Eschatology Book

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S1: Millennium, Madness & Meyhem Eschatology East & West
volume edited by Christopher Beall
Contents __________________________________________ ....Acknowledgements ....Introduction by Christopher Beall ....1: Celebrating the Saeculum: Correlation between Ludi Saeculares & attempts to overthrow the Emperor John Aveline ....2: Plague Narratives in Classical Literature J.M. Entwisle ....3: The Answer may be found in the Middle Ages: A Look at Some Artistic Perceptions of the Middle Ages in the Nineteenth Century Sarah Lippert	ORDER NOW When will the end of the world happen? According to who? Some faithful are trying to make it happen soon! ISBN 0-9714683-1-1 Cloth Bound Price $39.50 US Single Orders Volume Orders Excerpt Below
....4: The 'Myth' of Attila the Hun, Christopher Epplett ....5: Sex and the End of the World in Early Christianity, Max Nelson ....6: Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation: On the Violent Origins of Roger Scruton's Xanthippic Dialogues, Christopher Stewart Morrissey ....7: Islamic Eschatology: Implications for Christian Witness, Warren Larson ....8: Obstacles to Discipleship in an Islamic Context, Samuel P. Schlorff ....9: The Second Coming of 'Isa: An Exploration of Islamic Premillennialism, Larry Poston ....10: Eschatology in the Visual Arts of Islam, Christiane J. Gruber ....Conclusions Eschatology 911: A Brave New World, Sheldon Lee Gosline ....Bibliography ....List of Figures ....Index ....Illustrations

EXCERPTS

Sex and the End of the World in Early Christianity

Max Nelson
University of Michigan

In Luke, Jesus says to his disciples that the end will come unexpectedly as the flood came in the days of Noah and the fire and sulphur came to Sodom: “On that day, anyone on the roof who has belongings in the house must not come down to take them away; and likewise anyone in the field must not turn back. Remember Lot’s wife. Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it” (17:31-33). Then, Jesus states of the rapture (34?36):

I say to you, on that night there will be two in one bed; one will be taken and the other left. There will be two women grinding together {at the mill}; one will be taken and the other left. {Two will be in the field, one will be taken and the other left.}

Matthew’s parallel account is noticeably different (24:40-41):

Then two will be in the field, one is taken and one left. Two women will be grinding at the mill, one is taken and one left.


THE SECOND COMING OF ‘ISA:
AN EXPLORATION OF ISLAMIC PREMILLENNIALISM
Dr. Larry Poston, Nyack College
 
	There is a profound difference between a historian and an apocalypticist.  The former operates in a context delimited by a single reference point--the past.  While admittedly somewhat relative due to ongoing attempts at interpretation and re-interpretation, the past nonetheless enjoys the advantage of being fixed; its events are by definition completed and thus essentially unchangeable.  The disadvantage of this uni-directional orientation is, of course, that from the standpoint of the historian, the future remains completely open-ended, subject only to speculation. 

      The apocalypticist, however, utilizes two foci in the attempt to understand history: the past and the future.  While the historian may deride the idea of "future history" as pure fantasy, the apocalypticist claims that access to knowledge regarding the future allows for an infinitely better representation of history in all of its aspects, including the present and even the past.  Bernard McGinn has discussed the advantages of having two reference points for historical interpretation in an essay dealing with Christian eschatology, and his remarks are at least equally applicable within the context of Islam:
		
For the apocalypticist, history is universally conceived and deterministically structured ... [he] sees meaning where the uninitiated sees only chaos or catastrophe.  Knowledge of God's plan not only gives a sense of history's general structure and meaning but also provokes the search for the "signs of the times," for the significance of current events to the coming end.  This legibility of history, the ability to read the course of events as one reads a text, requires a sense of the imminence of final times.

In particular, then, apocalypticism provides "general meaning and structure" to history as a whole and significance to current events as they are made to fit into the overall structure. 
	The present essay seeks to chart specific developments in Islamic eschatology as seen  through the eyes of a Muslim scholar who functioned in certain areas of his scholarship as an apocalypticist.  Abu'l-Fadl Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti (850/1445 - 911/1505) was a Shafi'i scholar who held various scholarly positions in Cairo during the late Mamluk period.  He claimed to have authored over 500 works during the course of his life, ranging over tafsir, hadith, the Arabic language, and history, among other disciplines.  He also dealt with theological topics and among these was the subject of eschatology.  Under current consideration is a work that he authored entitled by J.O. Hunwick Risala fi man yab'ath Allah li hadhihi'l-umma 'ala ra's kulli mi'at sana, and by Ella Landau-Tasseron Kitab al-Tanbi'a bi-man yab'athuhu allah 'ala ra's al-mi'a.



