ABSTRACT
An obvious observation about what is surely the most famous apocalypse of Western culture—the biblical Revelation of Saint John—is that it elaborates the structure of its cataclysm as precisely alphabetic. “I am,” Christ tells us not once but repeatedly in that text, “the alpha and omega” (Rev. 1.8, 21.6, 22.13). The same Christian Bible that has given us a narrative of beginnings now provides us with an apocalyptic narrative of ending, and both of these, it says, are actually the same thing: God. It is worth distinguishing between two ways of reading this alphabetic statement. We might, as some early church fathers did, choose to take this as a linear statement that Christ as God contains the beginning and the end of things—which is to say, that time began at a certain moment (related in Genesis), has proceeded linearly for a certain time, and soon will end. Implicit in this theologically linear conception of history is that Christ is in some sense larger than this progression, that he more than contains it, he is it. 1 Alternatively, we might see this progression in nonlinear terms. Clement of Alexandria’s second-century Stromata (IV:4) glosses the alpha-omega identification as follows: “Christ is the Alpha and the Omega of Whom alone the end becomes beginning, and ends again at the original beginning without any break.” For Clement, Revelation relates not the one-off conclusion to a one-off story, but instead speaks to the larger logic of a cosmos defined by divine Grace (indeed defined as divine Grace) in terms of an endless circulation of alpha to omega and back again. Either way, though—and actually the relationship between these two ways of glossing this famous text is central to what I’m going to argue here—the alphabet is, in some sense, key.
