Age of the Son

Joachim of Fiore identified the second status, the Age of the Son, with the New Testament era and the institutional Church that grew from it, a period he understood himself to still be living within during his own lifetime in the twelfth century. Bernard McGinn's Calabrian Abbot describes how Joachim characterized this age as one of grace tempered with law rather than law alone, faith rather than only fear, and the ordained clergy rather than the married laity as its representative human type, a status intermediate in every respect between the Age of the Father before it and the Age of the Holy Spirit he expected to follow.

Because Joachim placed his own present squarely within this second age, his scheme carried an unmistakably self-critical edge: the Church of his own day, however necessary and legitimate as a stage in the divine plan, was for Joachim not the final or most perfect form Christian life would take, a claim that later readers, including reform-minded and dissenting movements well beyond anything Joachim himself proposed, would extend far past his own relatively cautious intentions. Joachim's own theological training within the Cistercian order, and his personal reputation for holiness, gave the scheme an authority his critics could not simply dismiss as fringe speculation; Pope Lucius III and later Pope Urban III both encouraged him to continue his prophetic and exegetical writing during his lifetime, an institutional tolerance that stands in some tension with the more troubled reputation the three ages scheme, and Joachim's name generally, acquired among later medieval and modern readers.

The method by which Joachim arrived at his three-age scheme, which he called concordia, involved matching the generations recorded in Old Testament genealogies against corresponding figures and periods in the New Testament and Church history, on the theory that history's two halves, before and after Christ, unfold in a structured correspondence rather than an arbitrary sequence. Marjorie Reeves's Influence of Prophecy treats this method as painstaking and genuinely original rather than simple numerology, distinguishing Joachim from many of the cruder date-setting prophets who followed him.

McGinn notes that Joachim's own generation-counting pointed him toward a transition out of the Age of the Son and into the Age of the Holy Spirit occurring around the year 1260, a specific figure that later Joachimist writers seized on and popularized far more insistently than Joachim's own more careful and qualified presentation of it, treating a date he had reached through his concordia method as though it were a firm prophecy rather than one output of a complex and revisable calculation. Joachim worked this concordance out in enormous technical detail across the Liber de Concordia, aligning specific Old Testament figures, from the patriarchs through the kings, against specific New Testament and Church-historical counterparts, a labor Reeves treats as closer in spirit to a scholarly commentator's cross-referencing than to a street prophet's vague pronouncement, even though the underlying premise, that such a correspondence exists and reveals God's plan for history, is itself a matter of faith rather than a claim later scholarship could verify.