Voegelin on the Christian Imperium in the Middle Ages (Part II)

Joachim and the New Age

The  movement [toward unmediated spirituality] reached its peak in the speculation of Joachim of Flora (d. 1202) and his new construction of immanent Christian history. Prefigured by the ideas advanced by the Norman Anonymous, Joachim of Flora’s influential history of the three realms would result in the ap­pearance of the symbolic “Third Realm” that “has remained ever since a basic category of Western speculation, reappearing when a rising force wished to express its claim to dominance of the age” (CW 20:111). Joachim, according to Voegelin, represents “the end of an evolution” away from the understanding of the Augustinian construction of history (CW 20:127).

The impetus for the evolutionary change was the existence of the religious orders that began to infuse European life with a new reli­gious sentiment and a “feeling that the rise of the orders was sympto­matic of progressive spirituality inaugurating a new phase of Christian life.” This, in turn, created the conditions by which the “revelational ex­perience of Joachim” was able “to touch off the potentialities of this field of sentiments and to create the new pattern of Christian history. The de­cisive step is the conception of the Third Realm, not as the eternal Sabbath, but as an age that is to follow the dispensation of the Son as the last age of human history” (CW 20:128-29). As Nicholas Campion wryly observes, “There is almost nothing original in Joachim’s ideas, and his importance lies in the simple fact that he was the right person in the right place at the right time.”³

Joachim of Flora was a Cistercian monk who had experienced the call to enter the order during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Like the Norman Anonymous, Joachim found the essential pessimism regarding human existence in history he saw in the Civitas Dei of Saint Augustine to be less desirable than the search for a meaning of and direction to history as it was experienced by human beings in their worldly existence. According to Joachim’s speculation, “The history of mankind is a progress of spiritual evolution from the natural, pre-Mosaic law, through the Mosaic and evangelical laws, to the fullness of spiritual freedom” (CW 20:129). This evolutionary passage is marked by human existence in the ages of history, each of which corresponds to one of the persons of the Holy Trinity. And the beginning of each realm is preceded by a period of preparation. Joachim was to be the prophet of the third age, the age of the Holy Spirit, in which the spiritual freedom of the individual hu­man person will be realized under the guidance of a new leader, the dux.

The Trinitarian structure of history was nothing new. In the Gospel of Matthew, the generations to Christ were reckoned in three groups, each encompassing fourteen generations (1:1-17). The logic of the identities of the Holy Trinity lent itself to divisions of three. Thus, Irenaeus was the first patristic leader to divide history into three ages and natural phe­nomena into three types.⁴ In the Manichean heresy, the struggle between the opposing forces of light and darkness passed through three stages.⁵ Even Saint Augustine had appropriated the use of the number three for the divisions of human affairs and the human qualities necessary for their study. But while “the trinitarian scheme of history was taken for granted by Christians of the first millennium,” the mystical revelation of Joachim would give the symbol a resonance that would move through history.⁶

The Source of Modern Meaning in History

Voegelin maintains that Joachim’s construction of history and its enter­ing into “the main stock of Western political speculation” has had a pro­found effect upon the understanding of history generally. Joachim’s periodization of a progressive history resulting in the appearance of the Third Realm has created the impression that “history has to have an in­telligible structure. The present age must not be a time of meaningless tran­sition; it has to be a meaningful step toward a definite goal. The Augustinian pessimistic waiting for the end of a structureless saeculum has disappeared” (CW 20:130).

Accordingly, the:

“third age would be to its predecessors as broad daylight compared with starlight and dawn, as high summer com­pared with winter and spring . . . . The Empire would be no more and the Church of Rome would give place to a free community of perfected be­ings who would have no need of clergy or sacraments or Bible.”⁷

Joachim’s construction of history is premised upon “the sentiments en­gendered by the Cistercian environment. The three realms are character­ized by the predominance of the law, of grace, and of the spirit” (CW 20:133).  As such, the third age, the age of the Spirit, was supposed to be realized in the community in “the perfect contemplative life of the monk,” and “the perfection of life . . . in the three elements of contemplation, liberty, and spirit” (CW 20:133). There is something almost tragic about the uses to which his symbolic construction would be put. Löwith writes:

“Joachim . . . could not foresee that his religious intention–that of desecularizing the church and restoring its spiritual fervor–would, in the hands of others, turn into its opposite: the secularization of the world which became increasingly worldly by the very fact that eschatological thinking about last things was introduced into penul­timate matters, a fact which intensified the power of the secular drive toward a final solution of problems which cannot be solved by their own means and on their own level . . . .”

