‘This is how it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’18 So Christ himself had warned. Similar prophecies – of how, on the day of judgement, both the living and the dead would be sorted into two groups, like good fruit and bad, like wheat and weeds, like sheep and goats – appeared throughout the gospels. So too, no less chilling, did lists of the signs that would herald the fateful moment. These were the portents that Gregory, when he looked about him at the agonies of the age, could recognise: wars, and earthquakes, and famines; plagues, and terrors, and wonders in the sky. Beyond that, however, detail in the gospels was lacking. Instead, for those Christians who longed to stare fully into the face of the end times, it was a very different work of scripture that provided them with an apocalypsis – a ‘lifting of the veil’. The Revelation of Saint John – whom Irenaeus, for one, had confidently identified with the disciple beloved of Jesus – offered the ultimate account of the judgement that was to come. Like a troubled dream, it provided no clear narrative, but rather a succession of haunting and hallucinatory visions. Of war in heaven, between Michael and his angels and ‘that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray’.19 Of how Satan would be cast down and bound for a thousand years. Of how martyrs, raised from the dead and given thrones, were to reign with Christ for the length of the millennium. Of a whore drunk with the blood of the saints, who sat on a scarlet beast, and whose name was Babylon. Of how a great battle would be fought at the place ‘that in Hebrew is called Armageddon’.20 Of how Satan, after the thousand years had passed, was to be released, and would deceive the four corners of the earth, before being thrown for ever into a lake of burning sulphur. Of how the dead, great and small, would stand before the throne of Christ, and be judged, according to what they had done. Of how some would be written in the book of life, and some – those who did not appear in its pages – would be cast into the lake of fire. Of how there would be a new heaven and a new earth. Of how the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, would descend out of heaven from God. Of how heaven and earth would become one.
Here, in this apocalypse, was a vision of the future more overwhelming in its impact than that of any pagan oracle. No riddling pronouncement of Apollo had ever served to reconfigure the very concept of time. Yet this, across the Roman world, was what the Old and New Testaments had combined to achieve. Those who lacked the Christian understanding of history, so Augustine had written, were doomed to ‘wander in a circuitous maze finding neither entrance nor exit’.21 The course of time, as sure and direct as the flight of an arrow, proceeded in a straight line: from Genesis to Revelation; from Creation to the Day of Judgement. Gregory was certainly not alone in measuring the events of the world against his knowledge of where time was destined to end. In Galatia, one bishop – a noted ascetic named Theodore, who insisted on wearing a fifty-pound metal corset and only ever eating lettuce – predicted the imminent materialisation of the Beast; in Tours, another, who shared with the pope the name of Gregory, anticipated ‘the moment foretold by our Lord as the beginning of our sorrows.’22 From east to west, the same anxiety, the same hope was expressed. The end days were drawing near. Time was running out.
And yet there was, for all that, a certain pulling of punches. Bishops, charged though they might be with shepherding the Christian people towards the time of judgement, flinched from calculating the exact hour. Pointedly, they refused to draw a precise correspondence between the events described in Revelation and the convulsions of their own age. The chance to identify who the Beast might be, or the Whore of Babylon, was spurned. Leaders of the Church had long dreaded the speculations that St John’s vision of the Apocalypse might foster among those given to wild and violent imaginings. Origen, ever the philosopher, had dismissed the idea that the thousand-year reign of the saints was to be taken literally. Augustine had agreed: ‘The thousand years symbolise the course of the world’s history.’23 In the Greek East, councils were held which denied Revelation a place in the New Testament at all. Few in the Latin West went that far: John’s vision of the Apocalypse was too firmly inscribed in their canon for that. Equally, though, the leaders of the Western Church could not help but dread how the ignorant and excitable might interpret its prophecies. The veil had been lifted; but it was perilous to look too closely at what lay beneath. Christ, as Gregory put it, ‘wants the final hour unknown to us’.24
Which did not mean that Christians should be unprepared for it. Quite the opposite. The vision of the end days was a vision as well of what awaited everyone after death. As such, it was bound to unsettle. ‘Many are called, but few are chosen.’25 So Christ himself had warned. The new Jerusalem and the lake of fire were sides of the same coin. For the earliest Christians, a tiny minority in a world seething with hostile pagans, this reflection had tended to provide reassurance. The dead, summoned from their graves, where for years, centuries, millennia they might have been mouldering, would face only two options. The resurrection of their physical bodies would ensure an eternity either of bliss or torment. The justice that in life they might either have been denied or evaded would, at the end of days, be delivered them by Christ. Only the martyrs, those who had died in their Saviour’s name, would have been spared this period of waiting. They alone, at the moment of death, were brought by golden-winged angels in a great blaze of glory directly to the palace of God. All others, saints and sinners alike, were sentenced to wait until the hour of judgement came.
This, though, was not the vision of the afterlife that had come to prevail in the West. There, far more than in the Greek world, the awful majesty of the end of days, of the bodily resurrection and the final judgement, had come to be diluted. That this was so reflected in large part the influence – ironically enough – of an Athenian philosopher. ‘When death comes to a man, the mortal part of him perishes, or so it would seem. The part which is immortal, though, retires at death’s approach, and escapes unharmed and indestructible.’26 So had written Plato, a contemporary of Aristophanes and the teacher of Aristotle. No other philosopher, in the formative years of the Western Church, had exerted a profounder influence over its greatest thinkers. Augustine, who in his youth had classed himself as a Platonist, had still, long after his conversion to Christianity, hailed his former master as the pagan ‘who comes nearest to us’.27 That the soul was immortal; that it was incorporeal; that it was immateriaclass="underline" all these were propositions that Augustine had derived not from scripture, but from Athens’ greatest philosopher. Plato’s influence on the Western Church had, in the long run, proven decisive. The insistence of Augustine’s opponents that only God was truly immaterial, and that even angels were created out of delicate and ethereal fire, had ended up dead and buried. So, as time went by, had the primordial teaching of the Church that only martyrs could be welcomed directly into heaven. The conviction that the souls of even the holiest saints were destined to join Abraham, just as Lazarus had done, and there await the hour of judgement, had faded. They too, so Augustine had taught, went straight to heaven. Yet even saints, before they could be received by Michael among the angels, still had to be judged. Gregory, the bishop of Tours, when he wrote in praise of his patron saint, described how Martin, as he died, had been visited by the Devil, and obliged to render account for his life. Naturally, it had not taken long. Martin had soon been on his way to join his fellow saints in paradise. The episode had redounded entirely to his glory. Nevertheless, in describing it, Gregory of Tours could not refrain from a certain nervous gulp. After all, if even Martin could be subjected to interrogation by Satan when he died, then what of sinners? Simply by asking this question, Gregory was speaking for a new age: one in which all mortals, not just martyrs, not just saints, could expect to meet with judgement at the moment of their death.