Chapter II
Anxious Foundations

To dwell in/on prophecy is to dwell nomadically. Always at the junctures of discontinuity, the prophetic ethos shades out of time and place. Emphatic yearning for an "other place" and an "other time" is synonymous to ecstatic affliction, and ecstasis, of course, literally translates as outward dislocation and as chronic displacement. Rupture and rapture, too, become synonymous, and the prophetic impulse exhorts peregrination to the peripheries, to the thresholds or liminalities of time-space that shade into sublime. Sublimity means living on the edge, and prophetic edginess is a most precarious existence. It obliges one to live beyond one's present in and for a time as yet inexistent and in an untenable terrain, deterritorialized by dint of a calling from a habitation not yet realized except as yearning. Uchronia and utopia (no-time and no-place), then, are the anxious dimensions whose frontiers recede ever beyond reach to receive those who heed prophecy's call and to compound, in the process, anxious expectancy's sublime edginess. Expectancy's anxiety is a desire for what one fears most, or a terrific anticipation of what one most desires. Prophetic impatience invests its energies in unequivocal futures. The prophet inevitably declaims "truth or consequences." Implacably convinced of the first, he dwells on and in the consequential.

Consequence too is a dwelling at the farther side, a cohabitation with an aftermath at the verge of the horizon.

Prophecy's declamation, then, proclaims its own charter to chart the unpastured sea, and the prophet's cartography traces the topology of a New World. Thus, the historical conjunction of the prophetic tradition with the transoceanic voyaging may not be the symmetry of a logical necessity. But the coalescence of prophecy's impulse and geography's traversal inevitably compels. Inasmuch as prophetic ends are trained on eschatology's promise, the cosmic End itself, we should not be surprised at the conjugation of the "discovery" of the New World with the end of the world, as Marcel Bataillon phrases it.^[1] By this prophetic arithmetic, we in the New World are would-be phantom souls inhabiting a post-apocalyptic ghostland that goes on outliving the life of an end-time calculus and its anxious expectations.

"Ghostland lies beyond the jurisdiction of veracity."^[2] So wrote Hawthorne sometime between 1853 and 1857. He served as consul in Liverpool at the time, representing his New World homeland in the Old World home of his ancestors. Hawthorne, of course, was irremediably haunted by his Puritan forebears. So much so, that his obsession drove him to seek the imperatives of his New England inheritance in the jurisdiction of veracity's fictions. I do not think, then, we would be conjecturing unduly were we to suppose that Hawthorne was writing of America when he noted his observations on "Ghostland" in his English Notebooks .

In a time closer to our own, the poet Wallace Stevens sought, not unlike Hawthorne, to ascertain an order for a "jurisdiction of veracity," only to discover that the frontiers of such jurisdiction faded no less into "Ghostland's" originary mirage of prophetic visions and phantom voices. Thus, he would conclude "The Idea of Order at Key West" with that clamoring stanza that echoes the beset prophet's voice in the wilderness:

Oh blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,

And of ourselves and of our origins
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.^[3]

Prophetic reckoning has proved a congenital obsession; and admonitions against the impulse have been equally timeless. As early as the time of that ancestral school master whom we identify as the Ecclesiastes, we are warned that "of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh" (Ecclesiastes 12:12), a caveat that has gone unheeded sempiternally. Even conservative church fathers who, like St. Augustine, endeavored to check the arithmetic impulse by pointing to such admonitory scriptures as Matthew 24:36, "But of that day and hour no one knows, . . . but the Father only," and Acts 1:7, "It is not for you to know the times or the seasons," have inadvertently inflamed apocalyptic calculus in ways that adumbrate the most powerful notions and the most brazen emblem of the New World: the eagle, bold and embaldened in America's self-conception as prophecy's fulfillment and piety's epitome that managed to baptize even Jupiter's thunderous arrows with righteousness. I am referring to St. Augustine's Eighty-first Sermon: "The world is passing away, the world is losing its grip, the world is short of breath. Do not fear, thy youth shall be renewed as an eagle" (81:8). St. Augustine is echoing the fifth verse of the hundred-third Psalm, and the Book of Psalms, as already noted, is the first book to be printed in New England's New World. (The eagle, emblematic also of another North American nation, Mexico, derives from native antecedents, the founding sources, equally anxious, of Aztec cosmology.)

