A History of the End of the World

Based on a few spare lines of text in the book of Revelation that describe the thousand-year reign of Christ and the saints, some wishful thinkers painted an elaborate picture of the earthly paradise that resembles nothing to be found in Revelation itself or anywhere else in the Christian scriptures. They insisted, for example, that the dead would awaken in flawless bodies of the approximate age of Jesus at the time of his crucifixion—“thirty-something,” as Paula Fredericksen wryly puts it.⁶⁹ Fat people would be given slender bodies, and amputees would get back their missing arms and legs. According to Irenaeus, who claims to possess knowledge of divine secrets that John taught but did not write down in Revelation, the millennium will resemble something out of a fairy tale.

“The days will come in which vines will grow, each having ten thousand branches, and in each branch ten thousand twigs, and in each twig ten thousand shoots, and in each shoot ten thousand clusters, and on every cluster ten thousand grapes,” he imagines in Against Heresies. “And when any of the saints shall lay hold of a cluster, another cluster will cry out, ‘I am a better cluster, take me.’”⁷⁰

For ordinary men and women who struggled from day to day to put food on the table—and who lived in constant fear of famine—it is hardly surprising that paradise is imagined as a place where there is plenty to eat. But Augustine finds these fantasies to be naive and infantile, and he openly ridicules the notion that the resurrected saints would spend a thousand years gorging themselves at “immoderate carnal banquets, in which there will be so much to eat and drink that those supplies will break the bounds not only of moderation, but also of credibility.”⁷¹

Augustine insists that the millennium as described in Revelation refers to a celestial paradise rather than an earthly one: “The joys of the saints in that Sabbath shall be spiritual,” he insists.⁷² And, contrary to the feverish imaginings of men like Montanus, he scoffs at the idea that the heavenly Jerusalem will be seen by human beings in the here and now. Rather, Augustine regards the new Jerusalem as depicted in Revelation as the symbol of “a glory so pervading and so new that no vestige of what is old shall remain”—that is, a phenomenon that is reserved until the world itself is gone.⁷³ No one will actually witness the thousand-year reign of Christ with mortal eyes, because the millennial kingdom, according to Augustine, is yet another symbol. “The Church,” declares Augustine, “is the Kingdom of Christ.”⁷⁴

Indeed, Augustine prefers to see all the spooky and scary details in the prophecies of Revelation as a series of elaborate metaphors for a divine truth so ineffable that John is compelled to reduce it to concrete words, numbers, and images because the ordinary human mind could not otherwise comprehend them. John puts the reign of Christ at one thousand years not as a literal measurement of time, according to Augustine, but as “an equivalent for the whole duration of this world”: one thousand, Augustine writes, is “the number of perfection.” And when John describes how Satan will be bound in chains and cast into an abyss during the thousand-year reign of Christ, Augustine understands “abyss” to mean “the countless multitude of the wicked whose hearts are unfathomably deep in malignity against the Church of God.”⁷⁵

Nor is Augustine willing to concede that the final battle between God and Satan, as described so vividly in the book of Revelation, can be recognized in the troubles that were, even as he wrote, afflicting Rome. Some of his contemporaries, for example, argued that when John sees visions of the armies of Satan at war with the armies of God, he is predicting the invasion of the Roman Empire by various “barbarian” peoples, including the Goths and the Moors, who were dubbed Getae and Massengetae in some ancient sources. But Augustine insists that John is only speaking metaphorically about the enemies of the church wherever they may dwell on earth. “For these nations which he names Gog and Magog,” writes Augustine, “are not to be understood of some barbarous nations in the some part of the world, whether the Getae and Massangetae, as some conclude from the initial letters, or some other foreign nations not under the Roman government.”⁷⁶

Above all, Augustine strikes a stance that one modern scholar calls “radical agnosticism” and another scholar dubs “the eschatological uncertainty principle.”⁷⁷ Augustine piously affirms the inner truth of the scriptural account of the end-times—but he insists that “the manner in which this shall take place we can now only feebly conjecture, and shall understand it only when it comes to pass.”⁷⁸ Since Jesus has already cautioned all good Christians that no one knows when the end will come, Augustine suggests, the book of Revelation must be consulted only for its “spiritual” instruction and not as a source of eschatological thrills.

