The Apocalypse and the shape of things to come

The approach of what is generally accepted as the end of the second millennium is a good pretext for re-examining the legacy of the work which has been the source of ʻthat vague millennialism and that hazy typological yearning which form part of the uncritical inheritance of the European imagination’, the Revelation of St John the Divine, otherwise known as the Apocalypse. The most controversial of all the books in the Christian canon, it underpinned the Western concept of linear, teleological time, defining the meaning of history in terms of its relationship to eternity and, by analogy, the purpose of all individual human lives whose meaning likewise lay in their end: ʻIn my beginning is my end’. In the liturgical calendar, the readings for the Sundays immediately preceding Advent focus on death and the Last Judgement, while the Second Coming is the theme for the first Sunday of Advent. Past, present and future formed an integral whole susceptible to ʻdecoding’ in the light of the unveiled prophecies of the apocalyptician, of whom the author of Revelation was the most famous and influential example.