The Coming of the Judge

But in case anyone should think this incredible, I will show how it is going to come about. First the empire will grow larger, and the supreme power, spread among many holders and cut into pieces, will be weakened. Then civil quarrels will be sown without a break, and there will be no rest from deadly wars until ten kings rise at the same moment, who will divide the world between them — not to govern it but to eat it up. They will build their armies up to an enormous size, and give up the working of the fields, which is where ruin and disaster begin; and they will lay waste, break in pieces, and consume everything. [a]

Then all at once a most powerful enemy will rise against them from the farthest edge of the northern country. He will destroy three of that number, the three who by then hold Asia; the rest will take him into alliance, and he will be made prince over all of them. He will grind the world down with a rule no one can bear. He will mix together the things of God and the things of men. He will contrive things too foul to speak of, and hateful. He will turn new schemes over in his mind so as to fasten the government on himself. He will change the laws and set up his own. He will defile, plunder, rob, and kill. And at last the name will be changed and the seat of government moved, and confusion and the ruin of the human race will follow. Then a hateful and disgusting time will truly have come, when life is a pleasure to no one alive.

Cities will be thrown down and destroyed, and not only by fire and the sword, but by earthquakes that never stop and by floods of water, by outbreaks of disease and famine after famine. The air will be tainted and turn foul and pestilent — now with rains out of season, now with barren drought, now with cold, now with excessive heat. The ground will not give a man its fruit: no field, no tree, no vine will produce anything. After they have raised the highest hopes in the blossom, they will fail at the fruit. Springs will dry up along with the rivers, so that there is not enough to drink, and waters will be turned into blood or into bitterness. Because of all this the animals will die off on the land, the birds in the air, and the fish in the sea.

Astonishing portents in the sky, too, will confound men’s minds with the greatest terrors: the trailing of comets, the darkening of the sun, the color of the moon, the sliding of falling stars. And these things will not happen in the usual way. Stars will suddenly appear that no eye has seen or known. The sun will be darkened without a break, so that there is hardly any telling night from day. The moon will fail, and not for three hours only: covered over with unbroken blood, it will move in ways it has never moved, so that no one will find it easy to work out the courses of the heavenly bodies or the system of the seasons. There will be summer in the winter, or winter in the summer. Then the year will be shortened, the month cut down, and the day squeezed into a short space; and stars will fall in great numbers, so that the whole sky will look dark, with no lights in it. The highest mountains will fall too, and be leveled with the plains, and the sea will be made unfit for sailing.

And so that nothing may be missing from the evils of men and of the earth, the trumpet will be heard from heaven — which the Sibyl foretells like this:

And then everyone will tremble and shake at that mournful sound. But then, through God’s anger against men who have not known righteousness, the sword and fire, famine and disease will reign, and above all a fear that never lifts. Then they will call on God, and he will not hear them. Death will be longed for, and it will not come. Not even night will give their fear any rest; sleep will not come near their eyes; dread and lying awake will eat away at men’s souls. They will weep and mourn and grind their teeth. They will congratulate the dead and pity the living. Through these and many other evils the earth will be left desolate, and the world disfigured and deserted — which the Sibyl’s verses put like this:

For the human race will be so used up that hardly a tenth part of mankind will be left, and where a thousand had gone out, hardly a hundred will go out. Of the worshippers of God as well, two parts will die; and the third part, the part that has been tested and proved, will remain.

But I will set out more plainly how this happens. When the close of the times draws near, a great prophet will be sent from God to turn men to the knowledge of God, and he will be given the power of doing wonderful things. Wherever men will not listen to him, he will shut up the sky and make it hold back its rain; he will turn their water into blood and torment them with thirst and hunger; and if anyone tries to injure him, fire will come out of his mouth and burn that man up. By these portents and powers he will turn many to the worship of God. [h]

And when his work is finished, another king will rise out of Syria, born from an evil spirit, the overthrower and destroyer of the human race, who will destroy what is left over from the earlier evil, and himself along with it. He will fight against the prophet of God, and beat him, and kill him, and leave him lying unburied; but after the third day the prophet will come back to life, and while everyone looks on and wonders he will be caught up into heaven. But that king will not only be utterly disgraceful in himself; he will also be a prophet of lies. He will set himself up as God and call himself God, and give orders that he be worshipped as the Son of God; and power will be given him to do signs and wonders, so that the sight of them may lure men into adoring him. He will command fire to come down from heaven, and the sun to stand still and leave its course, and an image to speak; and these things will be done at his word — and by such miracles even many of the wise will be lured after him. Then he will attempt to destroy the temple of God and to persecute the righteous people; and there will be distress and crushing such as there has never been since the beginning of the world.

All who believe him and attach themselves to him will be marked by him, as sheep are marked; and those who refuse his mark will either escape into the mountains, or be seized and killed with carefully devised tortures. He will also wrap righteous men up in the books of the prophets and so burn them; and power will be given him to lay the whole earth waste for forty-two months. That will be the time when righteousness is thrown out and innocence is hated, when the wicked prey on the good as though on enemies; no law, no order, no army discipline will be kept; no one will respect gray hair or recognize what he owes his own family, or pity a woman or a small child; everything will be confounded and mixed together against what is right and against the laws of nature. So the earth will be laid waste as though by one great robbery.

When all this has happened, the righteous and the followers of truth will separate themselves from the wicked and escape into empty country. And when the godless king hears of it, he will be inflamed with anger and come with a great army, and bringing all his forces up he will surround the whole mountain where the righteous are, so as to seize them. But when they see themselves shut in on every side and besieged, they will call on God with a loud voice and beg for help from heaven; and God will hear them and send a great king from heaven to rescue them and set them free, and to destroy all the wicked with fire and the sword.