The compelling imperatives of apocalyptic arithmetic served as threshold to the New World, and its reckoning is what has kept life on the edge for almost half a millennium now. This is because our historic year of 1492 figures prominently on the prophetic abacus of those early millenarian calculators who did not hedge on figures. To them, 1492 stood for urgent stakes of cosmic consequence. It meant the end of this world, the closure of history, the beginning of a New World, and the opening to a celestial reign.^[4] Instead, of course, they ended up with the earthly bathos of our New World and our not-so-celestial glories. Halfway between the

fall of Constantinopolis in 1453 and Columbus's 1492 disoriented landfall, the apocalyptic arithmetic becomes more precise. In his 1472 Chronography, Gennadius Scholarius, the first patriarch of Constantinopolis under Turkish rule, laid bare the figures: the Sabbath of the world, its seventh millennium when the curtain would rise on a heralded new age, was scheduled for the year 1492, that is, seven thousand years after its creation according to the Byzantine and Roman eras. In this reckoning, the first year of the creation extends from the first of September, 5509 B.C. to the first of September of 5508 B.C. which, subtracted from 7000 yields the unquestionable figure of 1492. Or, in the summationist progression of the Holy Patriarch's inexorable providence, 5508 plus 1492 adds up to the reckoned hour. This horological arithmetic finds its echo in the interpolated Slavonic version of Pseudo-Methodius, what is commonly referred to as the Revelation of Methodius of Patara,^[5] cited by Christopher Columbus in his Book of Prophecies^[6] to which we shall refer again shortly.

But both Gennadius Scholarius of Byzantium and the Slavonic Pseudo-Methodius are latecomers to the computing tables. The tallying tradition already is under way by the second century when, as we have seen in our previous chapter, the imminently expected end-time tarries beyond the imminent and expectation lingers long enough to take on mathematical weight, augmenting the factor of one by a thousand-fold. Thus, expectations of a here and now projected into the future recombine with enduring promises from the past to become factors of a millennial ledger. I shall explain and, in doing so, I shall rehearse some fundamental commonplaces of Old World accounting that would form the chronometric foundations of our New World cultures and their temporal anxieties.

Although it has pagan antecedents and heretical offshoots, millenarianism, as we know it, is scripturally founded.^[7] Confounded by the tardiness of the promised New Age, the second century probes the past for news of the heralded future, and those tidings are not lacking. I and II Thessalonians, I Corinthians, and later, of course, the Revelation of John the Divine announce the cosmic hiatus. Referred to as a Time of Rest in II Thessalonians (1:7) and

as the Millennium in Revelation (20:4), this intermediate status is to ensue from Christ's second coming, the Parousia that effects the defeat of Antichrist (II Thessalonians 1:8; Revelation 19:19), the resurrection of the dead saints, (I Corinthians, 15:23; I Thessalonians 4:16; Revelation 20:4), and the transfiguration of saints still living (I Corinthians 15:51). After a thousand years' reign with Christ on earth, there comes the Last Judgment and the passage of the righteous into the incorruptible other life (I Corinthians 15:25; I Thessalonians 4:17; Revelation 20:11–15). These testamental proclamations of the Messiah's triumph, His reign, and the New Creation are prefigured, in turn, in Hebraic prophets such as Ezekiel and in noncanonical scripture of apocalyptic and paradisiacal eschatology such as I Enoch, II Esdras (6:20–28), and II Baruch (29:4–8).

The classical text of millenarian arithmetic is Psalm 90:4, where "with the Lord one day is as a thousand years." The passage from this equation to a typology of the week in which the six days of creation represent the time of this world and the seventh day the time of the world to come derives from the Jewish tradition founded on Genesis. The extrapolation of this typology to the arithmetic of seven millennia as the total time of the world, however, is not Jewish. It is founded rather on Hellenistic mathematics of the seven planets in conflation with the Babylonian notion whereby each of the seven planets reigns over a corresponding cosmic era. In the synergism of this summation, the sum of Jewish and Hellenistic-Babylonian coefficients yields a whole greater than the accretion of those parts, thus giving us an eighth day that follows the millennium and comprises the beginning of another world. The earliest Christian manifestation of this conflation occurs in the second-century computations of the anonymous Epistle of Barnabas. The unknown Greek author from Egypt writes:

Of the sabbath he speaketh in the beginning of creation: And God made the works of his hands in six days, and he ended on the seventh day and rested on it. . . . Behold the day of the Lord shall be a thousand years. Therefore, . . . in six days, that is in six thousand years, everything shall come to an end. . . . He says to the Jews, it is

not your present sabbaths that are acceptable (unto Me), but the Sabbath which I have made, in the which, when I have set things at rest, I will make the beginning of the eighth day which is the beginning of another world. (XV.3–8)^[8]

