Like Muhammad, Joachim of Fiore was a prophet. By definition, a prophet, regardless of his or her theological affiliations, is one who receives the word of God and transmits it by means of human language to his or her fellows. But hard on the heels of Joachim’s lifetime of prophecy, latinized Christianity was overtaken by another form of religious vocation: mysticism.
All religions have—and deeply revere—their own mystics, just as all of them often honor the mystics of other faiths, and for good reason. Mysticism is a mode of conversation or of knowing that exists external to the particularities of a specific theology. That is, unlike the prophet, a mystic is not a conduit. Rather, the mystic is a fiber in a substantial rug—nothing more than that—a single fiber that is part of a thread that is part of a strand that is part of the rug. And the mystic speaks, not the pattern of the rug, but the essential rug-ness of which he or she knows himself or herself to be both an integral and an unnecessary part.
The list of the men and women who were European mystics in the two and a half centuries after Joachim is a roll call of dozens, if not hundreds, of reverenced names. One thinks, for instance, of Meister Eckhart (1260–1327 CE), John Tauler (c. 1300–61 CE), and Henry Suso (1300–66 CE), who together came to be known to later generations as the Rhineland school of mysticism. There was the great Flemish mystic, John Ruysbroek (1293–1381 CE) and the enigmatic Bavarian, Henry of Nordliger, who was born in the early fourteenth century, but then suddenly disappears completely after 1352 CE, leaving a personal mystery of his own behind him. Gerard Groot (1340–84 CE) was as Dutch as his name would indicate, and no one could ever forget the most eloquent of them all, Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471 CE), with his little book and his little nook. Nor could any counting ever be complete without that most beloved of all of them, Dame Julian of Norwich (1342–1416 CE).1
The list goes on and on, of course, but the mystics matter to our present discussion not so much as individuals but as an aggregate. Seen in that light, they become a kind of phenomenon that spoke at a popular level to the cultural and religious mind-set that Joachim had foreshadowed and that the Reformation would ultimately have to address.
The mystics were dealing outside the bounds of doctrine. They were yearning toward and reporting on experiential, rather than epistemological or well-ordered, religion. By and large, they were also getting away with spreading their blatantly extra-ecclesial writings and speeches. By any set of definitions, they were trafficking in what was “spiritual” even if it were not “religious” in the way that Mother Church understood that term.
What the mystics had to say, moreover, was of enormous appeal to the people who gathered around them. The very fact that many of them did indeed get away with publicly proclaiming their non-doctrinal and highly spiritual talk invited other folk—not necessarily mystics, but just plain uneasy Christians—to entertain daring and previously unarticulated thoughts and possibilities about the realm of the spirit or, as the case might be, of the Spirit.
Not all the restiveness of those centuries found its outlet in disjointed and non-cohesive conversations, though. All over Europe, there were scattered groups of Christians disavowing Mother Church and organizing themselves into worshipping bodies that owed their allegiance to the movings of the Spirit, not to those of Rome. The ones best known to most of us today were groups like the Cathars, the Albigensians, the Waldensians, or even the Bogomil churches in Bulgaria, all of them more or less identical in general thrust, if not always in the small details.
By the early thirteenth century, the Cathars had managed to go so far afield and to grow so numerous and influential as to frighten Pope Innocent III into mounting a major military campaign against their communities in the south of France. Shortly thereafter, Innocent went even further and instituted the Medieval Inquisition just to make sure he had gotten all those heretical experimenters, if not by one means, then by the other.
The Cathars’ doctrinal offenses were undeniably numerous, but foundational to them all was their dualism. They held that there were two Forces or gods in creation, one, God, who was good and the other, Satan, who was evil. But God was one entity—a disincarnate entity, in fact—that was pure Spirit. Catharism and its various spin-offs were clearly Gnostic and clearly heretical. Neither of those points has ever really been much in question. The point that is remarkable and pertinent, however, is that Catharism and its various presentations could not have existed, much less grown strong enough to seriously threaten the papacy and the Church, had there not been a deep-seated uneasiness among good, traditional Christians about what exactly “spirit” was and about what God was in relation to that ill-defined beingness.
The questions bubbled like a slow boil just below the surface of latinized Christianity and its teachings. In particular, there were those teachings not only about triune God, but also about the procession of one of them—of the most attractive one of them, in fact and mystically speaking—from the other two. Nor were those questions happening in an ideational vacuum. Islam and the Arabic culture that carried it had, as we have seen, begun a major push into both Africa and Europe within just a few decades of Muhammad’s death. By 750 CE, the area around Cordoba in Spain had already become a major caliphate, or Islamic state, that would, in turn, spawn other or spin-off Islamic units. It was not, in fact, until 1492, that year so fated in so many ways, that indigenous royalty finally succeeded in driving the Muslims out of the western part of Europe. It would take even longer in Eastern Europe, the last Muslim armies and political units not having been successfully driven out until 1683, when much of Vienna was torched in the process.
While there were certainly differing cultural and political values involved in that centuries-long struggle with Islam, the religious or theological struggle was primarily—and as we have already noted—one about One-God-in-Three-Parts and the impenetrable question of Spirit: what It was, what It was in divine relationship, what It was in function, how It was to be known—Separately? En masse? How?2
Each time latinized Christianity and the cultures that it informs have gone through one of our semi-millennial upheavals, there has always been a prior period of about a century and a half that serves as a buildup of sorts to the moment when the upheaval is demonstrably present and a documentable fact. Called the “peri-” as in the peri-Transition, or the peri-Great Decline and Fall, or the peri-Great Schism, or the peri-Reformation, it is concerned with the slow disestablishment of the authority that had held both the culture and the Church steady for the previous three or four centuries.
