A History of the End of the World (20 page)

Even as Augustine was advocating for a spiritual reading of Revelation, for example, some of his fellow clerics were scaring the wits out of their congregants by conjuring up the monsters and malefactors who stalk its pages and placing them in the here and now. Martin of Tours (316–397)—a visionary who believed that he had once seen the Devil with his own eyes—was convinced that the “beast” of Revelation was alive and well somewhere in the world, the flesh-and-blood spawn of the Devil himself, sired in the womb of an unwitting woman and destined to “assume power as soon as he reached the proper age.”
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One of Martin’s disciples, a man called Sulpicius, spread the same chilling message after Martin himself was dead and gone. Indeed, he anticipates the harum-scarum plotline of
The Omen
by a millennium and a half.

“Now, this is the eighth year since we heard these words from his lips,” writes Sulpicius in a work that first appeared at the beginning of the fifth century. “You may guess, then, how soon those things which we fear in the future are about to happen.”
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Signs of the end-times were seen everywhere by those who were looking for them in the fifth century. The barbarians at the gates of Rome, many of whom were baptized Christians, were seen as the armies of Satan whose arrival signaled the Second Coming: “Behold, from Adam all the years have passed,” declared one Christian sermonizer when Alaric and the Visigoths sacked the imperial capital in 410, “and now comes the day of judgment!”
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Earthquakes in Palestine and a solar eclipse that was recorded on July 19, 418, were seen as fulfillments of the prophecies of Revelation: “And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, and the moon became as blood.”
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Indeed, there were even more extravagant examples of the “ridiculous fancies” that Augustine so coolly disdained. Caught up in the apocalyptic panic—or, more likely, preying on those who were—one young man in Spain advertised himself as the resurrected John the Baptist and another man in the eastern reaches of the Roman Empire posed as Elijah, thus invoking the passage in Revelation that predicts the coming of the two “witnesses” who would be the precursors of Christ. And a Christian chronicler of the same era argued that the numerical value of “Genseric,” the name of the Vandal king who had placed himself on the throne of Carthage in North Africa, was the dreaded and demonic 666.

The Roman empire may have been in its decline and fall during the tumultuous years of the fifth century—but the world manifestly did
not
end, and the prophecies of Revelation remained unfulfilled. Still, the readers of Revelation continued to look for signs and wonders in the world around them. After the armies of Islam charged out of the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century, for example, the prophet Muhammad emerged as a compelling candidate for the Antichrist. One Spanish visionary, for example, calculated that Muhammad died in the year 666 on the Christian calendar—a fact that he confidently cited as proof that the founding prophet of Islam was the “beast” of Revelation whose death augured the imminent end of the world.

Once it began, of course, the restless and relentless search for a fleshand-blood Antichrist never ended, and precisely because the world itself never ended. Nero was an attractive candidate for the title of Antichrist among the readers and hearers of Revelation who recalled the first persecution of Christians in Rome, but Muhammad was a more credible choice for someone living in the early Middle Ages. During the Crusades, Saladin was seen as the Antichrist, and when the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, the Sultan of the Ottoman empire was the Antichrist of the hour. By the sixteenth century, Martin Luther and the pope of the Roman Catholic Church regarded each other as the Antichrist. At any given point between late antiquity and our own times, the usual suspects in the search for the Antichrist have reflected the anxieties of the age.

“Pin-the-tail-on-the-Antichrist” has always been a popular pastime among some readers of Revelation. But perhaps even more energy and enterprise have been invested in the effort to calculate exactly when the world will end by studying the mystical numbers that are embedded in the text of Revelation. Jesus specifically forbids any such speculation—and Augustine admonishes all good Christians who are inclined to count the years until doomsday to “relax your fingers, and give them a little rest”—but the plain words of the Gospels and the church fathers have never deterred the mystical number-crunchers.
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Like so much else in the apocalyptic tradition, the numbers game begins in the book of Daniel, where the prophet is granted a vision of the final ordeal of Israel: “It shall be for a time, times, and a half,” says one of his celestial mentors, “and when he shall have accomplished to scatter the power of the holy people, all these things shall be finished.”
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By extrapolating from other and rather less obscure passages of Daniel—the prophet, as we have seen, refers to a period of 1,290 days or 1,335 days as the countdown clock to final salvation, a period roughly equal to three and a half years—some early readers of the book of Daniel decided that a “time” is a year, and “times” is two years. Thus, “a time, times, and a half” is understood to mean three and a half years.

