Joachim of Fiore (c.1135-1202) remains one of the most fascinating and enigmatic figures of medieval Christianity. In his own time, he was an influential advisor to the mighty and powerful, widely respected for his prophetic exegesis and decoding of the apocalypse. In modern times, many thinkers, from Thomas Müntzer to Friedrich Engels, have hailed him as a prophet of progress and revolution. Even present-day theologians, philosophers and novelists were inspired by Joachim’s vision of a Third Age of the Holy Spirit. However, at no time was Joachim an uncontroversial figure. Soon after his death, the church authorities became suspicious about the explosive potential of his theology, while more recently historians held him accountable for the fateful progressivism of Western Civilization. Contributors are: Frances Andrews, Valeria De Fraja, Alfredo Gatto, Peter Gemeinhardt, Sven Grosse, Massimo Iiritano, Bernard McGinn, Matthias Riedl, and Brett Edward Whalen.

Joachim of Fiore has been described as the most singular and fascinating figure of mediaeval Christendom. This title explores his unique understanding of history and looks at the powerful influence of his ideas.

Joachim of Fiore proclaimed a philosophy of history which exercised a powerful influence in succeeding centuries. This book traces the influence of his prophecies concerning a Third Age of the Spirit to come, as later expressed in the themes of New Spiritual Men, Last World Emperor, Angelic Pope, and Renovatio Mundi. It shows that these ideas were not only the mainspring of various heterodox groups, but also engaged the attention of certain church leaders, university scholars, Renaissance thinkers, Protestant theologians, and political rulers down to the seventeenth century.

This renowned study provides a `map' of the influence of the powerful, original theology of Joachim of Fiore (c.1132-1202). Radically revised since its first publication in 1987, and augmented with further prophetic voices and symbols from the past, it confirms the deep structures of visions of the future while demonstrating and questioning the persistence of Joachimist themes in the twentieth-century fin de siecle.

The Exposition of the Apocalypse by Tyconius of Carthage (fl. 380) was pivotal in the history of interpretation of the Book of Revelation. While expositors of the second and third centuries viewed the Apocalypse of John, or Book of Revelation, as mainly about the time of Antichrist and the end of the world, in the late fourth century Tyconius interpreted John’s visions as figurative of the struggles facing the Church throughout the entire period between the Incarnation and the Second Coming of Christ. Tyconius’s “ecclesiastical” reading of the Apocalypse was highly regarded by early medieval commentators like Caesarius of Arles, Primasius of Hadrumetum, Bede, and Beatus of Liebana, who often quoted from Tyconius’s Exposition in their own Apocalypse commentaries. Unfortunately no complete manuscript of the Exposition by Tyconius has survived. A number of recent scholars, however, believed that a large portion of his Exposition could be reconstructed from citations of it in the aforementioned early medieval writers; and this task was undertaken by Monsignor Roger Gryson. Gryson’s edition, a reconstruction of the Expositio Apocalypseos of Tyconius, was published in 2011 in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina. The present translation of that reconstructed text, with introduction and notes, exhibits Tyconius’s unique non-apocalyptic approach to the Book of Revelation. It also shows that throughout the Exposition Tyconius made use of interpretive rules that he had laid out in an earlier work on hermeneutics, the Book of Rules, strongly suggesting that Tyconius wrote his Exposition as a companion to his Book of Rules. Thus, the Exposition served as an exemplar of how those rules would apply to interpretation of even the most intriguing of biblical texts, the Apocalypse.

This book makes available major texts in the Christian apocalyptic literature from the 4th to the 16th centuries. The apocalyptic tradition is that of traditional philosophy based on revelation and concerned with the end of the world.

How Christian depictions of the End allow spectators to experience--and feel--their place within the future history of humankind