Medieval Western eschatology was built on the basis of Holy Scripture and has undergone significant changes over the centuries. The witness of the first Christians shows that the advent of the Parousia, the object of their hope, is first of all envisaged by believers as the hope of inner and spiritual liberation, but also as an exterior and historical one.
The dissociation of these two aspects could induce, over the course of the development of the eschatological discourse, attempting to reduce their relationship to that of a logical relationship, supposed to allow them to be deduced from one of the other. It is in this way that eschatology was able to generate a teleology and that the discourse of theology was able to give way to a set of philosophemes bearing on “the end of History”.
The contributions brought together in this collective work aim at examining the historical stages of this mutation of the eschatological discourse, according to various thematic approaches (theology, history of the Church, history of art, philosophy, etc.), seeking to shed light on the turn taken in the Renaissance and the question of the emergence of modernity.
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