Prophetic Culture

Recreation For Adolescents

Federico Campagna

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350149656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Selected as one of The Tablet 's Books of the Year 2021 Throughout history, different civilisations have given rise to many alternative worlds. Each of them was the enactment of a unique story about the structure of reality, the rhythm of time and the range of what it is possible to think and to do in the course of a life. Cosmological stories, however, are fragile things. As soon as they lose their ring of truth and their significance for living, the worlds that they brought into existence disintegrate. New and alien worlds emerge from their ruins. Federico Campagna explores the twilight of our contemporary notion of reality, and the fading of the cosmological story that belonged to the civilisation of Westernised Modernity. How are we to face the challenge of leaving a fertile cultural legacy to those who will come after the end of our future? How can we help the creation of new worlds out of the ruins of our own?

CHAPTER ONE

TIME

FIGURE 1.1 Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, The Burial of Punchinello (La sepoltura di Pulcinella), c. 1800. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

PROLOGUE JONS THE SQUIRE

FIGURE 1.2 Hans Holbein the Younger, Death and the Soldier, copy from the Todtentanz engraved for Francis Douce by George Wilmot Bonner and John Byfield, 1833.

Rare swimmers in the vast whirpool.²

A lonely castle in the Scandinavian north. Six people around a table in an empty room. Emerging from the aura of a torch, framed by a black hood, Death makes its entrance. Lady Karin bids her welcome, while her husband the knight mutters his last prayers. The blacksmith and his wife introduce themselves to the ‘noble Lord’, who has come to take them all away. The nameless Girl, a survivor of rape and famine, breaks into a smile.

Jons: I could have given you an herb to purge you of your worries about eternity. Now it seems to be too late. But in any case, feel the immense triumph of this last minute when you can still roll your eyes and move your toes.

Karin: Quiet, quiet.

Jons: I shall be silent, but under protest.

Girl (on her knees): It’s finished.³

Jons the squire is the only one to rebel. He too, like the others, will skip at the rhythm of Death’s dance. But Death won’t win from him the consent of a subjugated heart. A grimace shall remain imprinted on his face, far longer than the vanishing of his flesh.

Until this final scene, the hero of Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal seems to be the melancholic knight, devoured by doubts and guilt along his itinerant tournament with Death. By the end, however, when truth becomes aletheia, ‘the unveiled one’, it is his squire Jons who takes upon himself the mask of the hero. His heroism isn’t that of the victor, nor is it the pious surrender of self-sacrifice. But it is Jons, and not his master, who remains faithful to that something, within each existent, which isn’t subject to Death’s worldly dominion.

The story of Jons’s life remains mostly untold. We meet him at the beginning of the film, asleep on a rocky shore, back home at last, after years of reluctant crusading. We hear him sing his lust for the pleasures of life and his disenchantment towards the illusions of society. His defiance in the face of Death, however, gives us a clue about an earlier time in his life. If we follow its trace, it will lead us far to the south of his master’s Scandinavian domains – to the origins of his education.

At the time when the events of The Seventh Seal are set, during the years of the first Crusade, a new esoteric sect had established itself in the territories at Orient of the Holy Land. Feared and respected by their neighbours, they were known as The Order of the Assassins.⁴ From their stronghold of Alamut, their leader Hassan-i Sabbah commanded the secret emissaries who descended to punish whoever would try to subjugate the Order. High on a rocky cliff on the Caspian mountains, the walls of Alamut surrounded a citadel in the shape of a garden – a vision, or a dream, of Earthly Paradise.

The Assassins were Shia Muslims, belonging to Nizari Ismailism. Following the teachings of Hassan-I Sabbah, ‘the Old Man of the Mountain’, they had subjected their faith to the esoteric fire, and had radicalized the theological tenets of Ismailism.⁵ Their esoteric ardour did not spare the sacred scriptures of Islam, and the thousands of books contained in the library of Alamut provided guidance on how to transcend the letter of the prophetic message. The true Quran is not written on paper, they claimed, but it lives in the mind of the interpreter. God’s constant presence, everywhere and anywhere, endows His creatures with the ability to receive His message ever-anew. God’s final revelation, if it is ever to take place, is not to be expected in a future Great Resurrection. The eschatological event is always-already taking place, here and now.

For a few decades, their faith brew in the murmur of theory. Until one day – which would have marked a historical date, if it had not been outside of history – the Assassins drew their final conclusions and aligned their lives accordingly. They abolished the Law, and first of all that of Death’s necessity. They stepped out of the rest of the Umma, the community of the faithful, to establish a new universal community, a new ecumene of indestructible existents.

On the 17th day of Ramadan in 559/8th August 1164, the Imam proclaimed the Great Resurrection (qiyamat al-qiyamat) before all the initiates assembled on the high terrace of Alamut. The protocol of that occasion has been preserved. What the proclamation implied was nothing less than the coming of a pure spiritual Islam, freed from all spirit of legalism and of all enslavement to the Law, a personal religion of the Resurrection which is spiritual birth, in that it makes possible the discovery and the living realization of the spiritual meaning of the prophetic Revelations.⁶

During his time in the Holy Land, Jons might have crossed paths with the Assassins. Perhaps he met them as prisoners of war, or during their periods of tactical alliance with the Crusader states. They might have taught him how to respond to a sky made sterile, a scorched earth and dried up waters, by withdrawing to Alamut rather than surrender. Judging by his defiance in the face of Death, Jons must have brought their flame with him to the cold lands of Northern Christendom.

