Historiography and Apocalypse, an Intimate Relationship?

Jerry (Jay) Burkette Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought 214 Major Williams Hall, Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg, VA 24061 +1-360-929-7667 (cell) +1-540-231-6367 (fax) burkette@vt.edu 2021 Bertoti Conference Submission Historiography and Apocalypse: an Intimate Relationship? Abstract: The concept of “apocalypse”, often evoking images of fiery, final judgments and cataclysmic endings, seems firmly situated within theological, indeed Christian, tradition. Recent historiographical literature analyzing the ways in which apocalyptic narratives have been leveraged within religious contexts, especially stories of conquest, has emphasized facets of this role, both rhetorically and logically, in their construction and framing. I investigate several of these, canvassing both long past and more recent examples, in order to unpack the ways in which they highlight the centrality of apocalyptic “technologies” in order to be recognized as historical narratives. Specifically, the discursive and aesthetic constituents of these narratives appear importantly connected to certain teleologies, and their requisite ontologies, emplotted within a framework of prophecy-cum-apocalypse. In this paper, I argue that this relationship is instrumental in order to give meaning to these narratives, as histories. This is a result of an inherent mechanism within that history’s interpretive telos functioning prophetically in support of their methodological and theoretical vantage points. As a result, historical analysis is often normatively constrained by the range of possible teli permitted within the boundaries of the discursive spaces inscribed by both the historian and the historical actors in play. Historiography and Apocalypse: an Intimate Relationship? I. Introduction ‘Apocalypse’ seems to belong to religious, indeed Christian, tradition. Images of fiery judgements and cataclysmic endings are often leveraged to support versions of apocalypses within narratives of religious conquest. Motivating some interpretations of the ‘end of history’ as triumphalist instead of disastrous. I will more later. Given its religious connotation in common usage, it might seem a bit odd to claim that apocalyptic form and content is central to historiography as a discipline. I will argue that this is, in fact, the case. I demonstrate that historiography tends to leverage some version of this concept. Apocalyptic logic turns out to be performative within historical narrative as an indispensable tool, or technology, for crafting histories. The specific terms used to describe any apocalypse are thus epiphenomenal to the primary goal of crystallizing that account by targeting a certain purpose fulfilled using contextualized referents. Put another way, prophetic elements within a history, and their entailed (or prophesied) apocalypse(s), are situated and described from various temporal vantage points that textually ‘look back’, highlighting their synthetic role as meaning-makers for religious and secular histories (Löwith, 1949, 1-19). I refer here to his ‘modern’ histories, This is over and against what he terms ‘ancient’ histories, which feature a cyclical (and inescapable) form and function to their narratives. Historical analysis, then, is constrained, normatively and aesthetically, by the range of possible teli permitted. By normatively, I refer to the ways in which the set of possible instantiations of a candidate history are bounded by the obtaining socio-political (including, of course, religious and cultural) constructs of power, either during the period described or by the mediator-cum-translator-cum-historian. By aesthetically, I mean the modalities of media available for a history’s transcription, representation, and propagation. There is much more to be said about aesthetic valences within and around historical narratives and their construction as either limiting or reinforcing their form and content. While I will refer to its importance at various times, especially within the material culture constitutive to any historical narrative, I cannot here attempt a contentful analysis of the role of ‘the aesthetic.’ This is very close to what Koselleck (1985, 267-288) proposes when explaining his theory of Begriffsgeschichte. Or, ‘conceptual history’. See also his commentary on ‘historical time’ (ibid, 5-12) in which he uses religiously apocalyptic terms to introduce his project. Fascinatingly, he describes this conceptual framework as historical ‘horizons of expectation’, positing the necessity of constituent indicators within any history pointing towards (either looking back or forward from multiple candidate temporalities) an unveiling of that history’s culmination or beginning. Where these unveilings are modally enclosed, meaning that histories purport to narrate ‘what happened’ as no longer open to alternative conditions of possibility. This is the case whether or not the history in question refers to (past) future events or past events (as being completed) as apocalyptic within its particular narrative. This reasoning generates questions concerning the centrality of control within historical narrative and how to parse strategies wielded to gain and keep that position of power. As examples, whose expectations do these (Koselleckian) horizons presage, and how (and by whom) are the boundaries of possible endings or beginnings within these histories delimited? Some concrete examples will prove useful in order to shed light on possible answers to these queries. These will be my focus in the next two sections. These certainly do *not exhaust the candidates available for analysis. The choice to deploy them is based on the ways in which they lend themselves to being extended to other contexts of analysis across disciplines. I then turn to a description of what the moniker of apocalypse, perhaps interpreted as a political term of art leveraged by history, might refer to in these contexts. It turns out that apocalypse, narratively