When Israel was in Egypt’s land: Let my people go:
Oppressed so hard they could not stand. Let my people go.
Go down, Moses, ’Way down in Egypt land.
Tell ole Pharaoh. Let my people go.
Your foes shall not before you stand: Let my people go.
And you’ll possess fair Canaan’s land: Let my people go.
Oh, let us all from bondage flee: Let my people go.
And let us all in Christ be free: Let my people go.
We need not always weep and moan: Let my people go.
And wear these slavery chains forlorn: Let my people go.1
When slaves sang this spiritual about Moses leading the people of Israel out of Egypt into the wilderness and Joshua leading them to the conquest of Canaan, they expressed their longing for freedom, for equality with their masters, and for a share in the prosperity of the United States. On January 1, 1863 Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves in those states that formed the Confederacy. On December 18, 1865, the thirteenth amendment abolished slavery. The fourteenth amendment with its “due process clause” was ratified on July 28, 1868. The slaves were liberated during and shortly after the Civil War. Nevertheless, some 130 years later, many African-Americans have still not arrived at the land of Canaan. Despite the success of a growing black middle class, many blacks are mired in urban ghettos, where a racially biased war on drugs, high unemployment, and police brutality persist. They have escaped Egypt, only to find themselves wandering in the wilderness for more than a century.
On November 7, 1917 the Bolsheviks successfully took over the revolutionary government of Russia. Eighty-one years later their dream of a stateless and classless worker’s paradise has been totally shattered. The USSR has broken up into nationalist states, and Russia itself is groping its way toward capitalism.
So pharaonic oppression, deliverance, Sinai, and Canaan are still with us, powerful memories shaping our perceptions of the political world. The “door of hope” is still open; things are not what they might be. . . . This is a central theme in western thought. . . . We still believe . . . what the exodus first taught . . . first,—that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt;—second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land;—and third, that “the way to the land is through the wilderness.” There is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching.2
The original exodus had three components: the liberation from Egypt, the journey through the wilderness, and the conquest of the land of promise. Liberation has been the easiest step to achieve. The journey was longer and harsher than the Hebrews expected—Moses was dead before the people entered Canaan. The third and final step has proved truly elusive. Sometimes the liberated never reached it at all and remained in the wilderness. At other times Canaan proved disappointing, another Egypt. The exodus formed a paradigm that has shaped the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of reformers and revolutionaries, of the oppressed and those whose mission was to free the suffering, but Canaan has either eluded them or proved to be as oppressive as Egypt.
The Israelites conquered Canaan and established a monarchy, but it split into two kingdoms of which the northern fell to the Assyrians in the eighth century and the southern, Judea, to Nebuchadnezzar, whose exiling of the leading citizens became a symbol of disappointment with Canaan. This caused an anonymous prophet to envision another exodus:
Comfort, comfort my people . . . speak tenderly to Jerusalem and tell her this, that she has fulfilled her term of bondage, that her penalty is paid. . . . Prepare a road for the lord through the wilderness, clear a highway across the desert for our God. (Isa. 40: 1–3, New English Bible)3
Exodus led to captivity and captivity to a new exodus. The prophets had voiced God’s discontent with Israel and Judea because they had failed to achieve the justice that the covenant demanded. When the dispersal of the northern people by the Assyrians was followed by the exile of the Judeans, the temptation grew to abandon Yahweh and to embrace the victorious deities of Babylon. The Judeans were dazzled by the opportunities in the metropolis, realizing how poor and off-the-beaten-track Jerusalem had been. Apocalypticism emerged in the prophets, Second Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, who created the notion of a renewed exodus and conquest to keep Judaism alive among the exiles. Cyrus, the Persian, permitted the return, but the second temple era had its own problems, culminating in the first Jewish War with the Romans in 70 AD.4
