Revelation, the Apocalypse as Understood by Catholics

 Amici,

With all that is happening, one can be excused for thinking we are living in the End Times. Many are showing a renewed, or first-time, interested into my favorite book in the entire Bible, The Apocalypse, The Book of Revelation. 

Traditionally, or I mean at least since the Protestant Revolution and more specifically since the first half of the nineteenth century, there have been four schools of thought about the prophecies (everything post chapter 4) in this book.

The Futurist school was originally held by the Church Fathers, and it asserts that everything after chapter 4 is to occur in the future, and the Apocalypse is literally an unveiling of that future. The the Historicist school, however, teaches the propheices have happened progressively, i.e., being fulfilled throughout church history, so while Revelation does predice the future, in a way it is essentially fulfilled throughout church history and not some future tribulation. (The later is a popular notion right now, for obvious reasons.)

Perhaps the simplest school, the Preterist, is a theory teaches that the events have passed already, with the prophencies fulfilled in the first century (i.e., the Destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, the dispersion of the Jews, and so on). N.B. Preterist being a fancy word in English for "past tense".

Finally, the fourth general notion is the Idealist school of thought: that the Apocalypse is about a symbolic fight between good and evil, a sort of allegory, and that the Bbook of Revelation should be taken as a purely symbolic explanation of our personal and collective battles raging on the plains of our souls.

It's the Futurist school that discusses and expect the “Great Tribulation” (of various lengths of time, some say for up to seven years) immediately prior to the Second Coming of Christ. This view in Protestant circles is the classically ‘Dispensational’ school, with sub-schools adhereing to "Pre-Trib" notions and others "Post-Trib". (Then, too, there are the Dispensationalists who are "premillennialists", i.e., they assert there will be a future, literal 1,000-year reign of Jesus Christ on Earth, from Revelation 20:6, involving the "new heavens and the new earth" as in Revelation 21. Catholics and the Orthodox are "amill", and one could go on but it is a "rabbit hole" pretty much!)

Not all futurists accept such views, of course, and it is obviously complicated. For example, some argue for "the Rapture" (developed by the Protestant John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) in the first half of the 1900s,  and the famous seals that are opened are then representative of all history. Also believed by many is that that upon Christ’s return the Davidic kingdom of Israel will be established for a period of 1,000 years – the Millennium – through which Our Lord will govern the world, after which follows the final judgement and the eternal state.

Well, amici, obviously, one could go on and on; many angles and schools of thought have cropped up over the centuries. Catholics have traditionally had various views at various times about the Apocalypse (as noted, for example, about the Church Fathers being Futurists, essentially). It depends on the circumstances. Basically, the underlyingi truth of it all is that the Book of Revelation describes (in some detail) the Heavenly Liturgy. 

"Liturgy" is a Greek word that originally meant a citystate-wide party celebrating some deity. The Panathenaea (Ancient Greek: Παναθήναια, "pan-Athenian festival"), was one such. So the early Christians used that word to refer to the religious worship they engaged in. The Liturgy was festive, a worship involving sacrifice (worship always involves sacrifice, and worship of Yahweh always involved blood sacrifice, except the one time in Genesis, when mysterious priest-king Melchizedek offered bread and wine in Genesis 14:18 – this is obviously what is called a "typology" of the Holy Eucharist), and it was free. (In the citystates, the rich had a lottery and whoever "won" it had to pay for the liturgy!) 

So the Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse (the unveiling) is an unveiling to Christians on Earth of the Heavenly Liturgy. Now, the Liturgy on Earth is considered to be directly related to the Eternal Liturgy in Heaven, its mirror, as it were, with only a veil between them, and the Liturgy is "the control room of Heaven" as one author put it. And the past, present, and future are all decided upon via the events of the Heavenly Liturgy. That's because the Heavenly Liturgy is outside of time, outside of our "space-time continuum". And that is the ultimate solution to all the various schools of thought regarding the Apocalypse.

N.B.

And as a side note, this is why traditionally, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was "done up" in so grand a fashion (and still is in the Orthodox World): because it is a literal participation in the glorious, sumptous, miraculous and incredible Litury of Heaven. Turning the Mass into a Protestant service is antithetical to the entire Catholic idea of "Liturgy". 

So that's the background to see the "prophecies" of the Heaven Liturgy, they're not foreshadowing future events, but they are our past, present, and future as seen from Eternity.

An Préachán