leveraged, is an aesthetic-cum-discursive construction created for (and in the image of) those very historical narratives (Liakos, 2007, 7, 20-21, 54-55). Liakos describes this phenomenon as identifying the necessity of identifying a future within a past for that past to become a history. More formally, apocalypse is instantiated within a narratival mechanism of prophecy and subsequent prophecy-fulfillment. These are both constitutively situated within histories to be cashed out in the service of a certain purpose. Histories, then, create and deploy a discursively created (future) space created within a narrative referenced to a specific (past) context and its actors. This mechanism, framing a linearly conceived telos-as-apocalypse (qua eschaton), requires a set of constitutive prophetic elements culminating in an ‘unveiling’ in order for historical narrative to have meaning and be identified as a history. As a result, restricting the efficacy of apocalypses to religious histories seems mistaken. Clear cases of this phenomenon can be found within ‘naming events,’ to include origin stories in the conquest of the New World and the chronicles of the First Crusade. The centrality of these for identification and teleological fulfillment puts the control of history front and center. I conclude by considering apocalypse alongside notions of progress, arguing that it remains likewise central to secular histories (in Löwith’s sense) tracing any linear progression towards an erstwhile conception of ‘better’ states of affairs. II. New World and Crusade ‘Apocalypses’ The first bad omen: Ten years before the Spaniards first came here, a bad omen appeared in the sky. It was like a flaming ear of corn, or a fiery signal, or the blaze of daybreak; it seemed to bleed fire, drop by drop, like a wound in the sky. […] The second bad omen: The temple of Huitzilopochtli burst into flames. It is thought that no one set it afire, that it burned down of its own accord. […] The sixth bad omen: The people heard a weeping woman night after night. She passed by in the middle of the night, wailing and crying out in a loud voice, ‘My children, we must flee far away from this city!’ […] (León-Portilla, 1962, 4-6) These samples are taken from the Florentine Codex, compiled by de Sahagún in 1555 and revised in 1585. These are samples of omens described by Bernardino de Sahagún’s students in the Florentine Codex, purportedly a narrative of conquest as told by the conquered Aztecs of Tenochtitlan. That the omens are apocalyptic in form and content is obvious; however, when examined in light of their narrative function, foretelling conquest, their purpose is clear. They are prophecies fulfilled by Cortez’ arrival and subsequent destruction of Tenochtitlan (and the eclipse of their god, Huitzilopochtli). While it is true that de Sahagún’s native informants might have told their subaltern story of defeat neither willingly nor completely truthfully, this only serves to confirm the purpose of (and desire to control) the narrative construction of the conquest as foreshadowed by previously observed portents of that event (Townsend, 2003, 659-687). Townsend’s argument troubles the oft-attributed Mexica characterization of Cortez and his companions as Quetzalcoatl or other ‘gods’ returning from over the sea. That this interpretation was projected/extended by Moctezuma’s descendants bears witness to the meaning-making requirement of histories, writ large. The resultant need to construct prophecies later fulfilled by Cortez’ apocalypse should not be surprising. For their part, Spanish accounts of New Spain’s conquest are emplotted as constitutive within a grander narrative of the ‘kingdom of God’ (see, e.g., Adorno, 2007). This is not strictly correct, in that this latter topos, interpreted in light of the mission of Christianity, served as rich philosophical grist for the mill of all European politico-theological thought (ibid; Cañizares-Esguerra, 2001). The latter provides an comparative analysis of New World historiography in the context of extranational debate concerning not only historiographical theory but also how the Enlightenment, in all its characterizations, was to be represented, deployed, and thus controlled from a ‘scientific’-cum-narratival international standpoint. Much of the motivation to propose competing narratives of both conquest and governance can be characterized as an attempt to dictate the course of ‘New World’ history (Adorno, 2007 and Caraccioli, 2018). In short, the objective was to control it by framing narratives so they aligned with concepts of ‘progress,’ referenced to imperial Christianity. Victory in the battle to control the narrative in the Old World was necessary (if perhaps not entirely sufficient) to extend that hegemony to the New World. While orthogonal to his main focus, Caraccioli’s (2018) analysis illustrates the importance placed on controlling the classification and naming of ‘things’ in this context – especially from the perspective of identifying and proscribing the ‘demonic’ naturalized within the landscape and culture of the New World. This is yet another example of the primacy given by historians (as theologians in this case) to efforts aimed at controlling their respective histories through classification and (re)naming extant ontologies. (Another term might be to ‘fix’ that history such that it has an accepted meaning, in this case ensuring scientific qua epistemological hegemony.) Without this normative valence, it would seem a bit ad hoc to posit the need for apocalyptic form and function within historiography. With it, however, apocalypse seems ubiquitous. A clear example of this literary conflict is the history of Bernal Díaz written as a first-person account (1551-1584). Writing from the avowed perspective of an ‘eyewitness’ and appealing to juridical norms as supporting his ability to write a ‘true’ history, Díaz directly engages contemporaneous historiography with the objective of wresting control of that narrative away from external perspectives (Adorno, 