Oltre Cîteaux: Gioacchino da Fiore e l'Ordine florense (review)

The Transfiguration in Matthew 17:1–13 is a touchstone of Western mysticism and of the churches' approach to mystical experience. The Apostles witness an event far beyond their comprehension, an irruption of the divine that transforms flesh, time, and space. Their immediate impulse is to build "tabernacles" to commemorate the event, but Jesus warns them,"tell no one about this vision." Joachim of Fiore's own attempts to corporealize his deeply mystical understanding resulted in a series of figurae that inspired generations of followers after his death and have fascinated and puzzled scholars ever since. Do these figurae express the progression of the three great ages, as the consensus holds? Might they, as Caroline Bruzelius and I have suggested, provide literal models for architecture—Sta. Chiara in Naples, for example?

Valeria De Fraja's groundbreaking work offers another interpretation, one that takes seriously the obligation of the textual scholar to deconstruct these verbal and visual mansiones—parsing and reassembling their language within their time and place. This detailed, well-annotated, and documented analysis demonstrates the merits of close reading of the texts and figurae and of the contexts of their production. It is the outcome of several articles and a dissertation completed under the guidance of Gian Luca Potestà and Roberto Rusconi, reflecting the influence of Herbert Grundmann throughout.

De Fraja's hypothesis is that beyond being solely the product of a deeply mystical intuition of the turning of the ages—of high theory or mystical intuition—Joachim's figurae (at least tables XII, the Dispositio novi ordinis under study here, and XIII, the twin trees) are the result of praxis: of his reflection in the 1180s and 1190s on the task of reforming Cistercian monasticism and building a new order in the Regno of Naples under the late Normans and early Hohenstaufen and in the context of declining Greek monasticism and the reforms of Innocent III. These figurae are not—or not only—expositions of universal patterns, of biblical concordances of old and new, but working instructions, visualizations of how an abbot ought to set up a new order that would incorporate harmoniously the three major spiritual communities common to the south at the time (monks, clerics, and laity) with a series of houses, outbuildings, and oratories. Joachim's "mansions" may enshrine deep mystery, but they derive from practical community planning by an engaged and politically astute churchman. This is not to rob Joachim of his spiritual and historical significance: both for Joachim and his followers these schemata embodied mysteries of time and space far beyond the quotidian. De Fraja stresses that they were to incorporate the plan of the heavenly Jerusalem on earth. Nor has De Fraja made Joachim a twelfth-century organizational guru. Instead, she has provided us with a sound philological approach to Joachim's corpus: taking his words and images as far and as literally as an informed and close reading will allow. Whatever his followers speculated on his works over the next centuries, De Fraja's Joachim derived his high theory from praxis and on-the-ground experience.

There are caveats for De Fraja's argument that she acknowledges: the textual evidence from Joachim's work is fragmentary; the documentation she appends for Joachim's foundations is sometimes equivocal; the innovations he sets forth in his schemata were not startlingly new for his time or place, and Joachim's followers failed to incorporate his practical achievements. Nonetheless, De Fraja's thesis, however measured, is compelling. Students of Joachimism and of late medieval spirituality should engage with this book and reflect on the deeply intertwined visibles and invisibles that she perceives here.