Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (21 page)

Since John’s visions allow no neutral place to stand, Athanasius’ reading suggests that what makes the difference between
heaven and hell is whether one believes in Jesus as “essentially the same being” as God, as the Nicene Creed prescribes, or rejects the “truth necessary for salvation” and so falls into everlasting fire, to be “tormented day and night, forever and ever.”
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By offering this interpretation of Revelation, Athanasius set an influential trend—one adopted by other Christians ever since, from Martin Luther and his Catholic critics to clashing Christian groups to this day. From more than a thousand years after that time, many Christians throughout the world painted vivid images of that last judgment on the back walls of their churches—from the humblest village church to the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, painted by Michelangelo—to serve as a final warning to those departing from worship.

Yet in that famous Easter letter in 367, Athanasius goes on to say that even establishing a fixed New Testament “canon” is not enough. Because he has heard that “the heretics” boast “about the books they call ‘apocryphal,” Athanasius orders that no one is to discuss or teach, much less read, what he calls the
“empty and polluted”
books written and revered by people
“who do not seek what benefits the church.”
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As David Brakke points out, Athanasius singles out for special censure the apocalypses attributed to Moses, Isaiah, and Enoch, which he says are “filled with myths.”
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Thus he sought to censor the “secret books” that Christians apparently were reading, whether in private groups scattered in cities and towns along the Nile or in communal devotions.

We do not know exactly what happened in response to Athanasius’ letter. What we do know is that, whether in response to this letter or to later denunciations of writings associated with
Origen, some time after Theodore ordered the bishop’s letter to be copied onto the monastery wall at Nag Hammadi, someone—perhaps monks resisting the bishop’s order—took more than fifty sacred writings, including gospels and secret “revelations,” packed and carefully sealed them into a six-foot jar, and buried them for safekeeping near the cliff where they were discovered nearly fifteen hundred years later, in 1945, and came to be known as the Gnostic gospels.

One final note: as early as 315, the emperor Constantine took John’s vision of Christ’s victory over the dragon as an emblem of his rule. Constantine emblazoned this image in the most conspicuous public places, apparently to show that he, as Roman emperor, far from embodying “the beast,” was now Christ’s agent, who destroys all evil power. The emperor’s friend and historian, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, describes having seen the “victorious trophy” that Constantine commissioned and “displayed on a very high panel placed before the entrance to the palace for everyone to see, showing in the picture the Savior’s sign placed above his own head.” So, Eusebius says, the emperor, adapting the visions of the prophets Isaiah and John of Patmos,

To display this image to his subjects in distant regions, Constantine ordered it struck on coins minted during his reign and circulated throughout the eastern empire. For after those crucial nights of battle and victory in October 312, when the energetic young emperor defeated and killed his rivals and ended persecution, he understood that he ruled through the power of Christ, having vanquished the dragon, whose evil power he now saw embodied in a far wider range of enemies. Eusebius says that for Constantine, the dragon represented not only the devil—“the invisible enemy of the human race”—but also Licinius, who initially reigned with him as coregent and whom he later killed as a rival. Constantine wrote in a letter to Eusebius that he had restored “liberty to the human race” after he drove “
that dragon
out of public administration.”
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Taking cues from bishops Eusebius and Athanasius, Constantine also saw the “evil one” stirring up trouble among Christians. When he heard that bitter disputes had broken out among Christians in Africa around 317, Eusebius reported that

A few years later, when Constantine sought to defuse the quarrel between Arius and Bishop Alexander, he wrote a solemn, careful, and conciliatory letter to rebuke them both for “sparring like juveniles”
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and to warn them to not succumb to “diabolic
temptations,” since the Evil One, the “common enemy of the whole world,” often attacks from within, having “set his own lawless will against your holy synods.”
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When Constantine convened the council of Nicea to resolve their dispute, he opened by exhorting the assembled bishops “not to let the malicious demon encompass the divine law with blasphemies.” A few years later, when he ordered that all the meeting places of “heretics” be confiscated and turned over to Catholic bishops, Eusebius says that he had “decided that certain people had to be eliminated from humanity like a poison,” since they infect “the whole world” with “great evil.” Finally, Constantine would include Jews among the horde of evildoers he felt called upon to vanquish, since he saw them as “killers of the prophets, and the murderers of the Lord.”
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Nearly forty years after Constantine’s death, Athanasius came toward the end of his own long crusade and died in May 373. To a remarkable extent, he had succeeded in his triple-pronged agenda mandating
creed, clergy,
and
canon.
Having been bishop for more than forty-five years (although he had spent seventeen of them in exile), he and his allies were able to require many monks, as well as other Christians, to accept the Nicene Creed as, indeed, the “truth necessary for salvation.” He also had enormously extended the authority, resources, and prestige of the Catholic clergy, having brought many churches and monasteries under their supervision. Finally, he also had persuaded many Christians to accept his version of the canon as the only “authorized” scriptures of the New Testament.

This brief sketch of its history may help us see how the Book of Revelation came to be placed in the New Testament canon
and enshrined in the Christian Roman Empire, but it does not answer a much larger question: How has this mysterious book of prophecies continued to speak to people thousands of years later, even now? Although to fully answer this question would require another book—or many books!—we turn to it in our conclusion.