2007, chps. 6-7). While motivated by the desire to defend encomienda as a just reward for deeds performed in the king’s service, the way in which his history closes is enlightening. As Adorno puts it: His effort to move from the autobiographical and self-referential relación to the illusion of the extrareferential probanza reveals that the stakes involved were higher than his own self-interest. […] His objective to save the glory of the conquests for posterity was an ever more pressing need as the 1550s and 1560s passed. (2007, 179) Díaz’ Historia verdadura confronts extant historical narratives, providing an example of this clash over how to cash out the ‘punch line’ for the story in question. He notably appeals to religiously apocalyptic (in this case salvific) frames of reference (justifying deeds during the conquest) when responding to both Sepúlveda and Las Casas (ibid, 153-154 and 158-164). Five hundred years previously, Robert the Monk’s (2005 transl.) history openly wields scripture as providing prophetic constituents within the events of the First Crusade culminating in the conquest of Jerusalem. He references Old and New Testament prophets (and other scriptural authors) as providing authoritative confirmation of the divine foreknowledge and sanction of that campaign. These are clearly identified as fulfilled prophecy, leading to apocalyptic fulfillment in Jerusalem’s fall (ibid, Book VI, Chp. XII). This stylization of Kerbogha’s mother’s speech leans heavily on Deuteronomy, Exodus, Numbers, and Psalms as providing its content and significance. This is only one example of Robert’s discursive strategy.. Perhaps even more revealing, he fixes the locus of the crusade as originating within scripture, going over and above biblical events to have greater import than all but the crucifixion: These [Old and New Testament historians] show how pleasing it is to God that an account should be written for the faithful of any miraculous deed he has brought to pass on earth which had been part of his plan from the beginning of time. And indeed since the creation of the world what more miraculous undertaking has there been (other than the mystery of the Redeeming Cross) that what was achieved in our time by this journey of our people to Jerusalem. (Prologue) This is an example of how apocalyptic logic functions within beginnings as well as endings. The language of apocalypse (to include terminus, in this case) turns out to be epiphenomenal to the telos of historiographical hegemony of the discursive (indeed, normative) space he creates here. See Rubenstein (2016, pp. 159-160) for the ways in which ‘terminus’ was central to Urban II’s appeal. His history is not, importantly, solely for contemporaneous audiences, as he claims that it ‘deserves to be publicized through a faithful account….for future generations’. To achieve this present and future control of history, Robert leverages the auctoritas of the biblical canon to both justify and give meaning to the First Crusade as divinely pre-ordained and on par with holy writ. Put another way, the aesthetic (Christian) ‘clothing’ of Robert’s argument serves to create a historiographically normative space which reifies both the authoritative and justificatory arguments he deploys. Crucially, these aesthetic elements (namely: its apocalyptic trappings) are simply tools in the hand of that requisite history’s translator-cum-historian. They are, at bottom, merely instrumental to its construction. The central issue is historical control (in the sense of freezing the narrative), and the agency exercised to gain and maintain that control is found not in any specific instantiation of aesthetically apocalyptic language or its prophetic, narratival constituents but firmly in the hands (words? painting? sculpture?) of the historian qua historiographer. Put differently, historiographical telos becomes the eschaton for that history as a prophesied apocalypse. Here we can see the scope of the aesthetic with regard to its application within historiographical contexts. For an example, see Michelle-Rolph Trouillot (1995, pp. 44-68) for a fascinating observation of the ways in which memorials and monuments reinforce (or, ‘mention’) certain historical events/actors while silencing others. See also Cañizares-Esguerra (chapters 4-5) for the ways in which Mexica material culture was instrumental to competing narratives evaluating the agency and, indeed, the personhood, of the conquered Indians. For an account of indigenous agency attempting to recapture some control of historical narrative in a Peruvian context, see Ananda Cohen-Aponte, Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between: Murals of the Colonial Andes, (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2016) for an investigation of colonial-era church murals, ironically often featuring (religiously) apocalyptic subject matter yet injecting pre-Columbian identificational subject matter to subtly co-opt Spanish discursive-cum-aesthetic hegemony in a way that avoided censorship. This decouples the mechanism of apocalypse from any exclusive relationship with religion and locates it within the historian’s toolkit for constructing historical narratives. Two recent articles (or op-ed pieces) address the construction of a modern, American myth, as well as opine on the mission of historians within academia. Both of these (perhaps unwittingly) bear witness to the ways in which the logic of apocalypse, instantiated by situating narratival-cum-prophetic elements that are then fulfilled in a way satisfying the telos of the account, is fundamental within historical inquiry. These examples are all the more intriguing for their extremely nuanced use of these logics (over and against erstwhile ‘Armageddons’). As such, they are uniquely positioned to demonstrate the ubiquity of its employment. Adam Serwer, in a piece for The Atlantic (2017), pries apart the ‘white supremacist’ from the ‘myth of Lee’ contrasted with the historical personage of General Lee. The nod to apocalyptic rhetoric is his analysis of southern, white supremacist interests and related strategies to both create and sustain the myth of General Lee as a ‘brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together’. This construction orthogonally situates the telos and eschaton of southern society, to include its secessionist governance, as (Lee’s words): The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially, and physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race, and I hope will prepare and lead them to better things. