how the strong analogy between the initial
efforts of Francis and those of the Poor Men of Lyons. His thought
ripened in an atmosphere thoroughly saturated with their ideas;
unconsciously to himself they entered into his being.

The prophecies of the Calabrian abbot exerted upon him an influence
quite as difficult to appreciate, but no less profound.

Standing on the confines of Italy and as it were at the threshold of
Greece, Gioacchino di Fiore[35] was the last link in a chain of monastic
prophets, who during nearly four hundred years succeeded one another in
the monasteries and hermitages of Southern Italy. The most famous among
them had been St. Nilo, a sort of untamed John the Baptist, living in
desert places, but suddenly emerging from them when his duties of
maintaining the right called him elsewhere. We see him on one occasion
appearing in Rome itself, to announce to pope and emperor the unloosing
of the divine wrath.[36]

Scattered in the Alpine solitudes of Basilicata these Calabrian hermits
were continually obliged to retreat higher and higher into the mountain
fastnesses to escape the populace, who, pursued by pirates, were taking
refuge in these mountains. They thus passed their lives between heaven
and earth, with two seas for their horizon. Disquieted by fear of the
corsairs, and by the war-cries whose echoes reached even to them, they
turned their thoughts toward the future. The ages of great terror are
also the ages of great hope; it is to the captivity of Babylon that we
owe, with the second part of Isaiah, those pictures of the future which
have not yet ceased to charm the soul of man; Nero's persecutions gave
us the Apocalypse of St. John, and the paroxysms of the twelfth century
the eternal Gospel.

Converted after a life of dissipation, Gioacchino di Fiore travelled
extensively in the Holy Land, Greece, and Constantinople. Returning to
Italy he began, though a layman, to preach in the outskirts of Rende and
Cosenza. Later on he joined the Cistercians of Cortale, near Catanzaro,
and there took vows. Shortly after elected abbot of the monastery in
spite of refusal and even flight, he was seized after a few years with
the nostalgia of solitude, and sought from Pope Lucius III. a discharge
from his functions (1181), that he might consecrate all his time to the
works which he had in mind. The pope granted his request, and even
permitted him to go wherever he might deem best in the interest of his
wo