We have now moved well beyond the time when apocalypticism was predominantly viewed as a revolutionary myth having to do with ‘turning the world upside down’. Yet we have not begun to explore fully those more conservative forms of apocalypticism which envisaged the end of the world not in the immediate or far distant future, but in the ‘middle future’, that is, within the next 100 to 200 years.

In the early modern period, ‘middle future’ apocalypticism enabled the understanding of the present as having apocalyptic meaning, it reinforced the social, political and religious status quo, and yet it set out the requisite conditions and the tasks necessary for bringing into reality in the future those events which necessarily preceded the second coming of Christ. It did so, in the main, by locating the present within a philosophy of history constructed from the prophetic books of the Bible, especially Daniel and Revelation, and it is particularly exemplified in the work of the sixteenth-century Scottish mathematician, John Napier.

It is a form of apocalypticism with which we are ourselves becoming more familiar, although our form of it is cast in the languages of science and economics, rather than those of the Bible and theology. Environmental apocalypticism, like its theological counterpart, imposes upon us both an anxiety and a hope for the future, an understanding of the present and an obligation to action. In the case of contemporary apocalypticism, activity in the present is intended to postpone the environmental doomsday for ever, in the case of early modern ‘middle future’ apocalypticism, to ensure a personal and social readiness for its inevitable arrival. But in both cases, the end is not so near as to render action in the present futile, nor so distant as to render it unnecessary.

In this article, I want to explore ‘middle future’ apocalypticism as a way in which early moderns understood their present rather than their future, and recognised the obligations it imposed upon them personally, socially and particularly politically, just as in our contemporary world environmental apocalypticism is reframing our understanding of the present and imposing upon all of us a fresh set of personal, social and political obligations.

For David Hume, John Napier was ‘the famous inventor of the logarithms, the person to whom the title of a GREAT MAN is more justly due than to any other whom his country ever produced’.Footnote ¹ It was a judgement made by Hume on the basis of Napier's mathematical skill rather than his theological acumen. Indeed, although he nowhere says so, Hume would have been particularly unimpressed by John Napier's work on the book of Revelation. Entitled A Plaine Discouery of the whole Reuelation of Saint Iohn, and first published in 1593, it was the first Scottish work on Revelation. It was a work the epistemological credentials of which were questioned indirectly by Hume in his ‘Of Miracles’ in his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in 1748, some years before his praise of Napier in his History of England. There Hume had remarked somewhat opaquely that what he had said of miracles ‘may be applied without any variation to, prophecies’, presumably on the grounds that no amount of evidence of successful prophecies made and fulfilled in the past could ever justify the likely fulfilment of any prophecies made in the past or present about the future.Footnote ²

Praise for Napier's work on mathematics and disdain for his apocalyptic theology was not uncommon during this period, and itself gives some indication of the extent to which a ‘scientific’ and ‘rational’ approach to Revelation was no longer countenanced. Thus, for example, Baden Powell wrote in his An Historical View of the Progress of the Physical and Mathematical Sciences from the earliest ages to the present times, ‘Exact and comprehensive as were his views of mathematical truth, he could not discriminate other kinds; and engaged with all the sober assurance of certainty in a puerile commentary, in which he imagined he had deciphered all the mysteries of the Apocalypse’.Footnote ³

For Napier, though, mathematical and religious truth were of a kind. And if Hugh Trevor-Roper's claim that Napier ‘invented logarithms in order to speed up his calculations of the Number of the Beast’ is to be taken very much as tongue in cheek, it does express the recognition that, in early modern Britain, the most advanced scientists of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century ‘included also the most learned and literal students of Biblical mathematics’.Footnote ⁴

Within the history of science and mathematics, Napier's work on the Apocalypse was often derided, mostly ignored. But, in its own time, it was highly influential. In addition to the original edition of 1593, there were further editions in English in 1594, 1611 and 1645. There were also two Dutch editions in 1600 and 1607, six editions in French between 1602 and 1607 and five in German between 1611 and 1627. There were in addition a number of works by other authors based on Napier's work, notably Napier's Narration: or, an epitome of his Booke on the Revelation in 1642, and a number of editions of a work entitled The Bloody Almanack combining Napier with astrology in 1643, 1647, 1648, 1650 and 1652.

