CHAPTER XX.
FRANCIS'S WILL AND DEATH, 333
CRITICAL STUDY OF THE SOURCES, 347
APPENDIX.
CRITICAL STUDY OF THE STIGMATA AND OF THE INDULGENCE
OF AUGUST 2, 433
* * * * *
INTRODUCTION
In the renascence of history which is in a manner the characteristic of
our time, the Middle Ages have been the object of peculiar fondness with
both criticism and erudition. We rummage all the dark corners of the
libraries, we bring old parchments to light, and in the zeal and ardor
we put into our search there is an indefinable touch of piety.
These efforts to make the past live again reveal not merely our
curiosity, or the lack of power to grapple with great philosophic
problems, they are a token of wisdom and modesty; we are beginning to
feel that the present has its roots in the past, and that in the fields
of politics and religion, as in others, slow, modest, persevering toil
is that which has the best results.
There is also a token of love in this. We love our ancestors of five or
six centuries ago, and we mingle not a little emotion and gratitude with
this love. So, if one may hope everything of a son who loves his
parents, we must not despair of an age that loves history.
The Middle Ages form an organic period in the life of humanity. Like all
powerful organisms the period began with a long and mysterious
gestation; it had its youth, its manhood, its decrepitude. The end of
the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth mark its full
expansion; it is the twentieth year of life, with its poetry, its
dreams, its enthusiasm, its generosity, its daring. Love overflowed with
vigor; men everywhere had but one desire--to devote themselves to some
great and holy cause.
Curiously enough, though Europe was more parcelled out than ever, it
felt a new thrill run through its entire extent. There was what we might
call a state of European consciousness.
In ordinary periods each people has its own interests, its tendencies,
its tears, and its joys; but let a time of crisis come, and the true
unity of the human family will suddenly make itself felt with a strength
never before suspected. Each body of water has its own currents, but
when the hurricane is abroad they mysteriously intermingle, and from the
ocean to the remotest mountain lake the same tremor will upheave them
all.
It was thus in '89, it was thus also in the thirteenth century.
Never was there less of frontier, never, either before or since, such a
mingling of nationalities; and at the present day, with all our highways
and railroads, the people live more apart.[1]
The great movement of thought of the thirteenth century is above all a
religious movement, presenting a double character--it is popular and it
is laic. It comes out from the heart of the people, and it looks athwart
many uncertainties at nothing less than wresting the sacred things from
the hands of the clergy.
The conservatives of our time who turn to the thirteenth century as to
the golden age of authoritative faith make a strange mistake. If it is
especially the century of saints, it is also that of heretics. We shall
soon see that the two words are not so contradictory as might appear; it
is enough for the moment to point out that the Church had never been
more powerful nor more threatened.
There was a genuine attempt at a religious revolution, which, if it had
succeeded, would have ended in a universal priesthood, in the
proclamation of the rights of the individual conscience.
The effort failed, and though later on the Revolution made us all kings,
neither the thirteenth century nor the Reformation was able to make us
all priests. Herein, no doubt, lies the essential contradiction of our
lives and that which periodically puts our national institutions in
peril. Politically emancipated, we are not morally or religiously
free.[2]
The thirteenth century with juvenile ardor undertook this revolution,
which has not yet reached its end. In the north of Europe it became
incarnate in cathedrals, in the south, in saints.
The cathedrals were the lay churches of the thirteenth century. Built by
the people for the people, they were originally the true common house of
our old cities. Museums, granaries, chambers of commerce, halls of
justice, depositories of archives, and even labor exchanges, they were
all these at once.
That art of the Middle Ages which Victor Hugo and Viollet-le-Duc have
taught us to understand and love was the visible expression of the
enthusiasm of a people who were achieving communal liberty. Very far
from being the gift of the Church, it was in its beginning an
unconscious protest against the hieratic, impassive, esoteric art of the
religious orders. We find only laymen in the long list of master-workmen
and painters who have left us the innumerable Gothic monuments which
stud the soil of Europe. Those artists of genius who, like those of
Greece, knew how to speak to the populace without being common, were for
the most part humble workmen; they found their inspiration not in the
formulas of the masters of monastic art, but in constant communion with
the very soul of the nation. Therefore this renascence, in its most
profound features, concerns less the archæology or the architecture than
the history of a country.
While in the northern countries the people were building their own
churches, and finding in their enthusiasm an art which was new,
original, complete, in the south, above the official, clerical
priesthood of divine right they were greeting and consecrating a new
priesthood, that of the saints.
The priest of the thirteenth century is the antithesis of the saint, he
is almost always his enemy. Separated by the holy unction from the rest
of mankind, inspiring awe as the representative of an all-powerful God,
able by a few signs to perform unheard-of mysteries, with a word to
change bread into flesh and wine into blood, he appeared as a sort of
idol which can do all things for or against you and before which you
have only to adore and tremble.
