12
Joachim of Fiore and the Dawning of a New Age

If this were a novel, we would introduce you now to a new character. We would tell you about a singular man born less than a century after the Great Schism, in 1135 CE, in Calabria, the Italian “toe” region that lies at the end of the peninsula and is surrounded by the Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas. This is not a novel, of course, but as it happens, this twelfth-century monk is essential to the story we’re telling. And strangely enough, if you want to begin to understand how the Great Schism, filioque, and the Spirit of God all have come to matter so much to us in the last century, you have to look back nearly a thousand years at the enigmatic Joachim of Fiore.

His Italian mother named him Gioacchino, but history has anglicized him to Joachim. He began adult life as a court clerk and notary, appointed to high-placed officials, including the archbishop of Palermo. A bureaucrat, he was nevertheless religiously active and spiritually sensitive, and while on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem as a twenty-four-year-old, he felt God stirring his soul.

Soon after his return from the Holy Land, young Joachim left career and family behind for the monastic life. Then he intensified his commitment to seek God by becoming a hermit, and relatively soon after that he was called back from “the desert” in order to become an abbot leading other monks. Eventually he founded a monastic order in Fiore, in his native southern Italian hills, and as a result, he’s forever since been known as Joachim of Fiore.

Joachim was a student of the Scriptures in a time when the Bible was still believed to contain deep and opaque mysteries—to be, in effect, a rich allegory whose truths were hidden well beneath its surface. Behind every phrase and verse there were subtle understandings ready to elude simple minds, and it was in this context that Joachim began his life’s work of interpreting Scripture allegorically, constantly finding in it meanings that were spiritually measured and spiritually defined. Joachim was not unusual in teaching the Bible this way, of course, but the particular genius that he brought to the work and the way in which his conclusions resonated with the feelings of the people of his era made him stand out.

Joachim had a mind for facts and details, but he was also the creator of meta-theories. As such, he became a fierce critic of one of the most popular theological ideas of his age, famously posited by Peter Lombard in a work entitled Four Books of Sentences. Four Books was actually one book—a medieval textbook, in fact—that was studied by every serious student of theology. In it, Lombard taught that the Godhead, in the purest and most ideal sense, could never possibly be known in this world. God could be contemplated but never truly understood.

In all fairness, Joachim probably believed that Lombard was a Sabellianist, that is, that he was a member of an openly heretical school of thought that was willing to trade in the essential threeness of God for the sake of a high version of the unity of the Godhead. Regardless of whether that justification is true or not, Joachim disagreed vehemently with the Sentences, insisting that God, in fact, wants to be known in history and in the workings of the world in each era. It was that battle of ideas that paved the way for the coming of Joachim’s most important meta-theory of all.

Because of his engagement with Lombard, Joachim came to a point in his own biblical and historical work where he believed that he could see all of human history divided into three epochs or dispensations. He, in fact, believed that God had revealed this personally to him. As a result, his most important teaching—which he preached and wrote about in many places throughout his life—became that the world is moving through these three successive eras or epochs and that these eras mirror the economy of the Holy Trinity itself. He taught that there was an Age of the Father, now past, an Age of the Son, still present, and an Age of the Spirit, emerging.

This was not unprecedented. The church fathers and mothers, for instance, had long explained that the persons of the Trinity were gradually revealed by the Godhead for a reason. These are the words of one of the great Eastern “doctors” of the church, Gregory of Nazianzus:

The old covenant made clear proclamation of the Father, a less definite one of the Son. The new covenant made the Son manifest and gave us a glimpse of the Spirit’s Godhead. At the present time, the Spirit resides amongst us, giving us a clearer manifestation of himself than before. It was dangerous for the Son to be preached openly when the Godhead of the Father was still unacknowledged. It was dangerous, too, for the Holy Spirit to be made (and here I use a rather rash expression) an extra burden, when the Son had not been received. . . . No, God meant it to be by piecemeal additions, “ascents” as David called them, by progress and advance from glory to glory, that the light of the Trinity should shine upon more illustrious souls.1

Joachim became a serious student of these “piecemeal additions,” so-called. In an elaborate series of biblical commentaries and theological treaties—he wrote so many that he had had to dictate them to various scribes and disciples—he determined that the very structure of the world, its history, and God’s way of working in it would move through these three stages:

• The world had seen the Age of the Father, which Joachim identified with the Old Testament: its teachings, its ways of understanding God, and God’s ways of interacting with the creation. In the words of Joachim, this first period was a time when human beings were like “slaves,” an era “ascribed to the Father, who is the author of all things.”2 The first era concluded at the time of Christ.
• Then came the Age of the Son, born in the era of the New Testament, and marked by the birth of God in human form and the growth of the church. Christ is he “who has been esteemed worthy to share our mud.”3 This was the era of human beings as “sons” not “slaves,” and was waning, Joachim said, in his own day.
• Emerging, then, was the Age of the Spirit, dawning soon, he wrote, and a time when humankind would relate primarily to the third member of the Trinity. This would be a moment marked by a decreased importance in ecclesial structures, sacraments, creeds, and clergy, when all people would begin to relate more directly “as friends” to the Divine. Joachim saw the seed of this idea in the imagination of St. Paul, quoting 2 Corinthians 3:17, “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”

Joachim was also a visual thinker, if ever the world has seen one, and he often used visual tricks and tools to aid his own memory and that of others. Three of them are relevant here. In the first, using the upper case of the alpha, or first letter, of the Greek alphabet, Joachim imagined the Holy Spirit as equal to the Son before the Father. God the Father is symbolized as the top of the alpha, processing downward on one arm to the Son, and on the other to the Spirit, yet with all three connected, one to the other and each necessary to the completeness of the construct.

