4 THE FUTURE OF THE END

The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants what must soon take place … for the time is near.

REVELATION 1.1–3

Behold, from Adam all the years have passed, and behold, the 6,000 years are completed, … and now comes the day of judgment!

AUGUSTINE (QUOTING SOME EXCITED CHRISTIANS), SERMON 113, 8

When would the Kingdom of God arrive? Where would it arrive? What happens to the dead before it comes, and after? And what sort of bodies would its residents have? Controversy swirled about these questions, from the time of Paul in the first century to the time of Augustine in the early fifth. And different answers abounded. For some, persecution signaled the approach of the End; for others, calculating the age of the world gave the answer. Ideas about eschatology (knowledge of final things) also supported speculations about the final fates of individual believers. The proclamation of God’s kingdom led to elaborate constructions of Christian ideas about heaven and hell.

The Second Coming

Followers of Jesus in his own generation—like Jesus himself and, before him, like John the Baptizer—had expected the Kingdom of God to arrive in their own lifetimes. From what we can see in our earliest documentation, this belief was tied to the idea of the impending resurrection of the dead. It was this conviction that prepared Jesus’s own earliest followers for their experience of his individual resurrection. That event vindicated and validated his prophecy: “The Kingdom of God is at hand!” (Mark 1.15).

Jesus’s resurrection, for this original community, was thus the first robin of the eschatological spring. Surely the Kingdom was now at hand; surely the general resurrection of the dead would soon occur. But now Christ himself would have to return to complete his mission: the earliest movement grew within what it saw as a temporal gap between Jesus’s first coming, which ended on the cross, and his second manifestation, in power.

Paul echoes this conviction in his earliest letter, 1 Thessalonians, written almost twenty years after Jesus’s death. The community there had apparently become unnerved that some of its members had died before Christ’s anticipated return. Paul confidently asserted that things were still on track. “The Lord will appear with the cry of command,” he reassured his Thessalonian hearers. “The dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds” (1 Thessalonians 4.16–17). Elsewhere, he taught his assembly at Corinth, “the form of this world is passing away” (1 Corinthians 7.31). The ends of the ages, he affirms, have fallen “upon us” (2 Corinthians 10.11). Christ’s Second Coming, or Parousia (“appearance”), urged Paul, would occur within the lifetime of his hearers.

Implied in this message was an uncoordinated cascade of events prophesied in older Jewish writings. The restoration of all Israel; the turning of the nations to Israel’s god; the final judgment; the rebuilding or glorification of Jerusalem or of its temple; the establishment of universal peace: these end-time events figured variously in different Jewish apocalypses. As Jewish prophetic traditions developed, details diverged. According to the Temple Scroll from the Dead Sea, the final battle would be heralded by two messiahs, one priestly (descended from Moses’s brother the first high priest, Aaron) and one royal (descended from David the warrior king). According to 2 Baruch, a first-century Jewish apocalypse, the Kingdom would be established on earth, which would then enjoy superabundance: each vine would have a thousand branches, and each branch one thousand clusters, and each cluster a thousand grapes. A version of this saying will later be attributed by the early Christian figure Papias, via Irenaeus, to Jesus himself (Against Heresies 5.33, 4).

Paul associated the arrival of God’s kingdom with the return of Jesus as, specifically, the Davidic messiah—that is, as an eschatological warrior. Only after the final battle would the dead be raised. But whom does Paul’s returning Christ defeat? In his first letter to Corinth, chapter 15, Paul had specified Christ’s apocalyptic opponents: every “ruler” and every “authority” and every “power.” What sounds like vague generalities actually refers to cosmic powers, those divine energy shells ringing antiquity’s geocentric universe: stars, planets, daimonia, “godlings.” Philo of Alexandria had designated the celestial bodies as “gods.” For him, their presence was benign. For Paul, they were hostile—the pagan gods who were by nature not-gods, he says, those beings, the elements of the universe, that had previously enslaved his gentiles to their worship. They would submit to Christ at his glorious return.

In Philippians 2, Paul had predicted the defeated acquiescence of these powers: knees “above the earth and upon the earth and below the earth” would bend to the victorious Christ (Philippians 2.10). In the (brief) interregnum between Christ’s resurrection and his triumphant return, Paul taught, believers were sustained by having Christ’s “spirit” or “holy spirit” within them. That spirit was already moving them toward their final transformation, when both the quick and the dead would rise to the upper air (1 Thessalonians 4.17), thence into the heavens (Philippians 3.20), in bodies made not of dross matter but of material spirit (1 Corinthians 15.44).

This bodily transformation—presumably like the one that Jesus himself, in Paul’s view, had undergone—would mark the believer’s redemption. But unlike many Jewish eschatological prophets, Paul did not speak of a kingdom on earth. “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God,” Paul explained to the Corinthians, “nor can the perishable put on the imperishable” (1 Corinthians 15.50). Paul’s vision of redemption was bodily, but not fleshly. For him, the Kingdom would be celestial, not terrestrial. The believer would ascend to the heavens in a sōma pneumatikon, a body made of spirit, above the sublunar realm. There, finally realizing God’s ancient promise to Abraham, the redeemed would be like the stars (Genesis 15.5).