So it was that when, by the late fourteenth century, the buildup to the Great Reformation—that is, the peri-Reformation—had begun to evidence itself, so too had the centrality of the Holy Spirit to the theology and ecclesiology that would become Protestantism.
In England, the Lollards, who were followers of John Wycliffe, were becoming more and more adamant that a clearer and more useful statement about the Holy Ghost must be formulated. In Europe, the “spiritual” Franciscans who, as an order, had always been like Joachim in believing in a new age of the Spirit, were again growing more outspoken about their beliefs. As copies of Holy Writ became more readily available, both privileged and ordinary citizens were beginning to express aloud their conviction that one of the great sins of the Church had been to usurp the Spirit’s function as sole interpreter of the Scriptures.3 Growing bodies of believers like the Anabaptists and the Munzerites were aggressively reconfiguring traditional doctrine and traditional Christian worship, claiming the Spirit and what they referred to as the “inner Light” as their authority for doing so.4 Mysticism was beginning to crop up again. And with all of this, the desire for experiential engagement with God, the Spirit, grew into a kind of steady simmer.
There was, in all of these various and sympathetic expressions of doctrinal insurrection, a clear agreement that the Church had held Christians and Christianity hostage for centuries. By its usurpation of power over all of life, the Church had circumvented Holy Writ and produced instead politically useful interpretations of it: custom-made formulations and self-serving and self-perpetuating strictures and obscurities. But no more. No more papacy, no more magisterium, no more curia.
One of the problems—indeed, probably the central problem—with disestablishing extant and operative authority is that chaos can and does ensue, unless the emerging new thinkers, leaders, politicians, and theologians can discover—preferably, sooner rather than later—a new source of authority. Looked at logically, the authority to be established by the great Reformers should have been the Holy Spirit unmediated—or as earlier times would have said, the Holy Ghost unmediated. That did not quite happen, at least not exactly.
Luther and his fellow reformers—though the primary role in this was Luther’s—in the press of their need to answer the question of “How now shall we live and in accord with which principles and rules?” turned to Scripture itself as the new base upon which authority was to rest and from which the rules of life were to flow. The leap from the rigidity of papal and curial control to unfettered control by direct engagement with the Spirit was too great to make. Maybe later, but not now.
Early on in the Great Reformation, standing in front of the Diet of Worms in May 1521, Luther delivered his immortal “Here I Stand” speech in defense of himself and of his new theology. In it, he would declare quite emphatically that he could not, and would not, follow any principle or doctrine or ecclesial officer or theological authority unless he was first convinced of the rightness of their position by what he found in Scripture and that was compatible with “plain reason.”
What is more interesting, however, is what he said next: “Scripture is to be understood alone through that Spirit who wrote it, which Spirit you cannot find more surely present than in these sacred Scriptures, which he himself wrote.”5
The Spirit had been located, at least for the time being, and sola scriptura would become the order of the day for the coming centuries.6
Notes
1. This should by no means be interpreted as suggesting that superb theologians were not also hard at work during these same centuries and on the same questions. They were. St. Augustine, in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, had laid much of the groundwork for what these later medieval theologians would formulate.
Heavily influenced by the Cappadocian Fathers and other thinkers like Didymus the Blind and Ambrose of Milan, Augustine was a persuaded processionist whose masterful Of the Trinity would be a major, formative influence on men like Thomas Aquinas and those who followed him. Living and writing in the thirteenth century, Aquinas was to become a doctor of the Church and, by common consent, the greatest of the medieval theologians. It would be Aquinas who, working from both Aristotle and Augustine, would formulate an understanding of the Trinity as relationship. His line of argument would inform the subsequent centuries and extend even into our own.
2. Contemporary Christians often forget—or sometimes never even knew—that Luther himself refrained from speculating on the interrelationships of the triune persons. He demonstrated uneasiness with the word “Trinity,” never including it in any of his catechisms or litanies. For more, see Christine Helmer’s seminal study, The Trinity and Martin Luther: A Study on the Relationship between Genre, Language and the Trinity in Luther’s Works (1523–1546) (Darmstadt, Germany: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1999).
3. One of the oddities of Aquinas’s work on the Trinity is the fact that he never assumed or taught this position.
4. One of the hallmarks, especially of these two groups, was their constant cry of “The Spirit! The Spirit!” in public as well as private gatherings. And one of the almost humorous things Martin Luther was ever known to have said was spoken in the midst of such a confrontation, when he turned and scoffed, “I will not follow where their ‘spirit’ leads!”
Luther or no Luther, there is no question about the fact that these men and women whose “spirit” he decried were charismatics in the fullest sense of that word as we use it today. The only problem was that they were living in their sixteenth century and not in our twenty-first one. They were five hundred years too early, in other words.
5. Gerald L. Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 145; capitalization of “Spirit” has been altered.
6. The growing bibliography on the formative centrality of Trinitarian thinking, both popular and professional, to the tensions and resolutions of the Great Reformation and their aftermath is almost overwhelming. There is neither the space nor the reason to list them here, of course, but the reader who would like to pursue the matter in greater depth will find a very fine beginning place in Paul C. H. Lim’s recently released Mystery Unveiled—The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).