It certainly made an impact among the Protestant communities in Paris. Jacques Espinard, for example, wrote on 5 July 1602 to Joseph Scaliger:

There is no extant reply from Scaliger even though his De Emendatione Temporarum is one of the few works which Napier cites. But Scaliger is unlikely to have read it nor to have been encouraged to do so by this letter, for he thought Calvin to have been wise ‘to leave the Apocalypse as he found it’.Footnote ⁶

The magisterial reformers, Calvin, Zwingli and Luther, had serious reservations about Revelation. They would all have been aware that Erasmus had raised doubts about its canonicity. Throughout his career, Calvin avoided writing a commentary on Revelation. To all intents and purposes, Zwingli ignored it. And Luther had a number of concerns about its theology. Thus, for example, in his preface to the book in the 1522 edition of the Luther Bible, he wrote, ‘My mind cannot reconcile itself to this book and for me it is reason enough not to value his mind when I see that Christ is neither taught nor recognised in this work.’Footnote ⁷ Still, by the time of the 1530 preface to the same book, Luther had changed his mind and, no longer questioning its theology, now raised doubts about its authorship. For he had recognised by then that, if it failed to teach Christ, it had plenty to say about the Antichrist and provided grist for his antipapal mill.

The Antichrist had been identified with the papacy in any number of radical fourteenth- and fifteenth-century commentaries on the Apocalypse. And it was when one of these came to light in Wittenberg in the 1520s, the anonymous Commentarius in Apocalypsin ante centum annos aeditus, that Luther realised that he was not alone in interpreting the papacy to mean the reign of Antichrist and wrote an enthusiastic preface to this effect. The key factor in this commentary was that it not only provided Luther with a schema that enabled him to identify the Antichrist with the papacy (as did Calvin also), but it did so in the context of an interpretative scheme which is the central feature of Protestant hermeneutics on the Apocalypse.

This is that Revelation is not to be read merely or only allegorically or spiritually, but is to be read historically in the broadest sense – as a book about the past, the present and the future. As Luther put it in his 1530 preface, ‘This book contains things that God revealed to John and that John revealed to the Church; it tells us how great are the tribulations that the Church suffered in its early days and suffers now and will suffer at the time of the Antichrist.’Footnote ⁸ And what matters to Luther is that Satan, who has been bound since the early days of the church, is about to be unleashed, that he is about to march across the earth with Gog and Magog (i.e. the Turks), and that the Last Judgement will then follow shortly after. Thus, the Apocalypse becomes a text which, correctly decoded, will enable readers to pinpoint their present in the history of salvation and predict their future.

We see this method at work in the so-called Carion's Chronicle, the second of the contemporary works which Napier explicitly cites in his commentary. And it was probably from this work that Napier derived his theory of the relation of history and prophecy. It was in 1532 that Melancthon revised a draft of a chronicle by the mathematician and astronomer John Carion. It was translated into English in 1550, and it was no doubt in its English form that John Napier was familiar with it. Carion's Chronicle distinguished between two types of history – profane and sacred. Profane history dealt above all with the history of kingdoms and politics, sacred history with the declaration of God's Kingdom. Prophecies, and notably those of Daniel and Revelation, provided the link between them so that a coherent and chronological account of the world could be constructed. That there is a match between the biblical prophecies and the history of kingdoms points to the veracity of scripture. That there is a match between what prophecy said would come to pass and what historically has come to pass guarantees, by virtue of the thus proven veracity of scripture, that there will be a match between what is yet prophesied to come and what will come to pass.