Later gospel writers saw things differently. Both Luke and John insisted on the fleshly physicality of the risen Christ. In Luke, Christ eats some fish to persuade the terrified apostles that he is not a ghost; in John, doubting Thomas famously fingers his scars. As the Kingdom lingered, other prophesied events filled in the widening gap between Jesus’s first and second comings. First, said the synoptic gospel writers, the temple had to be destroyed; there would be wars and rumors of wars and false messiahs and persecutions and darkness at noon (“predicted” in Mark 13, composed sometime after the temple’s destruction in 70, and repeated by Matthew and Luke). The Pauline author of Second Thessalonians, counseling patience in the wait for “the day of the Lord,” introduced another intervening apocalyptic episode. A “man of lawlessness” must first appear, said “Paul,” exalting himself and taking a seat in the temple. Currently restrained, this evil actor—associated with Nero as Antichrist in later Christian traditions—though abetted by Satan, would be slain by the returning Christ. And Christ’s kingdom would come on earth.

Surely the most elaborate apocalyptic scenario involving Jesus appears in the book of Revelation, which now closes the New Testament canon. Its period of composition is debated, but it seems to have been written before the turn of the first century, perhaps during the time of the Judaean rebellion against Rome between 67 and 73 CE. (This dating would explain why the community felt persecuted by Rome.) Revelation represents a pastiche of older Jewish prophecies recombined around the figure of the apocalyptic Christ. An angel reveals to John a message that came heavily encoded in symbols, numbers, and alarming visions. The slain Jesus appears, promising those killed for their witness to him that they will soon be avenged once their full number is attained. Quakes rack the earth, stars fall, the sun blackens, the moon becomes like blood. The martyred dead cry out for vindication and vengeance. 144,000 Israelites (male virgins all) are sealed from harm by angels; numberless others from all the nations, robed in white and “washed in the blood of the Lamb”—that is, of the slain Christ—worship before the throne of God. Mystical numbers structure the story: for five months, plagues ravage humanity. The nations trample the holy city for forty-two months. They gaze on the dead for three and a half days. Terrible reptiles and beasts prey on the saints, while the great whore of Babylon, drunk on their blood, commits fornication with the kingdoms of the earth.

But finally, dramatically, Babylon is no more. An angel binds Satan as the martyrs awake at a first resurrection to reign with Christ for a thousand years. Fire from heaven consumes the evil Gog and Magog. All the dead are then judged at a second resurrection. A new heaven and a new earth appear with the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem. Death is no more. Spread this prophecy, John’s angel urges, “for the time is near. Behold, I am coming soon” (Revelation 22.20).

Yet time stretched on. When, then, was “soon”? How could one know? One way was to study the prophets’ and the evangelists’ catalogues of catastrophes—persecutions, plagues, earthquakes, celestial and social turmoil—and their allusions to kings, armies, and empires, and match these to the times. Particularly in periods of persecution, such interpretations, promising the vindication of the righteous, could be powerfully persuasive. The link between such suffering and impending redemption came directly from older Jewish traditions originating in the period of the Maccabean Revolt, namely the book of Daniel and 2 Maccabees. These texts, originating in another period of persecution, influenced the evangelists’ apocalypses. Their prophetic potency was continually stimulated by events. During the reign of the emperor Severus (193–211), reports Eusebius, a Christian calculation based on numbers derived from Daniel predicted the imminent arrival of Antichrist, “so mightily did the agitation of persecution, then prevailing, shake the minds of many” (Church History 6.7).

Private revelations could also trigger apocalyptic hopes. Hippolytus of Rome, in his commentary on Daniel, warned against such responses. He related two cautionary tales. In Syria, a bishop convinced his flock that Christ was awaiting them in the desert. Quitting their homes, wandering in the mountains to meet the Savior, the community was almost cut down as bandits. In Pontus, prompted by visions, another bishop taught that the final judgment was imminent. His people deserted their farms and awaited the End, which failed to arrive. Poverty and near starvation ensued (Commentary on Daniel 4.18–19).

Prophesies of the impending arrival of the Kingdom, spurred by persecution, could take on a pointedly political cast. John’s apocalyptic Babylon, seated on seven hills, is clearly Rome. Writing against other Christians who imagined final redemption differently, Irenaeus read the prophesy of the book of Daniel together with Revelation and saw in the apocalyptic creatures the current ruling imperial power. The name of John’s apocalyptic beast, encoded in the numbers 666, Irenaeus said, is “LATINUS” (Against Heresies 5.30, 3). Victorinus of Pettau, circa 300, awaited “the ruin of Babylon, that is, of the city of Rome” (On the Apocalypse of John 8.2). Persecution, to these authors, indicated the approach of the End, when Christ would return to complete his messianic mission, a big part of which would be to avenge his martyred saints.

Taming the Apocalypse

“Where is the promise of his coming?” asked some weary Christians early in the second century. “Ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation.” The author of this pseudonymous New Testament epistle, “Peter,” consoled and exhorted his auditors by recalling a line from Psalms: “With the Lord, one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3.4 and 8; Psalm 90.4). The Kingdom was not late. God’s timekeeping was simply different.

Some Christians later combined this verse from Psalms together with the idea of the first week of creation as presented in Genesis 1, and with the thousand-year reign of the saints promised in Revelation 20, to produce a new way to know what time it was on God’s clock. They thus framed a key eschatological concept: the cosmic week, or the seven ages of the world.