T
he Book of Revelation reads as if John had wrapped up all our worst fears—fears of violence, plague, wild animals, unimaginable horrors emerging from the abyss below the earth, lightning, thunder, hail, earthquakes, erupting volcanoes, and the atrocities of torture and war—into one gigantic nightmare. Yet instead of ending in total destruction, his visions finally open to the new Jerusalem—a glorious city filled with light. John’s visions of dragons, monsters, mothers, and whores speak less to our head than to our heart: like nightmares and dreams, they speak to what we fear, and what we hope.

Christian leaders have understood the uses of fear and hope from the time that Justin “the philosopher” threatened Roman emperors with hellfire and courageously defied the judge who ordered him beheaded by declaring that God would raise him back to life. Thus John’s visions speak to what one historian calls the Christian movement’s most powerful catalyst—the conviction that death is not simply annihilation. For after Jesus’ earliest followers first said they had seen him alive after his death, many proclaimed that everyone, after death, would be raised to new life. But John’s visions go further, as he vividly imagines
how
one might live after death—and what this means for how we live now.

John himself faithfully reproduces Jewish tradition that speaks
of God judging people “according to their works,”
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but his visions open up a far wider range of interpretations than, for example, Jesus’ parable of divine judgment. For as Matthew tells it, that parable turns on specific deeds. The Son of Man invites into God’s kingdom those he calls blessed,

When his hearers protest that they have never seen him in such straits, he replies, “Whenever you did it to the least of these members of my family, you did it to me.” Shut out from God’s kingdom are those who withhold care and compassion from those in need.

By contrast, John of Patmos conjures cosmic war, good fighting evil until Christ crushes the dragon, through visions that can be plugged into almost any conflict. Because John more often defines “evildoers” with degrading epithets—“cowards, the faithless, abominable, filthy … and all liars”
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—than with specific deeds, nearly anyone might claim to be on God’s side, fighting “evildoers.” Throughout the ages, John of Patmos’ visions have fortified religious anger like his own, the anger of those who suffer oppression and long for retaliation against those who torture and kill their people. Yet those who torture and kill in God’s name often cast themselves into the same drama, seeing themselves not as the “murderers” John denounces but as God’s servants delivering divine judgment.

From the end of the second century to the fourth, as the movement increasingly developed institutional structures, some Christian leaders began to divide “the saved” from “the damned” less in terms of how they act than whether they accept a certain set of doctrines and participate—or don’t—in specific religious communities. Those who followed Athanasius’ ingenious reinterpretation of “whore” and “beast” as
Christian
enemies often came to identify “orthodox” believers alone as the saved, while consigning everyone who stood outside the Catholic communion—pagans, Jews, “infidels,” along with any Christians they called heretics—to outer darkness, both in this world and the next.

Those adopting these lines of interpretation could appreciate how John’s apocalyptic visions helped create coherence among all who identified as Catholic Christians and to establish a common bulwark against all whom they saw as outsiders. Ever since, Christians have adapted his visions to changing times, reading their own social, political, and religious conflict into the cosmic war he so powerfully evokes. Perhaps most startling is how Constantine invoked John’s vision of Christ’s victory over Rome to endorse his own imperial rule. More than a thousand years later, Lutherans published Lucas Cranach’s pictures of the pope as the whore of Babylon in one of the first Lutheran Bibles, while an early Catholic biographer retaliated by depicting Luther, on the frontispiece, as the seven-headed beast. During the catastrophic times of the American Civil War, Confederate loyalists portrayed Lincoln being strangled by the great dragon that is the Union, while those on the Union side took as their war anthem “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which weaves Jeremiah’s and John’s prophecies in to
that war, now seen as the Great Tribulation that precedes God’s final judgment:

We need not rehearse the history of religious violence—from crusaders fighting “infidels” and inquisitors torturing and killing Jews to save their immortal souls, to Catholics and Protestants fighting religious wars from the sixteenth century on, or Christian groups engaged in vigilante violence to the present time, or the wartime rhetoric of world leaders—to realize how often those who wield power and see themselves standing on God’s side against Satan’s have sought to force “God’s enemies” to submit or be killed. Such apocalyptic fervor, whether engaged in by Christians or Muslims, allows no neutral ground between God’s kingdom and the lake of fire, and no room for compromise, much less for human—or humane—interaction.

During the years in which Christians debated whether to place the Book of Revelation into the church’s definitive canon, other writers inspired by John of Patmos revised and amplified his warnings of the coming judgment. The scholar David Frankfurter has shown how the anonymous author of the Revelation of Elijah, writing in Egypt circa 250, updated “the signs of the time” to warn his contemporaries of God’s coming judgment.
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The Revelation of Paul, too, sharply separated the saved from the damned, taking special care to show how the divine judge would tailor hell’s tortures to fit each sinner’s crime,
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as its author contributed to a stream that eventually would include Dante’s
Inferno
and Milton’s
Paradise Lost,
and paintings by artists as diverse as Michelangelo and Bosch, William Blake and Picasso, as well as countless films and video games being produced to this day.

Yet John’s Book of Revelation appeals not only to fear but also to hope. As John tells how the chaotic events of the world are finally set right by divine judgment, those who engage his visions often see them offering meaning—moral meaning—in times of suffering or apparently random catastrophe. Many poets, artists, and preachers who engage these prophecies claim to have found in them the promise, famously repeated by Martin Luther King Jr., that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
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