Although the Epistle of the Egyptian-Greek Barnabas is telling with regard to the arithmetic of last things, his aim, as Daniélou notes, was primarily to purify Christianity from residual elements of Judaism in his catechesis. It was another church historian, the Syriac Theophilus of Antioch, who, in the second century, placed millenarian computations in the context of ancient cosmology. In this context, Theophilus was among the first historians of theology to be seduced, in turn, by the theology of history. And his tabulations would prove most influential in church fathers like Iranaeus whose work entitled Against Heresies plays a decisive role within the development of the patristic tradition, the mainline millenarian tradition. In Theophilus's computations, the birth of Christ corresponds to the world's 5500th year. This being the middle of the sixth millennium, the 6000th year should initiate the messianic reign of the seventh millennium, with the 7000th year marking the end of the world and the beginning of the New World. Theophilus's calculus extends the end to the year 1500, granting this world a reprieve of eight years beyond the 1492 hour of reckoning figured by Byzantium's Greek Patriarch. Theophilus's arithmetic is echoed in Hippolytus, a Roman priest by some accounts,^[9] a Syrian bishop, according to varying opinion.^[10] Hippolytus has left us the first complete Christian exegesis to have survived. His Commentary on Daniel packs more than the ostensible aims implied in the title of his work. The Greek treatise targets apocalyptic impatience, seeking to dampen the eschatological zeal that raged at high pitch in the beginning of the third century. Hippolytus's arithmetic attempts to fend off imminent expectations by simultaneously echoing Theophilus and recapitulating the Epistle of Barnabas through a strategy of allegorical reading. He writes:

Now the ark has five cubits and a half in length, and these are the 5500 years at the end of which the Lord came. From his birth, then,

500 years have still to pass to make up the 6000, and then shall be the end. (IV. 24)

Hippolytus, then, is a reluctant tabulator, and in that reticence he prefigures a long line of orthodox moderation compelled to intercede, numerically, on the side of patient anticipation as against enthusiasts who would precipitate the end with prophetic injunction and numerical invocation.

The Syrian tradition represented by the anonymous author of the Barnabas Epistle, by Theophilus, and by Hippolytus is a milder form of millenarianism. Its contemporaneous counterpart identified with Asia Minor counts in its ranks the third-century Tertullian, a radical millenarian who could be considered the father of Puritan nonconformity, and Lactantius, a converted Roman rhetorician often referred to as the "Christian Cicero." Focused primarily through Phrygia and the enthusiastic acolytes of Montanus, this Asiatic tradition compounds numerical arithmetic with earthly delights and fructiferous hyperbole, giving the millennium yet more tempting urgencies as tantalizing as any in the fertile imagination of a Hieronymus Bosch. If the Syrian tradition identifies its millenarianism with the more quiescent "Time of Rest" (II Thessalonians 1:7), the Asiatics are closer in line with the more frenzied activity of abundant multiplication and yield of paradisiacal materiality. The millennium in this context spells an earthly inheritance that proved a problem for early church fathers, but an inheritance whose impulse survived their vigilance to justify the enticements of New-World chiliasm (as millenarianism is often referred to by this Greek variant in the New World) in the Vineyard of Franciscans in New Spain and in the milk-and-honey-dipped New Canaan of New England's Puritan divines. This paradisal inheritance was, in fact, identified as Judaic and spurned as such by the church fathers. (In this sense, too, the referral to various geographies of the American New World as New Israel was not accidental.) But, in its acts of indictment and admonition, the more moderate tradition unwittingly extended the life of millenarian materialism in the very act of calling up visions and earthly delights to impugn and to admonish those who envisioned them. Disapproving recension, then, ends up

as reiteration. The earliest target of this censure was also the prototype of the later millenarian poor, portrayed in their zealous squalor by Norman Cohn's now-classic study, The Pursuit of the Millennium . They were the Ebionites, adherents to Judaic messianism who impatiently anticipated the temporal cornucopia promised for the time of that awaited Kingdom. Although not the first, St. Jerome is the most explicit in the condemnation of this error: "The Jews and the Ebionites, heirs of the Jewish error, who have taken the name of the 'poor' through humility, understand all the delights of the thousand years in a literal sense" (LXVI.20; cited in Daniélou). What Jerome censures in the fourth century is what Iranaeus had admonished before him, namely, the tendency to transfer the plenitude promised by Hebrew Testament prophets such as Isaiah (65:20–25) and Amos (9:13) from the next world to a messianic millennium in this world. That irrepressible foreshortening would prove a sempiternal foundation for millenarian apocalyptics and their hungry hosts who would progressively narrow the temporal gap between their direful "here and now" and the promised "then" with frenzied celerity. And understandably so, since what the good father Iranaeus rehearses in his second-century tract Against Heresies was bound to excite the appetite more than induce parenetic patience or forbearing contrition:

The days will come in which vines shall grow, each having ten thousand branches and each branch ten thousand twigs, and in each twig ten thousand shoots, and in each one of the shoots ten thousand clusters and on every one of the clusters ten thousand grapes, and every grape when pressed will give five and twenty metretes of wine. And when any one of the saints shall lay hold of a cluster, another shall cry out, "I am a better cluster, take me; bless the Lord through me." In like manner . . . a grain of what would produce ten thousand grains, and every grain would yield ten pounds of clear, pure, fine flour. (III.33; cited in Daniélou)

Such irenic attempts to keep faithful expectations alive and to check enthusiastic impatience at the same time become institutionalized of necessity. Assurance of an end is a cornerstone of the Christian edifice put in place by Christ himself; and the purposive movement of Christian history has that end as desired

goal, made more desirable at times by rift and dissonance that historical life introduces between the ultimately promised and the immediately endured, between deliverance and vicissitude. That institutionalization, like all institutions, aims at assuaging the conflictive stress and contrariety in competing impulses: faith and realization, expectancy and immediacy, patience and enthusiasm, abnegation and desire. Both elements of the binary are optimally valued and the institution must optimize the orderly unfolding, concert the disconcerted and the disconcerting, tame heterodoxy into orthodox orderliness without dulling the edge of faith or anesthetizing the edginess of fervent expectation. Clearly it is a precarious balance, and institutional hierarchies, whether in the Old World or the New, have succeeded only variably in the balancing of the millenarian impulse, usually through its incorporation by tacit acquiescence or outright appropriation. The American New World, especially its Puritan patrimony, is the unpredictable outcome of such mixed success (or variable failure, if one be so inclined). For at least half of the New World is founded on schismatic principles of protestation and its Protestantism, whereas the other half made its foundations spiritually plumb and theologically justified often by an adversary perspective toward the institutional orthodoxies of the moment. This does not mean, of course, that a millenarian explanation of the New World exhausts all that needs explaining. But it does mean that the articulated millenarian professions by its finders and founders must be duly countenanced, even when those finders and founders themselves may have been lost or foundering. Their belief in the course and outcome of their pilgrimage and its enterprise had the force of conviction rather than the wishfulness of probability. Or, to echo the frame of Hawthorne's phrasing with which we began, the way stations of their pilgrimage were indisputably within the jurisdiction of veracity, even if those jurisdictional boundaries circumscribed a "Ghostland." A u-topia or "Ghostland" it might have been, but to them it was undeniably a jurisdiction and a geography imbued with the spirit of the Holy Ghost and its promissory Ends.

The end, like most things in the New World, begins with Co-

lumbus. In his Book of Prophecies and dire epistles, Columbus articulates a number of topoi that throughout the Middle Ages, to which he so inextricably belonged, shaped millenarian expectations into conventional form. One of these conventions was the theme of translatio, a topos originally devised to explain the gradual passage of imperial authority and rule from East to West.^[11] By the twelfth century, the theme of translatio we now call "Westering" itself becomes subsumed by those conventions as metaphor for a spatial displacement, a geographical corollary through which a spiritual pilgrimage leads this world to its appointed end, transporting its expectant faithful from the unregenerate Old World to the promised millennial New World. In his hopeful writings, The Mystical Ark of Noah 4.9, Hugo of St. Victor who, as canon of his Parisian monastery between the years 1115 and 1133 transformed St. Victor into a stronghold of orthodoxy, sums up the tradition with clear conviction:

The order of place and the order of time seem to agree almost completely in the course of events. Thus it appears to be established by divine providence that what was done at the beginning of the ages, at the outset of the world, took place in the East, and finally, as time runs along to its End, the completion of events should penetrate even as far as the West. Hence we may acknowledge that the End of the world approaches because the sequence of events has reached the geographical end of the world. The first man was placed in the East, in the Garden of Eden already prepared, so that from this source his posterity might spread throughout the world.^[12]

Hugo of St. Victor's "geographical end of the world," whose attainment had to translate into the temporal End as well, was Europe's Atlantic shore. Christopher Columbus, of course, came a bit farther and, in doing so, by his 1498 third voyage he was convinced that he had reached the end of the Orient, well beyond the starting point of Hugo's visionary pilgrimage. And, in believing himself East of Eden, surely the End, the temporal correlative of this geographical encirclement could not be very far off. That was, as I mentioned, on Columbus's third voyage. The year was 1498, the year of Savonarola's public burning in Florence in an attempt to quell the fires of prophetic zeal, the year in which

Albrecht Dürer completed his Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and one year after John Cabot reconnoitered for England the eastern shores of the North American continent.

