The (Post-)Apocalypse

“Death and suffering,” Tarkovsky said, “are the same whether an individual suffers and dies, or the cycle of history ends and millions suffer and die.” This is so, namely from the point of view of the individual, as well as the demons that feed on the dying. With the death of any person, Ernst Jünger noted in his work At the Wall of Time, the world is extinguished “as his performance.” One picture of the world fades, and only that which represents the ethical consequences continues, insofar as their one view of the world produces all the rest. We cannot say this of the vast majority of people for a reason. Their disappearance will not produce any visible or invisible change, but will leave behind them only a void. This will happen in the manner of a natural cataclysm, which brings with it hundreds or thousands of human victims, such as an earthquake, flood, or war. Then the morning sun will rise above the ruins, rescue teams will rush to the aid of those still showing signs of life, or another long night will descend upon them in a long agony, full of cries of the dying. In the morning, bombers or cruise missiles will appear once more over their cities. The blow of nothingness will be strong, but not stronger than the preceding one. Something like light is looming over them. Neither the horror nor hopelessness will be extinguished. Maybe that’s how those condemned to death feel upon being thrown into a pit with lions.

The destruction of a city, for instance of Troy, which the invaders put to the torch one night, or Carthage, whose fields were sown with salt, is not the same as the passage of the “first earth and the first heaven.” Rather, such is an isolated catastrophe, whereas the apocalypse affects the whole world. Moreover, the end of the world spoken of by St. John the Theologian and the first Church Fathers no longer falls within the domain of expected events. The “end of the world” is something happening before our very eyes, something that is already underway. A part of the world disappears every day, with radiation and oil contaminations, population exterminations, bombardments with uranium projectiles, and atomic mushrooms which obliterate tens and hundreds of thousands of people into dust in a matter of a few moments, only for the places of ruin to see the sprouting up of absurd monuments and technological and technocratic civilizations testifying to progress — progress only of technological hubris. Taken as a whole, with all the consequences and cumulative effects, these events verily exhibit an apocalyptic character.

For a long time already we have been living in an “age of loss.” We have become accustomed to this and become tied to it. Every day, some ethnos disappears, and with it a language and ancient culture. Every day, consequently, some animal or plant species disappears. Futile efforts to preserve at least some of the abundance fill only museums, academies, institutions, and libraries, which are more like tombs than Noah’s Ark echoing the roar and voices of hundreds of species to subsequently populate the land. That grammars or dictionaries can fill the void that a language or an extinct human race leaves behind with its disappearance is an illusion. That knowledge of the DNA chain and various “genetic information” can compensate for the gap left by the extinction of a biological species is an illusion, even if science could one day enable the miracle of “resurrection” through the reconstruction of genetic codes.

Emerging out of the flames of the conquered city, the refugees of Troy carried on their shoulders, among other things, the boy Aeneas. We cannot expect anything similar from today’s scientists, scribblers, epigones, and specialists of narrow fields who operate not with living bodies but with corpses, with decaying bodies scattered across deserted shores, which, once filled with murmurs and screams, are now but sites of dead, grave silence.

A careful reading of the Book of Revelation of St. John the Theologian reveals to us that the Christians of the early centuries did not wait with fear as they neared the end of the world. What is more, the end was an object of numerous desires and wishes; many hopes were vested in it. The procrastination or absence of the end led to despair. As Jünger wrote in his At the Wall of Time, “Looking towards the end of the world is the only thing that makes things bearable here.”

The Lamb, the central figure of the Apocalypse, has the power to “make men kill one another.” It breaks the seals, drives the forces and horsemen of catastrophe, and brings death “by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth” (Revelation 6:8). The Apocalypse is the “day of the Lamb’s wrath,” before which shall bow, according to John the Theologian, “the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and everyone else, both slave and free” (Revelation 6:15–16).

In fact, here, destruction is the goal and not merely a means, and not only of society and its structure, but also of flora and fauna, the Sun, the Moon, and the stars, all the way up to the longed-for “New Earth and New Heaven,” which, Revelation promises, will finally replace the “old.” The furious rhetoric and bizarre imagination of the Apocalypse culminate in a call for a veritable cannibal feast: “Come, gather together for the great supper of God, so that you may eat the flesh of kings, generals, and the mighty, of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all people, free and slave, great and small” (Revelation 19:17–18).

