A History of the End of the World

satisfy their carnal appetites. With Joachim and Hildegard begins the tradition of using Revelation as a weapon against the church itself.

Hildegard saw some grotesque sights when she slipped into one of her trance states, as we have already noted, including the image of a beautiful woman who gives birth to a misshapen beast in the nave of a church: “In her vagina there appeared a monstrous and totally black head with fiery eyes, ears like the ears of a donkey, nostrils and mouth like those of a lion,” Hildegard writes in her account of the vision that came to her as she prayed. “Lo, the monstrous head removed itself from its place with so great a crash that the entire image of the woman was shaken in all of its members.”²⁶

Hildegard’s vision is plainly inspired by the book of Revelation—“a radical conflation” of the woman clothed with the sun and crowned with the stars, who gives birth to the Savior, and the Whore of Babylon, who fornicates with kings and rides on the back of a satanic beast with seven heads.²⁷But Hildegard, like her near- contemporary Joachim, assigned new and startling meanings to these symbols: the laboring woman represents the church, and the monster in her womb represents the Antichrist. To put it more plainly, the Antichrist will emerge from within the church itself like an infant from its mother’s womb—“a violent expulsion that is like a reverse rape,”²⁸ according to Bernard McGinn. And Hildegard, who lived chastely as a “bride of Christ” within the walls of a convent, dressing in bridal garb for the rite of communion, resorted to raw and explicit sexual imagery to express her anxieties about the will of God and the fate of humankind in the end-times: “[T]he evil male figure of Satan attacks humanity, the female bride of Christ, progressively figured in Eve, the synagogue, Mary, and the church.”²⁹

When Hildegard preached in churches and cathedrals—a wholly remarkable role for any woman, but especially a cloistered nun, in medieval Europe—the sins that she found most alarming were the sexual excesses and self-enrichment of the clergy. And she introduced a new understanding of how the final battle between good and evil would manifest itself in the end-times by describing a day in the not so distant future when the “rash populace” and the “greedy princes” would “cast [the clergy] down, chase them, and carry away their riches.” Then the world will see the “dawn of justice,” and the surviving clergy, once again poor and chaste just as God intended them to be, would “shine like the purest gold.”³⁰

Significantly, if also surprisingly, Hildegard’s preachments were not condemned by the church. Hildegard was so credible and so compelling that the archbishop under whose authority she lived and worked found himself forced to concede that her visions “were from God,” and so did the pope himself. Indeed, a monk was assigned to serve as her scribe so that the prophecies issuing from Hildegard’s mind and mouth would be promptly and accurately preserved, and she corresponded often and at length with popes, emperors, kings, and churchmen all over Europe. And so Hildegard reminds us, yet again, that a charismatic man or woman might succeed in catching and holding the attention of an audience by invoking the power of Revelation. If John had been graced with the gift of prophecy, they were willing to concede, why not Hildegard, too?

Not every reader of the Revelation, however, was able to complain about the church with the same impunity. For instance, the radical faction of the Franciscan order, the so-called Zealots or Spirituals, followed the example of Joachim and Hildegard in conjuring up the Whore of Babylon and the Antichrist when they condemned the corruption that they beheld within in the church itself. So did the Beguines, a remarkable community of women who took up their own crusade for purification and reform in anticipation of the end-times. And, as their numbers increased and their rhetoric escalated, all of them began to attract the ungentle attention of the Church Militant and Triumphant. Along with Jews, Muslims, and assorted Christian heretics, apocalyptic preachers were persons of special interest to the Holy Office of the Inquisition.

Pope John XXII (ca. 1244–1334) convened a papal court in 1317 to consider one especially aggravating instance of apocalyptic speculation among the Spirituals of the Franciscan order. The defendant was a book rather than a human being—a commentary on the book of Revelation by a Franciscan monk named Peter John Olivi (ca. 1248–1298), who insisted that the church founded by the disciples of Jesus Christ was now “infected from head to toe and turned, as it were, into a new Babylon.”³¹ The author himself was already dead, but his book was found guilty of heresy on charges that sixty of its tenets “offended the faith.”³² Copies of Olivi’s writings were put to the flames, and a few of his flesh-and-blood followers were put to death for the crime of reading and teaching his revolutionary ideas on the end-times.