Although the spirituality of Columbus's enterprise would intensify with each successive voyage, there was an unmistakable sense of mission and apostolic election in the mariner, even before he first sailed West for the ends of the East which, for him, stood in both literal and allegorical terms for the scriptures' "ends of the Earth." In fact, the scriptural citation, Psalm 19:4 in our Revised Standard version and 18:5 in the Latin Vulgate edition of the Bible Columbus was using, figures no less than five times in his Book of Prophecies .^[13] As Columbus cited it, it reads: "In omnem terram exivit sonus eorum, et in finis orbis terrae verba eorum." In our Standard version it is rendered as: "Yet their voice goes out through all the earth,/ and their words to the end of the world." To paraphrase Heinrich Bullinger's 1556 A Hundred Sermons uponn the Apocalipse that became so important to English Puritans, we could say Columbus was overtaken by the "ends of the earth," even before he convinced himself of having overtaken those ends when he knew he had reached the threshold of Terrestrial Paradise at the mouth of the Orinoco River. In general consensus, the historical canon points to the year 1489 as clearly the documentable first instance in which Columbus manifests a spiritual mission and a crusader's commitment in the enterprise of the Indies which he was proposing to the Spanish Catholic monarchs at the time. In that year, Columbus was in the city of Baza where the royal court was pursuing its own messianic crusade, the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula from the Moors. Two Franciscan emissaries from Pope Innocent VIII, one of the two being Father Antonio Millan, prior of the Monastery of the Holy Sepulcher, brought threatening tidings from the sultan of Egypt. He threatened actions of dire consequences against the Holy City if the Spanish monarchs continued their campaign against the Muslim community of Spain.^[14] From that encounter between Columbus and the two Franciscan fathers beneath the city walls of Baza, the enterprise of the Indies, as the Genoese mariner called it, must be devoted to the subvention of the con-

quest of Jerusalem and the restoration of Zion's Holy Temple. Columbus notes the assurances he received to this effect from the Catholic monarchs starting with a diary entry of 26 December 1492 during his first voyage. He does so repeatedly on or right after each of his subsequent three voyages, in his original will drafted between his second and third sailings, and, of course, in his Book of Prophecies , as well as in his letter of February 1502 to Pope Alexander VI.

Columbus's commitment to the recovery of Jerusalem was of a piece with his conviction that he had reached the "ends of the earth" East of Eden. It is of a piece, too, with Columbus's sense of an apostolic mission to carry the Word of the Gospel to parts of the world unknown until his Oceanic crossing. And all of these pieces come together in the Book of Prophecies to which I have so often alluded and should finally describe. Here, then, is the opening of El libro de las profecias:

Incipit liber sive manipulus de auctoritatibus, dictis, ac sententiis, et prophetiis circa materiam recuperande sancte civitates, et monte Dei Syon, ac inventionis et conversionis insularum Indie, et omnium gentium atque nationum . . .

[Here begins the book of a handful of authors, sayings, pronouncements, and prophecies concerning the recovery of the Holy City and God's Mt. Zion, and the discovery and conversion of the islands of the Indies and all peoples and nations.]

The Book of Prophecies was begun in 1501 with the help of a Carthusian monk, Father Gaspar de Gorritio, and was destined for the Spanish monarchs. Its end, like many prophecies, was never realized, and Their Royal Majesties never did receive it. To Columbus's typological understanding of history and historical events, it was imperative that his accomplishment be the proof of prophetic prognostications, the realization of visionary expectations long harbored. And it was important, too, to prove that this actualization of what had been prophesied for the agency of Columbus was indeed a step toward the eventual culmination of all prophecies' object, namely, the climactic end and the millennial beginning. In the terse overture just cited, Columbus encom-

