Victory and Defeat: A Conflicted Church, 1136–1140

2020 ◽  
pp. 110-140
Author(s):  
Brian Patrick McGuire

This chapter explores how the autumn and early winter of 1135–36 provided sufficient time for Saint Bernard to give his first sermons on the Song of Songs at Clairvaux and also to familiarize himself and come to terms with the brothers' ambitious building program. But just when he may have felt he had returned to the routine of monastic life, he was called back to Italy. His companion now, as previously, was his brother Gerard, Clairvaux's capable cellarer whom Bernard felt he needed at his side rather than leaving him behind to deal with the material affairs of the monastery. In March or April of 1137 at Viterbo, Gerard became severely ill. Bernard's description of events emphasizes how important it was for him to restore Gerard to his monastic community so that he could die there. During the last year of Gerard's life, Bernard must have lived in fear that he soon would lose the man whose company and guidance had shepherded him since childhood. Just as the papal schism was coming to a seemingly happy end, Bernard was facing the end of the world that had made him.

Author(s):  
David Cook ◽  
Nu'aym b. Hammad al-Marwazi

“The Book of Tribulations by Nu`aym b. Hammad al-Marwazi (d. 844) is the earliest Muslim apocalyptic work to come down to us. Its contents focus upon the cataclysmic events to happen before the end of the world, the wars against the Byzantines, and the Turks, and the Muslim civil wars. There is extensive material about the Mahdi (messianic figure), the Muslim Antichrist and the return of Jesus, as well as descriptions of Gog and Magog. Much of the material in Nu`aym today is utilized by Salafi-jihadi groups fighting in Syria and Iraq.


Moreana ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 45 (Number 173) (1) ◽  
pp. 167-174
Author(s):  
Peter Milward

In conjunction with the current “revisionism” of English history from a Catholic viewpoint, it is time to undertake a corresponding revision of the plays and personality of William Shakespeare. For this purpose it is not enough to rest content with the meagre historical record, but we have to go ahead in the light of recusant history with a reinterpretation of the plays, considering the extent to which they lend themselves to the Catholic viewpoint. This is not merely a matter of nostalgia for the mediaeval past, but it looks above all to the present sufferings of the “disinherited” English Catholics — in the light of the continued presence of Christ who is suffering, as Pascal famously noted, in his faithful even till the end of the world.


2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kas Saghafi

In several late texts, Derrida meditated on Paul Celan's poem ‘Grosse, Glühende Wölbung’, in which the departure of the world is announced. Delving into the ‘origin’ and ‘history’ of the ‘conception’ of the world, this paper suggests that, for Derrida, the end of the world is determined by and from death—the death of the other. The death of the other marks, each and every time, the absolute end of the world.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-50
Author(s):  
Claire Colebrook

There is something more catastrophic than the end of the world, especially when ‘world’ is understood as the horizon of meaning and expectation that has composed the West. If the Anthropocene is the geological period marking the point at which the earth as a living system has been altered by ‘anthropos,’ the Trumpocene marks the twenty-first-century recognition that the destruction of the planet has occurred by way of racial violence, slavery and annihilation. Rather than saving the world, recognizing the Trumpocene demands that we think about destroying the barbarism that has marked the earth.


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