The Real History of the End of the World (14 page)

Under Roger II of Sicily, there was a large amount of religious toleration. Greek Orthodox Christians, Jews, and Muslims were allowed to worship as they chose. Court documents were written in both Greek and Latin.
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Trained to be a notary like his father, Joachim was instead converted to the monastic life. He went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, then in Christian hands, and received his own spiritual revelation while wandering through the Palestinian desert. He then spent the Lenten season in meditation on Mount Tabor.
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On his return home, he became a hermit for a time, living on Mount Etna. In around 1171, he was ordained a priest and then joined the Benedictine monastery of Corazzo. By 1178, he had been made abbot of the monastery.

Prophets do not, in general, make good administrators. After fighting to change the monastery to the stricter Cistercian order, Joachim slacked in his duties. By 1183, he had left the monastery to hide out for a year to write, bringing only a few secretaries with him.
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It was perhaps then that he wrote the books for which he is best known, the
Liber Concordiae
and the
Exposito in Apocalypsim
,
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The first was his innovative method of seeing everything in the Old Testament as having a parallel person or event in the New Testament. He continued this idea by making history since then form a third parallel. “Everything which happened in the Old Dispensation, recorded in the Old Testament, has its own actuality in time, but is also a secret sign pointing forward to a future happening in the New Dispensation, which is, or will be, a fuller disclosure of God's purpose for humanity.”
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As Joachim put it, “According to this pattern, therefore, the persons of the Old Testament and those of the other gaze into each others' faces. City and city, people and people, order and order, war and war, act in the same way. . . . The difference is that those of the Old Testament refer more to the flesh, those of the New more to the spirit, albeit it must be recalled that there were indications of the spirit in the former, reminders of the flesh in the latter.”
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Joachim always tried to cover his bases. This three part view of the past and future led naturally to a search of the Bible for prophecies.

The second book Joachim composed was his explanation of the symbolism in the Book of Revelation. The order in which events in his life occurred after this differs from one biography to another, including the ones written by those who knew Joachim. However, it seems that about 1184 Joachim had an audience with Pope Lucius III. According to some reports, Lucius became convinced that the abbot was a genuine prophet when he explained a Sibylline oracle that had been discovered among the papers of the late Cardinal Matthew of Angers.
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Joachim explained it, speaking “in rather veiled terms . . . of a future pope who will actively preach to convert the gentiles and the Jews, the imminence of the antichrist and the end of the world.”
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The pope was impressed and gave Joachim permission to write what he would. The next two popes, Urban II and Clement III renewed the abbot's license to write.

Joachim tried to find a place where he could work in peace. He was allowed to resign as abbot and retired to a hermitage that he named Petra-Olei. But visitors still showed up, so he moved again, founding his own monastery at San Giovanni in Fiore in 1189.
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But he couldn't run from fame. Nobility and clerics came to see him. In 1191, he was invited to come see Richard I of England. You don't refuse an invitation from the Lionheart as he's setting out on crusade, so Joachim went to meet Richard at Messina. It was there that Joachim told the king in the hearing of many that he believed that the Antichrist has already been born in Rome;
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he may have derived this from the Sibylline prophecy that he had unraveled for Pope Lucius. One of the lines in it was: “A substantial cloud will start to rain since he who will change the world has been born.”
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Joachim hadn't mentioned this when he gave the first interpretation, but he may have been ruminating on the meaning in the intervening years. He also told Richard that the sixth head of the dragon of the Apocalypse was Saladin, the Turkish leader who had recently retaken Jerusalem. Joachim assured the king that God would “give you victory over your enemies.”
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Later, in a conversation with the Cistercian abbot Adam of Persigny (which just happened to be overheard and reported), Joachim backtracked a bit, saying that he meant that the Antichrist would be born in the “celestial Babylon” not the earthly Rome. He added that he thought that the current pope, Innocent III, would be the last, implying that the end times were approaching. Joachim even said that he himself might live to see the reign of the Antichrist.
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IN his study of the Apocalypse, Joachim continued with his theory that all of history, past and present, could be found in the Bible. One Easter as he was spending the night in meditation, “About the middle of the night's silence, as I think, . . . suddenly something of the fullness of this book and of the entire agreement of the Old and New Testaments was perceived by a clarity of understanding in my mind's eye.”
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From then on, the interpretations were easy.

For Joachim, the Book of Revelation contained within itself all the mirrored parallels that were found between the Old and New Testaments. He felt that it told both the past and the future; therefore, he blended the two in his explanation of the book.

His exposition of the dragon with seven heads includes past times of trouble for the Church as well as the troubles to come. For him the first persecutor was Herod, then Nero (a perennial favorite), then the Roman Constantius. Reflecting the fears of his own time, the next three are Muhammad, Mesmoth (thought to have been a king of Babylon), and of course, Saladin, who was not defeated by King Richard, after all.
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In Joachim's work, everything is seen as an allegory. He uses animals, plants, geometric forms, and natural forces, anything that he can fit in as symbol, for everything is unified and connected. In this attitude, he was right in step with other medieval thinkers and a large number of modern students of the Book of Revelation

Joachim had his own set of numbers for figuring out the concordances within the books of the Bible. He counted the number of generations of the Patriarchs of the Old Testament, rather than adding up their ages, as most others did. From this he formed his concept of three “states.” The first two were the Testaments; the third had not yet come. I am not going to try to duplicate his logic; however, the numbers three (for the Trinity), two (for the Old and New Testaments), and seven (for the days of creation and lots of other things), are favorites of his. He also was fond of twelve and five and of making diagrams that would help in understanding the connections.