“The revolution which had been proclaimed within the framework of an eschatological faith and with reference to the perfect monastic life was taken over, five cen­turies later, by a philosophical priesthood, which interpreted the process of secularization in terms of a “spiritual” realization of the Kingdom of God on earth. As an attempt at realization the spiritual pattern of Lessing, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel could be transposed into the positivistic and materialistic schemes of Comte and Marx. The third dispensation of the Joachites reappeared as a third International and a third Reich inaugurated by a dux or a Führer who was acclaimed as a savior and greeted by millions with Heil!”⁸

In summary, it may be that the Pauline compromise with history was based on the idea that the kingdom of God is both present and future. Saint Augustine had conceived of the division between sacred and pro­fane history with the realization of the destiny of human beings beyond history. However, the consciousness of epoch seen in Melito and Orosius had planted the seed of an idea regarding a progressive history of human beings in the world under the hand of Providence that was tempered through the Norman Anonymous to reach its fruition in the visionary rev­elation of Joachim of Flora.

The imperial ruler of Joachitic speculation would be transposed from a spiritual to a political figure in Dante (CW 21:79-80), and although Dante would seek to offset his temporal Dux with a new spiritual head of the empire, it would be the transfigured tem­poral ruler that would rule the march of history from Dante forward. Thomas Aquinas attempted to stem the tide released by the Joachitic spec­ulation, but the genie was out of the bottle.

St. Francis and the Sanctification of Nature

The influence of Joachim is most clearly seen in the program of Saint Francis of Assisi. As Voegelin notes, “As symbolic figures of their age, the persons of Saint Francis of Assisi and Joachim of Fiore are intimately connected. Saint Francis could not have been seen by the Spirituals as the decisive figure inaugurating a new epoch of Christian history unless the prophecies of Joachim had furnished the symbolic pattern for their interpretation” (CW 20:135).

Voegelin argues that with Saint Francis and the Franciscan movement:

“The penetration of the spirit into the realm of nature has now reached its full development. Saint Francis uses the formulas of eschato­logical hardness, and he can act hard, but the sentiment that moves him does not deny the world; on the contrary, it adds to the world a dimension of which it had been hitherto deprived in the Christian dispensation. The joy of creaturely existence and the joyful expan­sion of his soul, reaching out in brotherly love to that section of the world that glorifies God by nothing but the humbleness of being created, this simple joy in the newly discovered fellowship of God’s creation, makes Saint Francis the great saint.”

“Through his discovery and acceptance of the lowest stratum of creation as a meaningful part of the world, he became one of the momentous figures of Western history. He took the humble by the hand and led them to their dignity, not in an otherworldly realm of God, but in a realm of God that is not of this world. And he gave nature its Christian soul and with it the dignity that made it the ob­ject of observation.” (CW 20:141)

The new realm that Francis opened up was “distinctly intramundane” and stood “in opposition to the imperium with its Gelasian principles” (CW 20:140). Saint Francis attempted to construct the third age of Joachim’s historical speculation. Instead of opening up the realm of the spirit, Saint Francis created the complex of ideas concerning the con­struction of community that stood in opposition to the evocation of the sacrum imperium. Furthermore, there is a certain militancy to Saint Francis and the Franciscans generally that would become increasingly problematic and, in fact, is reminiscent of the Tyconian problem to which we have repeatedly referred.

