Imagining the End: Visions of
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| De civitate Dei
. (written c.
) Augustine set the weight of his authority firmly against those he called the miliarii , who interpreted the account of the first resurrection as prophesying ‘that those who will have then arisen shall enjoy huge banquets of meat in which there will be so much food and drink that it not only exceeds moderation, but is also clearly incredible’. 6 The bishop went on to provide two interpretations for the , -year reign of the resurrected saints. The period can be understood either as a synecdoche, signifying the final part of the last of the six ages of world history during which Christ casts the Devil into the abyss of the hearts of the wicked, or else the
years stands for ‘all the years of this world so that the fullness of time might be signified by a perfect number’. 7 Augustine favoured the former view, as he made clear in De civitate Dei
. when he identified the earthly church militant with the millennial kingdom. In De civitate Dei
. , however, he prefaced his remarks with the admission that a view of the millennium ‘would be to some extent tolerable [ utcumque tolerabilis ], if these delights in the sabbath destined for the saints were believed to be spiritual through the presence of the Lord’, noting that he himself had once held such a view. 8 More than seven centuries after Augustine expressed his opposition to carnal millennialism, the Calabrian abbot, Joachim of Fiore ( c.
–
), drove his millennial coach and four through this narrow opening that Augustine had left for a spiritual interpretation of the , -year reign of 150 Medieval and Early Modern Periods Christ and the saints in his massive
written in the s. Joachim recognized that Augustine was commonly read as opposing all forms of millenarianism, but he felt that this interpretation was mistaken and led to a neglect of future hope for a better state of the Church on earth. Augustine had been right to condemn a
view of the ,
years, but belief in a coming better seventh aetas on earth was not an error, but what Joa- chim called a
, that is, ‘a most exalted understanding’. Joachim held that a good exegete should distinguish three aspects of what was predicted in Apocalypse : (
) that there was a coming earthly state, which, contrary to the received Augustinian view, was the clear sense of the text; (
) the duration of this period, which Joachim agreed would not be a literal millennium; and ( ) the character of this brief period after the defeat of the Antichrist of this age, which would certainly not be one of a carnal nature, but for Joachim involved the contemplative monastic utopia of the Yüklə 4,01 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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