Augustine’s strict and narrow reading of Revelation was embraced and enforced by church authorities, and thus served to discourage any open speculation on the colorful details of the Second Coming. “Augustine glowered on Christian millennialists,” explains historian Robert E. Lerner, “and made them guard their words.” Apocalyptic speculation was so effectively suppressed by the church that, between 400 and 1000, “there is no surviving written product that displays an independent Western millenarian imagination.”⁷⁹ And those self-styled soothsayers who were audacious enough to fix a certain date for the end of the world, such as the doomsayers who announced with perfect confidence that the Second Coming would take place in the year 500 C.E., were denounced by more cautious Christians as deliri et insani—that is, “insane crazies.”⁸⁰

“And, of course, in terms of empirical verification, the essence of their argument has been vindicated by the simple passage of time,” observes Paula Fredriksen, “which has continued not to end.”⁸¹

Augustine’s stern and austere approach to Revelation, however, was never wholly successful in extinguishing the fires that the text was meant to ignite in the hearts and minds of its readers and hearers. Just as John had surely intended, the word-magic of Revelation was irresistible. For men and women who were forced to cope with the daily stresses and intermittent terrors of life in the medieval world, the book of Revelation held out the promise that plague, famine, pestilence, and war would be followed by revenge against one’s enemies on earth and the reward of eternal life in a celestial kingdom—and not just someday, but soon.

For the true believer, it is easy to explain the failure of the world to “end on time” without dismissing Revelation a mere allegory or, for that matter, a set of failed prophecies. The other way to read the book of Revelation is based on the conviction that divine secrets are surely encoded and enciphered in the text but that the readers of Revelation have so far failed to understand them. After all, the apocalyptic tradition is based on the thrilling notion that the real meanings of Revelation are hidden in plain sight and that “the mind which hath wisdom,” as John puts it, will discern and understand the divine secrets.⁸²

So the medieval Bible literalists, like their modern counterparts, insisted on reading the book of Revelation as divine prophecy, and they continued their tireless efforts at code breaking. The best example, then as now, is the effort to identify the villain who is described in Revelation as the “beast.” As early as the third century, a Roman bishop called Hippolytus (ca. 170–ca. 235) announced that the “beast” of Revelation is the very same arch-demon who is mentioned elsewhere in the New Testament in the epistles attributed to the apostle John: “Little children, it is the last hour! As you have heard the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour.”⁸³ And thus began the ancient and enduring tradition of doing exactly what Augustine warned pious Christians not to do—that is, looking for specific people and events in the real world and matching them up with the characters and incidents in the book of Revelation.

The task is all the more daunting precisely because the book of Revelation, like the Epistles of John, suggests that there will be more than one candidate for the title of Antichrist. Indeed, the author of Revelation comes up with a whole bestiary of satanic creatures. He starts with the red dragon, a creature that he straightforwardly identifies as “that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world.”⁸⁴But he also conjures up two more “beasts,” a seven-headed beast that rises from the sea and a two-horned beast that crawls up out of the earth, both of them serving as agents of the Devil. To the first beast, “the dragon gave his power and his throne and great authority,” and the second beast compels humankind to offer worship to the first beast.⁸⁵

Such ambiguities and complexities have demanded the attention—and taxed the imagination—of the readers of Revelation for the last two thousand years. Of course, one simple and compelling answer suggests itself when the text of Revelation is restored to the historical context in which it was first composed. Most modern scholars agree that John intends the beast from the sea to symbolize imperial Rome, with each of its seven heads representing a different Roman emperor. And he intends the beast from the land to symbolize the provincial gentry in the seven cities of Asia Minor whose aping of their Roman overlords so disgusted the author. Some of the earliest readers of Revelation, like the scholars who came long after them, sought to identify the “beast” with one or another of the reigning Roman emperors of antiquity.