Joachimism

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Joachimism is the tradition of apocalyptic thought descended from Joachim of Fiore, a Calabrian abbot of the late twelfth century (c.1135–1202) who read the structure of the Trinity into the structure of time. He was not, by his own insistence, a prophet. He disavowed the title, claiming instead a donum intellectus — a gift of spiritual understanding, intellectus spiritualis, that let him see the hidden concord between the two Testaments and the shape of the history they jointly disclosed. He submitted his writings to the papacy for judgment, and his person was approved in his lifetime. What was condemned, and when, came later and attached to conclusions drawn by others in his name. The distance between the abbot and the movement is the first thing to fix, because almost everything that has been called Joachimism for eight centuries lives in that gap.

Where most medieval theology divided history into two — before Christ and after — Joachim proposed a third. He taught that history unfolds in three overlapping ages, or status: the age of the Father, lived under the law of the Old Testament; the age of the Son, lived under the grace of the Church and the New Testament; and a coming age of the Holy Spirit, in which the institutional Church would give way to a contemplative freedom and the Gospel would be understood at last in its spiritual sense, no longer under the veil of the letter. Each status belonged to a Person of the Trinity, ran to a different order of the elect — the married laity, the clergy, and finally the monks — and gathered force from the one before it. The third proceeded from the first two as the Spirit proceeds from Father and Son.

The dynamic against the static

The originality of this is easy to miss from a distance, because the raw materials were old. Patristic exegesis had long read the Old Testament as a figure of the New; the Pauline triad of life before the law, under the law, and under grace was a commonplace; and the Augustinian frame had given the West a serviceable map of time. But that map was, in its deep structure, static. Between the Incarnation and the Last Judgment lay a single undivided stretch, the age of the Church, in which nothing decisively new could happen — the drama was finished, and history was the long interval of waiting it out. The age that mattered most was the one beyond history, not within it.

Joachim broke this open. He made history dynamic: a process of increasing spiritual depth, climbing through real stages toward a culminating condition that would arrive inside time rather than only after it. The departure from the inherited Augustinian scheme is the hinge of the whole tradition — where the older view treated the present as a holding pattern, Joachim treated it as the eve of something. He welded three things into a single instrument: the concordia method, a systematic typological parallelism between persons and events of the two Testaments — his pattern of twos; the doctrine of the three status — his pattern of threes; and a figural, diagrammatic theology that externalized his visions as figurae — interlaced circles, trees, the seven-headed dragon, a ten-stringed psaltery. None of these alone was new; their fusion was.

The system grew out of two illuminations the abbot describes, and on the strength of which he refused the name of prophet: one at Easter, opening the concord of the Testaments and the meaning of the Apocalypse; one at Pentecost, opening the Trinity, which he figured as a psaltery of ten strings. From the first grew the Expositio in Apocalypsim and the Liber Concordie; from the second, the Psalterium decem chordarum. These three works — the authentic core of a corpus that later swelled with pseudonymous additions — are exercises in matching the two Testaments against each other so that the pattern of the past could be read forward into the future. The Liber Concordie, completed near the end of his life, is the groundwork of all the rest. He calculated, cautiously, that the third status was near, and he located the renewed outpouring of spiritual understanding in the contemplative order he founded — but his pattern-of-twos held, throughout, that the authority of Scripture and the Church would endure to the end. The radical Joachim, the one who would dissolve the Church into the age of the Spirit, is a later construction.

The abbot and the two condemnations

The historical Joachim was an orthodox monastic reformer. He trained as a notary in the Norman court of Sicily, underwent a conversion on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, joined the Cistercian ambit and was made abbot of Corazzo against his wishes, then withdrew to the Sila plateau to found a stricter house — San Giovanni in Fiore — and with it the Florensian order, confirmed under Celestine III. He sought and received papal encouragement to write from Lucius III, Urban III, and Clement III. He submitted his works to Innocent III in 1200 and died in 1202 before any verdict was returned. He is venerated locally as a beatus but was never formally canonized.

