The Eschatological Future of the Jews in the ‘Vine Diagram’ of Joachim of Fiore

The 11th–12th Century Turn in the Christian View of the Jews

In the 11th and the 12th centuries Christian attitudes towards Judaism and the Jews underwent a fundamental transformation. ¹ This change is too complex to be linked with a single event or to be considered from a single point of view. The period in question includes the rise of Scholastic theology, the first three Crusades, and an all-too-sudden urbanization and economic prosperity in Western Europe. There is no doubt that both the first Crusaders’ anti-Jewish violence in 1096 and the anathema on usury pronounced by the Third Lateran Council in 1179 are milestones in the precarious and difficult relationship between Judaism and Western Christianity. It is, however, in the history of theology that we may witness the earliest and most illuminating development in this respect.

The beginning of the new theological ‘science’ of the schoolmasters (scholastici) coincided with the cessation of the binding force of Saint Augustine’s magisterial approach to the Jews, on the basis of which they had been granted a kind of protection supported by theological arguments throughout the Early Middle Ages. ² The word ‘coincidence’ is appropriate here because of its vagueness. Neither Scholasticism in general, nor the thought of its first eminent theologian, Anselm of Canterbury, in particular, necessarily implied anything anti-Judaic or anti-Semitic, or anything that would necessarily engender such a kind of theology. Still, essential tendencies in the thought of the scholastici, in interplay with current developments in Christian spirituality and social theory, produced a theological mechanism which supported rather than opposed Anti-Judaism and Anti-Semitism.

What Saint Augustine assigned to the Jews was the role of witnesses who, albeit unconsciously, testify to the truth of the Gospel. ³ Wherever the Word promulgated by Christianity expanded among the Gentiles, the Jews, who had survived the destruction of their Temple in Jerusalem but who had been expelled from the Holy Land and scattered everywhere by the Romans, would bear witness to the fact that the ancient prophecies about the Saviour are not Christian forgeries. Indeed, they are, according to Augustine, Christ’s witnesses, unaware of their testimony to the truth (testimonium veritatis). As a consequence, Augustine, as well as many theologians before and after him, shared a view of the Jews as the chosen people described in the Old Testament, a people whose presence is basically anachronistic in the time of the New Dispensation. Furthermore, Augustine’s theology was no exception to the commonly held faith in the prophecy of the Apostle Paul, according to which, as soon as the full number of the Gentiles have converted, ‘Israel shall be saved’ (Romans 11:26). The rejection of the chosen people which, according to Paul, is now for the sake of the Gentiles will come to an end at the very end of time.

In accordance with his theory, the mission to convert the Jews was not a matter of urgency for Augustine. ⁴ Paradoxically enough, he called for Christian polemics against Judaism without any demand to convert its adherents to Christianity. He interpreted Ps 59:11 (‘Slay them not, lest at any time they forget your law; scatter them in your might’) accordingly. To allow the Jews, scattered all over the world, to live as the Mosaic Law instructs them is, in Augustine’s view, in the interest of Christianity.

It is, however, exactly this assumption of an unchanged and fully anachronistic Old Testament Jew and his function of witnessing to Christ for the purpose of Christianizing the Gentiles that turned out to be less relevant by the end of the 11th and the 12th century. ⁵ On the one hand, the Christianization of Europe in terms of territorial expansion was practically complete by this time: from the Western and Southern areas of the continent the Latin and the Byzantine Greek churches came to cover Central, Northern, and Eastern Europe as well. Parallel to the disappearance of any pagan presence from its borders, ⁶ Latin Christianity, especially in the North-West of Europe, gave birth to the new ideal of a perfectly organized Christian society where such non-Christian elements as a Jewish population had no choice other than to be baptized or marginalized. ⁷

On the other hand, by the beginning of the 12th century it became clear that the Old Testament did not provide sufficient knowledge of contemporary Judaism which, as a matter of fact, had significantly changed since the time of Jesus. After a long period of complete ignorance of this development, a number of Christian polemicists, having gained some insight into the Talmudic literature, came to accuse Judaism of abandoning Mosaic Law. ⁸ What appeared to be the most difficult point to accept was the discovery that the old Israel of the Old Dispensation had a continuing history independent from that of its confessed heir, the Church of Jesus Christ, which considered itself the ‘true Israel.’ ⁹

Moreover, a tendency of late 11th- and 12th-century Christian spirituality had consequences that were quite the opposite to those which, in better circumstances, it might have had for Jewish-Christian relations. For, one might ask, what could be as promising a development for the co-existence of Judaism and Christianity as the contemporary emphasis on Jesus Christ’s earthly life, which should recall to the minds of the followers of both religions the figure of Jesus the Jew? But this period with its reinvigorated cult of the Mother of God, or its intensified perception of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist, gave rise to a new Christocentrism and a renewed theology of Incarnation, which often tended to provoke anti-Judaic or anti-Semitic attitudes. The particular attention paid to Jesus Christ’s earthly life was strongly fuelled by the Crusades to the Holy Land, which bore such ample testimony to the Lord’s birth, suffering, and death. The Crusaders’ imagination, moved by and devoted to the events of the life of Jesus, engendered a series of hysterical outbursts against the Jews, accusing them of his murder and avenging it against them. ¹⁰

It is particularly striking to see the profound and intricate prominence the doctrine of the Incarnation gained, even in comparison to the intimately related mystery of the Trinity. Anselm of Canterbury’s attempt to obtain ‘understanding sought by faith’ (fides quaerens intellectum) inevitably raised the question of the Incarnation as one of the most appropriate issues for demonstration. ¹¹ Anselm’s reasoning proves that an inquiry into Cur Deus homo (‘Why God became man’) has a good chance of finding a reasonable answer, even if, in searching for it, he felt it necessary to take the irremediable Fall of man as a postulate. ¹² According to Anselm, reason can support faith in the Incarnation of God. Can his approach be equally cogent in the case of the doctrine of the Trinity? The example of one of Anselm’s early Scholastic heirs, Gilbert Crispin, is most striking in this regard. ¹³ As far as the Incarnation is concerned, Crispin turns out to be Anselm’s good student in his dialogues devoted to arguments against the Gentiles and the Jews: ¹⁴ he is confident of convincing them of the truth of the Incarnation by the tools of reason, while he considers the doctrine of the Trinity neither amenable to rational demonstration, nor, it seems, essential in a debate with Jews (or any non-Christian). ¹⁵ Anselm’s vast legacy inaugurated an apologetics which applied the new weapon of reason to its debate with non-Christians, and this was especially so in its concern with the concept of Incarnation, which thereby gained a kind of predominance over the other foci of Christian doctrine. ¹⁶

