Joachim of Fiore (redirected from Joachim of Floris)

Joachim of Fiore (jō`əkĭm), c.1132–1202, Italian Cistercian monk. He was abbot of Corazzo, Italy, but withdrew into solitude. He left scriptural commentaries prophesying a new age. In his "Age of the Spirit" the hierarchy of the church would be unnecessary and infidels would unite with Christians. Joachim's works had a vogue in the 13th and the 14th cent.; many, especially the extremist Spiritual Franciscans, acclaimed him as a prophet. Dante places him in Paradise.

Bibliography

See study by D. C. West (1983).

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Joachim of Fiore

(born c. 1130/35, Celico, Kingdom of Naples—died 1201/02, Fiore) Italian mystic, theologian, and philosopher of history. After a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he became a Cistercian monk, and by 1177 he was abbot at Corazzo, Sicily. He retired into the mountains to follow a contemplative life in 1191, and in 1196 he founded the order of San Giovanni in Fiore. His Book of Harmony of the New and Old Testaments outlined a theory of history and traced correspondences in the Old and New Testaments. In his Exposition of the Apocalypse he examined the symbols of the Antichrist, and in Psaltery of Ten Strings he expounded his doctrine of the Holy Trinity. A man of vivid imagination, he was both acclaimed as a prophet and denounced as a heretic.