by Umberto Eco
Thus, Jerusalem ceases to be a geographical place in order to become the image of the Heavenly Jerusalem. Rather than urbanistic, John’s description is architectural, with special insistence on the aesthetic aspects. Moreover, his description is clearly inspired by that of Ezekiel, in which the construction is not rectangular, as it is in other biblical texts, by based upon squares.
The vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem could not fail to fascinate Beatus of Liébana and, centuries later, his illustrators. But more than anything else, he appears to be fascinated by three aspects: Jerusalem’s foursquare perfection, its measurements, and the splendor of its precious stones and its golden decorations. Beatus in fact is a forerunner of the aesthetics of the threefold criterion of beauty: integrity, proportion, and light, but he lacked the philosophical categories that would have allowed him to focus in on the reasons for his admiration. He therefore proceeds by confused interjections and inexact calculations.
The chief aspect of Jerusalem that strikes him seems to be the fact that the city shines like a gem without the need for an external light source. Jerusalem has no need of stellar illumination to shine; she radiates light from within herself like a soul internally illuminated by grace. The twelve gates are figures of the twelve apostles, the twelve prophets, and the twelve tribes of Israel. Twelve gates, twelve angels at the gates (a number John plucks out of nowhere, without any previous scriptural support), and twelve foundations, produce the number thirty-six, the number of hours Christ spent in the Sepulcher. The city is square as a reminder of the Four Evangelists, given that its breadth is the same as its length. Following the Vulgate that speaks of twelve thousand by twelve thousand cubits, Beatus decides to multiply twelve by ten to produce 120, which is (according to the Acts of the Apostles) the number of souls who have received the Holy Spirit. Then he adds to the 120 the 24 elders of the Apocalypse and comes up with 144, which is the measurement of the wall of Jerusalem in cubits. And we could go on and on, showing how every number, every detail of the city’s layout, permits Beatus to unearth ever newer and more prodigious allegorical allusions.9
In order to obtain a “readable” result, Beatus has no qualms in having recourse to citations that he presents as faithful, but which are in fact altered ever so slightly, changing a word here, eliminating an aside there, or modifying an inflection.
6.5. Mille Annos
What makes the Apocalypse fascinating for the Middle Ages is the substantial ambiguity of chapter 20, verses 1–15, which it will be useful to cite in full here. Here we can read it in the King James Version but we are obliged to put in a footnote the text as it was quoted by Beatus, which was lacunary at certain points with respect to the Vulgate:
And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand.
And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years.
And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season.
And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.
But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection.
Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years.
And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison. And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.
And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and the fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.
And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.
And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them.
And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God: and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.
And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.
And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.
And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.
Taken literally, this chapter could mean that, at a certain point in human history, Satan will be cast into prison and, during the entire time of his imprisonment, the kingdom of the Messiah will be realized on earth, and all of the elect will participate in it, rewarded with a “first resurrection.” This period will last for the 1,000 years of the Devil’s captivity. Then the Devil will be freed for a certain period of time, then once more defeated. At this point the enthroned Christ will begin the Last Judgment, human history will be fulfilled, and (we are now at the beginning of chapter 21) there will be a new heaven and a new earth, the advent, that is, of the Heavenly Jerusalem.
The problem for the Christians of the early centuries is whether the 1,000 years of the Messiah’s reign were still to come or whether they were the years that they themselves were living. If the first interpretation was correct they had to wait for a Second Coming of the Messiah and a kind of golden age (which had also been promised by a number of ancient religions), followed by a return of the Devil and his false prophet the Antichrist (as the tradition will gradually come to call him, although the Apocalypse itself speaks only in fact of a false prophet). And finally, the Last Judgment and the end of time. This is the dominant reading, with some fluctuation, down to Augustine.
In the fourth century the Donatist heresy gained a footing. True, it targeted the unworthy ministers of the cult, insisting that the sacraments that they administered were invalid; but to deny validity to the liturgical actions of a considerable portion of the official Church, and to set against it the purity of a rigoristically virtuous community illuminated by the Holy Spirit, was tantamount in the last analysis to setting against a Heavenly Jerusalem (yet to come) the new Babylon represented by the current Church.