It is beyond question that both the dogmas of the Incarnation and the Trinity, so essential to Christianity, were, and are, nothing more than misconceptions or blasphemies to Judaism. Nevertheless, the changed Christian perception of these dogmas apparently rearranged their positions in the anti-Judaic (and also anti-Gentile) polemics of Christianity as well. In this polemic, the Incarnation proved to be a mystery that reason could nonetheless demonstrate as reasonable, while the Trinity proved to be a mystery that is neither reasonable nor demonstrable; it could only be approached on the basis of biblical revelation.

Let it be added that, as regards basic attitudes towards Jews and Judaism, the nascent doctrinal machinery of Early Scholasticism was in accord with the theology of what may be termed a final flourish of Monasticism in the 12th century. The views of monastic theologians on Judaism form a prevailing paradigm in this period as epitomized by their great champion, the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, whose example is all the more representative when contrasted with the thin and wholly exceptional voice of an Augustinian canon, and later Benedictine monk, like Honorius Augustodunensis. ¹⁷ Whereas Honorius, in sharp contrast to his contemporaries in the first half of the 12th century, envisioned the Jews’ embrace of Christianity well before the end times, and their subsequent rise to the vanguard of the Church in her fight against the Antichrist, ¹⁸ Bernard’s strongly prejudiced, yet somewhat tolerant approach to them was still premised upon St Paul’s prophecy about their conversion as a final eschatological event. Although, on theological grounds, Bernard was opposed to the persecution of Jews and any open atrocity against them, the hostile stereotypes infusing his writing, albeit unwillingly, contributed to the increasing momentum of Anti-Jewish violence. ¹⁹

Against this background, the eminence of the Calabrian Abbot and apocalyptic thinker Joachim of Fiore (c.1135–1202) may emerge. His is not just a late 12th-century theology still pursued by means of a vast array of biblical references and a somewhat convoluted technique for reading Scripture which may prove challenging for modern readers. His exceptionality does not only amount to an eccentric numerological contemplation of salvific history, which was very much preoccupied with the Holy Trinity. What also had appeal for his medieval readers, and still has for any historical-systematic investigation of his theology, is a remarkable aspect in Joachim’s work: the major eschatological role he assigns to the Jews in his biblical and Trinitarian design of history.

It is evident even from its title that Joachim’s Exhortatorium Iudeorum, that is, ‘exhortation to the Jews,’ barely fits into the framework of the polemical Adversus Iudaeos literature of his age. ²⁰ Written either in the first half of the 1180s or around 1196, ²¹ the overtones of Joachim’s work are those of consolation inspired by Scripture, and joy in anticipation of the imminent reconciliation of two brothers, rather than apologetic zeal combined with an appeal to reason, or vexation over the stubbornness of the ‘irrational Jews,’ which is so characteristic of contemporary polemicists. Joachim’s approach differs not only from accusation for the murder of Christ or condemnation for stubborn irrationality, but also from the sophisticated tolerance of Augustine’s view of the Jews as witnesses. In Joachim’s mind the conversion of the Jews is not only unquestionable, but also as imminent as the last stage of history. Indeed, he hopes that a number of them are going to convert even before the end. In order to serve this purpose, his argument treats the vexed aspects of Incarnation carefully, and embraces a comprehensive Trinitarian point of view which is capable of integrating the doctrine of God the Son who became man. As Joachim’s ideas about the Jews unfolded in the Exhortatorium thoroughly correspond to the whole of his oeuvre, those followers who maintained the Joachite tradition also thought in this manner. ²²

Joachim’s keen interest in the Jewish tradition clearly emerges in a diagram which forms part of a collection, the Liber Figurarum, which, put together possibly by his disciples after his death, consists of diagrammatic figures Joachim and his collaborators drew throughout his career as an interpreter of the Scriptures. ²³ The diagram demonstrates the way in which the Hebrew Scriptures’ most sacred Name of God, the Tetragrammaton, is supposed to carry the mystery of the Trinity. ²⁴ Joachim explicitly says that this idea originates from a Jewish book entitled Secreta secretorum, to which he found a reference in the Dialogi contra Iudaeos by Petrus Alphonsi, an 11th–12th-century Jewish scholar, physician, and convert to Christianity. ²⁵ It is to the Secreta secretorum that Petrus attributed the idea of a tripartite division of the four-letter Name, which, he argued, is evidence of the Name as featuring and revealing the three Persons. ²⁶ Petrus, transcribing the four Hebrew letters (Yod, He, Vav, He) into four Latin ones (I, E, U, E), grouped them into three ‘names’ (IE, EU, UE). As his diagram exhibits, Joachim made his own contribution by assigning each name to a Trinitarian Person (IE to the Father, EU to the Son, and UE to the Spirit) and highlighting them with three interlinking circles. It was of great significance for Joachim that the division of the Name into three overlapping parts occurred in Jewish scholarship itself: he gives account of regular discussions between him and a most learned Jewish scholar (peritissimus Hebraeus) who confirmed Petrus’s claim that such division derives from Judaism, but denied the validity of a Trinitarian interpretation of it. ²⁷

Joachim’s approach to the Jews finds an even more striking expression in another diagram of the Liber Figurarum. This diagram features three intertwined circles made up of two sweeping branches of one single vine. ²⁸ The branches of the vine stand for the Jews and the Gentiles, the two peoples constituting the whole course of the history of mankind; their three circles show the three major phases of this history, assigned to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The figure corresponds to Joachim’s biblical commentaries concerning the Jews. By its eloquent visual power, the vine diagram might even surpass the appeal of his textual exegesis: it features luxuriant foliage, showing spiritual growth over the ages of Jewish–Gentile relations, a growth so abundant as to overwhelm Joachim’s numerical structure of history based on the Trinity and concordant numbers of generations. The powerful image of the vine diagram is, however, among those few figures of the Liber Figurarum that Joachim does not mention explicitly in his other works. The vine diagram is also exceptional in terms of the meagre number of captions provided to enrich and decode its visual message. In what follows I will attempt to interpret this diagram on the basis of related passages in the writings of Joachim, as well as other figures, and to show the irreducible surplus that its visual message offers over and above Joachim’s texts on the theology of Jewish-Christian eschatology.

