Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (16 page)

Thus Apuleius caricatures a convert who refuses to worship the gods and alienates her husband by drinking wine and participating in what Christians called “love feasts.”

Although he refrains from mentioning the most outrageous charges against Christians—that they forced initiates to plunge a knife into a newborn baby and kill it before eating its dismembered body—Apuleius’ description of this ignorant and dissolute woman suggests that Christians, like devotees of the Syrian goddess, violated Roman decency. Since Apuleius, like Justin, regards philosophy less as an intellectual discipline than a spiritual quest, what he finds most obnoxious is that Christians spurn what he calls “our sound religion.” What Apuleius apparently suspected—accurately, as it turned out—was that such wholesale rejection of the gods who supported the empire could undermine the basic values of Roman society.

Yet as the novel concludes, it assumes a different tone, even though the protagonist still speaks in the voice of an ass. For shortly after Lucius tells how he escaped from the mad devotees of the Syrian goddess and of Jesus, his comic tale opens onto a powerful and moving scene. Awakened one night by a full moon, Lucius grieves over his wasted life, washes to purify himself, and prays to Isis, “queen of heaven,” pleading to be restored to human form. At this point, Apuleius’ story tells of spiritual transformation, as signaled
by his original title,
The Metamorphoses.
Now he brilliantly uses the animal metaphor as Lucius tells how, having been an ass, a mere animal, he comes to be transformed into a genuine human being when he receives divine revelation. For Isis graciously answers his prayer, telling him to join the sacred procession that her worshippers celebrate on her great festival day. When he does, Lucius is overjoyed to feel his shaggy coat begin to fall away and his tail vanish as her power restores him to his true human stature. Trembling with gratitude and hope, he goes to her temple to ask her priests how to prepare to receive initiation into her sacred mysteries. In an account that resonates with ardent longing, Apuleius has Lucius tell how he paid the initiation fees, took the required cold plunges into the river, and bought the necessary clothes to prepare for the ritual. When initiation day arrived, he says, he finally “approached the gates of death” and underwent a kind of ritual death, until divine power came upon him, so that he was spiritually “born again” to eternal life, and received “salvation through divine grace.”
⁶³

Thus Apuleius’ story answers the question with which his quest, like those of many seekers, had begun: what kinds of revelation are false, and which are genuine? His account suggests that the truest wisdom is offered by the priests of Isis, who plumb the depths of ancient Egyptian lore. Some literary critics, noting that Apuleius maintains an ironic tone throughout the whole narrative, have suggested that Apuleius wrote simply to entertain people by ridiculing all spiritual seekers. It’s true that Apuleius maintains a certain skepticism about religious professionals throughout his story: he tells, for example, how after his first initiation, the same priests pumped him for more money in following years, offering the lure of more advanced initiations. The tone of his
writing is more complex, however, than simple satire. Instead, like a sophisticated Catholic who criticizes certain practices of the Vatican, Apuleius seems to speak as a genuine devotee of Isis. Without repudiating any of his other initiations or religious affiliations, his account suggests that through her divine radiance, as through a prism, he came to see refracted all the divine light in the universe.

Revelation, then, was prized by philosophers and seekers of all kinds, whether Jews, Christians, or educated “pagans” like Apuleius, who despised both Christians and Jews. And Christians could speak of Jesus—and baptism “into Christ”—much as Apuleius spoke of initiation into Isis. About twenty years before Apuleius wrote his
Metamorphoses,
his older contemporary Justin had explained that Christian baptism offers “illumination” to the initiate who offers the requisite prayers, takes a purifying bath, and so is “born again,” like those initiated into the mysteries of Isis or Mithra.
⁶⁴
Furthermore, Justin praised Jesus much as Apuleius praised Isis—as the divine Word (
logos
) who sends divine illumination to everyone on earth who has ever received it, from Moses to Plato. Anyone listening to a philosopher like Justin or Apuleius might well ask, what difference could it possibly make whether one follows Plato or Jesus, worships Isis or Christ?