Augustine’s response (De Civitate Dei XX) is that neither the City of God nor the millennium are historical events that will be realized in this world; they are mystical events. The millennium John speaks of represents the period that stretches from the Incarnation to the end of history, therefore it is the period we are already living, the period in progress, completely realized in the living Church. It does not occur to Augustine to separate in day-to-day history the perfect members of the perfect city from the reprobates; he is well aware that human history is riddled with sin and error, even the history of the just who seek salvation in the body of the Church. Earthly history, then, will not be the site of a battle for the supremacy of the heavenly city—Armageddon is not of this world.10
With this solution, however, Augustine leaves the way open for two magnificent suggestions. The first concerns the earthly possibility of that City of God that he had already demonstrated was not of this world. What happened in Augustine’s case was what happens with many polemists who, thinking to refute an argument, write a book that turns out to be such a success that the argument in question is, if not bolstered, at leas
t brought into the public eye. Accordingly, we will see how, in the course of subsequent history, the idea of the two cities will fascinate reformers and revolutionaries alike, all of them convinced that the City of God must be realized forthwith by the elect; what is needed, then, is a great battle, an Armageddon on earth, a revolution.
The second suggestion concerns the immediate advent of the Day of Judgment, and hence the expectation of the year 1000. If the millennium is not a promise for the future, but is going on here and now, if we are to interpret the Apocalypse correctly, the first thing that must come to pass is the end of the world. The fact that the interpreters were divided over doing the math—whether 1,000 years was to be taken as an approximate or precise figure, whether it was to be calculated from the year of Christ’s birth, from his Passion, from the beginning or end of the persecutions: whether in other words the years were 1,000, 1,400 or 1,033—did not affect the fact that the end of the world must come sooner or later.
The history of the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages oscillates between these two possible interpretations, accompanied by alternate euphoria and dysphoria, as well as a perennial sense of expectation and tension. Because, either Christ must still be coming to reign for 1,000 years on earth or he has already come, in which case it won’t be long before the Devil returns and with him the end of the world.
This is the context in which Beatus writes his commentary. History informs us that he wrote it for precise theological reasons. Elipandus, archbishop of Toledo, and Felix, bishop of Urgel, had resuscitated an old heresy, adoptionism, which denied the divinity of the Word, relegated to the role of adopted son of the Father. Spanish adoptionism was a “mitigated” form of the heresy and, while they accepted the fact that the Word was the natural son of the Father, they saw Christ in his human nature as merely an adopted son.
Beatus finds in the Apocalypse a text apt to display a Christ in his full consubstantial divinity and sonship, and he employs his commentary as a weapon. And he proves to be a winner, since later Charlemagne will convene two whole councils and a synod, in Germany and Italy, in the course of which the adoptionists will be condemned—and this may explain why the commentary created such a furor at the time.
Beatus lingers with lyric ardor, in a dazzling display of high medieval rhetoric, over the phrase “ab eo qui est, et qui erat, et qui venturus est” (“from Him who is, and who was, and who is to come”) from which, with something of a non sequitur, he draws the proof of the divinity of Christ. But what fascinates him most is that Christ is coming as judge (venturus ad iudicandum)—and when he arrives at chapter 20 of the Apocalypse, in other words at the ambiguous prophecy of the millennium, he goes so far as to open with an invocation imploring God not to let him fall into error. He is aware that he is dealing with a fundamental issue.
The text of John tells him first of all that the angel casts the Devil into the abyss “till the thousand years should be fulfilled” (Apoc. 20:3). Then it says that “the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast … lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years” (20:4). John goes on to specify that this reign is the “first resurrection,” which is baptism, and concludes: “but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years” (20:6). Beatus admits that these 1,000 years are to be calculated from the passion of Our Lord and are therefore those of the earthly reign of the Church, which had been the opinion of Augustine. He repeats several times that the millennium spoken of, both for the Devil and the blessed, is the one in which he and his readers are living: “they will reign with the Lord now and in the future … when speaking of 1,000 years he meant of this world.…” And so on and so forth.
In order that there should be no misunderstanding, he conducts a subtle analysis of the verb tenses, since John says at a certain point that the blessed “have reigned” for 1,000 years, and elsewhere that they “will reign for a thousand years.” Beatus, however, knows how to handle Holy Scripture and reminds us that the prophets, speaking of what will happen to Christ, often use the past perfect tense (“et diviserunt vestimenta mea” [“they parted my garments among them”]) when they are obviously talking about something that is destined to happen in the future. Secondly, he states more than once that the use of 1,000 years is certainly an example of synecdoche in the manner of Tyconius, and probably means a longer period of time, at the same time he makes it quite clear that, though it may be a perfect number that indicates a longer period, 1,000 is still a number that implies closure and does not allude to the “perpetuum saeculum” or eternity.
