Joachim of Fiore and the Influence of Inspiration

Essays in Memory of Marjorie E. Reeves (1905-2003)

Julia Eva Wannenmacher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754667063
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317110880
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Joachim of Fiore and the Influence of Inspiration. Essays in Memory of Marjorie E. Reeves (1905-2003) is a title that is deliberately reminiscent of the title of Marjorie Reeves' opus magnum: her book 'The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages' has been fundamental in the field of Joachimist studies from its publication in 1969 right up until today. The present volume is inspired both by Joachim of Fiore's lasting influence, which can be found in many places from the early thirteenth century until postmodern times, and by Marjorie Reeves's unsurpassed scholarly achievements and her inspiring personality. British, Continental and American scholars of several generations, from different academic disciplines, follow the paths she has opened, try to answer questions she was the first to ask, offer new insights and new texts in state of the art editions, immersing themselves deeply into materials Marjorie Reeves had provided us with in the field of Joachimism and the influence of prophecy. The volume is divided into three parts. In the first, the studies shed new light on different aspects of Joachim of Fiore's life and work. The second and third parts are dedicated to Joachim's afterlife -- with the contemporary and late medieval reception of Joachim's thought in the Iberian Peninsula, England, and Provence, and then on on Joachim's Wirkungsgeschichte in early modern England and Germany.

PART I
Perspectives on Joachim of Fiore’s Life and Work

Chapter 1
Joachim’s Unnoticed Pattern of History: The Second Diffinitio

E. Randolph Daniel

The first diffinitio is symbolized by the Greek letter alpha which letter is shaped like a triangle. The second diffinitio is symbolized by the Greek letter omega in which letter a single twig proceeds upward from the union of two twigs. Both of these diffinitiones need to be known because both pertain fully to the catholic faith.¹

Joachim’s first pattern is the familiar division of history into three status, which status correspond respectively to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as well as to the three orders, the married laity, the clergy, and the monks. Joachim envisioned the alpha as an equilateral triangle and saw this same shape in the psaltery, a triangular stringed instrument, with a hole in the middle. For Joachim the top of the triangle denoted the Father, the left-hand corner the Son, and the right-hand corner the Holy Spirit. Hence the line from the top to the left corner designated the generation of the Son by the Father. The line from the top to the right corner symbolized the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father, and the bottom line denoted the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son. Thus the prima diffinitio showed how two persons came from one. The top of the triangle also connoted the married laics, the left corner the clergy, and the right one the monks, showing that two orders came from one. Each status had a preliminary or initiatory phase, a period of flowering and finally one of decline. The root of the first status was Adam, its flowering began with Abraham, and its end came with Joseph, Mary’s husband. The second had its root in Uzziah [Ozias], flowered from Jesus and would end with the forty-second generation after Jesus. The third status had two roots, reflecting the double procession of the Holy Spirit, the first root from Elijah and the second from Benedict of Nursia, and would flower shortly after the year 1200.²

Joachim conceived the secunda, diffinitio as a lower-case omega. This letter, he suggested, symbolized two virgule, rods or twigs, each of them shaped like the letter ‘u’. These two rods merged in the stem that thrust up in the middle of the omega. The left-hand rod designated the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father; the right-hand one denoted the procession of the Spirit from the Son. Hence one person, the Holy Spirit, proceeded from two persons, the Father and the Son. The two rods corresponded to the two tempora and to the two peoples, the Jewish and the Gentile, from which would come the spiritual men, the viri spirituales. The rods also symbolized the two Testaments, the Old and the New, from which have come the spiritual understanding, spiritualis intellectus. The first tempus corresponded to the first status, extending from Adam to Joseph, and the second tempus corresponded to the second status. Instead of a third tempus, Joachim alluded to a sabbath that was to begin shortly after 1200.³

Before the year 1254 Joachim was best known for his Concordia of the Testaments, and as a prophet of Antichrist.⁴ The third status of the Holy Spirit first became widely known, indeed became notorious, when the Franciscan Minorite Gerard of Borgo San Donnino made it the central thrust of his Liber introductorius in Evangelium eternum, published in 1254 in Paris. According to Gerard, the second status was going to end and the third was to begin precisely in the year 1260. An Eternal Gospel made up of the writings of Joachim would replace the Old and New Testaments. A new spiritual church led by the barefoot — that is, the friars — would supersede the clergy and the sacraments.⁵

Antagonism between the friars and the secular faculty at the University of Paris was intense in 1254. The seculars immediately seized on Gerard’s Liber as proof that the friars should be banned from the university because of their radicalism. Pope Alexander IV ordered a copy of the Liber and other of Joachim’s works to be brought to Anagni, where a group of commissioners extracted and condemned numerous passages from the Liber and from Joachims own works. Pope Alexander condemned Gerard’s Liber introductorius on 23 October 1255 but did not condemn Joachim’s writings. Florentius, one of the commissioners at Anagni, was disappointed that Alexander had not condemned Joachim’s works and, having become archbishop of Arles, called a council there that condemned Joachim’s pattern of three status and the writings of Joachim in which that pattern was found. Despite the fact that no pope endorsed this provincial council’s judgement, the stigma of heterodox radicalism became widely attached to Joachim’s first definition.⁶

Twentieth-century scholarship has concentrated almost exclusively on this first pattern, debating whether Joachim was orthodox or a radical who anticipated Hegel and modern revolutionaries.⁷ Was Joachim’s Trinitarian doctrine tritheist, and did the third status of the Holy Spirit really represent a radical break from the present clerical status?⁸