That all this will happen just so has been announced by every one of the prophets, out of God’s own inspiration, and by the soothsayers too, at the prompting of the demons. For Hystaspes, whom I named earlier, after describing the wickedness of this last age, says that the devout and faithful will separate themselves from the wicked and stretch out their hands to heaven with weeping and mourning, begging Jupiter for protection; and that Jupiter will look down at the earth and hear the voices of men, and will destroy the wicked. All of it is true except one thing — that he credited to Jupiter what God will do. And one thing was also kept out of his account, and not without a fraud on the demons’ part: that the Son of God would then be sent, who would destroy all the wicked and set the devout free. [m]

Hermes, however, did not hide it. In the book called the Complete Treatise, after listing the evils we have been speaking of, he added this: “But when these things have so come about, then he who is Lord and Father and God, the Creator of the first and one God, looking at what was being done, and setting against the disorder his own will, that is, his goodness — calling back what has wandered and cleansing away the wickedness, partly flooding it with a great deal of water, partly burning it out with the swiftest fire, and at times pressing it hard with wars and plagues — brought his world back to its ancient state and restored it.”

The Sibyls also show that it could not be otherwise: that the Son of God would be sent by his supreme Father to set the righteous free from the hands of the wicked, and to destroy the unrighteous along with their cruel tyrants. One of them wrote this:

And another Sibyl:

And again another:

So the world will be crushed; and since men’s own resources will not be enough to overthrow a tyranny of such enormous strength — it will bear down on the captured world with great armies of brigands — a disaster that size will need help from heaven. And so God, roused both by a danger that could go either way and by the wretched crying of the righteous, will send a deliverer at once. Then the middle of the sky will be laid open in the dead darkness of the night, so that the light of the descending God may be seen over the whole world like lightning. The Sibyl spoke of it in these words: [p]

This is the night we keep with a watch, because our King and God is coming. That night carries two meanings, since in it he received life again when he had suffered, and in it he is going to receive the kingdom of the world. For he is the Deliverer and the Judge and the Avenger and the King and God, the one we call Christ; and before he comes down he will give this sign. A sword will suddenly fall from heaven, so that the righteous may know that the commander of the holy war is about to descend. He will come down with a company of angels to the middle of the earth, and an unquenchable fire will go ahead of him; and the power of the angels will hand over into the hands of the righteous that crowd which has surrounded the mountain, and they will be killed from mid-morning until evening, and blood will run like a torrent. With all his forces destroyed, the wicked one alone will get away, and his power will die out of him.

Now this is the one called Antichrist, though he will falsely call himself Christ. He will fight against the truth, and be beaten, and run; and he will start the war again and again, and be beaten again and again, until in the fourth battle, with all the wicked killed, subdued and taken, he pays the penalty for his crimes at last. But the other princes and tyrants who have harried the world will be led in chains to the king along with him; and he will rebuke them and reprove them and throw their crimes in their faces, and condemn them, and hand them over to the tortures they have earned. So, with wickedness stamped out and godlessness put down, the world will be at rest — the world that endured a dreadful slavery, subject to error and wickedness for so many ages. Gods made by hand will no longer be worshipped: the images will be dragged out of their temples and off their couches and given to the fire and burned, together with their marvelous gifts. The Sibyl announced that this too would happen, agreeing with the prophets:

The Erythraean Sibyl made the same promise:

After this the lower regions will be opened, and the dead will rise again, and the same King and God will pass judgment on them — the one to whom the supreme Father will give the great power both of judging and of reigning. About this judgment and this reign it stands in the Erythraean Sibyl like this: [t]

Then in another:

And in another place in the same one:

Not all men, however, will be judged by God then, but only those who have been trained in the religion of God. Those who have not known God cannot have a sentence passed acquitting them, and so they are judged and condemned already, since the holy Scriptures testify that the wicked will not rise to judgment. So it is those who have known God who will be judged, and their deeds — that is, their evil works — will be set against their good ones and weighed, so that if the good and just ones are more and heavier, they may be given a life of blessedness, but if the evil ones outweigh them, they may be condemned to punishment.

Here perhaps someone will say: if the soul is immortal, how can it be described as able to suffer, and as feeling punishment? For if it is punished as it deserves, plainly it will feel pain, and even death. And if it is not liable to death, then not to pain either; and it follows that it cannot suffer at all.

The Stoics answer this question, or argument, like this. Men’s souls go on existing, and are not dissolved into nothing by the coming of death. The souls of those who have been just are pure and beyond suffering and happy, and they return to the heavenly homes they came from, or are carried off to certain happy plains where they may enjoy wonderful pleasures. But the wicked, since they have dirtied themselves with evil passions, have a kind of middle nature, between an immortal and a mortal, and have something of weakness in them from the contagion of the flesh. Enslaved to the body’s desires and cravings, they take on a stain that will not come out, an earthly blot; and when that has soaked all the way in over long stretches of time, the souls are handed over to its nature. So although they cannot be put out altogether, since they are from God, they still become liable to torment through the taint of the body, which, burned into them by their sins, produces the feeling of pain. The poet puts the same thought like this:

These things come near the truth. For the soul, once it has been separated from the body, is, as the same poet says, such as this:

For it is a spirit, and by its very thinness it cannot be perceived by us, who are bodily; but it can be perceived by God, since it belongs to him to be able to do all things.