This was exactly the inference which Hume was to question a century and a half later. It was a style of doing history which, along with the history of the church and the history of providence, Francis Bacon recognised fifty years later as one of the three forms of ecclesiastical history, though it was a work ‘which I find deficient, but is to be done with wisdom, sobriety, and reverence, or not at all’.Footnote ¹⁰

In the context of Protestant apocalypticism then, Revelation assumed an importance it had not had previously. As John Bale put in his The Image of Both Churches, ‘Not one necessary point of belief is in all the other Scriptures, that is not here also in one place or another. The very complete sum and whole knitting up is this heavenly book of the universal verities of the bible . . . He that knoweth not this book, knoweth not what the Church is whereof he is a member. For herein is the estate thereof from Christ's ascension to the end of the world.’Footnote ¹¹ With the identification of the papacy with the Antichrist, and the establishment of the principle that the prophecies of the past could be decoded and the future determined (primarily through the decipherment of the books of Revelation and Daniel), the key items of Protestant apocalyptic epistemology were in place.

That the book was about the Pope as Antichrist, and that it was not only about the past but also the future was about all that Protestant commentators were agreed upon. Its form and content undoubtedly rendered it the most obscure of New Testament texts, then and now. John Bale saw the history ‘under pleasant figures and elegant tropes decided’.Footnote ¹² This was a more positive way of describing a book which Arthur Dent found ‘dark and hard to understand’, and Martin Marprelate declared to be ‘in manner riddle like’.Footnote ¹³

Written by a man who calls himself John somewhere in the latter part of the first century ad, it is the only work in the apocalyptic genre in the Christian canon. After an introduction and letters to the seven churches, the apocalyptic part of the book begins with a vision of heaven (Rev. 4–5), following upon which are two series of visions of the future, that of the seven seals and, under the seventh of these, the seven trumpets (Rev. 6–11), and then that of the woman and her child (Rev. 12), the two beasts (Rev. 13), the bowls and seven last plagues (Rev. 15–16). The last judgement is given in a series of images of the scarlet woman, doom of Babylon, Armageddon (Rev. 17–19) and then the end – the last apostasy, resurrection and judgement (Rev. 20), followed by the new heavens and the new earth (Rev. 21). The symbolic numbers that dominate the book are ‘seven’ (the spirits, seals, trumpets, bowls, heads of beasts), ‘ten’ (horns), ‘four’ (living creatures, corners of earth, winds), three and a half years, 42 months, time, times and a half a time, 1260 days, etc.

The variety in readings are the consequence of the need to make a series of key hermeneutic decisions about the following: the internal relations between the various visions and episodes in the text, the interplay of history and allegory, the identification of the various characters in the text, the relationship of visions to history, the meaning and time of the 1,000-year binding of Satan, the meaning of the first and second resurrections, the relation in the text between the first and second advents of Christ, the meaning of the temporal symbols and their relation to historical time.

In the main, two forms of reading have dominated the Apocalypse, one derived primarily from Augustine (the spiritual reading), the other from Irenaeus (the millenarian or chiliastic reading). And it has been cogently suggested by Rodney L. Petersen that one way of reading medieval European history is to find it rent by two competing interpretations of history, both taking their guidelines from Revelation. The first of these is the spiritual reading of Revelation by the fourth-century Donatist Tyconius, which was incorporated into Augustine's reading of Revelation, and aligned with Augustine's larger conception of history in the City of God. This elaborated a progressive historical vision that found a certain resolution in a present or sixth age of the church that followed upon earlier periods marked by the Old Testament inaugurated by the coming of Christ and believed to last for a symbolic 1,000 years. As Petersen puts it,

The other line of interpretation, deriving from Irenaeus but to be found in Tertullian, Victorinus, Lactantius and finally in Joachim of Fiore, read Revelation as a progression of symbols by which the progress of the church, from the present to a millennial age on earth when Christ would rule, could be marked. In this tradition, the primary apocalyptic images of the second coming of Christ – the general resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgement were interwoven with a second set of images – the Antichrist, the appearance of Adventual prophets and a first resurrection in distinction from a second and general resurrection. On the whole, Protestant readings of Revelation can take any form across the spectrum from a modified Augustinianism to a thoroughgoing chiliastic reading, and generally therefore, from a socially conservative to a socially radical position. Napier's eschatology is, as we will see, a modified Augustinianism focused on the further establishment and consolidation of the Reformed Church of Scotland as a necessary prerequisite to the second coming of Christ.

