Beloved,
believe not every spirit,
but try the spirits whether they are of God:
because many false prophets are gone out into the world.
1 John 4:1
1310 – between 1366 and 1370) .....His prophecies and violent denunciation of ecclesiastical abuses brought him into disfavor with his superiors...
The Franciscan alchemist John of Rupescissa was to complicate the story
further with
---his declaration of Antichrists to come from both East and
West, ---and his declaration of an angelic pope as counterpoint to the idea
of the papal Antichrist.
---For John, the angelic pope and the Last World
Emperor would unite to restore the world shortly before its end.
John of Rupescissa survived some of the most tumultuous decades of the
Middle Ages. The Great Famine, the Hundred Years War, the Black Death,
the Jacquerie, and the papal “Babylonian Captivity” unfolded before his
eyes. Viewed through the lens of Joachite and Franciscan Spiritual
apocalypticism, such events loomed even larger.
He claimed that knowledge of the natural world, and alchemy in
particular, could act as a defense against the plagues and wars of the
last days.
In 1356, John of Rupescissa warned in his prophetic treatise, the 
Vade mecum in tribulatione,
that within just a few short years, Antichrist would appear among
Christians, ushering in a terrifying climax of human history:
Before
we come to the year 1365, there will appear publicly an eastern
Antichrist whose disciples will preach in parts of Jerusalem with false
signs and portents to bring about the seduction of all with error . . .
in the five years between 1360 and 1365, destructions will abound beyond
all human estimation: tempests never before seen from the sky, floods
of water unheard...and the apocalyptic theology of Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202) and
Peter Olivi (1248–1298) influenced Rupescissa’s own views—especially the
Joachite notion that in imagining the “last things” (i.e. the last days
of human existence) Antichrist might actually be defeated.
In fact,
active human intervention might not only rout the forces of evil but
bring about a “third state,” a paradise on earth.
Others took up the theme. In 1300 Arnold of Vilanova set the year 1378
for the arrival of the eschaton. A little later, Ubertino of Casale
announced that the last days had already begun.
Sometime around 1335
Rupescissa divulged his own predictions. By the end of 1344 those
visionary insights had led to his imprisonment at Figeac, and by October
1349 a papal court at Avignon had declared him fantasticus and
consigned him to a papal prison. Although shut away, Rupescissa refused
to shut up. From his prison cell he composed a number of apocalyptic
tracts (many of which drifted through prison walls with the help of his
jailors). One prophetic text, his Vade mecum in tribulatione (1356),
described a new society that would be formed following the apocalyptic
clash with the armies of Antichrist.
In overturning the social order
while defeating Antichrist and his followers, human beings, Rupescissa
argued in other writings, would be aided by a certain form of knowledge
derived from the study of the natural world. This knowledge would serve
to replenish both the economic as well as the physical vigor of the
righteous as they worked to create the “third state.”
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