Popes Leo IX (1049–54) and Gregory VII (1073–85) launched the papal reform movement confident that God would enable them to attain their goals despite opposition from churchmen and lay rulers. Gregory, who expressed his vision of a reformed church in apocalyptic terms, was one of the first reformist apocalyptics, the prophets who used language traditionally associated with the end of history to describe thoroughgoing clerical reform. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) was the preeminent reformist apocalyptic of the first half of the twelfth century, and his De consideratione (written 1145–53) became a manifesto for his disciples, who included Gerhoch of Reichersberg (1092/1093–1169), Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), and Joachim of Fiore (1130S–1202). Bernard urged Eugenius III to implement clerical reform, arguing that the pope had been given the position of vicar of Christ in order to purify Christendom spiritually. Bernard was upset that Eugenius, instead of working for reform, was preoccupied with judicial business, was surrounded by lawyers, and was taking the temporal sword. Bernard reminded Eugenius that the issue of Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers was still hanging in the air.5
The trends that made Bernard uneasy intensified under the following pontiffs. The brief pontificate of Anastasius IV (1153–54) alarmed Hildegard, who addressed a scathing letter to him.6 Gerhoch of Reichersberg sought to persuade Hadrian IV (1154–59) to implement the decrees of the synod of Rheims over which Eugenius had presided in 1148, to read De consideratione, and to address its concerns, but Hadrian instead became involved in an increasingly bitter dispute with Frederick I.7
The schism between Alexander III (1159–81) and Victor IV (1159–64) completed both Gerhoch’s and Hildegard’s disillusionment with the popes as the agents to achieve clerical reform. Gerhoch supported the legitimacy of Alexander III, but he came reluctantly to the conclusion that simony had been involved in the pope’s election and that because Alexander refused to clear himself, he was quite probably a simoniac and certainly consumed by avarice. As such he was an “abomination of desolation” sitting on the papal throne. Alexander’s usurpation of the rights of Frederick and Alexander’s championing of papal justice and canon law were additional elements in Gerhoch’s indictment.8 Unable to believe that Alexander would struggle to realize reform, Gerhoch could only rely on his faith that somehow Jesus would reform the church just as he had come to his disciples on the stormy sea during the fourth watch of the night and reached out to Peter, whose lack of faith was causing him to sink beneath the waves (see Matthew 14: 25–33, Mark 6: 46–52, John 6: 15–21).9
Hildegard’s Sciuias (written 1141–51) was Augustinian in its apocalypticism, giving a detailed portrait of the final Antichrist but also alluding to a period of improvement after his annihilation (see Robert Lerner’s “Refreshment of the Saints”). Hildegard did, however, introduce the notion of a succession of periods before Antichrist characterized by five animals—a fiery dog, a yellow lion, a pale horse, a black pig, and a gray wolf.10 Charles Czarski has shown that Hildegard completely altered her thinking when she wrote her De operatione dei siue liber diuinorum operum simplicis hominis (begun in 1163). Under the fiery dog, the princes of the empire will strip the clergy of their temporal wealth, and the era of the yellow lion will begin millennially with holiness, peace, and prosperity. The pacifism of the Christians will induce outsiders to attack, but reform will again triumph. Both kings and princes will cease to have any respect for the empire and the pope will rule only Rome and its immediate environs. The renewed holiness will finally be engulfed by heretics and other sinners until Antichrist comes. The Liber diuinorum operum is certainly reformist, and, as Czarski has cogently argued, the shift must have resulted from Hildegard’s disillusionment with the papacy.11
Joachim of Fiore was born in the 1130s at Celico near Cosenza in Calabria. His father was a notary, and Joachim, the eldest son, was educated in his father’s profession and then given a post at the Norman court at Palermo. Sometime in the late 1160s or early 1170s, Joachim left the court, went to Palestine as a pilgrim, and returned convinced that he ought to become a wandering preacher. He became a monk at Corazzo, a Benedictine house between Cosenza and Catanzaro, where he was elected abbot in the late 1170s. In 1184 Joachim was at the Cistercian house of Casamari, which is located up in the mountains east of Frosinone between Rome and Monte Cassino. Joachim was trying to persuade the Cistercians to take Corazzo into their order. Eventually this happened, but by that time (c. 1189) Joachim had left Corazzo, was leading an eremitical life, and was about to found San Giovanni in Fiore, the mother abbey of his Florensian Order. The new order was prospering before Joachim died in 1202.12
Three intuitions shaped Joachim’s prophetic message. The first occurred when Joachim was in Palestine and involved concords between persecutions of Israel and persecutions of the church.13 This intuition was the basis of book one of the Liber de concordia.14
