A History of the End of the World (25 page)

Dante, of course, offers only one example of how Revelation served as a kind of lending library of stock scenes and characters, shorthand words and phrases, mystical codes and ciphers, and various other apparatus. By the time he set his hand to
The Divine Comedy
in the early fourteenth century, the reimagining and repurposing of the original text of Revelation was already an old if not always honorable tradition, and not only among pious theologians and self-styled seers.

Indeed, the author of Revelation, who envisioned the terrors and marvels of the near future, surely could not have imagined what would become of the words he spoke aloud to a little congregation of Christians in the provincial backwater of Roman Empire so many centuries before. Once set into motion in the Middle Ages, however, the enterprise of recycling the book of Revelation for new, startling, and sometimes reckless purposes turned into an engine of art, politics, and propaganda that is still running in high gear today.

Y
et it was the author of Revelation who assured the longevity of his little book by offering an all-purpose arsenal of excoriation by which one’s adversaries could be readily, thoroughly, and colorfully abused. The powerful inner logic of Revelation—and whole of the apocalyptic tradition—abandons all effort at persuasion, erases all ambiguities and uncertainties, and threatens the gravest punishment for even the slightest deviation or difference of opinion. By the lights of Revelation, a human being is either right or wrong, good or evil, godly or satanic. And, in the world according to the Apocalypse, anyone who disagrees with the author in the slightest degree is worthy of one or more of the convenient labels that the text provides in abundance: the Beast, the Great Whore, Satan and the Devil, among many others.

Some readers of Revelation were slower than others in realizing how useful Revelation could be in a culture war or, for that matter, a shooting war. Like Joachim of Fiore and Hildegard of Bingen, Martin Luther (1483–1546) was appalled by what he saw as the corruption of the Roman papacy. By 1517, when Luther famously nailed his defiant writings on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, he was ready to break with Roman Catholic dogma and, soon enough, the church itself. But Luther—a monk in the order of St. Augustine—also distanced himself from the book of Revelation.

“There is one sufficient reason for the small esteem in which I hold it,” writes Luther in 1522, “that Christ is neither taught in it nor recognized.”
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Eight years passed before Luther figured out how to deploy the book of Revelation as a rhetorical weapon in his own war against the Roman Catholic Church—and so “the Reformer performed a
volte-face
.”
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Luther, like the author of Revelation, saw his enemies as not merely wrongheaded but purely evil and even diabolical, and he gave himself permission to draw on its ideas and imagery in his own sermons, tracts, and missives. “[I]t is meant as a revelation of what is to come,” Luther now writes of the Apocalypse, “and especially of coming tribulations and disasters for the Church.” No longer quite so troubled by the absence of Christ in its text, Luther declares that the satanic beast whose coming is predicted in the book of Revelation is the papacy itself.
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“[T]he true Antichrist…is reigning in the Roman Curia,” proposes Luther. “I do not know whether the pope himself be Antichrist or his apostle, so miserably is Christ (i.e., the Truth) corrupted and crucified by him.”
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The author of Revelation may have radicalized the language of abuse, but Luther found new and ever more outrageous ways of using Revelation as a cudgel against his adversaries. Luther, for example, is only following the example of earlier reformers when he characterizes the papacy as the “Babylonian Captivity” of the church and Rome as “Babylon, Mother of Whores.” But he plays with the metaphor in genuinely shocking ways: “We too were formerly stuck in the behind of this hellish whore, this new church of the pope,” Luther rails in one of his notoriously scatological tracts. “We supported it in all earnestness, so that we regret having spent so much time and energy in that vile hole. But God be thanked that he rescued us from the scarlet whore.”
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Not every Protestant reformer was equally enamored with Revelation, and a few of them were as alarmed as the earliest church fathers had been by its potent and provocative imagery. Across the Rhine in Switzerland, for example, Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) and John Calvin (1509–1564) restricted the use of the inflammatory text “in order not to awaken visionary demons.”
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A synod in Saumur, a center of Protestant activism in western France, issued a decree in 1596 that flatly prohibited making any comment on the book of Revelation without formal approval from the church authorities. But Revelation turned out to be so useful and so compelling to the Protestant cause that literally hundreds of new commentaries were composed and published in the century following Luther’s declaration of war on the Roman Catholic Church, and Revelation soon established itself as the “text of choice” for Protestant doomsayers down through the ages.

