A History of the End of the World (21 page)

The book of Revelation itself, of course, is more restrained. Aside from John’s passing reference to “the synagogue of Satan,” however hateful it may strike us today, the rest of the text is wholly free of crude anti-Semitism. Indeed, as we have seen, John considers himself an authentic and faithful Jew, and he is deeply attached to Jewish history, ritual, and symbolism. At the only moment in the book of Revelation when he depicts himself as actually participating in a visionary event, for example, John is handed a golden measuring rod by an angel and ordered to survey the celestial Jerusalem in all of its particulars. John pauses in his otherwise wild-eyed and blood-shaking tract to note in meticulous detail that boundaries of the holy city are exactly twelve thousand furlongs (or fifteen hundred miles) in length on each of its four sides.
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By contrast, Jesus is shown in the Gospel of John to declare that the Temple at Jerusalem will be destroyed and replaced by “the temple of his own body.”
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Above all, John betrays his Jewish roots when he envisions the thousand-year reign of Jesus Christ. Indeed, it is exactly here that we see the fundamental difference between Judaism and Christian ity when it comes to the idea of the Messiah. The Jewish redeemer is imagined to be a flesh-and-blood human being whom God will send to bring security and sovereignty to the Jewish people down here on earth, an era that will last between forty and four hundred years according to some Jewish apocalyptic writings. By contrast, the Christian messiah is the Son of God, and he will reign eternally in heaven after the world has come to a final end. John seems to want it both ways in the book of Revelation: he predicts that Jesus will reign as king on earth in a restored Jerusalem for exactly one thousand years, and then the earthly kingdom of saints and martyrs will be replaced by a celestial one for the rest of eternity.

John is the only author in all of the Christian scriptures who plainly describes Jesus as an earthly king whose reign can be measured in real time. That’s one reason why Revelation has been characterized by some scholars as “subchristian or not even Christian.”
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And, in fact, John’s awkward embrace of the Jewish messianic idea provided a rhetorical weapon for Christian theologians like Jerome and Augustine who insisted on a “spiritual” rather than a “carnal” reading of Revelation. Only the Jews imagined a messianic kingdom like the one described in Revelation, and Christians must read and understand John’s text symbolically rather than literally: the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth as depicted in Revelation represents the authority of the church rather than a prediction that Jesus will actually float down from heaven and seat himself on a throne in the city of Jerusalem.

“The saints will in no wise have an earthly kingdom, but only a celestial one; thus must cease the fable of one thousand years,” insists Jerome, who characterizes the literal reading of Revelation as a theological error that only a Jew would make. Indeed, that’s the worst accusation and insult that he can lay against any Christian who commits the same error: “To take John’s Apocalypse according to the letter,” he warns, “is to ‘Judaize.’”
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John’s own ambiguous and highly conflicted attitude toward his Jewish origins will soon disappear under the flood tide of anti-Semitism that washed over Western civilization in the Middle Ages. Future readers will rediscover the theological subtleties at play in Revelation, and they will come to regard themselves as allies and advocates of the Jewish people and even as so-called Christian Zionists. For the next thousand years or so, however, all of the Jews will be consigned to membership in “the synagogue of Satan,” and Revelation will serve to inspire and justify some of the worst atrocities committed against them in the name of “the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David.”
¹⁰⁵

A
n elaborate mosaic that adorns one medieval church in western Europe reveals something subtle but crucial about the role of Revelation in early Christendom. The oldest portion of the mosaic depicts Jesus seated among the twelve disciples, a scene that was borrowed from the purely pagan motif of a colloquium of philosophers. Later, after Constantine embraced Christian ity and the Roman Empire became a Christian empire, the mosaic was embellished with the symbols of imperial authority: the chair on which Jesus sits has been turned into a gem-studded throne, and a golden halo has been added to suggest a kingly crown. And the third and final overlay introduces elements from the distinctive iconography of the book of Revelation—the “four living creatures” who serve God in the divine throne room; the celestial city of Jerusalem; and the Lamb of God, looking as if he were slain and yet standing upright with a sword in his mouth.
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By deconstructing the mosaic, scholars have confirmed a curious fact about the book of Revelation. The images of the Apocalypse were used only rarely in Christian art and architecture prior to the fourth century. Then, abruptly, the sword-wielding Lamb of God and other iconic symbols of the end-times begin to appear on sarcophagi, ivory carvings, murals, mosaics, and monumental paintings throughout Christendom. Alpha and omega, the Greek letters that John uses to evoke the creation and destruction of the world, are inscribed on artifacts ranging from a woman’s gold ring to a slave collar. So “sudden and profuse” was the eruption of apocalyptic imagery in Christian arts and crafts that one scholar characterizes the phenomenon as an “invasion”: the Apocalypse seemed to suddenly seize the imagination of both clergy and laity throughout Christendom, and the vengeful Christ of Revelation displaced the suffering Christ of the Gospels.
¹⁰⁷