Napier's interest in the Apocalypse was stimulated during his time at St Salvator's College in St Andrews which he began attending in 1563. The University was still theologically divided, although it had been three years since the parliamentary establishment of Reformed doctrines. According to the biographer of Andrew Melville, the Scottish reformer who was there at the same time as Napier, the students were exercised once a week in theological disputes. ‘The disputants’, wrote Andrew M'Crie, ‘were exhorted to avoid the altercation usually practiced in the schools, and not to bite and devour one another like dogs; but to behave as men desirous of mutual instruction, and as the servants of Christ, who ought not to strive, but to be gentle to all.’Footnote ¹⁵ His appetite for theology may have been whetted in such debates, particularly with a papist schoolfriend, but his interest in the Apocalypse was heightened by the sermons of Christopher Goodman, one of John Knox's colleagues in exile who had returned from Geneva to take up the position of minister in St Andrews in 1560. In 1593, Napier, reflecting on the dangers of Popery, declared:

We know nothing of Napier's education after he left St Andrews without having completed his studies there. Nor do we know at what point he may have acquired his knowledge of mathematics. What we do know is that at some point in his education, whether at St Andrews, or in a French or Dutch University, he was influenced by the work of Peter Ramus. The influence of Ramus on the work of Napier should not be over-emphasised. Napier nowhere refers to Ramus in his work, and what influence there is can only be inferred indirectly. Moreover, the influence of Ramism in England in general has been much over-emphasised, in part, as Mordechai Feingold has recently argued, the consequence of the failure to define Ramism.Footnote ¹⁷ What influence there was in Britain was only ‘low grade’. English Ramism manifested itself almost exclusively in terms of form rather than content, and notably, in the use of diagrams and charts. The use of these formal aspects of Ramus by Napier gave him the opportunity to give his work on the Apocalypse an air of non-partisan scholarly neutrality. That he was appropriating the scholarly work of a Protestant martyred in the St Batholomew's Day Massacre in 1572 would have been no hindrance to it, indeed may well have significantly contributed to its reception overseas. The Ramist apparatus is apparent in a number of related aspects of the form of the work.

The first is that the commentary proper on the revelation is preceded by an introduction consisting of thirty-six propositions, as Napier puts it ‘as neere the analytick or demonstratiue maner, as the phrase and nature of holy scriptures’.Footnote ¹⁸ These are intended to persuade the ‘naturalists’, and by this we may take him to mean those who deny the possibility of revealed truth, ‘of whome happily, God may either make true spiritual professors, or at the least, hereby bridle their opprobrious mouthes from calumniating the vndoubted trueth, when they see the naturall coherence of Gods mysteries so maruelously reuealing one another’.Footnote ¹⁹ And in theory at least, the propositions are ordered so that ‘euery proposition may be proued by the former proposition’.Footnote ²⁰ The second is the provision of two tables, the one explanatory of the first treatise with its thirty-six propositions, the second explanatory of the contents of the Apocalypse. The third, perhaps, resides in Napier's determination to use sources which are acceptable to all, Protestants and Catholics:

The analysis of the Apocalypse was completed then in this first treatise consisting of the elaboration and exposition of thirty-six propositions, derived the one from the other. According to Napier, this first treatise is ‘the first introduction and reasoning, for investigation of the true sense of euery cheife Theological tearme and date contained in the Reuelation, whereby, not onely is it opened, explained and interpreted, but also that same explanation and interpretation is proued, confirmed and demonstrated, by euident proofe and coherence of scriptures, agreeable with the euent of histories’.Footnote ²² The second treatise consisted of the commentary proper, with the application to the text of the propositions of the first. It was divided into either two columns (text and paraphrase) or, when prophetical, three columns (text, paraphrase and historical), with each chapter followed by Notes, Reasons and Amplifications.

