Messianic Hope and Apocalyptic Dread: Benjamin and Yeats on Modernity’s Crisis
Messianic Hope and Apocalyptic Dread: Benjamin and Yeats on Modernity’s Crisis

Summary/Abstract: This article examines Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (1921) and W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (1920) as responses to the crisis of Western modernity after the First World War. Both works emerge from a landscape marked by political collapse, social upheaval, and the erosion of imperial authority. The analysis proceeds through close reading and conceptual comparison. Benjamin exposes the entanglement of law and violence revealed by the instability of the Weimar Republic. Against the cycles of Lawmaking and Law-Preserving Violence, he posits Divine Violence as a non-instrumental interruption that suspends legal authority and gestures toward a messianic horizon of justice. Yeats, writing amid the Irish War of Independence, portrays civilisational disintegration through apocalyptic imagery. His vision of a creature advancing toward Bethlehem inverts the Christian Messiah, signalling an epochal shift defined by dread rather than redemption. Placing these works in dialogue shows how philosophical and poetic forms register crisis through distinct yet converging idioms. Both foreground the fragility of historical order and the ambiguous role of violence as destructive and potentially transformative. Their insights illuminate not only the contradictions of their moment but also the enduring tension between hope and dread that continues to shape modern crises.

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