Eschatology

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A dying person, a deathbed, the few who keep the watch: this is the smallest scale on which the question is asked, and the oldest. What becomes of the one who is leaving? Widen the frame and the same question opens onto the largest scale there is — what becomes of the whole order, when its own end arrives? The doctrines that answer these two questions, and bind them together, are gathered under the name eschatology: the teaching concerning last things.

The word is built from the Greek eschata, the last things. Its history is narrower and later than the subject it names. The Latinate form Eschatologia was coined by the Lutheran theologian Abraham Calov, who titled the twelfth and final section of his Systema locorum Theologicorum (1677) “Eschatologia Sacra” — the treatise de novissimis, concerning the last things. The heading sat in the technical vocabulary of Protestant scholasticism, where Johann Gerhard had already gathered the medieval matter of the novissima into his Loci Theologici. Only in the nineteenth century, as German became the working language of academic theology, did the term pass into general scholarly use; the English word surfaces around the 1840s. German Protestant theologians adopted it as a single heading for doctrines that had grown up piecemeal over centuries, and the heading stuck. The subject is far older than its name — older than writing, in some of the traditions that hold it.

The four last things and the two registers

Christian theology long organized the matter around four last things — death, judgment, heaven, and hell, the quattuor novissima of medieval teaching, named in the Latin as de novissimis, the newest things, and set as the appointed subject of the four Sundays of Advent. The fourfold scheme is a discipline of attention as much as a doctrine: a person is bidden to hold the end in view while still in the middle. Beneath it scholars now distinguish two registers that run through almost every tradition that takes the question up. Individual eschatology asks after the fate of the single soul: whether it sleeps, migrates, is weighed, is purified, or simply ends. Cosmic or universal eschatology asks after the end of the whole order: a final reckoning, a renewal, a return to the source. The registers are not always kept apart, and much of the drama of eschatological writing lies in the moment they fuse — when one person’s death is read as a rehearsal of the world’s, or the world’s end as the long-deferred verdict on every death that preceded it.

Where eschatology concerns itself with the single soul, it presses up against soteriology, the doctrine of how the soul is saved or freed; where it concerns the whole order, it draws on apocalypse, the unveiling of the end, and on prophecy, the inspired utterance that announces it. Eschatology is the content — the map of what is to come — as against the mode in which that content is delivered. The diviner and the seer disclose; the eschatologist orders the disclosed into a doctrine of the end.

Particular traditions: the cosmic register

Particular traditions fill the frame differently, and the differences begin at the level of shape. The Zoroastrian tradition, gathered in the Avestan and Pahlavi corpus, describes a final renovation — frashokereti, the making wonderful, Middle Persian frashegird. History in this frame runs a fixed course of twelve thousand years, a long age of mixture in which good and evil are intertwined giving way at last to a final separation. At the climax a savior, the last of three Saoshyants, raises the dead in the future body; the metals of the earth melt into a river of fire through which all souls pass, felt by the righteous as warm milk and by the wicked as a purging burn; the destructive spirit Angra Mainyu is undone, hell is emptied, and the world is restored to a perfection that this time cannot fail. The eschaton here is universalist: in the end every soul is saved. On the individual scale, the same tradition sends the soul on the fourth day after death to the Bridge of the Separator, the Chinvat, which broadens to a road for the righteous and narrows to a blade for the wicked, where the soul meets its own accumulated deeds personified as a figure beautiful or foul.

The apocalyptic strand of Second Temple Judaism awaits a decisive intervention of God in history. It is visible in the Book of Daniel, whose twelfth chapter carries the Hebrew Bible’s clearest statement that many of those who sleep in the dust will awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame; and in the Book of Enoch and the wider apocalyptic literature of the period, where seers are shown the chambers of the dead, the courses of the luminaries, and the day appointed for the judgment of the watchers and of all flesh. This is the matrix in which a developed afterlife, an angelic hierarchy, a final adversary, and a resurrection of the dead enter Jewish writing — features whose relation to the older Iranian materials has been argued, for and against, for two centuries, and which this account renders as the doctrines they are rather than as a verdict on who borrowed from whom.

Early Christianity inherited that expectation and recentered it on three things: the return of Christ, the resurrection of the body, and a last judgment. The hope was first imminent — the generation that had seen the crucifixion expected to see the end — and the long history of Christian eschatology is in part the history of what a community does when the end it awaits is deferred. The expectation crystallized into the Second Coming, the coming of the Kingdom of God in power, and the visionary architecture of the Apocalypse of John, with its broken seals and its Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding out conquest, war, famine, and death. The medieval West gathered the personal end into purgatory, heaven, and hell — a third place, between, taking on the solidity of a location only in the high Middle Ages — while holding the cosmic end in reserve as the consummation toward which the whole of history bends.

Islamic eschatology elaborates Yawm al-Qiyamah, the Day of Resurrection or Day of Standing, in great detail. The trumpet is sounded; all who have died are raised and assembled; deeds are weighed in the balance, the Mizan, where the weight of a mustard seed of good or evil registers; and every soul crosses the bridge over the fire, the Sirat, to Paradise or to the Garden’s loss. The sequence is a courtroom and a passage at once — reckoning followed by transit — and it sits at the center of the faith’s moral self-understanding, the horizon against which a life is lived. (Islam holds the Day of Resurrection among the articles of belief; the figure of the Mahdi who appears before the end belongs to the same cosmic register.)