We cannot help but wonder: what incites so much wrath on the part of the Lamb and those who follow it, when not even the blood of millions, hecatombs of human victims, and “the flesh of the free and slaves” can quench it, nor can the mere obscuration of the Sun and the stars, all the way up to the desired end of the world, when the “new heaven” will appear, because it will pass first?

According to one interpretation, the figure of the Apocalyptic Lamb is an expression of the psychological reality in which the first Christians lived, crucified as they were between, on the one hand, their position at the very bottom of the social ladder, their exposure to persecution and longing for martyrdom, and, on the other hand, the desire for revenge, a great revanche on Imperial Rome. Hence, the very figure of the Lamb is distinguished by incredible contradictions and extreme antagonisms: humble meekness and unseen bloodthirstiness, pastoral care for the “flock,” and “plague and death” for this “flock” which will not end until the Sun and stars are extinguished.

This cruel spectacle of thunder and heavenly trumpets, of cruel deaths and rivers of blood, would make the Church Father and theologian Tertullian exclaim to the “unbelievers” with shameless joy:

But what a spectacle is already at hand...that last, that eternal Day of Judgement, that Day which the Gentiles never believed would come, that Day they laughed at, when this old world and all its generations shall be consumed in one fire. How vast the spectacle that day, and how wide! What sight shall make my wonder, what my laughter, my joy and exultation? As I see all those kings, those great kings... liquefying in fiercer flames... those sages, too, the philosophers blushing before their disciples as they blaze together... And then, the poets trembling before the judgement-seat, not of Rhadamanthus, not of Minos, but of Christ whom they never looked to see! And then there will be the tragic actors to be heard, more vocal in their own tragedy; and the players...

But this spectacle of destruction, it is said, is “beyond.” Even St. John does not fully reveal his secrets: when the Seventh Seal is broken, there is silence, and a voice warns him not to write down everything he sees. Perhaps that is why the famous Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, speaking about the Apocalypse, suggests that questions of interpreting the Apocalypse be ignored, and that interpretations be left out in the silent expectation of meeting the Absolute as the “last link in the chain” with which the human epic ends:

Roughly speaking, we have become accustomed to Revelation being interpreted. This is exactly what, in my opinion, should not be done, because the apocalypse cannot be interpreted. There are no symbols in the Apocalypse. It is an image. In the sense that, if a symbol can be interpreted, then an image cannot. A symbol can be deciphered, or, more precisely, a certain meaning, a certain formula can be extracted from it, while we cannot understand an image; we can experience and receive it because it has an infinite number of possibilities for interpretation. It seems to express an infinite number of connections with the world, with the absolute, with the infinite. The Apocalypse is the final link in the chain. In this book is the last link that ends the human epic, in the spiritual sense of the word.

The question of who the real author of the Book of the Revelation of the Apocalypse is — whether John of Zebedee, the author of the Gospel of John and one of “Christ’s dearest disciples,” or someone else — is not without significance. The former was the view of St. Jeremiah of Lyons, as well as Hippolytus of Rome, and then was ultimately adopted by the Church itself. The opposite opinion was held by St. Dionysius of Alexandria and Presbyter Gaius. The importance of this book is also spoken to by the fact that apocalyptica was a Biblical and especially early Christian literary genre, and that the Church accepted, out of so many others, only John’s Apocalypse as a holy book and included it in the New Testament. To this should be added the symptom of the enormous interest in the Apocalypse that is appearing in our time, when the Christian faith and interest in it are generally on the decline and the church and the doctrine it represents are nearing the margins of society. The return of religiosity that is occurring at this moment, when the scientific picture of the world is beginning to be shaken, is not a return to Christianity, but rather something that, from a Christian perspective, is more reminiscent of the religion of the Antichrist.

