Year: 2008
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: This paper aims to examine what was distinctive about Byzantine expectations of the End of Time, and specifically, what distinguished them from expectations in the medieval West.It is clear that the eastern and western Christian traditions shared a common eschatological and apocalyptic culture, based on the same sacred texts interpreted by similar exegetical methods, formed within the same political system, and exposed to the same philosophical ideas.Both Greek East and Latin West were the heirs to the hope of the early Church in the Saviour's swift return, which Christ himself had promised in the Gospels and his apostles had eagerly anticipated in their Epistles.1 All parts of the Church developed similar strategies for coping with the fact that the Second Coming was perpetually delayed.The signs of the End were, for all Christians, those that Christ had told his disciples to look out for: The time frame that Christian thinkers imposed on world history was made up of certain basic schemes extrapolated from the Bible and corresponding to ancient motifs in the cosmology and mythology of the Near East.There was the notion of a cosmic week of six ages reaching fulfilment in a final seventh age, then coming full circle in the perfection of the octave.There was the idea of a succession of four world empires giving way to a kingdom without end.Finally, there was the idea of an Adversary who would appear at the last to oppose the Creator in a last, cosmic contest between light and darkness.The early Christian eschatology combining these motifs was common to both east and west: the six or seven ages of world history were equated with time periods of one thousand years, and the Adversary or Antichrist was considered to be held in check by the power of Rome, identified with the last in the series of four world empires prophesied by Daniel.East and west also worked out the same way of dealing with the most problematic of all Christian prophecies, that of the thousand-year reign of Christ and the saints foretold in the Apocalypse of St John.By the seventh century, Byzantium had adopted the Augustinian interpretation that prevailed in the early medieval West: the thousand years were not to be taken literally or thought of as a future golden age, but applied to the indeterminate period of the Church's ministry on earth that had been inaugurated by the Incarnation.In other words, the apocalyptic millennium was a prophecy already coming to
Source: De Gruyter eBooks
Language: German
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4236597048