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild and melting influence of Christianity, than the storms and tempests of fiery controversy (ibid, 3). Thus Confederate historical narrative was clearly apocalyptic, framing their society as beneficial to the ‘instruction of the [negro] race’ through the institution of slavery. To satisfy this telos ‘looking back at a past future’ juxtaposed against their defeat, the need to immortalize Confederate ‘heroes’ became necessary. General Lee’s history was constructed such that this telos was fulfilled in the myth known by that name, even though the Confederacy was defeated. This clearly exposes an effort to control historical narrative, but there is a more fine-grained way of parsing Serwer’s article such that we see him playing the ‘apocalyptic game’ himself. Throughout his debunking of Lee’s myth, he inserts voices serving as interlocutors contesting that rhetoric, fleshing out a foil to the discursive space it controls. To the extent that these dissenting voices ‘paint a picture’ (aesthetic metaphor intended) of a ‘better’ state of affairs, one situated against the dominant narrative sustained by the myth, they become prophetic servants of an alternate history, one with a decidedly different telos that, once fulfilled, becomes emancipation’s appropriate (and ‘just’) eschaton. This highlights the role that notions of progress, seen within a story’s plot arc described in narratival fashion, play. Histories, then, tend to be salvos in a battle to control a given narrative, deploying mechanisms that organize their historical elements to give meaning (and a purpose) to it for both actor and translator. The second contemporary example is written by a (self-identified) historian concerning how historians should comport themselves within a culture obsessed with ‘fake’ news. The way in which he frames ideal comportment for historians is enlightening: Learning about history, and learning to reason historically, may indeed affect the politics of our readers and students. We needn’t apologize for this. Part of the value of our discipline should be that it produces the foundations of better social understanding. It should not only be a burden. Better historical understanding may tear down political myths, but it can also offer the possibility of restorative justice. We should insist that historical knowledge is an important ingredient of democratic citizenship (Iber, 2018, 5, emphases mine). The telos of linear progress, seen as ‘better’ social and historical understanding, the ‘possibility of restorative justice’, and embodying what it is to be a ‘democratic citizen’, permeates this passage. Recall that this is an argument for how historians should act. It is a moral claim about the discipline, and it rests on a reified concept of progress leading to a better state of affairs in the future. Insofar as this approach to ‘doing history’ putatively situates past and current facts emplotted within a narrative leading to (possible) future fulfillment, it again trades on the same mechanism I am illustrating in this article. What is even more striking is the temporal perspective Iber’s situation of actor and apocalypse takes here. This is a full-throated call for contemporary action in the form of specific prescriptions supporting certain results. A historian’s moral duty, then, consists (at least partly) in prioritized actions that become prophetic within a narrative leading to a set of apocalyptic teli. This is, as a reminder, exactly what Robert the Monk is doing in the Historia. Contemporary events are emplotted such that they become either (or both) prophecy and prophecy fulfillment. Indeed, recognizing the temporal flexibility of apocalyptic logics seems central to comparative analysis of different narratives about similar time frames (Gabriele, 2016, 304-307). These examples should be sufficient to demonstrate how the logic of apocalypse functions to give meaning to, and control, history’s content and objective. That these elements are often couched as easily recognizable to both historical actors and intended audiences is thus unsurprising. As a result, they tend to be inherently political as well, in that they crystallize any given interpretation of the past such as to normatively close the allowed (or permissible) ends/futures of those histories. In the next section, I offer a more fine-grained description of ‘apocalypse,’ Highlighting the role of naming and origin events/accounts along with commonly recognized ‘end of history’ characterizations deployed in overtly religious texts. III. Apocalypse: Creating, Naming, and Changing From Alternate Perspectives Peru as a name and as a social fact…does not appear modestly or imperceptibly… [She] was…born of blood and tears in an abyss of history, with a loud crash that shook the world. (Thurner, 2009, 44) Original quote from Jorge Basadre, Meditaciones sobre el destino histórico del Perú (Lima, Peru: Huascarán, 1947, 104-105). It seems natural to associate apocalypse with a kind of death. There is a timbre of finality in the word, perhaps akin to a sense of loss or a recognition that certain possibilities are closed. Its instantiation within physical death is undeniable, on a communal or personal scale. Reff’s (2005) analysis about the ways in which Christianity co-opted epidemics in order to construct new discursive spaces is exemplary. It not only provides a clear case of the instrumentality of apocalypse, it also sheds light on the ways in which apocalypse can be defined. Reff’s work does