The saint, on the contrary, was one whose mission was proclaimed by
nothing in his apparel, but whose life and words made themselves felt in
all hearts and consciences; he was one who, with no cure of souls in the
Church, felt himself suddenly impelled to lift up his voice. The child
of the people, he knew all their material and moral woes, and their
mysterious echo sounded in his own heart. Like the ancient prophet of
Israel, he heard an imperious voice saying to him: "Go and speak to the
children of my people." "Ah, Lord God, I am but a child, I know not how
to speak." "Say not, I am but a child, for thou shalt go to all those to
whom I shall send thee. Behold I have set thee to-day as a strong city,
a pillar of iron and a wall of brass against the kings of Judah, against
its princes and against its priests."
These thirteenth-century saints were in fact true prophets. Apostles
like St. Paul, not as the result of a canonical consecration, but by the
interior order of the Spirit, they were the witnesses of liberty against
authority.
The Calabrian seer, Gioacchino di Fiore, hailed the new-born revolution;
he believed in its success and proclaimed to the wondering world the
advent of a new ministry. He was mistaken.
When the priest sees himself vanquished by the prophet he suddenly
changes his method. He takes him under his protection, he introduces his
harangues into the sacred canon, he throws over his shoulders the
priestly chasuble. The days pass on, the years roll by, and the moment
comes when the heedless crowd no longer distinguishes between them, and
it ends by believing the prophet to be an emanation of the clergy.
This is one of the bitterest ironies of history.
Francis of Assisi is pre-eminently the saint of the Middle Ages. Owing
nothing to church or school he was truly _theodidact_,[3] and if he
perhaps did not perceive the revolutionary bearing of his preaching, he
at least always refused to be ordained priest. He divined the
superiority of the spiritual priesthood.
The charm of his life is that, thanks to reliable documents, we find the
man behind the wonder worker. We find in him not merely noble actions,
we find in him a life in the true meaning of the word; I mean, we feel
in him both development and struggle.
How mistaken are the annals of the Saints in representing him as from
the very cradle surrounded with aureole and nimbus! As if the finest and
most manly of spectacles were not that of the man who conquers his soul
hour after hour, fighting first against himself, against the suggestions
of egoism, idleness, discouragement, then at the moment when he might
believe himself victorious, finding in the champions attracted by his
ideal those who are destined if not to bring about its complete ruin, at
least to give it its most terrible blows. Poor Francis! The last years
of his life were indeed a _via dolorosa_ as painful as that where his
master sank down under the weight of the cross; for it is still a joy to
die for one's ideal, but what bitter pain to look on in advance at the
apotheosis of one's body, while seeing one's soul--I would say his
thought--misunderstood and frustrated.
If we ask for the origins of his idea we find them exclusively among the
common people of his time; he is the incarnation of the Italian soul at
the beginning of the thirteenth century, as Dante was to be its
incarnation a hundred years later.
He was of the people and the people recognized themselves in him. He had
their poetry and their aspirations, he espoused their claims, and the
very name of his institute had at first a political signification: in
Assisi as in most other Italian towns there were _majores_ and
_minores_, the _popolo grasso_ and the _popolo minuto_; he resolutely
placed himself among the latter. This political side of his apostolate
needs to be clearly apprehended if we would understand its amazing
success and the wholly unique character of the Franciscan movement in
its beginning.
As to its attitude toward the Church, it was that of filial obedience.
This may perhaps appear strange at first as regards an unauthorized
preacher who comes speaking to the world in the name of his own
immediate personal inspiration. But did not most of the men of '89
believe themselves good and loyal subjects of Louis XVI.?
The Church was to our ancestors what the fatherland is to us; we may
wish to remodel its government, overturn its administration, change its
constitution, but we do not think ourselves less good patriots for that.
In the same way, in an age of simple faith when religious beliefs seemed
to be in the very fibre and flesh of humanity, Dante, without ceasing to
be a good Catholic, could attack the clergy and the court of Rome with a
violence that has never been surpassed. St. Francis so surely believed
that the Church had become unfaithful to her mission that he could speak
in his symbolic language of the widowhood of his Lady Poverty, who from
Christ's time to his own had found no husband. How could he better have
declared his purposes or revealed his dreams?
What he purposed was far more than the foundation of an order, and it is
to do him great wrong thus to restrict his endeavor. He longed for a
true awakening of the Church in the name of the evangelical ideal which
he had regained. All Europe awoke with a start when it heard of these
penitents from a little Umbrian town. It was reported that they had
craved a strange privilege from the court of Rome: that of possessing
nothing. Men saw them pass by, earning their bread by the labor of their
hands, accepting only the bare necessities of bodily sustenance from
them to whom they had given with lavish hands the bread of life. The
people lifted up their heads, breathing in with deep inspirations the
airs of a springtime upon which was already floating the perfume of new
flowers.
