From Prophecy to Condemnation

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.