This engaging monograph by Brett Edward Whalen, a historian at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, is rewarding on several levels. First, Whalen provides a clear and illuminating history of the papacy from the late tenth through the early fifteenth centuries—a turbulent era in Christian history. As successive popes struggled to establish Rome's hegemony and assert supremacy over the Eastern Orthodox Church based at Constantinople, they also battled schismatic movements within Europe itself, experienced surges of reformist energy and internal conflict (including a seventy-year interval, 1309–1378, when the curia decamped to Avignon), and confronted the challenge of an expansive Islam, including Muslim control of Jerusalem. As if this were not enough, the popes of this era contended with a series of obstreperous German emperors—some of whom supported the papacy and others of whom did not—and with invasions on Europe's eastern marches by Mongol hordes under Genghis Khan's successors.
Whalen handles this complex story and its vast cast of characters in well-organized chapters and readable prose. He is particularly good at untangling the fraught relations between Rome and Constantinople as a profound religious and geopolitical struggle unfolded in arcane debates over the precise nature of Jesus' divinity, the status of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity, and whether communion bread should be leavened or unleavened.
Within this larger framework, Whalen fits the story of the Crusades, from the first—launched by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in 1095, which achieved the capture of Jerusalem—to the abortive fifth (1213–1221)—which bogged down in Egypt. He makes clear that these vast military undertakings arose from a tangle of motives, involving not only a counter-offensive against Islam but also the conflict within Christendom itself. Indeed, the notorious fourth crusade (1202–1204), initiated by Pope Innocent III but mainly conducted by French clerics and nobles, culminated in the sack of Constantinople amid horrible brutalities, vastly deepening the schism between the eastern and western churches.
A further virtue of Dominion of God is Whalen's attention to apocalyptic and eschatological writings and their influence in shaping perceptions of the era's unfolding events. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, he discusses the writings of an impressive array of creative prophetic exegetes. Honorius Augustodunensis, Anselm of Havelberg, Oliver of Paderborn, Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, Peter John Olivi, and Arnold of Villanova are hardly household names today, but in medieval Catholic circles their treatises loomed large. Some used the prophecies to uphold papal claims, viewing the bishop of Rome as God's designated instrument for achieving the universal reign of Christ foretold in Revelation. For others, prophecies of Christianity's final triumph represented a summons to zealous missionary effort by newly formed religious orders. Fittingly, Whalen closes with Christopher Columbus, who became convinced that his voyages were advancing God's end-time plan for the Christianization of the world.
Hovering over Whalen's treatment of these apocalyptic themes is the prolific Franciscan monk and mystic Joachim of Fiore (1135–1202). Through both his copious writings and spurious texts that circulated in his name, Joachim's views on the correspondence of the Old and New Testaments and especially his exegesis of the Book of Revelation exerted a profound and lasting influence. By analogy to the Trinity, Joachim divided sacred history into three stages, with the final Age of the Spirit still to come. In this millennial future, Jews and Muslims will embrace the faith and Christ will reign triumphant. The papacy, having fulfilled its ordained role, will fade away, supplanted by a purified monastic order, the Spiritual Franciscans.
Such teachings, with their obvious subversive implications, provided a platform from which Franciscan reformers criticized a corrupt papacy and priesthood. Thomas Aquinas targeted Joachim's work in the Summa Theologica, reasserting the Augustinian view that while the ultimate triumph of righteousness is assured, details of the end times remain unknown. The Synod of Arles declared Joachim's writings heretical in 1263, but they remained influential. The Franciscan leader Bonaventure, Aquinas's colleague at the University of Paris, while avoiding the dangerous implications of Joachim's eschatology, was nevertheless sympathetic with his project. Anticipating John Darby's later dispensationalism, Bonaventure divided all history into seven stages.
Indeed, Whalen's work invites reflection from a presentist perspective, amid a mass culture awash in prophetic speculation, as writers and televangelists like Hal Lindsey, Jack Van Impe, John Hagee, Perry Stone, J. Randall Price, and that dynamic duo of the Left Behind series, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, tirelessly correlate biblical prophecies and current events, along with Rapture Ready, Prophecy Central, and countless other websites. Dominion of God underscores the antiquity of this hermeneutic approach. Just as today's popularizers find Russia, Israel, Iraq, the UN, the EU, China, and the World Bank foretold in Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation—along with credit cards, consumer product codes, communications satellites, and Barack Obama—so did these medieval prophecy writers find the rulers, empires, conflicts, and crusades of their day foretold in the Bible. Muslim potentates, Mongol invaders, Greek Orthodox leaders, and German emperors (especially Frederick II) were all fingered as the Antichrist by various writers. And, of course, the end was near. Citing Revelation 11:3, Joachim and others found great prophetic significance in the coming year 1260. As circumstances evolved, so did the interpretations. As Whalen writes: “Prophets sometimes had to scramble to keep pace with the changing political realities of the papal monarchy and its relationship to the outside world” (179). Plus ça change … ! Even as I write, are editors at Zondervan, Tyndale, or Word Books considering updated editions of Book Showing That the Times Are Rushing to an End (1353) and Pocket-Guide for the Tribulation (1356) by the Franciscan prophecy expositor John of Rupescissa?
This is elite intellectual history, drawn from elite sources. The lived religion of ordinary folk of medieval Europe, including the popular apocalypticism, is not Whalen's focus. For that, Norman Cohn's Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) and Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) remain valuable. Nevertheless, Dominion of God is a terrific book, and it deserves a broad readership.
