Quotes:Joachim of Floris

Zirkoff, Boris

Joachim of Floris (ca. 1145-1202). Italian mystic theologian, born at Celico, near Cosenza, in Calabria. Brought up at the court of Duke Roger of Apulia; at an early age visited the holy places; witnessing the plague at Constantinople, he resolved to change his mode of life, and, upon returning to Italy, became a monk in the Cistercian abbey of Casamari. Was abbot of the monastery of Corazzo, near Martirano, 1177; went to the court of Pope Lucius III at Veroli, 1183, and in 1185 visited Urban III. Later he retired to Pietralata, and founded with some companions under a rule of his own creation the abbey of San Giovanni in Fiore, on Monte Nero, in the massif of La Sila. In 1202, Innocent III approved the “ordo Florensis” and its rules. Joachim died the same year, probably on March 20.

Joachim was a prolific writer and a powerful figure in the contentions and polemics of the age. His authenticated works are: the Concordia novi et veteris Testamenti (Venice, 1519), the Expositio in Apocalypsin (Venice, 1527), the Psalterium decem chordarum (Venice, 1527), and a large number of “libelli.” Some of his writings were powerful instruments in the anti-papal polemic, sustaining the 421 revolving Franciscans in their hope of an approaching triumph. Joachim taught that after the age of Law and the age of the Gospels, there would come the age of the Spirit, which will be an age of contemplation, the monastic age par excellence. The church of Peter will be purified, and the hierarchy will efface itself before the order of the monks, the viri spirituales. This will be the resting season, the sabbath of humanity. These ideas spread into Italy and France and gained many followers. In 1260, a council held at Arles condemned Joachim’s writings and his supporters, but the ideas which he had promulgated penetrated into various fields of thought and inspired many other writers and mystics. From the 14th century to the middle of the 16th, such men as Ubertin of Casale, Bartholomew of Pisa, John of La Rochetaillade, Seraphim of Fermo, Johannes Annius of Viterbo, Coelius Pannonius, and others, repeated and elaborated the ideas of Joachim of Floris; men like Roger Bacon, Arnaldus de Villa Nova and Bernard Delicieux comforted themselves with the thought of the era of justice and peace promised by Joachim.

There is little doubt that Joachim of Floris had a strong intuition of the spiritual destiny of mankind as a whole, and of the higher stages of development which it would achieve by means of an inner communion with the spiritual essence within man himself, although these ideas had to be expressed in the language of his day and era. He was the representative in his time of the line of Hermit-Saints who had lived for at least four centuries before him in Southern Italy and Sicily, and had kept a constant connection with the monastic prophets of Arabia and Egypt, illustrating in their own lives the lives of the Fathers of the Desert.

A valuable essay by A. L. B. Hardcastle on Joachim of Floris may be found in The Theosophical Review, London, Vol. XXIV, May, 1899.

Source: Boris de Zirkoff, «H. P. Blavatsky Collected Writings», vol. 9, pp. 420-421