THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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Kingdom clearly continues to exert an influence here: ‘You should know’, says Miinzer in his work ‘On fictional faith’, praising the testimony of the genuine Christian
against the lackeys of princes and against scribbling priests, ‘You should know that they ascribe this doctrine to the Abbot Joachim and call it an eternal gospel with
great scorn.’ The German Peasant War very much dispelled this scorn; even the radicals of the English revolution, the agrarian­communist Diggers, the millenarians and
Fifth­monarchy men all bear the legacy of both Joachim and the Baptists. Only when the Joachite­Taborite spirit was eliminated from the Baptist movement, by Menno
Simons, did the western sects, and not just the Mennonites, become quiet, particularly quiet, evangelical communities. But even the other irredenta, that which was
detached from the Baptist movement, the incipiently rational, no longer irrational utopia of the modern age, abandoned the millennium; Plato and the Stoics triumphed
over Joachim of Fiore, even over Augustine. In this way a greater precision of institutional details developed in utopias, a connection with bourgeois emancipation
arose, which was already fully utopianized into socialist tendencies, but the elements of a final purpose and final goal, as contained in Joachim's utopia, were toned
down. They were turned — in the work of rational utopians like Thomas More, and also Campanella — into social harmony; a liberal or even an authoritative future
state thus became heir to the millennium. The mythologizing Christian way of thinking in the medieval Christian utopias certainly did not specify the element of a final
purpose, but nor did it ever lose sight of it. It persisted in the fermenting, dream­laden red dawn which filled the Joachite and the Baptist utopia to the brim and turned
the whole sky into an eastern glow. This way of thinking had less elaborated social utopia than Plato or the Stoics, let alone the rational constructions of the modern
age, but it had more utopian conscience in its utopia than they did. Conscience and the problem of the final What For thus remain indebted to the chiliastic utopias; quite
independently of the intolerably mythological designations of their content. And Joachim was cogently the spirit of Christian revolutionary social utopia: it was in this
spirit that he taught and continued to have an influence. He first set a deadline for the Kingdom of God, namely for the communist one, and called on people to observe
it. He deposed the theology of the Father, relegated it to the age of fear and servitude,but dissolved Christ into a commune. Here as nowhere else the social expectation
was in earnest which Jesus had placed in the new aeon and which had been turned into hypocrisy and cliché by the Church. Or as Marx says quite rightly on