passes the three key elements woven through the long prophetic tradition we have traced and its expectant scanning for the hopeful signs of the promised end: to wit, the recovery of Jerusalem, the geographical incorporation of all parts of the earth, and the conversion of all humanity to the light of the "true" faith. This worldwide inclusion would mean the realization of the "Universal Church" and would translate into prophecy's formulaic unum ovile et unus pastor —one flock and one shepherd—at which time a World Emperor (who, for the Iberian messianism of the moment had to be Ferdinand of Aragon) would engage and defeat the Antichrist on Mt. Zion, after which an Angelic Pope of a renovated church would lead the faithful flock into the promised time of a thousand-year bliss before the Last Judgment. This, in simple form, is the general plot of the Medieval tradition that Columbus knew so well and incorporated so diligently into his Libro de las profecias by way of citation, reference, and allusion. It is in this vein that he invokes an array of Classical and Hebraic authority, of scripture (canonical and apocryphal), and sundry ecclesiastical voices as diverse as St. Augustine and the Calabrian Abbot Joachim of Fiore, Pseudo-Methodius, and Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly, Nicholas of Lyra and Peter Lombard. The plot is tightly wrought and broadly documented. And, of course, this latest, and certainly the last , production of the cosmic drama could not play itself out except through the instrumentality and the providentially elect and amply prophesied, and most aptly named Christoferens , "the transporter or bearer of Christ" across the waters to the far shores of prophetic ends that abut the gates of a New Heaven and a New Earth. (Not to be outdone by the of course divinely determined symmetry between Columbus's "christopheric" name and his providential role, Cotton Mather, in his Magnalia Christi Americana [1702], would characterize John Winthrop, the first and, most symbolically, seven-time governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, as Hermes Christianus , after the Greek messenger god, duly baptized, of course.)^[15] As already pointed out, Christoferens is how Columbus became progressively accustomed to signing his name as part of the enigmatic sigla of his signature.

In 1500, writing to the nurse of the ill-fated Prince John, heirapparent of the Catholic monarchs, Columbus confesses:

God made me the messenger of the New Heaven and the New Earth of which he spoke through St. John in the Apocalypsis, after having spoken of it through Isaiah; and He showed me to that location.^[16]

A year later, in the cover letter that was to accompany the Libro de las profecias , Columbus reminds their highnesses of his providential appointment in nearly identical terms (pp. 79–89). And with this most humbly confessed admission, Columbus does more wonders for the New World "spot" he found than the Puritans' "Wonder-Working Providence" will have been willing to grant God's other chosen people and elect messengers in their more northerly New Earth. The "found" New World becomes articulated in its primal finder's confession in terms that make it consubstantial with the millennial dispensation of Isaiah's and John the Divine's "New World." A number of years later, the New World would be descried in analogous terms in the prognostications of Increase Mather, New England's ardently convinced millenarian (or chiliast, as was his wont) for whom the awaited end was most certainly and most literally imminent. I cite from a manuscript of Mather discovered in 1976. It is entitled "New Jerusalem" and dates from 1687:

Againe , when New Jerusalem comes down from heaven, it is saide that the heaven and earth that now are, shall be no more, but a new heaven and a new earth: Rev. 21:1,2. There will then be a New World , another world wonderfully differing from what this is at present where we now live. (29)^[17]

Columbus, of course, is fully cognizant of the steps and turns through which the prophetic script must arrive at its own and the world's apocalyptic last act. Accordingly, he rehearses the calculus with ingenuous faith and ingenious strategy, a combination undoubtedly founded in providential prompting. He calculates in earnest and the integers of his abacus span the sacral range of orthodoxy's gamut, lest anyone think to impugn his prophetic arithmetic with suspicions of heretical impatience. In the process, he marks the reckoned hour at a safe enough distance, a prudence

his New-World inheritors in New England and in Latinate America will not always emulate. He is, as you will remember, doing his arithmetic in 1501, one year after Theophilus of Antioch's second-century calculations would have all but mooted the need for further figuring. I translate, once more, from Columbus's still nearly Medieval and almost Renaissance Spanish in this section of the Book of Prophecies:

The sacred Scriptures attest in the Old Testament through the mouth of the prophets and in the New Testament through our Savior Jesus Christ that this world has to have an end. The signs for when this end should occur have been told by Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The prophets, too, had abundantly predicted it.

From the world's creation, or from Adam till the Advent of our Lord Jesus Christ, there are five thousand three hundred, forty-three years, and three hundred eighteen days, according to the accounting of King Alfonso [Alfonso X, "the Wise," of Castille], which accounting is held to be most certain. Following Pierre d'Ailly, in his Elucidario astronomice concordie cum theologica et hystorica veritate , Xth verba, and adding one thousand five hundred and one, we have six thousand eight hundred and forty-five. According to this calculation, there are but one hundred and fifty-five years remaining to complete seven thousand, at which time, as I said above following the cited authorities, the world will have to come to an end. (p. 81)