The apocalyptic invasion was especially lively and long-enduring in western Europe. But the same phenomenon can be seen in eastern Christendom, where Revelation was received only belatedly and only with a certain trepidation. Thus, for example, a strange text titled
The Revelation of the Holy Theologian John,
which first appeared in the eastern Roman Empire as early as the fifth century, depicts a heavenly encounter between God and the author of Revelation in which the physical features of the satanic “beast” are described in detail: “The appearance of his face is gloomy; his hair is like the points of arrows; his brows rough; his right eye as the rising morning star and the left like a lion’s,” John is told. “His mouth is a cubit wide, his teeth a span in length, his fingers are like sickles. His footprints are two cubits long, and on his forehead is the writing, ‘The Antichrist.’”
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The timing of the apocalyptic invasion is highly revealing. John may have intended the book of Revelation to console and exhort the persecuted Christians of his own era, but it was only when Christian ity was both militant
and
triumphant that the imagery of the Apocalypse began to proliferate across Europe. Indeed, Revelation achieved its sudden and widespread prominence shortly after Emperor Theodosius formally raised Christian ity to the status of the state religion of the Roman Empire in 391.

The apocalyptic invasion also coincides with a powerful change in the Christian perception of the world. The machinery of Roman power that had once been used against the Christians—the constabulary, the courts, the torture chambers, and the execution blocks—were now available to Christian authorities for use against their own enemies both inside and outside the church. So the Christ who is depicted in the Gospels as the victim of torture and execution suddenly seemed less appropriate to the new circumstances of the church than the Christ of Revelation who rides a warhorse, wields a sword, and wears a crown.

At the same time, of course, the Roman Empire was already in decline and fast approaching its ultimate fall. Rome itself and the western reaches of the empire disintegrated into a chaotic assortment of “barbarian” kingdoms soon after the sack of Rome in 410, and the eastern remnant was continually menaced by the pagan armies of Persia. Bubonic plague—the dreaded Black Death that seems to be prefigured in the imagery of Revelation—first appeared in the sixth century and reached epidemic proportions over the next two hundred years. By the eighth century, former Roman provinces in Spain, North Africa, and the Levant, including the city of Jerusalem itself, had fallen under the banner of militant Islam.

Revelation, however, offered a way to understand even the most catastrophic events as an augury of a greater triumph. Theologians may have debated whether the thousand-year reign of Christ as depicted in Revelation is prophecy or allegory, but whether Revelation is read “carnally” or “spiritually,” its unambiguous message is that, sooner or later, the world will be destroyed once and for all, and any Christian soul who is judged worthy by Jesus Christ will live forever in a celestial kingdom. Even Augustine, who declined to take the book of Revelation too literally, was convinced that the end of the world was inevitable.

“Elijah shall come; the Jews shall believe; Antichrist shall persecute; Christ shall judge; the dead shall rise; the good and the wicked shall be separated; the world shall be burned and renewed,” Augustine concedes. “All these things, we believe, shall come to pass; but how, or in what order, human understanding cannot perfectly teach us, but only the experience of the events themselves.”
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Augustine’s pointed phrase—“the experience of the events themselves”—reminds us of exactly what prompted a great many otherwise pious Christians to ignore his cautions about reading the book of Revelation as literal truth. For nearly a thousand years, daily life in the here and now seemed to fulfill even the most frightful prophecies of Revelation, and the end of the world seemed to be very near indeed. And yet, on the far side of their tribulation—wars and rumors of war, famine and plague, and all the other biblical afflictions that God promises to bring down on a suffering humanity—the readers of Revelation glimpsed the tantalizing sight of a new heaven, a new earth, and a New Jerusalem whose streets were paved with gold.

