January 05, 2005
A man of wealth and taste
Romania sure gets a bad press in American popular fiction. Vampires, orphans, war crimes, vampires. The horror writer Dan Simmons once managed to work all three together in one of his books, with added vampire content (this is not a recommendation).
But Romania might now be best known among American readers as the home of the Antichrist.
Yes, that's right. Just when you thought Romania's PR couldn't get any better.
The Left Behind series of books is immensely popular in the US. Tens of millions of copies have been sold here. Basically, it's a series of disaster thrillers where the disaster is a fringe Protestant interpretation of prophecies regarding the Christian Apocalypse. The story begins with all the good Christians vanishing -- the Rapture -- and the people left behind (get it?) scrambling in their wake.
It's religious fiction with a viewpoint from deep within the paranoid tradition of the American psyche. About the only concession these books make to modern ecumenical sensibilities is including Old Red Socks the Pope in the general disappearances. (This is a big step forward, believe it or not. Remember where Ian Paisley got his doctorate.) I'm not sure if there's a parallel European genre to this type of fiction. Holy Blood, Holy Grail? The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Kind of sort of? Gentle European readers, you tell me.
The authors, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, aren't exactly subtle. I'm an extremely lapsed Methodist myself, but I am familiar with Protestant traditions even more paranoid and esoteric than theirs, so when I skimmed these books I kept on expecting the obvious Jesus guy also to be a minion of the Devil -- those false prophets, don't you know -- and his followers cast into the Lake of Fire to burn forever and ever, mwahahahaha! No such luck.
Anyway, the real Antichrist in the series is a fellow named Nicolae Carpathia. See what I mean about subtle? At the beginning of the first book, he's an obscure politician from the lower house of the Romanian parliament, I dunno, maybe from Brasov, but due to his extraordinary, nay, vampiric charm... well, you know.
Fred Clark at Slacktivist is doing a page by page commentary of the Left Behind series, all of which is worth reading, and the rest of his blog is pretty good too. But this comment in particular caught my eye:
That word -- "peacemaker" -- practically screams Antichrist. For LaHaye and Jenkins' intended readers, it wouldn't be any clearer if Carpathia had the number "666" tattooed on his forehead and went by the nickname "Horny Beast."
It so happens I have a book called Gorbachev! Has the real Antichrist come?, by one Robert W. Faid, published by Victory House Publishers of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1988. You know I'm going to give you a sample.
Gorbachev is anxious to present himself to the world as a man of peace, to be trusted and accepted by the Western World. Such a treaty would establish him as the leading global statesman of the age. He would be hailed by the entire world community as a 'man of peace'. I expect such treaties to be signed before the end of the current administration and to result in what will be a monumental victory for Gorbachev and the Soviet Union.
The irony of all this is that Gorbachev, the man who is very probably the antichrist, could conceivably win the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Ronald Reagan who will retire from office with dignity and respect for it.
What irony will this be, for if Gorbachev is truly the man John saw astride a white horse with a bow and a crown, he will, as told to us in Revelation 6:3, "go forth conquering and to conquer."
In our reality, Gorbachev couldn't even put down the Lithuanians, and ended up making TV commercials for Pizza Hut. He did have that freaky birthmark though.
At least thinkers within Orthodox Christianity have wrought a more interesting picture of the Antichrist. Here's an excerpt from Vladimir Solovyov's last work, War, Progress, and the End of History:
At that time, there was among the few believing spiritualists a remarkable person -- many called him a superman -- who was equally far from both, intellect and childlike heart. He was still young, but owing to his great genius, by the age of thirty-three he had already become famous as a great thinker, writer, and public thinker. Conscious of the great power of spirit in himself, he was always a confirmed spiritualist, and his clear intellect always showed him the truth of what one should believe in: the good, God, and the Messiah. In these he believed, but he loved only himself.
He believed in God, but in the depths of his soul he involuntarily and unconsciously preferred himself. He believed in Good, but the All-Seeing Eye of the Eternal knew that this man would bow down before the power of Evil as soon as it would offer him a bribe -- not by deception of the senses and the lower passions, not even by the superior bait of power, but by his own immeasurable self-love. This self-love was neither an unconscious instinct nor an insane ambition. Apart from his exceptional genius, beauty, and nobility of character, the reserve, disinterestedness, and active sympathy with those in need which he evinced to such a great extent seemed abundantly to justify the immense self-love of this great spiritualist, ascetic, and philanthropist.
Did he deserve blame because, being as he was so generously supplied by the gifts of God, he saw in them a sign of Heaven's special benevolence towards him, and thought himself only second to God himself? In a word, he considered himself to be what Christ in reality was. But this conception of his higher value showed itself in practice not in the exercise of his moral duty to God and the world but in seizing his privilege and advantage at the expense of others, and of Christ in particular.
Then a mysterious stranger advises him to become a best-selling author. Around the world, "cheap editions with portraits of the author were sold in millions of copies", and soon this fellow reaches the highest political office of them all...
Honest.
I'm just saying.
Posted by coyu at January 5, 2005 05:43 AMCrap, I'm behind schedule.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at January 5, 2005 01:50 PM
Dear Carlos:
SO that's what the Left Behind series is all about. I see stacks and volumns of them for sale here and there, but being pretty far behind in most things, I have haven't had the time to peruse this trash.
Thanks for doing this for me and bringing me up to speed...lol
Best Wishes,
Traveller
Posted by: Traveller at January 5, 2005 01:59 PMOh, they're even worse than that, Traveller. The Left Behind books are intended to proselytize the unwary to the authors' occult version of 'dispensationalist' theology.
