Faith in the future

John Gray’s latest work brings together many themes that will be familiar to fans of this scintillatingly gloomy intellect. It denounces neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism as forms of utopianism, destined like all previous forms to shipwreck upon the hard facts of human existence. It emphasises al-Qa’eda’s roots in Western political extremism rather than Islamic tradition. It envisages a world in which history, far from coming to an end, has resumed its usual bloody course against a background of dwindling oil resources and proliferating weaponry. And it insists that our only escape from this miserable farrago lies in the company of ‘mystics, poets and pleasure-lovers’.

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All this is vintage Gray. What is new is a bold attempt to trace the utopian impulse back to the heart of Christianity. Christ and his apostles believed that the kingdom of God was at hand. The Church later reinterpreted their pronouncements symbolically, as referring to an eternal transcendent realm. But the apocalyptic seed was there, ready to sprout forth luxuriantly in times of famine and war. Modern theories of progress, liberal, socialist and technocratic, are no more than secularised versions of Christian salvation myths. Though decked out in rational colours, their ulterior appeal is to the religious heart, not the scientific head. With the collapse of the latest of these secular utopias in Iraq, the scene is set for the reversion of millenarianism to its originally religious form.

Black Mass is a sparkling synthesis of religious history and contemporary political analysis. It is especially persuasive on the follies of neo-conservatism and the need for realism in international relations. However, its main thesis — that apocalypticism, indeed any form of historical optimism, is inherently Christian — fails to convince on two counts. For a start, it misconstrues Christianity.