The second intuition came to Joachim at Pentecost while the abbot was at Casamari (probably in 1184). Joachim thenceforward understood trinitarian relationships by analogy to the musical instrument called a psaltery that was shaped like an equilateral triangle but with a blunt top; it had ten horizontal strings and a hole in the middle. The hole represented the unity while the top represented God the Father by whom the Son was generated. The Spirit proceeded from both the Father and the Son. Visualize a triangle with the Father at the top, the Son at the lower left facing angle and the Spirit at the lower right facing angle. The line from the top to the left angle represents the generation of the Son, the line from the top to the right angle the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the bottom line the procession from the Son.15
The third intuition happened after Joachim had left Casamari (hence in 1185 or 1186). Joachim was working on his commentary on the Apocalypse and was wrestling with some difficulty when, on Easter eve, the solution came to him.16 Joachim, I believe, realized that the Apocalypse was the inner wheel that corresponded to the outer wheel in Ezekiel’s vision (Ez. 1: 4–21). The outer wheel was the history of the Hebrew people from Abraham to the return from Babylon, recorded in the scriptures from Genesis through Nehemiah. The Apocalypse or inner wheel thus “concorded” with the history of the Hebrews and contained the history of the church.17
Joachim began his Liber de concordia while he was at Casamari (c. 1183–85) and finished it no later than 1198. The first four books formed a prolegomenon in which Joachim worked out the concords between the history of the Hebrew people and the history of the Church. In this working out, Joachim defined the patterns of history to which I shall return shortly.18 The Psalterium decem chordarum was begun at Casamari and finished about 1186. In it Joachim explored trinitarian relationships and began to formulate the pattern of three status. Book five of the Liber de concordia commented on the scriptures from creation week to the prophets, ending with a commentary on Daniel. The Expositio in Apocalypsim was begun at Casamari and was finished by 1200 when Joachim wrote his Testamentary Letter.19 The Tractatus super quatuor euangelia commented on a harmony of the four gospels. Most scholars have considered it to be a late work because it is incomplete and is not listed in the Testamentary Letter. That omission, however, may have been because it was left unfinished.20 Joachim intended to comment on all those books of the Bible that were considered suitable for spiritual or allegorical interpretation—the histories, the prophets, the gospels, and the Apocalypse. The wisdom books were excluded, as well as the letters of Paul and the other apostles, except for Job, which Joachim considered one of the four special books from the Hebrew scriptures (the others were Esther, Judith, and Tobit). Joachim commented on these four special books in book five of the Liber de concordia.21 The four gospels corresponded to these four special books and to the four hubs and the living creatures on Ezekiel’s wheels.
While he was a hermit at Petra Lata before he founded the abbey at S. Giovanni in Fiore, Joachim began but left unfinished a commentary on the life and rule of St. Benedict. Stephen Wessley dated it to 1186–88 and argued that in it Joachim was justifying himself by reference to the life of Benedict.22
Joachim thought visually and analogically. Trees, vines, and geometrical shapes underlay his thinking. He inserted figure into the Liber de Concordia, Psalterium decem chordarum, and Expositio in Apocalypsim, and the Liber figurarum is a collection in which the figures are considered to be genuine works of Joachim, although the compiler was one of his disciples. Some of the figures in the Liber figurarum correspond to those in the other works, but even in these cases there are significant differences.23 Like Bernard, Gerhoch, and Hildegard, Joachim was a monastic theologian. Theology was commentary on Scripture and primarily on the spiritual senses. Symbolism was intrinsic in Joachim’s methodology.24
Joachim was widely respected as a prophet during his lifetime. In 1184 he went to Veroli to see Pope Lucius III. The abbot sought permission to write and confirmation that God had indeed revealed the concordia to him. While he was in the pope’s presence, he commented on a sibylline text that had been discovered among the papers of Matthew of Angers, cardinal priest of San Marcello. This commentary is his earliest extant work, the De prophetia ignota.25
In 1186 Joachim went to Verona, where Pope Urban III (1185–87) renewed Joachim’s permission to write. On June 8, 1188 Clement III wrote to Joachim from the Lateran Palace in Rome, mentioning Urban’s permission and exhorting Joachim to finish his “Expositionem Apocalipsis and Opus concordie.” Joachim came to Rome in this same year and received Clement’s permission to leave his post at Corazzo, which became a daughter house of Fossanova.26
