The following excerpt from Michael Horton, Magician and Mechanic: The Roots of “Spiritual but Not Religious” from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution (Eerdmans, 2026) is published with permission from Eerdmans Publishing.
This is the second volume of a trilogy. See Mere Orthodoxy’s forum on Volume 1, with reviews by John Ehrett and Nadya Williams, and Michael Horton’s response.
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This volume contains considerably more evidence of the impact of the twelfth-century monk Joachim of Fiore. The Axial tendency to return the soul to the One through ascetic practice (purgation, contemplation, union) was a ladder laid on its side, as a historical process. From now on, Joachite eschatology was the most influential current in early modern history. Figures as diverse as Columbus, Quaker George Fox, and a host of radical puritans and pietists who shaped the modern age agreed. This eschatology is the main engine of modern utopianism. Indeed, the transition from a locative premodern condition to a utopian “axiality” reaches heretofore unknown heights. Perhaps only in ancient Gnosticism was the divine self ever more reflective on its own transcendence and unwilling to live in the present. The historical sensibility of the Renaissance magus is something unprecedented in previous “leaps of consciousness.”
Outside Judaism and Christianity, the dominant view of time was cyclical, from a golden age of innocence to a point of gradual decline and catastrophe until the rebirth of a new utopian age. The emanation-return schema of Orphic cosmology rendered history merely a moving picture of eternity. “The end is like the beginning” was the motto that Hermeticism symbolized by a snake eating its tail. In contrast, biblical faith breaks the circle into a line from promise to fulfillment. It is always a “new thing” that God will accomplish in the future (e.g., Isa 43:19), a new covenant (e.g., Jer 31), something that “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined” (1 Cor 2:9). According to early Christian teaching, some of these prophecies are fulfilled in Christ’s first advent and others will be in his second, but all of them turn on Christ. Like other apocalyptic figures in the book of Revelation, the “thousand years” (Rev 20:7) is symbolic of the entire age of Christ between his two advents. For now, he is conquering the nations, not through the secular sword but by his word and Spirit, until he returns in final judgment and salvation to consummate his everlasting reign.
Adopting a literal interpretation of the millennium, however, the leaders of a second-century movement called the New Prophecy—Montanus together with his assistants, Prisca and Maximilla—claimed to be inspired prophets ushering in a new Pentecost centered in their native Phrygia. Opposed by churches in the East and the West, Montanism was declared a heresy, and in 431 the Council of Ephesus officially rejected the idea of a literal millennium before Christ’s return. At about the same time of this council, Augustine defended a symbolic interpretation of the “thousand years” in Revelation 20. Representing completion, the thousand years symbolizes the whole period between Christ’s two advents. According to this interpretation, which was shared by leaders in the Christian East, this era is marked by tribulation for the saints yet progress of the gospel to the ends of the earth. The next apocalyptic event is Christ’s return, the resurrection and last judgment, followed by the everlasting Sabbath.
However, the twelfth-century Calabrian monk, Joachim of Fiore, redrew the eschatological map. Similar to Montanism’s announcement of a new Pentecost, Joachim taught that a utopian “age of the Spirit” was about to dawn in the middle of history before the return of Christ. The age of the Father (law; the order of the married) was superseded by the age of the Son (grace; the order of the clergy). And the age of the Spirit (immediate gnosis; the order of the monk) will replace the church and its ministry. The new covenant (age of the Son), advancing through the ministry of the visible church, will be as obsolete as the age of the Father. Joachim was familiar as a monk with the three stages of ascent from purgation to contemplation and union. At the first stage, one depends on authorities and an elaborate system of physical rites, but then recognizes them as pictures of higher truths. Finally, one transcends reason as well, surrendering to the mystical ecstasy of union with God.
Yet, what is utterly new in Joachim is that he places this ladder on its side, fusing the vertical ascent of the soul with the historical orientation of Christianity. This direct union with God, apart from any mediation, will not only be the experience of a few spiritual athletes, but the whole world will be a vast monastery. The movement from the purgation (age of the Father) to union (age of the Spirit) is a growth from childhood dependence on authority to the maturity of autonomy based on the inner light.
