Apocalypse

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Apocalypse comes from the Greek apokalypsis, an uncovering or unveiling. In its plainest sense it names the moment when something hidden is shown — but the word carries two larger meanings that have nearly swallowed the first. It is the name of a kind of writing, and it is the name of an idea about how the world ends.

The literature is the older thing. Between roughly the third century before the Common Era and the second century after, Jewish and then Christian writers produced a stream of texts in which a human figure is granted a vision of what is normally sealed off from sight: the architecture of the heavens, the fate of the dead, the calendar of history, the judgment toward which everything is bent. The disclosure is usually mediated — an angel interprets, a seer is carried upward — and it usually arrives in dense, coded imagery: beasts, numbers, thrones, the books in which deeds are recorded. Daniel and the Book of Revelation are the two that entered the biblical canon; many more circulated outside it, among them the Enoch literature, 4 Ezra, and the apocalypse attributed to Baruch. Scholarship, working from this corpus, has come to define apocalypse as a genre in fairly exact terms: revelatory narrative, an otherworldly mediator, a human recipient, and a disclosure that is at once spatial — the structure of the cosmos — and temporal — the end of the age.

The idea that travels with the genre is harder to fix. Apocalyptic, used of an outlook rather than a text, names the conviction that present history is moving toward a decisive close, that the order people see is not the whole or the final order, and that the real account of things has been kept hidden and will be revealed. The traditions that held this conviction held it for reasons of their own. For communities under foreign empires it framed endurance: the kingdom that crushes them now is not the last word, and a different sovereignty is already written. Early Christians read the resurrection as the first installment of that ending, the age to come breaking into the present. Later readers, across many centuries, returned to Revelation to date a future they believed imminent.

It is worth marking how the word’s center has shifted. In ordinary modern use, apocalypse means catastrophe — the end as disaster, fire and collapse. In the texts themselves the accent falls the other way: on the unveiling, on knowledge withheld and then given. The catastrophe is real in them, but it is the occasion, not the point; what the seer is shown is that the chaos has a shape, and that the shape was always there. The same impulse — that what saves is being shown the hidden order — runs close to the revealed knowing that other currents called gnosis, though apocalyptic keeps its gaze fixed on history and its end where gnosis turns inward. The resemblance is worth noting and not worth collapsing. Each meant something exact, and meant it in its own register.

→ In the library: Charles — The Book of Enoch (1912) · Charles — Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the OT (1913) · Terry — The Sibylline Oracles (1899)

→ Related: Book Of Baruch · Michael · Gnosis · Book Of Habakkuk