In closing Hugo of St. Victor's geographical circle, Columbus thus closes the time of the world's pilgrimage, announcing the good news of the end. Being the news that was long awaited, its impact is myriad. For the most part, however, Columbus's achievement spells a closure both of a time and of a geography. His compatriot Amerigo Vespucci also knew he had reached a New World and his editor cleverly entitled Vespucci's letters announcing his find Mundus Novus , after the usage first employed on October 20, 1494 by Peter Martyr of Anghier in a letter to his friend Borromeus. The usage, by the way, does not figure in Columbus until August 1498, that is, during his third voyage. But a world of difference, so to speak, sets Columbus's New World apart from Vespucci's as we shall see in greater detail in our next chapter. As we have already seen, however, Columbus's is the old New World either as the farthest East that is West of everything,

or as the New World long prophesied of old in venerable anticipation. Vespucci's, on the other hand, is a new continent that doubles the size of the known hemisphere. Copernicus, born a year after the prognostications of the Byzantine Patriarch Gennadius Scholarius and already twenty-eight years old at the time of Columbus's prophetic calculations, did see something new in the good news of Columbus and the newer news of Amerigo Vespucci. But there was, too, something old already even in the novel vision of the Polish astronomer, something that had been so terribly disconcerting to the orthodox and orthodoxy's cosmic order that it was gripped tightly between the jurisdictional parentheses of that order for a very long time, lest the drama's plot be altered and the expected final act thwarted. The notion that the earth was not the center of the cosmos and that the course of its providential history was not identical to the history of the cosmos was already advanced some 1,800 years before the similar claims of the ill-starred Copernicus. Heliocentric astronomy had already been proposed in the fourth century B.C. by Aristarchus of Samos.^[18] And Aristarchus himself, by the way, was no slouch when it came to the computing tables of time, having added 1/1623rd part of a day that Callippus had left out of his calculation of a 365 1/4-day year. That indispensable leap addendum comes to 0.89 minutes, or 53.23 seconds. But even this fraction was more than the time of day Copernicus would be given by those who brokered the ideological futures of a futurity on which our New World would be founded. Copernicus's De Revolutionibus proved revolutionary, indeed; so much so that the tailspin into which it sent the Protestant Puritans' ideological forefathers kept the Catholic Church from condemning it officially from its first publication in 1543 until after the end of the sixteenth century. On the other hand, Giordano Bruno was eventually burned at the stake by the Inquisition for revealing the Polish astronomer's theory in his Ash Wednesday sermon of 1584. Bruno was thrown into a dungeon in Rome, where he was lured from Venice, in 1592, exactly one hundred years after our Columbian annus mirabilis , and was burned eight years later on the threshold of the seventeenth century. The Catholic Church did not admit the Co-

pernican recycling of Aristarchus's idea until 1820. The former Augustinian monk Martin Luther, quicker than most, assessed the significance of Copernicus's work in 1539, four years before its publication: "There is mention of a new astrologer who endeavors to prove that the earth, not the firmament, moves and revolves in circles. . . . This crackpot wants to disrupt the whole art of astronomy. Nonetheless, as the Holy Scriptures indicate, Joshua ordered the sun, and not the earth, to stay still." John Calvin, even less inclined to disruptions of preordained order than Luther, simply asked: "Who can dare place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Scriptures?" And the distinguished German Humanist Philip Melancthon felt terribly chagrined by the audacity of such talk: "A certain man, eager for novelty," Melancthon wrote, obviously oblivious to Aristarchus, "or wishing to make ostentation of his ingeniousness, has come to the conclusion that the earth moves, and proclaims that the sun and the heavenly spheres do not move. To assert such a thing publicly is to be lacking in honesty and decency."^[19]

The drama occupying center stage at the time was providential history's and, clearly, Copernicus did not figure in its plot. The novelty of the New World was absorbed as novel on wholly other terms. And even when the novelty had already been novel for two centuries and well beyond the apocalyptic end-year of 1656 prophesied by Columbus, its promise for other-worldly possibilities was being enthusiastically proclaimed. I cite from the New England divine Samuel Sewall's Phenomena quaedam Apocalyptica, Or some few Lines towards a description of the New Heaven As It Makes those who stand upon the New Earth (1697):

For when once Christopher Columbus had added this fourth to the other Three parts of the foreknown World; they who sailed farther Westward, arriv'd but where they had been before. The Globe now failed offering anything New to the adventurous Travailer; Or, however, it could not afford another new World. And probably, the consideration of America's being The Beginning of the East, and the End of the West; was that which moved Columbus to call some part of it by the Name of Alpha & Omega . Now if the Last Adam did give

