JOURNALISM AND JOACHIM'S CHILDREN

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realms, each corresponding to a person of the Trinity. The Third Realm, said Joachim, was about to begin with the appearance of Dux e Babylone. (In terms of modern Gnosticism, the leader from Babylon would be called Superman or Der Führer, or "the dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of the democratic centralism of the Party.") The Third Realm was to be characterized by wisdom, and after the Third Realm's beginning (set by Joachim for the year 1260), men would soon be so perfect that they would not need any Dux or government or discipline. (Marx's translation: After the triumph of scientific socialism in the classless society, the state would "wither away" because men, purged of the evil of class conflict, would not need it.)

Joachim's Third Realm corrupted the Christian idea by promising perfection on earth; it also transgressed the limits Plato had set upon the state and upon men's tendency to alter the higher truths of philosophy and religion to fit political or material ends. Militarily, Mongol absolutism entered the West through Hungary; philosophically, political absolutism re-entered the West through Joachim. Joachim's invasion was more devastating because the anti-Christian attempt to embrace salvation on earth went beyond Genghis and other primitive societies, and was to produce despotisms and perversions of truth worse than primitive society ever knew.

THE RISE OF THE MODERN GNOSTICS

At first, the Joachimite movement grew slowly. The church condemned Joachim's writings and put down a flurry of Joachimism among some of the Franciscans.* Through religion, the Third Realm entered Russia in the idea of Moscow as "The Third Rome," a last and higher state on earth. (Belief in the Third Rome was welcomed by the czars, used politically by them, and is manipulated by Kremlin propagandists today.)

In the West, Joachim's influence appeared at the extremes of two seemingly opposite movements. The most radical of the English Puritans thought that they could found on earth a "communion of saints" which would take over and perfect temporal government. The vigor of Renaissance humanism created in some minds other delusions about men like gods and another kind of confusion about heaven and earth. Example: Pope Leo X's "Let us enjoy the Papacy which God has given us."

In the 18th century Gnostic activists became openly anti-Christian.* The French Revolution, crowning a Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame and proclaiming man's ability to achieve his salvation on earth, established Gnosticism as the religion of a large part of Western intellectuals and people.

Thereafter, Gnostic influence on thought snowballed. Auguste Comte (1798-1857), whose mark still lies heavily upon the social sciences, set up a system of three states of knowledge; in his Third Realm, called positivism, the scientists would take over "the general direction of this world." Intellectuals who advanced the world toward perfection would achieve immortality in the memory of mankind. Providence was the "Great Being," not God, but a personification of humanity. (A great and in some ways typical 20th century positivist was H. G. Wells, who believed that man was progressing through science to Utopia; Wells's last years, like Comte's, were spent in near-despair.)