisms” and “just transition frameworks,” technical terms that are not wrong but catastrophically insufficient, they exemplify this first failure: refusing to name the apocalyptic dimension of the crisis we face.

On the other side: apocalyptic exploitation, the weaponization of end-times rhetoric by authoritarians, nationalists, and demagogues to harden group identities, justify aggression, and foreclose democratic deliberation. When Vladimir Putin’s ideologists frame the war against Ukraine as a metaphysical struggle between Orthodox civilization and Western Antichristic decadence, when American evangelical leaders interpret political opponents as literal servants of Satan, or when white nationalist manifestos speak of demographic “replacement” as an existential threat requiring violent response—this is apocalyptic imagination in its most dangerous form. These are not metaphors to be dismissed as colorful rhetoric. They are reality-shaping claims that authorize emergency measures, demand absolute loyalty, and transform negotiable political conflicts into cosmic battles where compromise becomes treason.

The tragedy is that these two failures reinforce each other. Technocratic denial of ultimate questions—the refusal to acknowledge that we face genuine apocalyptic possibilities, that nuclear war could happen, that climate systems could collapse into uninhabitable states, that democracies could die—leaves the field of eschatological meaning to extremists. When secular elites treat all talk of ends as superstition to be politely ignored, they abandon humanity’s deepest questions about meaning, mortality, and justice to whoever will address them, no matter how recklessly. Nature abhors a vacuum; so does the human need for ultimate meaning. Into the space evacuated by liberal proceduralism rush the prophets of purification, the calculators of doom, the peddlers of certainty—religious and secular, left and right, each promising to reveal history’s hidden pattern and your role in its denouement.

But the deeper stakes are existential, philosophical, anthropological. What hangs in the balance is nothing less than how we understand human freedom itself. If we accept that apocalyptic imagination is not an eliminable superstition but a permanent structure of human consciousness, arising from our unique relationship to mortality, justice, narrative, and time, then the question becomes: Can we configure this imagination in forms that enable rather than destroy life with dignity and freedom? Can we keep apocalyptic urgency while refusing apocalyptic certainty? Can we face genuine catastrophic possibilities without succumbing to the fantasy that we know the script, that history has already decided our fate, that only total transformation—purifying violence, revolutionary rupture, technological transcendence—can save us?

This is what I mean by the burden of the open future, a concept we’ll develop in Essay Six. We cannot bear the thought that history might be genuinely open-ended, that there is no providence, progress, or dialectic guaranteeing meaning, that injustice might not be ultimately rectified, that the good might not finally triumph, that our civilizations might simply collapse into ruin like the empires that preceded us. The apocalyptic imagination offers psychic relief from this burden: Someone—God(s), History, Nature, Evolution—will deliver a verdict. The account will be settled. The story will have a conclusion that makes sense of what came before. But this relief comes at a price: the division of humanity into camps, the authorization of violence in the name of salvation, and the foreclosure of the very political space in which negotiation, compromise, and democratic deliberation become possible.

The wager of this series is that another relation to apocalyptic consciousness is possible. Not its elimination that proved impossible, not its uncritical embrace that proved catastrophic, but its transformation into eschatological sobriety. By this I mean: the capacity to acknowledge genuine apocalyptic possibilities without apocalyptic intoxication, to maintain urgency without certainty, to judge without claiming sovereignty, to transform without purifying, to hope without guarantees. Whether such a stance can be achieved, whether it can move from philosophical proposal to political practice, and whether it can shape how policymakers respond to crises—these are open questions. But they are, I submit, the right questions, more urgent than most of what occupies our attention.

Consider what we face. Climate scientists tell us that within our children’s lifetimes—not some remote future but their lifetimes—Earth systems may cross tipping points that make much of the planet uninhabitable (IPCC, 2021). Nuclear strategists remind us that nine countries possess almost 13,000 nuclear warheads, hundreds on hair-trigger alert, and that even a “limited” nuclear exchange could trigger global famine killing billions (Toon et al., 2019). AI researchers debate whether artificial general intelligence might arrive within decades, bringing either utopia or extinction depending on whether we solve what they call the “alignment problem” (Bostrom, 2014). Epidemiologists warn that the next pandemic could be far deadlier than COVID-19, and that synthetic biology makes engineered pathogens increasingly feasible (Inglesby, 2021). Political scientists document democratic backsliding across dozens of countries, the erosion of norms that protect pluralism, and the rise of authoritarianisms that combine digital surveillance with nationalist mobilization (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018).

These are not metaphors. They are technically and politically real possibilities. To deny them is foolish. But to respond to them with apocalyptic certainty—to claim we know exactly how and when the end comes, to divide humanity into those who see the truth and those who are blind, to justify emergency measures that suspend democracy indefinitely, to authorize violence in the name of preventing catastrophe—is equally dangerous. The question is whether we can hold both truths simultaneously: that the risks are real and that we don’t know the outcome, that action is urgent and that humility is essential, that we must judge systems that enable catastrophe, and that we cannot claim the position of ultimate judge.

Václav Havel, who lived through Nazi occupation, communist dictatorship, and the difficult birth of post-communist democracy, once defined hope in a way that applies perfectly to our situation:

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out” (Havel, 1990, 181).

This is the stance these essays will attempt to articulate and defend. Not optimism, not pessimism, but something harder: the commitment to act responsibly under conditions of radical uncertainty, to work for justice without guarantees of success, to face apocalyptic possibilities without apocalyptic fantasy.

The prophet and the algorithm, the preacher and the scientist, the theologian and the technologist—all imagine ends because humans must imagine ends. We are eschatological animals, oriented toward futures we will not live to see, burdened with knowledge of our mortality and capacity to recognize injustice we cannot fully remedy. The question is not whether to imagine the end—we cannot help it—but how to imagine it. Whether our apocalyptic imagination will be democratic or authoritarian, open or closed, liberating or enslaving, weak or sovereign, sober or intoxicated.

These essays wager that the difference between these forms is the difference between livable and unlivable futures, between politics that preserves plurality and politics that demands purity, between the time that remains and the time that ends. The stakes are absolute, but the outcome is not. And that uncertainty—that terrible, precious uncertainty—is exactly what we must learn to bear.

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