Joachim predicted this new age, which began with St. Francis, would reach its apex in the year 1260. Rather than look for Jesus at the end of the age, attention was drawn to a golden age under the leadership of an angelic pope and a final world emperor. However, this would not occur without the active participation of the godly. After a terrible persecution, they would triumph over a false pope and emperor. For many, the questions “Where can I find fullness?” and “Where is history going?” received a single answer in Joachite prophecy. People are not victims of cruelty, playthings of despots and death, or passive spectators to the decline of civilization and the church simply waiting for Jesus to return. Rather, they have a decisive role to play in the triumph of the saints here and now.
Aquinas criticized Joachim’s view of the Trinity as heretical tritheism, as the Fourth Lateran Council had in 1215, which was followed in suit by the Synod of Arles in 1263, but Dante placed the abbot in the sun heaven of his paradise along with Lombard, Aquinas, and Bonaventure. Already in the late medieval period, Bauer notes, Hermeticism was absorbed into the “millenarian prophecy inspired by Joachim of Fiore.” Especially in Franciscan circles, “the alchemists enveloped their theories of matter in prophetic spiritualism.” Bauer adds that
in 1317, Pope John XXII—the same pope who would later rule against Francis-can poverty—outlawed alchemy, in his decretal Spondent quas non exhibent. Although the alchemists launched a counteroffensive against Avicenna’s and the Thomists’ attacks, the philosophical debate about the efficacy of alchemy henceforth assumed distinctly theological implications about the borderline between religious orthodoxy and heterodoxy.
Alongside the Epicurean and Platonic revivals, we discover in Renaissance Florence a resurgence of Joachite prophecy in the person of Girolamo Savonarola. Though it survived and even flourished in some places through the Spiritual Franciscans, the Joachite eschatology exercised a significant impact from Christopher Columbus to Isaac Newton.
As we will see, Joachite prophecy was particularly formative in Anabaptist circles. The expectation of an age of the Spirit, leaving behind the visible church and its ministry of preaching and sacraments, fit well with spiritualist emphases. By the seventeenth century, millennialism had suffused the European imagination, in both Roman Catholic and Protestant lands, and had contributed significantly to utopian ideals of universal progress and enlightenment. Combined with Hermeticism, alchemy now becomes a historical process of transmuting base metals into gold. Roger Garaudy observes that of “the first revolutionary movements in Europe, all were more or less imbued with the ideas of Joachim of Fiore.”65 Contrary to the usual lamentations, history was not growing old; it was about to reach its apotheosis. “Here history is theophany,” notes Frank Graziano, “the mood is constructive, and the actions are decisive, with human efficacy guided by divine will as the cosmic plan unfolds. God and his creation collaborate in the progression, perfection, and culmination of history; enterprise becomes eschatology.”
The march of history and the perennial tradition are metanarratives that pre-suppose an ideal—a golden age in the future or the past—by which historical advancement and decline are judged. These narratives often presuppose an origin and a telos that plot everything in between as either development or decay, an inexorable cultural evolution toward utopia or dystopia. Both presuppose a model of cultural evolution in which modern definitions and antitheses of science and magic, reason and religion, are given a normative status. As Burkert points out, the study of ancient cults is “a battlefield between rationalists and mystics since the beginning of the nineteenth century.” Indeed, the battle between these meta-narratives is bound up with modern and antimodern sensibilities.
The march of history orientation strikes most of us as a straightforward explanation of the facts. Its basic outline unfolds in familiar chapters, leading from the childhood of religious dogmatism and superstition to the maturity of autonomous reason and science. Whether valorized or vilified, “modernity” is not merely a convenient periodization or description of common features but an ideological construction. The very idea of progress from authority to autonomy belongs to the history of modernity itself rather than standing outside it like a natural fact. In other words, the concept of “modernity” is a utopian script that has been written by Orphic bricoleurs, bound up with the enduring impact of a fertile dogma: the “divine self.”
