In the Prologue to Confessio Amantis, apocalyptic is the vehicle for a farreaching statement about the shape of history and about good political order. This is political theology of a different order from the noon-day demon and animal Armageddon fireworks of Vox Clamantis. The thoroughness of the poem's apocalyptic indicates how full and theorized is the Confessio's idea of earthly politics. The Prologue's apocalyptic history is mirrored in the lover's personal, penitential apocalypse at the end of the poem. This implies a fulcrum between the political and the personal, and this fulcrum bears a special, politically positive load in Gower's idiosyncratic inflection of apocalyptic with a wished-for new Arion.

Apocalyptic and apocalypse are overlapping but not coterminous categories. Bernard McGinn sets out the distinctions: ‘The word apocalypse means “revelation”, the unveiling of a divine secret.’ Apocalypse in this sense might not be apocalyptic in the sense of ‘linking the succession of time and its end’. Apocalyptic or apocalypticism is ‘a species of the genus eschatology’distinguished by the urgency of its concern for ‘the structure and End of history’. It might not be presented in the form of an apocalypse.

The apocalyptic in the Confessio is more coherent than that of the Vox, but, focusing on the figure of a new Arion, it also introduces a level of contingency untypical of apocalyptic writing in general. Helen Cooper has observed that apocalyptic writing ‘in the Middle Ages, and later’, uses ‘the idea of the nonnegotiable judgments of God to take political and moral discourse out of the realm of debate and replace it with a religious absolute’. God's sense of right and wrong functions in such a way in the Confessio, but the new Arion passage posits that the timing of Judgment is contingent, and depends on human disunity or social reform. This gives the poem's apocalyptic theory a very significant pro-history twist, imagining for lay poetry and politics independent (if divinely monitored) power on the threshold of the religious absolute.