Protestant preachers, in fact, were even more readily convinced than their Catholic counterparts that they knew when the world would end—and, of course, they were just as wrong. Michael Stifel, a German mathematician, mounted the pulpit in Luther’s church to announce his calculation that the end-times would begin promptly at 8:00
AM
on October 19, 1533. More than two hundred years later, undiscouraged by any of the earlier failed prophecies, an English preacher named George Bell declared with equal certainty that Jesus Christ would descend from heaven to earth on February 28, 1763. On the night of the promised Second Coming, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, preached all night long in an effort to calm the agitated crowds and prepare them for the disappointment of what he correctly presumed would be the dawning of yet another unremarkable day.

The apocalyptic tradition embraces two very different approaches to the proper conduct of pious men and women in times of tribulation. The book of Daniel, as we have seen, teaches the “wise ones” to suffer in silence until God is ready to revenge himself on their oppressors—but
The Animal Apocalypse
praises the true believers who pick up the sword and go to war. Significantly, the book of Revelation, for all of its rhetorical fireworks, actually sides with Daniel. As John sees it, the suffering saints are meant to wait patiently for their martyrdom and look forward to the happy day when the Word of God, “clothed with a vesture dipped in blood” and bearing a sword in its mouth,
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will return to wreak a bloody vengeance.

Not every of reader of Revelation in the medieval world, however, was able to check the powerful emotions that were stirred up by the words and images to be found in the last book of the Bible. A longing for the endtimes—and a willingness to hasten them along—burned hotly among “the underprivileged, the oppressed, the disoriented, and the unbalanced,” as Norman Cohn puts it, all of whom populated what he calls “the obscure underworld of popular religion.”
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Not a few of them, like the sword-wielding lambs in
The Animal Apocalypse,
were inspired to take matters into their own hands. Indeed, that’s exactly why Revelation has always been regarded as a dangerous text by the more sober clerics, early and late.

One striking example of the power of Revelation is found in the Crusades. The popes who called on Christian soldiers to take back Jerusalem from its Muslim overlords—and the princes and kings who harkened to the call—may have embraced the rhetoric of Revelation, but their motives can be seen as geopolitical rather than religious: “The Great Crusade,” declares Bernard McGinn, “was fundamentally a papal plan for the reestablishment of the Mediterranean Christian empire under the leadership of the pope.”
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But a great many ordinary Christians understood the call to take up the cross as a fulfillment of the prophecies of Revelation. The so-called People’s Crusade and, even more poignantly, the Children’s Crusade were spontaneous upwellings of apocalyptic fervor that inspired men, women, and children to set off for the Holy Land and take back Jerusalem from the Antichrist.

“Many portents appeared in the sky as well as on the earth, and excited not a few who were previously indifferent to the Crusade,” writes Ekkehard of Aura in
Jerusalem Journey,
an account from the eleventh century. “Some showed the sign of the cross stamped by divine influence on their foreheads or clothes or on some parts of their body, and by that mark they believed themselves to be ordained for the army of God. In the midst of all of this, more people than can be believed ran to the churches in crowds, and the priests blessed and handed out swords, clubs and pilgrim wallets in a new ritual.”
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Some of the Crusaders were so agitated that they could not wait until they reached the Holy Land to unsheathe their swords. As they crossed the European countryside, they set upon the Jewish communities that lay in their line of march, inflicting a kind of proto-Holocaust on those whom they had been taught to hate as members of the Synagogue of Satan. Indeed, the “folk eschatology” of medieval Europe, as we have seen, included the notion that the Antichrist would be the offspring of Satan and a Jewish whore, and so the crusaders were unsentimental about slaughtering Jewish men, women, and children alike, any one of whom might be the Antichrist himself.
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The same apocalyptic impulse was triggered in the poor and disempowered folk who, from time to time, rose up against their masters just as Hildegard and Brother John had predicted. Thus, for example, Wat Tyler’s Rebellion of 1381—a bloody rebellion by English workers and farmers against the gentry and the clergy—was seen as a sign of the end-times, and the armed mob was likened to the apocalyptic armies of Gog and Magog. The Taborites, a movement composed of Bohemian peasants and the urban poor of Prague, set up their own armed communes in the fifteenth century in anticipation of the millennial kingdom that would replace kings and priests alike. By 1452, a punitive expedition succeeded in capturing the last stronghold of the Taborites in what turned out to be only a toy-box version of the Apocalypse.