Here's an example of how occult the books actually are: Old Nick's full name in the series is 'Nicolae Jetty Carpathia'. The origins of the first and last names should be fairly obvious. But that middle name!
You see, Carpathia's special number in the series is 216. 216 is, of course, 6 * 6 * 6. And if you add up the letter values of his full name, using the simple substitution A = 1, B = 2... Z = 26, you get... 216.
I am not sure how they came up with Jetty in particular. My working hypothesis is that they came up with the somewhat cool pulp name of 'Nicolae Carpathia', did their bit of numerology, and found out they had 80 more to go. 'Jetty' breaks down rather simply to 10 + 5 + 20 + 20 + 25. Perhaps they were working towards 'Jassy'; or perhaps they add numbers best in multiples of five.
I'll note there's an actual Romanian name that would have worked as well: 'Bossy' = 2 + 15 + 19 + 19 + 25. But perhaps Nicolae Bossy-Carpathia was just a little too unsubtle for LaHaye and Jenkins.
C.
Posted by: Carlos at January 6, 2005 03:01 AMAn interesting website which expands upon the subject of the rapture and presents many additonal points of view.
Posted by: larry at January 6, 2005 05:22 AMThanks for the interesting link, Larry, (and nothing against you personally, I have some rapture oriented people in my family), but these people are, "Nutters." Still, that site was an interesting read.
What I find somewhat curious is that there are good and sufficient reason to have, at times and on certain issues, an apocalyptic view...but this never seems to enter peoples minds.
I’ve written a bit on the recent Tsunami, a perfectly normal event in geological time, but today I did a little piece on Yellowstone to hopefully give some perspective to a friend on a private site that lost a much loved cousin in the Tsunami. She was 25 years old, lovely, and had everything in the world to live for...but she took a limousine instead of a bus to the beach from the airport and arrived just as the Tsunami hit...a different mode of transportation, five minutes one way or another, she’d still be alive, safe in her hotel rather than driving along the shore line in a Limo...well...life is tough as an entirety, but fragile beyond belief individually.
Still, things very naturally and normally go apocalyptic in this world from time to time. Man in his weakness seeks comfort in some form of religious explanation.
Dear Members:
I doubt that what follows will forward any emotional solace to Xxxx, his cousin was very pretty, full of life and yet, by some random act of fate has lost it all. My sadness over this is indescribable.
And yet, I must say that I'm a little fatalistic also. I just happened to be reading Bill Bryson's best seller, A Short History of Nearly Everything, and thought it might be interesting to pass along, to have my secretary type the passage on Yellowstone. If we were to think that the Tsunami was bad, recent (in geologic terms) lesser volcanic eruptions reduced mankind to a few thousand individuals and it took apparently twenty thousand years for human kind to recover.
Anything from Yellowstone would be infinitely worse. Brynson on Yellowstone:
***********
“All this was hypothetically interesting until 1973, when an odd occurence made it suddenly momentous: water in Yellowstone Lake, in the heart of the park, began to run over the banks at the lake's southern end, flooding a meadow, while at the opposite end of the lake the water mysteriously flowed away. Geologists did a hasty survey and discovered that a large area of the park had developed an ominous bulge. This was lifting up one end of the lake and causing the water to run out at the other, as would happen if you lifted one side of a child's wading pool. By 1984, the whole central region of the park-several dozen square miles-was more than three feet higher than it had been in 1924, when the park was last formally surveyed. Then in 1985, the whole of the central part of the park subsided by eight inches. It now seems to be swelling again.
The geologists realized that only one thing could cause this-a restless magma chamber. Yellowstone wasn't the site of an ancient supervolcano; it was the site of an active one. It was also at about this time that they were able to work out that the cycle of Yellowstone's eruptions averaged one massive blow every 600,000 years. The last one, interestingly enough, was 630,000 years ago. Yellowstone, it appears, is due.”
************
Our Time Span on this earth is so short that we probably won't see Yellowstone go bad...but it is out there, and waiting. Mankind itself might very well not survive such an eruption by the volcano that underlies all of Yellowstone Park, it is mammoth and huge beyond our meager comprehension.
Best Wishes,
Traveller
I don't mean to step on anyone's toes, but I'd rather that one of the most important events in Time itself was based on a sounder method than the one used to determine whether Aquaman can marry a woman without gills or not.
There is a story that John Calvin was once asked why he never wrote any commentaries on the Book of Revelation. He is said to have replied, because that is the one book of the Bible I don't understand.
I'm pretty sure LaHaye's understanding of the Bible (and Hal Lindsey's, and so forth) is less than John Calvin's.
C.
Posted by: Carlos at January 6, 2005 06:21 PMFred Clark's commentary is indeed impressive - if he keeps it up, he'll have written the longest and most detailed book review since the Talmud. (About a year ago I did a wordcount on Fred's first few posts, and worked out that he had devoted 3600 words to the first 9 pages of the first book in the series.
I have a vision of the final Slactivist Commentary being published in the form of a series of enormous folio volumes, with the text of _Left Behind_ in the center and Fred's comments (and those of future commentators) surrounding it on all sides.
Posted by: Robert at January 8, 2005 06:03 AMI was speaking with a friend who is an expert on the Book of Daniel about Al Gore's documentary and how Gorbacev (with the Hebrew number "6" on his head that also resembles a "fatal wound that has healed [Rev. 13]) has the same philosophy and focus as Gore, and she blurted out "The Big horn and the little horn ... Gore and Gorby ...." We were stunned. I looked up the Hebrew translation in Strong's Concordance and the word for "horn" from Daniel 11 is "qeren", from the root "qaran" - English translation ... "to gore"....
Posted by: Chuck at May 27, 2006 12:27 AM