Joachim’s Exegesis Relating to the Jews and its Link with his Vine Diagram

Before making a first detailed approach to Joachim’s vine diagram, it is worth highlighting a major theme of his exegesis which the diagram brings into the fullest clarity. Joachim’s doctrine of the threefold course of history assigned to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit does not emerge from any other diagram as manifestly as it does here by virtue of a clear preference for historical relations to the dogmatic rendition of the inner life of the Trinity. While, however, the dogmatic point of view is hardly absent, the vine diagram’s simplified focus on the Trinity of God as against the Unity of God serves a likewise simplified Trinitarian structure of history that consists of nothing but the shifting relations between the Jews and the Gentiles (as Christians and yet-to-be Christians). It was Joachim’s conviction that there was to be an imminent and predestined conversion of the Jews that provides a major contribution to his imposition of a Trinitarian pattern into history’s traditional twofold structure (that is based on the Christian division into the two stages of the Old and New Testaments). ²⁹ The collective conversion of the chosen people would be an unmistakable and necessary sign of the end of the second and the beginning of the third Age that, translated into Joachim’s other pattern of history, the pattern of Sevens, would also coincide with a seventh and final period, that is, the Sabbath of history. ³⁰

The implicit appearance of the pattern of Threes through the idea of Jewish conversion prior to the very end of history enables Joachim’s Exhortatorium to introduce a tone highly unusual in the 12th century Anti-Jewish debate. ³¹ For, in Joachim’s mind, the Jews are no longer just fossilized witnesses of the termination of the Old Dispensation, but the elect who will regain the grace of God and the Holy Spirit that they lost to the Gentiles by Divine Providence. Insofar as Joachim is not reluctant to make use of some hostile expressions inherent in the Anti-Judaic literature of his time, it is about the Old Testament Jew that he speaks. It is, however, for contemporary Jews that his Exhortatorium is intended. Joachim of Fiore addresses his Jewish contemporaries in a warm tone of charity, consolation, and exhortation.

The overarching idea that contributes to a pattern of Threes and a Trinitarian approach is the course of divine election, pedagogical correction, and re-elevation of the Jews, as far as Joachim’s conception of the history of salvation is concerned. As for the development of the argument of his Exhortatorium, it is also divided according to a Trinitarian structure which evidently forms the way in which the work addresses its audience. Thus, the Trinitarian manner of thinking about the Jews proves a related manner of appeal to them. In the first part of his work, Joachim, who emphasizes faith in God the Father as common to Jews and Christians, tries to convince his addressees that the doctrine of the Father, his Word, and his Spirit draws heavily on the Hebrew Scriptures. In the second part, it is through a long sequence of quotes from the Psalms and the Prophets that Joachim turns to God the Son in order to show the Jews Jesus Christ as man and God, rather than the troubled details of his Incarnation and Death. ³² The third part is devoted to the Holy Spirit from a peculiar point of view: it makes an attempt to prove the necessity of the spiritual understanding of Scriptures. The idea of spiritualis intelligentia is not merely a measure of the correct reading of biblical history, but also a vital, constitutive component of the history of salvation. Joachim presents the Jews’ incapability of understanding Jesus as a consequence of the Holy Spirit’s withdrawal from them (by reason of their ‘carnal nature’), which results in the removal of the Crucifixion from its precarious position as the central event of history and the quintessence of Jewish sin. ³³ Indeed, what will take place, as the eschatological mercy of God on his people, will be a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon them, which, in Joachim’s mature theory of history, is an unmistakable sign of the historical Sabbath as the final stage of history.

Finally, the Exhortatorium completes its argument with the biblical Book of Tobit, the allegorical reading of which gives a special appeal to Joachim’s discourse. The story, very briefly, is as follows: Tobit was an elderly Jew who lived in Nineveh during the exile. One day he fell asleep and went blind. So at Tobit’s request, it was his son, young Tobit, who set out to conclude some business in the distant land of the Medes. On his way young Tobit met another youth who became his guide. He was not aware that this youth was not a man, but the angel Raphael. In the land of the Medes Tobit married a woman named Sara, after exorcising a demon that had possessed her. Having accomplished the business commissioned by his father, he started back for home, still accompanied by the angel. Before Tobit reached his father’s house, his dog ran ahead, announcing his master’s arrival. Then old Tobit arose and received his returning son who, with the aid of angel Raphael, made him recover his sight.

Joachim gives Tobit’s story a detailed allegorical meaning, of which I will offer only a short outline here. ³⁴ For the purposes of a critical approach to Joachim’s vine diagram, it is essential to observe the way in which he deciphers this story. The Book of Tobit in itself does not necessarily prompt its reader to attempt an allegorical decoding of the text, yet Joachim’s resourceful interpretation extends it and rearranges both the message of this biblical book and the understanding of the entirety of Jewish-Christian history. Old Tobit is the Jewish people, whose advanced age and blindness stand for its long expectation of the Messiah and lack of spiritual understanding. The young Tobit illustrates the apostolic order which stems from the Jewish nation, embraces Jesus Christ, and undertakes a mission to the Gentiles. The latter are represented allegorically by Sara, plagued with the ‘spirit of error.’ She becomes the allegory of the Christian Church of the Gentiles, healed, liberated, and married by the apostles, represented by Tobit. As a figure of the charismatic preachers of the Church born from this spiritual marriage, Tobit returns to his old father with love and compassion, giving his eyes back their light, that is, granting him spiritual understanding. Both missions of the young Tobit are guided and protected by the Holy Spirit, in the figure of the angel Raphael, who is the healer of both the Gentiles and the Jews. Joachim assigns a role even to his own exhortative discourse: it is the voice of Tobit’s dog, announcing the son’s arrival to his father.

