Law, Fear and the Old Testament

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.