Commenting
on some factors that lead to a growth in an allegorical interpretation of the
millennium in Rev 20 in third and fourth-century Christianity, Anthony R. Cross
wrote:
[A] number of factors
have been suggested that contributed to a major reaction against apocalypticism
in general and millennialism in particular. For over two and a half centuries
the Roman empire had been viewed in a very negative light, as is reflected in the
book of Revelation itself (Rev. 14.8; 16.19; 17.5; 18.2, 10, 21), but with the ‘conversion’
of the emperor Constantine in 312 this inevitably had to change. From this
point onwards, the life of the Church and the Roman state seemed inextricably
linked. Further, a literal-historical reading of apocalypticism seemed to many
to be too ‘Jewish’. Jerome believed that ‘to take John’s Apocalypse to the
letter is to Judaize’. No longer was Revelation to be read as a prophecy of the
events of the end, nor as revealing its timetable, for such was excluded by Acts
1.7’s ‘It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set.’ Rather,
Revelation was to be read as an allegory of the Church, and particularly its
struggle with good and evil. In the third century, Origen (c. 185-c. 254) had
attacked the literal historicizing of apocalyptic in favour of an allegorical and
spiritual interpretation (Origen, On
First Principles 2.11.2-3), and in this he was followed by the great
historian of the early Church, Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 263-c. 339), and Methodius
of Olympus (d.c. 311) (Methodius, Symposium
9.1). But the problem with this was allegory’s ahistorical nature. This
fact was recognized by Tyconius (c. 330-c. 390) and Augustine of Hippo
(354-430). Paula Fredricksen writes:
Many earlier
theologians had either allegorized any historical and temporal reference out of
John’s prophecy or repudiated the text altogether. Other Christians, and most
especially those in North Africa, had on the authority of the Apocalypse
asserted an enthusiastic and socially disruptive millenarianism. Against these
two extremes, Tyconius and following him, Augustine introduced in the late
fourth and earthly fifth centuries a reading of John that affirmed its
historical realism while liberating it from the embarrassments of a literal
interpretation. (Paula Fredriksen, ‘Tyconius and Augustine’, p. 21)
In order to avoid a
literal millennium on the one hand and ahistorical allegory on the other,
Tyconius pioneered a typological reading of Revelation which did not deny its historical
significance, yet permitted him to assert that the time of the end and the
identity of the saved could not be known. This dual approach was important, as
he was trying to correct his fellow Donatists, who had adopted a separatist
ecclesiology coupled with a millennial expectation of the end within a hundred
years (for details, see Fredricksen, pp. 21-24). To this end he developed seven
rules that he believed were ‘the compositional principles of Scripture, encoded
in the text itself, which conceal or obscure its meaning’ (Fredriksen, p. 26).
Tyconius was an anti-apocalypticist; and his seven rules, which complicated the
biblical text, enabled him to preserve the historical significance of some of
the most apocalyptic and millennialist passages of Scripture, while obscuring
their eschatological important. For instance, his fifth rule enabled him to
interpret the numbers and dates o Revelation, including the thousand-year
millennium, as symbolic and indicative of spiritual truths, rather than
literally (Fredricksen, p. 27-28). (Anthony R. Cross, “The Bible, the Trinity and History:
Apocalypticism and Millennialism in the Theology of Joachim of Fiore” in
Stanley E. Porter, Michael A. Hayes, and David Tombs, Faith in the Millennium [Roehampton Papers 7; Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic Press, 2001], 260-97, here, pp. 264-65)