not fit neatly within the historian’s guild. It is, in fact, an ethnographical intervention proposing a way of parsing causal valences constitutive within Christianity’s rise to (western) religious hegemony. Reff’s thoughts here (for example, 16-34) might better be described as ethno-political, in that his thesis and argument center on a comparative analysis of Old and New Worlds, showcasing the ways in which Christianity manipulated tragedy in order to situate those physical events within a metaphysical context (referenced to a certain ontology). It is hard to imagine a clearer example of the instrumentality of apocalypse, both personal and corporate, deployed to create and control (religiously-cum-politically) contemporary and historical discourse for social construction purposes. Despite this disciplinary breadth, his use of apocalypse (here: as disease leading to widespread death) is uniquely instructive as it highlights the impact ‘on the ground’ of this mechanism, both contemporarily to historical actors and historiographically within histories. Quoting Adorno (2017, 14), he reminds us that ‘real things happen to real people’ in history. Reff claims that similar states of affairs occurred in the Old World and the New, namely outbreaks of disease, causing widespread death overwhelmed extant socio-economic structures and exposed their inability to cope with these epidemics. The Church, represented by its Mendicant and Jesuit orders, stepped into the gap created by these events to construct a discursive space normed not only by physical realities but by metaphysical logics and ontologies. These provided both meaning and purpose (definition and telos) to individuals and communities (and entire continents) for these widespread ‘death events’. More importantly for my purposes, the apocalyptic logic leveraged to provide epistemological support and ontological justification for the epidemics effectively controlled historical discourse in these ethnographic contexts for both contemporary actors and their translators-cum-historians to follow. Though ostensibly about disease and death, Reff’s work reveals the inherent processes of creation, naming, and change within apocalyptic discourse. Providing a comprehensible reason for these epidemics required creation on both physical and metaphysical levels of existence. Creation necessitates the subsequent naming event for the thing(s) created (including, importantly, renaming of recreated entities). Although quite parochial, it no accident that the author of Genesis describes one of Adam’s first actions following the putative creation of the world as that of naming the things within it. See Genesis (2:19-20, ESV). Change, entailed within the processes of creation and naming, follows uncontestably. As a result, any change involving a significant epistemological and/or ontological shift such that either historical actor or historian interpret it as impacting the former or the latter’s worldview can be defined as apocalyptic. I think it fitting that the term’s original interpretation (apokálypsis) is that of an unveiling or uncovering, a revealing of knowledge. What is (re)creation or construction of ontological existences and their associated epistemologies if not a revealing of knowledge? And what does history purport to do? Antonis Liakos (2007, 21) has compellingly argued that this knowledge revealed within respective narrative histories includes (as a central ingredient) visions of the future (what I am referring to here as the ‘prophetic’) emplotted within those past events as referenced to idealized imaginings within them. As he puts it, ‘From this point of view [the horizon of long-term social expectations in writing history], ideas about the future are part of the deep structure of which forms our understanding of what is historical thinking’ (ibid, emphases mine) See also his (2011) argument for the emplacement of utopian (or, perhaps more broadly, idealized) concepts of the future within historical narrative as necessary for that narrative to be a history. It is narrative with a plot, ‘fall and salvation; desperation and hope’ (ibid, 22). It thus embodies a stylistically messianic narrative trope – one that creates the content of history together with its explanation. Indeed, he correctly notes that this way of describing the phenomenon originates with Walter Benjamin, in that messianic valences permeate historicity. See Benjamin’s On the Concept of History, (1940, 2005 translation by Dennis Redmond), XVII, A-B for a characterization of messianic valences within historicity, simpliciter. He (Liakos) also references Giorgio Agamben (La Potenza del Pensiero, Vicenza, IT: Nerri Pozza, S.p.a., 2005) in his formulation of the ‘future within the past’ constituent necessary to historical narrative. Apocalypse, as historiographical technology, is intimately connected to crafting histories, both during its creation and its reinvention as historical narrative, in order to give it meaning and make it comprehensible (and accessible) to both historical actors (whose actions/words/artifacts form the corpus of Trouillot’s ‘historicity 1’) and historiographers (re-constructing constituents of ‘historicity 1’ into ‘historicity 2’). Here I follow Truillot (1995, pp. 2, 22-29, 106, 115) in his description of what he sees as the two essential, concrete elements of historiographical inquiry. ‘Historicity 1’ refers to empirical fact (or for him, ‘social process’), personifying what has happened of (modally speaking) past necessity. This he describes as ‘what has happened’. ‘Historicity 2’, on the other hand, refers to the ways in which the first variety is interpreted by the second. This process of interpretation includes both selecting (in the form of ‘mentions’) and not selecting (in the form of ‘silences’) events and personages, etc. and comprises the discipline of historiography. This fascinatingly leaves open the question of whether it might be, in principle, possible for a history comprising only the subject matter inherent within historicity 1 