During the winter of 1190–91, Joachim was interviewed by Richard I the Lionhearted while the English king was wintering in Messina.27 Joachim went to Rome again during the pontificate of Celestine III (1191–98), and on August 25, 1196, Celestine issued a bull formally approving the foundation of S. Giovanni in Fiore and the constitutions of the Order of Fiore.28 Finally Adam of Persigny, a Cistercian, interviewed Joachim while he was in Rome. The extant account dates the interview to 1196, but Marjorie Reeves has argued that it must have been in 1198 after Innocent III had become pope because it refers to him.29 In addition to his contacts with the popes and with Richard I, Joachim maintained active ties with the rulers of Sicily and Calabria, William II (died 1189), Tancred of Lecce, and Henry VI.30
Bernard of Clairvaux in his De consideratione wrote: “Quaternity sets limits to the earth; it is not a characteristic of the deity. God is trinity, God is each of three persons. If it pleases you to add a fourth divinity, I am already convinced that what is not God should not be worshipped.” 31
Bernard was attacking Gilbert of Poitiers.32 Bernard’s attack on Gilbert probably caused Joachim to write a treatise in which the Calabrian abbot accused Peter Lombard of teaching that the godhead was a quaternitas rather than a trinity. Lateran IV took Lombard’s side and condemned Joachim’s attack. This condemnation provoked a furious reaction among Joachim’s Cistercian and Florensian disciples.33 This reaction is reflected in Pseudo-Joachim, Super Hieremiam prophetam, completed by 1248 at the latest.34
In 1248 Friar Gerard of Borgo San Donnino was in Provins, where he cited the Super Hieremiam to Friar Salimbene.35 In 1254 Gerard published a Liber introductorius in euangelium eternum at Paris, which probably consisted of an introduction and all or parts of the Liber de concordia, Expositio in Apocalypsim, and Psalterium decem chordarum with glosses by Gerard in which Gerard interpreted the third status radically. Gerard was a Franciscan, and the order was currently involved in a bitter dispute with the secular masters at the University of Paris. They seized on the Liber introductorius, arguing that it reflected the antichristian heresies that the mendicants were propagating. The condemnation of Gerard’s Liber and the subsequent condemnation of extracts from Joachim’s works by the Commission of Anagni raised questions about Joachim’s orthodoxy that are still argued.36
Hence modern scholarship has focused on two issues—Joachim’s doctrine of the trinity and his division of history in three status. Interpreters who have favored a radical understanding—making Joachim the progenitor of Hegel—have argued that Joachim was a tritheist who gave more weight to the three persons than to the unity and gave the Holy Spirit a mission equal to and separate from that of Jesus Christ. The third status of the Holy Spirit would involve as complete a break from the present status of the Son as that status had made from the first status of the Father. In particular, the clerical church and the sacraments would cease to function when the ecclesia spiritualis arrived, just as the synagogue had earlier been replaced by the church.
Defenders of Joachim’s orthodoxy argued that his trinitarian theology was completely orthodox and even tried to prove that the treatise condemned at Lateran IV was a forgery. Despite whatever changes the third status might involve, the clergy and sacraments would persist unchanged to the end of history. Scholars quoted random passages from Joachim’s works in defense of their views. Many of these passages had been cited by the Commission of Anagni.37
Marjorie Reeves has compiled a major revision of all prior interpretations. Methodologically, she has argued that the figures are the keys to understanding Joachim’s thought. McGinn, West, and Zimdars-Swartz have all followed Reeves’s lead in this respect. Reeves has also compelled scholars to recognize that Joachim used several patterns of history and that the three status had to be understood in parallel with the two tempora and the patterns of fives and sevens.38
Augustine of Hippo tried to discourage speculation about the end and was pessimistic about the future. Reform for him was strictly personal. Joachim has been contrasted with the Augustinian tradition because Joachim expected the apocalyptic crisis in the imminent future and because he expected the third status of the Holy Spirit to be significantly holier and more spiritual than the second status of the church.39
