Abstract
So as to represent the phenomenal experience of time, two different and seemingly contradictory concepts are often employed. Time may be experienced as a mere repetition of identical occurrences as moon cycles, seasons or ‘red days’ in a calendar. The second and more worrisome understanding of time points at the irreversibility of its passage.1 In Greek mythology, one of primordial deities symbolizing the idea of time’s irreversibility was the tyrannical Kronos, a titan known to the Romans as Saturn. In 1815, the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya portrayed Kronos in the guise of a sharp-toothed ogre devouring his own children.2 That image brings out the essence of what it means, and will always mean, to be human: defenceless exposure to realities of chance, change, decay and death. Throughout the world, religious mythopoeia are concerned with finding a solution to entropic time. The necessity to ‘climb beyond’ the limits of an ephemeral and transient life accounts for the tight link between man’s experience of time and that of the sacred.3
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Notes
For an analysis of the dualistic scheme of human time, see ‘Two Essays Concerning the Symbolic Representation of Time’, in Edmund Leach, Rethinking Anthropology, Athlone Press, 1971, pp. 30–53.
Henri-Charles Puech, ‘Gnosis and Time’, in Joseph Campbell (ed.), Man and Time: Papers from the Eranos Yearbook, Princeton University Press, 1971, p. 40.
See Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History, University of Chicago Press, 1949, pp. 1–8.
See Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, Harcourt, 1961, pp. 80–113.
Klaus Vondung, The Apocalypse in Germany, University of Missouri Press, 2000, p. 71.
See Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, Harper Collins, 1963, pp. 65–7.
See Stephen O’Leary, Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 196.
Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith, Yale University Press, 1999, p. 153.
Donald H. Akenson, God’s Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster, Cornell University Press, 1992, p. 13.
Gideon Shimon, The Zionist Ideology, Brandeis University Press, 1995, p. 334.
See Anthony Smith, Chosen People, Sacred Sources of National Identity, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 49.
See Theodore Olson, Millennialism, Utopianism, and Progress, University of Toronto Press, 1982, pp. 18–35.
See Ronald E. Diprose, Israel and the Church: The Origins and Effects of Replacement Theology, Paternoster, 2004, pp. 169–73.
See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 12–13.
See D. S. Russell, Apocalyptic, Ancient and Modern, SCM Press, 1978, pp. 28–32.
See John Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, Eerdmans, 1998, pp. 42–3.
John Collins (ed.), Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre, Semeia 14, Scholars Press, 1979, p. 9.
See Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity, Crossroad, 1982, p. 11.
See Bernard McGinn, ‘Early Apocalypticism: The Ongoing Debate’, in C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (eds), The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature, Manchester University Press, 1984, p. 11.
John J. Collins, ‘From Prophecy to Apocalypticism’, in John J. Collins (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, Vol. 1: The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity, Continuum Publishing, 2000, p. 158.
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of Millennium, Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Pimlico, 2004, pp. 19–20.
Orlando E. Costas, The Church and its Mission, Tyndale House, 1974, p. 261.
Quoted in Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture, Harvard University Press, 1994, p. 42.
Catherine Wessinger, ‘Millennialism with and without Mayhem’, in Thomas Robbins and Susan J. Palmer (eds), Millennium, Messiah, and Mayhem: Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements, Routledge, 1997, pp. 47–61; and
Bernard McGinn, ‘Revelation’, in Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (eds), , Harvard University Press, 1990, p. 523.
See Adela Yarbo Collins, Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse, Westminster, 1984, pp. 156–9.
See Philip Kreyenbrock, ‘Millennialism and Eschatology in the Zoroastrian Tradition’, in Abbas Amanat and Magnus T. Bernhardsson (eds), Imagining the End: Visions of Apocalypses from the Ancient Middle East to Modern America, Tauris, 2002, pp. 33–56.
See Bernard McGinn, Anti-Christ: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil, Harper Collins, 1994.
Henry H. Rowley, The Relevance of Apocalyptic: A Study of Jewish and Christian Apocalypses from Daniel to the Revelation, Attic Press, 1941, p. 38.
Aviezer Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism, and Religious Radicalism, University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 171.
See Yakov Rabkin, A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, Zed Books, 2006, pp. 71–81.
Ducan B. Forrester, Apocalypse Now? Reflections on Faith in a Time of Terror, Ashgate, 2005, pp. 52–3.
Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, Schocken, 1995, p. 8.
Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment, University of California Press, 2000, p. 33.
David Ohana, ‘J. L. Talmon, Gershom Scholem and the Price of Messianism’, History of European Ideas, 34, 2008, 169–88.
On the themes concerning the Biblical apokatastasis, see especially Ernesto De Martino, The End of The World: A Contribution to the Analysis of Cultural Apocalypses, Einaudi, 2002, pp. 215–17 (in Italian).
Quoted in Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Thesis 14, in Illuminations, Schocken, 1968, p. 261.
See Jacob Neusner, Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, Exile and Return in the History of Judaism, Beacon Press, 1987, pp. 222–4.
See Jeffry Burton Russell, A History of Heaven: The Singing Heaven, Princeton University Press, 1997, pp. 30–3.
See Gaetano Lettieri, ‘The Ambiguity of Eden and the Enigma of Adam’, in Regina Psaki (ed.), The Earthly Paradise: The Garden of Eden from Antiquity to Modernity, Bingham University Press, 2002, pp. 23–55.
See Regina M. Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating: On Milton’s Theology and Poetics, University of Chicago Press, 1988, p. 35.
St Augustine, Essential Sermons, New City Press, 2007, Sermon 24.
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© 2014 Carlo Aldrovandi
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Aldrovandi, C. (2014). Meaning at the End. In: Apocalyptic Movements in Contemporary Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316844_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316844_2
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