In the second century, the Montanist church was established in Asia Minor, under the leadership of the prophet Montanus, who introduced himself as an envoy of Christ and predicted the near end of the world. The Montanist movement represented a reaction not to any “stagnation of the church,” but in fact to the loss of the chiliastic tensions inherent to early Christianity, being an attempt to revive them by promising the impending, desired End of the World. Montanus’ movement heralded numerous chiliastic and millenarian movements which would develop under the auspices of the church or outside of it, including up to this very day. It seems that these anticipations have culminated on American soil in altogether bizarre interpretations of Scripture by such movements as the Adventists, whose prophets predicted the exact date of the apocalypse. That the end of the world did not occur within the time they allotted has not detracted from their vigor. In a tradition whose originator seems to have been Christopher Columbus himself (as is evidenced by his words to King Juan of Spain: “God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John... and he showed me the place where to find it”), America gained a veritable eschatological dimension. This motif is carried on to this day in the anticipations of the “Tribulation period” and the “ascension of the righteous in the rapture” of American Dispensationalists and television Evangelicals.

The Russian theologian Alexander Men argued that “expectations of such an end” are a sick phenomenon in the spiritual life of the church, which contradicts the Christian worldview, and that the Apocalypse of various authors, including John, is only a “reflection of prophetic visions, not them themselves.” Through such visions, in Men’s understanding, true revelation no longer shines, but rather only man’s imagination, dreams, and fantasies. In other words, the matter at hand is not an original teaching of Christ, but only “fantasies” mainly based on borrowings from foreign, Middle Eastern, predominantly Chaldean sources, alongside numerous Old Testament symbols already largely incomprehensible to Christians, a point which explains the fierce debates within the church over the Book of the Apocalypse as well as the very fact that this book, although canonized, is not used in worship.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Boris Anisfeld (1878–1973)

We could agree with Men’s opinion, save for one essential qualification: it is this “sick phenomenon” in the life of the church, this chiliastic tension, and not the message of the Gospel, that represented the main driving passion and the main feature of early Christianity and ultimately ensured its triumph over all other religions, such as Mithraism, as is evidenced, among other things, by the writing of Emperor Julian (known as the “Julian the Apostate”), entitled Against the Galileans.

If “Christ’s dearest disciple” and the evangelist John are one and the same author of the Apocalypse, then there is no split: the vision explains itself, and the Old and New Testaments form a single whole to which John’s vision is harmoniously connected. If John the Theologian and John of Patmos are two different individuals, then this gives grounds to speak of two aspects or even two irreconcilable currents within Christianity, one of which is represented by the Gospel of John and another which culminates in the Apocalypse as a continuation of the Old Testament.

The spectacle of the Apocalypse is to materialize precisely so that — or only so that — this teaching about the Apocalypse is to be confirmed.

The appearance of the Antichrist and the rise of a global (pseudo-)civilization under his rule (we could say that such would be the rise of a technocracy) is not only proclaimed in this prophecy, but is necessary for the very sake of the realization of the Christian eschatological scenario, whose true culmination is the emergence of a “New Earth” and “New Heaven.” For this reason, victims look for their executioners, and martyrs, as in the first centuries of Christianity, cry out for suffering and bloodshed.

The terrible days of the martyrs must be repeated for the new faith, but this time on a much larger, indeed global, scale that will affect all of humanity, so that the blood of martyrs and victims of faith will provoke the appearance of the Savior, the true Messiah, and mark the end of time. In this case, the Antichrist takes on the role of Judas, who is aware of the consequences of his deeds and does not betray Christ for the sake of thirty pieces of silver, but for the prophecy to be fulfilled and Jesus to be sacrificed for the salvation of all people. In other words, to fulfill the words of the prophet.

At some point, starting in the 15th or early 16th century, something truly new was born out of the ruins of Christian civilization: a civilization aimed at endless expansion and growth, freed from the medieval burden of anticipating the imminent and impending Judgment Day, that terrible “mortgage” of the Apocalypse.