The Assassins survived Jons by almost two centuries. In the year 1256, the citadel of Alamut fell to the assault of the Mongol armies led by Hulegu Khan. Its secret garden was razed to the ground, the library burned and scattered, the walls demolished. The Assassins tried to re-establish their stronghold, but the Mongols defeated them again in 1276, and finally vanquished them in 1282.

Over the centuries, also the ruins of Alamut have crumbled off the rocks. Only faint traces, today, testify that a fortress ever existed on that mountain.

But the Assassins knew the art of occultation. They knew how to withdraw, when victory is impossible. ‘One day – they said to Jons – a voice will rise again from the terrace of Alamut. One day, again, Death shall be abolished, and the Law will be forbidden. That day will be just another today. But as long as it will not be this today, you must continue to carry Alamut on yourself, hidden in your grimace, “closer to you than your jugular vein.”⁷ An amulet against worldly powers and the deception of the end.’

And death shall have no dominion.⁸

A GREAT FUTURE BEHIND YOU

FIGURE 1.3 Gabriel Rollenhagen, Astra Deus Regit, emblem from Emblematum Centuria Secunda, engraved by Crispijn de Passe the Elder, 1613. © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel.

The Khazars believe that deep in the inky blackness of the Caspian Sea there is an eyeless fish that, like a clock, marks the only correct time of the universe.⁹

I was living in Milan and I was half-way through my first year of bachelor’s. By that point, it was dawning on me that I had made a mistake. Studying economics was not for me. I couldn’t see how any of that could fit into the picture that I had of my own future. But it was too late to change it. I didn’t know that it was possible to give up something without declaring existential bankruptcy. The only strategy that I could devise was to lull myself into a state of denial, as if none of it had ever happened. I ignored classes and assignments and for a while I took on the habit of swapping day and night.

One afternoon, my father came home from work to find me, yet again, asleep on the sofa. Swinging between dream and vigil, I waited for him to desist from his protestations. When he finally walked out of the room, I heard him say in a neutral tone, ‘You have a great future behind you.’¹⁰

Still lying down, I felt that there was something to my father’s oracle. The ‘story of my life’ that used to be my compass had already become false – and I was bringing to a close also the new story in which I was entangled. The futures that they had inscribed within me also seemed to be ending (though none of them would have been as great as my father believed).

The future was behind me – I realized with relief. But something didn’t add up. If the future was behind me, what time was it in which I was living? My time had run out of thread, but all the same I continued to live in time, or at least in some, post-ultimate time. With my head on the pillow, I imagined falling in a fissure between temporal plates, somewhere after the future and before the present.

That question has remained with me. Is it possible that the future might run out? Can time finally end, and people still continue to live after its demise? This is possible, of course, in the case of an individual who has outlived a certain existential trajectory. But does the same apply also to the end of the future itself – to that story, which an entire social group calls ‘time’?

This might sound like an academic question, and rightly so. For over two millennia, metaphysicians have investigated the strange weaknesses and inconsistencies of the notion of time. In the fifth century BC, the Eleatic school disproved the passing of time as a logical impossibility,¹¹ while Theravada Buddhist philosophers in the third century BC defined it as a phenomenon that is entirely mind-dependant.¹² A little over 100 years ago, the English metaphysician John McTaggart used logic to demonstrate ‘the unreality of time’¹³ and, more recently, quantum physicists have added their voice to destabilize further any fixed or ‘real’ notion of time.¹⁴ The existence of time as a ‘thing’ in itself has been rejected by many due to it being a mere convention,¹⁵ a purely subjective parameter¹⁶, an inconsistent notion¹⁷ or a concept that defies common sense.¹⁸

For all its failure to stand to a test of logical legitimacy, however, time remains present to our experience at every turn. Time is so innate to us that it appears to be a basic parameter of how we are able to perceive reality.¹⁹ The flow of time is inextricably related to the functioning of that machine, within a subject (be it collective or individual), which creates a ‘world’ out of the raw avalanche of perceptions.²⁰

Aristotle’s definition, perhaps, comes closest to capturing our paradoxical experience of time: the ‘counting of change with respect to the before and after’.²¹ If we consider it as the process of someone’s ‘counting’ – rather than as an autonomous entity – then time loses its apparent absoluteness, varying instead on the basis of the modes of counting, and on who engages in this chronogenic (time-making) process.²² Time is no longer presented as a thing that might be real or unreal, but as a process that is at once fully fictional and fully authentic – a limit-process, whose cosmological location is at the threshold between the reality that we can apprehend and what lies beyond it.

Despite its efficacy, however, the metaphor of counting encounters an empirical problem: it implies that time-making is a much more conscious process than our experience suggests. In our daily life, we feel time flowing somehow laterally to reality – in the same way that a musician feels the rhythm of what they’re playing. It is only seldom that we actively ‘count’ time, while most frequently it emerges together with the unfolding of things, events and situations that make up the tapestry of reality. The term ‘narrating’ might better evoke the subterranean quality of time. To paraphrase Aristotle, time could be described as the ‘rhythm of a subject’s narration of change, with respect to the before and after’.

To investigate this rhythmic/narrative quality of time, let us begin by observing the nature of that process of worlding, to which the birth of time is connected.

Upon opening our eyes in the morning, we are not immediately and automatically greeted by a comfortable world, made up of clear and distinct things among which we can navigate our way. The flow of perceptions that constitutes our experience of reality is more akin to the onslaught of an oceanic tide – immense, faceless and undivided. At each instant, our awareness attempts to canalize percepti...