The University Ethics Observatory has published this text, which denounces ideological manipulation in the context of a public exhibition, calling for a more respectful approach to traditions and religious heritage in the analysis of texts and works of art. The OEU Editorial Board.

A unique exhibition on the Apocalypse

"The National Library of France is offering the first major exhibition devoted to theApocalypse.apocalypse ? An obscure, frightening word, a word that speaks of the end of the world. It has continued to resonate for two thousand years in our Western culture and societies when a major catastrophe occurs, and still today, in the background of our climate anxieties. And yet… This word means revelation, unveiling. In its biblical source, theApocalypse speaks of a veil lifting over the timeless kingdom that will reunite believers in the heavenly Jerusalem. A word of hope, designed to thwart our deepest fears?
This is how the press release from the organizers of the "largest exhibition on the Apocalypse" in Paris, and certainly in Europe according to them, begins.

The exhibition is divided into three parts. In the first part: "Opening the exhibition route in the two galleries of the François-Mitterrand site, the section The Book of Revelation immerses the viewer in the Apocalypse of John, the most famous apocalyptic text in the West. It offers keys to interpreting the representations linked to the different episodes that compose it, from the seven seals to the Last Judgment, highlighting the original meaning of the story: the positive meaning of a revelation rather than a tragic end. Space No. 1 is dark, symbolizing in a way the ignorance of the neophyte visitor.
The second part of the exhibition, entitled The Time of Disasters, is devoted to the fortune of the Apocalypse in the arts, from Dürer to Brassaï, passing through the English apocalyptic sublime and German expressionism. » In this second place, physical light gradually imposes itself.
Finally, the third section presents a collection of contemporary works, some of which are monumental in size (Otobong Nkanga, Abdelkader Benchamma, etc.), "which sketch out this day after, marked by divine "anger" or that of the elements. It is around this day after that the most inventive fictions and representations are constructed, which, in a certain way, remain faithful to the Apocalypse, by conceiving the catastrophe as the prelude to a new world order."¹. ".

                             Henri Rousseau, known as Customs Officer Rousseau, The war (1894)

A dive into mystical darkness

The novice visitor is plunged into darkness from the very beginning of the exhibition itinerary. He admires the beautiful pieces of this collection of the BNF: superb specimens of medieval bibles illustrated with very beautiful illuminations; ritual objects/objects of the Christian rite and some paintings by Renaissance masters. Given the allocated space, the architecture of the exhibition and the number of collection pieces mobilized, one can easily imagine the very high cost of this exhibition. The exhibition guide claims to offer keys to interpreting the book of the Ultimate "Unveiling".
One of the panels at the beginning of the route sets the tone: "But beyond these particular contexts, the period is less conducive to eschatological anxieties: the stabilization of the powers of the Church and States and the advent of a form of rationalism contribute to calming anxieties and warding off John's hallucinatory visions."
An erudite visitor, having studied this masterpiece of Christianity extensively in a multidisciplinary manner, senses the "deception," the cunning, the falsification, and the underlying ideology of this supposedly grandiose artistic event. John would be a "hallucinated person," in other words, in psychiatric terms, a poor guy suffering from "delusions." The exhibition panels very quickly and grotesquely dismiss the mystical dimension of the vision, thus clearly expressing the dynamics of ideological manipulation and the expression of total cultural ignorance, even contempt. At the heart of the first part, in the darkness, the visitor subliminally witnesses the deconstruction of the central message of the Apocalypse.

A series of captions accompany the projection of panels of the Apocalypse Tapestry :
“Fourth, the Horseman of Death; Second trumpet, the third of the ships destroyed; Saint Michael slaying the dragon; The two beasts, of the earth, and of the beast; Second and third bowls poured out; Fall of Babylon; Beasts cast into the lake of fire; Heavenly Jerusalem² »
The scholar discovers with astonishment that the descriptive panel deliberately conceals the legend of the Christ the Victor of the Apocalypse on his white horse slaying the Dragon surrounded by eagles. This slide which is projected remains without relevant caption on the panel, is simply tapestry 74 of the Angers hanging³.

