JOACHIM of FIORE (c.1135–1202), biblical exegete and mystic. Two contemporary biographical fragments were expanded and embellished with legends in the two 17th-cent. Lives upon which the account in the Acta Sanctorum was based. Born in Celico, Calabria, as a young man he went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where he may have had the first of three experiences of spiritual illumination, the latter two, at Easter and Pentecost, being recorded in his own writings. He became a monk in the Benedictine, later Cistercian, monastery of Corazzo. Elected abbot against his will in 1177, he later relinquished this office to lead a more contemplative life, finally receiving Papal permission in 1196 to establish his own congregation in the Sila mountains, the Monastic Order of San Giovanni in Fiore (St. John in Fiore or Flora, also known as the Florensians).  [The Florensians were incorporated in the the Cistercian Order in the late sixteenth century, and ceased to exist after 1623.]

    Three Popes encouraged his writing and in a testamentary letter he required his successors to submit his works to the Holy See. When the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) condemned his Trinitarian doctrine (he had accused Peter Lombard of heresy), his reputation for sanctity was safeguarded. Dante placed him in Paradise—di spirito prophetico dotato.

The central doctrine of his three chief works, ‘Liber de Concordia Novi ac Veteris Testamenti’, ‘Expositio in Apocalypsim’, and ‘Psalterium decem Chordarum’, is a Trinitarian conception of the whole of history, viewed in three great periods (‘status’).

The first, characterized by the ‘Ordo conjugatorum’, was the Age of the Father in which mankind lived under the Law until the end of the OT dispensation;

the second, characterized by the ‘Ordo clericorum’, is that of the Son, lived under Grace and covering the NT dispensation which Joachim calculated as forty-two generations of about thirty years each;

the third, that of the ‘Ordo monachorum’ or ‘contemplantium’, is the Age of the Spirit, to be lived in the liberty of the ‘Spiritualis Intellectus’ proceeding from the Old and New Testaments. This age would see the rise of new religious orders to convert the whole world and usher in the ‘Ecclesia Spiritualis’.

Joachim never advanced his doctrine of the third age to a point of danger to ecclesiastical authority, but his expectations concerning history had a far-reaching influence in the following centuries among groups who carried his ideas to revolutionary conclusions, notably certain Franciscans and Fraticelli. The Franciscan Gerard of Borgo San Donnino in 1254 claimed to complete Joachim’s pattern of threes by proclaiming the Eternal Gospel (excerpts from Joachim’s works) which superseded the OT and NT.

His views received Papal condemnation in 1255 and in 1263 the provincial Council of Arles condemned the doctrine of Joachim himself. But Joachim’s vision continued to captivate the imagination of many throughout the later medieval and Renaissance period.

His three chief works, mentioned above, pub. Venice 1519 and 1527, are available in photographic repr.; the first four books of the Liber de Concordia Novi ac Veteris Testamenti also ed. E. R. Daniel (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 73, pt. 8; 1983). The Centro Internazionale di Studi Gioacchimiti is issuing a series of works on Joachim, Rome, 1995 ff., incl. an edn. of his Opera Omnia, to date incl. as vol. 5, the Tractatus super Quatuar Evangelia by F. Santi (Fonti per la Storia dell’Italia Medievale, Antiquitates, 17; 2002). Other modern edns. of his Expositio de Articulis Fidei by E. Buonaiuti (Fonti per la Storia d’Italia, 78; 1936); of Adversus Iudaeos by A. Frugoni (ibid. 95; 1957); of Liber Figurarum by L. Tondelli (2 vols., Turin [1940]; 2nd edn., ibid., 1953, vol. 1, ed. L. Tondelli, vol. 2, ed. L. Tondelli, M. [E.] Reeves, and B. [M.] Hirsch-Reich); of De Vita Sancti Benedicti by C. Baraut, OSB, Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia, 24 (1951), pp. 33–122; and of De prophetia ignota, by M. Kaup (MGH, Studien und Texte, 19; 1998).

AASS, Mai. 7 (1688), pp. 89–143. H. Grundmann, Studien über Joachim von Floris (Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance, 32; 1927); id., Neue Forschungen über Joachim von Fiore (Münstersche Forschungen, 1; 1950). E. Buonaiuti, Gioacchino da Fiore: I tempi, la vita, il messaggio (1931). A. Crocco, Gioacchino da Fiore (Naples, 1960). M. [E.] Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford, 1969; repr., 2000; also with additional bibl., Notre Dame, Ind., and London, 1993). id. and B. [M.] Hirsch-Reich, The Figurae of Joachim of Fiore (Oxford, 1972). D. C. West (ed.), Joachim of Fiore in Christian Thought (2 vols., New York [1975]). H. Mottu, La Manifestation de l’Esprit selon Joachim de Fiore (Université de Genève thesis; Neuchâtel and Paris, 1977). H. de Lubac, SJ, La Postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore (2 vols. [1979–81]). Storia e Messaggio in Gioacchino da Fiore: Atti del I Congresso Internazionale di Studi Gioachimiti … 1979 (Fiore, 1980); A. Crocco (ed.), L’Età dello spirito e la fine dei tempi in Gioacchino da Fiore e nel Gioachimismo medievale: Atti del II Congresso … 1984 (2 vols., ibid., 1986); G. L. Potestà (ed.), Il Profetismo gioachimita tra Quattrocento et Cinquecento: Atti del III Congresso … 1989 (Genoa, 1991). B. McGinn, The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought (1985); M. [E.] Reeves and W. Gould, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1987). Repertorium Fontium Historiae Medii Aevi, 6 (Rome, 1990), pp. 261–6.

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