Joachim, however, was fundamentally Augustinian. His understanding of the trinity relied on Augustine’s analogy to the faculties of the human mind, memory, reason, and love.40 Moreover, Augustine’s eight etates are the foundation of Joachim’s understanding of history. Augustine relied on the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew 1: 2–17, which supplied forty-two ancestors from Abraham to Joseph divided into three groups of fourteen each (Abraham to David, David to the exile, the exile to Jesus). This was supplemented by the twenty generations that Luke gave from Adam to Abraham (Luke 3: 23–38). Augustine sought to undermine the anno mundi dating that fed constant expectation of a millennial seventh worldweek by using the generations rather than numbers of years to define the etates before Jesus because generations, especially those before Abraham, involved extremely varied lengths of time. Augustine therefore divided the time before Jesus into five etates, the first two of ten generations each, the last three of fourteen each. Augustine’s sixth etas began from the Incarnation and lasted until the end of the world. Its length was indeterminate so that its end could only be surmised by the onset of various signs. The seventh ran parallel to the sixth, but the sixth was terrestrial, an age of suffering and trouble, while the seventh was heavenly—the rest of the souls who had died in Jesus and were awaiting the final resurrection. Augustine equated the millennium of Apocalypse 20: 1–6 with the entire history of the church, in order to blunt the thinking that it would be the seventh worldweek of earthly bliss. The eighth etas of eternity was beyond history.41
Properly we call the concordia a similitude of equal proportion of the New to the Old Testament, equal I say as to number but not as to dignity, when namely person and person, order and order, war and war by means of a certain parity gaze as it were into each other’s faces.42
Moreover that understanding which is called concords resembles a continuous highway that goes from the desert to the city. Along the route there are low spots where the traveler is uncertain about the right direction to pursue and there are also mountain peaks from which the pilgrim can look both backward and forward and measure the right way by contemplating the path he has come.43
Concordia was not typology or allegory. Events, persons, places, institutions, and orders in a particular generation have similarities or parallels in the same generation in the succeeding status or tempora. Josiah was the twenty-eighth from Jacob in the line of Jesus’ ancestors and the thirty-sixth from Jacob counting by the judges of Israel. Josiah, king of Judah from 640 to 609 B.C., carried out a major reform inspired by “some form of the book of Deuteronomy.”44 Josiah, however, tried to stop pharoah Necho II of Egypt from marching to the Euphrates but was defeated at Megiddo and killed.45 Pope Leo IX (1049–54), who lived in the thirty-sixth generation of the church, initiated the papal reform movement, but his expedition against the Normans resulted in a bitter defeat.46 Josiah and Leo “concord” with each other.
By means of the concordia, the uiator could look back from a “mountain peak” and by seeing the road that had been traveled, discern the main shape of the road that still lay ahead. To reveal the concords and interpret them was the task that God had given Joachim.47
The first intuition gave Joachim the notion that the persecutions that the Hebrew people had suffered paralleled those suffered by the Christians. This is the subject of book one of the Liber de concordia, written at Casamari and left untouched thereafter.48
Joachim began anew with the first twelve chapters of book two, part one. Joachim contrasted Jewish insistence on a literal, earthly fulfillment of the promises to Abraham with spiritual, heavenly Christian expectation and then defined the concordia (chapter two) and allegory (chapter three). Chapter four introduced the prima diffinitio—the pattern of the three status and their parallel, the evolution of the three orders of the married, the clergy, and the monks (chapter five). Chapter eight introduced the secunda diffinitio—that of the two tempora to which correspond the Jewish and gentile peoples and the two testaments or covenants.49
Both diffinitiones were patterns extrapolated from series of generations. The first series consisted of the ancestors of Jesus according to Matthew’s and Luke’s genealogies. The second and third series begin with someone in the first series but continue beyond it to the generations of the common era, each of which is computed at thirty years, although Joachim refused to commit himself on the length of the generations after the fortieth (1170–1200 A.D.), in which he was living when he wrote. The first series included sixty-three generations, divided into three groups of twenty-one each.50 Joachim likened this series to a tree of which the first twenty-one generations are the root projecting upward (the initiatio), the second twenty-one the trunk sending forth limbs and leaves (fructificatio), and the final twenty-one the full blossoming and the gradual decay (consummatio).51
