Drugie przyjście problem upadku dziejów
The Second Coming The Problem of the Decline of History

Summary/Abstract: The objective of this study is to indicate the astoundingly topical nature of the evangelical eschatological paradigm (presented in the introduction) by resorting to examples of selected cultural texts. Despite the mass-scale secularisation of our civilisation the process of experiencing such texts is mystical and testifies to sui generis epiphanies uncoordinated with traditional orthodoxy and connected not with doctrine but with the Man Jesus, whose (second) coming grants them the character of an ultimate event. The reflections concern the cultural phenomenon of experiencing the insufficiencies of Tradition, inspired by the theme of the Fifth Anthropological Symposium held in Zakopane in 2015. Selected texts served an analysis of the antinomies of nostalgia and dialectics as well as classical decadence (e.g. Baudelaire’s Le voyage) and mysticism, which reveals its features as “empty ideality” (according to the interpretation by H. Friedrich). The decline of history is illustrated by P. Verlaine (Decadence) and A. Blok (The Scythians). These experiences lead towards a vision of the revolution (in the finale of The Drunken Boat by A. Rimbaud), on the one hand, and towards an astounding revelation of Jesus descending into Hell, an unorthodox experience of the Gospel and Parousia (an encounter with the Bridegroom at the bottom of Hell’s pit), on the other hand. A similarity, difficult to explain, of the sceneries of those epiphanies in Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell and Blok’s The Twelve is indicated. Eschatological epiphanies of Jesus are presented in interpretations by Russian authors: M. Gogol, V. Solovyov, F. Dostoevsky, M. Bulgakov, and B. Pasternak. Emphasis is placed on the important contribution made by the forgotten work by Y. Golosovker: Запись неистребимая / Сожженный роман (1928/1991). All these epiphanies are also analysed from the viewpoint of the idea/figure of the “deceiver” and pseudo-prophet - the Antichrist, of crucial significance in the New Testament.

• Details
• Contents