THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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open to it. Only the heretical sects, with Joachim among them, allowed revelation to spring up anew even in the west, and the Holy Spirit accordingly recommended
astonishing Pentecosts to them. It recommended social principles of Christianity which, as the example of Thomas Münzer indicates, were not cringing and did not treat
the proletariat as a rabble. This was heretical Christianity and ultimately revolutionary Adventist utopia; with the social principles of Baal they would not have arisen.
They blossomed in the preaching of Joachim, to such an extent that a single antithesis exposed the masters' Church here: ‘They deck the altars, and the poor man
suffers bitter hunger.’ This very antithesis sounds, as we have seen, as if it was from the Bible, from Amos, from Isaiah, from the Jesus quoted by Münzer. In fact even
the ideal states constructed out of pure reason, which prepared the way for socialism from the sixteenth century on, are themselves, for all their rationality, still built into
the third aeon. They no longer keep this space occupied, but they still keep it, despite an unspoken finality, at bottom: there are no such utopias without an
unconditional element. The will to happiness speaks for itself, but the plans, or contemporary images of a New Moral World speak differently, i.e. chiliastically.
However secularized and finally, eventually, set on its feet, the social utopia since Joachim has the societas amicorum within it, this Christlikeness turned into a society.
Happiness, freedom, order, the whole regnum hominis, resound with it, in its utopian application. A remark by the young Engels in 1842 (MEGA I, 2, p. 225f.)
contains an echo from Joachim, only a few years before the Communist Manifesto: ‘The self­confidence of humanity, the new Grail around whose throne the nations
jubilantly gather … This is our vocation: to become the Templars of this Grail, to gird our swords about our loins for its sake and cheerfully risk our lives in the last holy
war, which will be followed by the millennium of freedom.’ Utopian unconditionality comes from the Bible and the idea of the kingdom, and the latter remained the apse
of every New Moral World.
Thomas More or the utopia of social freedom
The bourgeois citizen got moving, went in search of his Own, in which he could flourish. He was in favour of work, making way for efficiency, and the end of class
differences. The work of the English Chancellor Thomas More, ‘De optimo rei publicae statu sive de nova insula Utopia’ (Concerning the best condition of the state or
concerning the new island of Utopia),