on account of his attachment to Joachism. The apocalyptic strains of Joachism will be tackled in more depth in Chapter 3, but to understand Olivi’s views on creation, it is necessary to outline a few of the salient details of Joachim’s mode of exegesis which Olivi adopted.
Discussion of Joachite exegesis often highlights its more radical and apocalyptic features. Olivi’s fidelity to this exegetical strategy, however, displays the more subtle aspects of its inventiveness, especially the principle of concordia. Like traditional typological readings of scripture, concordia argues for intertestamental links. It does not, however, stop there, as the intertestamental relationships could also describe future events. According to Joachim, the two testaments are a complete work of scripture that cannot be superseded, but they record a history of an age of the Father (identified with the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament), and the beginning of an age of the Son. By understanding the parallels between the two testaments one can use them to intrepret history since the age of the apostles and thus deduce the structure of the remaining age of the Son and the third age of the Holy Spirit. Concordia highlights the numerical patterns of the Bible as particularly instructive, as they can be found in a wide variety of places. We saw this to a degree in Bonaventure, who adopted some of the exegetical strategies of Joachim, but opposed the Joachite idea that the books of the Bible could be used to see the order of the future.57 Olivi, however, is sympathetic to this view, and in his commentary on Genesis puts special emphasis on patterns of three that mirror the Trinity. In the prologue to the commentary, Olivi puts concordia front and center. Again, the principle of concordia relies on earlier biblical typology, and its novel aspects are not always immediately obvious. For instance, citing Genesis 18:4–5, when Abraham greets the three angels, Olivi tells his readers that these three angels signify the three persons of God.58 This Trinitarian formulation is at the heart of Olivi’s Genesis commentary, but was already a longstanding typological interpretation. Yet, in the friar’s view, there is no aspect of creation that fails to reveal the Trinity and enrich one’s understanding of it.
Genesis, Olivi tells us, is like a tree. Its roots are the six days, its trunk is the line of patriarchs, and its branches are their descendants, divided into the twelve tribes of Israel. Its leaves are the laws, and its flowers the wisdom literature and the prophets.59 Again, Olivi’s tree metaphor is not new. The tree long served exegetical thinkers as a means of mapping the genealogies beginning in Genesis (and concluded in the Gospels). Yet, for Olivi the story of Genesis does not—and should not—stand on its own. “Under the tree,” he says, “is the entire Trinity of God, the threefold hierarchy of angels, and the three types of existence of men: under the law of nature, under the law of Scripture, and under the law of grace” (emphasis mine).60 The italicized portion at the end of this passage communicates Olivi’s understanding of concordia, that the Hebrew Bible prefigures not only the events and persons of the New Testament, but events throughout the whole of salvation history, here divided into yet another pattern of three.
Olivi’s discussion of human existence may not, at first blush, seem entirely novel. It looks something like the usual binary between law and grace, but, as Burr rightly shows, it emerges from Jewish exegesis and had been employed by Christian authors prior to Olivi as a a typical means of “citing Judaism against itself.” Olivi himself likely was drawn to the idea because the threefold structure is suggestive of its compatibility with Joachite apocalyptic thought, a point that is underscored by his employment of the same phraseology in his commentary on the Apocalypse.61 Olivi, like Joachim before him, conceived of sacral history as unfolding in three ages—those of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The schematic rendering of a threefold history by Jewish sages was simply more evidence that Joachim and Olivi were correct.
Olivi likely believed himself and his fellow Christians to be on the cusp of a transition to the third and final epoch. Such a transition would not obviate prior biblical writings, nor require additional scripture, but would include a deeper and more spiritual understanding of the mysteries encoded within the Bible. Hence, each era was aligned with a person of the Trinity and a moment of scriptural awareness.62 It is likely that penetrating deeper into the biblical texts was precisely Olivi’s point in writing. Hence, when Olivi writes on Genesis (or any other piece of scripture) he is never writing just about Genesis. Genesis is always in conversation with other scriptures, as well as fundamental theological truths, such as the nature of the Trinity, and salvation history.
Probably the best example of this comes early in the commentary, when Olivi discusses the six days of creation (and final day of rest) as a historical model. The six days of creation (and the day of rest) had been a model of salvation history since the patristic era, so Olivi is hardly breaking new ground, but he builds a more complex picture than seven phases of history corresponding with the seven days. For example, Olivi argues that the pattern of seven asserts itself in both Testaments. In the Old, history occurs in seven distinct phases, which Peter calls both a tempus and an opus: 1) the ornamentation of nature (that is, creation), 2) the events leading up to and including the Flood, 3) the covenant with Abraham, 4) the establishment of the Law, 5) the glory of the kings of Israel, 6) the time of the prophets, and 7) a time of quiet in which the Temple was rebuilt.
Likewise the seven days set a pattern for the tempora or opera of the New Testament and the period after it. Since not all this era is yet consigned to history, Peter uses the events of the first seven days to mystically (mystice) explain the unfolding of salvation history both past and future. On the first day, God created light; hence, the first opus or tempus of the New Testament is the sowing of grace, that is, the time of Christ and the apostles. The separation of the waters on the second day provides a metaphor for the “baptism” of the blood of the martyrs. On the third day, dry land appeared, corresponding to the early Church from Pope Sylvester through the general councils of late antiquity. Here the close visual and visceral connection to the days of creation and eras of breaks down, as the fourth and fifth ages belong to Justinian and Charlemagne respectively. The sixth opus is somewhat vague from a temporal standpoint, as it is the era in which Olivi positions himself, a time of deepening faith and the emergence of a Christ-like way of life. In regard to the latter, Olivi probably had in mind his own Order, but likely also other friars and monastic orders. He sees this period as having begun with the growth of formal theology as a discipline. Finally, the day of rest is a future event, the opening of the seventh seal as described in the Apocalypse.63 While one might expect similar and very spiritual readings of Genesis to follow, instead we find that Olivi changes course quite quickly, and focuses almost exclusively on natural philosophy for the rest of his discussion of the Hexaemeron. The commentary on the six days alone is quite long, and summarizing its contents is difficult, as Olivi tackles a range of subjects. Instead, a few examples will serve to show how Olivi used his Genesis commentary as a means of explicating natural philosophy and truths regarding the natural world.
At times it seems that Olivi is using Genesis as an excuse to tackle ad hoc philosophical questions. One such example comes from the second of his two chapters on the six days of creation. Taking up Genesis 1:3 (And let there be light), Olivi jumps into a discussion of optics, specifically whether rays of light retract or not. “Some people” says Olivi, not naming his philosophical adversary whether real or imagined, “think that light does not move from its place—that after the space of a usual day when it has illuminated the world it retracts its rays and thus it becomes night in the whole world.”64 Olivi naturally thinks this is impossible, and argues that light rays are accidents of luminous bodies that do not retract themselves. Olivi argues that such an action would require a miracle of God, but he doubts this has ever occurred. Light emanates from its source, argues Olivi, and the kind of mutation required to make light retract itself would be unnatural. Olivi later connects this argument to the kind of light emanated by saintly bodies and by Christ, but they are examples of his theoretical claims rather than their aim.
In Olivi’s desire to connect the seven days to salvation history, the Trinity, and other Christian truths, he never
