Cultures of Eschatology

Volume 1: Empires and Scriptural Authorities in Medieval Christian, Islamic and Buddhist Communities. Volume 2: Time, Death and Afterlife in Medieval Christian, Islamic and Buddhist Communities

Veronika Wieser, Vincent Eltschinger, Johann Heiss, Veronika Wieser, Vincent Eltschinger, Johann Heiss

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110593587
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Apokalyptische Vorstellungen von Untergang und Verheißung, von letzten Dingen und äußersten Wahrheiten, von Endgültigem und noch nie Dagewesenem begleiten die europäische Kulturgeschichte seit mehr als 2000 Jahren. Die vorliegende Reihe Kulturgeschichte der Apokalypse legt eine heterogene und interdisziplinäre Durchmessung des Endzeitdenkens aus historisch-kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive vor. Sie betont die einzigartigen Verhaftungen apokalyptischer Diskurse in jeweils zeitgenössischen, epistemischen, medialen und politischen Kontexten und plädiert für den Mut zum Bruch – zum Bruch mit homogenen Lesarten, linearen Denktraditionen und lediglich formalen Rückführungen auf einen apokalyptischen Ursprung. Dabei öffnet sie den Blick in andere religiöse wie geographische Kontexte und lädt zum interdisziplinären Vergleich ein.

Empires and Last Days 1

Eschatologies of the Sword, Compared: Latin Christianity, Islam(s), and Japanese Buddhism

Philippe Buc

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the role of eschatology in violence, across several ensembles, premodern catholic Christianity (with a focus on the First Crusade), medieval Japanese Buddhism, Twelver Imamite Shi'a Islam, and twelfth-century Almohad Mahdism. In particular, it looks at the impact of beliefs in the nature of the eschatological moment on the conduct of war, including intra-cultural war. These eschatologies assumed corruption and evil in the world. All these ensembles could trust that the eschatological moment called for the purge of evil, including in one's own ranks. The call for violent purge was exceptional in Japan, and limited to the Hokke School founded by Nichiren, likely because of both its eschatology and its intolerant exclusivism, which brings it close to medieval Catholicism and the aforementioned versions of Islam, in their refusal to accept the orthodoxy of other variants of the true religion.

[…] one must first learn to understand the time.

Nichiren, The Selection of the Time.¹

[…] The highest skill in matter of Scriptures [is] to

know how to distinguish between the times.

Bernhard Rothmann, Von der Verborgenheit der Schrift des Reiches Christi.²

What can a comparison between medieval Japan and medieval Catholic Europe, with an additional foray into classical and medieval Islams (plural),³ tell us about the role of eschatology (including apocalyptic expectations) in provoking, explaining, or shaping armed violence? Evidently, human beings do not need organised religion in order to wage war; nor is religion war's sole source of meaning or legitimacy. One should look at religion, rather, as one among several Bedingungen der Möglichkeit, “conditions of possibility”, for war.⁴ One can also explore whether specific visions of the end push human beings to armed violence and provide scripts for it.⁵

In Western and Central European Christianity until perhaps as late as 1600, two normative scenarios co-existed when it came to the End Times. In the first, human beings would renounce armed violence and if necessary die as martyrs (in analogy to what the Church taught about apostolic and early Christian times). In the second, they would join the angelic armies of heaven and help the returning Christ purge the world of evil people and of sins. Commenting on John's Apocalypse, a biblical exegete likely active around the time of the First Crusade (1096–1100) leaned in the second direction:

And the armies that are in heaven followed Him (Apoc. 19:14) […] By the armies that John saw following Christ, and issuing from heaven, understand the saints who will be born at the end of the world and will fight against Antichrist.⁶

