Hope Against Hope: A Reading of Joachim of Fiore Peter Cramer Prophets are also satirists. Preoccupied as they are with God’s will for his peo- ple in time, they employ scorn in order to correct the behaviour of the people whenever it strays from this will. Their concern with mistakes in the present gives them a profound interest in the present as a whole. This made Joachim of Fiore anxious: “But if it were right to fear men and not God, I would silently put this pas- sage of the Gospels aside, and so avoid speaking the truth, because the truth is all too likely to make me a burden on the truth-shunners, and then I would be a scandal, suffering for injustice.”1 Yet Joachim will take his courage in his hands, and like Christ in the passage in question, from the Gospel of John, leave Galilee for Jerusalem, and chase the moneylenders from the Temple. The reluctance is characteristic of his work. It is, perhaps, a very deliberate hesitancy, at any rate a conscious one, and I will argue that it comes from an immediate awareness in him that authority in matters of the ultimate truth is not a human thing; and because it is divine, as radically beyond the human as could be, it is groundless, or at least not trans- latable into ordinary language or institutions. This hesitancy of Joachim sits, disconcertingly, alongside a willingness to speak with the soaring words of the prophets, to quote Isaiah or Hosea as if completely appropriating their speech. Joachim is anxious, but, driven by the necessity of the end-time, he will go up to Jerusalem, and with all the zeal it takes, speak out publicly against those who have been buying and selling offices of the church: against the simoniacs, that obdurate party which had been the butt of reformers since before Gregory VII in the 1070s and 1080s.2 There is a difference of a hundred years between Gregory and Joachim, yet they share certain habits of mind, especially that of zeal, the visionary intensity of the reformer who sees an ideal world (of some 1 “Set si oporteret revereri homines pocius quam Deum, vellem hunc sancti locum tacite pre- terire, ne forte dicens veritatem, honerosus appaream desertoribus veritatis et scandalum patiar pro iustitia” Tractatus super Quatuor Evangelia; Ernesto Buonaiuti; Fonti per la Storia d’Italia: Scrittori, secolo xii: Rome 1930) 3:242. 2 Joachim, Tractatus, 243. The simoniacs would have seemed to some to have had just as strong a claim to legitimacy as Gregory VII and his cronies. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004�7�040_��7 Hope Against Hope: A Reading of Joachim of Fiore 233 kind, for in both cases it is difficult to say how this world is made up, or even whether the authors of an ideal world believed it could be made real this side of the day of judgement); and they also share a radical questioning of the very nature of authority.3 Joachim’s anger at contemporary abuses in the church, an example of the satirical tendency in him, is an illustration of how he keeps coming back, repeatedly if not frequently, to his own times. On other occasions he is inclined to lament rather than criticise. In the midst of his shorter commen- tary on Revelation, for example, while explaining the content of the sixth age by revealing it to be the unsealing of the sixth seal and a concordance with, among other episodes, the flood of Noah, he comes all of a sudden to 1187 and the sack of Jerusalem by Saladin. The tribulations which stalk the course of history, and especially recent history, are what Christ was thinking of when he warned of the stages with which the end would come. “. .The end will not come immediately. People will rise up against people, kingdom against kingdom, and there will be plagues, and starvation and earthquakes from one place to another. These though are only the beginning of the adver- sity” (Matt 24:6–8). And Joachim comments: “Thus far, we see that what we read here has been fulfilled. The other things that are to follow are near, up against the gates, unless they include what we have recently learnt of events in Jerusalem.”4 Plagues and wars are familiar enough, but the fall of Jerusalem to the Saracens suggests a new turn, the advent of the “blood-dimmed tide.” Against the backdrop of the grandeur of sustained symbolic language, of a sometimes apparently obsessive attempt to make out the patterns of the hid- den speech with which God speaks, however erratically, in the historiae of Old and New Testaments, this sudden focus on a recent event comes as a shock. Readers are brought up short by the pain of recognition. But they are also given the giddy suggestion that 1187, in its closeness and specificity, is of a piece with the endless whole of the Biblical epic. Joachim was not the first to set his own time in the frame of biblical his- tory. In his enlightening essay on eschatology and history in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, H.D. Rauh puts forward the thesis that the tradition of 3 For this aspect of Gregory VII, see his letter to Bishop Hermann of Metz (15th March 1081), ed. H.E.J. Cowdrey, The Register of Pope Gregory VII 1073–1085. An English Translation, 8, 21 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 387–95, and especially 390. 4 Enchiridion super Apocalypsim, ed. Andrea Tagliapietra, Gioacchino, Sull’Apocalisse; Milan: Feltrinelli, 1994) “Hucusque ut legitur ita completum videmus, ceterum quod sequitur in januis prope est, sitamen ad hoc non pertinet, quod nuper Hierosolymis accidisse didicimus,” 5:172–74..