On the other hand, the guide praises the horseman of Death. For the uninformed future visitor, let us recall the vision of these two horsemen of Saint John:
“And I looked, and behold, a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hades followed with him. And power was given to them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, with hunger, with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” (Revelation 6:1-8)
“Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse. He who sat on him was called Faithful and True, and with righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes were like a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns. He had a name written on him, which no one knew except himself. He was clothed in a robe dipped in blood: his name is “The Word of God.” The armies of heaven followed him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. From his mouth came a sharp [two-edged] sword with which to strike down the nations. He will rule them with an iron rod, and he himself will crush the grapes in the winepress of the fierce anger of Almighty God. He has a name written on his robe and on his thigh: “King of kings and Lord of lords.” (Revelation 19,11:17-XNUMX)⁴)

An ideological interpretation of the Apocalypse

The specialist in Judeo-Christian eschatology quickly understands that the strongly ideological exhibition expressly aims at the deconstruction of the Vision of Saint John⁵. Leaving the first part of the exhibition, the visitor enters the light of the true "woke" revelation. After a room dedicated to Dürer, the visitor majestically discovers the famous painting by Le Douanier Rousseau, La Guerre (1894). An apotheosis of feminism undermining masculinism. It is more expressly an authentic declaration of war on masculinism. At the center of the painting, an armed and fierce woman holds a sword and a torch.
It is the advent of materiality in all its splendor and the definitive destruction of the One (masculine principle) embodied by Christ the Knight. It is now the apotheosis of the Two (feminine). It is the fight for the equality of the Two against the One. Place for the opposition and not the complementarity of the One and the Two producing the Three, the latter symbolizing the coincidence of opposites highlighted in the theology of Nicholas of Cusa. The Three is also the symbol of creation. By opposing the One and the Two, creation becomes an existential void, in other words nothingness, nihilism in its splendor. The One and the Two, being separated, we shift from natural creation to artificial creation.

                   The Horsemen of the Apocalypse Tapestry (Angers)

First Horseman of the Apocalypse

Third Horseman of the Apocalypse

Women will now procreate alone thanks to new technologies and men will no longer have any use: "This sort of Bellona, ​​the Roman goddess of war, rides a horse that looks more like a hybrid monster."
Subliminally, Christ the Knight on his white horse is replaced by a rider riding a black steed. We thus move from Christ-like messianism to feminist messianism. The apocalypse reveals the woman of the end times.
The Amazon, a figure of warrior feminism, defeats white males guilty of all the ills of humanity: sexism, decolonialism, fascism, etc.
A complete reversal of values: mystical vision versus nihilistic vision. According to classical theological symbolism, the rider on the black horse embodies poverty:
“And I saw, and behold, a black horse, and he that sat on him had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four living creatures saying, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and the oil and the wine do not hurt them.” (Revelation 6:1-8)⁶)
Moving slowly towards the third part of the exhibition, the visitor is overwhelmed by paintings of horsemen of death and horsemen of famine. A final panel reveals the "secret" of John's vision, the "retard" according to the instigators of the exhibition:
"Apocalypse without a Kingdom" (…) In their compositions where the world disintegrates, loses its form, they seek the possibility of an afterlife, even if it is a Revelation without a kingdom."

                                              Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse

An Apocalypse without a kingdom?

The authors of the scenario of the supposedly unique event display their wishes, subliminally, through the formula " revelation without kingdom »: deconstructing the apocalyptic or eschatological genre. How? Eschatologies are omnipresent in all the great religious traditions of the East and the West. In the case of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic eschatologies, theologians agree that the coming of a Messiah brings about the advent of a new kingdom: heavenly Jerusalem for Jews and Christians and a Caliphate for Muslims. This end-time Messiah will come on a white horse: Mashiach David for the Jews, "King of Kings" for the Christians and the Mahdi for the Muslims. There may sometimes be some nuances on the mount and the dress of the mystical steed. However, ALL Messiahs have a mount, symbol of royalty. Moreover, the Messiah is according to the three traditions, with linguistic nuances, the manifestation of the divine Principle or the Unique⁷They embody the divine Word again with subtleties depending on the language – Hebrew, Greek or Arabic. This synthesis of the three messianisms was achieved in Portugal through the myth of the Fifth Empire⁸
On the metaphysical level, the Messiah or the "Rightly Guided One" (Muslim term used to designate the Mahdi and also "the Awakened One" or the Imam of the end of time) realizes the union of the Absolute Being and the relative Being, otherwise the coincidence of the Infinite and the finite. On the linguistic level, it would be a question of the unity of analogical language and logical language.⁹The unity of the two levels of language, imaginary and real, can only be achieved by means of a ternary dynamic.¹⁰The ternary is the law of the universe according to Pessoa and of course Hegel.
Charles Sanders Pierce places "ternary syntax" at the heart of his semiotic theory¹¹. Hegel, in his treatise on Logic, evokes being (Sein), being – other (Dasein) to become again being – for-itself (for you¹²). Thinking about the "Mysterium Conjonctionis" philosophically implies the "included middle", that is to say, what allows us to go beyond the contradictory. Moreover, this triphasic force leads to the creation of a new "kingdom" which is always, according to the majority of religious traditions, a "pentadic" structure: a circular City with four directions or four elements (the Timaeus of Plato) and a center or catalytic element. The churches of old were built according to this mystical vision.

