Christianity emerges from the tensions of the Hellenistic world, from an unstable synthesis between East and West. More than a new religion, it becomes the decisive spiritual event of the first century, asserting itself through a doctrine sustained by a shattering narrative: the drama of death and the hope of resurrection.
For me, the Christian era remains one of the great archetypes of the European narrative imagination. Its appearance was not an accident, but a response to a profound crisis of the ancient world. The idea was already prepared. Around the year 28, John the Baptist was preaching a baptism of repentance, and Jesus of Nazareth—one of those baptized—would transform this experience into a doctrine of universal love. In a very short time, no more than three years, the force of his word altered the course of spiritual history.
Christianity proposes a radical idea: love as the only path to salvation. Not an abstract love for God, but the love of each person for all others. Carried to the point of sacrifice, this idea is doubled by the miracle of the Resurrection, which grants existence a new meaning: life, truth, and the way are unified in a total spiritual experience.
At the same time, the first century is an age of great cultural syntheses. Paul of Tarsus transforms an ecstatic experience into a doctrine of salvation through identification with Christ. Philo of Alexandria attempts a bridge between Judaism and Greek philosophy, affirming the role of the Logos as mediator between humanity and God. The Stoics—Seneca, Epictetus—seek salvation in harmony with nature and in inner freedom. Literature, too, undergoes a decisive transformation: Lucan demythologizes heroism, Petronius invents the novel as a form of a degraded world, and Tacitus establishes a model of history written sine ira et studio.
Against this background, alternatives also arise: Gnosticism, magic, mystery religions. All respond to the same anxiety: if God exists, why does evil persist? Christianity prevails not through erudition, but through the promise of a resurrection accessible to all.
The Apocalypse of John condenses this tension into a vision of extraordinary literary force. It is not merely a theological text, but a great symbolic narrative about the end and its meaning, about fall and restoration. Its images have nourished European literature, folklore, and imagination for centuries.
I have always been preoccupied with the mythical connections between Christianity and its ancient heritage. The first century is not only a moment of origin, but a narrative matrix: it is here that the patterns are fixed which will shape the European imagination up to the present day.
The full text was published in my blog for Adevărul.