Here and there in the world there are many souls capable of all heroism,
if only they can see before them a true leader. St. Francis became for
these the guide they had longed for, and whatever was best in humanity
at that time leaped to follow in his footsteps.
This movement, which was destined to result in the constitution of a new
family of monks, was in the beginning anti-monastic. It is not rare for
history to have similar contradictions to record. The meek Galilean who
preached the religion of a personal revelation, without ceremonial or
dogmatic law, triumphed only on condition of being conquered, and of
permitting his words of spirit and life to be confiscated by a church
essentially dogmatic and sacerdotal.
In the same way the Franciscan movement was originally, if not the
protest of the Christian consciousness against monachism, at least the
recognition of an ideal singularly higher than that of the clergy of
that time. Let us picture to ourselves the Italy of the beginning of the
thirteenth century with its divisions, its perpetual warfare, its
depopulated country districts, the impossibility of tilling the fields
except in the narrow circle which the garrisons of the towns might
protect; all these cities from the greatest to the least occupied in
watching for the most favorable moment for falling upon and pillaging
their neighbors; sieges terminated by unspeakable atrocities, and after
all this, famine, speedily followed by pestilence to complete the
devastation. Then let us picture to ourselves the rich Benedictine
abbeys, veritable fortresses set upon the hill-tops, whence they seemed
to command all the surrounding plains. There was nothing surprising in
their prosperity. Shielded by their inviolability, they were in these
disordered times the only refuge of peaceful souls and timid hearts.[4]
The monks were in great majority deserters from life, who for motives
entirely aside from religion had taken refuge behind the only walls
which at this period were secure.
Overlook this as we may, forget as we may the demoralization and
ignorance of the inferior clergy, the simony and the vices of the
prelates, the coarseness and avarice of the monks, judging the Church of
the thirteenth century only by those of her sons who do her the most
honor; none the less are these the anchorites who flee into the desert
to escape from wars and vices, pausing only when they are very sure that
none of the world's noises will interrupt their meditations. Sometimes
they will draw away with them hundreds of imitators, to the solitudes of
Clairvaux, of the Chartreuse, of Vallombrosa, of the Camaldoli; but even
when they are a multitude they are alone; for they are dead to the world
and to their brethren. Each cell is a desert, on whose threshold they
cry
O beata solitudo.
O sola beatitudo.
The book of the Imitation is the picture of all that is purest in this
cloistered life.
But is this abstinence from action truly Christian?
No, replied St. Francis. He for his part would do like Jesus, and we may
say that his life is an imitation of Christ singularly more real than
that of Thomas à Kempis.
Jesus went indeed into the desert, but only that he might find in prayer
and communion with the heavenly Father the inspiration and strength
necessary for keeping up the struggle against evil. Far from avoiding
the multitude, he sought them out to enlighten, console, and convert
them.
This is what St. Francis desired to imitate. More than once he felt the
seduction of the purely contemplative life, but each time his own spirit
warned him that this was only a disguised selfishness; that one saves
oneself only in saving others.
When he saw suffering, wretchedness, corruption, instead of fleeing he
stopped to bind up, to heal, feeling in his heart the surging of waves
of compassion. He not only preached love to others; he himself was
ravished with it; he sang it, and what was of greater value, he lived
it.
There had indeed been preachers of love before his day, but most
generally they had appealed to the lowest selfishness. They had thought
to triumph by proving that in fact to give to others is to put one's
money out at a usurious interest. "Give to the poor," said St. Peter
Chrysologus,[5] "that you may give to yourself; give him a crumb in
order to receive a loaf; give him a shelter to receive heaven."
There was nothing like this in Francis; his charity is not selfishness,
it is love. He went, not to the whole, who need no physician, but to the
sick, the forgotten, the disdained. He dispensed the treasures of his
heart according to the need and reserved the best of himself for the
poorest and the most lost, for lepers and thieves.
The gaps in his education were of marvellous service to him. More
learned, the formal logic of the schools would have robbed him of that
flower of simplicity which is the great charm of his life; he would have
seen the whole extent of the sore of the Church, and would no doubt have
despaired of healing it. If he had known the ecclesiastical discipline
he would have felt obliged to observe it; but thanks to his ignorance he
could often violate it without knowing it,[6] and be a heretic quite
unawares.
We can now determine to what religious family St. Francis belongs.
Looking at the question from a somewhat high standpoint we see that in
the last analysis minds, like religious systems, are to be found in two
great families, standing, so to say, at the two poles of thought. These
two poles are only mathematical points, they do not exist in concrete
reality; but for all that we can set them down on the chart of
philosophic and moral ideas.
