A Rebirth of Images: The Making of St.John's Apocalypse

346 Pages·1986·20.782 MB·English

by  Austin Farrer

lih baf!~ fliN!"!!:
wh
an yes tt.,(,H: tts a fll:u
15 An 'IUs feet like unto
as if theY burned in a furrm.cc: and
his volce as the sound of many
waters,
1:6 And he had ltt his rIght. hand
stars: and out of his mouth
~ven
went a sharp twoedgcd sword: and
Ilis countenance. {t'IlS as the sun
shincth In his strength.
li And when I saw hlrn. I fell at his
feet as dead. And he. laid his right
hand upon me. saYing unto me. Fear
not; I am the first and the last!
18 I am he that liveth. and was
which thou sawest In my right hand.
and the seven golden candlesticks.
The seven stars are the angels of
the seven churches: and the seven
candlesticks which thou sawest are
the seven churches.
A REBIRTH OF
IMAGES
of
The Making St John's Apocalypse
BY
AUSTIN FARRER
State University of New York Press
First Published in 1949
Printed in Great Britain by Robert Macl..ehose and Co. Ltd.
Uni'Oersit~ Press, Glasgow
Published by
State Unil)ersity of New York Press. Albany
., 1986 Trustees of Mrs. KD. Farrer
All rights reseroed
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this boole may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsotl)er wilhout written permission
ercept in the case of brief quotations embodied in
crilical arlicles and rel)iews.
For informlltion, IIddress SllIle Uniwrsity of New York
Press, sllIle Unil)ersily Plllza, Albllny, N.Y .. 12246
Librllry of Congress Calaloging in Publiclltion Data
Fllrrer, Austin Marsden
A rebirlh of images.
Originally published: Great Brilain: Unil)ersity
Press, Glasgow, 1949.
Includes inder.
1. Bible. N. T. Rroelalion-Criticism, interpretation.
etc. I. Titlt.
Bs2825.F36 1986 228'.06 85-26219
ISBN 0-88706-271-7
ISBN 0-88706-272-5 (pH.1
10 Q 8 7 b ~ 4 l 1
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAOB
I. THE PLACE OF THE ApOCALYPSE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 13
II. THE SEVENFOLD PATTERN (I) 36
III. THE SEVENFOLD PATTERN (2) 59
IV. THE CALENDAR OF FEASTS (I) 91
V. THE CALENDAR OF FEASTS (2) II7
VI. THE CALENDAR OF FEASTS (3) 157
VII. THE SACRED DIAGRAM (I) 185
VIII. THE SACRED DIAGRAM (2) 216
IX. THE SYMBOLICAL NUMBERS 245
X. THE NAME OF GOD 261
XI. THE KINGDOM OF DARKNESS 284
XII. CONCLUSIONS 299
TEXT OF THE ApOCALYPSE 317
INDEX 345
PREFACE
N
othing justifies the writing of prefaces, except that they are
in fact epilogues: one puts them at the beginning, as a con
cession to the common vice of reading books backward~. The
preface is written last, and so it may serve as a vehicle for those
general observations one feels moved to make on the scope and
nature of the work as a whole, after it is fmished and done with.
Now that I have detached my mind to some extent from my task,
I may be able to say a few things which will prevent the reader
from being misled or imposed upon.
When I look back on the course of my study, I see how many
different positions I have confidently ad0pted and passionately
maintained in the course of the seven or so years during which it
has engrossed me. There is nothing in this to be distressed about:
the only way to arrive at a right construction is to try every hypo
thesis in turn, to do one's very best for it, and to break it against
the facts. And it is some comfort against scepticism to see that what
appeared most convincing in the earlier hypotheses has a way of
nestling into the frame which the later hypotheses provide; so that
it has not been simply a matter of abandoning position after posi
tion in face of inexorable evidence· and fighting a continual rear
guard action against the encroachment of intractable fact. At the
same time it is impossible, in view of such a history of instability,
to claim finality for the present stage of interpretation. Although
I can see no further than I have got, I must realize that anything I
can publish is no more than an interim report.
If so, why publish now? Because one tires of pursuing novel
and exciting investigations by oneself in a corner, or talking about
them with people who are not in a position to be as severe as they
ought, not having the whole matter in black and white before
them. There is no way of bringing other minds to bear, except by
publishing in full. Even the first stage of publication brought my
type-script into the hands of an acute and painstaking critic, whose
5
reactions gave me so much to think about, that I almost rewrote
the book. So what may I not expect from actual publication? The
book will be thoroughly pulled to pieces, which will be all to the
advantage oft he truth.
