Profeti e profetismi: Escatologia, millenarismo e utopia ed. by André Vauchez (review)

Although perhaps not as fashionable as they were around the turn of the last millennium, the intertwined subjects of prophecy, eschatology, and apocalypticism remain a vital part of scholarship on the Western tradition, ranging from antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the modern (or even postmodern) era. The “pursuit of the millennium,” to speak, harkening back to Norman Cohn’s ground-breaking work on the problem of millenarianism and its revolutionary potentialities, continues among historians, sociologists, political scientists and others. Far from being marginal, prophetic voices, apocalyptic predictions, and eschatological speculations provide a fascinating opportunity to interrogate all sorts of texts, events, and figures that relate to a wide range of political, intellectual, and social issues, some conservative and others subversive, framed in religious but also secularized forms of theorizing about the future.

This volume of essays edited by André Vauchez (an Italian translation of the original publication, Prophètes et prophétisme [Paris, 2012]) makes for a welcome addition to the ongoing dialogue about what Vauchez calls the “three principal forms of prophecy” (eschatology, millenarianism, and utopianism), viewed here as “cultural constructs, with a strong symbolic character, that need to be taken seriously since they illustrate the role played by the imagination in human society” (p. 17). The collection includes contributions by Jean-Robert Armogathe, Sylvie Barnat, Jean-Pierre Bastian, Philippe Boutry, Pierre Gibert, Balerio Petrarca, and Isabelle Richet. These studies designedly stretch across the entirety of Western apocalyptic discourse from the Bible to the late-twentieth century. They also widen the geographic scope of their inquiry into various iterations of prophecy and millenarianism, including chapters on Africa, Latin America, and North America (meaning, in effect, the United States).

Scholars conversant in the premodern apocalyptic tradition will encounter many familiar texts and names in this collection, starting with the Christian roots of prophecy and messianic thought in the Hebrew tradition to the highly influential patristic thinker Augustine of Hippo (whose stultifying effect on millennial speculation was considerable, albeit not absolute), followed by medieval monastic authors including Hildegard of Bingen and Joachim of Fiore, and Reformation-era firebrands like Thomas Müntzer (along with, inevitably, Michel de Notre Dame, better known as Nostradamus). Moving into the period from the French Revolution to the twentieth century, one encounters a less typical line-up of intellectuals and social critics, thinking in explicitly and implicitly eschatological terms: the French essayist Charles Péguy; the Jewish-born German philosopher Walter Benjamin; and the eminent Catholic scholar Yves Congar. The final three chapters on areas outside of Europe introduce even less familiar—at least, to those who work mainly on European apocalypticism—figures from millenarian traditions in Africa and Latin America such as the Congolese religious leader Simon Kimbangu, along with North American eschatological impresarios like William Miller and Joseph Smith.

Despite such forays into colonial contexts of millenarianism, Europe remains at the center of this volume: 357 out of 445 pages deal with events and persons from the field of European history. Indeed, given the salience of apocalyptic themes in recent forms of fundamentalist Islamic ideology, including that of the so-called Islamic State, one wishes that the collection would have included an essay on Islamic apocalyptic traditions, developing outside the immediate textual orbit of Western prophecy and eschatology, whether Christian or secularized, but surely just as much a product of colonial and postcolonial experiences. Regardless, Vauchez and the volume’s authors have made a valuable contribution to our understanding of an apparently inescapable human desire to understand ourselves and our place in history through the imagining of possible futures, whether irenic or forged in violence.