Happy New Year all! I deliberately read a short book to 'get one done' which is not really in the spirit of the thread, is it? But it's something I've wanted to read for a while.
- The Revelation of St John the Divine
The vision/prophecy of a saint of the Christian church, the final book of the Christian Bible.
I was interested to see whether it really seemed like a psychotic vision, as some say; I haven't experienced psychosis myself but have lived with someone who had psychotic episodes.
I wasn't sure about that, in the end. I'm not sure it had that much value. What I felt about it was that it had beautiful and extraordinary images in it, which would work very well as a kind of performance art, by a good preacher in front of a packed house, much more than by reading it. It's like the other poetic books of the Bible such as the Song of Solomon as it kind of spirals - multiple repeats of very similar images/events with only small things changed, such as the type of beast, or the action of an angel. I was also really struck by the number of phrases and images in it that are woven really deeply into Christian commentary and thinking. And the maleness of it; there are two females/cities in it, Babylon the Mother of Harlots and Jerusalem the Bride of Christ. There is also a lot of hating of heresies, and of specifying which of the 7 churches of Asia is doing things right (soz, Laodiceans, you're just a bit lazy and nice).
Ultimately, for an atheist like me who can't bear any more even the possibility of God, this is only going to make me feel more like that. On one level it's simply insane. But then, it hangs together too well to be straightforwardly psychotic. More, perhaps, like a badge of honour; if you can study this, treat it seriously and make sense of it, you ascend to the next level of Christian thought.