Two condemnations followed, and conflating them is the most common error in the field. The first, at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, struck a single treatise: Joachim’s attack on Peter Lombard’s formula for the unity of the divine essence, in which the abbot accused Lombard of positing a quaternity — three Persons plus a shared essence as a fourth thing. The council upheld Lombard, declared the contrary position heretical on that one point, and in the same breath expressly protected the monastery of Fiore and noted that Joachim had submitted all his writings to Rome. His person and his theology of history were left untouched.

The second condemnation, four decades later, struck not Joachim but a follower. In 1254 a young Franciscan, Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, published the Liber introductorius in Evangelium aeternum — an introduction to an Eternal Gospel assembled from Joachim’s writings, presented as a third Testament that would supersede the Old and the New with the dawning age of the Spirit. Gerard identified Francis of Assisi with the angel of the sixth seal and assigned his order the role of the new spiritual men. A papal commission under Alexander IV — the so-called Protocol of Anagni — examined the book and condemned it; it was ordered destroyed in 1255 and suppressed in the academic milieu of Paris, where it had detonated a quarrel between the seculars and the mendicants. Gerard, unrepentant, ended in prison for life. What was burnt at Anagni was Gerard’s radicalization, not the abbot’s own corpus — but the scandal fixed Joachim’s name, in the eyes of authority, to a doctrine that threatened the Church itself.

The Spiritual Franciscans and the third age as program

This is where Joachimism, as distinct from Joachim, was made. The strict party of the Franciscan movement — the Spirituals — read their own order as the contemplative men who would inaugurate the third status, and read Francis into the abbot’s prophecy as its herald. Peter John Olivi and Ubertino da Casale gave the expectation theological weight; the Fraticelli carried it into open defiance; and the rapid rise of the mendicant orders looked, to many, like the prophesied arrival of the two new orders of spiritual men — a prophetic vindication that revived Joachim’s reputation after the Lateran rebuke. Bonaventure, as minister general of the order, held the tension at the center: he repeated the Lateran censure of Joachim’s anti-Lombard tract while quietly absorbing Joachimite patterns of historical correspondence into his own theology of history, moving the third age from imminent prophecy toward inward mysticism. Dante, a century on, placed “the Calabrian abbot Joachim, endowed with prophetic spirit” among the wise in the Heaven of the Sun — and had Bonaventure introduce him — leaving scholars to argue ever since how far the poet endorsed the doctrine and how far he honored the exegete.

Around this living reception grew a vast shadow corpus. As the symbolic year 1260 approached, prophecies began to circulate under Joachim’s name that he had never written — a pseudo-commentary on Jeremiah, the De Oneribus Prophetarum, and later the Vaticinia de summis pontificibus, a set of papal prophecies stitched together from older Byzantine oracles. This pseudo-Joachite literature, far more than the authentic trilogy, drove the abbot’s medieval and Renaissance fame as a seer. The myths of the Angelic Pope and the Last World Emperor, the apocalyptic ferment around the Apostolic Brethren and the Dulcinians, the Provençal Beguines, and traces reaching toward Savonarola and even Columbus: much of this is reputation rather than demonstrable filiation, and the authentic abbot recedes behind it. Separating the two — the real corpus from the prophecy attached to the name — is the central source-critical problem of the whole subject. (See the research and reception section.)

The three-age scheme after Joachim

The afterlife is the larger subject, and the harder one. The three-age scheme — a present order giving way to a final, perfected condition within history rather than beyond it — proved endlessly portable, and later thinkers traced its shape, rightly or by loose analogy, far outside the cloister. In the radicalism of the Reformation era, in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophies of progress that posited a third and culminating stage of human development, and in the modern political millenarianisms that promised a kingdom on earth, the same threefold figure keeps recurring: an age of law, an age of grace or reason, and a coming age of fulfillment.