There are religions which look toward divinity and religions which look
toward man. Here again the line of demarcation between the two families
is purely ideal and artificial; they often so mingle and blend with one
another that we have much difficulty in distinguishing them, especially
in the intermediate zone in which our civilization finds its place; but
if we go toward the poles we shall find their characteristics growing
gradually distinct.
In the religions which look toward divinity all effort is concentrated
on worship, and especially on sacrifice. The end aimed at is a change in
the disposition of the gods. They are mighty kings whose support or
favor one must purchase by gifts.
Most pagan religions belong to this category and pharisaic Judaism as
well. This is also the tendency of certain Catholics of the old school
for whom the great thing is to appease God or to buy the protection of
the Virgin and the saints by means of prayers, candles, and masses.
The other religions look toward man; their effort is directed to the
heart and conscience with the purpose of transforming them. Sacrifice
disappears, or rather it changes from the exterior to the interior. God
is conceived of as a father, always ready to welcome him who comes to
him. Conversion, perfection, sanctification become the pre-eminent
religious acts. Worship and prayer cease to be incantations and become
reflection, meditation, virile effort; while in religions of the first
class the clergy have an essential part, as intermediaries between
heaven and earth, in those of the second they have none, each conscience
entering into direct relations with God.
It was reserved to the prophets of Israel to formulate, with a precision
before unknown, the starting-point of spiritual worship.
Bring no more vain offerings;
I have a horror of incense,
Your new moons, your Sabbaths, and your assemblies;
When you multiply prayers I will not hearken.
Your hands are full of blood,
Wash you, make you clean,
Put away from before my eyes the evil of your ways,
Cease to do evil,
Learn to do well.[7]
With Isaiah these vehement apostrophes are but flashes of genius, but
with Jesus the interior change becomes at once the principle and the end
of the religious life. His promises were not for those who were right
with the ceremonial law, or who offered the greatest number of
sacrifices, but for the pure in heart, for men of good will.
These considerations are not perhaps without their use in showing the
spiritual ancestry of the Saint of Assisi.
For him, as for St. Paul and St. Augustine, conversion was a radical and
complete change, the act of will by which man wrests himself from the
slavery of sin and places himself under the yoke of divine authority.
Thenceforth prayer, become a necessary act of life, ceases to be a magic
formula; it is an impulse of the heart, it is reflection and meditation
rising above the commonplaces of this mortal life, to enter into the
mystery of the divine will and conform itself to it; it is the act of
the atom which understands its littleness, but which desires, though
only by a single note, to be in harmony with the divine symphony.
_Ecce adsum Domine, ut faciam voluntatem tuam._
When we reach these heights we belong not to a sect, but to humanity; we
are like those wonders of nature which the accident of circumstances has
placed upon the territory of this or that people, but which belong to
all the world, because in fact they belong to no one, or rather they are
the common and inalienable property of the entire human race. Homer,
Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Michael Angelo, Rembrandt belong to us all
as much as the ruins of Athens or Rome, or, rather, they belong to
those who love them most and understand them best.
But that which is a truism, so far as men of genius in the domain of
imagination or thought are concerned, still appears like a paradox when
we speak of men of religious genius. The Church has laid such absolute
claim to them that she has created in her own favor a sort of right. It
cannot be that this arbitrary confiscation shall endure forever. To
prevent it we have not to perform an act of negation or demolition: let
us leave to the chapels their statues and their relics, and far from
belittling the saints, let us make their true grandeur shine forth.
* * * * *
It is time to say a few words concerning the difficulties of the work
here presented to the public. History always embraces but a very feeble
part of the reality: ignorant, she is like the stories children tell of
the events that have occurred before their eyes; learned, she reminds us
of a museum organized with all the modern improvements. Instead of
making you see nature with its external covering, its diffuse life, its
mysterious echoes in your own heart, they offer you a herbarium.
If it is difficult to narrate an ordinary event of our own time, it is
far more so to describe the great crises where restless humanity is
seeking its true path.
The first duty of the historian is to forget his own time and country
and become the sympathetic and interested contemporary of what he
relates; but if it is difficult to give oneself the heart of a Greek or
a Roman, it is infinitely more so to give oneself a heart of the
thirteenth century. I have said that at that period the Middle Age was
twenty years old, and the feelings of the twentieth year are, if not the
most fugitive, at least the most difficult to note down. Everyone knows
that it is impossible to recall the feelings of youth with the same
clearness as those of childhood or mature age. Doubtless we may have
external facts in the memory, but we cannot recall the sensations and
the sentiments; the confused forces which seek to move us are then all
at work at once, and to speak the language of beyond the Rhine, it is
_the essentially phenomenal hour of the phenomena that we are;_
everything in us crosses, intermingles, collides, in desperate conflict:
it is a time of diabolic or divine excitement. Let a few years pass, and
nothing in the world can make us live those hours over again. Where was
once a volcano, we perceive only a heap of blackened ashes, and
scarcely, at long intervals, will a chance meeting, a sound, a word,
awaken memory and unseal the fountain of recollection; and even then it
is only a flash; we have had but a glimpse and all has sunk back into
shadow and silence.