Precisely the same period of time is invoked almost obsessively the book of Revelation. The woman clothed with the sun, for example, flees to the desert to escape the red dragon—and, according to John, she will stay there “a time, and times, and half a time.” Elsewhere in Revelation, John specifies that her sojourn will last 1,260 days. He predicts that the Gentiles will trample the holy city of Jerusalem for forty-two months, and the two witnesses will prophesy for 1,260 days. And John later predicts that the “beast from the sea” will reign over earth for forty-two months.
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All of these periods are equal to three and a half years if we calculate on the basis of a thirty-day month. And, not coincidentally, three and one half is exactly half of John’s favorite number, the divine number seven.

According to a certain conventional wisdom that came to be embraced by apocalyptic date-setters, John means to reveal that the end of the world will come exactly three and a half years after the appearance of the Antichrist. A North African bishop called Evodius of Uzala, for example, assured his congregation in 412 that Satan himself will reign over the world as the Antichrist for exactly three and a half years before Jesus Christ returns to earth in triumph, all as predicted in the book of Revelation. The same three-and-a-half-year period was invoked throughout late antiquity and the Middle Ages as the countdown to the end-times.

Once convinced that the arrival of the Antichrist was the triggering event for the countdown to the end of the world, Christian doomsayers were all the more alert and active in searching for likely prospects among the flesh-and-blood kings and conquerors in their own world. The book of Revelation offers both bad news and good news, as we have seen, and here is yet another example: the Antichrist will bring oppression and persecution, to be sure, but he is also the surest sign that Jesus Christ is on his way. And, after all, three and a half years is not such a long time to wait for the rewards that are promised in Revelation—the second coming of Jesus Christ, the millennial kingdom, the final defeat of Satan, the Day of Judgment and, for a happy few, eternal life in the new heaven and the new earth. Apocalyptic true believers have been on the lookout for the Anti-christ ever since.

But on the question of timing, too, the apocalyptic imagination has never been satisfied with simple notions, and far more elaborate theories were proposed in the early Middle Ages for calculating the end-times. The most enduring and pervasive theory is based on an ancient tradition that the history of the world from beginning to end can be divided into seven periods, each one a thousand years in duration. The seed of the idea can be found in a stray line of Jewish scripture—“For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday,” says the Psalmist to God in the Hebrew Bible—but it sprouted and flowered in some remarkable ways in the hothouse of the apocalyptic tradition.
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The same simile, for example, is rephrased in the Christian scriptures in a way that suggests a more literal meaning: “One day is with the Lord as a thousand years,” writes the author of the epistles of Peter, “and a thousand years as one day.”
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And the readers of Revelation elaborated on these spare lines of scripture by imagining that the seven days of creation in Genesis are meant to predict the so-called World Week—that is, seven ages of history, each age a thousand years in duration. The seventh and final “day” in the cosmic week of ages—the so-called Sabbath Age—will be the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth as predicted in Revelation.

The seven ages of history have been used to solve some of the more perplexing mysteries within the text of Revelation. John, for example, explains that the seven heads of the beast from the sea are meant to symbolize seven kings, but he does not specify which ones. Some early readers studied
The Twelve Caesars
of the ancient historian Suetonius in the hope of putting names on the seven heads. One faction starts with Julius Caesar and counts the first seven emperors in strict order of succession, and another faction leaves out the more obscure ones like Otho and Vitellius and counts only the most celebrated or notorious Roman emperors. But theologians of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages preferred to see the seven-headed beast of Revelation as a symbol of the seven ages of history, and they thrilled at the notion that they were living in the seventh and final age.

