Revelation 17:1–2

Revelation 17:1 — The Angel's Summons and the Prostitute's Identity

The chapter opens with a deliberate structural parallel to Revelation 21:9, where one of the same seven bowl-angels invites John to see "the Bride, the wife of the Lamb." This pairing is not accidental: the two visions — the Prostitute and the Bride — form the Apocalypse's great antithesis, the city of man set against the City of God. By using the same angelic mediator and the same Greek construction (deuro, deixō soi — "Come, I will show you"), John signals to his readers that these two women, these two cities, are to be read together as a theological contrast.

The designation pornē megalē, "the great prostitute" (or harlot), carries enormous weight in the biblical tradition. In prophetic literature, the image of a city or nation as a sexually unfaithful woman was a standard idiom for spiritual apostasy — the abandonment of the covenant God in favor of foreign idols, powers, or alliances. Isaiah applied the image to Tyre (Is 23:15–17); Nahum to Nineveh (Na 3:4); Ezekiel deployed it at length against Jerusalem herself (Ez 16; 23). John is thus drawing on a rich prophetic vocabulary: the prostitute is any great power that draws the nations away from the worship of the true God through the seductive promise of wealth, prestige, and domination.

The phrase "who sits on many waters" is immediately interpreted within the chapter itself (v. 15) as "peoples and multitudes and nations and languages" — a universal dominion. Yet it also evokes ancient Babylon, the city built on and between the great rivers of Mesopotamia. For the original audience of Revelation — Christians living under the Roman Empire, many of whom faced martyrdom — "Babylon" was transparently Rome: the city on seven hills (v. 9), the empire whose commerce reached every shore, the power that had shed the blood of the apostles. But the Fathers and the Catholic tradition have consistently recognized that "Babylon" exceeds any single historical referent. It names a principle of worldly power organized against God.

Revelation 17:2 — Universal Seduction and the Wine of Immorality

Verse 2 develops the prostitute's destructive influence in two directions: upward, to the kings of the earth (hoi basileis tēs gēs), and downward, to the inhabitants of the earth (hoi katoikountes tēn gēn). This bi-level corruption — of rulers and peoples alike — indicates that the prostitute's seduction is systemic and total. No tier of society is exempt.

The language of "committing porneia" with the prostitute is both literal (the moral corruption of sexual immorality promoted by pagan Rome's cult and culture) and deeply typological. In the prophetic tradition, porneia is the standard metaphor for idolatry — the betrayal of the covenant relationship between God and His people. When kings "commit fornication" with Babylon, they adopt her values: the worship of power, the cult of the emperor, the reduction of human beings to economic units.

The image of being "made drunk" (emethysthēsan) with "the wine of her porneia" intensifies the picture. Drunkenness implies a loss of rational judgment, a stupor that prevents the inhabitants of the earth from perceiving the true nature of what is happening to them. This is the spiritual condition Babylon produces: a kind of collective intoxication that mistakes enslavement for freedom and corruption for prosperity. Jeremiah used identical imagery for the historical Babylon: "Babylon was a golden cup in the LORD's hand, making all the earth drunken" (Jer 51:7), a verse John is almost certainly citing directly. The echo confirms that John's Babylon is the eschatological fulfillment of the prophetic type.

The Catholic interpretive tradition brings several distinct contributions to these verses.

The Church Fathers read Babylon with nuance. Tertullian and Hippolytus saw Rome as the primary historical referent, but Origen and Augustine widened the lens. For Augustine in The City of God, Babylon is the earthly city in its fullest theological sense — the community of those who love self to the contempt of God — standing eternally opposed to the City of God, the community of those who love God to the contempt of self (De Civitate Dei XIV.28). This Augustinian reading, enormously influential in Catholic tradition, prevents any simplistic identification of "Babylon" with a single nation and insists on its suprahistorical, spiritual reality.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§2853) references the Book of Revelation's Babylon in its treatment of the "ruler of this world," noting the cosmic struggle between the kingdom of Christ and the "spirit of the world." The CCC (§668) also situates the Apocalypse's visions within the already/not yet of the Kingdom: the powers of evil are already defeated in principle by Christ's Paschal Mystery, yet they continue to rage until the final consummation.

Pope Benedict XVI, in Jesus of Nazareth Part II and various homilies, explicitly connected the Babylonian imagery to the seduction of relativism and the "dictatorship of relativism" — systems of thought that, like the wine of the prostitute, intoxicate souls and render them incapable of recognizing absolute Truth.

Theologically, these verses teach that the greatest danger to Christian faith is not crude persecution alone, but subtle seduction — the intoxicating offer of worldly power, comfort, and cultural belonging that gradually draws hearts away from the living God. This is precisely what the prostitute represents: not only brute force, but alluring compromise.

For contemporary Catholics, these two verses pose a searching question that cuts beneath political categories: In what ways have we, too, been "made drunk" with the wine of the world's Babylon? The seduction John describes is not always violent or obvious. It arrives in the form of consumerism that promises fulfillment through accumulation, a media culture that shapes desire and numbs moral perception, or a therapeutic spirituality that makes the self — rather than God — the center of all meaning. The "kings of the earth" in our age are not only political leaders but cultural architects: algorithms, entertainment industries, and economic systems that reward conformity to anti-Gospel values.

The practical call of these verses is to sobriety — the precise antidote to drunkenness. St. Peter uses the same image: "Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion" (1 Pt 5:8). For a Catholic today, this means cultivating the habits of mind and spirit — regular examination of conscience, fasting, Eucharistic adoration, engagement with Scripture — that keep the soul's judgment clear and its desires ordered. It means asking, concretely: What narratives am I consuming? What "wines" are slowly altering my perception of what is real, good, and true?