Philosophical and metaphysical deconstruction

Therefore, to think of an apocalypse or an eschatology "without a kingdom"?, such is the proposal of the exhibition, simply amounts to denying a philosophy of being and by extension a total deconstruction of classical philosophy stemming from the Greek tradition. It also means thinking of a linguistics of systematic opposition. This approach is simply the use of the multiple without unity as demonstrated by Hegel in his philosophy of logic¹³According to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, classical philosophical thought but also classical metaphysics consider the world in a double sphere: the sphere of Man and the sphere of God otherwise the sphere of logical language (real) and the sphere of analogical language (imaginary)¹⁴). Both are intertwined through an "isthmus" or an "included middle." In clearer terms, Parmenides said that Truth is found on the side of the sphere and wandering or "opinion" on the side of the negation of the sphere, that is to say, the refutation of Being.¹⁵. Poincaré said that it is the eternal conflict between the analytical mind (dichotomous and relative) and the synthetic mind (the quest for the Unique or Principle of Truth). Plato spoke of the tension between the sophists and the philosophers and Saint Thomas Aquinas spoke of the struggle between the Mystic and the Legalist, valid in all religious traditions. This tension of opposites will always exist and Pascal suggested the union of "the Spirit of geometry and the Spirit of Finesse". Nicholas of Cusa said that negation leads to affirmation and that Truth is to be sought on the side of Learned Ignorance.
To think of "the Apocalypse without a kingdom" is therefore to affirm, like Nietzsche, that "God is dead." The only difference between this master of German thought and the apprentice nihilists in the exhibition is major: the authentic philosopher knows how to think in double spheres and beyond the spheres. Hegel, initiated into the tradition of Taoism, will conclude that emptiness and plenitude are inseparable and form the mysterious One that authorizes Man to build himself.
Nihilism is a deviation of the mind that consists of denying the overcoming of contradiction. It stems from the individual's inability to think about reality, in other words, what is. It is also, on an epistemological level, the inability to link abduction, induction, and deduction, a triad attributed to Charles Sanders Pierce. Abduction is the fundamental phase of the true thinker who establishes the first intuitive hypothesis, that is, the first being or first sign or geometric center or the numerical one.
Induction is the investigation of the real field, and the final phase is the formalization of the deduction, in other words, the theory. The ancient masters of both East and West all assert that obsessive duality simply leads to mental disorder, a total destruction of the inner unity of the human being and the unity of society. Nihilism always builds from a dislocated mind, not a unified body.

A new ideological paradigm

The authors of this so-called historical exhibition aim to offer visitors the True Revelation, in other words that of the true deconstructive, nihilistic, scientific awakening, announcing the reign of fragmentation, social anarchy and diversity in chaos.
Long live the reign of division and Manichean opposition in the Augustinian sense.
Negation is the only epistemological truth.
The new world order announced is one of total inversion of body and mind and its tearing apart. It is the advent of materiality in all its splendor and the definitive destruction of the Patriarchy embodied by Christ the Knight.
In reality, it is the Celebration of the Coming of the Great Whore, Babylon, who substitutes the Woman of the Apocalypse for the twelve stars¹⁶ of the Old World, announces the end of the old Adam versus Eve vision. The truth is the diversity of gender.
The heavenly Jerusalem evokes the apotheosis of theagape love. Babylon expresses the enjoyment of thelove-eros. To worship Babylon and ignore Jerusalem means that eros takes precedence over agape. This is subliminally the meaning of an Apocalypse without a kingdom. It is the reign of eros without Principle, in other words, eros in the diversity of gender. The Woman with twelve stars symbolizes the One and Multiple femininity. Babylon, for its part, expresses its opposite: femininity in diversity by abolishing its uniqueness (genetic, we might add).
This exhibition is interesting because it reveals how far the nihilistic and deconstructive dynamic can go, the pseudo-scientific delirium currently underway in our cultural and academic institutions and the fierce desire of its prophets, these modern-day hallucinators mobilized to annihilate the foundations of our Western civilizations. "A clean slate for the past" is the message of the Apocalypse: in short, an apotheosis of intellectual and cultural falsification. The heavenly Jerusalem does not exist, the place is for Relativism, not for the Universal.
This event would have been all its charm if the organizers had opened the exhibition to all perspectives, those of the sophists and those of the philosophers. Alas, we are once again faced with the madness of a small group claiming to be the little truth of the Great Dogma, forever established. 

The Kingdom of tomorrow will, let us hope, be that of PHILIA, in other words that of overcoming dualisms!