The Fourth Gospel decides in a double way: it decides partly for going beyond the Christ – many things cannot be said now, but the Spirit will come and help you; and on the other hand: the spirit does not take it from its own; it says what is already present in the 2nd period, in the period of the Son, in Jesus, according to the Fourth Gospel.
These ideas about the meaning of historical development must be taken very seriously. Don’t reject the whole thing because of these Old Testament names, which are certainly arbitrary. The arbitrariness of every historical periodization is known to every historian.
Every historian will tell you that the period which you call “Renaissance” was .”Renaissance” only for a few people – for some artists, scholars, and politicians, and, following, some other people in England, Holland, Germany, etc. But the masses of the people lived still in a period which was of hundreds of years ago. And so it is always. You never can say about a historical period that it is one hundred per cent that of which you say it is.
What are the characteristics of these stages? The first stage is, as Joachim knew – being a profound observer, as (were) all the others also – sociologically to be determined. It is a state in which marriage is the decisive sociological form where, with respect to economy, the need to work and servitude (slavery, feudalism, etc.) are decisive, and which therefore can be also identified religiously with .the period of the law. You see it is a very rich assembly of categories which he uses in order to describe these periods.
In the second period it is the clergy and the organized Church which is decisive.
Here we have the graces, I. e., the sacramental reality which makes the law unnecessary, and in accepting the graces demands faith instead of good works. It is not an age of autonomy, but the age in which the clergy represent for everybody the presence of the Divine.
The third period is monasticism, where the monastic ideal will grasp mankind, and the production of new generations will cease. Therefore this is by necessity the last period. It has higher graces given by the Holy Spirit than the sacramental graces of the end period, and higher, of course, than the law of the first period.
While the 2nd period is prepared already in Judaism–where there are some sacramental there are some sacramental graces – the 3rd period is prepared in Church history, with the foundation in monasticism. The inner part of this period is freedom, i. e., autonomy, not subjected any more to state or Church authorities.
The attitude is contemplation instead of work, and love instead of law.
If we look at this we can observe that it is sociological, but if sociology is not the “cause” of : every thing, as it is in Marxism, but it is a necessary condition. It is connected with the other attitudes. So we have here an early sociological understanding of the different periods of history. At the same time we have the religious understanding, which shows the difference of work, of grace – accepted by faith – –and of autonomous freedom, in contemplation and love. The scheme is trinitarian, I. e., the dynamic element, which is always implied in trinitarian thinking. has become horizontal. It has been transferred to the historical movement. It is the historizaton of the trinitarian idea: Father, Son and Spirit have different functions in history. Of course, all three are always present – God cannot be divided – but they are present with a different emphasis.
