A Collective Messiah : Joachim of Fiore’s Constitution of Future Society

At the end of the 12th century, the famous Calabrian abbot and apocalyptic seer Joachim of Fiore drafted a constitution for the universal Christian society he expected to emerge in a coming third age of the Spirit. This articles shows that the constitution combines a highly complex symbolic structure with very concrete and pragmatic instructions for future social life. While the symbolic structure amounts to the image of a collective messiah, the pragmatic structure evokes the picture of a strictly hierarchical society, where the rank of a person depends on the possession of spiritual knowledge.