For all of the high anxiety and Grand Guignol on display in its pages, in fact, Revelation has always been understood by some readers as a story with the happiest of endings. That’s why Revelation can be a soporific drug—“Take it, and eat it up,” says an angel to John, urging him to literally consume the “little book”—that leaves the reader in a kind of mystical stupor.
¹¹⁰
Since God’s plan for the world is already written down in the pages of Holy Writ—and since God has promised to raise the saints and martyrs to eternal life in the end-times—the credulous readers of Revelation are content to close their eyes to the dangerous world in which they live, dream of the delights to come in the messianic kingdom, and pray that they will wake up in the celestial Jerusalem.

But there is quite another way to experience the book of Revelation. Some men and women across the ages, as we shall see, find Revelation to be a stimulant that fills them with frantic energy. They are fully awake and alert to the workings of the Devil, and they find themselves compelled to
do
something to hasten the final victory of God. Some are moved to preach and prophesy, some are inspired to go in search of the new world that God has promised to bestow on humankind, and some are willing to pick up “the sharp two-edged sword” in willful imitation of Jesus as he is depicted in the book of Revelation and nowhere else in the New Testament.
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The time for vengeance has come, and the Lord wishes me to unveil new secrets….

G
IROLAMO
S
AVONAROLA

O
ne cherished idea about the Apocalypse holds that the hopes and fears for the end of the world spiked in the year 1000. The turn of the first millennium of the Christian calendar, we are invited to imagine, was the occasion for extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, all inspired by the sure belief that the end was near—“The Terrors of the Year 1000,” according to the phrase embraced by a few overexcited historians.
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The scene is memorably suggested in Ingmar Bergman’s
The Seventh Seal,
a motion picture whose title alludes to the end-times as depicted the book of Revelation. The Lamb of God is ready to break the seventh seal over a plague-ridden, corpse-strewn, and omen-haunted landscape peopled with penitents and flagellants, doomsaying preachers, and knights on crusade. But the idea of a millennial panic in the year 1000, like so much of the conventional wisdom about the Apocalypse, is wrong.
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To be sure, more than a few medieval preachers thrilled at the notion that a thousand years had passed since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and they were convinced that
something
remarkable would surely happen. But they did not even agree among themselves whether the momentous year would be 1000, the anniversary of the birth of Jesus, or 1033, the anniversary of the crucifixion of Jesus, or somewhere in between. Indeed, the whole exercise of counting down the end of the world in units of one thousand years was (and is) fundamentally flawed by an error in the calculations of Dionysius Exiguus, the sixth-century monk who devised the calendar system that uses the markers
B.C.
(“Before Christ”) and
A.D.
(“
Anno Domini
,” or “In the Year of Our Lord”). Dionysius, according to modern scholarship, “got the year of Christ’s birth wrong by at least four and possibly as much as six years.”
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As a result, the end of the first millennium had probably passed unnoticed a few years before the calendar year 1000.

Christians who heeded the cautions of Jesus, Paul, and Augustine about such speculation, as it happened, were capable of remaining calm as the year 1000 approached and passed without incident. So did the Bible readers who knew that the book of Revelation does not regard the passage of one thousand years from the birth or death of Jesus as a significant benchmark. Jesus Christ’s reign on earth would last one thousand years, of course, but the starting date of the millennial kingdom is not mentioned at all in Revelation. And the church itself continued to insist on a “spiritual” rather than a “carnal” reading of Revelation, a doctrine that tamped down the hotter fires of apocalyptic yearning among compliant Christians.

“When I was a young man I heard a sermon about the End of the world preached before the people in the cathedral of Paris,” writes a monk called Abbo of Fleury (d. 1004) about an experience of his own during the countdown to the year 1000. “According to this, as soon as the number of a thousand years was completed, the Antichrist would come and the Last Judgment would follow in a brief time.” Abbo, a careful reader of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, was unimpressed by all the doomsaying: “I opposed this idea with what force I could from passages in the Gospels, Revelation, and the Book of Daniel.”
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Abbo, in fact, is the only contemporary observer who links the year 1000 to the end-time prophecies in the Bible—and he “does so only to dismiss the notion.”
⁵
Still, the good monk fully expected the world to end even if he piously refused to speculate on the precise date. Indeed, the apocalyptic fever in medieval Christendom was chronic rather than acute, and the church had never really been successful in turning back the so-called apocalyptic invasion of the fourth century. The men and women of medieval Christendom, especially in western Europe, were exposed to apocalyptic imagery in the ornamentation and decoration of churches, the monumental architecture and inscription of public buildings, the illuminated manuscripts of holy books, the pronouncements of preachers and pamphleteers, and the secular arts and letters that flourished in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