It will be to the advantage of the truth, on one supposition
that the task which I have taken in hand is a genuine and impor
tant task, a task which has got to be finished, however imperfectly
I have begun it. This is the last stronghold of vanity, to believe
that one has at least got hold of an important issue. Ifit is vanity
for one cannot pretend to doubt the seriousness of a study to which
one has given so much time and attention.
Whatever success I may have had with the interpretation, my
wrestling with the Apocalypse has convinced me of this: it is the
one great poem which the first Christian age produced, it is a
single and living unity from end to end, and it contains a whole
world ofs piritual imagery to be entered into and possessed. It may
well be that what I have just said about St John's vision may not
seem to some readers any very solid support for its position in the
New Testament. No one, after all, has proposed to include
Dante's Commedia in the body of inspired scripture. I do not
propose to discuss here the right of the Apocalypse to its place in
the Canon. I shall merdy observe that those who wish to under
stand the mind of the later New Testament age must embrace the
study of a great and vividly imagined poem, in which the whole
world oft hat age's faith is bodied forth.
I began my work on the Apocalypse in reaction against the
attitude of the commentators I read. It appeared to be too easily
assumed that the several paragraphs of the book' could be inter
preted piecemeal, and by reference to what lay outside St John's
own work. Here he was accused of rehandling a pagan myth,
there of imperfecdy adapting a scrap of 'apocalyptic tradition',
postulated ad hoc by the commentator. I began with the resolution
to find out ifl could what StJohn was doing, thinking, imagining
in his own mind, and, if I could, to see each vision as the appro
priate expression of his mental act. Stjohn's mind, I thought, was
not a sort of rag-bag which had got stuffed with all sorts of con
tents from various sources, it was a living act. When one could
see what St John was doing, one might hope to see that he did it
6
well, and that his 'borrowings' no more disfigured his work than
Virgil's or Milton's disfigure theirs.
But what was St John doing? I observed two facts. There
appeared to be in several parts of his book a more continuous,
hard-headed and systematic working-out of Old Testament
themes than had been recognized; and St John's finished work
exhibited an extremely elaborate and varied cyclic pattern, both
in the regular recurrence of themes, and in the form of their
visionary presentation. These two facts provided my original
hypothesis. I would suppose that St John believed Ezekiel, Zech
ariah and Daniel to express the form of things to come, that he
laid the three prophecies side by side and went straight through,
meditating the triple strand of visions into unity at each point of
his progress, in the light of the Christian revelation. And I would
further suppose that he wove the resultant new vision into a
cyclic rhythm of his own, a sort of mental music. These two
suppositions, I hoped, might account for the facts.
They did not. But the attempt to work them out led to a great
deal of wholesome exercise in the appreciation of the structure of
the cyclic rhythm, and in the recovery of St John's way ofw orking
with the Old Testament. My attempt to force the hypothesis of a
continuous use of the principal ancient prophecies led to a lot of
impossibly artificial interpretation. But at the same time as I was
forcing upon St John my continuous exegesis of Ezekiel and the
other prophets, I was recognizing how much else from the Old
Testament St John used; while I tried to make out that his
starting-point was always in the texts I had chosen for him, I had
to admit that he called in a great deal besides by way of parallel,
even from the 'wrong' parts of Ezekiel, Daniel or Zechariah.
Gradually my 'text' of continuous exposition grew thinner and
my 'foot-notes' of parallel matter more hopelessly disproportion
ate, and the hypothesis capsized. The continuous exposition
vanished, and I was left with the footnotes, which I had anyhow
arrived at by accident and honestly, without any axe to grind. So
I had to fmd a new soul of continuity to animate and knit together
these disjecta membra.
The principle of intelligible continuity has (to cut a long story
short) turned out to be absolutely one with the musical formality
7
of the design. St John was not imposing rhythmic form on some
intelligible matter alien to it; the rhythmic fOIm simply expresses
the intelligible progress of the sense. And this form, both rhyth
mical and intelligible, turns out to be-it was the last thing I
wanted or expected to find-thoroughly Rabbinic, and not a little
Gnostical. St John does not see the scriptures in what seems to us
to be their 'own' pattern, he sees them artificially arranged in the
Jewish sacred calendar, with its feasts and its lessons: and he
imposes further elaborations of pattern upon the calendar itself,
quite alien from the spirit of the Old Testament, and still more
alien from the common sense oft he modern world.
It is the ever clearer emergence of the Rabbinic factor in the
pattern of the book which has, more than anything else, made it
clear to me that I must publish what I have got and· hand the
investigation over. I am not, and shall not probably become, a
competent Rabbinic scholar, and the questions involved are of the
most intricate kind. So what I have written is no doubt most un
scholarly. Let me mention a single point by way of illustration.
