THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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obsequiousness which the old aeon needs in its victims, but without the day of judgment and the triumph over Babel, without intending towards a new heaven and a
new earth. Resignation to fear, servitude and empty promises of the other world are the social principles of a Christianity which are despised by Marx and cast into
Orcus by Joachim; but they are not the principles of a long­abandoned early Christianity and a social­revolutionary history of heresies that sprang from it. In his
expectation of the kingdom, Joachim of Fiore merely expresses the continuing influence through the centuries of the eschatological preachings of Christ, what he said
about a future ‘Spirit of truth’ (John 16, 13), and what did not seem to be concluded with the first pouring out of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost (Acts 2, 1–4). The
western Church declared such things to be concluded, the only thing that was unconcluded was its compromise with the class society; the eastern Church at least left
open a continuation of this pouring out. After the Lateran Council of 1215, the western Church put all monasteries under the spiritual control of their diocesan bishop;
even after it had adopted the western order of the sacraments, the eastern Church had to allow a charismatic and often heretical independence to monasticism, and the
sects. The western Church confined enthusiasm to apostles and the ancient martyrs, in order to deprive Adventist beliefs of any kind of sanction; the eastern Church, on
the other hand, which is so much less thoroughly organized, teaches a continuing presence of the Spirit outside the priestly Church, among both monks and laymen. It
thus lacks the monopoly of administering the host, the whole legally established or screwed­in business of redemption; Russian Orthodoxy under the Tsars was too
ignorant for this anyway, it had no scholasticism, let alone the legal sharpness and dogmatic formulations of scholasticism. Instead, out of reach of the Holy Synod, a
constant unwritten essence of Joachim of Fiore lived on in Russian Christianity: it lived on in the easily kindled feeling of brotherhood, in the Adventist beliefs of the
sects (the sect of the Chlysts has a doctrine of Russian Christs, of which it lists seven), in the basic motif underlying everything: in the unconcluded revelation. Several
great peculiarities were thus able to spring up in Christo­romantic fashion on Bolshevist soil; the indisputable Bolshevik and equally indisputable chiliast Alexander Blok
gave an indication of this, thoroughly in the Joachite spirit. When in Blok's hymn, the ‘March of the Twelve’, that is, of the twelve Red Army soldiers, a pale Christ
precedes the revolution and leads it, this kind of presence of the Spirit is just as remote from the western Church­combines as it finds the eastern Church at least
theologically