In the second piece of pairing, the third member of the Trinity takes a position of real prominence and power. Using the lower case of omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet, Joachim taught that the left arm of the omega is the Pater, the right arm is the Filius, and the center where the two come together is the Spiritus Sanctus.4

And perhaps most familiar to us today, Joachim’s preoccupation with the circularity and interrelatedness of the Trinity led to the popularization of the so-called Borromean rings as the accepted visual symbol of the Trinity.

The work of the Holy Spirit, Joachim believed, was to be the culmination of history. It was to usher in the final, glorious time beyond all time called eternity. But this was not your typical apocalyptic prediction. Joachim was not looking for the end of the world. He was instead seeking its final and culminating era. This is where he was unique: Joachim was studying the meaning of God, looking at the trajectory of human history, and identifying a new day of openness, inspiration, and intimacy between God and earth. Although he never used the now-popular phrase, Joachim was perhaps the first to foresee our own new era of “horizontal transcendence.”

Joachim, however, was also nothing if not complex. He occasionally contradicted himself, and he used every numeric symbol he could. Beyond that, world events did not always fit neatly into three successive eras. In fact, Joachim also, and perhaps as a bow to tradition, taught the two traditional, more generally understood covenants:

• The Old: from the creation of the world until the advent of the Son.
• The New: from that advent, the Incarnation, until the Second Coming.

The Old was, within Joachim’s taxonomy, the Age of the Father. The New was the Age of the Son. Then, as the consummation of all things previously accomplished, would come the blessed time beyond time when the person of the Spirit—in a triumphant sort of reversal and reinterpretation of the diminishing effect that the filioque had performed on the Godhead—completes everything. The Spirit who hovered over the waters of first-created matter and who appeared as a sign when the incarnate One came out of John’s baptismal waters would now hover, again, and in that hovering somehow illuminate, accompany, and move us closer than ever toward the heavenly kingdom.

Those are the essential ideas of Joachim of Fiore,5 and one cannot help but acknowledge that by means of them he initiated a conversation that is as active among us today as it was among both his own contemporaries and also among those who followed over the following centuries.

Is our era the one that Joachim foresaw? Is the upheaval of the present moment, of this every-five-hundred-year shakeup in the church, the sign that the Age of the Spirit is upon us? Who knows? Many a well-trained and credentialed theologian has considered the question over the last few decades, certainly, and one of the most credentialed and respected of them, Bernard McGinn, professor emeritus of historical theology and the history of Christianity at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago was very clear recently on PBS’s Frontline about his assessment of Joachim:

Joachim of Fiore is the most important apocalyptic thinker of the whole medieval period, and maybe after the prophet John, the most important apocalyptic thinker in the history of Christianity.6

In any event, though, the old Chinese proverb/curse still says, “May you live in interesting times,” and this is how Joachim presented the portent of a true Age of the Spirit. The Spirit is unsettled, not settled, wild, not tame. As Joachim would say and as the Gospel of John puts it, quoting Jesus: “Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:7–8).

Notes

1. Gregory of Nazianzus, “The Fifth Theological Oration: On the Holy Spirit,” in On God and Christ (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), orat. 31.26, p. 137.

2. Quotes from Joachim of Fiore in this section are the translations of Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, Italian Academy Lectures, trans. Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 30.

3. Vattimo and D’Isanto, After Christianity, 30.

4. Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future (New York: Harper, 1977), 6–8.

5. Regrettably, our brief coverage here can give scarcely more than the slightest suggestion of Joachim’s scope and certainly of his influence. Dante, for example, was a great admirer of Joachim’s work and, in The Divine Comedy, placed him in Paradise. According to some sources, Richard the Lionhearted stopped on his way to the Third Crusade in order to be taught by Joachim. Even as recently as 2008, there was a spurious but energetic inundation of chitchat about the fact that Barack Obama had quoted Joachim three times in his preelection campaigning. While the tale may have proved to be erroneous, its appearance on the internet still speaks volumes about Joachim’s lasting impact.

By all accounts, though, Joachim is one of Christian history’s most colorful characters, as well as one of its most seminal and mysterious ones. As a result, the bibliography of Joachim books is considerable, but readers interested in learning more may want to begin with such basic volumes as Delno C. West, ed., Joachim of Fiore in Christian Thought: Essays on the Influence of the Calabrian Prophet (New York: Burt Franklin, 1975).

6. Bernard McGinn, “Who was Joachim of Fiore?” Frontline, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalyse/explanation/joachim.html.