Olivi was among the most prominent and influential members of the Spirituals. Drawing on the text of Revelation, they saw Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan order, as “the Angel of the Sixth Seal,”³³ and they imagined Francis and Domingo de Guzman (ca. 1170–1221), founder of the Dominican order, as the two witnesses of the end-times. And when Pope John XXII condemned the Spirituals as heretics, he succeeded only in confirming the zealous friars in their conviction that he was the real heretic or, even worse, the Antichrist himself.

Joachim of Fiore may have issued an oblique and intentionally vague warning that the Antichrist would come to sit on the papal throne, for example, but one of the Spirituals, a radical monk named Ubertino da Casale (ca. 1259–ca. 1330) was perfectly willing to name names. Da Casale insisted that the beast from the land and the beast from the sea, the satanic twins described in Revelation, were actually visions of two popes of his own era, Boniface VIII and Benedict XI, both sworn enemies and active persecutors of the Spirituals. And, following the example of the author of Revelation, da Casale worked out the numerical value of the letters in Benedict XI’s name as the dreaded number of the Beast, 666.³⁴

So the Spirituals were revolutionaries rather than reformers. For example, John of Rupescissa (ca. 1310–ca. 1366), a Franciscan monk from southern France who is sometimes known simply as “Brother John,” insisted that all of the afflictions foretold in Revelation would be visited on the world as punishment for the sins of the church. Inspired by visions of his own, he saw the Saracens, Turks, and Tartars who threatened medieval Christendom as the satanic armies that were gathering for the final battle of Armageddon. And he predicted that the last days would bring what he called “a horrendous novelty”: the common folk would take their own bloody revenge against both the gentry and the clergy, rising up against the rich and powerful “like earthworms devouring lions” and tearing down the palaces and cathedrals with their own hands.³⁵

“The world will be filled with indignation against the ostentation of wealth, and the oppressed peoples will rebel in an unexpected and sudden way,” warns John of Rupescissa in Handbook in Tribulation. “Many princes, nobles, and mighty ones will fall from the height of their dignities and the glory of their riches, and the affliction of the nobles will be beyond belief.”³⁶

His prophecy of what we would call a social revolution is decorated with all the eschatological trappings of Revelation. Based on an epiphany that he experienced “while the choir was singing the Te Deum during the Matins liturgy for the feast of the Virgin,”³⁷ Brother John predicted that a pair of Antichrists would appear, one in the eastern realm of Christianity in 1365 and the other in the west in 1370. A Franciscan monk would be raised to the papal throne, and the new pope would appoint a French king to the throne of a world empire. Together, the pope and the emperor would make war on the two Antichrists, close the schism between the eastern and western churches, and call the Jews into communion with the Christians.

Indeed, John’s “greatest prophetic daring” was his conviction that the Jewish people would become “God’s new imperial nation.” Here was another novelty. At a time when the mystery plays of medieval Europe enshrined the old slander that the Antichrist would be the spawn of the Devil and a Jewish harlot, Brother John predicted an exalted role for the Jewish people in the end-times. Jerusalem would be rebuilt to serve as the glorious capital of a unified and purified faith during the millennial kingdom on earth. With explicit apologies to Augustine, who had warned against taking the reign of Christ on earth too literally, John explained that he had been granted a divine revelation of his own on the subject of the thousand-year Sabbath, and he insisted that his vision of the future was “most certain, infallible and necessary.”³⁸

Brother John’s attacks on the church grew so ferocious that even his superiors in the reformist Franciscan order felt obliged to confine him in one of their own prisons, and he was eventually put on trial by the papal court in Avignon on charges of heresy. Although he was not condemned to death by the cautious church authorities, who were apparently willing to entertain the notion that perhaps he was really in touch with God, the fiery monk remained in prison for the rest of his life, and all of his surviving apocalyptic tracts were written behind bars.³⁹ Yet copies of Handbook in Tribulation circulated throughout Europe in its original Latin text as well as in French, German, Czech, and Castilian translations—an early example of the “medieval ‘best-sellers’” that were inspired by the book of Revelation.⁴⁰