After a short introduction of Nicholas of Lyra’s biographic and intellectual path, I will show how this exegete’s reflection on the Apocalypse is placed within a specific groove according to which the pages of the Book of Revelation provide an opportunity for a continuous reading of the history of Christianity. I will therefore focus mainly on the most problematic moment of the work, namely the au-thor’s comment on Revelation XX. In fact, it is precisely in this chapter that Nicholas, declaring his lack of access to the prophetic gift, reveals his myopia in the face of any attempt to recompose the events surrounding him from an historical-eschatological perspective. As I will show in Part II, with this strategy, the prophetic word is therefore subjected to a speculative work aimed at subtracting it from the claims of the apocalyptic thought and at relocating it adequately within a social project suited to the needs of the Church of the time.
Schlagwort: Apocalypse
Thomas Sojer presents a working paper on ‚Apocalypse of the Cross‘
The apocalypse of the cross radically recalibrates the totality of all self-world relationships. It is the consequence of a disruption that is as life-changing as it is unavailable. Because of the apocalypse of the cross, Paul worked from the previously unknown and ‘foolish’ gospel of the cross to the previously known and, crucially, misunderstood scripture. For Irenaeus, scripture was previously like a myth but once brought to light by the cross it becomes the very flesh of Christ. Yet, these theologies of the cross in antiquity as well as in (late) modernity do not merely consist in interpreting the cross as such, but in interpreting by means of the cross the contemporary world, society, and most importantly one’s own cruciform conditio humana. The leftist political theorist Simone Weil experienced the apocalypse of the cross herself through the aesthetic performance of liturgy. However, Weil’s concept of the cross takes on a monstrous character. Imagined as a rape, the cross, for Weil, is bottomless affliction endured by a completely surrendered God facing the virtual omnipotence of evil. Within this tension, the paper portrays the fracture between a pre-modern ‘God certainty’ and a growing spiritual crisis of the modern and even more radicalized late modern religious habitus.