The Language of Likeness in the Apocalypse

Extract

Sometime around the middle of the third century Dionysius of Alexandria gave his views on the Apocalypse of John. He said

Some indeed of those before our time rejected and altogether impugned the book, examining it chapter by chapter and declaring it to be unintelligible, and illogical, and its title false.

For they say that it is not John’s, no, nor yet an apocalypse (unveiling), since it is veiled by its great thick curtain of unintelligibility....

Many readers have no doubt entertained such views. Dionysius was not inclined to endorse them. He would not, he said, reject a book so highly thought of by many of his co-religionists. But he doesn’t find it any more intelligible for all that. He goes on to say

... but, reckoning that my perception is inadequate to form an opinion concerning it, I hold that the interpretation of each several passage is in some way hidden and more wonderful. For even though I do not understand it, yet I suspect that some deeper meaning underlies the words.

The book must be meaningful, then, because he doesn’t understand it That curious position may actually provide a clue to the way the book works. What the seer saw is spectacular. But more interesting is how he saw it—or rather how he says he saw it, in his book of the vision. The significance of Revelation lies, to a considerable extent, in how the seer wrote it.