The immediate reason for the publication of the work, in a hurry and in English rather than the Latin originally planned, was the so-called affair of the Spanish blanks in 1592, when the discovery of letters and blank documents showed that several Catholic nobles (among them Napier's father-in-law), were conspiring with Spain to overthrow James VI. Although Napier himself looks back to 1588 and the Armada as the decisive factor, he was no doubt keen to indicate that, unlike his wife's father, he was loyal to his Protestant ruler. The work was at any rate dedicated to James (although for reasons unclear to me, this dedication drops out of the 1611 edition).Footnote ²³ And the epistle dedicatory, reading Revelation as a book about Kingdoms for Kings, makes no bones about the fact that the king needs to clear his own house, family and court of all those not passionately of the Protestant persuasion:

Napier of course knew full well that James had (notionally anyway) already done his own bit of personal purging in his work on the Apocalypse, Ane fruitfull Meditatioun on Rev. 20:7–10 in 1588, and had claimed a divine right authoritatively to interpret the text. And Napier knew also that the King would be sympathetic to his reading of it. For James, like other Protestant readers, saw Revelation as ‘a speciall cannon against the Hereticall wall of our common aduersaries the Papists’.Footnote ²⁵ So Napier's work was not an injunction to passively await the end, imminent as that might be, but an incitement to Christian kings to continue the work of the Reformers and purge the world of Antichrist.

Dedicated to the King it might have been, and intended for his edification, but its publication in English and its preface ‘To the Godly and Christian Reader’ make it clear that Napier had a wider audience in mind. Napier admits to his audience the difficulties of understanding the book, ‘the more subtily I searched’, he says, ‘the more darknes I found’.Footnote ²⁶ But it is also a recognition of the possibility of multiple and equally contentious readings – a possibility as quickly denied as recognised. For his reading of the text, he immodestly claimed, came from divine inspiration. It pleased God, he declares, ‘to giue me that grace, to espy in short time, that woonderful ouerture which in long time before I could not consider: So that I began then to take up matters by their right beginning, and by most easie grounds, And to prosecute out the rest by their coherence in order, as is here set downe, to the full resolution of all the former doubts’Footnote ²⁷ (ibid., fo. A.6^r). So, in spite of the fact that he submits his interpretation ‘to the gentil correction of every wise and discreete person’, there can be little doubt that he believes that he has both Reason and Revelation on his side.

The thirty-six propositions of the first treatise may be divided into three kinds – those which formally establish mathematical relations (propositions 1, 5, 9, 13, 15, 16), those which establish the structure of the text (propositions 2, 11, 33) and those which relate these to persons or events, or processes in history (the remainder).

Proposition 1 quite simply enables us to make a move from prophecies about days, weeks, years and times into years: ‘In propheticall dates of daies, weekes, moneths, and yeares, euerie common propheticall day is taken for a year’.Footnote ²⁸ So a prophetical day is a year, a week seven years, a month thirty years (because the Greek and Hebrew calendars have thirty days) and consequently a prophetical year is 360 years. The second important move in Napier's biblical mathematics occurs in proposition 15. This is to the effect that the 42 months, 1,260 prophetical days, three great days and a half, and times, times, and half a time mentioned in the books of Daniel and Revelation are all one time. This is supplemented by proposition 16 which is to the effect that all of these times signify 1,260 years.

Proposition 5, 9 and 13 relate to the mathematics of particular subsections of the text – more specifically, that the time of each trumpet or vial is 245 years (with a whole set of arguments as to why 245 years is half a prophetical jubilee or 490 years), that each seal lasts seven years, and that each of the first three thundering angels lasts a jubilee of 49 years, the last four angels appearing all at once, and the fourth angel being Christ returning.

Of those propositions which relate to the structure of the text, the key proposition is the second: ‘The seven Trumpets of the 8. and 9. chapters, and the seuen vials of the 16. Chapter are all one.’Footnote ²⁹ With this in place, we can now get a sense of the span of years which Revelation covers. These are six seals by seven years (for the first trumpet is sounded and the first vial poured out at the opening of the seventh seal) plus six trumpets or vials by 245 years (for the end will come at the sounding of the seventh trumpet), including the appearance of the first three thundering angels for forty-nine years each, a grand total of 1,512 years.

