Cauda Pavonis 9:2

 

The Stem and the Branches:

Joachim of Fiore and His Nineteenth-Century Myth

by

Virginia Hyde

 

Daunting factors have prevented a widespread knowledge of the enigmatic Calabrian abbot, Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135-1202)--even though he has been termed more "living" for moderns than St. Augustine.¹ Almost all of Joachim's major work is, even now, rare and untranslated; what readers "know" about it is generally in the realm of the second and third hand--indeed, of the "mythic." They will, therefore, be grateful for the comprehensive perspective of a major new study, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press) by Marjorie Reeves and Warwick Reeves is a lifelong Joachim scholar, and Gould specializes in literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In an earlier book, The Figurae of Joachim of Fiore (Oxford, 1972), Reeves and Beatrice Hirsch-Reich show how much Joachim and his followers liked to depict the development of historic movements by means of "genealogical" trees and charts. These designs diverge significantly from the more familiar Jesse tree, which portrays the Old Testament patriarch Jesse as the stem of a tree with David and other descendants as branches and Christ as the flower; Joachimite versions generally place Adam at the base and represent the final flowering of the tree not in the age of Christ but in a future age of "spiritual men." It would be interesting to see such a "tree" depicting not the lineage of Jesse or Adam but that of Joachim himself, for he has been associated (rightly and wrongly) with Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, the French Revolution, Comtean Positivism, the Third Reich, Marxism, and other diverse movements. Even Christopher Columbus, in promoting his own sense of mission, invoked Joachim (among others). Joachim has been termed a "false prophet" (along with Merlin and Nostradamus)--in fact, both Nostradamus and Paracelsus drew upon pseudo-Joachimist prophecies--and he has been lauded by no less than Dante, in Paradiso XII, as one gifted with sacred prophecy. His name has appeared in lists of Catholic saints and in catalogs of heretics. Just as his reputation has embraced duality, his continuing legacy is mixed, for Joachimism left its traces among Franciscans (and certain other orthodox thinkers) as well as among occultists--and in both artistic "antinomianism" and progressive social theory (including revolutionary activism). His significance in apocalyptic thought, too, is attested by such modern studies as Prophecy and Millenarianism: Essays in Honor of Marjorie Reeves (London, 1980).²

Reeves and Gould differentiate among these complex strains, separating the stem from the branches (and pruning off a few illegitimate ones), as they painstakingly assess the influence of Joachim's own works and that of his interpreters, detailing the growth of a multiplying "myth." The task involves them in difficult questions of direct transmission, climates of opinion, and the universal archetypes that Jung himself associated with Joachim. The authors do not deal with the nineteenth century alone but with eight centuries of the "redoubling of influence upon influence" (179).

For the general reader, the obscurity of the Joachim sources needs a sharp initial emphasis (perhaps even sharper than the authors realize), bearing as it does upon the abbot's strange reputation in the past two centuries. Aside from excerpts and summaries, his principal works have been available only in a Renaissance edition--Liber Concordie Novi ac Veteris Testamenti (Venice, 1519), Expositio in Apocalypsim (Venice, 1527), and Psalterium decem chordarum (Venice, 1527), all reprinted in 1963-1964 in Frankfurt. Only recently is there activity on these essential texts--as evidenced, for example, in a new edition of the Concordie by E. Randolph Daniel (Philadelphia, 1983), who has even translated portions of it into English. In addition, Reeves, along with Hirsch-Reich and Leone Tondelli, published an edition of the Liber Figurarum (2nd rev. ed., Turin, 1954), vital to an understanding of Joachim's thought despite unclear issues of provenance.³ But these achievements stand as exceptions to the long history of Joachim's relative inaccessibility; and the scarcity of his works, in past and present, could not but compound the confusion surrounding him. The earliest misconceptions, coming fifty-odd years after his death, have long been clarified, but they have continued to recur and proliferate--and hence the importance of anatomizing this ongoing "myth" as Reeves and Gould do.

Joachim held that history unfolds in three stages (status), reflecting the pattern of the Trinity in time; and he proclaimed concords between Old and New Testament figures (somewhat as in standard Biblical typology) and between these and later churchmen. He related the final age typologically to the apostle John, thus seeming to some nineteenth-century thinkers to anticipate the popular Johannine Christianity and "voices of John" as adapted by figures like J. G. Fichte and George Sand. Yet Joachim foretold not a third testament nor a supersession of the church but an increasingly spiritual life to be led by a spiritualis intellectus (apparently in contemplative monkish orders). At his death, in 1202, he submitted all his writings to the Pope, and one of his views, a doctrine of the Holy Ghost which he had advanced in opposition to Peter Lombard's, was condemned in 1215 without challenge to his personal piety. While Joachim himself became associated with the angel of the "Eternal Evangel" in the Book of Revelation (14:6), he did not see himself as its oracle but was so cast by a follower, Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, in 1254. This extremist Franciscan declared that the Old and New Testaments were abrogated forever in favor of a new scripture, the Eternal Evangel or Everlasting Gospel. Gerard offered this revelation himself by affixing his own introduction and glosses to selections from Joachim's three main works, and the "book" was condemned to burning by Pope Alexander IV in 1255.