We find the same difficulty when we try to take note of the fiery
enthusiasms of the thirteenth century, its poetic inspirations, its
amorous and chaste visions--all this is thrown up against a background
of coarseness, wretchedness, corruption, and folly.
The men of that time had all the vices except triviality, all the
virtues except moderation; they were either ruffians or saints. Life was
rude enough to kill feeble organisms; and thus characters had an energy
unknown to-day. It was forever necessary to provide beforehand against a
thousand dangers, to take those sudden resolutions in which one risks
his life. Open the chronicle of Fra Salimbeni and you will be shocked to
find that the largest place is taken up with the account of the annual
expeditions of Parma against the neighboring cities, or of the
neighboring cities against Parma. What would it have been if this
chronicle, instead of being written by a monk of uncommonly open mind, a
lover of music, at certain times an ardent Joachimite, an indefatigable
traveller, had been written by a warrior? And this is not all; these
wars between city and city were complicated with civil dissensions,
plots were hatched periodically, conspirators were massacred if they
were discovered, or massacred and exiled others in their turn if they
were triumphant.[8] When we picture to ourselves this state of things
dominated by the grand struggles of the papacy against the empire,
heretics, and infidels, we may understand how difficult it is to
describe such a time.
The imagination being haunted by horrible or entrancing pictures like
those of the frescos in the _Campo Santo_ of Pisa, men were always
thinking of heaven and hell; they informed themselves about them with
the feverish curiosity of emigrants, who pass their days on shipboard in
trying to picture that spot in America where in a few days they will
pitch their tent.
Every monk of any notoriety must have gone through this. Dante's poem is
not an isolated work; it is the noblest result of a condition which had
given birth to hundreds of compositions, and Alighieri had little more
to do than to co-ordinate the works of his predecessors and vivify them
with the breath of his own genius.
The unsettled state of men's minds was unimaginable. That unhealthy
curiosity which lies at the bottom of the human heart, and which at the
present day impels men to seek for refined and even perverse enjoyments,
impelled men of that time to devotions which seem like a defiance to
common sense.
Never had hearts been shaken with such terrors, nor ever thrilled with
such radiant hopes. The noblest hymns of the liturgy, the _Stabat_ and
the _Dies Iræ_, come to us from the thirteenth century, and we may well
say that never has the human plaint been more agonized.
When we look through history, not to find accounts of battles or of the
succession of dynasties, but to try to grasp the evolution of ideas and
feelings, when we seek above all to discover the heart of man and of
epochs, we perceive, on arriving at the thirteenth century, that a fresh
wind has blown over the world, the human lyre has a new string, the
lowest, the most profound; one which sings of woes and hopes to which
the ancient world had not vibrated.
In the breast of the men of that time we think sometimes we feel the
beating of a woman's heart; they have exquisite sentiments, delightful
inspirations, with absurd terrors, fantastic angers, infernal cruelties.
Weakness and fear often make them insincere; they have the idea of the
grand, the beautiful, the ugly, but that of order is wanting; they fast
or feast; the notion of the laws of nature, so deeply graven in our own
minds, is to them entirely a stranger; the words possible and impossible
have for them no meaning. Some give themselves to God, others sell
themselves to the devil, but not one feels himself strong enough to walk
alone, strong enough to have no need to hold on by some one's skirt.
Peopled with spirits and demons nature appeared to them singularly
animated; in her presence they have all the emotions which a child
experiences at night before the trees on the roadside and the vague
forms of the rocks.
Unfortunately, our language is a very imperfect instrument for rendering
all this; it is neither musical nor flexible; since the seventeenth
century it has been deemed seemly to keep one's emotions to oneself, and
the old words which served to note states of the soul have fallen into
neglect; the Imitation and the Fioretti have become untranslatable.
More than this, in a history like the present one, we must give a large
place to the Italian spirit; it is evident that in a country where they
call a chapel _basilica_ and a tiny house _palazzo_, or in speaking to a
seminarist say "Your Reverence," words have not the same value as on
this side of the Alps.
The Italians have an imagination which enlarges and simplifies. They see
the forms and outlines of men and things more than they grasp their
spirit. What they most admire in Michael Angelo is gigantic forms, noble
and proud attitudes, while we better understand his secret thoughts,
hidden sorrows, groans, and sighs.