The Jewish synagogue of the First Century A.D. read the scrip
tures according to a lectionary which has since gone out of use,
and has to be conjecturally reconstructed. The late Dr Biichler,
a learned Jew, made what appeared to be a very workmanlike
reconstruction, 1 but it is in fact challenged by others. St John sees
the scriptures through the pattern of the feasts and their lessons.
Some of the most important festal lessons are, fortunately, beyond
dispute, but there is much uncertainty about others, especially
about the readings from the prophets. Now I am not c~mpetent
to touch these most intricate questions. The best I can do is to
build upon the agreed points, and for the rest to show what texts
St John in fact used in several parts of his book. Others will, I hope,
be able to weave many of these texts into the lectionary pattern.
But I realise that, in doing so, they may see themselves constrained
to pull parts of my pattern to pieces. I can only hope that the
principal pegs of my structure are firmly and truly driven.
The cruciality of some of these Rabbinic points has (to make a
clean breast of it) come home to me since I became committed to
the publication of this book. I cannot make myself competent to
1 ]rll,isl, Qu(lrftrly Rr"itIV, Old Series, v, 420 :md vi. I.
8
settle them for myself before I let it go into the press, and so I let
it go as it is. For I feel a reasonable confidence that I have been
able to see from within St John's work what St John is doing in
the main, and the whole thing is not going to be overthrown by
more exact Talmudic learning. The Talmudists may call me, with
justification, several hard names, of which 'unscholarly' should be
the first: but I hope they may fmd something here that they can use.
I trust that nothing I have written may appear to show lack of
appreciation for the work of previous commentators. Nearly all
the facts one requires have, in truth, been collected and piled
conveniently to one's hand by the admirable and massive learning
of men like Dr R. H. Charles, a learning which I have no preten
tions to emulate. The next stage belongs to our generation; it is
for us to reap the harvest of their labours by working the puzzle
for which they have provided the pieces. If we could hope to dis
charge the task that falls to us as well as they discharged theirs, we
should be well content. We have not got to go down the mine
and dig out the metal: one thinks of Charles and his collaborators
at work on hitherto un translated and unpublished Jewish apoca
lyptic writings, recovered out of all sorts of corruption and dis
figurement, and from under the disguise of Ethiopic or old
Slavonic versions.
From contemporaries I have received all sorts of encouragement
and kindness, and not least from Fr Richard Kehoe, O.P., who
looks into the spirit of scripture with marvellous discernment.
But there is, I think, only one person whom I have plagiarized
wholesale, my former pupil, Miss Aileen Guilding. whose sugges
tions I should now find it difficult to discriminate from the rest of
my work. She is now studying St John's relation to the ancient
Jewish lectionary under Dr Herbert Danby's direction, and what
ever I have got right in the matter of the lectionary I probably owe
to her directly; how much to Dr Danby indirectly I cannot say.
He has been very kind in answering particular questions which I
put to him. Miss Guilding has not only steered me in the matter
of the lectionary; she has made several acute observations about
St John's use of particular texts from the Old Testament, which
she appears to know backwards and inside out. She is not to be
held responsible for my errors.
9
My sister has typed and typed again the several rewritings of
this book with unfailing patience and care. My father has made
me an index. Miss Adams, of the University Observatory, has
explained to me such points of astronomy as I have supposed to be
involved in St John's symbolism.
I wish that my book did more credit to so much kind assistance,
as well in form as in substance. As to the form, I have several
times tried to write the thing out pleasantly and consistendy, but
it would keep demanding to be patched and rewritten piecemeal,
and the result may not be very smooth. Perhaps it will be remem
bered that my task has been considered for the last seventeen
centuries to be one of peculiar intri~acy. There are, I hope, no
material inconsistencies. There are apparent inconsistencies:
different reasons are given in different places for Stjohn's having
written this or that sentence in the way he did. But the reader will
no doubt realize that there is no such thing as the reason for the
occurrence of any line in a poem. Why does Shakespeare make
Hamlet say such-and-such a thing? Because it belongs to Hamlet's
character; because the circumstances demand it of him; because
it expresses the quality of human destiny; because it fulfIls the
design of the plot; because it falls in with the traditional fable.
One may give the answer appropriate to one's point of view at
the moment. My various answers do nothing but relate Stjohn's
words to different aspects of his symbolism and different parts of
his context. At least, I hope so. If I have contradicted myself, I
have contradicted mysel£
Enough of apologies and excuses. I hope I have been able to
express what has excited me so much, and that a great deal of it is
true.
Oxford
January 1948
10