This account of the Jewish-Christian history of salvation becomes further elaborated as to its threefold division and Trinitarian view in other works. ‘The Holy Spirit will descend on the Jews again [italics mine],’ as Joachim’s Super quatuor evangelia puts it. ³⁵ In his Expositio in Apocalypsim he argues quite explicitly that ‘the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son,’ which represent ‘the Jewish people and the Gentiles (populus gentilis), from which one Church of spiritual men proceeds.’ ³⁶ This formulation reflects the full elaboration of Joachim’s Trinitarian approach to salvation history, making a threefold reading necessary.

While the different medium of the vine diagram necessarily raises an additional set of questions, we may already see that its contrast to the straightforward equivalences quoted from the Expositio in Apocalypsim, as well as to the allegorical interpretation of Tobit’s story in the Exhortatorium, is telling. ³⁷

The figure of the vine diagram depicts the two sons of Noah, Shem and Japheth, whose names are inscribed in the two twisting branches that make up the entire figure. (There is also a third, stunted trunk that bears the name of Ham, Noah’s third son, who is represented as having no descendants. ³⁸ ) These circling lines of Noah’s two sons turn out to be the populus judaicus and populus gentilis, according to inscriptions written on the branches. The medallion of a bearded man at the trunk of the tree carries both the name of Noah (Noe vir iustus) and that of God the Father (Pater) who, therefore, is both the origin of the peoples of history and the Trinitarian person determining history’s first stage. In the Father’s circle the allegory of the Jewish nation as Shem’s progeny swerves to the left, bearing foliage richer than that of the right-side branch, the allegory of Japheth’s gentile progeny. The second circle is assigned to God the Son by means of a small icon of Christ with the caption Filius. It is beneath his medallion that the Gentiles’ branch crosses over to the left, bearing an abundance of leaves and flowers whose texture, in this circle, is more luxuriant than that of the Jewish nation’s branch. However, the foliage of both circles is merely introductory to the organic wealth of the third circle, created by a second crossing of the branches beneath the medallion of a dove with the caption Spiritus Sanctus. The growth of the tree bursts into an impenetrably dense texture of twigs, leaves, fruits, and flowers sweeping from, and proliferating beyond, the branches which, by their final union, close the circle of the Spirit and also the whole course of history.

This diagram cannot be interpreted on the basis of a particular locus, since it is related to the great variety of Joachim’s utterances concerning the Jews. However, it is particularly tied to a passage from his Psalterium decem cordarum:

… since the peoples (populi), which have been divided, shall become one nation (populus) and one people (plebs ), so they shall be truly a chosen and holy nation (genus electum et gens sancta) and also one fold with one shepherd (unum ovile et unus pastor). Two lines of descendants will no longer continue as they did from Shem and Japhet, who, in [their progenies] the Jews and the Gentiles, remained divided for a while on account of their different morals and habits, but there shall be one nation and one people created for the glory of God. ³⁹

In conjunction with the Exhortatorium Iudeorum including Tobit’s story and the passage quoted from the Expositio in Apocalypsim, this text from the Psalterium decem chordarum may be considered an exposition of the general idea of the figure.

Apparently, the vine diagram also reproduces the network of notions quoted from the Expositio and the Psalterium: the proceeding of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son as well as the emergence of the new spiritual Church from the Jews and the Gentiles. The pattern of Threes, the birth of One from Two, and even the spiritual growth that is implied in the Expositio and the Psalterium, are all rendered in visual form here. At first glance, in the medium of a visual figure, Joachim’s diagram gives the striking impression of plainness, reduction, and conceptuality, which resembles the linguistic medium of the above quotes as reduced to a few concepts. Still, the Tree diagram offers a surplus of imagery while being in inescapable need of interpretation by the medium of language. As a matter of fact, the visual surplus of the diagram becomes approachable by its difference from Joachim’s propositions in the Expositio and the Psalterium, to which, at the same time, the diagram provides an efficient tool in their interpretation, a kind of Medieval ‘information technology.’ While arranging, visualizing and, consequently, serving concepts, the figure of the vine diagram cannot be confined to any equivalence with Joachim’s propositions relating to the same concepts.

As to the relation of the vine figure to the interpretation of the Book of Tobit, it is important to note that this interpretation proves an obvious masterpiece of allegorical resourcefulness. In this book, Joachim’s early doctrine of history has to subsume a wealth of details that belong to the story. Indeed, the narrative of Tobit and that of salvation history merge in an artistic game of allegory, whereas there is no trace of the exactness and simplification characteristic of Joachim’s vine diagram. While being even more focused on the Holy Spirit and the Jewish nation in narrating the double mission of the former from and also to the latter, Joachim’s allegories of Tobit’s story could not be fully rendered by means of a diagrammatic simplification by numbers, that is, the way in which the vine diagram is preoccupied with Twos (of two branches) and Threes (of three circles). It is clear that the allegorical reading that Joachim makes of the Book of Tobit is not meant to reduce it to numerical equivalences or to simplify it in any other way. Instead, such is the task of diagrams. The more this task is considered to be an essential motivation behind Joachim’s diagram, the more striking its different features must appear.

Does Joachim’s vine diagram imply such a reduction to a couple of elements, such that it can rightly be described in terms of its two branches, three circles, and varying intensity of foliage? Might the visual surplus offered by the diagram be something more than a decoration or an ornament? Could it even be in conflict with the basic numerical structure of the diagram?