In scholarly detail, Reeves and Gould reveal cases not only of Joachim's influence but also of coincidental affinity between his and other works, suggesting that some of the patterns attributed to him appear to be recurrent aspects of human thought--like the iteration of "threes" in historic patterns, a scheme that proved particularly adaptable to the dialectical temper of the nineteenth century with its interest in Hegelian dualism and resolution. Indeed, a majority of "passing references" to Joachim do not seem to substantiate direct influence (5). This judgment follows more sweeping and more general claims--from Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (rev. ed., Munich, 1923) through Henri de Lubac's recent two-volume study, La posterité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore (Paris, 1979-1981). Reeves and Gould show that some figures' "Joachimist" traits may be based on the Bible itself and its other interpreters (as seems quite likely in the cases of Jacob Boehme, the seventeenth-century English millenarians, and Blake). Reeves and Gould claim only quite modest Joachimist connections for Rosicrucianism. They note that, while Johann Valentin Andreae mentions Joachim in a list of the prophets of Antichrist, his writings, like Boehme's, show "more evidence of alchemical, cabbalistic, and cosmological inspiration than of the exegetical biblical methods of Joachim" (26). Nonetheless, the authors would agree with Spengler that Joachim has somehow sparked an entire "world-outlook," and with de Lubac that the abbot's posterité spirituelle includes some unusual visionaries.

They believe that Gerard's very action in creating the "Eternal Evangel" scandal in 1254 made Joachim acceptable to nineteenth-century thinkers who, having lost their faith, found a need for such a historic base and metaphysic as they conceived the abbot to provide--thinkers who, however, could identify with him only as a heretic, not as a nearly orthodox churchman. The renewed interest in Joachim, though partly anticipated by G. F. Lessing, centered in nineteenth-century France, involving Pierre Leroux, Jules Michelet, Ernest Renan, and others, with Sand as perhaps its major popularizer (in, for example, the novel Spiridion [1838-39], which associates the "liberty, fraternity, and equality" of the French Revolution with the third age). Elements of Joachimism spread north, west, and east, affecting figures as diverse as F. W. Schelling in Germany and the patriot Mazzini in Italy. As for Auguste Comte, he had caught a "faint echo" of Joachim--possibly from Lessing or the Saint-Simonians but certainly from Dante--when he began to formulate Positivism.

Another particularly significant Joachimist strain, in both England and France, was an "aestheticizing tradition" (214) extending from Renan through Walter Pater, J. A. Symonds, Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and W. B. Yeats. Despite its intensely private and "antinomian" direction, this tradition also saw Joachim as the precursor of a great artistic age, the Renaissance, which might in some sense recur. Joachimism had become so diffuse as to affect Matthew Arnold's expectation of a "new type of Englishman" (152) and Yeats's dream of a new Celtic age of art. Aspects of occultism flourished side by side with dim memories of Joachim (or Gerard) among some of the "aesthetes" and "decadents" of the end of the century. (Huysmans, for example, an adept in the "occult wars" in Paris [197], wrote in Lá-bàs [1891] of the Vintrasian Cult of the Paraclete--apparently influenced somewhat by Joachimist thought--as well as Rosicrucianism and Satanisme. Yeats, too, who knew the same milieu, not only wrote of Joachim but also joined hermetic and theosophical groups while including French Luciferian elements in some of his early essays.)

Reeves and Gould shed new light on individual texts. They show, for example, the ways in which George Eliot's Romola (1863) may owe as much to Joachim's three ages as to Comte's. In addition, several Yeats texts receive significant illumination. The Yeats chapter represents a culmination of a line of scholarship including both the variorum edition of The Secret Rose, edited by Phillip L. Marcus, Gould, and Michael J. Sidnell (Ithaca, 1981), and Gould's earlier study, "'Lionel Johnson Comes the First to Mind': Sources for Owen Aherne," in Yeats and the Occult, edited by George Mills Harper (Toronto, 1975). Of particular interest is the short story "The Tables of the Law," containing fictive passages (supposedly from a text by Joachim) which have been known to fool an unwary reader. In actuality, this "lost" work, concocted by Yeats and rendered into convincing Latin by Lionel Johnson, expresses Yeats's own 1890s exaltation of "supreme art," mysticism, and apocalypse. It suggests, as well, the image of Joachim that Yeats gained from his age. The story was intended to be set into a "triptych," with "Rosa Alchemica" and "The Adoration of the Magi," concerned with the Order of the Alchemical Rose (and embodying ideas from Dublin Hermeticism, the Theosophical Society, and the Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn). But the publisher, apparently realizing a blasphemous design in these stories as a group, omitted two of them from the 1897 story collection The Secret Rose (although he later issued them privately). From "The Tables of the Law," James Joyce explicitly derived Stephen Hero's fascination with ambiguously heretical "monk-errants"--an interest surviving more vaguely in Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). It is significant that, while Portrait never mentions Joachim, it does refer to Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, whom Joyce may have disceerned in the background of Yeats's story. In Yeats, as in Huysmans, two Joachimist branches meet--the generally social and progressive strain traced elsewhere in the Reeves/Gould book and the occult supernaturalist strain, in which "Joachim's name exerted a shadowy but still powerful presence" (200).

