The oppression of the early Christian communities by the Roman emperors leads to a recrudescence of Jewish apocalyptic motifs, as expressed in the twentieth chapter of the Book of Revelations, which, Taubes notes, became “the Magna Carta of chiliasm.” But from the second Christian century on, a transformation occurs, as the ever-awaited  Parousia fails to occur, and what was once a scattering of Christian communities becomes a Church. Beginning with the Church Father Origen and reaching its culmination in Augustine, eschatology is turned inward. It is no longer an expectation of the imminent transformation of the external, historical world; instead it becomes an internal drama of the soul, of ascent from body to spirit. With the adoption of Christianity as the religion of the Empire under Constantine, eschatological hope is further domesticated in Christian theology. The Kingdom of God, once expected to mark a transformation of the external world, comes to be identified by Augustine with the Church itself, which exerts its influence on the city of man, thus accepting the reali ty of secular politics. The revolutionary power of the apocalyptic ideal is sapped.

But it reemerges in a new and influential form, Taubes contends, in the twelfth- century monk Joachim of Fiore. Joachim offered a novel interpretation of history that endowed the pre sent and  future with radically new meaning. He distinguished three historical eras. The first, the Age of the Father, corresponded to the Old Testament; the second, the Age of the Son, began with the New Testament. But now, Joachim proclaimed, a new age was at hand, the Age of the Holy Spirit, in which the institutional Church would be superseded by a new spiritual church (ecclesia spiritualis). According to Taubes, Joachim marks the beginning of the modern age.  Here Taubes drew upon the work of Balthasar and perhaps (without noting it) on Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times, which had called attention to the central role of Joachim’s form of historical messianism.

To orthodox Catholic theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, Joachim and his followers, the Joachimites, seemed incomprehensible, Taubes writes. This, Taubes observes, demonstrates a recurrent pattern in the history of occidental eschatology: each new wave of apocalypticism bursts apart the settled order, its norms and expectations. The newly interpreted ideal of the Kingdom of God then serves to erode and delegitimate the current order, and leads to an apocalyptic moment that seeks to realize that ideal on earth. “With each new apocalyptic wave a new syntax is created, and the breakdown of meaning in language makes  people from the old age appear deranged to  those of the new, and vice versa. . . . T o the new men, the old man is a corpse, a has- been, as the [Bolshevik] Russians call the emigrés, while in the eyes of the old men, the new men are deranged.”