ARMAGHGEDDON
ARMAGH City, the ecclesiastical centre of Ireland, is today a tranquil, untroubled place, dreaming perhaps of its glory days in t he 5th century when St Patrick established his mission here.
Sleepy it may be, but it contains some fascinating sights — and may even have a footnote in predicting the end of the world.
There are two St Patrick’s cathedrals in Armagh City. Dublin gets by with one, as do New York, Melbourne and Karachi. But the chequered history of these parts means that two cathedrals with the same name are required.
The older of the two St Patrick’s has been destroyed and rebuilt 17 times, and substantially restored between 1834 and 1840. A slab on the north transept wall commemorates Brian Boru beside an 11th century stone cross.
The Cathedral Library contains an astonishing range of swag. A long manuscript dating back to about 1360 is written in colloquial I talian. The writer, Brother Stephanus, testified that he took it down faithfully as a direct dictation from St Catherine of Siena while she was in the throes of a mystical ecstasy. So, probably a good read if you happen to speak colloquial Italian.
Jonathan Swift could well have had a peek at St Catherine’s words — he wrote Gulliver’s Travels while Dean here. A copy of the book — corrected in Swift’s own hand — takes pride of place beside the ‘Claims of the Innocents’, basically pleas of mercy to Oliver Cromwell (surprisingly, nobody has written ‘good luck with that’ in the margins).
But you’ll be wanting to know about the end of the world, and how Armagh Cathedral was at the leading edge of such speculation. The 17th century Archbishop of Armagh James Ussher is our man. He calculated a ‘ best before’ date for humans of 4/11, 1996, when the world would call it a day.
He had already calculated the date of the creation of the universe — ‘the night preceding the 23rd day of October... the year before
Christ 4004’; that is, around 6pm on October 22, 4004BC. The Archbishop didn’t know that in parts of the world by 4004BC the horse was domesticated (and horseracing had begun), the plough was in use, and pottery had become quite sophisticated in Mesopotamia. Not Belleek china, certainly, but fancy enough.
Learned though the Archbishop undoubtedly was — his literary collection became the nucleus of the library at Trinity College Dublin — his prediction for the creation of the world was about 4.6billion years out. The predicted date for Domesday was also out of whack, but by how much we obviously don’t know yet. Undaunted, his avid followers have recalculated and confidently predict that the end is definitely nigh-ish.
They point to the Book of Revelation. It’s all in there apparently.
Scientists take a slightly more nuanced stance than ‘a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns’.
Anthropologists will point to the fact that a threat to all human life is not terribly new. Some have suggested that early humans living about one million years ago came perilously close to extinction. The genetic evidence suggests that the effective population — an indicator of species viability — was about 18,500 individuals worldwide. Roughly the population of Mullingar.
Somehow we survived, although only time will tell if a large brain and an opposable thumb was a good idea for Team Earth. Now, as the 21st century wears on, we are having a glimpse of how the apocalypse might happen. But the number of ways that the world could come to an abrupt end has multiplied — extermination of life could arrive through environmental disaster, or perhaps by heat death, an unfortunate expansion of matter into a cold and empty universe. There’s also magnetic obversity, mass insanity, robotic revolution.
Another f avourite has also emerged — scientists regard volcanic super- eruptions as one of nature’s greatest killers. If enough became active, disaster. And we’re not talking just a few cancelled flights, as happened with the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, when in 2010 ash from the Icelandic volcano caused airline havoc.
Then again, the curtain could conceivably be brought down by artificial intelligence — although you’d have to say the smart money at the moment i s on human stupidity.
I can almost see Archbishop Ussher nodding his head.