As God had created the world in six days, and rested on the seventh, and as a day for him is as a thousand years, so too would the world exist for six ages, each lasting a thousand years. Then at the end of the sixth age, six thousand years since creation, Christ would return to inaugurate the millennial Sabbath rest of his saints. For another thousand years, in a restored Jerusalem, the saints would reign with Christ. To know the time of the End, then, one had only to calculate the age of the world. (No one in this period was dating anno domini: that convention was still centuries off.) To know the date of Christ’s promised return, one had simply to discern when the year 6000 would fall.

This “scientific” calculation of the millennial week ran counter to the situational stimulation of apocalyptic hopes. These could be triggered by personal prophetic revelations: that was how the “New Prophecy” of Montanism had bloomed in mid-second-century Phrygia, foretelling the approach of the imminent End. Celestial anomalies, too, might presage the coming Kingdom. In the early third century, Tertullian, writing against Marcion, had spoken of the “heavenly Jerusalem” hovering in the Judean sky for forty days: it pointed ahead to the thousand-year reign of the saints, he said, when God would bring the heavenly city to earth. In 351, over Jerusalem, a luminous cross appeared in the sky. According to Jerusalem’s then-bishop, Cyril, both pagans and, more especially, Jews were thereby prompted to convert: these events, coupled with the appearance of the celestial cross, were the sign of the coming Son of Man. The eschatological countdown had begun.

Still later, in 418, having forced Minorca’s Jews to be baptized, Bishop Severus framed this event, too, as an eschatological sign of the approaching end: “Perhaps that time predicted by the Apostle has indeed now come, when the fullness of the gentiles will have come in and all Israel will be saved” (Letter of Severus 31.1). In the same year, Bishop Hesychius of Salona, spurred by a recent solar eclipse that had coincided with a great drought and an earthquake, wrote to Augustine asking whether the End might be at hand. Hesychius also based his hopes on a fundamentally optimistic reading of recent history. Since Rome had become Christian, he argued, most of the signs predicting Christ’s Parousia had been accomplished, and the gospel had been preached throughout the whole world (Letter 198.6).

Chronological calculations gained some control over such enthusiasms. Against agitations occasioned by circumstance—persecution, or natural phenomena whether on earth or in heaven, or social occurrences like mass conversions—these calculations had a calming effect. If the year 6000 were still some centuries off over the historical horizon line, current circumstances could not be interpreted as signaling the imminent end of the age.

Christian dating systems proliferated, drawing on the numbers and symbols available both in prophetic texts and in ones that could be read through that lens. One such system, advanced in the early third century by Hippolytus, identified the year 5500 since creation as the time of Christ’s first advent. “From the birth of Christ one must count another five hundred years” (Commentary on Daniel 4.23–24). The year 6000 was thus pushed off to the equivalent date of 500 CE, a safe several centuries away. But such calculations were themselves fated to age. The date was affirmed by Constantine’s apologist Lactantius in the early fourth century: “the entire time left seems no greater than two hundred years,” he proclaimed in his Divine Institutes (7.25). The due date crept ever closer. In 397 CE, the bishop Hilarianus reiterated that the year 6000 was a scant hundred years off. The millennium loomed.

What would it be like, this earthly reign of the saints? Some Christians believed “after the resurrection that there will be engagements to marry and the procreation of children, for they”—that is, those Christians, complained Origen, who thought in these ways—“picture themselves in an earthly Jerusalem to be rebuilt with precious stones” (On First Principles 2.11, 2–3). Contra Origen, drawing again on Jewish prophetic texts and Christianized “pagan” prophecies like the Sibylline Oracles, Lactantius celebrated precisely this terrestrial future, looking forward to the millennial procreation of an infinite multitude of saints, to mountains oozing honey, to wine flowing down in streams, and to rivers running with milk. And contra Lactantius, Augustine especially lamented the material feasting and drinking that the faithful believed would mark life after the first resurrection, during the thousand-year Kingdom. The Kingdom, he insisted, was a nonterrestrial heaven.

Augustine’s protests against this vision of future feasting had a precise immediate focus: current celebrations of the martyred dead. Some of these customs were simply carried over from long-traditional Mediterranean observances for family members, who gathered around the tomb of their deceased to partake of a meal. But the celebrations over the special Christian dead took on a life of their own. Dining tables were erected over sacred tombs; eventually, church buildings surrounded these. Singing, dancing, eating, and above all drinking, especially during the vigil the night before the saint’s festal day, were all part of enthusiastic expressions of fervent piety. Such Christians, Augustine acerbically commented, “worship tombs and drink with utmost self-indulgence over the dead and set food before them. In so doing, they bury themselves at such graves, and then attribute their gluttony and drunkenness to religion” (On the Morals of the Manichees 1.34). These behaviors, he complained, presented ready examples of unseemly carnal-mindedness to watching (and scornful) heretics.

But these festivities also made a theological point: they articulated expectations about what life would be like after the first resurrection. The faithful were enacting the joys of the Kingdom over the physical presence of the martyred saint. Augustine disapproved. Such worshipers anticipated that the raised would “spend their rest in the most unrestrained material feasts,” he thundered in the City of God, “in which there will be so much to eat and drink that those supplies will break the bounds not only of moderation, but also of credibility” (20.7).

It was just embarrassing, Augustine urged. Manichaean critics especially noted the “paganism” and unelevated quality of the saints’ cults. But Augustine also taught that this enacted millenarianism was also theologically wrong. When he worked to transform traditional observances, to turn these “carnal” banquets into a day of preaching and orderly congregational prayer, more than a question of Christian deportment was at stake. The bishop sought to impose a vision of the eschatological reign of the saints, as previewed in these celebrations around their memoriae, that was fundamentally different—in his own terms, “spiritual.”

