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 who read the structure of the Trinity into the structure of time. 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.

Joachim presented this not as private revelation but as something disclosed by the scriptures to a reader given the right key. His major works — the Liber Concordie, the Expositio in Apocalypsim, the Psalterium decem chordarum — are exercises in matching the two Testaments against each other so that the pattern of the past could be read forward into the future. He calculated, cautiously, that the third age was near. He did not name himself its prophet; the Church approved his person in his lifetime, and only later condemned particular conclusions drawn in his name.

What scholarship establishes is the gap between the abbot and the movement. The historical Joachim was an orthodox monastic reformer who submitted his writings to Rome. The Joachimism that mattered to later history was largely the work of others, who took the third age as a program. Among the Franciscans, the strict party known as the Spirituals identified their own order with the spiritual men who would inaugurate the age of the Spirit, and read Francis of Assisi into Joachim’s prophecy; a notorious compilation, the Eternal Gospel, was condemned by a papal commission at Anagni and suppressed at Paris in the mid-thirteenth century. From there the pattern detached itself from its monastic origin entirely.

The afterlife is the larger subject. The three-age scheme — a present order giving way to a final, perfected condition within history rather than beyond it — proved endlessly portable. Later writers traced its shape, rightly or by loose analogy, in Reformation radicalism, in the secular philosophies of progress that posited a third and culminating stage of human development, and in modern political millenarianisms that promised a kingdom on earth. Some of these genealogies are demonstrable lines of transmission; others are resemblances that later interpreters have read back. The resemblances are real, and worth tracing. They are not all descent.

What persists, under 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. It outgrew him, and became one of the durable shapes the Western imagination gives to the future.

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