Beatus lingers with lyric ardor, in a dazzling display of high medieval rhetoric, over the phrase “ab eo qui est, et qui erat, et qui venturus est” (“from Him who is, and who was, and who is to come”) from which, with something of a non sequitur, he draws the proof of the divinity of Christ. But what fascinates him most is that Christ is coming as judge (venturus ad iudicandum)—and when he arrives at chapter 20 of the Apocalypse, in other words at the ambiguous prophecy of the millennium, he goes so far as to open with an invocation imploring God not to let him fall into error. He is aware that he is dealing with a fundamental issue.
The text of John tells him first of all that the angel casts the Devil into the abyss “till the thousand years should be fulfilled” (Apoc. 20:3). Then it says that “the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast … lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years” (20:4). John goes on to specify that this reign is the “first resurrection,” which is baptism, and concludes: “but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years” (20:6). Beatus admits that these 1,000 years are to be calculated from the passion of Our Lord and are therefore those of the earthly reign of the Church, which had been the opinion of Augustine. He repeats several times that the millennium spoken of, both for the Devil and the blessed, is the one in which he and his readers are living: “they will reign with the Lord now and in the future … when speaking of 1,000 years he meant of this world.…” And so on and so forth.
In order that there should be no misunderstanding, he conducts a subtle analysis of the verb tenses, since John says at a certain point that the blessed “have reigned” for 1,000 years, and elsewhere that they “will reign for a thousand years.” Beatus, however, knows how to handle Holy Scripture and reminds us that the prophets, speaking of what will happen to Christ, often use the past perfect tense (“et diviserunt vestimenta mea” [“they parted my garments among them”]) when they are obviously talking about something that is destined to happen in the future. Secondly, he states more than once that the use of 1,000 years is certainly an example of synecdoche in the manner of Tyconius, and probably means a longer period of time, at the same time he makes it quite clear that, though it may be a perfect number that indicates a longer period, 1,000 is still a number that implies closure and does not allude to the “perpetuum saeculum” or eternity.
Therefore, Beatus insists, John is speaking of the current millennium and the end of this world. Psychologically speaking, Beatus was, as Camón Aznar describes him, an author obsessed with the millennium and at the same time a rationalist, in the sense that he wanted at all costs to reduce the visionary suggestions of his favorite text to a series of comprehensible messages. And someone obsessed with the millennium is not so much interested in the fact that we are living it as that it is approaching its end.
Augustine, seemingly irritated by the literalist myopia with which the fanatics of the coming millennium read chapter 20 (he declares that many have reduced this passage to a kind of ridiculous fable [De Civitate Dei XX, 7]), found an elegant solution to the problem: what we are dealing with is a figurative expression that indicates the period in which the Church Militant will live in this world (he avoided prophesies as to how long this might be). Beatus, instead, feels obliged to compel John’s text to express this concept literally in every word, every verb ending, every adverb. It is not that he wants to be right at all costs, he just wants the text to be manifestissime (most manifestly) transparent.
Thus, readers of Beatus’s text found themselves faced with the end of the millennium as an incontrovertible historical event, which helps explain why his text had such a wide circulation, and why the better part of the illuminations that accompany it were made between the beginning and the end of the tenth century, in other words, when the first millennium was drawing to a close.11
Just how profound was Beatus’s visionary immersion in his play of verbal echoes (biblical citations, patristic influences, captious disputations) can be seen from the energetic fashion in which he inveighs against the dangerous heretics who held that the millennium was to be dated from the Incarnation onward, whereas for him there was no doubt that it had to be calculated starting from the Passion. But it is even clearer in the pages he devotes to the Antichrist.
Beatus is obsessed with the idea of the Antichrist, as is apparent from the very start (Commentarius I, S 44, B 73): “Incipit tractatus de Apocalypsin Iohannis in explanatione sua a multis doctoribus et probatissimis viris illustribus, diverso quidem stilo, sed non diversa fide interpretata, ubi de Cristo et ecclesia et de antichristo et eius signis primissime recognoscas” (“Here begins the treatise on the Apocalypse of John, which in the commentaries of many doctors and highly esteemed famous men has been interpreted in different ways, but not with different faith, in which what concerns Christ and his church and what concerns the Antichrist and his signs can be examined at the highest level”). The Apocalypse is a treatise on the Antichrist and how to recognize him.
On this subject Beatus did not only have the suggestions of the Apocalypse to go on. Quite apart from the readings in this sense of certain Old Testament prophets, the Gospels too spoke of the Antichrist, as did the First Epistle of Saint John.12 Patristic literature also frequently referred to the Antichrist (we have only to think of the De Antechristo of Hippolytus in the third century), to say nothing of other more or less spurious texts.13 But Beatus was not content with what he found already available. He plunges first of all into an incredible Kabbalistic speculation, teasing out the numerical hints of John’s text to provide a mathematical matrix by means of which to identify the name of the coming Antichrist.
Secondly, once he has declared that the Antichrist is bound to come, that he will destroy the community of the faithful, that the saints will need all of their spirit of martyrdom and perseverance to resist him, he launches into a prolonged diatribe to demonstrate that the Antichrist will seek to restore the Judaic law and will definitely be a Jew, taking up a theme common to most previous authors of apocalyptic treatises, but blithely forgetting that in his day his own country has fallen prey to a flesh-and-blood Antichrist in the person of the Muslim invader. It is not clear whether he was even aware of it (because after all the kingdom of Asturias where Beatus was active fell within the Frankish orbit) or whether he is resorting to some kind of code, since his Antichrist will not only impose circumcision but will have the added characteristic of not drinking wine, which would seem to allude to the Muslims, were it not for the fact that he will have the further distinction of not appreciating female embraces (something about which the Muslims might have begged to differ). What is more, the Antichrist—and this trait would not fit either the Muslims or the Jews—though himself impurissimus, will seduce the people by preaching, sobriety, and chastity. Here Beatus may be alluding to some rigoristic heresy, maybe one no longer even active in his own day, but combated in one of his sources.
Beatus’s readers, however, did not stop to worry about the coherence of his narrative. They wanted to hear about the Antichrist. The fact is that the fortune of a text may be explained by something outside the text. After the year 1000 the medieval reader will develop a taste for tales of war, love, and magic, but in Beatus’s day the Song of Songs couldn’t hold a candle to the Apocalypse.
This is why the treatise of Adso of Montier-en-Der, De ortu et tempore Antichristi (PL 101, 1289–1293), came out in the tenth century, probably under Beatus’s influence. Adso claims that the Antichrist will be born of the Jewish people and, born from the union of a father and a mother like the rest of mankind, and not, as some would have it, from a virgin, he will be entirely conceived in sin. From his first conception, the Devil will enter his mother’s womb, he will be nourished in the womb by virtue of the Devil, and the power of the Devil will be always with him. And, as the Holy Spirit descended into the womb of the mother of Jesus Christ and filled it with his virtue, so the Devil will enter into the mother of the Antichrist and will fill her, surround her, and make her his own, possessing her within and without, so that, thanks to the cooperation of the Devil, she will conceive him in congress with a man, and he who will be born shall be wholly evil, iniquitous, and damned. And for this reason he
