Suchergebnisse

Abstract
"Apocalypticism" and "Globalization" are not commonly juxtaposed to one another, with the former taken to begin in ancient times and the latter taken to be a modern phenomenon. This Forum explores the convergence of thoughts about the history of the world and the practices those thoughts engendered among the peoples of Western Europe and the Mediterranean region during the "early modern" era, roughly between 1400 and 1800. Scholars in history and the humanities commonly regard this period as a long transition in a "from-to" narrative when "pre-modern" institutions and intellectual and cultural traditions, characterized by the entanglements of the worldly with the divine, the temporal with the spiritual, the secular with the sacred, and the microcosm with the macrocosm, were transformed into "modernity" by the replacement of beliefs dependent on faith with knowledge established by reason. The essays in this Forum take a different approach by treating the development of modern understandings of the political, social and natural world as emerging from religiously-grounded discourse, debate, and practice in the early modern era.

Abstract
This essay is about irenicism and science, i.e. about the interrelationship between the quest for peace on earth and the quest for knowledge about the world. Both are global aspirations, the former focused on achieving concord among rival peoples and ideologies, nations, and religions; the latter on comprehending the earth and the heavens and the way the things in them are made. Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Viscount St. Alban and sometime Lord Chancellor of England, who, citing in Latin the Biblical prophecy in Daniel 12:4 – "Many shall go to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased" – linked together the increase of geographical knowledge in his own day with the prospect for new discoveries in all fields of learning. For Bacon, the advancement of all branches knowledge, fated to come together in the same age, would in time bring religious unity and with it this-worldly peace, thereby paving the way for the fulfillment of the apocalyptical prophecy in the Book of Daniel, which in Christian discourse was interpreted to mean the Second Coming of Christ. This essay explores Bacon's discussions of his aims and the methods he advocated as addressed the consequences of "discovery" for mending world back to its wholeness.