Therefore, Beatus insists, John is speaking of the current millennium and the end of this world. Psychologically speaking, Beatus was, as Camón Aznar describes him, an author obsessed with the millennium and at the same time a rationalist, in the sense that he wanted at all costs to reduce the visionary suggestions of his favorite text to a series of comprehensible messages. And someone obsessed with the millennium is not so much interested in the fact that we are living it as that it is approaching its end.
Augustine, seemingly irritated by the literalist myopia with which the fanatics of the coming millennium read chapter 20 (he declares that many have reduced this passage to a kind of ridiculous fable [De Civitate Dei XX, 7]), found an elegant solution to the problem: what we are dealing with is a figurative expression that indicates the period in which the Church Militant will live in this world (he avoided prophesies as to how long this might be). Beatus, instead, feels obliged to compel John’s text to express this concept literally in every word, every verb ending, every adverb. It is not that he wants to be right at all costs, he just wants the text to be manifestissime (most manifestly) transparent.
Thus, readers of Beatus’s text found themselves faced with the end of the millennium as an incontrovertible historical event, which helps explain why his text had such a wide circulation, and why the better part of the illuminations that accompany it were made between the beginning and the end of the tenth century, in other words, when the first millennium was drawing to a close.11
Just how profound was Beatus’s visionary immersion in his play of verbal echoes (biblical citations, patristic influences, captious disputations) can be seen from the energetic fashion in which he inveighs against the dangerous heretics who held that the millennium was to be dated from the Incarnation onward, whereas for him there was no doubt that it had to be calculated starting from the Passion. But it is even clearer in the pages he devotes to the Antichrist.
Beatus is obsessed with the idea of the Antichrist, as is apparent from the very start (Commentarius I, S 44, B 73): “Incipit tractatus de Apocalypsin Iohannis in explanatione sua a multis doctoribus et probatissimis viris illustribus, diverso quidem stilo, sed non diversa fide interpretata, ubi de Cristo et ecclesia et de antichristo et eius signis primissime recognoscas” (“Here begins the treatise on the Apocalypse of John, which in the commentaries of many doctors and highly esteemed famous men has been interpreted in different ways, but not with different faith, in which what concerns Christ and his church and what concerns the Antichrist and his signs can be examined at the highest level”). The Apocalypse is a treatise on the Antichrist and how to recognize him.
On this subject Beatus did not only have the suggestions of the Apocalypse to go on. Quite apart from the readings in this sense of certain Old Testament prophets, the Gospels too spoke of the Antichrist, as did the First Epistle of Saint John.12 Patristic literature also frequently referred to the Antichrist (we have only to think of the De Antechristo of Hippolytus in the third century), to say nothing of other more or less spurious texts.13 But Beatus was not content with what he found already available. He plunges first of all into an incredible Kabbalistic speculation, teasing out the numerical hints of John’s text to provide a mathematical matrix by means of which to identify the name of the coming Antichrist. Secondly, once he has declared that the Antichrist is bound to come, that
he will destroy the community of the faithful, that the saints will need all of their spirit of martyrdom and perseverance to resist him, he launches into a prolonged diatribe to demonstrate that the Antichrist will seek to restore the Judaic law and will definitely be a Jew, taking up a theme common to most previous authors of apocalyptic treatises, but blithely forgetting that in his day his own country has fallen prey to a flesh-and-blood Antichrist in the person of the Muslim invader. It is not clear whether he was even aware of it (because after all the kingdom of Asturias where Beatus was active fell within the Frankish orbit) or whether he is resorting to some kind of code, since his Antichrist will not only impose circumcision but will have the added characteristic of not drinking wine, which would seem to allude to the Muslims, were it not for the fact that he will have the further distinction of not appreciating female embraces (something about which the Muslims might have begged to differ). What is more, the Antichrist—and this trait would not fit either the Muslims or the Jews—though himself impurissimus, will seduce the people by preaching, sobriety, and chastity. Here Beatus may be alluding to some rigoristic heresy, maybe one no longer even active in his own day, but combated in one of his sources.
Beatus’s readers, however, did not stop to worry about the coherence of his narrative. They wanted to hear about the Antichrist. The fact is that the fortune of a text may be explained by something outside the text. After the year 1000 the medieval reader will develop a taste for tales of war, love, and magic, but in Beatus’s day the Song of Songs couldn’t hold a candle to the Apocalypse.