While the numerical components that constitute it and also bear an illuminative caption have been approached first, the diagram itself and the question of its central allegory of a ‘vine tree’ have not been addressed as yet. Since the allegorical imagery that lies behind this figure is far from self-evident, it is highly relevant to examine what kind of allegory makes history appear as a tree, and what kind of history appears through this allegory. Joachim makes use of the trope of the tree in several loci when investigating biblical history, but his concept of ‘tree’ (arbor) refers to an iconographical genre rather than to history itself, viewed as a tree. History proves to be a tree only by the mediation of this iconographical genre. This iconography will be discussed in the next subsection by means of a short hermeneutical detour through the medieval tradition of the Tree of Jesse. ⁴⁰

The Vine Diagram in the Iconographical Tradition of the Tree of Jesse

The diagram of the ‘vine tree’ and also other diagrams in Joachim’s Liber Figurarum draw heavily on the idea that history can be portrayed as a succession of various stages through the visual figure of a tree. The representation of history as organic growth of trunk, branches, and leaves hides a unique combination of biblical ideas that is eminently exemplified in the 11th–12th-century tradition of the so-called Tree of Jesse. This tradition shows a variety of insightful shifts among its different versions, to which Joachim’s diagrams owe a great debt and make a genuine contrast.

The most famous version of the Jesse Tree, often regarded as its paradigmatic example, is a 12th-century glass window in the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis. It features Jesse, King David’s father, recumbent under a genealogical tree of his royal descendants (reading upwards) to the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ, the last of whom is crowned with the Gifts of the Holy Spirit in the shape of seven doves. ⁴¹ Strikingly enough, the tree is rooted in, and grows out of, Jesse’s recumbent body itself. The lineage of the ancestry of Jesus Christ is flanked on both sides by two perpendicular lines of prophets who foretold his Coming as Messiah. These features, so indicative of contemporary theological developments, may rightly be taken as formative of a later type of Tree, while being anything but necessary criteria for the Jesse Tree in general. ⁴²

If anything can be such a criterion, then recognizable visual references to Isaiah’s prophecy of Jesse’s progeny as shown in a late 11th-century manuscript illustration from Prague could be so considered. ⁴³ In this illustration there is no representation of kings, Christ or the Virgin in human form. It lacks any genealogical motif. The only humans presented are a sitting Jesse and the prophet Isaiah. From below Jesse there grows a tree which opens its branches wide for seven doves perching on them. Isaiah holds a scroll with the inscription of his prophecy flung around Jesse. The prophecy (Isa 11, 1-3) reads as follows:

Et egredietur virga de radice Iesse, et flos de radice eius ascendet. Et requiescet super eum spiritus Domini: spiritus sapientiae et intellectus, spiritus consilii et fortitudinis, spiritus scientiae et pietatis; et replebit eum spiritus timoris Domini.

The English Authorised Version gives only a general idea of the prophecy; it does not entirely convey the imagery that was so inspiring to its medieval readers.

And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots: and the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.

The major loss caused by this translation is not primarily the reduction of the Gifts of the Spirit from seven to six. What must be highlighted as a major characteristic of the Latin version is the clear sequence of shoot (virga) and flower (flos) stemming from Jesse as root (radix). Moreover, the Latin text enables a word association crucial to its medieval reception. As a result of an association at least as early as the third century, Christian exegesis linked the virga stemming from Jesse with Mary, the Mother of Jesus as Virgo, that is, Virgin. Beside its fruitful iconic potential, this association proves especially felicitous in theological argument. Mary of Nazareth is also a descendant of Jesse. In reality it is through her that Jesus was born from Jesse’s progeny (as a matter of fact, Jesus also appears as Joseph’s legal son in the genealogies of Matthew and Luke). Descent from Mary and her motherhood emerge in a fascinating way by the striking organic imagery provided by the words ‘root’ (Jesse), ‘shoot’ (Mary), and ‘flower’ (Jesus) of Isaiah’s prophecy. After a 1,000-year history of Christian art, this imagery burst into a proliferation of visual representations called ‘Trees of Jesse’ in the late 11th and the 12th century.

Besides its inescapable reference to Jesus Christ, the Jesse Tree as iconographic genre contains a strong Pneumatic as well as Mariological character. Its essential elements corresponding to the biblical prophecy include Jesse himself in any attitude, a rod or tree with any reference to the Virgin, and also the sevenfold allegory of the Holy Spirit which, at the same time, may also appear as a single dove.

What is, therefore, the major difference between the Prague manuscript and the glass window of the Church of Saint-Denis? It is undoubtedly the presence or absence of the genealogical motif. In this respect, such versions of the Jesse Tree as a Dijon manuscript illustration to St Jerome’s Explanatio in Isaiam are particularly revealing. ⁴⁴ It simply substitutes the image of Mary with the Child for Jesse’s virga. Apparently, there is no hint of any historical succession between these figures: the line formed by the recumbent Jesse, the Mother with her Child (flanked by two angels) and the dove of the Holy Spirit does not relate to distinguishable stages of history. But even if it were to, what the image suggests seems to be nothing more than the general idea of descent from the Old Testament to the New, in terms of prophecy and fulfilment rather than any genealogical line.

Still, even this simple form of the Jesse Tree with Mother and Child was occasionally used as an illustration of the genealogy at the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew. ⁴⁵ The prophecy of Isaiah found its way into the biblical idea of Jesus Christ’s genealogical lineage. What is more, this lineage was transformed into the iconology of the Jesse Tree in terms of the line of kings, the Virgin and Christ, as portrayed in the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis, even though the generations displayed on the trunk were usually not as exhaustive as the biblical genealogies in Matthew and Luke, running from Abraham or Adam to Christ.