According to some exegetes, the armies of heaven comprised the martyrs. These were the men and women whom the same Apostle John claimed to have seen in his vision clamoring to God, asking: How long shall you delay judging and avenging our blood on those who dwell on earth? (Apoc. 6:10: Usquequo Domine sanctus et verus non iudicas et vindicas sanguinem nostrum de his qui habitant in terra?) The theological consensus had it that this divine vengeance would take place at the end of time; but disagreement existed among commentators of the Bible as to whether the martyrs would themselves participate in the great bloody harvest of the impious. The idea of a waiting period, until the End, was not innocent; in the etymological sense of the word, it was not non-noxious: for it did not deny the virtue of purgative massacre, it just delayed its implementation, and kept it alive as a hope and value. The available scripts included the first two books of the Maccabees, which provided an oxymoronic alloy of passive and active martyrdom, melded together via the hot metal of vengeance. In 1 Maccabees, the family of Mattathias and Judas rose up in arms against pagan Greek oppressors and Jewish collaborators to avenge the blasphemies committed against the Jewish God. They died weapons in hand, but their cause met with success. One Eleazar threw his spear from under what he believed was the Greek ruler's elephant, and died under the dying beast's weight. He had thus “given himself [to death] to free his people and acquire an eternal renown” (1 Macc. 6:43–46). In 2 Maccabees (6–7), pious figures suffered passively for refusing to accept pagan practices, but God's vengeance struck their persecutors both miraculously (the tyrant Antiochus IV died a horrible death, 2 Macc. 9:5–28) and militarily (the heathen were massacred on the battlefield to avenge the martyrs, 2 Macc. 8:3–4). What linked this Old Testament past, the deeds of vetus Israel, the Israel of yore, to the present and the New (novus) or True (verus) Israel, that is, Christianity, was typology and prophecy.⁷ Christian exegetes of the Bible considered that a number of figures in the Old (Jewish) Dispensation were types for entities or events in the Christian Era (the New Dispensation), or prophesised these. Thus the Maccabean fighters, for instance, were types for the milites christi, those men and women of the verus Israel soldiering for, or serving, Christ.⁸ And the genocidal fate of the enemies of the Israel of Old (depicted for instance in Isaiah) anticipated the destruction of Christianity's enemies at the end of time. These notions, developed in biblical exegesis, were displayed in the liturgy, which communicated them to the faithful at large.

Indeed, the liturgies commemorating martyrs, such as that for the children of 2 Maccabees 7, linked their willingness to die with the coming retribution at the end of time. This willingness drew on the Old Testament counterpart to the martyrs' clamor in Revelation, that is, on Psalm 78: “Avenge, O Lord, the blood of Your saints that has been shed.”⁹

This liturgical juxtaposition, sung year after year as part of the calendar in Catholic churches remained for centuries just that – liturgical. Yet at one point it was – or so some Christians thought – enacted. With the First Crusade,¹⁰ the structure became event.¹¹ A critical mass of human beings had convinced itself that the apocalypse was just around the corner. The crusaders, in terms of Christian typology, were the New Israel, the New Maccabees. Their martyrdom, however, did not add to delayed vengeance, but triggered immediate retribution. One chronicler, himself a participant of the crusade, connected into a single sequence the martyrdom suffered by a number of Christian warriors before the walls of Antioch in 1098, and then, via the clamor of Revelation 6, the retributive massacre of the enemy Turks. According to the anonymous Deeds of the Franks, the latter's twelve leaders “died soul and body”. A related version, that of Petrus Tudebodus, was even more explicit: all the enemies “received an eternal death [in hell] with the Devil and his angels”.¹² According to another source, before storming Jerusalem in June 1099, the crusaders did not only imitate the script of the “Israel of Old” (their typological exemplar) against Jericho via a procession around the city's wall. They also spent the night reciting psalms and the litanies of the saints, among which one recognises elements of the vengeful liturgy for the martyrs.¹³ And the same author, depicting the mounds of slaughtered “pagan” bodies after the crusaders' conquest of the Holy City, saw in this landscape poetic divine justice. Did the situation not invert the verses of the psalm (uersa uice […] mutato), “They laid the corpses of Your enemies to be fodder for the birds of the air, the flesh of Your opponents [to be fodder] for the beasts of the earth?”¹⁴ The original Psalm 78:2 read: “They have given the corpses of Your servants to be fodder for the birds of the air, the flesh of Your saints [to be fodder] for the beats of the earth.” The liturgies enacted right after the conquest of Jerusalem also echoed those for the martyrs.¹⁵

The actualisation of these specific biblical scenarios came about because one reached a tipping point (the moment when an accumulation of elements, which accumulation had up until then not changed dynamics, brutally engenders a wholly new process):¹⁶ a critical mass of men and women had convinced itself before or during the crusading expedition of 1096–1099 that the world stood on the threshold of history's end, the Eschaton.¹⁷ That the First Crusade was moved in part by apocalypticism is controversial among scholars, but is made more likely by a similar configuration obtaining in more fully documented episodes of paroxysmal religious violence, such as the Taborite h...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Approaches to Medieval Cultures of Eschatology
• Literary and Visual Traditions
• Scriptural Traditions and their Reinterpretations
• Empires and Last Days 1
• Apocalyptic Cosmologies and End Time Actors
• Death and Last Judgment
• Afterlife and Otherworld Empires
• Empires and Last Days 2
• The Afterlife of Eschatology
• Proper Names
• Geographical Names and Toponyms