A mystical glance into the secrets of the divine world order

On the very threshold of the Western Culture we meet the great Joachim of Floris (c. 1145-1202),* the first thinker of the Hegelian stamp who shattered the dualistic world form of Augustine, and with his essentially Gothic intellect stated the new Christianity of his time in the form of a third term to the religions of the Old and the New Testaments, expressing them respectively as the Age of the Father, the Age of the Son and the Age of the Holy Ghost. His teaching moved the best of the Franciscans and the Dominicans, Dante, Thomas Aquinas, in their inmost souls and awakened a world outlook which slowly but surely took entire possession of the historical sense of our Culture. Lessing — who often designated his own period, with reference to the Classical as the “afterworld”** (Nachwelt) — took his idea of the “education of the human race” with its three stages of child, youth and man, from the teaching of the Fourteenth Century mystics. Ibsen treats it with thoroughness in his Emperor and Galilean (1873), in which he directly presents the Gnostic world conception through the figure of the wizard Maximus, and advances not a step beyond it in his famous Stockholm address of 1887. It would appear, then, that the Western consciousness feels itself urged to predicate a sort of finality inherent in its own appearance.

But the creation of the Abbot of Floris was a mystical glance into the secrets of the divine world order. It was bound to lose all meaning as soon as it was used in the way of reasoning and made a hypothesis of scientific thinking, as it has been — ever more and more frequently — since the 17th Century.

It is a quite indefensible method of presenting World history to begin by giving rein to one’s own religious, political or social convictions and endowing the sacrosanct three phase system with tendencies that will bring it exactly to one’s own standpoint. This is, in effect, making of some formula — say, the “Age of Reason,” Humanity, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, enlightenment, economic progress, national freedom, the conquest of nature, or world peace — a criterion whereby to judge whole millennia of history. And so we judge that they were ignorant of the “true path,” or that they failed to follow it, when the fact is simply that their will and purposes were not the same as ours. Goethe’s saying, “What is important in life is life and not a result of life,” is the answer to any and every senseless attempt to solve the riddle of historical form by means of a program.

14 K. Burdach, Reformation, Renaissance, Humanismus, 1918, pp. 48 et seq. (English readers may be referred to the article Joachim of Floris by Professor Alphandery in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, XI ed., Tr.)

15 The expression “antique” — meant of course in the dualistic sense — is found as early as the Isagoge of Porphyry (c. 300 A.D.).

Oswald Spengler
The Decline of the West