A Status, Not Only a Period

Marjorie Reeves's Influence of Prophecy stresses that Joachim's status are not simply sequential historical periods that begin and end cleanly, since he held that each age is prepared within the one before it and lingers on within the one after it, an overlapping structure he compared to how a plant's root, stem and fruit belong to a single continuous growth rather than to three separate, disconnected objects. On this reading the Age of the Father does not vanish the moment the Age of the Son begins with Christ's incarnation; its characteristic obedience and fear persist as an undercurrent within later ages even as faith and, eventually, spiritual love come to predominate.

This organic, overlapping model distinguishes Joachim's three ages sharply from a simple king-list style periodization of history, and Reeves argues it is precisely this quality, an age understood as a unfolding condition rather than a fixed span with hard edges, that let later medieval readers apply Joachim's framework so flexibly to their own historical moments, reading their own era as the anticipated dawn of the Age of the Holy Spirit regardless of how many generations had passed since Joachim's own twelfth century calculations.