Concordance, Condemnation and Influence

Joachim's central method, concordia, read the Old and New Testaments as two unfolding patterns whose persons and events correspond point for point across history, so that a careful reader could project the pattern forward and read the shape of ages still to come. From this method he drew his best known scheme, a history of three overlapping status: the Age of the Father, running from creation to Christ and typified by the married laity living under the law; the Age of the Son, running from Christ through Joachim's own day and typified by the clergy living under grace; and a third Age of the Holy Spirit, not yet arrived, in which contemplative spiritual men would live the gospel directly, without the institutional mediation the church still required. He illustrated the scheme with elaborate circular and tree shaped diagrams, the figurae, showing the three ages interlocking like the persons of the Trinity itself.

That trinitarian diagramming caused Joachim's one serious brush with condemnation. A short treatise attacking Peter Lombard's account of the Trinity, attributed to Joachim, was condemned by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, thirteen years after his death, though the council took care to commend Joachim's personal orthodoxy and left his order undisturbed. The condemnation did nothing to slow the spread of his ideas. Spiritual Franciscans in the following century read the coming Age of the Spirit as an imminent overturning of clerical authority, an application Joachim himself never made and one the church increasingly treated as heretical, and Joachimist expectation of a coming spiritual age continued to surface in apocalyptic movements for centuries after his death.