Books: Through a Glass, Darkly

A BOOK OF PROPHECY—edited & introduced by John Cournos—Scribner ($2.50).

These sibylline leaves, raked together by Novelist John Cournos, are a publisher’s response to the modern impulse that makes Adolf Hitler keep a stable of astrologers, makes desperate Frenchmen con the optimistic prophecies of 7th-Century St. Odile, makes the current U.S. vogue for books about Nostradamus and his dubious doggerel.

The prophecies in this anthology range from bright to dark, from inspired vision to inspired foresight. There are prophecies for every pocketbook, every human hope, dream, fear. The most magnificent prophets are still the Jews. This book contains much of Isaiah and Ezekiel, the Book of Revelation complete. Eighty pages are devoted to modish Michael Nostradamus, whose double-talk may or may not predict Hess’s flight, Hitler’s downfall. St. Odile predicts the end of the Germans—unless she is predicting the end of the Mohammedans, a more pressing danger in the 7th Century. “America’s greatest prophet,” John Ballou Newbrough, prophesies that there will be a great revolution in the U.S. circa 1947 and that “all nations will be demolished and all the earth be thrown open to all people to go and come as they please.”

The great modern prophets gain in clarity, but not in mutual agreement. Some of their conflicting forecasts:

> Tolstoy—”No rational man . . . can help seeing that there is no practical way out; that it is impossible to devise any alliance or organization that can save us from the destruction into which we are uncontrollably rushing.”

> Victor Hugo (on the 20th Century)—”War will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, animosity will be dead, but man will live.”

> Lenin—”Socialism, putting an end to classes, will thereby put an end to the State.”

> Chekhov—”Do you know that in three or four hundred years all the earth will become a nourishing garden. And life will then be exceedingly easy and comfortable.”

> Hitler (in 1920)—”Today brute force can conquer only by assuming a socialist, a revolutionary cloak. Never can Germany win a war if England is fighting actively on the opposing side. Only by ideologically destroying it from within can Germany conquer Europe. By brute force alone—never!”

> One of the earliest and tersest prophets, a Roman sibyl, may well claim the record for prophetic realism. Said she: “There shall be no end to war in this world. They all shall slay one another.”