ABSTRACT
Joachim’s rst pattern is the familiar division of history into three status, which status correspond respectively to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as well as to the three orders, the married laity, the clergy, and the monks. Joachim envisioned the alpha as an equilateral triangle and saw this same shape in the psaltery, a triangular stringed instrument, with a hole in the middle. For Joachim the top of the triangle denoted the Father, the le-hand corner the Son, and the right-hand corner the Holy Spirit. Hence the line from the top to the le corner designated the generation of the Son by the Father. e line from the top to the right corner symbolized the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father, and the bottom line denoted the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son. us the prima dinitio showed how two persons came from one. e top of the triangle also connoted the married laics, the le corner the clergy, and the right one the monks, showing that two orders came from one. Each status had a preliminary or initiatory phase, a period of owering and nally one of decline. e root of the rst status was Adam, its owering began with Abraham, and its end came with Joseph, Mary’s husband. e second had its root in Uzziah [Ozias], owered from Jesus and would end with the forty-second generation
aer Jesus. e third status had two roots, reecting the double procession of the Holy Spirit, the rst root from Elijah and the second from Benedict of Nursia, and would ower shortly aer the year 1200.2
Joachim conceived the secunda dinitio as a lower-case omega. is letter, he suggested, symbolized two virgule, rods or twigs, each of them shaped like the letter ‘u’. ese two rods merged in the stem that thrust up in the middle of the omega. e le-hand rod designated the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father; the right-hand one denoted the procession of the Spirit from the Son. Hence one person, the Holy Spirit, proceeded from two persons, the Father and the Son. e two rods corresponded to the two tempora and to the two peoples, the Jewish and the Gentile, from which would come the spiritual men, the viri spirituales. e rods also symbolized the two Testaments, the Old and the New, from which have come the spiritual understanding, spiritualis intellectus. e rst tempus corresponded to the rst status, extending from Adam to Joseph, and the second tempus corresponded to the second status. Instead of a third tempus, Joachim alluded to a sabbath that was to begin shortly aer 1200.3
Before the year 1254 Joachim was best known for his Concordia of the Testaments, and as a prophet of Antichrist.4 e third status of the Holy Spirit rst became widely known, indeed became notorious, when the Franciscan Minorite Gerard of Borgo San Donnino made it the central thrust of his Liber introductorius in Evangelium eternum, published in 1254 in Paris. According to Gerard, the second status was going to end and the third was to begin precisely in the year 1260. An Eternal Gospel made up of the writings of Joachim would replace the Old and New Testaments. A new spiritual church led by the barefoot – that is, the friars – would supersede the clergy and the sacraments.5
