Joachim of Fiore's trinitarian reading of history into three overlapping ages, with his own generation-count method pointing toward a transition into the third, the Age of the Holy Spirit, around 1260. Later Joachimist writers, chiefly the Spiritual Franciscans, read the date with far more certainty and urgency than Joachim's own qualified presentation of it, some applying it as an imminent overturning of clerical authority, an application Joachim himself never made in his lifetime.
Facts
Fulfillment
Documented ResponseThe passing of 1260 did not end Joachimist expectation. Spiritual Franciscan writers continued elaborating the three status framework, in some readings identifying Francis of Assisi and his most rigorous followers as the awaited spiritual men. The Church moved against the movement's written expressions of this reading both before and after 1260 passed: a pseudo-Joachimite tract, Gerardo of Borgo San Donnino's Introduction to the Eternal Gospel, was condemned in 1255, and Pope John XXII's bulls of 1317 and 1318 condemned the Spiritual Franciscans, by then commonly called the Fraticelli, on five specific articles, after which several adherents were executed as unrepentant heretics, four of them burned at Marseille in 1318. Joachim of Fiore himself was never condemned in his own lifetime; the only censure ever to touch his name was posthumous and narrower, when the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, thirteen years after his death, condemned a short treatise on the Trinity attributed to him, while explicitly commending his personal orthodoxy and leaving his own religious order undisturbed. 1 Dating
Predicted DateAround 1260, derived by applying Joachim of Fiore's own generation-count method to his three status historiography; Joachim's own presentation of the date was considerably more qualified and tentative than the certainty later Joachimist writers gave it. 1 Date AttributedSet out across Joachim's major works, chiefly the Liber de Concordia and the Expositio in Apocalypsim, composed in the decades before his death in 1202. 1 Origins
Attributed Author / CompilerJoachim of Fiore, whose calculation was taken up and read far more literally and urgently by later Joachimist and Spiritual Franciscan writers than by Joachim's own qualified presentation of it. 2 Attributions
TraditionThe Spiritual Franciscans, the rigorist current within the Franciscan order that most fully adopted and radicalized Joachim's apocalyptic reading of history. 1 Sources
Primary SourceJoachim of Fiore's own Liber de Concordia and Expositio in Apocalypsim set out the calculation; its later Spiritual Franciscan elaboration and the Church's response are documented in Marjorie Reeves's The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages, the standard scholarly history of Joachimism, and in Bernard McGinn's study of Joachim's apocalyptic theology. 1 Debunked
Claimed FulfillmentThat around 1260 the Age of the Son, the age of the Church under grace and clerical authority, would give way to a coming Age of the Holy Spirit, lived by contemplative spiritual men in direct understanding without need of the Church's existing institutional structure, a reading Spiritual Franciscan writers pressed as an imminent overturning of clerical authority. The year 1260 passed with no such transformation, and clerical authority remained fully intact. 1 Connections
Associated With
The same doctrinal content: this entry records it as this atlas's prophecy register does, a dated, testable claim with a specific expected transition around 1260.
Source The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in JoachimismMarjorie Reeves
Joachim of Fiore composed and taught this calculation as a Catholic abbot in good standing and was never condemned in his own lifetime; only a later, posthumously attributed treatise on the Trinity was censured, and his own order was explicitly left undisturbed.
Source The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western ThoughtBernard McGinn
Attributed To
Source The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western ThoughtBernard McGinn
Belongs to Tradition
Source The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in JoachimismMarjorie Reeves
Sources
1. The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism
Marjorie Reeves, Clarendon Press, 1969
2. The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought
Bernard McGinn, Macmillan, 1985
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