Joachim of Fiore, the Calabrian abbot and the age of the Spirit
Joachim of Fiore, twelfth-century Calabrian abbot: the doctrine of the three ages, his main works, his meeting with Richard the Lionheart and his legacy.
“The Calabrian abbot Joachim, endowed with prophetic spirit”: thus Dante, in the twelfth canto of the Paradiso, places Joachim of Fiore among the wise spirits presented by Saint Bonaventure. The line is a sign of the extraordinary fame achieved by a monk born in Calabria around 1135, who never regarded himself as a prophet in the strict sense, but as an interpreter of Scripture able to read in it the hidden design of history.
From the Cistercians to the founding of Fiore
Born at Celico, near Cosenza, Joachim made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land as a young man, an experience that the biographical sources present as decisive for his conversion. He then entered monastic life and became abbot of the monastery of Corazzo, which joined the Cistercian order. His gifts as an exegete attracted the attention of several popes, who encouraged him to set down his interpretations in writing.
Dissatisfied with life at Corazzo, he withdrew with a few companions to the Sila plateau, where around 1189 he founded the monastery of San Giovanni in Fiore, origin of the Florensian order, approved by Pope Celestine III in 1196. He died in 1202, leaving behind a growing community and a body of writings destined for a long and controversial afterlife.
The three ages of history
The heart of Joachimite thought is a Trinitarian reading of history. In the Concordance of the New and Old Testaments, Joachim identifies three states: that of the Father, the time of the law and of the married; that of the Son, the time of grace and of the clergy; and a third state, of the Holy Spirit, in which the spiritual understanding of Scripture would fully unfold in a contemplative Church, guided by spiritual men of a monastic kind.
Alongside the Concordance, his major works are the Exposition on the Apocalypse and the Psaltery of Ten Strings. Also linked to his circle is the Liber figurarum, a collection of remarkable diagrams that translate the structure of sacred time into images, trees, interlocking circles and geometric figures. Joachim set no firm dates for the coming of the third age, but his calculations by generations were read by others as pointing towards the middle of the thirteenth century.
Kings, condemnations and followers
According to the English chronicler Roger of Howden, in the winter of 1190 to 1191 Richard the Lionheart, halting at Messina before sailing on crusade, wished to meet the abbot and questioned him about the Antichrist and the outcome of the expedition. The episode shows how far Joachim's reputation had by then spread beyond the borders of southern Italy.
After his death, the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 condemned one of his treatises on the Trinity, written against Peter Lombard, without condemning him personally. More serious was the case of the Franciscan Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, who in 1254 presented Joachim's writings as a new Eternal Gospel: the work was condemned in 1255. Joachimite ideas long nourished the Spiritual Franciscan currents and numerous apocryphal prophetic texts.
The figure of Joachim thus remains suspended between monastic orthodoxy and the long wake of movements that claimed him as their own. Prophecies about popes and emperors that he never wrote were composed in his name. At San Giovanni in Fiore the Florensian abbey still preserves the memory of its founder, and his thought continues to be studied as one of the most original philosophies of history of the Middle Ages.