Refreshment of the Saints: The Time after Antichrist as a Station for Earthly Progress in Medieval Thought

Abstract

For St. Augustine the saeculum—the sum total of earthly human existence — was malignant. Not only was it so, he thought, since Adam's fall, but it would remain so until the Last Judgment. Since the Fall this world was no place in which to rejoice; only otherworldly liberation could be had ‘from this life of misery, a kind of hell on earth.’ Historical events, aside from the Incarnation, remained for Augustine ‘a chaos of human sin divided by acts of divine power.’ With Christ, history had entered into its sixth and last earthly age and there was no hope for any greater earthly future. In the City of God (20.7) Augustine rejected as a ‘ridiculous fable’ the view that the thousand-year kingdom of Christ in Revelation (20.1-6) would be a future earthly kingdom, interpreting it instead as a figure for the life of the Church in the present. ‘There are no verbs of historical movement in the City of God,’ Peter Brown assures us, ‘no sense of progress to aims that may be achieved in history.’

The Influence of Joachim in the 13th Century

“…16 Lerner instead argued that, although Joachim went "far beyond his sources," his originality on some issues had been exaggerated. 17 He noted, for example, the contrast between traditional Augustinian pessimism about worldly life and the optimism of Joachim's time of earthly happiness, but argued that the latter stemmed from non-western Sibylline and Tiburtine texts and from 12thcentury reworkings of the ideas of Jerome and Bede. In particular he identified Jerome as the inadvertent originator of the notion of a continuation of earthly history before the coming of the Antichrist, an idea transformed in the 12th century and perpetuated through widely disseminated texts such as the Glossa ordinaria.…”

Antichrist as (Anti)Charisma: Reflections on Weber and the ‘Son of Perdition’

“…For Weber, charisma denotes a "natural leader," the holder of "specific gifts of the body and spirit" ( [5], pp. [18][19]. The charismatic individual is "set apart from ordinary men and is treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities" ( [5] If Christ represents a classic example of Weberian charismatic authority, one might reasonably consider the case of Antichrist as a projection of (anti)charisma, an example of a "false prophet," a simulacrum of the messiah expected at the end of days.…”

“…11:3)-before the Second Coming of Christ, who will cast him down before the defeat of Satan and Final Judgment. According to some early Christian and medieval thinkers, God will allow a period of "rest" for those who lapsed during the trials of Antichrist to do penance, a space of time that offers a corollary of sorts to the notion of the millennium as an age of peace and justice on earth before coming of God's kingdom [18]. In such works, however, details about the life of Antichrist are scant.…”

Franciscan Prophets and the Inquisition (1226–1326)

“…2, Glaube und Geschichte (Congar 1958, pp. 86-90); Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Latter Middle Ages (Reeves 1969); Robert Lerner, "Refreshment of the Saints: The Time after the Antichrist as a station of Earthly Progress in Medieval Thought" (Lerner 1976); Henri de Lubac, La posterite spirituelle de Joachim de Flore (De Lubac 1978, vol. 1-2); Bernard McGinn, The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought (McGinn 1985); E. Randolph Daniel, Joachim of Fiore: Patterns of History in the Apocalypse," in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Daniel 1992, pp.…”