Other Christian thinkers had tackled the problem of fleshly constructions of redemption in other ways. Both Valentinus and Marcion (if we can trust Justin’s reports about them) had taken Paul at his word: flesh and blood could not inherit the Kingdom. They therefore anticipated redemption as the ascent of the individual soul beyond the cosmic realm (Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 80; Tertullian, wielding the text of Revelation 20 like a cudgel, had pummeled Marcion for this view). The sublunar realm was to them beyond salvation. Repudiating the idea of a fleshly resurrection and a kingdom of God on earth, some Christians also appealed to allegory. Such allegorists, complained Tertullian in his work on resurrection, understood death in a spiritual sense: not as the separation of body from soul, but as ignorance of God, “by reason of which man is dead to God, and no less buried in error than he would be in the grave.” When, then, and what, according to these allegorizing Christians, is the resurrection? Said Tertullian disapprovingly, when they “are with the Lord, once they have put him on in baptism” (On Resurrection 19).

Origen, despite his repudiation of Valentinus and of Marcion, was in fundamental agreement with such allegorizing understandings. The wine that the saints will drink in the Kingdom, he explained (taking a position that Tertullian would heatedly deny) is the wine of divine wisdom. The bread is the bread of life: these nourish the soul and enlighten the mind of the spiritual body. Those Christians who think otherwise, he sighed, whether from poverty of intellect or from lack of education, have an extremely low and mean idea of the resurrection of the body. But the resurrected body, he insisted, must be spiritual, as Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 had taught. These less intellectual Christians reject the labor of hard thinking “and seek after the outward and literal meaning of the law”—a code for interpreting in a Jewish manner—“or, rather, they give way to their own desires.” Apocalyptic texts might indeed seem to speak of earthly and bodily resurrection, Origen conceded, but the force of such scriptures “must be spiritual and figurative” (On First Principles 2.11.2).

For proto-orthodox and, later, orthodox thinkers, the ancient Jewish prophecies of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, which spoke of a coming end-time, could not be repudiated. At best, their problematic passages could be allegorized. The book of Revelation, however, was of uncertain authority. When a third-century Egyptian bishop, Nepos of Arsinoë, insisted in his treatise On the Refutation of the Allegorists on a more literal reading of the text, Origen’s pupil Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, debated with his followers for three full days. He then wrote his own refutation of Nepos, On the Promises. Subjecting Revelation to rigorous literary criticism, Dionysius concluded that John its author could not be the same man as John the apostle, the author of the gospel. The denial of apostolic authorship deprived Revelation of much of its authority. The canonical status of Revelation remained in play throughout the fourth and fifth centuries.

Christians—even those who were notionally within the same church—thus expressed a wide range of responses to the book of Revelation and to the message that it embodied. Some, spurred by immediate circumstances, actively anticipated the imminent arrival of an earthly kingdom. Others, like Justin, asserted that all scripture spoke of two comings of Jesus: the Christian awaited his second glorious manifestation, when he would gather the raised saints into an earthly Jerusalem for a thousand years. Others, generating learned chronologies, scientifically calculated the time of the Kingdom’s arrival. Others—among the proto-orthodox, most notably Origen—radically allegorized John’s apocalyptic text; others, like Dionysius and, following him, Eusebius, queried its apostolic authority. In their situation of continuing persecution, post-Constantine, the Donatists could carry on enacting and anticipating an earthly kingdom: they were, after all, the true heirs of the martyrs. Others, encouraged precisely by the benefits of imperial support, could conclude that the Kingdom was about to arrive because the gospel had reached the whole world.

It was with this unstable and destabilizing collection of behaviors and interpretations that Christians, anticipating the approach of the apocalyptic year 6000—the equivalent by our dating system of 500 CE—awaited the dawning of the reign of the saints.

Apocalypse Now

Between the years 389 and 420 CE, different disturbances beset the empire. Hail; earthquakes; a solar eclipse; famine and violent storms. Apocalyptic expectation transformed these events into prodigies. But none of these matched the trauma of 410, when the city of Rome fell to invading Goths.

Promoted during Augustus’s principate as “the eternal city”—Roma aeterna, aurea Roma—Rome’s tremendous cultural capital had transferred readily into Christian idioms as well. As much as persecution spurred negative associations—Rome as the apocalyptic Babylon; the emperor Nero as the ultimate anti-Christian persecutor and, indeed, as the Antichrist—so too did it give rise to positive ones. Rome became the city of the church’s two chief, foundational apostles, Peter and Paul. Legend connected both saints to Rome, where (so the stories) both had been martyred under Nero, Peter by crucifixion, Paul by the sword. This meant that Rome housed the bodies of these two most prestigious figures. Their retrieved relics would encourage both local piety and pilgrimages. The more the city was associated with the memory of persecution—especially after Constantine—the more the number of its martyrs proliferated, congesting both the Christian city’s landscape and its calendar.

