Joachim of Fiore

(c. 1135–1202)



Italian abbot and scriptural expositor. (“Fiore” is sometimes given inaccurately as “Flora” or “Floris.”) His theory of the movement of history, with the past and present leading to a foreseeable future, has been called “the most influential known to Europe until the appearance of Marxism.” The prophetic part not only affected medieval thinking, it surfaced again, reinterpreted and rationalized, in later times.
Joachim was born in the south of Italy about 1135. After a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he entered the Cistercian order and became abbot of Curazzo in Calabria. Very little is known of his life, but he built up a reputation for learning. Almost the first fact on record about him is that in 1184, Pope Lucius III asked his opinion of the “Sibylline” texts. Impressed by Joachim’s response, Lucius encouraged him in a plan to study the relation between the Old and New Testaments.
Papal approval seems to have acted as a trigger, and ideas began to come in a flood. Day-to-day monastic administration interfered. Joachim left Curazzo to stay at another monastery as a guest of its head and then moved out to live by himself. However, inquirers would not leave him alone, and some became virtually disciples. At last, he got permission from Rome to form his own congregation, the community of San Giovanni

placed him on a level with Christ. A dissident Franciscan party, the Spirituals, who held that the order had betrayed the founder’s ideals, talked the language of revolution. They produced a book called the Eternal Evangel or Everlasting Gospel (no longer extant in its original form), which was based on Joachim’s teaching but distorted it and caused trouble. He was partly to blame himself. He had conjectured that the present age would end and the great change would be visible in 1260.
While the immediate ferment slowly died down, the hope continued. Theorists who may be called “Joachites” evolved a kind of program with two prophetic characters who were to prepare the ground for the Age of the Holy Spirit. The Angelic Pope was to purify the Church, and a great emperor, the Second Charlemagne, was to unite Christendom. Several actual persons were cast in these roles but did not live up to them. A particular disappointment was the election of a saintly hermit as Pope Celestine V in 1294. After a few months of chaos, he was forced to resign; Dante blamed him for his “great refusal.”
In the sixteenth century, Joachism briefly received a fresh impetus from the voyages of discovery and the missions that followed them. Columbus cited Joachim, and he and others believed that the opening-up of the world and the spreading of the Christian faith might be ushering in the third age. However, this upsurge was temporary, and the movement, in its original form, died away. A late product of its influence was a curious text known as the Prophecies of St. Malachy, which has a prophetic interest of its own.
Despite all vagaries, Joachim achieved one very great thing. He gave a place in Christendom for optimism about the earthly future. Christians had assumed that while there were obviously good times and bad, ours was a fallen world and could never be fundamentally better. Sooner or later, quite likely sooner, God would end it. Joachim, by envisaging the Age of the Holy Spirit, made room for a real change and a real advance. His ideas played a part in medieval popular protest. While it would be too much to claim that he invented progress, his conception of historical changes, with a quantum leap forward and upward, reappeared in ideologies outside the Church.
Several German philosophers—Lessing, Hegel, Schelling—took it up in various ways. Lessing, writing in 1780, expressed a renewed hope for a good time coming. He acknowledged his source and spread a new awareness of Joachim or, at least, of the movement his prophecies had inspired. Hegel applied the triple pattern to the history of Germany. Schelling reinvented Joachim’s three ages—independently as he thought, though the abbot’s ideas may have reached him indirectly—and he was excited when someone spelt them out to him.
Followers of Saint-Simon, the French pioneer of Socialism, adapted the three ages to their own theories and spoke of a “new Christianity” as the spiritual basis for a future Utopia. Possibly because of an early association with Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, the founder of sociology, likewise detected three phases in history or, more precisely, in human mentality. A “religious” phase and a “metaphysical” phase were leading up to a “positive” phase, when science would reign. While Comte’s three phases were not Joachim’s, he knew of the abbot and acknowledged his importance. The English novelist George Eliot, who absorbed some of his thought, brought Joachim’s prophecies into her historical novel Romola.
Though Karl Marx rejected religious thinking, he was deeply influenced by Hegel and by Hegel’s touches of Joachim. Marx too expounded historical phases. He lost the triadic pattern, eventually having five. But he kept the final quantum leap, when a revolution would open the way to a classless world, free from oppression and exploitation. Like Comte, he had a famous literary disciple in England, William Morris. Morris’s novel News from Nowhere is a wishful fantasy of society after the revolution. The happy future he imagines has been described as the Age of the Holy Spirit without the Holy Spirit