But what makes this development a crucial theological achievement worthy of any hermeneutical investigation? What is the theological relevance of the idea of Jesus Christ’s genealogy as a reinterpretation of the Tree of Jesse? The point is certainly not the biblical idea of genealogy in itself. At a technical level, the reinterpretation of the Jesse Tree took place by means of a visual genre of juridical calculation, the so-called ‘juridical tree’ (arbor iuris) that was a genealogical diagram invented for the purpose of showing inheritance relationships and grades of consanguinity. ⁴⁶ ‘The idea of introducing a genealogical motif into the Tree of Jesse arose at a time when the Arbor Iuris had become thoroughly well known (…).’ ⁴⁷ This figure of the juridical tree was a simple geometrical design arranging names. ‘The Arbor Iuris was an abstract descending genealogy. Its main perpendicular line consisted of rectangular and circular compartments in which were inserted the names of the successive grades.’ ⁴⁸ The arbor received its name on account of its abstract shape reminiscent of a tree. Thus, a genealogical figure as ‘tree’ has very little to do with the imagery of human generation as organic growth or vegetative proliferation. Ironically, it is anything but a biological dimension that enables the ‘biological’ tree metaphor to reinforce the organic imagery of such words as ‘root,’ ‘flower,’ and ‘shoot’.

Being an independent visual representation, a genealogy-like tree ascending to Jesus Christ no longer functions only as Matthew’s and Luke’s genealogies do, making explicit the Davidic descent of Jesus Christ and his Gospel’s continuity with the Old Testament. What the reinterpreted diagram of the Jesse Tree promotes is the idea that, being goal and fulfilment of all antecedents, Jesus Christ stands at the very end of their succession. As a result, its preoccupation with the Virgin was gradually reduced, whereas its implicit concern with the Saviour became the focus of the image. The Holy Spirit gives the Tree glory through Jesus Christ alone, since its Gifts are attributed to his figure glorified above all. If linked to the Tree, God the Father appears also at the top, in the compartment of Jesus Christ. The idea of Trinity becomes manifest only through and in God the Son, who crowns and fulfils the whole Tree.

In other words, the genealogical transformation of the Jesse Tree bears witness to and reinforces the theological mechanics of Christocentrism, and, in doing so, it accords with the 11th- and 12th-century turn in the approach to Judaism and the Jews of Western theology and spirituality. Jesus Christ stands at the end of a story that is not merely the story of the Davidic lineage, but also the history of the Jewish nation. This conclusion is not just an implicit message. It emerges in a rather explicit way in the allegorical figures of Ecclesia and Synagoga which are made to flank the Tree of Jesse as developed in the 12th century. They oppose each other in the obvious terms of succession and substitution. ⁴⁹

While embracing the tree symbolism of history that originates from the Tree of Jesse, Joachim’s vine diagram is far from being Christocentric, and its lack of Christocentrism is associated with a much more positive approach to the Jews than that of the Jesse Tree. In the vine diagram, the Jewish nation plays a constitutive role until the very end of history. Furthermore, the luxuriant vegetative imagery of the vine diagram does not give way to any genealogical dimension. This latter characteristic renders it markedly different not only from the Tree of Jesse, but also Joachim’s other tree figures, the ‘genealogical trees,’ a paradigmatic example of which is the Tree of the Two Advents.

Joachim’s Vine Diagram and his Tree of the Two Advents

In contrast to the vine diagram, the idea of history as a diagrammatic tree with a genealogical perspective forms an essential element in Joachim of Fiore’s other tree diagrams, some of which can rightly be considered ‘collateral lines’ from the tradition of the Tree of Jesse. Some of their characteristics, however, render them closer to the vine figure. What will offer a valuable insight in this respect are the major differences and similarities between the vine diagram and the Tree of the Two Advents as a typical example of these other tree diagrams. Before taking a look at the latter tree figure, however, it is important to note the significance of Joachim’s own idea of historical genealogy.

It is a telling fact that the earliest writing attributed to Joachim of Fiore is entitled ‘Genealogy,’ beginning with the illuminating words: ‘genealogy of the ancient holy fathers’ (genealogia sanctorum antiquorum patrum). ⁵⁰ In the Genealogia Joachim introduces his essential measure of time, drawing on the historical rhythm of human descent. His preoccupation with long sequences of biblical generations causes him to adopt an odd technique of computation which seeks to cover the entirety of history. Its extension over the whole of history implies something thoroughly different from a narrative that stretches from beginning to end in the manner in which the stories of Scripture are tied together by the venerable concept of the history of salvation (Heilsgeschichte). This salvation history is nevertheless far from continuous, due to a number of blank periods between its distinguished events from Creation to the Last Judgement. ⁵¹ Granted that, in accordance with Joachim’s preference, even these periods are filled with the successive generations of the ancient fathers from Adam to Jesus Christ, there still remains one particularly long and blank stage of the history of salvation. From the stories of the Acts of the Apostles, that is, from the initial events of the Early Church to the Second Coming of Christ there is a biblical terra incognita, of which Scripture does not and cannot make known any generation or any name.

The theological argument that, from the perspective of salvation, the history between the First and the Second Advent of Jesus Christ has no relevance other than to provide time for conversion can hardly be regarded as an indisputable thesis. Indeed, there are at least two relevant and correlative options for revising it. The one considers particular events, the other takes a general-allegorical perspective as a point of departure. The one option is particularly concerned with history from the First Advent of Christ to the present, according to which biblical history can simply be prolonged by the history of the Church, stretching from Jesus Christ to the present day. Joachim carries out this prolongation by adding subsequent generations to the genealogies familiar from the two Testaments. ⁵² The other option purports to cover the whole story between the two Advents by means of biblical allegory: this option draws on the Revelation of John, as interpreted by an allegorical reading in view of the events of Church history, or of the whole history of salvation. ⁵³

As a matter of fact, these options presuppose each other, and neither of them can be considered Joachim’s invention. Indeed, these ways of tackling the gap between the two Advents of Christ had become exegetical commonplaces by the 12th century, reinforced by such authorities as Bede the Venerable or Hugh of Saint Victor. ⁵⁴ What emerges as original in Joachim’s approach is the idea and method called concordia that aims at bringing the New and the Old Dispensations of history into full concord with each other in terms of a redoubled pattern of persons, events, and generations. Concordia between the two Dispensations, that is, the double history of Israel and the Church, is much more than a mere typology between the two Testaments. The idea and method of concordia is not focused on Jesus Christ as the fulfilment of history adumbrated through a number of persons and events as antitypes in the Old Testament. Joachim of Fiore’s concord of the New and the Old aims at covering the whole of history, generation by generation, until the Second Advent of Christ. Instead of being centred on the Incarnation of Christ, Joachim’s view of historical concords seeks to discover God’s biblical design for the future. ⁵⁵