Place before their eyes a picture by Rembrandt, and more often than not
it will appear to them ugly; its charm cannot be caught at a glance as
in those of their artists; to see it you must examine it, make an
effort, and with them effort is the beginning of pain.
Do not ask them, then, to understand the pathos of things, to be touched
by the mysterious and almost fanciful emotion which northern hearts
discover and enjoy in the works of the Amsterdam master. No, instead of
a forest they want a few trees, standing out clearly against the
horizon; instead of a multitude swarming in the penumbra of reality, a
few personages, larger than nature, forming harmonious groups in an
ideal temple.
The genius of a people[9] is all of a piece: they apply to history the
same processes that they apply to the arts. While the Germanic spirit
considers events rather in their evolution, in their complex becoming,
the Italian spirit takes them at a given moment, overlooks the shadows,
the clouds, the mists, everything that makes the line indistinct, brings
out the contour sharply, and thus constructs a very lucid story, which
is a delight to the eyes, but which is little more than a symbol of the
reality.
At other times it takes a man, separates him from the unnamed crowd, and
by a labor often unconscious, makes him the ideal type of a whole
epoch.[10]
Certainly there is in every people a tendency to give themselves a
circle of divinities and heroes who are, so to say, the incarnation of
its instincts; but generally that requires the long labor of centuries.
The Italian character will not suffer this slow action; as soon as it
recognizes a man it says so, it even shouts it aloud if that is
necessary, and makes him enter upon immortality while still alive. Thus
legend almost confounds itself with history, and it becomes very
difficult to reduce men to their true proportions.
We must not, then, ask too much of history. The more beautiful is the
dawn, the less one can describe it. The most beautiful things in nature,
the flower and the butterfly, should be touched only by delicate hands.
The effort here made to indicate the variegated, wavering tints which
form the atmosphere in which St. Francis lived is therefore of very
uncertain success. It was perhaps presumptuous to undertake it.
Happily we are no longer in the time when historians thought they had
done the right thing when they had reduced everything to its proper
size, contenting themselves with denying or omitting everything in the
life of the heroes of humanity which rises above the level of our
every-day experience.
No doubt Francis did not meet on the road to Sienna three pure and
gentle virgins come from heaven to greet him; the devil did not overturn
rocks for the sake of terrifying him; but when we deny these visions and
apparitions, we are victims of an error graver, perhaps, than that of
those who affirm them.
The first time that I was at Assisi I arrived in the middle of the
night. When the sun rose, flooding everything with warmth and light, the
old basilica[11] seemed suddenly to quiver; one might have said that it
wished to speak and sing. Giotto's frescos, but now invisible, awoke to
a strange life, you might have thought them painted the evening before
so much alive they were; everything was moving without awkwardness or
jar.
I returned six months later. A scaffold had been put up in the middle of
the nave; upon it an art critic was examining the paintings, and as the
day was overcast he threw upon the walls the beams of a lamp with a
reflector. Then you saw arms thrown out, faces grimacing, without unity,
without harmony; the most exquisite figures took on something fantastic
and grotesque.
He came down triumphant, with a portfolio stuffed with sketches; here a
foot, there a muscle, farther on a bit of face, and I could not refrain
from musing on the frescos as I had seen them bathed in sunlight.
The sun and the lamp are both deceivers; they transform what they show;
but if the truth must be told I own to my preference for the falsehoods
of the sun.
History is a landscape, and like those of nature it is continually
changing. Two persons who look at it at the same time do not find in it
the same charm, and you yourself, if you had it continually before your
eyes, would never see it twice alike. The general lines are permanent,
but it needs only a cloud to hide the most important ones, as it needs
only a jet of light to bring out such or such a detail and give it a
false value.
When I began this page the sun was disappearing behind the rains of the
Castle of Crussol and the splendors of the sunset gave it a shining
aureola; the light flooded everything, and you no longer saw anywhere
the damage which wars have inflicted upon the old feudal manor. I
looked, almost thinking I could perceive at the window the figure of the
chatelaine ... Twilight has come, and now there is nothing up there but
crumbling walls, a discrowned tower, nothing but ruins and rubbish,
which seem to beg for pity.
It is the same with the landscapes of history. Narrow minds cannot
accommodate themselves to these perpetual transformations: they want an
objective history in which the author will study the people as a chemist
studies a body. It is very possible that there may be laws for historic
evolution and social transformations as exact as those of chemical
combinations, and we must hope that in the end they will be discovered;
but for the present there is no purely objective truth of history.
To write history we must think it, and to think it is to transform it.
