We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 December 2009
This article explores the notion of ‘middle future’ apocalypticism through the work of the late sixteenth-century Scottish theologian and the discoverer of logarithms, John Napier. Middle future apocalypticism envisaged the end of the world, not in the immediate or far distant future but (rather like modern environmental apocalypticism) within the next 100–200 years. It enabled the understanding of the present in apocalyptic terms, and set out the requisite conditions, tasks and obligations – social, political and personal – essential for bringing to reality those events which were necessary precursors of the coming of Christ. John Napier's 1593 A Plaine Discovery of the whole Reuelation of Saint Iohn was the first Scottish work on the book of Revelation. Though later to be derided by historians of mathematics and science, in its time, it was highly influential, not only in Scotland and England but also in Protestant communities on the Continent. I explore the complex mathematics which Napier brings to bear and suggest that the middle future apocalypticism of Napier, as demonstrated in the carefully articulated mathematics of history in this work, is both socially conservative and socially active. Living in the seventh age, as Napier believed he did, did not entail either ‘downing tools’ and passively awaiting the end, nor actively hastening the end by radical social upheaval. But it did mean in the here and now fighting the Antichrist of Rome, bringing in Reformed religion and spreading the true Gospel.
1 Hume, David, The History of England (London: T. Cadell, 1792), pp. vii. 44Google Scholar.
2 Wollheim, Richard (ed.), Hume on Religion (London: Collins, 1963), p. 226Google Scholar
3 Quoted by Napier, Mark, Memoirs of John Napier of Merchiston (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood & Cadell, 1834), 181nGoogle Scholar.
4 Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’, in Trevor Aston (ed.), Crisis in Europe, 1560–1660 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), p. 64.
5 Quoted by Mark Napier, Memoirs of John Napier, p. 179.
6 Ibid., p. 178; and see also Firth, Katherine R., The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 37, n. 18Google Scholar.
7 Quoted by Backus, Irena, Reformation Readings of the Apocalypse: Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenburg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 7Google Scholar. I am indebted to Backus for this discussion of Luther.
8 Ibid., p. 9.
9 Carion, Johannes, The thre bokes of cronicles (London: for Gwalter Lynne, 1650)Google Scholar, fo. vir.
10 Johnston, Arthur (ed.), The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), p. 78Google Scholar.
11 Christmas, Henry (ed.), Select Works of John Bale, D.D. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849), p. 252Google Scholar.
12 Ibid., p. 252.
13 Dent, Arthur, The Ruine of Rome (London, 1602)Google Scholar, A.3v; Marprelate, Martin, A Catholic Exposition of the Revelation of St John (London, 1574), p. ivGoogle Scholar. And see Sharpe, Kevin, ‘Reading Revelations: Prophecy, Hermeneutics, and Politics in Early Modern Britain’, in Sharpe, Kevin and Zwicker, Steven N. (eds), Reading, Society, and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 122–63, p. 126CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Petersen, Rodney L., Preaching in the Last Days: The Theme of the Two Witnesses in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 233Google Scholar.
15 Quoted by Mark Napier, Memoirs of John Napier, p. 86.
16 Napier, John, A plaine Discovery of the whole Reuelation of Saint John: set down in two Treatises: the one searching and prouing the true Interpretation thereof: the other applying the same paraphrastically and historically to the text (Edinburgh: Robert Waldegrave, 1593)Google Scholar, A.6r.
17 See Mordechai Feingold, ‘English Ramism: A Reinterpretation’, in Feingold, Mordechai et al. , Influence of Petrus Ramus (Basel: Schwabe & Co., 2001), p. 128Google Scholar.
18 John Napier, A plaine Discovery (1593), A.6r.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., table 1.
21 Ibid., A.7r.
22 Ibid., A.6v.
23 Gribben, Crawford in his The Puritan Millennium: Literature and Theology, 1550–1682 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), p. 41Google Scholar, suggests that James’ support for episcopacy in England led Napier to lose faith in his ideology of the ‘godly prince’.
24 Ibid., A.3v–A.4r.
25 James I, King of England, The Workes of the most high and mightie Prince, James by the Grace of God, King of Great Britaine, France and Ireland (London, 1616), p. 2.
26 John Napier, A plaine Discovery (1593), A.6r.
27 Ibid., p. 1.
28 Ibid., p. 2.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., p. 14.
31 Petersen, Preaching in the Last Days, p. 201.
32 See Patrides, C. A., ‘Renaissance Estimates of the Year of Creation’, Huntington Library Quarterly 26 (1963), pp. 315–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 John Napier, A plaine Discovery (1593), p. 21.
34 Ibid., pp. 21–2.
35 On Foxe, see Olsen, V. Norskov, John Foxe and the Elizabethan Church (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973)Google Scholar.
36 Ibid., p. 143.