Joachim conceived the prima diffinitio as A or as the ten-stringed psaltery, shaped like an equilateral triangle with a blunted top. The psaltery, as we have seen, described the generation and procession of two persons from one, of the Son and the Holy Spirit from the Father.52
The first status, representing the Father and the married, had its root in Adam, its fruition in Jacob, and its consummation in Uzziah (Ozias) (king of Judah, 783–42 B.C.). The second status, which began with Uzziah, who was the twenty-first generation before Jesus, flowered in Jesus, and began its final stage in the twenty-second generation after the Incarnation, belonged to both the Son and to the Holy Spirit, primarily to the Son who was generated from the Father and secondarily to the Holy Spirit who proceeded from the Father. Like the Son from the Father, the clergy proceeded from the married and the monks like the Holy Spirit came from both the married and the clergy. Hence the third status began twice, the first time in the reign of Asa (Judah, 913–873 B.C.) with the appearance of Elijah and Elisha and the second time with Benedict of Nursia. Joachim tried to draw these three trees in the Liber de concordia but never succeeded. The closest representation is Table Seven, in which the first column represents the generations of the first status from Adam to Joseph, the third column represents the generations of the second status from Uzziah to generation forty-two after Jesus, the second column represents the first beginning of the third status with the generations from Asa to the forty-second generation after Jesus, and the fourth column represents the second beginning of the third status from generation sixteen of the church to the forty-second generation after the end of the second status or the eighty-fourth of the church. The three status are organic, living entities sprouting from each other, overlapping and progressively moving step by step from the world of the married and from the promise that the Hebrews would conquer the land of Palestine to the ultimate virginal monastic contemplatives whose “conquest” would be complete peace and silence in which to contemplate God.53
Joachim described the lower case Greek omega, ω, which symbolized the secunda diffinitio, as one rod that proceeded from two. The first tempus, identical to the first status, consisted of the generations from Adam to Joseph, husband of Mary, and corresponded to the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father, to the letter of the Hebrew scriptures, and to the populus iudaicus. The second tempus, which was the same as the generations of the second status from Uzziah to the forty-second generation of the church, corresponded to the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son to the letter of the Christian testament and to the populus christianus. From the letter of the two scriptures proceeded the spiritual understanding (spiritualis intelligentia), and from the two peoples came the uiri spirituales, or monks.54 Thus the two diffinitiones describe the same historical pattern, the progression from the original exodus to the still future monastic “land of promise.”55
Joachim began to explicate these two diffinitiones in book two, part one, chapter twelve. The development of the prima diffinitio ended with book two, part two, chapter nine. From chapter ten to the end of the first part of book four, Joachim devoted himself to the secunda diffinitio.56
In book three, part one Joachim interpreted the seven seals of the first tempus, and in part two the corresponding seven openings of the second tempus. Using the image of the wheels of Ezekiel Joachim devised another pattern of generations in which the first four tempora signaculorum represent four animals, each with six wings, and four ordines, those of the apostles, martyrs, confessors, and virgins to which were alloted six generations each for a total of twenty-four. The fourth opening ended in 720 A.D. The fifth opening, the sedes, would have sixteen generations and would last from 721 to 1200 A.D.57
Moreover the forty-first generation alone is to be accepted as double, so that it could rightly be called twice the sixth, for the chief reason that there is to be a double tribulation under the sixth opening in likeness of the passion, in which, the shadows being doubled, Christ has suffered. Indeed in the forty-second generation, which will be like a sabbath, the seventh seal will be opened, about which the Apocalypse has spoken: “And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” (Apoc. 8: I)58
In the second tempus when the seals were to be opened, ten generations were to be subtracted from the sixth and seventh seals and added to the opening of the fifth seal. The opening of the fifth seal would extend therefore from 720 to 1200. The sixth seal would follow and last only one generation. During it, two persecutions would occur. Then the seventh seal would ensue, an era of sabbath.