“The Apocalypse is ubiquitous,” write Bernard McGinn and his colleague Richard K. Emmerson, a fellow specialist in apocalypticism during the Middle Ages. “John’s powerful revelation seeped into almost every aspect of medieval life.”
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For people who lived their lives in the precarious world of medieval Europe, a world that teetered between hope and despair, Revelation turned out to be an inspiring and even intoxicating text. The opening of the seven seals, the sounding of the seven trumpets, and the pouring of the seven bowls of God’s wrath, for example, offered a way of understanding and enduring the catastrophic events that afflicted Christendom—invasion and conquest, war and revolution, famine and plague, earthquakes and floods. And, at the same time, John’s sublime vision of “a new heaven and a new earth” held out a shining promise of redemption and reward that sustained the readers of Revelation even (and especially) in the moments of greatest tumult.

Once imprinted on the Western imagination during the Middle Ages, the iconography and “language arsenal” of Revelation—and its terrifying but also thrilling fantasies of the end-times—would never be wholly erased. Indeed, an obsessive concern with when and how and why the world will come to an end can be seen as a dominant habit of the Western mind, no less in the third millennium than in the first, and no less in popular culture of the twenty-first century than in the religious art and letters of medieval Europe. And the obsession begins here and now.

T
he thousand-year reign of Jesus Christ on earth, as we have noted, was understood by Augustine and other Christian authors as a purely symbolic reference to the sovereignty of the church itself. “The Church Militant and Triumphant,” according to its glorious self-description,
was
the millennial kingdom. One early theologian, for example, fixed 326 as the year when the emperor Constantine raised the church to earthly power and glory in Rome—and so he calculated that the end of the world would come in 1326, exactly one thousand years later, thus fulfilling the prophecy of Revelation.

Other medieval Christians, however, were not so convinced that the Church Militant and Triumphant deserved to be compared to the kingdom of saints and martyrs that is described in Revelation. Rather, they saw something satanic at work in the excesses and abuses of the church, now so rich and so powerful. Priests, bishops, and even popes, for example, took wives or concubines or both—a practice that came to be condemned as “Nicolaitanism.” (The term is borrowed from the book of Revelation, where it is used by John to condemn a rival faction in the early church.) Clerical marriage had been commonplace for centuries, of course, even if one church directive of the eighth century restricted a priest to a single wife only. Now, however, the purifiers of the church argued for a strict rule of celibacy.

“The hands that touch the body and blood of Christ must not have touched the genitals of a whore,” stormed one preacher in 1059, referring not to prostitutes but to the consecrated wives of the clergy.
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But the call for chastity was not purely a spiritual concern; it also served the material and political interests of the church. A bishop with a wife and children, for example, might be inclined to regard the lands, buildings, and treasures of his bishopric as property to be passed down to his sons. Clearly, the wealth and power of the church were at risk unless the clergy were deprived of the temptation and opportunity to sire potential heirs. Such concerns were on the mind of Pope Gregory VII (1020–1085) when he complained of clerical marriage as a “foul plague of carnal contagion” that “[loosened] the reins of lust.”
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Then, too, the call for the criminalization of clerical marriage owed something to the fear and loathing of women that is writ large in the book of Revelation. Thus, for example, Peter Damian, a white-hot church reformer of the eleventh century, addresses the consecrated wives of married priests as “appetizing flesh of the devil, that castaway from Paradise” and condemns them en masse as “poison of minds, death of souls, companions of the very stuff of sin, the cause of our ruin.”
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Indeed, he saw
all
women as sisters of the Great Whore of Babylon, and he was provoked into rhetorical excesses quite as hateful as the worst passages of Revelation.

“I exhort you, women of the ancient enemy, you bitches, sows, screech-owls, night-owls, blood-suckers, she-wolves,” rails Peter. “Come now, hear me, harlots, prostitutes, with your lascivious kisses, you wallowing places for fat pigs, couches for unclean spirits.”
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Another besetting sin of the medieval church was the practice of simony—that is, the buying and bartering of church offices for profit among the royalty, aristocracy, and gentry as well as the high clergy. Politics were at work here, too; popes were jealous of their power to make and break bishops and cardinals and resented the monarchs who tried to take it away. After all, a bishop who owed his rank and title to a king was less likely to side with a pope in the struggle between church and state that was a commonplace of the late Middle Ages. But it is also true that those who profited from their clerical offices were often tempted to spend their riches on lives of opulence and sensuality. Simony reached all the way to the papacy; Pope Gregory VI (d. 1048), for example, is said to have purchased his seat on the papal throne from the previous pope, Benedict IX, at the stated price of two thousand silver pounds.