Completing his seizure of western power in 312, Constantine had conquered Rome. He respected the city’s pagan institutions while undertaking an ambitious building program that put specifically Christian sites on the urban map. Consolidating power in 324 in the East with his defeat of his rival emperor Licinius, Constantine in 330 then founded a new Rome, Constantinople, an eastern nerve center of political and military power. Both he and later emperors imported various relics to the new city, but these could never match the prestige of Peter’s and Paul’s. In the West, imperial courts and, thus, imperial clout concentrated in frontier capitals like Trier and Milan; in the East, Antioch remained an important seat of administration. Constantinople, however, repositioned the center of gravity, serving as the emperor’s permanent residence. Yet the new city never undermined the cultural capital of the old. Rome continued to abide as the (imaginative) heart of the wide-flung empire, for Christians no less than for pagans—which is why its sack, in the year 410, came as such a shock.

We hear the loudest reverberations in Christian literature, because Christians had the most to answer for. When the old gods had been worshiped, Rome had thrived. Supplanted by the Christian god, their patronage and protection had ceased—and the Christian god, clearly, had not been up to the job. (The fact that the city had “fallen” to Christian invaders, Alaric and his Goths, was an added awkwardness.) These complaints called forth a huge response from Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans. But his bulky masterpiece was only partly directed at dismantling pagan criticisms. The entire final third speaks to—or rather, against—the millenarian expectations of Augustine’s own church.

Underlying his response to both audiences, pagan and Christian, was the more fundamental issue of Christian triumphalism, the theological celebration of the empire’s patronage of the church. Such triumphalism was undergirded by the assumption that biblical prophecy lined up with current history. To this way of thinking, the hand of God could be clearly discerned in contemporary events, which were transparent on biblical promises. Such prophetic decoding could convey both a positive message (the triumph of the church) and a negative one (disasters presaging the End).

Earlier Christian apologists—Melito, Origen—had argued that the empire and the church had been founded (nearly) simultaneously by divine providence: the order imposed by empire, they held, had facilitated the spread and the growth of the church. Constantine’s surprising conversion in 312 then provided triumphalism with history’s pole star. Commenting on the emperor’s ambitious building projects in Jerusalem, Eusebius had rhapsodized that it seemed as if divine glory had at last returned to its ancient seat. “Perhaps this is the new Jerusalem announced in the prophetic oracles” (Life of Constantine 3.33.2). Politics recast prophecy: through the pax Romana Christiana, a (nonapocalyptic) holy kingdom had been established on earth.

Augustine himself had similarly celebrated imperial legislation that, in 399, had ordered the closure of some pagan temples in Carthage. But the fall of Rome in 410 for him began to close the window of prophetic transparency that the antipagan imperial laws of 399 had thrown open. In City of God, his certainty about the eschatological value of current events gave way to an abiding agnosticism. Only in the period narrated in the Bible, he now insisted, because it was narrated in the Bible, could God’s actions in history be clearly seen. With the close of the apostolic period—thus, of the New Testament canon—time, Augustine now asserted, had become eschatologically opaque. No event, whether positive (the destruction of idols; the universal proclamation of the gospel; the Christianization of government) or negative (famine, earthquake, foreign invasion) could reveal the shape of the divine plan. Extrabiblical time was thus radically secularized, as was human politics. The empire, neither demonic before 312 nor divine thereafter, simply did not figure as a marker or as a medium of revelation. The fall of Rome therefore, urged Augustine, revealed nothing about God’s timetable for history’s end.

What, then, about the promises of the book of Revelation? In the closing books of the City of God, Augustine argued that these had already been realized. Christ’s bodily Second Coming as the triumphant Son of Man? It had already occurred, through the coming of his “body,” the church. The saints’ reign with Christ on earth? They do so already, in the church, through their manifest presence at their tombs. And their thousand-year reign? “One thousand” is a number that indicates a quality (“the fullness of time,” 10 × 10 × 10) not a quantity (“one thousand years”). If the number is actually a symbol for perfection, then the saints’ reign is of unknowable temporal duration. The binding of Satan? He has already been bound, that is, his power, through the church, was now bridled. Satan was thus bound until, not at, the end of the age. Given that all these prophecies have already been fulfilled, Augustine urges, Christians should stop looking at current events—like the fall of Rome—through an apocalyptic lens. No one knows when the End will come, and Revelation cannot help with any such calculus.

What then about feasting, drinking, terrestrial plentitude, all those great eschatological promises anticipated in the celebrations around martyrs’ tombs? The fleshly body will be raised spiritual, Augustine insists, agreeing with Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 15.50. “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.” But “spiritual,” he explains, refers to the body’s moral orientation, not to its substance. The raised body, he insists, will have corporeal substance. It will even have gender. (The question had clearly been debated.) But the raised body will not dwell on a transformed earth. Rather, insists Augustine, defying the scientific thinking of his day, these spiritually oriented fleshly bodies will—paradoxically—dwell in heaven, where saints will stand in chaste and comradely contemplation of the beatific vision of God. No food, sex, or social relations in the Kingdom. As for the millennial seventh day of the cosmic week, the eschatological Kingdom—that, says Augustine, is the saints themselves. “After the present age God will rest, as it were, on the seventh day; and he will cause us, who are the seventh day, to find our rest in him” (City of God 22.30).

Augustine’s arguments established a plumb line for all later learned orthodox readings of Revelation. Contemporaries, however, were less convinced. Events combined with long tradition to undermine the persuasiveness of a nonapocalyptic understanding of current history. Thanks to the Vandal invasions of the western empire in the mid-fifth century, Augustine’s world very nearly did “end” on time. One North African chronicler, in 452, divined that the name of the Vandal king Geiseric, if decoded, revealed the number of the apocalyptic Beast of the book of Revelation, 666. Another North African—Quodvultdeus, Augustine’s own younger colleague—argued strenuously that the apocalyptic signs of the approaching end-time were currently being fulfilled: the barbarian tribes of the Getas and the Massagetas, he held, were none other than the long-foretold forces of Gog and Magog.