It is exactly its genealogical arrangement, across the whole span of history that appears as one of the most salient features of Joachim’s Tree of the Two Advents. ⁵⁶ What emerges as another striking feature of the diagram is unquestionably the double rhythm of the two sets of 12 branches of tribes and churches, dividing the main perpendicular lines of its trunk. ⁵⁷ The method of concordia as covering the totality of the Old and New Dispensations is pictured here through both the trunk and the branches. Branches of the same number shoot aside from the icon of Jacob and that of the first Advent of Christ as two concordant phases of the two Dispensations, the first of which reaches its ‘fructification’ in the former branches of Jacob’s 12 sons, while the second reaches its concordant phase in the latter branches of Christ’s 12 disciples. Even more important are the concords as listed on the trunk. Both Jacob and the first Advent of Christ coincide with the 21st generation of their respective Dispensations, the first of which begins from Adam (it is his icon that appears at the very beginning of the trunk), while the second starts from king Uzziah (pictured through the large inscription ‘Ozias,’ without icon), whose rule is supposed to mark the beginning of the Gospel by the prophet Isaiah. What is more, it is the computation by means of the generations featuring on the trunk that the Tree of the Two Advents can represent the totality of history reaching beyond the incarnate Christ: the 63 generations from Adam to the first Advent of Christ evokes a correspondent and partly overlapping 63 generations from king Uzziah to the second Advent of Christ.

What the Tree of the Two Advents establishes by the intricate genealogical method of concordia appears in a far more simple form in the vine diagram. The two figures share a holistic view of history going beyond the first Advent of Christ, whereas the vine diagram does not employ the genealogical computation, which is so salient in the Tree of the Two Advents. It is without the tool used by the Tree of the Two Advents that the vine diagram embraces a historical perspective that reaches to the very end.

Furthermore, in a manner relevant to the message of the vine diagram as well, the Tree of the Two Advents shows a major difference from the vine diagram as to the functions of its elements. What engenders a high visual-hermeneutical tension in the diagram is the opposition between two groups of its components. There are textual and also pictorial elements that are coordinated with each other by means of the locations occupied by them. In other words, their positions convey a more or less precise meaning. The names as well as the icons that constitute the trunk establish a chronological scale by generations representing 30 years each. All the branches and their names, as well as a few inscriptions of persons and events outside the Tree, are positioned in relation to the chronological line. While all these elements are determinable by means of diagrammatic location and biblical-historical reference, quite the opposite is true in the case of the foliage. Although their entirety must have an allegorical, albeit rather uncertain meaning, the leaves themselves hardly carry any informational value: they look rather subsidiary and ornamental from the point of view of the information carried by the network of inscriptions and icons.

In the vine diagram, however, it is exactly the allegorical, but scarcely decipherable, ‘spiritual’ foliage that turns out to be a central component. The increasing texture of leaves, fruits, and flowers introduces a form of expression that is less diagrammatic, even if the image as a whole is clearly meant to have a strong diagrammatic quality. Accordingly, the diagrammatic tools of the vine diagram for displaying information are made slightly peripheral: in comparison with their function in the other diagram, they play an inverse role. In the Tree of the Two Advents, calculation by the scale of generations is assigned to the main perpendicular line of the tree trunk which dominates and organizes the whole image. But the vine diagram, completely abandoning calculation by means of generations, appears to locate its numerical tools of intertwined branches into the position of a framework rendered secondary by the turmoil of foliage in the third circle. It seems as if the abundance of organic imagery in the vine diagram replaces the multitude of names inscribed in the Tree of the Two Advents: it is as if this abundance itself engenders the relative lack of inscriptions. In doing so, it also reduces the use of numerical structures in understanding history, leaving only the pattern of Twos (of two branches) and Threes (of three circles). Is this reminder of Joachim’s numerology of history, however, still sufficient for determining the profile and message of the vine diagram, by virtue of retaining the main characteristics of its genre?

To answer this question, another must also be addressed: which is more basic and powerful: the branches or their foliage? As has been said above, the branches form a framework, which is undoubtedly true as far as the first, and perhaps also the second, circle is concerned. As early as the second circle, however, there is a hint of the replacement of the framework. Here the foliage begins to fill in the space far beyond the framework set by the left-side branch. While sprouting from the tree, the texture of leaves and flowers no longer adjusts only to the branch: rather, we see the beginnings of a powerful growth that nearly swallows up the third circle in its increasing foliage. It is the latter that establishes a new framework for the ‘vine tree.’ The foliage proves to be the carrier of the branch rather than the other way around. In running riot, the foliage exceeds the unified circle of branches to such an extent that it almost deprives the diagrammatic structure of Twos and Threes of its significance. The figure is, therefore, predominated by an organic growth which, being much more than a gradual increase, escapes any kind of numerical approach.

This predominance of an incomputable element has far-reaching consequences for the interpretation of the figure. Its view of history, formed by nothing but a concern with the Jews and the Gentiles (or Gentile Christians), cannot be understood as a numerical series of conjugated stages. In other words, the figure of the vine diagram does not portray history as an abstract substrate with a given numerical pattern, for it makes the shifting relations between the Jews and the Gentiles themselves constitute history and its pattern. Yet the ‘third’ stage cannot simply be taken in the sense of a third subsequent member in a series, since this status does not have a third order of protagonists. What brings about the status of the Holy Spirit is the unification of the peoples of the first and the second status, into a ‘spiritual Church’ which immeasurably surpasses the whole preceding course of history of both the Jews and the Gentiles. Note that this insight could not have been gained except through the medium of an extraordinary diagram. In being able to resist a too diagrammatic interpretation (or decoding) of its allegorical meaning, the foliage that overwhelms the vine diagram has a message no more and no less than what emerges exactly from its complete lack of measure.