Within a few years, it is true, men have believed they had found the
secret of objectivity, in the publication of original documents. This is
a true progress which renders inestimable service, but here again we
must not deceive ourselves as to its significance. All the documents on
an epoch or an event cannot usually be published, a selection must be
made, and in it will necessarily appear the turn of mind of him who
makes it. Let us admit that all that can be found is published; but
alas, the most unusual movements have generally the fewest documents.
Take, for instance, the religious history of the Middle Ages: it is
already a pretty delicate task to collect official documents, such as
bulls, briefs, conciliary canons, monastic constitutions, etc., but do
these documents contain all the life of the Church? Much is still
wanting, and to my mind the movements which secretly agitated the masses
are much more important, although to testify to them we have only a few
fragments.
Poor heretics, they were not only imprisoned and burned, but their books
were destroyed and everything that spoke of them; and more than one
historian, finding scarcely a trace of them in his heaps of documents,
forgets these prophets with their strange visions, these poet-monks who
from the depths of their cells made the world to thrill and the papacy
to tremble.
Objective history is then a utopia. We create God in our own image, and
we impress the mark of our personality in places where we least expect
to find it again.
But by dint of talking about the tribunal of history we have made most
authors think that they owe to themselves and their readers definitive
and irrevocable judgments.
It is always easier to pronounce a sentence than to wait, to reserve
one's opinion, to re-examine. The crowd which has put itself out to be
present at a trial is almost always furious with the judges when they
reserve the case for further information; its mind is so made that it
requires precision in things which will bear it the least; it puts
questions right and left, as children do; if you appear to hesitate or
to be embarrassed you are lost in its estimation, you are evidently only
an ignoramus.
But perhaps below the Areopagites, obliged by their functions to
pronounce sentence, there is place at the famous tribunal for a simple
spectator who has come in by accident. He has made out a brief and would
like very simply to tell his neighbors his opinion.
This, then, is not a history _ad probandum_, to use the ancient formula.
Is this to say that I have only desired to give the reader a moment of
diversion? That would be to understand my thought very ill. In the grand
spectacles of history as in those of nature there is something divine;
from it our minds and hearts gain a virtue at once pacifying and
encouraging, we experience the salutary sensation of littleness, and
seeing the beauties and the sadnesses of the past we learn better how to
judge the present hour.
In one of the frescos of the Upper Church of Assisi, Giotto has
represented St. Clara and her companions coming out from St. Damian all
in tears, to kiss their spiritual father's corpse as it is being carried
to its last home. With an artist's liberty he has made the chapel a rich
church built of precious marbles.
Happily the real St. Damian is still there, nestled under some
olive-trees like a lark under the heather; it still has its ill-made
walls of irregular stones, like those which bound the neighboring
fields. Which is the more beautiful, the ideal temple of the artist's
fancy, or the poor chapel of reality? No heart will be in doubt.
Francis's official historians have done for his biography what Giotto
did for his little sanctuary. In general they have done him ill-service.
Their embellishments have hidden the real St. Francis, who was, in fact,
infinitely nobler than they have made him to be. Ecclesiastical writers
appear to make a great mistake in thus adorning the lives of their
heroes, and only mentioning their edifying features. They thus give
occasion, even to the most devout, to suspect their testimony. Besides,
by thus surrounding their saints with light they make them superhuman
creatures, having nothing in common with us; they are privileged
characters, marked with the divine seal; they are, as the litanies say,
vials of election, into which God has poured the sweetest perfumes;
their sanctity is revealed almost in spite of themselves; they are born
saints as others are born kings or slaves, their life is set out against
the golden background of a tryptich, and not against the sombre
background of reality.
By such means the saints, perhaps, gain something in the respect of the
superstitious; but their lives lose something of virtue and of
communicable strength. Forgetting that they were men like ourselves, we
no longer hear in our conscience the command, "Go and do likewise."
It is, then, a work of piety to seek behind the legend for the history.
Is it presumptuous to ask our readers to try to understand the
thirteenth century and love St. Francis? They will be amply rewarded for
the effort, and will soon find an unexpected charm in these too meagre
landscapes, these incorporate souls, these sickly imaginations which
will pass before their eyes. Love is the true key of history.
A book has always a great number of authors, and the following pages owe
much to the researches of others; I have tried in the notes to show the
whole value of these debts.
I have also had colaborers to whom it will be more difficult for me to
express my gratitude. I refer to the librarians of the libraries of
Italy and their assistants; it is impossible to name them all, their
faces are better known to me than their names, but I would here say that
during long months passed in the various collections of the Peninsula,
all, even to the most humble employees, have shown a tireless
helpfulness even at those periods of the year when the number of
attendants was the smallest.
Professor Alessandro Leto, who, barely recovered from a grave attack of
influenza, kindly served as my guide among the archives of Assisi,
deserves a very particular mention. To the Syndic and municipality of
that city I desire also to express my gratitude.