to exist. I am skeptical, yet the question does highlight the importance of access to historicity 1, to include obstacles and facilitations affecting that access. If historical narrative both: 1) tends to leverage apocalyptic logic to give it meaning, and 2) is all we have as humans in order to communicate histories (as claimed famously, for example, by Hayden White), then the prospects for such a pure history seem less than optimistic. The result takes the form of ‘future-within-the-past’ stories, constructing a framework for that history’s empirical and interpretive elements. This methodology can be highlighted within a series of questions. What is needed to: 1) make a history accessible to both actor and eventual reader/hearer; 2) situate the resultant narrative in a recognizable context; 3) fix its loci, both physical and ‘spiritual’; 4) identify its topoi, reifying what counts as being ‘important’ and included; 5) connect with recognized and comprehensible ontologies and the epistemological frameworks that accompany them – in short, how to connect the history with an understood Weltänschauung; and 6) crucially, situate the narrative such that actor, translator, and consumer resonate with an identificational valence central to it? I only have the space to focus on this last question in this section, as the previous five have been (at least briefly) addressed within examples canvassed earlier. This concern, that of locating and fixing identities within historical narratives, highlights what I refer to as the temporal flexibility of apocalypse manipulated within historiography. It will additionally flesh out the processes of creation and naming as changes-cum-apocalypses. Thurner (2009, 46-49) refers to these moments of apocalypse, these blendings of death and rebirth, as naming (or origin) events. They are ‘abysses’, moments in time that concatenate present identities such that a space of ‘immediate non-being’ is opened. Thurner uses three terms to describe this process. The first is the ‘abysmal event’, which he characterizes as the ontological fissure (or destructuring) of what existed prior to this concatenation. The second he refers to as (using Badiou’s words) the ‘baptismal event’ (in Catholic liturgy, baptism is coincident with naming the infant or convert). During this phase, the historian ‘christens’ the historical subject, creating a new ontological and epistemological framework for it. The final phase is the ‘inaugural performance’ of the newly (re)created subject within the myth-making apparatus of apocalypse. The ontological erasure of a new naming event results in a vacuum, one that requires filling in terms that justify and explain it to actors and historians (and future consumers). The opening epigraph of this section describes the implosion of former existences combined in a ‘bloody’ rebirth of new ones. The described historical seam, like a spatial ‘black hole,’ creates vacant interstices that are opportunities to construct different narratives, stories that prophesy and then bring to fulfillment their requisite apocalypses. For pre-existent and subsequent narratives to have meaning for their intended audiences, the abysses revealed within these creation-cum-naming events must be situated as telos and eschaton. If we grant that narrative, with regard to its form, requires a beginning, middle, and end in order to be a story, then what I am describing here seems to be, roughly glossed, as the beginnings and endings created and named by the contested discursive space comprising the ‘middle’ of the narratives in question. As an example that, while intended as a critique, showcases the function of naming events in the way Thurner does, Furét’s (1981, see esp. 1-17, 36-46, and 195) attempt to downgrade the (nationally internal) significance of the French Revolution is instructive. While arguing against the unique significance given by the French nation to the revolution as an ‘origin event’ for the republic, he notes the ways in which it’s deployment as apocalyptic fulfillment ‘played out’ within national discourse as prophecy when applied to extra-national revolutionary events (such as the Bolshevik revolution). Particularly revealing is his statement (p. 19) that ‘The postulate that ‘what actually happened’ did so of necessity is a classic retrospective illusion of historical consciousness, which sees the past as a field of possibilities within which ‘what actually happened’ appears ex post facto as the only future for that past.’ See also Gabrielle (2016, pp. 305-307) for an account of how prophecies can turn out to be false while apocalypse remains inevitable. His reconstruction of events during the preceding century frames these such that they prophetically indicate the coming upheaval. He then situates them within a narrative for which revolution is both telos and eschaton. The fact that he bridles at Gallic insistence on reifying the event as the moment of creation-cum-identity for the French Republic only confirms Thurner’s conclusion. The naming event constituted the ‘immediate non-being’ of the French state, a vacuum that demanded filling in a manner such that looking back on the event as both apocalypse and genesis generated prophetic constituents within the story that then continued to have identificational significance after the event. These follow-on prophecies continue to define French democracy. Furét rails at these processes in vain. The way they have played out is predictable given the identificational valences required within historical narratives for them to have meaning as histories. All of this highlights the importance of temporal flexibility wielded as historiographical technology. Matthew Gabriele has recently examined the significance of verb tenses used in crusade (and Christian) histories. In it, he clarifies (2016, 308) how Robert the Monk subtly altered prophetic scripture such that foretold events (i.e., the holy sepulchre’s glorification mentioned in Isaiah 11:10) were transformed into already fulfilled (and thus