Premessa, in m. Alessandrelli (a cura di), Conflagrazione: ciclicità e conservazione del mondo dall'antichità al Rinascimento, «Bruniana & Campanelliana», 25, 1, (2020), pp. 79-83

The purpose of this section is threefold: firstly, to illustrate the Stoic conception of conflagration; secondly, to examine conflagration as an aspect of Christian eschatology with reference to the exemplary and exhaustive synthesis of an entire tradition of thought provided by Thomas Aquinas; finally, to examine the development of this idea - in its twofold recurrent and una tantum variants - in the Renaissance, within theoretical frameworks that either downplay its scope, or erase it, or even enhance it. The idea of conflagration, as conceived in the Stoic variant of this cyclical event, played a dialectically fundamental role in the development both of the Christian concepts of linear time and of history as something irreducible to natural cycles and of the notion of an infinite universe, pervaded by forces that always keep it in balance.