Indian traditions frame the question through rebirth and its cessation, so that the last thing is less an endpoint in time than a release from the cycle altogether. Where the Abrahamic and Iranian schemes run toward a single end, reincarnation sets the soul on an indefinite round of deaths and births governed by karma; the great cosmic ages, the yugas, turn and turn again, dissolving and reforming the world without a terminal moment. The decisive end, here, is moksha or nirvana — the stepping-out of the round, the one event that is not followed by another. This is a difference of shape, not merely of furniture: an endless turning against a single line, a release against an arrival.

The individual register: ascent and the esoteric reading

Within Western esotericism the accent often falls on the individual register read as ascent. The soul’s passage after death is figured as a climb back through the planetary spheres toward its origin — the counterpart and reversal of its descent into a body, which the Hermetic and Neoplatonic writings treat as the soul’s coming down through those same spheres, taking on at each a layer of the temperament it will shed again on the way up. The locus classicus is the first treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Poimandres, in which the soul ascending surrenders to each zone the passion it received there — appetite, cunning, ambition — until, stripped, it enters the eighth sphere and sings. Plotinus gives the philosophical form of the same movement: the descended soul returns by purification and contemplation to the One from which it came, the higher part of it having, on his reading, never wholly left.

Here eschatology shades into soteriology, and the line between dying well and being delivered grows thin. The end of the single life and the freeing of the soul become two names for one passage; death, rightly undergone, is the deliverance. This is the register in which gnosis does its eschatological work — saving knowledge that effects the ascent rather than merely describing it — and in which the Western art of dying took shape, the ars moriendi that schools the dying not in technique but in a posture toward the threshold they are crossing.

A further turn appears where the messianic and the antinomian meet. In the Sabbatean movement that swept the Jewish world in 1665–1666, the eschaton was declared not awaited but begun: the messianic age had opened, and on the radical reading the redemption required the messiah’s descent into the realm of the husks, so that what looked like apostasy was the cosmically necessary plunge into the deepest shell where the last sparks of holiness lay captive. The slogan of the movement turned the law of the unredeemed age inside out. The same logic ran on into Frankism, where conversion itself — the descent toward Esau — was made the instrument of an end already underway. Here eschatology ceases to be a doctrine about a coming time and becomes a claim about the present one, with consequences that tore through a tradition. (On the historical theology of the broken vessels that underwrites it, see Lurianic Kabbalah and Sabbateanism.)

A structurally related move belongs to the Calabrian abbot Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202), whose theology of history divided the ages into three status — of the Father, of the Son, and a coming Age of the Holy Spirit — and so located the decisive turn not at the end of time but within it, as a third dispensation still to dawn inside history. The pseudo-Joachite literature that gathered under his name, and the long afterlife of the three-age scheme in later thought, made his into one of the most consequential of all periodizing eschatologies; it is treated in full under Joachimism.

Scholarship and the textual record

The modern study of eschatology has two faces: the close editing of the primary apocalyptic and otherworld texts, and the comparative and historical synthesis built on them.

Bernard McGinn’s Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (expanded ed., Columbia University Press, 1998) is the standard documentary survey of the Christian apocalyptic imagination from late antiquity to the close of the Middle Ages, assembling and translating the sources in which the cosmic register took its Western form (cup.columbia.edu). Jerry L. Walls, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology (Oxford University Press, 2008) maps the field across traditions and across the personal and social registers, with the constitutive problems of temporality, eternity, and theodicy set out in the editor’s introduction (global.oup.com). For the term’s own genealogy, Abraham Calov’s Systema locorum Theologicorum (1655–1677) is where “Eschatologia Sacra” first stands as a heading; the word then waits more than a century and a half for its general currency.

For the Iranian materials, Mary Boyce’s Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (Routledge, 1979) remains the most influential single account of frashokereti and the Chinvat judgment, and her programmatic essay on the antiquity of Zoroastrian apocalyptic frames the long debate over Iranian influence on the Abrahamic end-time. The primary corpus — the Bundahišn’s twelve-thousand-year scheme, the otherworld topography of the Arda Wiraz Namag — is preserved for the Anglophone reader in E. W. West’s Pahlavi Texts in the Sacred Books of the East (1880–1897), public domain and available through John Bruno Hare’s archive (sacred-texts.com).

The site holds two of the central witnesses to the Second Temple apocalyptic imagination. R. H. Charles’s translation of The Book of Enoch (1912) gives the seer’s tour of the chambers of the dead and the day of judgment that stands behind so much of the later literature (Charles, 1912); Milton Terry’s The Sibylline Oracles (1899) preserves the verse oracles in which Jewish and Christian hands carried the pagan prophetic form forward into a literature of the end (Terry, 1899). For the esoteric ascent, the soul’s reascent through the spheres is set out in the Poimandres of the Corpus Hermeticum and in the return-treatises of Plotinus’s Enneads, hosted in Stephen MacKenna’s translation (MacKenna, Enneads).

Each of these texts is, at bottom, an account of where a road leads — and each builds the road as it describes it, so that to learn the doctrine is already to be told how to walk it. That is the practical work eschatology does inside a tradition: it furnishes the dying with a geography.

So the deathbed with which this began is never only a deathbed. To die, in the frame of any of these traditions, is to step into a structure already built to receive the step — a bridge to cross, a balance to face, a sphere to rise through, a sleep from which one will be wakened, a round one may at last leave. The watchers at the bedside attend a small instance of the largest thing the tradition knows how to say; and the dying person, in going, goes first where the whole world is held to be going after.

→ In the library: The Book of Enoch (Charles, 1912) · The Sibylline Oracles (Terry, 1899)

→ Related: Revelation · Apocalypse · Book Of Daniel · Kingdom Of God · Gnosis · Reincarnation · Soul · Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse · Second Coming