apocalyptic) events. Specifically, the tomb’s spiritual condition could be expressed by a juxtaposition of its eternal state – one of being always-already glorified as a result of Christ’s resurrection – with a temporal state that interpreted the futurity in Isaiah’s account as having been accomplished in a re-glorification of that tomb (ibid, 307-310). This temporal flexibility allowed Robert to situate the events of the First Crusade within historical and ongoing narrative both reifying recent events as physically-cum-metaphysically significant as well as giving them (a specific and understandable) meaning. Able to be flexibly emplotted in time as apocalypses, they could be wielded either as a canonization of their contents or a prophetic call to energize new ones. This is, in fact, probably what Robert was ‘up to’ with the Historia as a re-publication or ‘improvement’ of the Gesta Francorum. See Carol Sweetenham’s introductory chapter on his textual history for a compelling case in this regard (Historia, 2005, 4-8). As noted above, Liakos (2007 and 2011) agrees with this placement of the future in the past, specifically for emplotting a prophetic ‘utopia’ as telos within historical narrative as a necessary constituent. It should be clear that I am resisting the notion that prophecy and apocalypse are best (and only) seen from the perspective of ‘looking back’ at the events in question (as accessed through source data, to include translational impurities). This is surely mistaken. A (constructed) temporal perspective of ‘looking forward’ to apocalypse and situating current events as prophetically positioned to culminate in that ‘future-past’ seems indispensable to both religious and secular histories. If there is even such a thing as ‘secular’ history. Löwith gets it right (149, pp. 201-203) when he claims that all secular history is theological in form, perhaps even more fundamentally so as it divorces itself from theological content. I think that (modern) histories quite often rely on both prophecy and apocalypse, both past and present events being interpreted as the former with some future ‘better’ state of affairs instantiated in the latter. Note that ‘futures past’ then references multiple possible modalities as fit to purpose and linked with diverse loci and foci. That Robert’s text is a ‘historical sermon’ (as claimed in his Sermo apologeticus) probably does not seem strange, not least for his societal role. Yet if I am right, every history might be a kind of sermon, complete with ‘holy’ text and ‘prophesied’ apocalypse. Does all history qua historiography then reduce to all and only religious historiography? In the next section, I offer some thoughts on this perhaps shocking suggestion. IV. Conclusion: Is All History Religious History? If notions of progress inhere within modern histories as essential to their function (to trace that progress within certain discursive spaces) and form, then these histories just are apocalyptic. Löwith, for one, would seem to argue for this (1949, 1-20 and 191-203). For all but ‘ancient’ histories. He describes ancient, poly-theistic histories (and, in a sense, ‘true’ Christianity as being unconcerned with history) as entailing a cyclical form to history entailing historical actors’ (better, any actor’s) subjugation to ‘destiny’ or fate. As a historical ‘looking back’ was valuable only insofar as it outlined ‘what had been’ such that it presaged ‘what will come again’, the set of possible teli in the case of these histories turns out to be quite different from religious and secular ‘modern’ histories, both of which are linked with diverse notions of teleologically-driven progress, controversial as that term might be in this context. The subjects and ‘endings’ of these accounts are the apocalypses in question, and their constitutive events turn out to be prophetically indicative of their instantiations. A contextualized interpretation is thus necessarily expressed using referents with which the intended audience, to include historical actors, is familiar. Amerindians, writing the history of their conquest under the gaze of evangelizing friars, deployed images and concepts unique to their culture and history within omens fulfilled by Cortez’ conquest. Robert, ‘perfecting’ the Gesta Francorum, clothed his history in the trappings of fulfilled scriptural prophecy, forging links between holy writ, past Crusade events, and possible future campaigns. The terms and language used in specific scenarios turn out to be epiphenomenal at best. They become window dressing for the causally efficacious aspects of the narrative. These are the aesthetic elements created or repurposed to serve the goal of binding a given history to a certain telos or teli. To this point, this summary is logically consistent with Löwith’s account of both (modern) secular and religious histories. See his introduction (1-20) for his way of describing teleological-cum-eschatalogical history. This effort selects and organizes certain prophecies that, when they are fulfilled, result in its (the apocalyptic telos’) fulfillment. This, again, follows Truillot and his (1995) deployment of ‘mentions’ and ‘silences’. As Gabriele stresses (2016, 306), even though individual prophecies might fail due to future contingencies, apocalypse remains inevitable. Thus far, my argument and Löwith’s seem similar. He goes on, however, to lump both religious and secular history together as one and the same project. In his words: It is also within this teleological, or rather eschatological, scheme of the historical process that history became ‘universal’; for its universality does not depend merely on the belief in one universal God but on his giving unity to the history of mankind by directing it toward a final purpose. When II Isaiah describes the future glory of the new Jerusalem, his religious futurism and nationalism are actually teleological universalism. ‘Mankind,’ however, has not existed in the historical past, nor can it exist in any present. It is an idea and an ideal of the future, the necessary horizon for the eschatological concept of history and its universality. [P] We of today, concerned with the unity of universal history and with its progress toward an ultimate goal or at least toward a ‘better world,’ are still in the line of prophetic and messianic monotheism; we are still Jews and Christians. (1949, 18-19) On this view, all modern history reduces to monotheistic history. Löwith distinguishes this from ‘true’ Christianity. In his view, to the extent that this worldview ‘stops’ current time in the form of ‘the last times’ (perhaps as the coming of Christ), it does not subscribe to a linear characterization of history. I think this is too quick. I agree that apocalypse functions within historiography as a necessary arbiter in support of any narrative of ‘progress.’ Yet I see two problems resulting from a conflation of secular and religious history, one being parochial and the other more substantive. The parochial concern centers on the import of Augustinian historical theory and its ramifications for human action in the ‘earthly city’ while awaiting the ‘city of God’. I am not convinced that ‘true’ Christianity cannot inhabit the discursive space of modern historiography without abandoning notions of progress. This may seem to be merely a theological debate, but it has much larger ramifications, specifically as they pertain to efforts aimed at achieving a more just society in the here and now. Be that as it may, I cannot comment further on this here. We can gloss the more substantive worry in philosophical terms. That histories of all types offer epistemological boundaries enclosing the acceptable interpretations of those events is obvious. Fixing the locus of any difference in those terms seems mistaken. Religious and secular narratives, to the extent that they deploy theological discursive structures to construct their histories, reduce to one-and-the-same kind of ‘epistemological effort’. To gesture at where I part ways with Löwith, I think a crucial difference exists in the recognized, or allowed, ontologies in their respective accounts. Religious historiography necessarily must allow an ontological set that goes over and above that of its secular counterpart. As such it remains importantly different. Insofar as these ends and/or beginnings are not merely epistemological claims about better or worse states of affairs, the cosmic stakes seem much higher for religious histories. To conclude this attempt to clarify the role of apocalypse within historical narratives, I think it fitting to set it against O’Leary’s (1994) book tracing the rhetorical role of apocalypse as performative within historical discourse. See especially his introductory sketch (pp. 1-14) for the theoretical considerations motivating the book, to include its methodology. The form this performativity takes, according to him, is that of offering a theodicy that explains and justifies the existence of evil. This requires rhetorical-cum-historical discourse to play a prophetic role, one that not only identifies prescient constituents within the past and present that predict a vindicating futurity but also constructs those elements so that they fit the appropriate description needed. This is cashed out in two ways, the first being that apocalypse is a mythical and rhetorical solution to the problem of evil, and the second that this purpose is accomplished through constructions of temporality (ibid, 14-15). Significantly, apocalypse is situated, ‘not as text embodying archetypal and timeless formal principles, but as an event ‘alive in its present,’ attempting to discover how it influences, and is influenced by, the discursive practices that surround it.’ Emphasis mine. Note that the ‘present’ in this case, seems to indicate the time in which the discourse in question is crafted, thus tying it inescapably to historiographical narrative. The italicized words are those of Stephen Pepper, World Hypotheses, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970), 232. O’Leary’s study is similar to my argument in that it allows for the temporality of any apocalypse to be tailored to the history for which it provides both telos and eschaton. I also agree that apocalypse is instrumental within history; we both see its role as performative, an indispensable tool in the historian’s toolkit giving her narrative contextualized meaning. This granted, his account differs in its construction of apocalypse as being primarily about evil, specifically in its instantiation as redemption. While he is certainly correct that apocalypses can be cast as theodicies justifying historical means, my argument goes over and above his to claim that apocalyptic logics trade as much in beginnings as they do in endings. The performativity of apocalypse can be equally applied to histories emplotting concepts of ‘progress’ (or even utopias) towards better states of affairs. If I am right, the term refers as often to triumphalist interpretations as it does to disastrous ones, resulting in characterizations of the ‘end of history’ being mapped to both these predicates. Indeed, from a certain perspective O’Leary himself might permit this construction. In his conclusion (218-224), he argues for a ‘deliteralization’ of apocalyptic rhetoric in religious (specifically Christian) discourse and presses for historians and theologians to reopen a dialogue decoupling narratives of progress from literally-interpreted, cataclysmic endings ‘putting the world right.’ Thus he gestures at the possibility for apocalypses to be instantiated as both endings and beginnings in symbolic terms. As a final thought which unfortunately must await future development, consider that triumph seems to entail the defeat, or conquest, of a competitor. It follows then that histories rely, in varying degrees, on a foundation of conquest. They are vested with a motive to control their narratives and the subjects and events within them. Unsurprisingly, the scope of this desired hegemony must then extend into the future. 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