This shift was closely linked with a reorientation from land toward sea. As Mircea Eliade rightly observed in his “Paradise and Utopia: Mythical Geography and Eschatology”: “It was in this messianic and apocalyptic atmosphere that the transoceanic expeditions and the geographic discoveries that radically shook and transformed Western Europe took place.” The real goal of overseas expeditions, however, was no longer the liberation of the Holy Sepulcher or the establishment of a Christian kingdom in Jerusalem (as was the aim during the Crusades at the end of the Middle Ages), but the conquest of colonies to provide a steady influx of gold into the metropolises, to ensure that nothing hindered the increase of power and wealth.

Henceforth, science and a new manner of social organization were to serve this goal. Citizenship takes the place of heritage, and villages are replaced by cities, enabling unprecedented accumulation of knowledge and material resources. The circulation of money and financial flows gains new momentum, and banks gain unprecedented power reminiscent of the past power of the Church. Any enterprise becomes inconceivable without them, whether an expedition to overseas lands or conquest. Thus, the ban on interest had to be repealed. One after another, technological and geographical discoveries ensued and marked a dizzying change of perspective with which the geocentric view of the world collapsed. In the new constellation, God was allotted a very modest place. God ceased to be the source of royal and earthly power, with his power restricted to temples and church property.

Spain and Portugal were not quite suited for the unfolding revolution, as these countries remained pronouncedly Catholic and did not have the strength to attempt a sufficiently definitive break with the Church. In France, this led to bloody conflict between Catholics and Protestants, such as St. Bartholomew’s Night, and culminated in the assassination of the king, the guillotine, and revolutionary massacres like the one committed in Vendée. A completely new faith was born on the ruins of the old.

Thus, the victories of one remote kingdom, that of bourgeois and Puritanical England over imperial Catholic Spain, were deeply logical and predictable. This kingdom’s defeat in conflict with the Puritan colonists of New England was also predictable. The new Anglican Church was only nominally Christian, being in reality an instrument of state power which, in turn, served the exclusively narrow, selfish goals of the king, the court, and the merchant class with their powerful societies and companies. The notion that earthly wealth and power are “signs of God’s grace” was deeply bound to the doctrine of predestination, and with these ideas the Old Testament concept of the “chosen people” was revived.

In Puritan eyes, the New World discovered in the West was thus identified with the Earthly Paradise, the Promised Land, Canaan, a conquest of renewal or even general salvation, and the god of England was identified in the writings of the Anglican theologian William Crawshaw with the god of Israel. The Puritans believed a New Golden Age to be on the horizon, with America as the land where “God will create a new paradise and a new Earth” (Edward Johnson).

The banner of progress was taken over by the followers of the most radical Protestant sects, this time on American soil so as to be “far from history and its delusions,” i.e., to be unfettered by tradition, especially European tradition, in establishing “God’s city on the hill.” America thus became the land of the much-anticipated Second Coming of Christ, and numerous eschatological hopes were attached to it. This, however, could not take place in a direct way, as Protestant theologians once imagined, but only through technocracy and by way of the literal fulfillment of New Testament apocalyptic prophecies. This would soon lead to rivers of bloodshed.

Little by little, millenarianism turned into the Puritan ideology of labor and progress, according to which the “New Jerusalem” and the Earthly Paradise will be “produced by labor.” Hence the American cult of progress, innovation, and youth, and, in general, the “American flair for the grandiose” (Eliade). Before the “City of God” is built on the hill, however, the destruction of everything old and the “world damned by God” must take place. The Antichrist will appear and exercise his rule as a weapon in someone else’s hands, whether he is aware of his true role or not, as a means of provoking God’s wrath, as a blind tool of the apocalypse for ruthless destruction and the Second Coming — the return of the true God to Earth.

Evidently, Satanism and the cult of Satan did not exist until the victory of Christianity (and this opinion is shared by the historian of religions Mircea Eliade). The convinced followers of Beelzebub, Satan, the Prince of Darkness, and Lucifer appeared out of the persecution and remnants of ancient pagan cults, “sorcerers,” “witches,” “wizards,” and priests opposed to the church.

Once summoned, however, the Devil truly comes in his own way. The mission of the Antichrist is to provoke the appearance of the Messiah on Earth.

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READ MORE: The Reawakening of Myth (PRAV Publishing, 2020)