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And disobey our orders . . .
What shall we know then?
God will know it.
In the West, this kind of absolutist thought, that put truth and morality at the mercy of a ruler, was intellectually destroyed by Plato. He put two kinds of limits on the idea of the state as a representative of the highest truth: 1) the institutions of society could not arbitrarily disregard man's nature (this is the origin of the idea of "inalienable rights"); 2) the soul and its relation with a Supreme Being were higher truths, too solid to be shifted about by shifting political notions. (Plato's fundamentals were still agreed upon in the U.S. of Emerson-Longfellow.)
Christianity went further than Plato: to a Christian, the highest truth was the hope of salvation after death, an idea that could not have a small-scale model in the political institutions of society. The Christian proposition was that the state could represent the soul in its freedom to accept or reject salvation, but the state could not be modeled upon salvation itself.
This was (and is) a hard idea for the Christian to get down. Many early Christians developed a belief in a prompt Second Coming. St. Augustine, however, called the literal belief in the millennium "a ridiculous fable," and tried to separate man's earthly lot of sorrow, insecurity and imperfection from the hope of a heavenly kingdom. For centuries this separation worked because the worsening conditions of life in the Roman Empire suggested anything but an earthly millennium. Heaven appeared the only feasible goal of hope.
ENTER: THE GNOSTICS
By the 12th century, this passive mood about the world was ending. Men had made progress in ordering their earthly affairs; more progress seemed possible. Pressure grew for a formula that would put together man's hope of salvation and his natural and legitimate hope of a better life on earth.
This pressure in extreme form found its man in Joachim of Flora (circa 1132-1202), whom Dante called "the Calabrian abbot filled with the spirit of high prophecy," and who was, in fact, the first Christian to pervert the hope of salvation into a systematic belief in an earthly society of purified and perfected men. Joachim, not finding materials for his formula in Christian or Greek thought, turned to another source: Gnosticism.
A Gnostic is one who seeks to rise above nature and find salvation through "hidden knowledge" rather than through faith and works. Ten centuries before Joachim, Christianity in a hard struggle had driven underground a host of Gnostic sects, but enough Gnosticism survived in Joachim's day to supply material for his formula. The 2nd century Gnostic magicians had been interested in personal salvation, not in social or political progress; Joachim transferred some of their methods and attitudes to the problem of social progress raised by 12th century vigor. Voegelin applies the name Gnostic to Joachim and to many present-day doctrines and attitudes. Gnosticism—ancient, medieval or modern—never had a common dogma. Since a Gnostic detours all check points of reality, weaving his dreams out of his own wishes, he can believe literally anything, and Gnostics of one sect often violently oppose Gnostics of another.
Joachim believed that the story of man on earth was divided into three periods or