Joachim of Fiore

Joachim was born around 1135 in Celico, a hill town in Calabria then part of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, the son of a notary. As a young man he entered royal administrative service before a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where by his own later account he experienced a period of illumination that turned him toward religious life. On returning to Calabria he lived for a time as a hermit and preacher on Mount Etna before entering the Cistercian monastery of Sambucina and then the abbey of Corazzo, where the monks elected him abbot around 1177.

As abbot, Joachim found the discipline of running an indebted, poorly endowed house left him little time for the biblical study he considered his true calling. He travelled to Rome and won papal permission, first from Lucius III and then confirmed by Urban III and Clement III, to withdraw from administrative duties and devote himself to writing. Corazzo was incorporated into the Cistercian order to secure its future, and Joachim moved deeper into the Calabrian mountains, gathering companions at San Giovanni in Fiore.

There, in the 1190s, he founded a stricter monastic congregation, the Florensian Order, formally approved by Celestine III in 1196. He spent his final years at Fiore composing his major works, the Liber de Concordia, the Expositio in Apocalypsim and the Psalterium Decem Chordarum, while advising secular and religious rulers who sought his prophetic reputation, including, according to later chroniclers, King Richard the Lionheart on his way to the Third Crusade. Joachim died at Fiore in 1202, and his order continued under its own rule until it merged with the Cistercians in 1570.

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.