Spiritual Men and the Liberty to Come

Joachim of Fiore described the third and, in his own lifetime, still future status, the Age of the Holy Spirit, as a time in which the literal letter of scripture would give way to direct spiritual understanding, and in which a new order of contemplative "spiritual men," free of the institutional structures that governed the Church of the Age of the Son, would live in a condition of liberty and love beyond what either the Law of the first age or the faith of the second had permitted. Bernard McGinn's Calabrian Abbot reads this as the most genuinely radical element of Joachim's thought, a claim that history itself would move beyond the Church's existing sacramental and clerical order rather than simply perfecting it.

Joachim did not claim this third age had already arrived, nor did he identify himself or his own Florensian order unambiguously as its "spiritual men," a caution later followers frequently abandoned; his own writing on the coming age remains more suggestive and less specific about exactly who its representatives would be than the movements that later claimed his mantle.