Transcendence of time through language is possible because of syntax. Only language can shape time into a whole structure and so image eternity as the indivisible Whole of reality. It is in the achievement of a totality of sense – the meaning of the whole phrase – that the temporality of the phenomenal appearance of its separate parts, the letters, is transcended and an experience of the eternal – God – as an experience essentially of language in its production of meaning is achieved. This experience of the eternal through concrete elements in time is the essence of the Incarnation, which Dante has, in fact, ciphered into the heart of his vision even numerologically, with the thirty-five letters evoking Christ’s life in history up to the acme of the arc of human life and turning thirty-five years old. Christ, as the eternal Word, is the indispensable key to the transcendence of time through language.

Chronograms are a cryptographic written practice in which the numerical values of some letters of a text encode a date relevant to that text. They constitute a form of ludic numeracy ‒ a specific kind of ludic language or wordplay in which writers not only highlight their skill with words and numbers but also conceal information, forcing readers to expend effort to extract their hidden meanings. Four distinct chronogram traditions are outlined: South and Southeast Asian word-symbols, South Asian alphasyllabic numerals; Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic alphanumeric chronography; and the early modern Western European tradition using Roman numerals. This chapter analyzes a corpus of over 10,000 Roman numeral chronograms from the fourteenth through the twentieth centuries, drawn from those previously compiled by the antiquarian James Hilton. Roman numeral chronograms use the letters IVXLCDM, specially marked within texts, to encode dates.While these chronograms began prior to the Hindu-Arabic (Western) numerals’ ubiquitous use, they were most popular in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, by which time the Roman numerals were already archaic. It was thus just at the point when Roman numerals were falling out of everyday use that they were ripe for symbolic repurposing in chronograms.

The “galactic empires” were never dominated by a single polity, nor was this region united by any monotheistic religion. Nevertheless, collective beliefs created a shared political and social order throughout Southeast Asia. This regional international society was based on the view that the social and political world should be constructed so as to mirror the religious and cosmological realm. Political authority radiated from a sacred political and geographic center, with authority dissipating concentrically from the center outward.

The Book of Revelation sits in a distinctive place in the canon of the New Testament, with its relentless succession of apocalyptic imagery—but also sits in a distinctive place within apocalyptic literature as a whole. Making theological sense of it demands both discipline and imagination on the part of the reader, but also mastery of some technical issues (numerology, structure, and its use of imagery) which put it at a cultural distance from the contemporary reader.