I have found an excellent parallel between Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos and James Blish's Doctor Mirabilis.
In Operation Chaos, the Johannine Church teaches that:
"'The day of the Old Testament, of the Father, was the day of power and fear; the day of the New Testament, of the Son, has been the day of expiation; the day of the Johannine Gospel, of the Holy Spirit, will be the day of love and unveiled mysteries.'" (p. 138)
(OK so far except that John's Gospel is part of the New Testament.)
In Doctor Mirabilis, Roger Bacon reads the Introduction to the Eternal Gospel by Gerard of San Borgo:
"The Eternal Gospel of the title was the work of one Joachim of Flora, who had predicted that an Age of the Holy Spirit would begin in 1260, ushered in by a new Order of monks headed by Merlin..."
-James Blish, Doctor Mirabilis IN Blish, After Such Knowledge (London, 1991), pp. 1-318 AT X, p. 224.
"And this, then, was the first year of the Age of the Holy Spirit!"
- Blish, op. cit., XII, p. 236.
Bacon is condemned and imprisoned for Joachism.
See here for Joachim's theory of the three ages and its basis in Revelation 14:6.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Needless to say, I don't agree with anything like the speculations of Joachim of Flora. It was merely a Medieval era revival of gnosticism, the ancient nonsense dreaming of secret revelations and secret knowledge magically ushering in an Earthly Paradise. And we've seen such things also popping up in the 19th and 20th centuries. Including such secular variants as Marxism. I like how Eric Voegelin contemptuously described such people: they were trying to "immanentize the eschaton."
Ad astra! Sean
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