Apocalypse Explained: 1051-1100

*Apocalypse Explained* is an 18th-century theological commentary by Emanuel Swedenborg, working within the Christian mystical/visionary tradition. This excerpt interprets chapters of the Book of Revelation verse by verse, decoding symbolic figures — the scarlet beast, the woman who rides it, the seven heads and ten horns — as referring specifically to the Roman Catholic Church's corruption of scripture and worship. Swedenborg's central argument is that the beast represents the Bible itself: once received and read openly, then systematically suppressed by papal authority and replaced with decrees, masses in an unknown tongue, and saint-worship — all in service of institutional domination. A distinctive and polemical claim runs throughout: the Catholic Church exemplifies a specific form of spiritual "profanation," in which sacred things are instrumentalized as means to worldly power rather than treated as ends, inevitably adulterating truth into falsity and good into evil. Swedenborg also develops a typology of profanation, arguing that only those who have genuinely believed and lived rightly can commit the deepest sacrilege by later inverting those beliefs — making the Church a uniquely dangerous profaner precisely because it once held real faith. The writing combines dense symbolic exegesis with sharp anti-Catholic polemic, framed within Swedenborg's broader system of correspondence theology, where every biblical image maps to a precise spiritual or ecclesiastical reality.

Apocalypse Explained: 1051-1100

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