Apocalypse et livres sapientiaux: Sagesse et apocalyptique

Apocalyptic fever is a recurrent phenomenon that occurs as both a social and a symbolic crisis and has a subversive impact on the spatio-temporal articulation constitutive of a world. It is an imaginary, nearly panic-ridden amplification of collective problems to which hopefulness seems helpless to provide a response. The Biblical Apocalypse long underwrote this imaginary and, in the contemporary atmosphere of catastrophism, born of an ecological anguish that foresees the worst, the Apocalypse is secularized: Nature becomes (once again) a mythical figure, considered as taking revenge for having been abused. Confronted with this sort of collective pathos, which wisdom, which caution seem to be possible ? As it happens, in the Biblical corpus, the opposition of two types of temporality – that in terms of the end of time and that in terms of a certain continuity – gave rise to an intense symbolic effort of which we may say, assuming the risk of any interpretation, that it aims at limiting each of these two types, hence to “poetically” conjugate dispair and well-reasoned confidence, if not in the world, at least in a “possible world”.