Christian admirers of the Book of Revelation could answer that question, since many stood in diametric opposition to the Roman world. A pagan critic like Apuleius, for all his curiosity about foreign religions, despised what he saw of theirs. Apuleius’ caricature of Christians as the illiterate, low-class baker’s wife shows his contempt for the majority of Christians, who lacked—or rejected—Roman culture. Ambitious and gifted men coming from
the provinces, like Apuleius himself, instinctively recognized that the empire’s cosmopolitanism demanded conformity to its shared values. So although he could embrace almost any kind of religious devotion, he despised foreign cults whose practices violated Roman sensibilities—the castrated priests of the Syrian goddess, and the crowd of rabble who “worship Jesus as a god.”
⁶⁵
Apuleius, like Celsus, despised Christians for pitching their message to the dregs of the empire. While his own initiations into the mysteries of Isis and those of Serapis, Asclepius, and Mithra required him to pay expensive initiation fees and buy special clothes for the required rituals and celebrations, practices that screened out undesirables, Christians offered baptism without payment, welcoming even beggars and slaves.
⁶⁶

In practical terms, then, Christian baptism had an effect opposite that of Isis initiation. When Apuleius devoted himself to Isis and saw all divinity encompassed by her, he embraced a universal vision, one that allowed—even encouraged—him to continue to respect and pay homage to the entire pagan pantheon, from the patron deities of Rome to the gods of Egypt, Greece, and Persia. But accepting Christian baptism, along with indoctrination into Jewish traditions about God, cut off the initiate from such universal worship. On the contrary, Christian initiation alienated everyone who received it from Rome and her gods and placed the person into a new—potentially dangerous—situation. As Apuleius noted, the Christian convert refused to worship any but her “one unique god,” not only turning her back upon all other deities but damning them all as demons. Although educated Christians like Justin often prided themselves on their universalism, those on both sides realized that the difference between
worshipping Isis and worshipping Jesus could make the difference between life and death.

When Tertullian confronted charges like these—that Christians played to the masses—he gleefully confirmed them. Deliberately outraging the sensibilities of his literate audience, he addressed his own subversive messages directly—even preferentially—to “the rabble.” Tertullian declares that he intends to speak above all to the person who is “simple, rude, uncultured, uneducated,” whose soul “belongs entirely to the road, to the street, to the workshop.” Everyone instinctively seeks God, he says, but finds divine revelation not, as Plato says, through the intellect but through intuition, which is available to everyone. When it comes to knowing God, Tertullian tells his audience, being illiterate may be an advantage:

Expecting his hearer to agree that educated people are often fools, Tertullian encourages him to “have faith in your soul; thus you will believe in yourself.”
⁶⁸
Rejecting Plato’s warning that God is hard to find, Tertullian insists that, on the contrary, “every Christian workingman finds God, and manifests God,” simply by plumbing the depths of his own soul. Tertullian adds that even though “I realize that you are not a Christian,”
⁶⁹
he expects his hearer to agree that, as “everyone knows,” truth comes not from sophisticated elites but from ordinary working people.

Had critics like Celsus and Apuleius read Tertullian’s
Apology,
they could have predicted—and would have despised—its appeal to marginal people, especially illiterates and resident aliens working in Roman cities. When Tertullian speaks to such people, he turns on its head what Romans learned as schoolboys: that the gods bestowed power and empire upon the Roman people to reward their piety. “Unless I am mistaken,” he says sarcastically, “all rule and empire are gained by war and victories.” Rome’s conquests are actually not the reward of piety but come “from acts of impiety,” including the atrocities Roman soldiers routinely practice, besieging and capturing cities, razing buildings and setting whole neighborhoods on fire, as well as terrorizing, raping, and killing innocent people and stealing the property of the slain.
⁷⁰
Like atheists today who say there is no God who sanctions traditional values, Tertullian mocks those who offer sacrifice and pray that the gods will protect them, for, he says, “as you yourselves secretly know,” the gods are nothing but dead men whom later generations imagine as heroes. Consequently, Roman religion is nothing but a flimsy fabric of lies.
⁷¹

