Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World

Above all, the “war in heaven” between the archangel Michael and the red dragon—the eschatological high point of Revelation—is strongly reminiscent of the so-called combat myth that can be found in stories of creation in pagan texts from all over the ancient Near East. Indeed, the notion of a primal struggle between a high god and a primal beast—that is, a symbolic account of the struggle between order and chaos, creation and destruction—can be discerned within the Hebrew Bible itself, where Isaiah (among other biblical authors) refers to the defeat of Leviathan, “the twisting serpent and the dragon of the sea,” by a sword-wielding Yahweh. 145The combat myth of pagan tradition can be glimpsed only through the cracks of the biblical text, but it is the centerpiece of the book of Revelation.

Some scholars insist that such pagan associations are mostly in the mind of the beholder. And, in any event, none of the pagan subtext that might be teased out of the book of Revelation need be seen as evidence of hypocrisy on John’s part. Rather, it is a sign of John’s savvy that his “language arsenal” is not confined to Jewish sources. “John co-ops this imperial propaganda,” proposes Adela Yarbro Collins, “to claim that the true golden age will come with the messianic reign of Christ.” 146

After all, once he resolved to look beyond the Jewish community in search of readers and hearers, John apparently realized that he needed to use scenes and stories that would be meaningful to pagans who were strangers to the Jewish scriptures. John’s preachments would transcend both the Jewish and pagan sources that seem to have inspired him, and the words and images of Revelation came to be imprinted, deeply and ineradicably, on the Western imagination, ranging from the church paintings of medieval Europe to the music videos in heavy rotation on MTV. John, of course, fully expected that his words of prophecy—and the world itself—would last “but a short time,” and yet the sheer staying power of Revelation turns out to be John’s greatest achievement. 147

Afew pious readers of Revelation imagine that John travels to the remote and barren island of Patmos on a kind of vision quest—he seeks a revelation and, like others who have done the same over the centuries and millennia, finds what he is looking for. Although there is nothing in the text to justify such speculation, the idea links John to the long line of mystics and ecstatics who come before him and long after him. Like the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, Moses on Mount Sinai, and Muhammad in the hill caves around Mecca, John finds the wilderness to be a good place to get a glimpse of the divine.

John himself describes his visionary experience on Patmos in way that is surely meant to remind his readers of the classical prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Like Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Daniel, among his other role models, John is favored with a series of revelations by a “God in heaven who revealeth secrets,” as Daniel puts it. 148And, like other prophets who struggle to use mere words to convey something ineffable, John describes his experience as both exalting and shattering, sublime and horrific.

“I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day,” he writes, “and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet.” 149When he turns around to see who is speaking, John beholds the first of the many strange sights that fill the pages of Revelation: “One like unto the Son of Man,” a robed and girded figure whose face is “like the sun shining in full strength” and whose eyes are “as a flame of fire,” with a “sharp two-edged sword” projecting from his mouth and “seven stars in his right hand.” And John is literally staggered by what he sees: “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead,” he explains, “but he laid his right hand upon me, saying, ‘Fear not, I am the first and the last.’” 150

Significantly, John is specifically charged by his celestial visitor with the task of writing down and publishing his revelations. “Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter,” says the Son of Man. “Write what you see in a book, and send it to the seven churches.” 151Here, too, John places himself squarely in perhaps the single most crucial tradition in monotheism—the making of books. Then as now, human beings are more likely to believe what is written than what is said aloud, and John pronounces a curse on anyone who might be inclined to tamper with his text. And John makes it clear that the divine secrets revealed to him by God are meant to be secrets no longer: Revelation is intended for the ages and for the whole world.

“Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near,” says the last of the angelic messengers to John at the very end of Revelation. “And if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.” 152

John’s writings were to be preserved, passed along, and read with ever-greater ardor and imagination over the centuries to come, and he continues to serve as a shining role model for generation upon generation of visionaries. A couple of examples of the influence he wields on the religious imagination, one dating back to the Middle Ages and another of more recent vintage, allow us to glimpse the workings of the visionary mind, including his own, with far greater clarity than he records in his own writings.

Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was first blessed with visions—or, perhaps more accurately, afflicted by them—at the tender age of five. By the time she was eight years old, her mother and father felt compelled to deliver young Hildegard into the custody of the abbess of a monastery in Germany where she spent the rest of her life—an indication of what it must have been like for parents who were raising a juvenile mystic. Hildegard echoes the words and phrases that she read in the book of Revelation when she describes how she is “taken up in spirit” and hears voices “like thunder,” 153and she gives us an illuminating account of an experience that John himself may have shared.

“Heaven was opened and a fiery light of exceeding brilliance came and permeated my whole brain, and inflamed my whole heart and my whole breast,” writes Hildegard in her masterwork, Scivias, “and immediately I knew the meaning of the expositions of the Psalter, the Gospel and the other catholic volumes of both the Old and New Testament.” 154

Some of Hildegard’s visions are populated with creatures who seem to have crawled out from the pages of Revelation. While at prayer in church, for example, she sees the spectral figure of a woman in front of the altar—and, as she watches in horror, she realizes that the woman is ready to give birth. But, unlike the laboring woman in Revelation—the woman clothed with the sun whose child is the Messiah—the one in Hildegard’s vision delivers herself of a monstrous beast: “From the navel to the groin she had various scaly spots,” writes Hildegard. “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, gnashing with vast open mouth and sharpening its horrible iron teeth in a horrid manner.” 155

Not every reader of Revelation is attracted to the moments of terror and horror in John’s text. Twentieth-century poet and novelist Robert Graves, for example, was more intrigued by what he calls “St. John’s cryptogram”—that is, the meaning of 666, the number of the Beast—and he describes the experience in The White Goddess as an exercise in both ecstatic vision and number-crunching. Graves renders 666 in Roman numerals as D.C.L.X.V.I., and, like Hildegard, he imagines that a secret has been suddenly revealed to him. He sees the letters as an acronym for a Latin phrase that he translates as “Domitian Caesar basely killed the Envoys of Christ.” 156We might wish that John had described his own revelations as clearly as Graves does, and we might speculate that he experienced them in much the same way.