With the mathematical principles in place, and the structure of the text etched in, including the span of years covered by the text, Napier can now make his crucial move – the linking of the text to a historical event. First link to history, and then move backwards and forwards to fill in the details. This he does in the third proposition which is based on the fifth trumpet of Rev. 9:1–3: ‘And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.’ So proposition 3, according to Napier, informs us that the star that fell from heaven was Muhammad the Prophet, that the locusts were the Turks and that the verses refer to the victory of the Muslims in ad 1051 under the rule of someone whom Napier (and John Foxe in his Actes and Monuments) calls Zadok and we would identify as Toghril Beg, the founder of the dynasty of the Seljuq Turks.

With this date fixed, Napier is now able to move forwards and backwards by periods of 245 years linking up the prophecies of the trumpets and the vials with historical events. Thus we can move forward to 1296 to the foundation of the Ottoman Empire (the sixth trumpet), thence to the Reformation, and the fall of the Kingdom of Antichrist and all other profane kingdoms in 1541: ‘And this can no other wayes come to passe, but by the preaching of the Euangell, which was of newe opened vp, and preached at the comming of the first Angell.’Footnote ³⁰ Here, there is no sense of doom at the approaching Apocalypse. On the contrary, there is a strong sense of triumphant apocalypticism. As Petersen remarks, ‘This apocalyptic confidence seen in Foxe and now Napier would mark British Protestantism well into the nineteenth century.’Footnote ³¹

And from the date 1251, Napier can move backwards too: to 806 when Charlemagne was made Emperor, to 561 and the destruction of Rome by Totila, to 316 and Constantine's translation of the seat of Empire from Rome to Constantinople, and finally to 71 and the destruction of Jerusalem. According to the internal structure of the book as analysed by Napier, the opening of the seventh seal which coincides with the first trumpet was also ad 71. Working our way back through seven years per seal, we come to the opening of the first seal in ad 29, the year in which Christ's ministry began and his baptism occurred.

According to Napier's mathematics, if the sixth trumpet sounded and the last vial was poured out in 1541, we can expect the second coming of Christ 245 years from then, namely in 1786, and this is what proposition 11 claims. Or at least, this is a terminus ad quem. For only three propositions later we have a different calculation resulting in the world's coming to an end somewhere between 1688 and 1700. The relevant calculations are prefaced by a reference to the so-called Prophecy of Elias. This was a rabbinic calculation of the length of the world, which utilised a day-millennium formula to prophesy that the world would last 6,000 years, the equivalent number in millennia it took to create it in days. In the rabbinic context, it entailed 2000 years without the law, 2000 under the law and 2000 years of the Messiah.

This was a claim eagerly seized upon within the Christian context. And Napier would have known it from its inclusion in Carion's Chronicle and perhaps too from its occurrence in the so-called Complaynt of Scotland in 1549. Granting that he took the creation of the world to have been somewhere around 4,000 bc (as most did),Footnote ³² that the end of the world may have been thus expected around ad 2000 was little help to his cause. This was an Apocalypse too far in the future to engage the present. What was helpful though was that both the rabbinic and the Christian exegesis on this was that, granting the sinfulness of us all, the times would be shortened. And with this in mind, he invoked Daniel 12:11–12: ‘And from the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination that maketh desolate set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days. Blessed is he that waiteth, and cometh to the thousand three hundred and five and thirty days.’ The setting up of the ‘abomination of desolation’ he places in the year 365, the year in which Julian allowed the rebuilding of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. On this calculation, 1700 would be ‘the end of all wonders’.Footnote ³³ By a different method, the three thundering angels begin in 1541 for 49 years each, bringing us now to 1688. Another calculation generated the year 1699, this time from a formula applying distances to years. In Revelation 14:20, we read that blood came out of the winepress ‘even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs’:

This variation in dates is surprising. For one might expect a high degree of accuracy in someone so mathematically inclined and in something so important as the dating of the Apocalypse itself. But this uncertainty reinforces the fact that, in ‘middle future’ apocalypticism, it is the meaning of the present and the activities required in it that matter, more than the precise date of the end in the middle future.