I cannot close without a warm remembrance to the spiritual sons of St.
Francis dispersed in the mountains of Umbria and Tuscany.
Dear dwellers in St. Damian, Portiuncula, the Carceri, the Verna, Monte
Colombo, you perhaps remember the strange pilgrim who, though he wore
neither the frock nor the cord, used to talk with you of the Seraphic
Father with as much love as the most pious Franciscan; you used to be
surprised at his eagerness to see everything, to look at everything, to
thread all the unexplored paths. You often tried to restrain him by
telling him that there was not the smallest relic, the most meagre
indulgence in the far-away grottos to which he was dragging you, but you
always ended by going with him, thinking that none but a Frenchman could
be possessed by a devotion so fervent and so imprudent.
Thank you, pious anchorites of Greccio, thank you for the bread that you
went out and begged when I arrived at your hermitage benumbed with cold
and hunger. If you read these lines, read here my gratitude and also a
little admiration. You are not all saints, but nearly all of you have
hours of saintliness, flights of pure love.
If some pages of this book give you pain, turn them over quickly; let me
think that others of them will give you pleasure, and will make the name
you bear, if possible, still more precious to you than it now is.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The mendicant orders were in their origin a true
_International_. When in the spring of 1216 St. Dominic
assembled his friars at Notre Dame de la Prouille, they were
found to be sixteen in number, and among them Castilians,
Navarese, Normans, French, Languedocians, and even English and
Germans.
Heretics travelled all over Europe, and nowhere do we find them
checked by the diversity of languages. Arnold of Brescia, for
example, the famous Tribune of Rome, appeared in France and
Switzerland and in the heart of Germany.
[2] The Reformation only substituted the authority of the book
for that of the priest; it is a change of dynasty and nothing
more. As to the majority of those who to-day call themselves
free-thinkers, they confuse religious freedom with irreligion;
they choose not to see that in religion as in politics, between
a royalty based on divine right and anarchy there is room for a
government which may be as strong as the first and a better
guarantee of freedom than the second. The spirit of the older
time put God outside of the world; the sovereignty outside of
the people; authority outside of the conscience. The spirit of
the new times has the contrary tendency: it denies neither God
nor sovereignty nor authority, but it sees them where they
really are.
[3] _Nemo ostendebat mihi quod deberem facere, sed ipse
Altissimus revelavit mihi quod deberem vivere secundem formam
sancti Evangelii._ Testamentum Fr.
[4] The wealthiest monasteries of France are of the twelfth
century or were enlarged at that time: Arles, S. Gilles, S.
Sernin, Cluny, Vézelay, Brioude, Issoire, Paray-le-Monial. The
same was the case in Italy.
Down to the year 1000, 1,108 monasteries had been founded in
France. The eleventh century saw the birth of 326 and the
twelfth of 702. The convents of Mount Athos in their present
state give us a very accurate notion of the great monasteries of
Europe at the close of the twelfth century.
[5] St. Petrus Chrysologus, sermo viii., de jejunio et
eleemosyna. _Da pauperi ut des tibi: da micam ut accipias totum
panem; da tectum, accipe coelum._
[6] By what right did he begin to preach? By what right did he,
a mere deacon, admit to profession and cut off the hair of a
young girl of eighteen? That is an episcopal function, one which
can only devolve even upon priests by an express commission.
[7] Isaiah i. 10-17. Cf. Joel 2, Psalm 50.
[8] The chronicles of Orvieto (_Archivio, storico italiano_, t.
i., of 1889, pp. 7 and following) are nothing more than a list,
as melancholy as they are tedious of wars, which, during the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, all the places of that
region carried on, from the greatest to the smallest.
[9] Do not forget that in the thirteenth century Italy was not a
mere geographical expression. It was of all the countries of
Europe the one which, notwithstanding its partitions, had the
clearest consciousness of its unity. The expression _profectus
et honor Italiæ_ often appeared from the pen of Innocent III.
See, for instance, the bull of April 16, 1198, _Mirari cogimur_,
addressed particularly to the Assisans.
[10] Note what the Fioretti say of Brother Bernard: "_Stava solo
sulle cime dei monti altissimi contemplando le cose celesti._"
Fior., 28. The learned historian of Assisi, Mr. Cristofani, has
used similar expressions; speaking of St. Francis, he says:
"_Nuovo Christo in somma e pero degno d'essere riguardoto come
la piu gigantesca, la piu splendida, la piu cara tra le grandi
figure campeggianti nell' aere del medio evo_" (_Storia
d'Assisi_, t. i., p. 70, ed. of 1885).
[11] It remains open all night.
* * * * *
LIFE OF ST. FRANCIS
* * * * *