Jacques Ellul’s Apocalypse in Poetry and Exegesis A. F. Moritz
Although not published until 1997, Jacques Ellul’s book-length poem, Oratorio: The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse was written in the 1960s (publisher’s jacket copy), and thus it seems to antedate the composition of his 1975 exegetical work, The Apocalypse: Architecture in Movement. Both works center on the relationship of the human word to God’s Word and the struggle of the best speech amidst babble and falsehood; together they throw great emphasis on the centrality of these themes in Ellul’s thought. The poem presents in a white-hot fusion the dialectical ideas, including those regarding the word and communication, which become a basis of Ellul’s exegesis of the Apocalypse of John. We can see this in two essential and related elements of Oratorio: the image of the mendicant, and the idea of the presence of the end in the beginning and throughout history. In Ellul’s poem, the wandering beggar is the Word of God in the world, powerless unless it is received, constantly appealing for love. Similarly, the end that is already present in history is the Word that needs and begs to be heard. This idea of the end in the beginning, which is Ellul’s radical eschatology, is expressed both in the mendicant and in the very structure of Oratorio, which in turn mirrors the structure of the Apocalypse as Ellul analyzes it. Both poems—for so Ellul terms the Apocalypse—use a symmetrical form to symbolize that the basic structure of history is the hidden presence of the Eternal in Time, which makes an appeal, as the mendicant does, eschewing power until a response of love shall be given. Throughout Oratorio the mendicant appears in various guises and is particularly expressive of the humility and humiliation of the word, which is everything—creation and