“We see that the Scholastics are reasoning, whatever their logic tells them they come up with. And once you speculate on the idea of newness, you begin to say, “Why can’t we have something new now? Because Christianity itself becomes stale. Our monks have become corrupt.” That’s what Francis was rebelling against. He wanted to have himself a purer poverty. And therefore from the very idea of Christianity, once the idea of Christian tradition is removed, you logically have the idea of a “new” Christianity, some new flowering of wisdom, spirituality, and actually a new revelation. This, again, is the “Grand Inquisitor” of Dostoyevsky, the making of a new Christianity better than Christianity was.

And of course all that time released Protestantism and all the sects of today. And the source for this is no longer the Orthodox tradition, which is lost; the source is either reason or visions. At this time of course we have all these new things arising in the Catholic Church, the new orders: Dominicans, Franciscans, and all the rest, the very idea that this is the normal way. And so these two, Francis and Joachim, will be very influential in later times. People keep coming back to their ideas because they are in the seed period of the modern age.”