In the case of the Franciscan Spirituals, the puritanical strug­gle against vice echoes the puritanical struggle of the Donatists against the established institution of the church. Voegelin points to the Franciscan tract Praise of Virtues and argues that it indicates the “tragic necessity that the creation of an order, even of love, requires demonic ruthlessness of action, offensive to the environment.” To struggle against vice, however, is a collective struggle against the world itself. Voegelin writes:

“It is impossible to understand the Franciscan attitude if the eth­ical categories of virtues and vices are supposed to refer to the char­acter of the individual person alone. In the context of the Praise, virtues and vices are forces emanating from the supreme powers of good and evil, from God and Satan, and taking possession of men. The struggle of virtues against vices becomes a collective under­taking; the virtues of the one group have the function of “con­founding” the vices of the other . . . . The possession of the virtues thus serves the attack on the world with its institutions of family, property, inheritance, governmental authority, and intellectual civ­ilization.” (CW 20:135-37)

In the case of Saint Francis personally, this struggle against the vices and the world takes the form of simple preaching and a general call to re­pentance for the faithful. However, to paraphrase “Publius,” wise men will not always rule.

Voegelin observes that what “distinguished Saint Francis from other sectarian leaders, and made him a saint instead of a heresiarch, was his convincing sincerity, his exemplary personal realiza­tion of the ideals he taught, his charm, his humility, and his unworldly naivete” (CW 20:138-39). It was perhaps this odd combination that made him so effective and also so myopic regarding the forces he was inad­vertently unleashing on the world. The Franciscan formulation was not simply a matter of recognizing the human dignity of the poor, but rather it was an elevation of “the poor” to the status of agents of change. Voegelin argues, “The spirit of revolt against the established powers was spreading all over the Western world, ranging from the intellectuals to the townspeople and the peasants. The movement was increasingly directed against the feudal organization of society” (CW 20:138).

Christ as the Symbol of Intramundane Forces

Saint Francis transformed the image of Christ and in so doing provided a symbol of opposition to the established order of the society generally. Voegelin argues that in his conformance to the life of Christ, “Saint Francis had conformed the image of Christ to the human possibilities,” but the grandeur of “Christ the king in his glory” was lost.

In the sequence of intramundane forces using Christian symbols for their self-interpretation, Saint Francis had created the symbol of the intramundane Christ, but this symbol can absorb only that aspect of the person of the Savior that conforms with the humble and the suffering of this world. The function of Christ as the priestly-royal hierarch had to be neglected; the Christ of Saint Francis is an inner­worldly Christ of the poor; he is no longer the head of the whole corpus mysticum of mankind.

The great evocative achievement of the compromise with the world, particularly in the Western imperial pe­riod, was the understanding of the natural differentiation of men and of the spiritual and temporal hierarchies as functions in the mystical body. In this preference for the Christ of the poor and his neglect for the hierarchical Christ, this great civilizational work was, in princi­ple, undone by Saint Francis. The world had to break asunder when Christ was no longer the head of the differentiated body of Christianity but only the symbol of particular forces who claimed for themselves a privileged status in conformance with him. (CW 20:142)

Frederick II: His Construction of a New Age

This is not to say that the imperial image of imperial Christ had sim­ply vanished. Indeed, nearly contemporaneously with the new reality proposed by the Franciscans emerged Frederick II (d. 1250). Voegelin asserts:

“We have seen how Saint Francis transformed the image of Christ into that of the suffering Jesus with the consequence that Christ became an intramundane symbol to which the poor and humble could conform while the hierarchies were left without the messianic head. The ideas of Frederick II represent the opposite attempt at creating an image of rulership in conformance with Christ as the cosmocrator, with the Messiah in his glory” (CW 20:157).

Voegelin notes with some irony that the “last medieval emperor was the founder of the first modern state. In him the crisis of the age met with the man who became its perfect symbol through the circumstances of his descent and through his personal ge­nius” (CW 20:144).

Frederick II came to power as the sacrum imperium was being battered by political and spiritual powers on the “‘fringe’ that, by their sheer weight, shifted the center of politics to the west and the south. The rise of these powers had the consequence of dissolving the imperial idea and of supplanting it with new evocative ideas adapted to a world of rival powers; the Gelasian principle as the dominating evoca­tive idea of the West was on the wane, and the problems of power pol­itics in the modern sense emerged” (CW 20:148). In his capacity to recognize and adapt to the changing situation Frederick II’s greatness and weakness may be observed.

