Age of the Father

Bernard McGinn's study The Calabrian Abbot sets out how Joachim of Fiore, a Cistercian monk who became abbot of his own reformed order at Fiore in Calabria, read the whole of sacred history as unfolding through three overlapping status corresponding to the three Persons of the Trinity, a scheme he worked out through an elaborate method of concordia, or matching, between generations recorded in the Old and New Testaments. The first status, the Age of the Father, he identified with the Old Testament period running from Adam to Christ, or in some formulations to Uzziah or John the Baptist, governed by the Mosaic Law and characterized above all by fear and obedience rather than by the fuller understanding he believed later ages would bring.

Joachim assigned this age to married laypeople as its typical human state, in contrast to the clergy he associated with the Age of the Son that followed and the free contemplatives he associated with the Age of the Holy Spirit still to come, building a social as well as a theological dimension into what might otherwise read as a purely doctrinal scheme. McGinn treats this three-part structure, worked out across Joachim's major works including the Liber de Concordia and the Expositio in Apocalypsim, as the single most influential piece of medieval apocalyptic thought produced after Augustine.

Marjorie Reeves's Influence of Prophecy stresses that Joachim's status are not simply sequential historical periods that begin and end cleanly, since he held that each age is prepared within the one before it and lingers on within the one after it, an overlapping structure he compared to how a plant's root, stem and fruit belong to a single continuous growth rather than to three separate, disconnected objects. On this reading the Age of the Father does not vanish the moment the Age of the Son begins with Christ's incarnation; its characteristic obedience and fear persist as an undercurrent within later ages even as faith and, eventually, spiritual love come to predominate.

This organic, overlapping model distinguishes Joachim's three ages sharply from a simple king-list style periodization of history, and Reeves argues it is precisely this quality, an age understood as a unfolding condition rather than a fixed span with hard edges, that let later medieval readers apply Joachim's framework so flexibly to their own historical moments, reading their own era as the anticipated dawn of the Age of the Holy Spirit regardless of how many generations had passed since Joachim's own twelfth century calculations.