From this Tertullian concludes that Roman law, which claims divine sanction, is merely an arbitrary invention: “Your law is not right; it is only a human construct … it did not come down from heaven.”
⁷²
Expecting his hearers to share his alienation from Rome, Tertullian urges them to admit that instead of loving and trusting the emperor, they fear him and resent his power. Addressing workmen who carve images of the gods, hammering out their statues for huge public monuments and stamping them on coins, Tertullian says, “While you are working on the bronze image of Juno and adorning Minerva’s helmet with figures, you never think of appealing to any of these gods.”
⁷³

Tertullian dismisses such gods as masks for Rome’s military
power. He invites his hearers to identify instead with Jesus, whose crucifixion showed how brutally the Romans treated subjects who resisted their power—and whose resurrection expressed their hope of seeing Rome conquered. Citing the Book of Revelation, Tertullian suggests that what “our own John” saw in heaven has opened up a region in the imagination where even now God’s messiah rules as “King of kings and Lord of lords,” whence he is about to descend to destroy all earthly powers. Tertullian exalts that this vision, which turns the world as he knows it upside down, gives him and countless others courage to defy the overwhelming forces that now dominate them on earth. Declaring himself a citizen of that “heavenly country,” Tertullian claims that John’s vision stands as a judgment against the demonic empire now ruling the world and gives him courage to stand as a free man on earth. “Never will I call the emperor ‘god.’ I am willing to call him ‘lord,’ in the ordinary sense of the term, but
my relationship to him is one of freedom
.”
⁷⁴

Emboldened by John of Patmos’ vision, Tertullian demands from Roman magistrates something unprecedented—something for which he might have been the first to conceive the idea that American revolutionaries, more than fifteen centuries later, would incorporate into their new social and political system: freedom of religion, which Tertullian, writing in Latin, calls
libertate religionis
.
⁷⁵
Those of us who usually think of
human rights
and
natural rights
as concepts born from the Enlightenment, wrung from the violence of the French and American revolutions, might be surprised to see this African Christian standing up to defy Scapula, the Roman magistrate stationed in Africa, circa 205
C.E.
, with these words: “It is a
fundamental human right, a power bestowed
by nature, that each person should worship according to his own convictions,
free from compulsion.”
⁷⁶

Thus followers of Jesus widened the gap that Jews had originally placed between politics and religion. What Tertullian demanded on the basis that God had created the human soul American revolutionaries would claim on similar grounds, alluding to the Genesis creation account to insist, in 1776, that “
all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.
”
⁷⁷
Tertullian, of course, was speaking of freedom for Christians, and hoped for it only after Rome’s downfall, when, as John had prophesied, Christ would descend in glory to reign over the new Jerusalem. But what actually happened was something that the fierce prophet John, for all his visions of the future, could hardly have foreseen.

T
he fourth century began in a decade of terror. Rome was now “making war” on Jesus’ followers, just as John of Patmos had prophesied that “the beast” would do. On February 23, 303, the emperor Diocletian ordered his soldiers to destroy churches, confiscate and burn their sacred books, and strip anyone who resisted of civil rights, status, and police protection. This edict was enforced throughout much of the empire but most seriously in Egypt, where Christians experienced increasingly systematic persecution.
¹
A few months later, Diocletian sent another edict ordering magistrates to arrest church leaders and use any means necessary to force them to sacrifice to the gods. Christian leaders were divided on how to respond. Peter, bishop of Alexandria, went into hiding and commended others who fled or bribed officials to avoid apostasy, saying that this showed that they loved God more than their money. While many Christians found such ways to accommodate the laws and survive, others, like Bishop Melitius of Lycopolis, a city in Upper Egypt, urged believers to resist Rome and accept death rather than either comply with the laws or evade them. During the seven years between 303 and 310, Christians in Alexandria reported that 660 of their own were killed in that city alone.
²