Such human flaws and failings among the clergy, high and low, sparked the so-called Gregorian reform, a wide-ranging set of innovations and improvements that reached a critical mass during the reign of Pope Gregory VII. The book of Revelation provided Pope Gregory with the language arsenal to justify his decrees: “For the nearer the time of Antichrist approaches,” he declared, “the harder he fights to crush out the Christian faith.”
¹¹
And the same impulse toward the purification of Christian ity—“a longing for an ideal gospel life built on the imitation of the life lived by Jesus and his followers”
¹²
—moved Francis of Assisi (1181/82–1226) to found the monastic order that inspired medieval Christians to ask themselves: “What would Jesus do?”

Here was yet another culture war in which the book of Revelation served as a rhetorical weapons dump. While kings and popes contested with each other for worldly power, monks and priests like Francis of Assisi, known as the
Poverello
(“Poor little man”), aspired to simplify and purify Christian ity by stripping the church of its corrupting wealth and splendor. Both factions, as we shall see, resorted to the book of Revelation to justify their respective visions of the right way to live as a Christian in the world as we find it rather than the world to come. Indeed, it was the sorry state of the church—rather than war, famine, plague, and the other classic signs of the end of the world—that prompted a revolution in the reading of Revelation.

The maker of the apocalyptic revolution in medieval Europe was a visionary monk called Joachim of Fiore (ca. 1135–ca. 1202). Joachim was raised and educated to serve as an official in the royal court of the Norman king in southern Italy, but he was drawn to the life of “a wandering holy man,” the same calling that sent John to the seven churches of Asia Minor. Joachim took monastic vows and later founded a monastery in the rugged reaches of the Calabrian countryside, where he was inspired to undertake a study of the scriptures in an effort to crack the divine secrets that were hidden away in Holy Writ.
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When Joachim started to read the book of Revelation, he hoped to find “the key of things past, the knowledge of things to come,” as he puts it, “the opening of what is sealed, the uncovering of what is hidden.”
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But he reached only the tenth verse of the text before the mysteries of Revelation stopped him like “the stone that closed the tomb.”
¹⁵
Like so many other visionaries, Joachim sought a revelation of his own—and received one. After a year of prayerful longing and meditation, as Joachim himself describes it, the epiphany took place on Easter morning around the year 1184. Not unlike the experience described by Robert Graves eight centuries later, the baffling text miraculously snapped into focus for the medieval monk.

“About the middle of the night’s silence, as I think, the hour when it is thought that our Lion of the tribe of Judah rose from the dead, while I was meditating,” recalls Joachim, referring to Jesus Christ with the same code words that John uses in Revelation, “I suddenly perceived in my mind’s eye something of the fullness of this book and of the entire harmony of the Old and New Testaments.”
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Once he had been given what he called “the gift of understanding,” Joachim extracted all kinds of new and unsuspected meanings from the book of Revelation.
¹⁷
He was convinced, for example, that human history is divided into three ages, each one corresponding to a “person” of the Trinity—the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The first age lasted until the crucifixion of Jesus, the second age was in progress during Joachim’s lifetime and would end with the arrival of the Antichrist, and the third age—an age of spiritual peace and perfection—would begin only after the Antichrist is defeated. And, echoing the words of Jesus himself, Joachim expressed his conviction that the final battle between God and Satan was at hand.

“This will not take place in the days of your grandchildren or in the old age of your children,” warns Joachim, “but in your own days, few and evil.”
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Joachim’s single most revolutionary innovation was his refusal to confine Revelation to the spiritual realm, thus breaking with the approved reading of the text that dated all the way back to Augustine. Rather, he saw even the strangest visions in Revelation as prophecies of specific people and events in the real world. The seven heads of the satanic red dragon, for example, are understood by Joachim to signify the seven persecutors of the church across the centuries of human history, including Herod, Nero, and Saladin, the celebrated Muslim warrior who took Jerusalem back from the crusaders in 1187. The seventh head, he insisted, was the Antichrist yet (but soon) to come.