The year 500/6000 slipped past, but Western chronographers continued to recast their timetables. Famine, earthquakes, plague, assorted terrestrial and celestial disturbances—all continued to send people into panic, from late antiquity through the high Middle Ages and beyond. Eventually, religiously inflected dating systems shifted from counting by the ages of the world to counting anno domini, from the Incarnation. This calendrical change in turn highlighted the apocalyptic possibilities of the year 1000—as also of the year 2000. Repeatedly disconfirmed but never discredited, the expectation of the approaching Kingdom continues evergreen in Christian proclamation.

Different Endings: Heaven and Hell

Christ as redeemer had a double function in Christian traditions. By his death, he saved from sin; by his resurrection, he saved from death. The believer in this life could participate in the work of redemption through moral effort (ascetic supererogation, support for the poor) and by penitential actions. Redemption from death, for the proto-orthodox, had to wait for time’s end and the corporate event of the resurrection of the dead.

As the End oscillated between “soon” and “later,” eschatology—theology about final things—developed in different ways. The redeemed Christian was promised eternal life, but if the establishment of the venue of eternal life, God’s kingdom, was indefinitely postponed, what happened in the meanwhile? With the separation of soul from body, where did the postmortem individual go? Was there life after death before Christ’s Second Coming, or simply some quiescent state of “sleeping”? Where, and how, was life after death lived? On these questions, we see the development of two different kinds of eschatological real estate: heaven, and hell.

Christian concepts about the afterlife had precedents in both pagan and Jewish culture. Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid had featured their hero’s descent into the underworld, to converse with the shades of the dead. Hades itself was conceived as subdivided into two zones, pleasant (Elysium, abode of the few) and radically unpleasant (Tartarus, much more populated with tormented shades). For philosophers of Platonic and Neopythagorean bent, the soul was the self, and it was immortal. Flesh, clearly, was not. For them, the ultimate abode of the soul was with the stars: the individual soul, free of the body, would ascend into the heavens, ad astra. Afterlife is lived by the soul, not by the soul reunited with the body.

Concern about afterlife, however, did not dominate most ancient Mediterranean religions. “Ancestral practices” focused primarily on how to live one’s present life, not on what might happen in some postmortem future life. Philosophers and members of mystery cults might focus on afterlives; but did other people? Some common funeral inscriptions gestured toward annihilation (“I was not, I was, I am not, I care not”). Others bequeathed the person’s shade to the “infernal gods,” dis manibus: the abbreviation D.M. is so formulaic, like our R.I.P., that it is found even on Jewish and Christian tombstones.

Jewish biblical texts are famously vague about the conditions of individuals after death. In the late Second Temple period, however, afterlife begins to be linked to ideas about resurrection. “Enoch,” for example, a biblical figure from before the Flood (Genesis 5.21–24), sometime in the third or second century BCE was given a tour of postmortem territories assigned to different sorts of human souls, righteous and (varying degrees of) unrighteous: the latter would endure punishments eternally. The blessed, Enoch saw, will inherit a fecund, peaceful earth (1 Enoch 10.18–19) and, ultimately, will shine like the luminaries of heaven (104.2). Daniel 12 spoke of the dead “awakening from sleep,” some to everlasting life, others to eternal contempt; the righteous would be “like the stars.” Second Maccabees linked martyrdom and the suffering of the righteous explicitly to a postmortem restoration of the fleshly body: “The king of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for his laws” (7.9).

In gospel traditions, Jesus tells of the soul of poor Lazarus after death. Lazarus is borne by angels to the “bosom of Abraham,” while the rich man who ignored him in life spends eternity in Hades, across an unbridgeable space, in burning torment (Luke 16.19–31). The fires of Gehenna are unquenchable (Mark 9.48). The torment of the wicked precedes the day of judgment: souls alone, minus their bodies, can feel thirst and pain. What about the fate of the redeemed? Contesting with Sadducees, Jesus speaks of the postresurrected state of the saved as being angelic: those who rise from the dead “neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Mark 12.18–27). In the Gospel of John, Jesus speaks elliptically of his followers’ gaining eternal life as a present condition as well as a future one: his own resurrection guarantees that his followers “will live also” (John 14.19). Paul, too, talks of eternal life, teaching that the bodies of believers whether living or dead will be transformed into bodies of pneuma, material spirit—very fine stuff, not not-stuff—fit to dwell in the realm above the moon once Christ returns. All those who worship images, however—that is, in Paul’s day, most of humankind—will be the objects of “the wrath that is coming” (1 Thessalonians 1.10). Yet in his final letter, Romans, Paul seems to speak of a universal redemption: “the fullness of the nations” and “all Israel” will be secured for the celestial Kingdom (Romans 11.25–26).

In these afterlife traditions, the ultimate destination of the (un)dead was calibrated according to behavior in this life. This conviction gives us a glimpse of the ideas both about universal justice and about ethics, what counts as wrong behavior, what as good. Afterlife provides a belated opportunity for justice, when the righteous are rewarded and the wicked punished. In some apocalypses, angels are judged as well as humans.