Conclusion

Joachim of Fiore’s theology of history re-envisions Christian doctrine through his view of the apocalyptical role of the Jews as pictured in his magnificent diagram of the ‘vine tree.’ The idea of the historical group of Two, of the Jews and the Gentiles, who form a union for the last, third stage of history, strikingly re-arranges the pattern of One and Three familiar from the dogma of the Trinity, which professes one God in three Persons.

In Joachim’s ingenious prophecy of Jewish-Christian history, Christology, and the doctrine of Incarnation is also bound to take up a changed position, inasmuch as the vine diagram provides a considerable revision of the Christology offered by the iconographical tradition of the Jesse Tree. The Christology of the Jesse Tree is based on another pattern of Twos that includes fulfilment in the one (the Christian Church) to the disfavour of the other (the Jewish nation). In accord with its occasionally featuring the opposition of Church and Synagogue, the Jesse Tree shows that the one Jesus Christ has fulfilled the story of Jesse’s Davidic progeny and, by the same token, the whole history of the elect of the Old Testament. The Tree of Jesse is a Tree of two Testaments, one of which covers its entire sequence which the other fulfils and terminates. The transformation of the Tree from a tripartite image (in relation to the three allegorical elements of radix, virga, and flos) to a genealogical lineage of icons does not alter its extension in the historical terms of its beginning in Jesse and its end in Jesus Christ. Rather, the genealogical transformation lays an increasingly strong emphasis on the end of the sequence and, thereby, highlights its character as fulfilment in Christ. Interchangeable inscriptions, icons, and vegetative imagery constitute a rather transparent kind of diagram, offering clear allegorical equivalences and translatability. As the flower of the whole figure is Jesus Christ, the allegories of the Holy Spirit or, occasionally, God the Father, can accompany no location but that of the one flower that takes precedence over all its antecedents.

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Figure 1.

By permission of the Library of the Episcopal Seminary, Reggio Emilia.

In his theology of history, and through his diagrams, Joachim of Fiore re-envisioned the pattern of Twos as paradigmatically embodied in the Christology of the Jesse Tree, and what is more, imposed the pattern of Threes onto it. While giving way to a fully developed Trinitarian theology in the vine diagram, which consists of two branches of two historical peoples, Joachim’s pattern of Twos retains here the extension given it through the idea of two Dispensations as pictured in the Tree of the Two Advents. One of Joachim’s major ideas is precisely that of the two Dispensations as an extension redoubled by the method of concordia that ties them together. In the Tree of the Two Advents, the method of concordia lines up dense inscriptions of generations far beyond the incarnate Jesus Christ (that is, the first Advent of his), who, as the tradition of the Jesse Tree shows, should otherwise be the only name and icon that embodies the truth of the New Testament. Featured as one historical point, originating 12 new branches, as the First Advent that precedes a Second Advent, the so-called ‘Christ-event’ becomes integrated into the generations of the genealogical tree figure. As far as the employment of genealogy and its consequences are concerned, Joachim’s Tree of the Two Advents, and other genealogical tree figures, are remarkably opposed to the tradition of the Jesse Tree. In the Tree of Jesse, a later introduction of the genealogical motif reinforces an inherent theology of fulfilment in Jesus Christ; the Tree of the Two Advents and Joachim’s other genealogical tree figures were designed as epitomes of his genealogical computation, which established their scope in the measured entirety of time (from the beginning to the end of history).

It is a historical scope which is full, but void of Joachim’s usual genealogical measurement, that makes the vine diagram so exceptional among his tree diagrams.

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Figure 2.

By permission of the Library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

The vine diagram applies a simplified numerology by means of the doctrine of the Trinity and the essential duality of the Gentiles and the Jews, the withdrawal of the latter of which, as a scholar remarked, would result in a collision of Joachim’s theology of history. ⁵⁸ In the branches of Shem and Japheth, the history of the Jews and the Gentiles makes up the Tree of Trinity, which, as covering the entirety of history, overgrows the event of the Incarnation as well as the Age of the Son. The one (the Christian Church of the Gentiles) is no longer the fulfilment of the other (the Jewish nation) in Jesus Christ. The vine diagram introduces a broadly dissimilar process between the one and the other. The one and the other are unavoidably two. First, the one, then the other, and, finally, the union of the one and the other inevitably make up something threefold in accord with their three stages.

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Figure 3.

By permission of the Library of the Episcopal Seminary, Reggio Emilia.

At the level of its well-structured meaning, the message of the vine diagram clearly stands out from the contemporary theology of a renewed Christocentrism and growing Anti-Semitism. However, it is exactly the possible numerical transparency of the structure of the vine diagram and the complete translatability of its meaning that might show an essential similarity to the Tree of Jesse which appears as a characteristic example of contemporary theology. If this similarity proved true, the similar ways in which the visual languages of the two diagrams form meaning would render the vine figure even more transparent and translatable than the Jesse Tree on account of its emphasis on a simplified numerical structure. But can the vine diagram be fully rendered in terms of such structure?

The ‘vine tree’ of the Trinity as something unitary and re-born from the union of the Jews and the Gentiles is carried forward and realized by an extraordinary piece of manuscript illumination with a proliferating foliage, which endows this union with the shape of an extraordinary oneness. A whole world of different perception is hidden in the contrast between the vine diagram in its fullest blossoming and a reduced numerological version of it construed without foliage and under the exclusive rule of numbers and names. Oneness and union shown merely by the conclusive and enclosing branches in the last circle profoundly differ from the oneness and union in the overwhelming texture of leaves, fruits, and flowers. Through the shape of the foliage in the vine diagram, the structure of history develops, as it were, its own ‘deconstruction.’ History as a numerical framework of Twos and Threes does exist here, in the sense that its third stage yields to the power of incalculability born from the spiritual marriage of the Jews and the Gentiles. The proliferation of the foliage proves to be such an achievement of manuscript illumination that it can replace the numerical scale of mere names: this magnificent imagery of vegetative power, as it were, is a hypertrophy of colourful letters from unknown names.