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Apocalypse, 21^st century
(Apocryphal fragment)

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9. And the LORD said: Cut ye off Evil from yourselves; by conceiving yourselves to be God ye do gainsay the existence of Evil in the world.

10. Ye must do battle with Evil, and ye must defeat Evil, but ye must not gainsay that Evil exist, because the absence of Evil is not the same as Good.

11. For though ye wash yourselves with nitre, and take you much soap: yet ye remain merely men, for God cannot be made from man.

12. Yet I say unto you: ye are neither God nor man, but a divine animal.

13. Ye say: here am I, and here is nature; for these are, as it were, two separate things.

14. For this reason ye have separated yourselves off from the order of nature; ye have made nature around you so desolate and forlorn as your hearts are desolate and forlorn within.

15. In the nature environing you, destroy ye all kinds of form, for ye yourselves no longer have the strength to bear their variety of kind; cleanse ye nature of all that is dark and opaque, for ye yourselves do not see what is within you; ye have made nature polluted, stinking and rotten, since the very thought that gave rise to your stinking and rotten acts was itself polluted, stinking and rotten.

16. Ye have made an enemy of nature; in your blindness ye realise not that ye yourselves belong to the order of nature, and whosoever destroyeth nature, destroyeth himself.

17. Who hath put it into your heads, that you are the lords of the Earth? For do ye not know that the Earth existed before you, and shall yet exist after you? Ye are like the idiot who runneth on the ground, who to the amusement of drivers standeth at the crossed roads of busy streets and waveth at the vehicles, as if they went on their way in accordance with his will.

18. Do ye not see that ye are nought but mere worms of the earth; or that ye are like the blossom of the apple tree, which at the passing of a zephyr breeze gently detaches itself from the branch and whose orphaned petals eddy like a white cloud in the very air?

19. One single gust of wind, one single movement of the earth can raze your houses and your streets; one single wave of the sea can sweep away your cities from the face of the earth; should it rain or snow more than is customary, it drencheth your goods, and upsetteth the course of your lives; the least warming or cooling of the air can destroy your lands and your cattle, dry your rivers and your lakes, and finally kill you.

20. O foolish man! Do ye not take it into your head, that the more ye conquer nature, the more ye shrink in spirit, like the worm?

21. Your inventions are immeasurably numerous and marvellous, and bear the signs of acumen: and yet, as your inventions grow in number, so shall they diminish in usefulness; and the more of them there are, the more shall they lose of their strength, as if the strength of your intellect were distilled in them; and thus the marvellous acumen and divine ability serve mere idle ends, the playthings of infants.

22. Ye have made of yourselves children, who think not of the morrow.

23. And as the child who beginneth to weep, kick and paw if he doth not get his tasty morsel: so are ye, if the harvest be only a little less or the tax a little more, and for this reason your comfort be compromised: then ye rush to bemoan and seek commiseration, and ye chase away the leaders who act for your country, and call in their stead those who care for nothing but to charm you to themselves; in this way what shall ye do if the day come when true deprivation fall upon you and your lives be in danger?

24. Most able are ye to manage distress which has already befallen you; and yet ye have little facility for eschewing distress.

25. Devices for life, that assist you, are in great plenitude; but how to live life itself, is an art ye have forgotten.

26. I say unto you: your forefathers suffered perhaps greater need; but yet did they feel freer in spirit, and greater serenity dwelt in the houses of the people.

27. Whosoever is free doth not speak of freedom, for he knoweth not what it may be; ye do in continuity speak of freedom, but the word is made devoid of its essence, and in truth ye are slaves.

28. The many speeches on freedom put freedom itself to flight: for in reality ye quake at the notion of freedom, and forever do ye seek your lords; and ye seek never in vain.

29. O thou fool! Thou givest boundless freedom to the people, and then, when thou seest what confusion ariseth from it (not due to the freedom, but to its boundlessness), before long thou art constrained to drive the same into boundless slavery; for boundless freedom is most uncannily alike to slavery.

30. Thou settest as an example before the people that which is base and execrable, and thou exhibitest it in letter and in moving picture, that many should follow it and see themselves in it; but whosoever strives for good in resemblance to God, and does not wish to sully himself: then he must hide himself and be ashamed, as if plagued by scabies or the louse; yet he is merely different from the mob.

31. If somebody, denying the LORD, should say: proud am I, that there is in me no divine part, for I am only a man; I say unto you, such a one does not amount even to a man.

32. For without God man is minute.

33. Humility is gone from you; and yet humility, like the darkness, helpeth us to see the light of heaven.

34. Ye have employed science, because ye no longer dared to believe; that is, ye no longer recognised the reality of evidence which cannot be proven: for this reason ye believe in the idol of science as your almighty God.

35. Ye say of yourselves that ye be enlightened; yet ye live in the darkness: since your light is merely the dim light of earth.

36. Verily I say unto you: your light may go out at any time; but my light shall last for ever.

37. This much has the LORD said: and they heeded Him not. Then the LORD unleashed all manner of distress on the people; and in the terrible wrath of fire and water a great many were destroyed.

38. Yet after this sacrificial destruction, when it was done, mankind remained.

39. Those who remained had nothing, and they lay under the naked sky amongst the ruins, and lamented their lost loved ones: and yet felt they purer than hitherto.

40. Now they were in decline, they recognised that they were one another’s brothers; and that they were not alone.

41. People who beforehand would have buried their heads in their shoulders if another passed them in the street: Now did they loudly greet him and willingly talk with him; for they now knew that man could not be alien from man.

42. No longer did they speak with others of things they had thought out beforehand, in order thus to mislead the other: but they spoke with the other of what lay on their heart; and they were kind to him.

43. And people themselves took pleasure one in the other; and they rejoiced, for the other in being different, was identical to them, and they opened their hearts to one another.

44. And they perceived the other person in his own personhood, due to this they knew even themselves better than hitherto.

45. Their thoughts are not their own, but a part of what all men have in common: for this reason they had lightness of spirit and did not shrink from the other.

46. For as without destruction made all as one, so within were the hearts of men made one.

47. The houses, the roads, the bridges and the skye-skrapers had collaps’d, and together with them the states, partyes, companyes, organisations, committees and institutions had unravel’d, which had all confounded and frozen people’s neighbourliness to one another; and people grew close to one another, not only in body (since there were no walls between them, but only the mere creatures of nature), but also in spirit; for the walls that man would have built up in stone were already there in spirit: and there was no longer anything to separate people from one other.

48. And man’s life became simple once more.


Miklós Dolinszky
Translated by Richard Robinson