Visualizing the Eschaton in Islamic Painting, 13th to 16th Centuries

Christiane Jacqueline Gruber*
University of Pennsylvania

Your Companion is not possessed;
He truly saw Him on the Clear Horizon;
He is not niggardly of the Unseen (81: 22-4

Introduction

Immediately preceding the excerpt cited above, the sura entitled “The Darkening” (al-Takwir) describes with unsparing detail a series of catastrophic events located in the unforeseen future: the sun darkens, stars fall to the ground, mountains tremble, seas boil, the heavens strip off, Hell is set ablaze, and Paradise is brought near.  These are some of the many Signs of the Hour (isharat al-saca) made manifest as a sequence of reversals of natural phenomena, which herald the ultimate moment of judgment.  At this precise moment, the Prophet—in what could be interpreted as a state of optical clarity and spiritual clairvoyance— indeed sees Him (God) and many other visible occurrences on the clear horizon.  Muhammad’s visual perception of the Divine and the unseen (ghayb),  both in this world and the next, precipitates an image-based verbalizing, thinking, and visualizing of death, the Last Judgment, Heaven, and Hell in Islam.
Although the “graphic” quality of many otherworldly events, places, and beings has been emphasized by western scholars analyzing Islamic eschatology based on the Qur’an, Hadith (Sayings of the Prophet), tafasir (exegeses), and Arabic qiyama (eschatological) literature,  a systematic study of the impact of the Hereafter in the visual arts of Islam has not yet been investigated.  Extant representations relating to the eschaton, particularly in painting from the 13th to the 16th centuries,  support the thesis that eschatology played a crucial role in shaping the praxis of culture in Islamic lands.  The material evidence forces the researcher to go well beyond literary works in Arabic to include an examination of the role of eschatology in the Persian and Turkish realms, where most manuscript production took place during the medieval and early modern periods.  Expanding the canonical boundaries of Islamic eschatological studies beyond literature in Arabic to include a discussion of visual culture in Anatolia, Persia, and Central Asia, reveals the permeability and ubiquity of imagining the Afterworld in Islamic poetical thought, historical writing, biography, and divination.
This article is not intended as a review of the field of Islamic eschatology, although it will use some of its key studies to analyze pictorial representations, nor can it possibly survey all illustrations concerned with the heavenly and the chthonic.  Key works presented in chronological fashion,  and interwoven thematically, will prove that a shift in the role of eschatology in the pictorial arts took place from the 13th to the 16th centuries.  Most notably, historicized eschatology— i.e. the present moment in which men act in the political and religious present in anticipation of future reward or punishment— slowly gives way to what C. H. Dodd has termed “realized eschatology,” or “the absolute entrance of... the eschaton into human experience.”   The Hereafter begins to lose its relationship to political and religious events (which had been so intimate in the early centuries of Islam),  ceding way to autonomous ascension narratives, and ultimately becoming fertile ground for expressing mystical inspiration or presaging courses of actions.  Simply put: Islamic painting is a witness of, and an arena for, the transformation of eschatology in the service of religious conversion and political action into a vehicle for spiritual transmutation and personal predestination.




The ‘Myth’ of Attila the Hun

Christopher Epplett
University of Lethbridge

If one were to name the ten greatest villains of history, Attila the Hun would almost certainly appear on such a list.  For over a millennium, up until the present day, Attila and his Huns have been synonymous with savagery, plunder, and slaughter. As one scholar has expressed it, “The Huns have become the very model of barbarity.”  One need only think, for example, of the nickname 'Hun' applied to the Germans by their opponents both in the Franco-Prussian and First World Wars.  In this paper some of the possible origins and motivations for this apocalyptic view of Attila, which first arose in the mid fifth century western Roman empire, will be discussed. It can be argued that this 'demonization' of Attila and his Huns has as much to do with the contemporary political situation in the western and eastern halves of the Roman empire as with actual atrocities committed during the Hunnish invasion of western Europe. In particular, accounts vilifying the Hunnish king often have as much to do with his opponent, the Roman general Aëtius, as with Attila himself. 

Accounts of the Huns prior to Attila:

It should first be pointed out that the uniquely negative view of Attila amongst western writers did not arise in a vacuum; such a view was partially rooted in the pre-existing hostility and fear felt by other groups towards the Huns in general. The Huns had appeared on the lower Danube some time before Attila's rise to power, and consequently had been an object of some contempt and dread to Roman writers of the eastern empire as early as the late fourth century.  Ammianus Marcellinus was the first extant Roman historian to describe the Huns, noting in particular their strange and savage customs, as well as their prowess in battle.  Jerome, writing only a few years later than Ammianus Marcellinus, described the Hunnish raid of 394 on the eastern empire in terms scarcely less apocalyptic than those used for Attila's western campaigns some fifty years later:
Behold, the wolves, not of Arabia, but of the North, were let loose upon us last year from the far-off rocks of Caucasus, and in a little while overran great provinces. How many monasteries were captured, how many streams were reddened with human blood! Antioch was besieged, and the other cities washed by the Halys, Cydnus, Orontes, and Euphrates. Flocks of captives were dragged away; Arabia, Phoenicia, Palestine, and Egypt were taken captive by their terror. Not even if I had a hundred tongues and a hundred mouths, and a voice of iron could I recount the name of every catastrophe. 

Other early writers, in an attempt to explain the military prowess of the Huns, attributed to them a mythical origin. Priscus and Jordanes, perhaps drawing upon an original Gothic source, claimed that the Hunnish race was begat by the Haliurunnae, a group of witches exiled by the Goths. It was supposedly the vengeful spirits of these witches that allowed the Huns to discover Scythia, previously unknown to them, a land ripe for conquest. This discovery, as the story goes, laid the seed for destructive Hunnish campaigns against the Goths, as well as many other tribes and nations at a later date.  The eastern historian Priscus, followed by Jordanes, claimed that the personal prowess of Attila himself was foretold by the latter's discovery of the sacred 'sword of Mars' in Scythia. Such 'sword-cult' stories were popular amongst the nomadic tribes of eastern Europe; this particular story may well reflect the respect for Attila felt both by his own people and neighbouring groups like the Goths.