places for fat pigs, couches for unclean spirits.”10
Another besetting sin of the medieval church was the practice of simony—that is, the buying and bartering of church offices for profit among the royalty, aristocracy, and gentry as well as the high clergy. Politics were at work here, too; popes were jealous of their power to make and break bishops and cardinals and resented the monarchs who tried to take it away. After all, a bishop who owed his rank and title to a king was less likely to side with a pope in the struggle between church and state that was a commonplace of the late Middle Ages. But it is also true that those who profited from their clerical offices were often tempted to spend their riches on lives of opulence and sensuality. Simony reached all the way to the papacy; Pope Gregory VI (d. 1048), for example, is said to have purchased his seat on the papal throne from the previous pope, Benedict IX, at the stated price of two thousand silver pounds.
Such human flaws and failings among the clergy, high and low, sparked the so-called Gregorian reform, a wide-ranging set of innovations and improvements that reached a critical mass during the reign of Pope Gregory VII. The book of Revelation provided Pope Gregory with the language arsenal to justify his decrees: “For the nearer the time of Antichrist approaches,” he declared, “the harder he fights to crush out the Christian faith.”11And the same impulse toward the purification of Christianity—“a longing for an ideal gospel life built on the imitation of the life lived by Jesus and his followers”12—moved Francis of Assisi (1181/82–1226) to found the monastic order that inspired medieval Christians to ask themselves: “What would Jesus do?”
Here was yet another culture war in which the book of Revelation served as a rhetorical weapons dump. While kings and popes contested with each other for worldly power, monks and priests like Francis of Assisi, known as the
The maker of the apocalyptic revolution in medieval Europe was a visionary monk called Joachim of Fiore (ca. 1135–ca. 1202). Joachim was raised and educated to serve as an official in the royal court of the Norman king in southern Italy, but he was drawn to the life of “a wandering holy man,” the same calling that sent John to the seven churches of Asia Minor. Joachim took monastic vows and later founded a monastery in the rugged reaches of the Calabrian countryside, where he was inspired to undertake a study of the scriptures in an effort to crack the divine secrets that were hidden away in Holy Writ.13
When Joachim started to read the book of Revelation, he hoped to find “the key of things past, the knowledge of things to come,” as he puts it, “the opening of what is sealed, the uncovering of what is hidden.”14 But he reached only the tenth verse of the text before the mysteries of Revelation stopped him like “the stone that closed the tomb.”15 Like so many other visionaries, Joachim sought a revelation of his own—and received one. After a year of prayerful longing and meditation, as Joachim himself describes it, the epiphany took place on Easter morning around the year 1184. Not unlike the experience described by Robert Graves eight centuries later, the baffling text miraculously snapped into focus for the medieval monk.
“About the middle of the night’s silence, as I think, the hour when it is thought that our Lion of the tribe of Judah rose from the dead, while I was meditating,” recalls Joachim, referring to Jesus Christ with the same code words that John uses in Revelation, “I suddenly perceived in my mind’s eye something of the fullness of this book and of the entire harmony of the Old and New Testaments.”16
Once he had been given what he called “the gift of understanding,” Joachim extracted all kinds of new and unsuspected meanings from the book of Revelation.17 He was convinced, for example, that human history is divided into three ages, each one corresponding to a “person” of the Trinity—the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The first age lasted until the crucifixion of Jesus, the second age was in progress during Joachim’s lifetime and would end with the arrival of the Antichrist, and the third age—an age of spiritual peace and perfection—would begin only after the Antichrist is defeated. And, echoing the words of Jesus himself, Joachim expressed his conviction that the final battle between God and Satan was at hand.
“This will not take place in the days of your grandchildren or in the old age of your children,” warns Joachim, “but in your own days, few and evil.”18
Joachim’s single most revolutionary innovation was his refusal to confine Revelation to the spiritual realm, thus breaking with the approved reading of the text that dated all the way back to Augustine. Rather, he saw even the strangest visions in Revelation as prophecies of specific people and events in the real world. The seven heads of the satanic red dragon, for example, are understood by Joachim to signify the seven persecutors of the church across the centuries of human history, including Herod, Nero, and Saladin, the celebrated Muslim warrior who took Jerusalem back from the crusaders in 1187. The seventh head, he insisted, was the Antichrist yet (but soon) to come.
Yet Joachim’s vision of the end-times can be seen as a bright and cheerful one precisely because he saw the millennial kingdom as the reign of a reformed Christian church right here on earth. “His glorious new era was to occur within history and was therefore more utopia than Millennium,” explains British journalist and historian Damian Thompson. “This has led to Joachim being blamed for every failed utopian experiment from Savonarola’s Florence to Soviet Communism.” Joachim, however, regarded himself as a reformer rather than a revolutionary, and his conception of the New Jerusalem was “an exclusively Catholic vision.”19
Joachim’s new reading of the book of Revelation could be as baffling as the original text itself, and, in fact, his writings did not attract a sizable readership until they were copied out and circulated by his posthumous followers, the so-called Joachimites. Once Joachim had broken Augustine’s grip, however, those who came after him dared to interpret the visions of Revelation in ever more audacious ways. The church condemned them as “diviners and dreamers” and dismissed their writings as “false and fantastic prophecies.”20 Not a few of them were burned along with their manuscripts. But Revelation was now, quite literally, an open book.
“The abbot’s discovery of a new interpretation that remained influential for centuries,” observes Bernard McGinn, “might have made him the patron saint of critics had he been canonized rather than condemned.”21
Significantly, Joachim’s influence was not confined to the scholars and theologians who found their way to his arcane writings. Some of his readers were outraged by his inflammatory rhetoric, including the high clergy who recognized themselves in his denunciation of Christians who “abandoned the bosom of the Chaste Mother and preferred the Whore who rules over the kings of the earth.”22 But other readers, including popes, kings, and crusaders all across Europe, sought him out as a kind of “apocalyptic advisor,” and begged him to reveal to them the divine secrets that he had prized out of the scriptures.23
No less commanding a figure than Richard the Lion-Hearted, the legendary English king, called on Joachim on his way to the Holy Land during the Third Crusade in 1190–1191 to find out what Revelation might foretell about his own fate. And the old monk obliged the crusader-king by revealing that when John sees “a beast rise up out of the sea” in the book of Revelation, he is actually glimpsing the Saracen army that Richard would soon face in the battle for Jerusalem. Soon thereafter, Joachim assured Richard, Jesus Christ would return to earth to undertake the final crusade against the Antichrist, the long-promised battle of Armageddon.
“And this Antichrist (he sayde) was already borne in the citie of Rome, and should be there exalted in the Apostolical see,” Joachim is shown to say to King Richard in a sixteenth-century Protestant tract. “And then shall the wicked man be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirits of his mouth and shall destroye with the brightness of his coming.”24
The Antichrist, in other words, would be the pope himself.
Another reader of Revelation who achieved a kind of superstardom in the eleventh century was Hildegard of Bingen, the Benedictine nun who distinguished herself as a visionary, a preacher, and an author of apocalyptic tracts as well as various texts on medicine, music, and natural history. Indeed, her treatise on the use of herbs to cure illness remains “among the foundational documents of western pharmacy,” and her musical compositions “make Hildegard the only medieval figure whose life story must include a discography.”25 Like Joachim of Fiore, Hildegard insisted that the greatest evil in Christendom was to be found within the bosom of the church, where members of the clergy were using their offices to enrich themselves—and then using their riches to
