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FRANK KERMODE
ology in a conviction that his was the only moment, the moment of
unprecedented cultural crisis, when one could achieve a clear aware–
ness of the true character of Europe; for "European civilisation is
approaching the term of its existence," is about to be engulfed
in
another historical unity. Even the scholar who studies crisis as a recur–
rent, if not perpetual, historical phenomenon tends to single out ours
as the major instance. Sorokin, in his
Social Philosophies in an Age
of Crisis,
considers other people's crises-"painful transitional situa–
tions" as he calls them-in general, but works throughout on the
assumption that "the twentieth century is the period of the greatest
crisis ... a catastrophic transition to a new culture." Well may modern
philosophies of history, he says, be eschatological in character.
Now I also believe that there is a powerful eschatological element
in modern thought and that it is reflected in the arts, as "Guer–
nica" is said to reflect medieval apocalypses that interested Picasso;
but I don't find it easy to see the uniqueness of our situation.
It
is
commonplace to talk about our historical situation as uniquely ter–
rible and in a way privileged, a cardinal point of time. But can it
really be so? It seems doubtful that our crisis, our relation to the future
and to the past, is one of the important differences between us and
our predecessors. Many of them felt as we do.
If
the evidence looks
good to us, so it did to them. Perhaps if we have a terrible privilege
it is merely that we are alive and are going to die, all at once or one at
a time. Other people have noticed this, and expressed their feelings
about it in images different from ours, armies in the sky, for example,
or a palpable antichrist; and these we have discarded. But it would
be childish to argue, in a discussion of how people behave under
eschatological threat, that nuclear bombs are more real and make
one experience more authentic crisis-feelings than armies in the sky.
There is nothing at all distinguishing about eschatological anxiety;
it was, one gathers, a feature of Mesopotamian culture, and it is now
a characteristic, often somewhat hand-me-down in appearance, of
what Mr. Lionel Trilling calls the "adversary culture" or subculture
in our society. Of course, since this anxiety attaches itself to the escha–
tological means available, it is associated with changing images. And
we can best talk about the differentiae of modern crisis in terms of
the literature it produces; it is by our imagery of past and present and
