The final entry in the Christian scriptures, The Book of Revelation, is written in a style known as apocalyptic, hence, the alternate name, The Apocalypse, literally, the “un-covering”. This literary form was in vogue for several centuries before Jesus and continued to have some cachet in early Christian times. It discourses by relating fantastical visions, often interlaced and seemingly interlarded. It enunciates a specific understanding of a situation in an anfractuously baroque and gongoristic manner. That it is transmits a divinely appointed intervention with hidden clues about future events is simply a gross misunderstanding of another culture and its literary forms.
In every civilization there are times wherein it is the custom to bedizen writings with studied and obscure references, and over-wrought imagery, just as in certain times fashion dictates excessively embellished costume, art, architecture. The apocalyptic in literature might well be considered a relative of the disciplined excesses of rococo and churrigueresque. No one would consider the paintings of Bosch eidetic. One not familiar with the cultural history of Europe would be befuddled by a baroque dress padded to the size of a small boat, or a Victorian parlour stuffed to the rafters with fringes, folderols, flora and fauna. Few of us can decipher the allusions in Spencer without a guide. Even well-worn Shakespeare requires for most of us a healthy dose of footnotes.
There are, however, a certain number of people who are disposed to taking the figurative lexicon of another time and culture literally and attempting to find therein indices of times and places to come. Despite all the convolutions of cognition involved, it is seemingly easier to embrace some science-fiction vision of heaven, hell and the in-between rather than deal with the everyday routines and missions of making this world The Kingdom wherein goodness, compassion and love reign. Such religiosity is an escape into the imaginary, and it comes at the cost of a realistic spirituality.
We have in Revelation an orderly series of meditations on the cost of discipleship. They who would find in the symbols of sounding trumpets, broken seals, emptied bowls, etc. a cipher of events to come, ought rather to contemplate the disciple’s true emprise and reconsider these images in terms of living a Christian life in the here and now, in the travail of virtue in the face of the enticements of vice.
The great brouhaha around the name of the beast is here of note. There have been countless efforts to expose the meaning of the number 666 by resorting to numerical values given ancient alphabetical characteries. Depending upon the mathematics, numerical assignments and the alphabet used, the 666 has been understood to denote everything from Caesar Nero to Hitler. There is a simpler and more culturally befitting translation of the 666.
Allow me to digress and note the obvious. Giving a symbolic significance to a number is not a peculiarity of ancient Jewish culture. In our own society seven is considered lucky, thirteen is considered unlucky. And we take such signification seriously enough to name levels of high-rise buildings non-sequentially so there is no thirteenth floor. I once had surgery in an operating room dubbed “12B”. It stood between “12A” and “14”. I was neither fooled nor amused, especially when I was connected to a monitor and it read I had neither pulse nor heartbeat. It was a faulty machine, but then what ought one to expect in room 13, no matter how coy the pseudonym. In China, eight forecasts good fortune, and four forebodes ill.
In the Johannine corpus, the numbers three and seven are important symbols. In the Gospel according to John there are seven signs given by Jesus, seven declarations of “I am” followed by a figurative image, and a number of inverted parallelism consisting of seven verses, there are three predictions of the passion, three scenes comprising the crucifixion, three mockings, three denials by Peter, three questions put to Peter. Not all scholars are of one mind regarding all of these, but there is a consensus that the three and seven significations are integral to the style of the Johannine compositions. What do these numbers mean?
Seven is a number identified with perfection, and it has a fundamental place in the schema of Revelation. The text is made up of seven visions. The first six– letters, seals, trumpets, signs, bowls, sights— are again each sub-divided into seven parts. The final and seventh vision is the New Jerusalem, which some hold can be viewed as given in three parts.
Six is the number of “always a tad less than perfection”. The visions of the seals, trumpets, signs, bowls and sights each contain an interruption between the sixth and seventh section. The finale of each of these is temporarily suspended while something else happens. There is here, indeed, in the whole of the work, a thematic structure of delaying, of enduring a delay before a final disclosure.
Three is the number identified with a closed system, a “complete-ness”.
Six written three times becomes a symbol for constantly falling short, the complete manqué, the “want-to-be” before the “I AM”, the relentless and restless acclamation of “Me” before the eternal and ethereal “I”. We may summarily say the name of the beast is Pride.
John is teaching that pride and every vice, every wreckingly powerful and sovereign-seeking enticement in this life, seek to distract, detour and destroy the disciples. He seeks to reinforce the spirit and faith of his fellow Christians in their time of trial, in the torrent of torments and temptations they must face, within and without, as they trudge along toward the great prize, the recapitulation of the ages into a new age, a new heaven and earth wherein God is manifestedly light and life to and for all.
There is neither need nor any sense in trying to assign some empiric past or future reference to any of these figures depicting the struggles of the soul. The beast, the many headed entity, the crowns have been taken to refer to a multitude of powers from the empire of Rome to the European Union. The glassy sea has been considered sundry things from a cataclysmic oceanic mutation to the plain of Armageddon solidified by an atomic blast (one commentator, cross referencing to a passage in Ezekiel, claiming Russia the nuclear culprit). The New Jerusalem and its gemmed portals have had some find it a reference to an alien space-craft. For all the kudos one might wish to fard upon the ingenuity required to concoct such connections, all these efforts are no more than fanatical fancies.
We misrepresent and misinterpret the role of prophet if we understand it as a seer of obscurities, a forecaster of distant times. The prophet’s word is about the aposematic. It heralds attention to a conspicuous and premonitory situation, and challenges the hearer to confront it factually and faithfully. We are not without prophets in our own day calling us to recognize the prodromata of the ills that threaten us, within and without, and to muster the resolve to face them realistically and morally. In Revelation, John embraces the mantle of prophet, pays homage to the idioms and imagery of the prophets of ancient Judaism, and references the socio-political situation of his day as emblematic of the workings of the world that endlessly deride and denigrate holiness. He is proven wrong if his work is a history of the future. Seven generations from his writing, Constantine grants Christ’s cross a place upon the icon of state, and swiftly thereafter the state itself is enfolded into the church.
Image-making, imagin-ing, the use of image-language is an integral part of how we communicate, with one another and with ourselves. No one takes literally that women who are well read wear blue stockings, that a task which is easily accomplished morphs into a portion of a cake, or that something which comes as a surprise has a proto-existence in the light spectrum at approximately 4600 Angstroms. Our dreams are concatenations of images drawn from our day and from the depths of our human history. In meditation the same wells of imagery are tapped. Anyone accustomed to keeping a dream journal or record of meditations will know that the reading of them will sound alike to a synopsis of a work of science-fiction, and that, in a sense, is what they are: science and fiction, literally knowledge and something made-up, in short, a tale told to convey knowledge. No one reads the spiritual diaries of Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross, or Ramon Lull as literal works. We owe to the prophet on Patmos the same reverent courtesy.
There is no hidden message in The Book of Revelation. One tale is played out in all the visions, and the last paean of the text is the theme of them all: “Lord Jesus, come!” In all the travail of daily life, it is standing in and with God’s Christ alone that one can comprehend the parameters of self and the world, that one survives, that one triumphs, that one is transported to safety and surety. The prisoner of Patmos had made his prayers, meditated upon the viciousness that life can conjure up, held firm in faith, and now encourages his charges to do the same. His witness stands not to some catastrophic future time, but to Jesus Christ, and it is a fitting climax to a body of works that begins: “Behold I send my messenger before you to prepare the way, the voice of one crying in the desert, make clear, make ready, the path of the Lord”.