“Liberate us from the evil Antichrist and his cunning army,” they chanted as they prepared for Armageddon. “Accursed be the man who withholds his sword from shedding the blood of the enemies of Christ.”
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The tremors and eruptions that followed in the wake of the Protestant Reformation included an armed peasant uprising in Germany under the leadership of Thomas Müntzer (ca. 1488–1525), a minister who was persuaded that God had chosen him as the new revelator on the very eve of the end-times. “Harvest-time is here, so God himself has hired me for his harvest,” declared Müntzer, alluding to the Grim Reaper as depicted in Revelation. “I have sharpened my scythe, and my lips, hand, skin, hair, soul, body, life curse the unbelievers.” He saw his faithful followers as the “Elect,” and everyone else as the minions of the Devil. “For the ungodly have no right to live,” he insisted, “save what the Elect choose to allow them.” Like so many other messianic warriors, he was hunted down, tortured, and beheaded by the very princes whom he boldly condemned as “godless scoundrels.”
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Another upwelling of “apocalyptic activism” was prompted by the crusade that Louis XIV carried out in the late seventeenth century against the Protestants of France, the Huguenots.
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Long accustomed to persecution and oppression by the Catholic monarch, they rallied to the charismatic “child-prophets” who assured their elders that the latest outrages were sure signs of the Second Coming. And some Huguenot preachers, embracing the popular notion that the French “Babylon” would be destroyed in 1690, succeeded in setting off a guerilla war by the so-called Camisard rebels against the army of the Sun King. Fatefully, the war ended with the withdrawal of all civil and religious liberties and the self-exile of nearly a half million Huguenots.

But the acting out of the apocalyptic impulse reached its fullest expression in 1534 with the establishment of a self-proclaimed messianic kingdom in the German city of Münster. A radical faction of Anabaptists managed to convince themselves that the whole world
except
their hometown would shortly be destroyed. Münster, they believed, would be the New Jerusalem and the site of “a kingdom of a thousand years,” and they anointed a former tailor and sometime actor named Jan Bockelson (also known as Jan van Leiden) as “Messiah of the Last Days.”
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And the first public act of the charismatic, handsome, and high-spirited young man was a characteristically showy one.

“He ran naked through the town in a frenzy and then fell into a silent ecstasy which lasted three days,” writes Norman Cohn, an influential British historian specializing in medieval studies, in
The Pursuit of the Millennium.
“When speech returned to him he called the population together and announced that God had revealed to him that the old constitution of the town, being the work of men, must be replaced by a new one which would be the work of God.”
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The townsfolk were required to surrender their gold and silver, submit to rebaptism, and comply with a strict code of sexual morality that was meant to purify all good Christians in anticipation of the Day of Judgment. Later, however, Bockelson revised the code to permit the practice of polygamy in imitation of the Hebrew patriarchs and kings—and he promptly took a gaggle of young women, “none older than twenty,” as his own wives. Anyone who defied his authority was subject to capital punishment: “Now I am given power over all nations of the earth, and the right to use the sword to the confusion of the wicked and in defence of the righteous,” he declared. “So let none in this town stain himself with crime or resist the will of God, or else he shall without delay be put to death with the sword.”
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Bockelson, seated on a golden throne, presided over the beheadings that were conducted in the town square with the “Sword of Justice”—and the King of the New Jerusalem himself lopped off more than a few heads. Among the victims was a woman who had committed the crime of “denying her husband his marital rights.”
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