None of these theories, however, and nothing in Revelation itself, suggests that the world will end in a year that ends in three zeroes. The only significance of the millennium in the book of Revelation is the duration of Christ’s earthly kingdom and the period of Satan’s imprisonment in the bottomless pit. John seems to allow that the millennium might start in
any
year of the calendar. Thus, for example, a Spanish monk called Beatus of Liébana, writing around the year 775, confidently predicted that the Sabbath Age would begin sometime in the year 800—but he cagily downplays the significance of the precise date.

“Every catholic ought to ponder, wait and fear, and to consider these twenty-five years, as if they were not more than an hour, and should weep day and night in sackcloth and ashes for their destruction and the world’s,” writes Beatus in his thousand-page commentary on Revelation, “but not strive to calculate time.”
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Far more important than the number of zeroes in any given year on the calendar were the signs and wonders that John warns his readers to expect when the end-times approach. The breaking of the seven seals, the pouring of the seven vials, and the sounding of the seven trumpets are all said to signify plague and pestilence, famine and war, earthquake and eclipse, and even stranger phenomena of nature: “And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood,” writes John, “and the stars of heaven fell unto earth, and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.” For the watchful Christians of the Middle Ages, then, anything even slightly out of the ordinary—a calf born with a birth defect, a seismic tremor, or a shooting star—might turn out to be a welcome sign of the end-times.

“Alpha and Omega. The beginning and the End,” are the words of an inscription from Poitiers in the seventh century. “For all things become every day worse, for the end is drawing near.”
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Even the most commonplace sights on the landscape of medieval Europe, in fact, were also freighted with apocalyptic meanings for Christians who lived in anticipation of the end-times. And, prompted by the book of Revelation to watch for the signs of the Antichrist, they let their eyes fall on the men and women among them whom John so hatefully characterizes as members of “the synagogue of Satan.” Thus did the Jews earn a crucial role in the apocalyptic drama that came to dominate the Christian imagination in the Middle Ages.

Here is yet another dark and dangerous irony. Christian ity started as a sect within Judaism. Jesus, the twelve disciples, and all of the first Christians were Jews by birth, of course, and the author of Revelation, too, proudly claims to be an authentic Jew. But Revelation clearly shows the theological fault line along which the two faiths split asunder in the early history of the Christian church. The first Christians, after all, were Jews who saw Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah, but they were not content with distancing themselves from their fellow Jews who refused to do the same. Following the example of Revelation, the Jews were not merely condemned but demonized, too.

Bishop Hippolytus, writing in the third century, was among the earliest Christian propagandists to characterize the Beast of Revelation as both satanic
and
Jewish: the Antichrist, he insists, will be a descendant of the biblical tribe of Dan, and he will recruit his demonic army from Jewish communities throughout the world. By linking the Antichrist with the tribe of Dan, Hippolytus is offering an intriguing solution to one of the most obscure mysteries of the book of Revelation. John includes a list of the twelve tribes of ancient Israel, but he pointedly omits the biblical tribe of Dan. Perhaps John leaves Dan off the list because he has been granted an undisclosed revelation that the Antichrist will carry that tribe’s blood in his veins, or so the early church fathers speculated.

By the fourth century, the depiction of the Antichrist in religious propaganda was even more elaborate—and even more specifically anti-Semitic. Martin of Tours, for example, warned that when the Antichrist finally reveals himself to the world, he will seat himself on a throne in the city of Jerusalem, rebuild the Temple of Solomon, and compel the universal practice of circumcision. And, according to the lascivious details that were added to the profile of the Antichrist in Christian legend and lore, he will be conceived in a Babylonian brothel, the child of the Devil and a Jewish whore; he will be circumcised in Jerusalem, where he will declare himself to be the Messiah; and he will die when he attempts to ascend to heaven from the Mount of Olives but falls into the depths of hell.