hgr

Geographia Sacra: Spatiotemporal Structures in the Jewish-Christian Apocalyptics and Hagiography

Christian hagiography is known by its apparently arbitrary use of the geographical and temporal categories. The same is true for the Jewish predecessors of the Christian hagiographical works, such as 2 Maccabees or Judith. The great Bollandist Hippolyte Delehaye became the first who saw here a system. He described the most common types of the transformation of space and time in the hagiographical works. Despite his mathematical background, Delehaye worked before the development of the graph theory (1930s) that provides the most useful way to present his observations. In fact, Delehaye stated that the spatiotemporal structures in the hagiographical works are some graphs. The whole four-dimensional spatiotemporal universe of a given hagiographical work is grounded on some points in space and time that are vertices of a graph, while the space and time between such points has no semantic value and therefore is almost non-existing. Each two spatiotemporal points-vertices are connected by the edge of a graph and not by segments having any spatiotemporal extension. This is why we have either a desert directly after the gate of Jerusalem (in the Protoevangelium of James) or a famous time-conversion phenomenon coined by the Bollandists as “téléscopage” (when the events that took place in different epochs are projected onto the unique formative period, as it is common in the epic literature). All these spatiotemporal features were elaborated in the cosmological works of the late Judaism, that is, in the Jewish apocalyptics whose most influential specimen is 1Enoch. These data need also an interpretation as a specific type of the spatiotemporal modalities that are to be added to Lubomir Doležel’s list of the modal logics predefining the microstructure of the possible world of a given narrative.