Less ambitious than the chapter on Yeats is the one on D. H. Lawrence, which acknowledges its heavy dependence on Frank Kermode's reading of Lawrence's apocalyptic typology. Although silent about Lawrence's known source on Joachim--an account by the thirteenth-century monk Salimbene (in G. G. Coulton's From St. Francis to Dante [1907])--Reeves and Gould offer the speculation that the novelist may have encountered the "Eternal Evangel" in Sand or Huysmans or elsewhere. The suggestion is credible, for Lawrence read Sand's novels in 1909, and he appears to know something about the three status before 1916, when he read Coulton. He was familiar, as well, with Huysmans, very possibly at an early age. Still other sources might be found in his wide readings in theosophy. Reeves and Gould trace a "trinitarian" pattern in Lawrence's treatment of personal relations, concluding that in itself it may be "spontaneous." But they rightly credit Joachim for some of the novelist's views on history, as proven by a discussion of the abbot in Lawrence's textbook, Movements in European History (1921).⁴

The Reeves-Gould study has international scope, dealing not only with French, English, and German but also with central European and Russian works. It is interdisciplinary, considering, for example, the abstract art of Vassily Kandinsky and a musical version of "The Eternal Evangel" (an apocalyptic Czech poem by Jaroslav Vrchlicky) set to music by Leos Janacek and first performed in Prague in 1917 in wartime. Such details are typical of the book, for it excels in its awareness of the historic contexts in which works were created and experienced.

Reeves and Gould are perhaps most impressive in drawing careful distinctions between the Joachimist "third status" and other idealizations of a climactic age. For example, a cognate myth of the "Third Rome," unrelated to Joachim's ideas, deeply influenced Russian and Polish writing (and Mazzini), entering into the "apocalyptic mysticism" of turn-of-the-century Moscow. Not only do the authors deal with this complication; they even distinguish between Pan-Slav and Czech intellectual climates, finding the latter more clearly imbued with western influence. They show that some thinkers were able to combine the cyclic time of classical Golden Age mythology with the linear time of Joachim's vision. They distinguish between the millenarian, who awaits a supernatural event, and the Joachimite, who looks for the third age to arise through historic progression.

This book is evocative at the same time that it is scrupulously factual and circumspect. It does not treat Joachim's nineteenth-century "descendants" reductively but sees them as "passionately religious" individuals, many of them with a strangely bohemian but creative vision of the Middle Ages: "The heretics, the mendicants, the mystics, the prophets, the singers, the artists, the wanderers--these were the true sons of the Church and the forerunners of the latter-day visionaries" (316). Yet the authors never lose sight of the stem of the Joachimite tree--the man himself: "It was an irony of history that the abbot who submitted all his works to the pope found his popular role in the nineteenth century as the prophet of heterodoxy" (205). Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth Century deserves wide distribution among scholars (who must be prepared to read Latin and French)--scholars of comparative literature, religion, interdisciplinary studies, the Middle Ages, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, secret societies and occultism. If a scholarly "bandwagon" has been constructed for Joachim, as mentioned by Reeves and Gould (3), it is because his elusive but tenacious presence affects modern thought this widely.

Washington State University

Notes

¹Jürgen Moltmann to Karl Barth, as recounted in Henri de Lubac's La Posterité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore, 2 vols. (Paris: Editions Lethielleux, 1979-1981), 1:7, and Reeves and Gould (1987).

²See also, for example, Bernard McGinn, "Awaiting an End: Research in Medieval Apocalypticism, 1974-1981," Medievalia et Humanistica: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture, n.s. 11 (1982): 263-89, and Reeves's own Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future (London: SPCK, 1976), Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), "The Originality and Influence of Joachim of Fiore," Traditio 36 (1980): 269-316.

³See Reeves and Hirsch-Reich, Figurae, and Delno C. West and Sandra Zimdars-Swartz, Joachim of Fiore: A Study in Spiritual Perception and History (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1983), 116-17.

⁴See also Virginia Hyde, The Risen Adam: D. H. Lawrence's Revisionist Typology (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1992), 10-14.