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.
