Age of the Holy Spirit

Joachim of Fiore described the third and, in his own lifetime, still future status, the Age of the Holy Spirit, as a time in which the literal letter of scripture would give way to direct spiritual understanding, and in which a new order of contemplative "spiritual men," free of the institutional structures that governed the Church of the Age of the Son, would live in a condition of liberty and love beyond what either the Law of the first age or the faith of the second had permitted. Bernard McGinn's Calabrian Abbot reads this as the most genuinely radical element of Joachim's thought, a claim that history itself would move beyond the Church's existing sacramental and clerical order rather than simply perfecting it.

Joachim did not claim this third age had already arrived, nor did he identify himself or his own Florensian order unambiguously as its "spiritual men," a caution later followers frequently abandoned; his own writing on the coming age remains more suggestive and less specific about exactly who its representatives would be than the movements that later claimed his mantle.

Marjorie Reeves's Influence of Prophecy traces how Joachim's Age of the Holy Spirit was taken up in the following century by radical elements within the Franciscan order, the so called Spiritual Franciscans, who read their own movement, and Francis of Assisi himself, as the herald of the coming third age. The friar Gerard of Borgo San Donnino pushed this reading to an extreme in 1254 with a work he called the Introduction to the Eternal Gospel, presenting Joachim's own writings as a new scripture destined to supersede the Old and New Testaments once the Age of the Holy Spirit fully dawned, a claim the Church condemned in 1255.

That condemnation fell on Gerard's extension of the idea rather than on Joachim's own writings as such, which had received a measure of papal tolerance during his lifetime, but the episode permanently associated Joachim's name with heterodox apocalyptic speculation in later centuries. Bernard McGinn notes the further irony that the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, thirteen years after Joachim's death, had already condemned a separate and narrower point in his Trinitarian theology unrelated to the three ages scheme itself, so that Joachim entered later memory as a figure under a cloud of censure his own most distinctive and influential idea, the three status, had not actually incurred.