The Christian tours of heaven and hell that begin to accrue in the early second century wax especially articulate about what constitutes sin—and about the torments that await sinners.

The Apocalypse of Peter, an early second-century text, opens by praising divine mercy, though very little mercy is shown to those considered wrongdoers, who are subject to the “judgement of wrath.” Once judged by Christ at his Second Coming, the newly (re)embodied will suffer, in quite precise ways, for all eternity. Blasphemers will hang by their tongues. Women who tempted men to fornicate will hang by their hair; their male partners, by their genitals in a “place of fire.” Murderers will burn forever in the sight of their victims (Peter 7). Women who aborted pregnancies will sink in pain and excrement up to their necks, their breasts oozing congealed milk that turns into flesh-eating beasts. “God wills it so” (8). Slanderers gnaw endlessly on their own tongues; the deceitful have their lips cut off; those who trusted in wealth will be tormented in filthy garments (9). Other afflictions beset usurers, idol worshippers, those disrespectful to parents, lapsed virgins, disobedient slaves, and practitioners of sorcery (10–11). Torments notwithstanding, these sinners will acknowledge that their (perpetual) punishments are just.

About the redeemed, Peter has much less to say. Moses, Elijah, the patriarchs, and the righteous, as well as those who have been persecuted for Jesus’s sake will stand in a great garden (16), much like the venue anticipated in some pagan traditions. The author scarcely speaks about the upside of final judgment; his energies and attention focus primarily on the eternally damned. After a few brief remarks on the destiny of the saved, “Peter” ends by praising God for preserving the names of the righteous in the book of life (17). Redemption wrought through Christ, for this author, is clearly not universal.

Later apocalypses and other early church fathers express variations on these themes. And afterlife itself begins to monopolize Christian sensibility: this life becomes a prelude for the individual’s ultimate eternal life, whether in heaven or in hell. What determines who goes where? In the view of some, salvation is limited to membership in the right Christian community, marked by baptism. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus was taught by the bishop Cyprian mid-third century: outside of the church there is no salvation. In this view, the vast majority of humankind is doomed to unending torment; the few, the happy few, to eternal bliss.

But church membership (and membership in the right church, meaning the church of the author) was itself no guarantee of heaven either. The Apocalypse of Paul, a later text derived partly from the Apocalypse of Peter, features a tour of a hell occupied predominately by failed Christians. Besides the (usual) fallen virgins, “Paul” sees a fornicating presbyter in a river of fire, tortured by angels; a lector who did not practice what he read standing in a fiery river while a red-hot razor slices his lips and tongue; ascetics who failed to love their neighbor and care for the stranger suffer burning pitch and sulfur; those whose theological opinions on Christ, Mary, and the eucharist differ from the author’s own are encased in a stench-filled well. The redeemed, meanwhile—their virtue calibrated by levels of sexual continence—ascend to a Paradise in the “third heaven,” to live with Christ for a thousand years in a place of superabundant richness. Higher achievers pass to a beautiful city (the heavenly Jerusalem?), their zone of residence again tied to their levels of piety in their former life.

If Christ is the sole pathway to salvation, what then of all those generations born before his coming? What kind of divine justice would account them as doomed? The Acts of Pilate, a fifth-century text, answered these questions. It developed an idea present in nuce in a canonical letter, 1 Peter 3.19, which claimed that Christ after his death but before his resurrection “made a proclamation to the spirits in prison”—meaning to those souls in hell. Pilate described the postmortem Christ’s rescue mission to the underworld. Confronting Hades, binding Satan, Christ liberates the dead (“all you who have died through the tree which [Adam] touched,” 8.24, 1), paying special attention to the saints of the Old Testament: Adam, the prophets, and the patriarchs, as well as the (pre-Christian) martyrs. All these proceed to Paradise as a group—spirits still, not yet reembodied. Presumably, at the final resurrection, they would resume their bodies, and the final judgment would occur. Through Christ, these pre-Christian saints had already been redeemed, to live their afterlives prior to the Second Coming.

Ideas about heaven and hell reflect ideas about the character of God. The biblical god is praised for being both just and merciful. But in what proportions? Does his mercy extend to all his creation? In the End, would all be saved to life eternal? Origen thought so. Anything less, he taught, would undermine the grace and omnipotence of God, and diminish the scope of Christ’s mission of salvation. But majority opinion tilted in the other direction. God, or Jesus, assumed the stern features of a late Roman imperial magistrate, justly punishing—though for eternity—those who violated divine law. Some apocalypses softened this sentence with an idea of mitigated mercy. In traditions about Mary’s descent into hell—she is horrified and grieved by the suffering that she sees—she negotiates a release of nine hours every Sunday. The Apocalypse of Paul envisions Sunday as a full day of rest; other texts name the period of respite as lasting for the fifty days between Easter and Pentecost. Eternal just punishment would be leavened by periodic mercy.

What is the purpose of hell: punishment, or rehabilitation? Is eschatological suffering purgative or punitive? Answers varied. Those “compassionate Christians” who urged that hell would not last forever were the targets of Augustine’s closing arguments in his City of God, a defining master work of late Latin theology. He urged a type of eschatological symmetry: if saintly beatitude were eternal, he explained, then the sufferings of the damned had to be eternal too. The effectiveness of saintly intercession, he further held, had its limits: no martyr patron could guarantee salvation.

