The Heavens Folded Together as a Book and the New Heaven
Old Testament: Isaias 34:4
And all the host of the heavens shall pine away, and the heavens shall be folded together as a book: and all their host shall fall down as the leaf falleth from the vine, and from the fig tree.
Old Testament, also: Isaias 65:17
For behold I create new heavens, and a new earth: and the former things shall not be in remembrance, and they shall not come upon the heart.
New Testament: Apocalypse 6:14; Apocalypse 21:1
And the heaven departed as a book folded up: and every mountain, and the islands were moved out of their places... And I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the first heaven and the first earth was gone, and the sea is now no more.
The connection
Isaias supplies both ends of this, and the Apocalypse takes them up in order. The sky is not smashed in his oracle; it is folded together as a book, the way a reader closes a scroll he has finished with, which makes the heavens a text rather than a ceiling, something that was written and can therefore be concluded. John reports the sixth seal in almost the same words, the heaven departed as a book folded up, and the effect in both places is the same: the fixed things start moving, mountains and islands out of their places, the host of heaven falling like leaves off a fig tree in Isaias, and in John like green figs shaken from it. What makes this more than an image of ruin is where Isaias goes afterward. The same prophet who closes the scroll also says, behold I create new heavens, and a new earth, and John ends his book on that verse rather than on the sixth seal. So the folding is not the end of the story but the end of a reading, and what follows is not emptiness but a second creation in which the former things shall not be in remembrance. Augustine insisted the distinction mattered, that what passes is the figure of the world and not its nature, so that the rolling up is a change of state and not an annihilation.
Moral sense
A world described as a scroll can be read, and a scroll that can be closed was never meant to be leaned on. Holding creation loosely is not contempt for it but accuracy about what kind of thing it is.
Anagogical sense
The same prophet who folds the heavens together promises new ones, so that the last word over creation is not the closing of the book but the writing of another.
The Fathers
St Augustine, City of God, Book XX, ch. 16, quoting the Apostle that "the figure of this world passeth away" and concluding, "The figure, therefore, passes away, not the nature," and, in the same chapter, that by the universal conflagration "the qualities of the corruptible elements which suited our corruptible bodies shall utterly perish, and our substance shall receive such qualities as shall, by a wonderful transmutation, harmonize with our immortal bodies."
Warrant
Apocalypse 6:14 does not cite Isaias 34:4 by name, and Apocalypse 21:1 does not cite Isaias 65:17, but in the Douay-Rheims the wording of each pair is close to identical, the heavens shall be folded together as a book against the heaven departed as a book folded up, and I create new heavens, and a new earth against I saw a new heaven and a new earth. The connection rests on that verbal correspondence and on John taking up the two Isaian images in the same order Isaias gives them. Checked in the Greek, and the shared verb is an uncommon one: Isaias 34:4 has heligesetai and Apocalypse 6:14 has helissomenon, both from helisso, to roll up. The Apocalypse names no earlier text, so the tier is unchanged, but the image is carried by the same verb rather than by a similar picture.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1043.
The verses
Isaias 34:4 · Isaias 65:17 · Apocalypse 6:14 · Apocalypse 21:1