The twentieth-century Catholic scholars Marie-Dominique Chenu, Henri Cardinal de Lubac, and Yves Congar focused virtually exclusively on the prima diffinitio, understood it as radical, and made ‘a consistent and on the whole negative appraisal of Joachim’s third status’.⁹ Antonio Crocco tried to defend the orthodoxy of the status of the Holy Spirit.¹⁰ Henri Mottu, a Protestant, interpreted the status of the Holy Spirit as ‘the moment when the word “revolution” came to have its modern political meaning’ instead of its traditional astronomical meaning.¹¹ Later, Mottu drastically moderated his interpretation of the tertius status but it remained his primary concern.¹² Bernhard Töpfer, a Marxist scholar from the German Democratic Republic, saw the status of the Holy Spirit as a new age, Zeitalter, which would be an idyllic era of peace in sharp contrast to the present age.¹³

The late Delno West and Sandra Zimdars-Swartz made a significant contribution to the study of both definitions by emphasizing the centrality of Joachim’s interpretation of Ezekiel’s vision of the living creatures and the wheels (Ezek. 1:4–21) in the structuring both of his works and of his thought, but the first pattern dominated their thinking.¹⁴ Stephen E. Wessley’s Joachim was a novus Benedictus whom God had chosen to found a religious order that in the coming new status would place Joachim and Benedict himself on the same plane. Wessley emphasized the prima diffinitio.¹⁵

Robert Lerner has won a preeminent place among contemporary scholars who have concentrated virtually exclusively on the prima diffinitio. Lerner insists that Joachim’s third status derived from the tradition that there would be a period of time on earth after the annihilation of the Antichrist for the rest of the saints. This tradition stemmed from Jerome, who, commenting on the book of Daniel, came to the passage where Daniel predicted that the ‘abomination that desolates’ will reign for 1295 days, but then added that ‘happy are those who persevere and attain the 1335 days’ (Dan. 12:11b—12). Jerome suggested that those extra 45 days might be a time of silence during which period the elect might be tested.¹⁶ Later, this brief space came to be interpreted as a time of rest and some commentators added to it another extra period of undefined length. Lerner argues that Joachim developed his third status directly from this ‘refreshment of the saints’.¹⁷

According to the tradition, the ‘refreshment of the saints’ must follow the annihilation of the Antichrist. Joachim discussed the antichrists and Antichrist extensively, but the most comprehensible text is tav. XIV of the Liber figurarum that depicts a dragon with seven heads and a tail. The caption to the seventh head reads: ‘Here is the seventh king who is properly called antichrist, although another exists similar to him and equally malicious who is designated in the tail.’¹⁸ Because the period of ‘refreshment’ has to follow the annihilation of Antichrist, Lerner insists that the Antichrist must be Joachim’s seventh head, not the tail.¹⁹

According to Lerner, Joachim’s interpretation of the Apocalypse as referring sequentially to key events from Jesus to the end of history led Joachim ‘across the border into the forbidden territory of millennialism or chiliasm’ so that Joachim came to foretell ‘a future millennial kingdom on earth’. Thus he ‘[contravened] the Augustinian position’ and ‘[teetered] on the edge of heresy’.²⁰ Lerner’s Joachim was a millennialist whose third status was to be a new earthly phenomenon. Lerner reaffirmed his thesis in his recent book on Joachim, Joachimism and the Jews.²¹

Bernard McGinn has also been a dominant figure in Joachim research over the last 25 years. He, too, has emphasized the prima diffinitio but has consistently recognized that the secunda diffinitio must be considered in any effort to interpret the totality of Joachim’s thought.²²

Joachim saw himself neither as a visionary nor as a seer of the future. God had given him, he believed, the key to a spiritual understanding of the scriptures that went farther than previous understandings and that was urgently needed in the light of the looming crisis.²³ Joachim in the first four books of his Liber de Concordia composed a prolegomenon to his commentaries on the scriptures.²⁴ His plan was to comment on all those books of the Scriptures that were customarily commented upon using the spiritual senses — that is, the histories, the prophets, the gospels, Acts, and the Apocalypse. In Book Five of the Liber de Concordia Joachim commented on the Hebrew Scriptures, focusing chiefly on the histories from Abraham to the return from Babylon. The unfinished Tractatus super quatuor Evangelia was the beginning of a commentary on a harmony of the four gospels. The Expositio in Apocalypsim was the crown of this exegetical corpus. The fifth book of the Liber de Concordia had covered the outer wheel, that is, the histories from Genesis to Ezra and Nehemiah. The Expositio covered the inner wheel, the history of the church from Jesus to the end of history and the advent of eternity.²⁵

Joachim used the concords between the generations from Abraham to Joseph and from Jesus to the year 1200 as the structural framework on which to build both diffinitiones. Joachim followed Augustine’s model, the Genealogy of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew (Matt. 1:1–17), who counted 42 generations from Abraham to Joseph and divided them into three groups, 14 from Abraham to David, 14 from David to the exile to Babylon, and another 14 from the exile to Joseph. To these Joachim added the 20 from Luke (Luke 3:23–38) th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• In Memory of Marjorie E. Reeves (Bernard McGinn)
• Part I: Perspectives on Joachim of Fiore’s Life and Work
• Part II: Joachim of Fiore’s Influence in the Later Middle Ages
• Part III: Joachim of Fiore’s Influence in Early Modern Europe
• Selected Bibliography of Marjorie Reeves’s Writings on Joachim of Fiore and Joachism
• General Index
• Index of Manuscripts
• Biblical References