Order for the engraving of his own Name upon this Last Earth; 'twill draw with it great Consequences; even as such will, in time, bring the poor Americans out of their Graves, and make them live. (p. 61)^[20]

Sewall's Edenic optimism for a millennial dispensation in the only new New World, or Last Earth, possibly may be somewhat belated. It is, nonetheless, symptomatic of the momentum generated by the conviction that a literal millennial Sabbath in Puritan New England for God's new chosen people was imminently inevitable. The Puritans were fully convinced of their errand out of the hopelessly declined Old World toward a rendezvous with destiny in a New World whose novelty promised the Next World so persistently longed for through the centuries: "The Land Was as the Garden of Eden, or Paradise, Before them: and Behind Them a Desolate Wilderness," Sewall writes in his Phenomena (p. 57) in an obvious reversal of scripture and of Milton's closing stanza in Paradise Lost .

The most ardent enthusiast for the impending end-time among the Puritan settlers was the minister of the Massachusetts Bay Colony's covenantal theocracy, John Cotton, who was to be seconded and succeeded in the imminence of his expectation by his son-in-law Increase Mather. The New World had to come in the New World, obviously, and the Puritans, like the spiritual founding fathers of Iberian America of a century earlier, saw themselves singularly privileged by history, by geography, and by God's grace for the experience. In 1639, probing anxiously all signs and arithmetical tables, John Cotton calculated in his An Exposition upon the Thirteenth Chapter of the Revelation that the appointed time would be in the year 1655, an end-line sum that differs from Columbus's calculus by only one impatiently foreshortened year. We do not know whether it was fortunate or unfortunate for John Cotton that he did not live long enough to see his anxieties confirmed and his most fervent expectations disappointed. Nonetheless, in that would-be annus mirabilis, the Puritan apologists for the "New England Way" in London publish John Cotton's treatise, and his friend Thomas Goodwin postpones the appointment with the millennial advent until 1700.

Increase Mather, in his 1710 A Sermon Shewing that the Present Dispensations of Providence Declare that Wonderful Revolutions in the World are Near at Hand (clearly, no relation to Copernican revolutions), asserts with an optimism whose incremental conviction belies its own cheerfulness that 1716 has to be the year: "So that in the year 456, there were Ten distinct Kingdoms in the Roman Empire; consequently from that Year we are to date the Commencement of Antichrist's Reign: which is to continue from first to last but 1260 Years, which added to 456, brings us to the year 1716" (p. 23).^[21] The year 456, according to Mather, marks the turning point in the purity of the church, and 1260 years are derived from scripture typologically, primarily from Daniel's apocalyptic book and from Revelation 11:2–3. The figure 1260 is significant, too, in the prophetic tradition associated with the Calabrian Abbot Joachim de Fiore and the Franciscan Spirituals so significant to Christopher Columbus's apocalyptic ledger.^[22] Like the expectant faithful of the second century, the anxiety of New England's settlers was not over the possibility that the world would end, but over the obstinate tardiness with which the millennial end was delaying its advent. And, like the second century, the anxieties of the founding Puritans found a venue, a safety release, in the parenetic injunction of metaphor and figural transfiguration of the end that was literally anticipated in the beginning. The prophetic destiny of the founding fathers would become manifest in alternate ways, and the anxieties of that providential digression would become articulated in the contrite language of probation and the exhortation of the Jeremiad, a genre that would become naturalized in the New World with elaborate and stentorian resonances.

New Spain, we should remember, kept the founding Puritans of New England from being unique in this regard a century earlier. The prophetic vein and apocalyptic verve, as well as the attendant anxieties and contrite Jeremiads in Latinate America have been documented by the late John Leddy Phelan in his The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World,^[23] to which the reader is referred for a more southerly version of this "ghost story."

Clearly, when Columbus named one of the capes on the island of Cuba Alpha and Omega on his first voyage, it is doubtful that he anticipated so many ends (and so many beginnings) for the New Earth he thought to have discovered and the New Earth he was convinced to have heralded.

Having begun with Hawthorne and Wallace Stevens, I should like to close this chapter with a few lines from the latter that might resound all too echoic by now. I cite from "The Comedian as the Letter C," where Christopher Columbus too is so preponderantly inscribed as prototype of peregrine viatores whose oceanic pilgrimage took them into the plus ultra of transworldly destinations. Stevens declaims:

He was a man made vivid by the sea
A man come out of luminous traversing,
Much trumpeted, made desperately clear,
Fresh from discoveries of tidal skies,
To whom oracular rockings gave no rest.
Into a savage color he went on. (p. 61)