THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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moral unfreedom of the will did not even gain acceptance in the Church. The defusing of the millennium into the Church was little hindrance, especially as civitas Dei,
being such a high vision, constantly gave the lie to the corrupting Church's claim to be the millennium. Chiliasm broke out in all periods of unrest again, the kingdom of
God on earth became the revolutionary magic formula throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern era, right up to the pious radicalism in the English revolution.
Civitas Dei in the work of Augustine himself is more lasting in its definition of the power­states than in its apologia for the Church, more lasting in its utopia of
brotherliness than in its theology of the Father. Human beings were henceforth utopianized as brothers even where a Father was not believed in any more — civitas Dei
remained a political wishful image even without God.
Joachim of Fiore, the third gospel and its kingdom
It all depended on whether people were serious about what they were expecting. The revolutionary movements were in this position, and they created a new image of
the kingdom. They also taught another kind of history, one which animated the image and held out the promise of its incarnation. The most momentous social utopia of
the Middle Ages was drawn up by the Calabrian abbot Joachim of Fiore (around 1200). He was not trying to purge the Church, or even the state, of their atrocities;
they were abolished instead. And the extinguished gospel was rekindled, or rather the lux nova within it: what was called by the Joachites the Third Kingdom. Joachim
teaches that there are three stages of history, and each one is closer to the viable breakthrough of the kingdom. The first stage is that of the Father, the Old Testament,
of fear and of known Law. The second stage is that of the Son or the New Testament, of love and the Church, which is divided into clerics and the laity. The third
stage, which is yet to come, is that of the Holy Spirit or the illumination of all, in mystical democracy, without masters and Church. The first Testament gave the grass,
the second the ears, and the third will bring the wheat. Joachim elaborates on this sequence in many ways, mostly with direct reference to his age, believed to be a final
apocalyptic age, and with the political prognosis that the masters and the priests will no longer be able, and the ‘laity’ will not want, to go on living as before. Joachim's
sermons thus dealt, in an early­bourgeois visionary way, with the curse and radical end of the corrupt feudal and ecclesiastical kingdom; with an anger born of hope, a
satis est, which had hardly been heard since the days of John