In the Prooemium to the Constitutions of Melfi, Frederick II advanced an idea of rulership that Voegelin describes as a “naturalistic theory of gov­ernment, deriving the function of rulership from the structure of intra­mundane human reality” (CW 20:153). But it does so by the use of “Christian language.” The theory advanced in the Prooemium is that gov­ernment was instituted among human beings after the Fall, which had resulted in the loss of immortality as a punishment. “With the death of man, however, creation would have lost its meaning, and in order not to destroy creation with the first man, God made him fertile. The inclina­tion to transgression being inherited, men fell out among themselves, and God provided rulers of the people to preserve the order of human soci­ety.”

Through this construction, the grace of God as represented by the Incarnation of Christ is removed from the calculation. Furthermore, “the substitution of the community of mortal man for immortal man re-forms the hierarchical structure of the world; the creation reaches its climax in the ruler who has to preserve the order of the people” (CW 20:153). There was nothing at all remarkable in the idea that political life was made nec­essary by the transgression of human nature—after all, Saint Augustine had argued essentially the same thing. What Frederick II did, however, was transfer the hierarchy of creation that reaches its pinnacle in God, to the realm of politics with himself as the apex of creation.

The New Averrosit Anthropology

The third, and perhaps most important, element of Frederick’s construction is what Voegelin describes as its “Averroist” element. “The place in the hierarchy of the paradisiacal immortal couple has been taken, after the Fall, by the succession of generations of mortal man. The collective im­mortality of mankind has succeeded the individual immortality of Paradise.”

The importance of this sentiment lies in the fact that by adopt­ing a position that substitutes the immortality of the species for the im­mortality of the individual, Frederick II struck at the heart of the Pauline conception of the body of Christ:

“The collectivist interpretation of mankind is, by principle, opposed to the Christian idea of the corpus mysticum. The idea of the mysti­cal body achieves an understanding of the spiritual unity of mankind while leaving the natural gifts as well as the human personality and the immortality of the soul intact. The collectivist idea, in its logi­cally elaborated form, absorbs the human personality into the spirit of the group. Man is the individuation of a generic intellect, and death means depersonalization through dissolution into the world-mind (or the group-mind) . . . .”

“In the field of ethics and politics this anthropological assumption may have the consequence of sup­porting the ideal of conformance to a type, a group discipline, and of governmental measures for the enforcement of such confor­mance and discipline. The Averroist anthropology may become, in brief, the philosophical basis for a collectivist, totalitarian organi­zation of society.” (CW 20:154)

In place of the corpus mysticum, in which the spiritual equality of indi­vidual human beings is taken as the origin of community, Frederick II would substitute a system in which the ruler is elevated in order to main­tain order in God’s creation. Thus:

“the evocation of the Constitutions tends to reserve the dignity of full humanity to one person in the community only, the ruler. This se­vere irruption of the intramundane force of rulership into the realm of Christian ideas, the transformation of the mystical body of the immortal faithful under the leadership of Christ into a mystical body of mortals under the leadership of the ruler, had to precipitate a cri­sis when it went beyond the stage of implications, as it actually did in the deeds and pronouncements of the emperor and his associ­ates.” (CW 20:156-57)

In the case of Frederick II, his conflicts with the papacy destroyed the existential representation of the idea of the sacrum imperium and plunged the papacy into a slow death spiral that would not reach final fruition until Boniface VIII issued the Unam Sanctum.

The idea of the sacrum imperium does not die with Frederick, but the personality and institutions that have any hope of achieving the realiza­tion of the idea are swept from the stage of history. Instead of the grandeur of a communal empire bound together by the spirit of Christ, a system of competing powers would be rationalized and justified by new, emerg­ing ideas. The idea of the sacred empire began to give way to the de­mands of realpolitik.

In the dichotomy between Saint Francis and Frederick II is the symbolic representation of what had occurred within the sacrum imperium. The elements of the Christian personality, indeed of the personality of Christ himself, had been split into two images. Neither one was complete in it­self, yet both were clung to by their adherents with a ferocity that only ex­treme faith could give. For all practical purposes, the break in the idea of the imperium occurred when Frederick II died, but the potential for renewal remained in the willingness of the church to adapt to the changes brought on by the shifting political situation.

The broken body of the corpus mysticum would move into the future and be given another opportunity at life through the philo­sophical and theological explorations of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who would offer a way out of the mess that the wreck of the imperium had created. But because the church lacked the ability to recognize what had happened, it failed to adjust itself to the dramatically altered circumstances with which it would be confronted.