One radical thing that Joachim did was to contradict St. Augustine. He would have been horrified to realize it, for Augustine was the preeminent Church Father. Joachim based his ideas of history on Augustine's work, apparently without realizing that he was negating it. From the early fifth century, when Augustine wrote, until the later Middle Ages, theologians had considered the Apocalypse to be an allegory, not a predictor of the future. The idea of the six ages of the world was well accepted. For Augustine, the sixth age started with the Advent of Christ and would continue until the end of the world. And there was no way of knowing when that would be, although he believed that society would decline until the time of Second Advent.
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Joachim's belief that the millennium was yet to come doesn't sound unusual now, but it made many people, especially in the following two hundred years, rethink the idea of the Apocalypse. Joachim explained it:

When Joachim got on an analogy roll, nothing could stop him. But his point was that the third state or epoch was still to come. He also appeared to believe that this state would be blissful one, which would not need an organized church, for people would understand without the need of an intermediary priest. His idea seems to have been that two new orders of monks would appear to lead the world, perhaps by example, into a perfect society.
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These new orders were foreshadowed by the appearance of the two witnesses in Revelation. He should have got in trouble for this with the papacy, but it may be that his writing was so convoluted that the authorities missed it.

Joachim seems to have worked out that the new age would begin in 1260, although this may have been an invention or misunderstanding by his followers. He also believed that the emperor at that time, Frederick II, would wreak havoc upon the Church for seventy years.
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Since Joachim died on March 30, 1202, at least he wasn't disappointed about the failure of the new age to arrive, although many of his followers were. The friar Salimbene (1221-1290), who wrote a chronicle of his times, was one of those so disillusioned. He was even more upset in that he had believed that the prophet, Merlin, and the Sibyl had agreed with Joachim.
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Joachim's influence went far beyond his life and the inaccuracy of his prophecies, however, and in ways that might have horrified him.

Joachim was known more by hearsay than from his writing. He was represented as one who could explain obscure prophecies, although he never claimed to be a prophet himself. His views of the Trinity were finally studied and condemned at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, although much of the rest of his work was allowed. He left a flourishing monastic order, the Florensians, who were not condemned at the council. These monks were instrumental in getting the work of Joachim to a wider audience.
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The condemnation of his ideas on the Trinity gave Joachim a posthumous reputation as a renegade with heretical tendencies. That only increased his allure for some intellectuals of the thirteenth century.

Unfortunately, what intrigued them most were his numeric prophecies. When Roger of Hovedon explained Joachim's work to the English court, they mainly wanted to know, “
Ubi est Antichristus natus? Quando erit hoc?
” (Where was the Antichrist born? When will he appear?).
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So much for intellectual discussion.

Even the general populace became nervous as 1260 approached. In Italy, the Flagellants, a group who publicly whipped themselves to atone for the sins of the world, were out in force. “The scourging went on for many days in each city; any one abstaining was thought worse than the devil.”
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There was great disappointment when the year passed with no Apocalypse. Many years later, Salimbene was asked about those times. He admitted that he had been a believer in Joachim, “But after the Emperor Frederick died, and 1260 passed, I totally lost faith in that teaching and now I believe only what I see.”
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However in 1255, just before the prophesied date, there was a wonderful clash at the schools of Paris when a Franciscan, Gerard of Borgo San Donnio, announced that Joachim had foretold the third epoch and that it had already started. The Old and New Testaments were to be replaced by a new book, as shown in Revelation 14:6, “And then I saw another angel flying in mid-heaven with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who live on the earth—to every nation and tribe and language and people.”

A committee sent by the pope studied Joachim's work and Gerard's preface to it.
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Gerard, a friend of Salimbene, insisted that the Franciscans were one of the orders Joachim had predicted; that Francis of Assisi was the sixth angel of the Apocalypse; and that the eternal gospel, which superseded the other two, had been entrusted to the Franciscans.
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After reading Joachim's genuine work, the committee made their decision. Joachim was vindicated as not being heretical, but Gerard was locked up for the rest of his life, hopefully with medication.

Not everyone was a follower of Joachim; Salimbene notes that a friend of his “cared as much for Joachim's doctrine as for the fifth wheel of a wagon.”
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In the years after Joachim's death, other people wrote and circulated treatises under his name. Most of these were much more radical that anything the abbot had written. They took up the theme of the third epoch and elaborated on the evils of the Church, as well as the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II. These manuscripts circulated much farther than Joachim's own work had. Many of them survived into the sixteenth century and were printed both in Latin and translations.

To some, Joachim was a visionary who foresaw the Protestant Reformation, which was, of course, the real third epoch. The Catholic reformer Wycliffe quotes from what he believed were Joachim's prophecies. But, where Joachim clearly stated that the emperor was an Antichrist, Wycliffe's sources were adamant that the evil enemy was the pope.
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