account of the first resurrection as prophesying ‘that those who will have then
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
presence of the Lord’, noting that he himself had once held such a view.
150
Medieval and Early Modern Periods
Christ and the saints in his massive
Expositio in Apocalypsim
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
carnal
view of the
,
years, but
belief in a coming better seventh
aetas
on earth was not an error, but what Joa-
chim called a
serenissimus intellectus
, 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
Dostları ilə paylaş: