Esoteric Histories: Age of the Spirit

Part the Third

If you’d like a refresher, please review the previous entries:

Part the First.

Part the Second.

Welcome back dear Readers, to the Esoteric Histories series, last week we discussed the concept of ‘Great Work’ as used by the Rosicrucians and how this ‘Great Work’ was a plan to transmute the 'dead' 'superstition' of the Roman Church into a new, 'living', 'enlightened,' ‘Church of Reason’.

We can see this in multiple ways, one of the chief being that one of the asserted (with little to no evidence) Authors of der Wedding and OG Members of the Rosicrucian Invisible College is none other than Francis Bacon and multiple references occur in the literature to the House of Solomon and the New Atlantis.

We can also see the appetite of these Rationalist Pamphleteers to appoint themselves as priests of a New Order of the Ages and workers of Rationalistic Miracles in passages such as this:

"But we confess, and witness openly with the Lord Jesus Christ, that it shall first happen that the stones shall arise, and offer their service, before there shall be any want of executors and accomplishers of God's counsel; yea, the Lord God hath already sent before certain messengers, which should testify his will, to wit, some new stars, which do appear and are seen in the firmament in Serpentario and Cygno, which signify and give themselves known to everyone, that they are powerful Signacula of great weighty matters. (...) Now there remains yet that which in short time, honour shall be likewise given to the tongue, and by the same; what before times hath been seen, heard, and smelt, now finally shall be spoken and uttered forth, when the World shall awake out of her heavy and drowsy sleep, and with an open heart, bare-head, and bare-foot, shall merrily and joyfully meet the new arising Sun."

The numerologically pregnant and astrologically ecstatic language of der Wedding and later Rosicrucian literature points to an expectation of a ‘New Age’, one of ‘Rationality’, ‘Freedom’, and ‘Humanism’. Indeed the millenarian language is often recycled from that of an earlier radical visionary, one Joachim of Fiore (AKA Joachim of Flora and Gioacchino da Fiore 1135-1202) an Italian monk and founder of the order of San Giovanni in Fiore, whose followers in eschatology and apocalyptical speculation are called Joachimites.

We know only a little about Joachim. He is supposed to to have been born in Calabria, near Cosenza, in the Kingdom of Sicily. According to his legend, he had an ecstatic and mystical conversion experience on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land sometime around AD 1159, after which he became a hermit or anchorite, unattached to any religious community. At some point his independent preaching ruffled enough local feathers that the Cistercian community at Santa Maria di Corazzo was coerced to make him first a brother and then a hieromonk, placing him under some sort of religious authority. Unfortunately, this plan seems to have backfired horribly as the charismatic brought his community brethren under his sway and his fellow monk elected him Abbot by 1177.

He would go on to splinter a new congregation off from the old Cistercian Order, devoted to his own pneumatic spirituality and strict observances. He was widely regarded as a saint and a prophet in his own lifetime, and several Popes approved his activities, notably, without reading the material he was producing. No less than Dante Alighieri considered him a saint and wrote him into Paradiso, but very little was understood about his heterodoxy at the time. It was only later that his strange doctrines would come to light.

His millenarian and dispensationalist doctrine of "the eternal gospel" is based on his personal interpretation of the Book of Revelations (not the first time this book has caused issues, nor the last) especially REV 14:6 "And I saw another angel flying through the midst of heaven, having the eternal gospel, to preach unto them that sit upon the earth, and over every nation, and tribe, and tongue, and people". He divides all of history into three fundamental epochs or dispensations based on the three persons of the Trinity; the Age of the Father, the Age of the Son, and the Age of the Spirit.

The age of the Father corresponding to the Old Testament, the Son to the New, and the Age of the Spirit, to which Joachim devotes himself particularly. This last dispensation is to be one of direct, unmediated, personal knowledge of God, transcending the Gospel of Christ, an age of Total Freedom, Universal Love and Universal Rationality. This Utopian age to come would see the new Spiritual Man made ‘free’, invalidating and rendering unnecessary all hierarchies and inequalities, indeed a future ‘Society of the Just’ would replace the Church of Christ itself and proceed make a worldly paradise on Earth instead of looking for paradise beyond this vale of tears.

It was this speculation that caused his writings and the ‘Spiritual Franciscans’ inspired by him to be suppressed over and over again, first by the Fourth Lateran, then +Alexander IV, and finally at a special Synod at Arles in AD 1263 his teachings, or at least, those taught by his disciples using his name, were anathematized in whole. Unfortunately, it was too late to prevent the spread of such pertinacious errors, for the Joachimites would inspire imitators in such later groups as the Amalricians, Dulcinians, and the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the which would influence movements as diverse as the Lollards, the ‘Men of understanding’, the Cathars, and the Waldensians.

It is to this end that der Wedding concludes with sending out missionaries to spread the ‘Rosicrucian Science’ and make converts for the ‘Invisible College’ by which to transform the world. And what exactly is this science? It is Renaissance Hermeticism; a witches' brew of Mathematics, Alchemy, Kabbalah, Natural Magic, Astrology, and the sort of systematic ‘Natural Philosophy’ that we now call 'Science' or the 'empirical method', or what Francis Bacon called “Nature under constraint and vexed,” a process by which Nature could be put to the question, for “nature exhibits herself more clearly under the trials and vexations of art than when left to herself.” The exemplar par excellence of this ‘science’ being Frederick V of Bohemia's gardens at Heidelberg, containing clockwork automatia and mechanical marvels such as water organs, singing clockwork birds, and an animated statue. And the end or purpose of this science was to be the ‘reconstruction of the World’.

Just who are these missionaries? Well next time we will take up that thread by looking at one of the most famous of them and with him, the specifically English roots of all this fervor; Dr. John Dee.