The coincidence of the sounding of the seventh trumpet and the pouring out of the seventh vial with the Reformation is further reinforced by the interpretation of the Antichrist. The Pope is identical with the Antichrist who will reign for 1,260 years beginning in the year 300 at the earliest or 316 at the latest, these years being those in which the Church becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire and the power of the papacy is established. It is not uninteresting that amongst Protestants of the period the declaration of Christianity as official is not seen as a good thing. Pure Christianity, especially among English Protestants, was often seen in pre-Constantinian Christianity – and pre-Council of Nicea too – hence the tendency for anti-Trinitarianism among English Protestants. In this calculation, the reign of Antichrist is thus ending around 1560 (the year in which, not coincidentally we might say, Scotland declares itself ‘Reformed’) and 1576.

A ‘simple’ reading of Revelation 20 would suggest that, at the Apocalypse proper, Christ would return and Satan would be bound for 1,000 years. There would then be a first resurrection, Christ would reign with those resurrected for 1,000 years, and a final resurrection and judgement would occur 1,000 years later. In short, Revelation is conducive to a ‘millenarian’ reading. This was the standard ‘millenarian’ position in early modern Europe. It is the position known these days as pre-millennialism according to which Christ comes at the beginning of the millennium as compared to post-millennialism in which he comes at its end (I am not aware of any early modern representatives).

Augustine had read Revelation against the grain in at least two ways. First, he had argued that the binding of Satan would not occur at the second advent but had already occurred at the first. And thus Satan's loosing would occur around ad 1000. But second, he had suggested that the length of years should not be taken too literally, but rather figuratively. Augustine in short, was more concerned with the eternal conflict between world and church rather than the temporal outcomes of it.

In general we can say that millenarianism proper was typical of the radical wing of the Reformation in Europe in the sixteenth century and dominant in the English Revolution in the mid-seventeenth century, not least as a result of the commentary on Revelation by Joseph Mede. But a revised Augustinianism was more typical of sixteenth-century European Lutheran, Calvinist and Zwinglian commentators, and this is the tradition that we find picked up in sixteenth-century England, notably by John Foxe and then by John Napier.Footnote ³⁵ In the case of Napier and Foxe, however, the Augustine position is modified in two ways. First, a strictly historical reading of the Apocalypse is taken as the dominant one. Second, it reads the binding of Satan as having occurred, not at the time of Christ but at the time of the rise of Antichrist, around 300, that period when Christianity assumed its position as the religion of the Roman Empire. So God was seen as cleverly balancing, as it were, the amount of evil in the world by binding Satan, while simultaneously allowing the reign of Antichrist in the persons of the Popes. Antichrist was then loosed around 1300 and thus the stirring up of the armies of Gog and Magog – the ‘Papistical and Mahometicke’ armies at that time.

In Napier's eyes, he was living in the good times. The complete time for revelation and knowledge had now come, he wrote.Footnote ³⁶ He was living in the last days, with the end perhaps only a hundred years away. During the seventh age, in which he lived, all would be revealed. There was in Napier's reading of Revelation no sense that the world needed to be turned upside down. On the contrary, as his commentary showed, God was working his purposes out, the reign of Antichrist was over, the true church in a true society could now come to the fore. This is a vision of hope rather than doom. And it may be a typically Calvinist apocalyptic – the elect will be alright in the end.

The end was close – knowledge, wisdom and truth would increase, but it was not so close that we should all down tools and passively await it, nor do anything actively to hasten its time by engaging in social upheaval. But, before the end, the reformation must spread. ‘Middle future’ apocalypticism was socially conservative but it was socially active. To spread the Gospel, to bring in Reformed religion, to fight the Antichrist was an eschatological obligation. And it was one laid on both King and people.