Some of these genealogies are demonstrable lines of transmission; others are resemblances that later interpreters have read back. The distinction matters and is not always easy to draw. There is a strong scholarly thesis — associated with Karl Löwith’s Meaning in History (1949) and Eric Voegelin’s account of the immanentization of the eschaton — that Joachim’s three status are the structural ancestor of the modern progressive philosophy of history, and, in stronger versions, of the totalitarian third-age ideologies of the twentieth century, the Drittes Reich among them. On this reading the lineage runs through Lessing’s Education of the Human Race, through Comte’s three stages and the Hegelian and Marxist eschatologies of a final synthesis. Jacob Taubes and Norman Cohn pressed kindred claims; Oswald Spengler had already called Joachim the first thinker to shatter the dualistic world-form of Augustine and replace it with three ages of Father, Son, and Spirit.

Against this stands an equally serious counter-reading. Henri de Lubac’s two volumes on the spiritual posterity of Joachim, and the lifework of Marjorie Reeves, argue that the secularization narrative is overstated — that for the faithful Joachite the Church endured, that the leap from a contemplative Trinitarian theology to Saint-Simon, Marx, or Rosenberg crosses chasms the evidence cannot bridge, and that genuine transmission must be shown link by link rather than assumed from the shape of a triad. The wider quarrel — whether the modern idea of progress is secularized eschatology at all — is the Löwith–Blumenberg debate, and it turns on how much weight a shared three-part shape can bear. What the record shows plainly is the channel itself: a reading of history as three rising ages, minted in a Calabrian cloister, that later and very different projects found ready to hand.

Research, textual history, and the secularization debate

The authentic Latin works are medieval and therefore public domain everywhere; the living scholarly questions concern the editions, the boundary between genuine and pseudonymous Joachim, and the contested modern reception. The first prints came from Venice in the early sixteenth century — the Liber Concordie in 1519, the Expositio in Apocalypsim with the Psalterium decem chordarum in 1527 — and of the six books issued there under Joachim’s name only these are authentic. The 1519 Concordia survives in a full digitized scan at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica, ark:/12148/bpt6k65598b). The modern critical-edition project is the Monumenta Germaniae Historica Opera omnia, including Alexander Patschovsky’s four-volume Concordia (2018), reviewed in The Medieval Review, and Kurt-Victor Selge’s Psalterium decem chordarum (2009); E. Randolph Daniel’s partial Concordia appeared in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society in 1983. The Liber Figurarum, the album of diagrams gathered after Joachim’s death and rediscovered by Leone Tondelli in the 1930s, is now accepted by most scholars as genuine.

The standard scholarly anchors are Bernard McGinn’s The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought (1985), which names him the most important apocalyptic thinker of the medieval period and treats the intellectus spiritualis at length; Marjorie Reeves’s The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages (1969) and, with Beatrice Hirsch-Reich, The Figurae of Joachim of Fiore (1972); Herbert Grundmann’s foundational German studies; and more recent work by Gian Luca Potestà and Matthias Riedl, whose Companion to Joachim of Fiore (Brill, 2018) collects the current state of the field. A concise vetted overview of the theology of history and its departure from the static Augustinian scheme is the EBSCO research starter. For the contested modern reception, the Löwith–Voegelin secularization thesis and its critics in de Lubac and Reeves are surveyed by Robert Boulter and Philipp Rosemann, “Three Responses to Joachimism: Ratzinger, de Lubac, Milbank” (Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses, 2023), available in preprint. On the affair that fixed the abbot’s radical reputation — Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, the Eternal Gospel, and the condemnation of 1255 — the documentary outline is set out here.

What persists, under all the variations, is one idea: that history has a hidden threefold form, and that the present is the eve of its last and best stage. The abbot offered it as a way of reading scripture, and within a century his name had been pulled loose from his books — fixed to prophecies he never wrote, condemned for positions he had not held, claimed by Franciscan radicals he never knew. To read him at all is first to prise the Calabrian exegete apart from the apocalyptic legend that grew over his name.

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