The seals embraced forty generations, from Abraham to Jehoiachin, to which were added the forty-first designated by Shealtiel and the forty-second that belonged to Zerubbabel. Hence forty generations were counted down to the beginning of the Babylonian Exile. Shealtiel, the forty-first, reigned during the Exile. Zerubbabel led the return to Palestine in the forty-second generation.59
Joachim’s objective was to equate the history of the Hebrews from Jacob to the Exile with the history of the church from Jesus to Joachim’s own fortieth generation (1170–1200). Specifically Joachim equated the generations from Josiah to Shealtiel with the period from Pope Leo IX (1049–54) to 1200. Thus Joachim made the history of the church from the beginning of the papal reform movement correspond to the events that began with Josiah’s reform in Judah and ended less than a century later with the deportation of the Jews to Babylon. The parallel between Josiah and Leo IX has already been pointed out.60 Ioachaz’s removal from Jerusalem to Egypt by pharoah Necho “concorded” with Gregory VII’s flight to Salerno and Henry IV’s elevation of Clement III as antipope. Joachim’s forcible submission to the Babylonians paralleled Henry V’s effort during his coronation “to extort a privilege of investiture” from Paschal II.61 After Joachim died, Jechonias, his son, reigned until Nebuchadnezzar removed him and put on the throne Zedekiah, the paternal uncle of Jehoiachin and son of Josiah, a king whom Joachim called “homo pessimus et iniquus.” Joachim described the years after the death of Josiah as a “time of confusion” and noted:
Thus also in the church a certain confusion has been created by the intervention of worldly princes on whose strengths schismatic men relied, so that sometimes both indecently and illegally two and two at the same time seemed to go up together to the papacy, about whom the stupefied people doubted a long time and opposed parties of men had opposed sentiments. And even if one of the two was catholic, the other schismatic, this did not upset the concords.62
Joachim was referring to the Alexandrian schism, which finally ended when Alexander and Frederick agreed to the Peace of Venice in 1177. That peace, Joachim said, was broken “in the days of pope Lucius and especially of Urban, in whose pontificate the church suffered almost beyond endurance.” Then Joachim added: “Whether moreover on this occasion the church will have lost something of its liberty to these sons of the new Babylon, may she see who better knows that which [the church] has suffered.”63 Then Joachim summed up his point:
The summit of the concordia of these [five] generations is this that there we have read that the king of Babylon fought against Jerusalem, and here Roman emperors against the liberty of the church. And some of the kings of Judah obeyed the king, but repented and tried to stand in their liberty by relying on the strength of the Egyptians; another [king] went over to the [Babylonians] without war and was led to Babylon. Here some of the Roman pontiffs inclined toward and agreed with the emperors on some occasions, but at other times tried to resist them with the help of various princes; some [pontiffs] decided entirely to humble [themselves] under the [imperial] hands and to live pacifically.64
The struggle between the reforming pontiffs and the emperors had culminated in a Babylonian exile of the church, according to Joachim. The emperors from Henry IV through Henry VI persecuted the popes and deprived the church of its liberty. The popes themselves were partly to blame, especially Alexander III and his successors, because of their vacillating policies. Joachim, however, counseled the popes to submit because the exile was God’s will. Although there were some “spiritual Christians” who tried to live holy lives, the overwhelming majority of the Latin Christians were driven solely by carnal desires and by worldly ambitions. Using Lamentations as a text, Joachim included a scorching indictment of the simoniac clergy and the monks who were cenobites only on the outside.65 “Until this present place we have rowed securely navigating past landmarks that we knew well. Henceforth, we must voyage cautiously, keeping careful lookout from side to side during the rest of our journey. We are like seamen who sail unfamiliar coasts, even if we are close inshore, because to steer by what we have heard is one thing, but by what we have seen is very different, although both are equally possible from God.”66
The concords permitted Joachim to interpret God’s plan securely down into the 1190s. The abbot was confident that he correctly understood the events that had ensued since 1049. Beyond 1200, however, only the scriptural concords could be discerned clearly. Their imminent parallels remained dim. Joachim dated Holophernes’s assault, recorded in the book of Judith, during the exile. He also tried to date Haman’s plan against the Jews, which is recorded in Esther, to this same period. Joachim therefore expected two antichristian persecutions of Latin Christendom while it was in “Babylon.” Joachim, however, could only speculate on the identity of the future persecutors.67
Josiah’s successors had been literally conquered and exiled. The exile of the papacy and of Latin Christendom was figurative. Simony and the pursuit of worldly goals had become so pervasive that the church had become Babylon rather than Jerusalem. Even the popes had been lured into pursuing temporal power, especially by embarking on military adventures. The combined effect of the antichristian persecutions would shatter Babylon as John of Patmos had predicted in Apocalypse 18; in other words these assaults would purify Latin Christendom of the simoniac clergy and of monks who were only outwardly followers of Benedict.68
The exilic prophets had interpreted the return to Jerusalem from Babylon as another exodus and journey in the wilderness.69 Joachim used the same imagery when he wrote that:
The forty-second generation will begin in the church in the year or hour that God knows better [than we do]. In that generation, indeed, after the general tribulation has purged the weeds from the grain thoroughly, a new dux [i.e., a new Zerubbabel] will ascend from Babylon, a universal pontiff of the new Jerusalem, that is of holy mother church; in whose type it is written in the Apocalypse [7: 2]: “I have seen an angel ascending from the direction where the sun rises, having the sign of the living god.” And the remainder of those who have been released from exile [will journey] with him. He will ascend, moreover, not by actual walking or by a journey from one place to another, but because complete liberty will be given to him to reform the Christian religion and to preach the word of God, because the lord of hosts has begun to reign over the entire earth.70
After the “antichrists” have purged the clergy, then a reform pope will lead a figurative return to Jerusalem. This pope will realize the Gregorian dream of a holy and purified Latin Christendom that then will dominate the entire world.