Further, Augustine taught, people would suffer in hell not only for their own sins, but also because of the inherited stain of original sin, which stemmed from Adam’s insubordination. Even babies, if dying before baptism, were irredeemable on account of original sin. All humanity after Adam, he urged, was justly condemned as a massa damnata. Even membership within the true church (that is, Augustine’s church) was no guarantee of salvation. Given that humanity was universally marked by Adam’s sin, what required explanation was not God’s just condemnation of the many, but rather his merciful decision to remit punishment to the few. Why are the damned damned? In order to demonstrate God’s justice. Why are the saved saved? In order to demonstrate God’s mercy. “Many more are condemned by vengeance than are released by mercy” (City of God 21.12).

At the final resurrection, Augustine explained, fleshly body and spiritual soul for both populations, the saved and the damned, would be eternally reunited. But the nature of flesh will have changed. For the saints, flesh will be entirely and effortlessly under the control of spirit. For the damned, flesh will be so configured that it will be capable of sustaining fire and pain eternally, inescapably. Whereas in this life death could mean a release from pain, in the afterlife, even that avenue of escape was foreclosed. After the resurrection, for all humanity, death will be no more—to the detriment, even the regret, of those in hell.

The flesh of the saints, too, will have undergone eschatological transformation, not only moral but also physical. The resurrected body will conform to a certain aesthetic. Men’s breasts, for example, would still have nipples, despite their serving no purpose other than ornamentation. All the saved—even infants and children, Augustine speculated—would be raised in their prime, at the same age as Christ was when raised (that is, around the age of thirty). The body would be perfected and beautiful. Amputees would have their limbs restored. The saint would be neither overweight nor underweight. Physical defects will have no place in heaven. The only exception would be the scars of the martyrs, which will abide—as did Christ’s wounds, after his resurrection—as (beautiful) signs of their righteous valor. And somehow, the embodied saints will be able to see the nonembodied God (City of God 22.29).

All forms of Christianity proffered a vision of redemption. Teachings about the afterlife as the realm of that redemption obliquely defined how the faithful should act, and what they should believe, in this life. Narratives of heaven, teaching about the retrieval of the heroes of the Old Testament, made a theological point: these people had in effect been Christians before Christ. The Old Testament really was a preparation for the New Testament, the old Israel a prelude to the new. Narratives of hell taught about the hazards of sin, the particular sin linked with its own particular punishment. Eternity held out the promise of condemnation as well as of salvation.

How much of this stern and frightening message accounted for the spread of the Christian movement(s)? A lot, opined the late second-century pagan critic Celsus. Christians, he said, invented terrors by their teaching about everlasting punishments (Against Celsus 3.16). Hell was part of the hard sell. This, despite the repugnance and incoherence of Christian teachings about the resurrected body—apparently, in Celsus’s view, another loud part of the missionary pitch.

It is foolish of them also to suppose that, when God applies fire (like a cook!), all the rest of mankind will be thoroughly roasted and that they alone will survive, not merely those who are alive at the time but also those long dead who will rise up from the earth possessing the same bodies as before. This is simply the hope of worms. For what sort of soul would have any further desire for a body that has rotted? The fact that this doctrine is not shared by some of you [Jews] and by some Christians shows its utter repulsiveness, and that it is both revolting and impossible. For what sort of body, after being entirely corrupted, could return to its original nature and that same condition which it had before it was dissolved? As they have nothing to say in reply, they escape to a most outrageous refuge by saying that “anything is possible to God.” (Against Celsus 5.14)

Celsus goes on to argue that the idea of physical resurrection offends against right reason. Eternal soul is reasonable; eternal flesh is not. Origen, critiquing Celsus in turn, concedes that this doctrine of physical resurrection is preached in the churches, but “it is more clearly understood by the intelligent” (5.18). The dead are not given back their same bodies, he urges. Rather, deferring to Paul’s statements about flesh, blood, and spiritual body in 1 Corinthians 15, the eschatological body will be constituted of spirit—or so, says Origen, do the more “intelligent” understand. By implication, the majority do not.

It is against Origen’s position that Augustine taught: fleshly body’s nature, he insisted, is changed morally, but not physically. People rise in their “same” bodies, though for the saved, these bodies will be ethically and aesthetically reformatted for eternal beatitude. And by insisting that such bodies will abide “in heaven,” Augustine literally cut the ground out from under terrestrial visions of a kingdom of God on earth. In this way, Augustine united two originally different end-time visions, one celestial (“up there,” in heaven), one terrestrial (down here, on earth, for the embodied saints’ thousand-year reign). Eschatological flesh will dwell in heaven. More of it, though, will burn forever in hell.

In Christian stories and apocryphal apostles’ acts, hellfire often seems to have been more consistently emphasized than were visions of heaven. Here pagan, Jewish, and Christian conceptualizations converged. Tartarus (with its population of tormented shades), Gehenna (a place of “unquenchable fire where the worm never dies,” Mark 9.48), and hell together formed a culturally coherent whole.

Eternal pain for moral malfeasance, howsoever conceived, spoke in a readily comprehended cultural vernacular, one that conveyed positive moral and theological teachings while articulating the dangers of defiance. Christ may have come the first time in order to bring redemption; at his Second Coming, Christ the judge would bring just condemnation as well. Heaven and hell served both as the end points of the individual’s life, and as the final point on the arc of history. In this way and for these reasons, the message of damnation assumed a prime place in the Christian message of salvation.