When we come to the second half of Revelation, after the new-born child is snatched to heaven and the woman has fled into the wilderness, there is a sudden change, and we feel we are reading purely Jewish and Jewish-Christian Apocalypse, with none of the old background.
And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon.’ They cast down the dragon out of heaven into the earth, and he becomes Satan, and ceases entirely to be interesting. When the great figures of mythology are turned into rationalised or merely moral forces, then they lose interest. We are acutely bored by moral angels and moral devils. We are acutely bored by a ‘rationalised’ Aphrodite. Soon after iooo b.c. the world went a little insane about morals and ‘sin’. The Jews had always been tainted.
What we have been looking for in the Apocalypse is something older, grander than the ethical business. The old, flaming love of life and the strange shudder of the presence of the invisible dead made the rhythm of really ancient religion. Moral religion is comparatively modern, even with the Jews.
But the second half of the Apocalypse is all moral: that is to say, it is all sin and salvation. For a moment there is a hint of the old cosmic wonder, when the dragon turns again upon the woman and she is given wings of an eagle and flies off into the wilderness: but the dragon pursues her and spues out a flood upon her, to overwhelm her: ‘And the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed up the flood And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.’
The last words are, of course, the moral ending tacked on by some Jew-Christian scribe to the fragment of myth. The dragon is here the watery dragon, or the dragon of chaos, and in his evil aspect still. He is resisting with all his might the birth of a new thing, or new era. He turns against the Christians, since they are the only ‘good’ thing left on earth.
The poor dragon henceforth cuts a sorry figure. He gives his power, and his seat, and great authority to the beast that rises out of the sea, the beast with ‘seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion.’
We know this beast already: he comes out of Daniel and is explained by Daniel. The beast is the last grand world- empire, the ten horns are ten kingdoms confederated in the empire — which is of course Rome. As for the leopard, bear, and lion qualities, these are also explained in Daniel as the three empires that preceded Rome, the Macedonian, swift as a leopard, the Persian, stubborn as a bear, the Babylonians, rapacious as the lion.
We are back again at the level of allegory, and for me, the real interest is gone. Allegory can always be explained: and explained away. The true symbol defies all explanation, so does the true myth. You can give meanings to either — you will never explain them away. Because symbol and myth do not affect us only mentally, they move the deep emotional centres every time. The great quality of the mind is finality. The mind ‘understands’, and there’s an end of it.
But the emotional consciousness of man has a life and movement quite different from the mental consciousness. The mind knows in part, in part and parcel, with full stop after every sentence. But the emotional soul knows in full, like a river or a flood. For example, the symbol of the dragon — look at it, on a Chinese tea-cup or in an old wood-cut, read it in a fairy-tale — and what is the result? If you are alive in the old emotional self, the more you look at the dragon, and think of it, the farther and farther flushes out your emotional awareness, on and on into dim regions of the soul aeons and aeons back. But if you are dead in the old feeling-knowing way, as so many moderns are, then the dragon just ‘stands for’ this, that, and the other — all the things it stands for in Frazer’s Golden Bough: it is just a kind of glyph or label, like the gilt pestle and mortar outside a chemist’s shop. Or take better still the Egyptian symbol called the ankh, the symbol of life, etc., which the goddesses hold in their hands. Any child ‘knows what it means’. But a man who is really alive feels his soul begin to throb and expand at the mere sight of the symbol. Modern men, however, are nearly all half dead, modern women too. So they just look at the ankh and know all about it, and that’s that. They are proud of their own emotional impotence.
Naturally, then, the Apocalypse has appealed to men through the ages as an ‘allegorical’ work. Everything just ‘meant something’ and something moral at that. You can put down the meaning flat — plain as two and two make four.
The beast from the sea means Roman Empire — and later Nero, number 666. The beast from the earth means the pagan sacerdotal power, the priestly power which made the emperors divine and made Christians even ‘worship’ them. For the beast from the earth has two horns, like a lamb, a false Lamb indeed, an Antichrist, and it teaches its wicked followers to perform marvels and even miracles — of witchcraft, like Simon Magus and the rest.
So we have the Church of Christ — or of the Messiah — being martyred by the beast, till pretty well all good Christians are martyred. Then at last, after not so very long a time — say forty years — the Messiah descends from heaven and makes war on the beast, the Roman Empire, and on the kings who are with him. There is a grand fall of Rome, called Babylon, and a grand triumph over her downfall — though the best poetry is all the time lifted from Jeremiah or Ezekiel or Isaiah, it is not original. The sainted Christians gloat over fallen Rome: and then the Victorious Rider appears, his shirt bloody with the blood of dead kings. After this, a New Jerusalem descends to be his Bride, and these precious martyrs all get their thrones, and for a thousand years (John was not going to be put off with Enoch’s meagre forty), for a thousand years, the grand Millennium, the Lamb reigns over the earth, assisted by all the risen martyrs. And if the martyrs in the Millennium are going to be as bloodthirsty and ferocious as John the Divine in the Apocalypse — Revenge! Timotheus cries — then somebody’s going to get it hot during the thousand years of the rule of Saints.
But this is not enough. After the thousand years the whole universe must be wiped out, earth, sun, moon, stars, and sea. These early Christians fairly lusted after the end of the world. They wanted their own grand turn first — Revenge! Timotheus cries. — But after that, they insisted that the whole universe must be wiped out, sun, stars, and all — and a new New Jerusalem should appear, with the same old saints and martyrs in glory, and everything else should have disappeared except the lake of burning brimstone in which devils, demons, beasts and bad men should frizzle and suffer for ever and ever and ever, Amen!
So ends this glorious work: surely a rather repulsive work. Revenge was indeed a sacred duty to the Jerusalem Jews: and it is not the revenge one minds so much as the perpetual self-glorification of these saints and martyrs, and their profound impudence. How one loathes them, in their ‘new white garments’. How disgusting their priggish rule must be! How vile is their spirit, really, insisting, simply insisting on wiping out the whole universe, bird and blossom, star and river, and above all, everybody except themselves and their precious ‘saved’ brothers. How beastly their New Jerusalem, where the flowers never fade, but stand in everlasting sameness! How terribly bourgeois to have unfading flowers!
No wonder the pagans were horrified at the ‘impious’ Christian desire to destroy the universe. How horrified even the old Jews of the Old Testament would have been! For even to them, earth and sun and stars were eternal, created in the grand creation by Almighty God. But no, these impudent martyrs must see it all go up in smoke.
Oh, it is the Christianity of the middling masses, this Christianity of the Apocalypse. And we must confess, it is hideous. Self-righteousness, self-conceit, self-importance and secret envy underlie it all.
By the time of Jesus, all the lowest classes and mediocre people had realised that never would they get a chance to be kings, never would they go in chariots, never would they drink wine from gold vessels. Very well then — they would have their revenge by destroying it all. ‘Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils.’ And then all the gold and silver and pearls and precious stones and fine linen and purple, and silk, and scarlet — and cinnamon and frankincense, wheat, beasts, sheep, horses, chariots, slaves, souls of men — all these that are destroyed, destroyed, destroyed in Babylon the great — how one hears the envy, the endless envy screeching through this song of triumph!
No, we can understand that the Fathers of the Church in the east wanted Apocalypse left out of the New Testament. And like Judas among the disciples, it was inevitable that it should be included. The Apocalypse is the feet of clay to the grand Christian image. And down crashes the image, on the weakness of these very feet.
There is Jesus — but there is also John the Divine. There is Christian love — and there is Christian envy. The former would ‘save’ the world — the latter will never be satisfied till it has destroyed the world. They are two sides of the same medal.