In book two of the Liber de concordia, Joachim had drawn a figure of three circles, resembling the circle figures in the Liber figurarum.71 In the Liber de concordia version, each large circle contained three smaller circles that enclosed texts. In the first circle (that of the primus status duodecim patriarche), the texts referred to the sons of Israel entering Egypt, leaving Egypt, and entering the promised land. The second circle, labeled secundus status duodecim apostoli, cited the apostles preaching in the synagogue, then going to the gentiles, and receiving their hereditary, gentile Christianity. The third circle, inscribed tertius status duodecim spirituales uiri, referred to the uiri spirituales who would preach in the world to gain others, who would cross over to a harsher monastic life, and to those who would have faith in the uiri spirituales and thus enter the rest the prophets foresaw. In this version of the circle figure, each status is an exodus involving precisely the three elements of liberation, journey, and conquest. The first was a literal journey; the other two were figurative, the last more spiritual than the second.
Joachim was very much a disciple of Bernard, whom he called an “alter Leui et alter Moyses”72: “But nevertheless [Bernard has been made] like a leader and teacher of all by the prerogative of grace. Because he was taught by the spirit and the hand of God was with him, he has been made like another Moses, who led his brothers and their sons, not his sons, from Egypt. . . . He did not lack an ally like another Aaron, who was the high priest Eugenius, Roman pope.”73
Joachim compared the Second Crusade to the journey of the Israelites in the wilderness. Both the Israelites and the crusaders “perished in the desert” and turned against their leaders, but Bernard, Joachim added, defended himself in his De consideratione by comparing the crusade to the Sinai journey.74Joachim equated Cîteaux, La Ferté, Pontigny, Clairvaux, and Morimund with the five tribes that received their inheritance first in the promised land in the first status and the five patriarchates in the second.75 Joachim refused to identify any candidates for the concords to the seven tribes that received their inheritance later and to the seven churches to which John of Patmos had written in the Apocalypse, but the author of the anonymous Vita certainly thought that Joachim intended them to come from his own foundation, the Order of Fiore, and this same thinking may well have motivated the monks of this order.76
The third status was already becoming fruitful when Joachim was writing in the 1180s and 1190s. The founding of Cîteaux and its daughter houses was a step toward its realization. Bernard of Clairvaux was its Moses. Joachim understood the status of the Holy Spirit as a third exodus, one that had begun already at the end of the eleventh century and was going to come to complete fruition when the church was completely reformed after 1200.
Two paradigms shaped Joachim’s thinking, the exodus and the exile. The former included three components—liberation, journey, and conquest. The Israelites had been freed from Egypt, had journeyed in the wilderness, and had conquered Canaan, but eventually they were conquered and the people of Judah were deported to Babylon. Jesus and his apostles had been a second “exodus,” but simony and worldliness had transformed Latin Christendom into another “Babylon.” A third exodus, however, had already begun and under papal and monastic leadership would culminate in the coming, contemplative land of promise.
Like the American slaves and the Communists in Russia, Joachim would have been deeply disappointed had he lived to see the actual future he imagined. Scholastic theology triumphed over monastic theology, and clerical reform never occurred. The early promise of the Florensian Order was not fulfilled. The advent of the friars excited Joachimists but proved finally unavailing as a means of thoroughgoing clerical reform. For Joachim even the envisioned exodus proved elusive.