CHAPTER XI
THE INNER MAN AND WONDER-WORKING
The missionary journey, undertaken under the encouragement of St. Clara
and so poetically inaugurated by the sermon to the birds of Bevagna,
appears to have been a continual triumph for Francis.[1] Legend
definitively takes possession of him; whether he will or no, miracles
burst forth under his footsteps; quite unawares to himself the objects
of which he has made use produce marvellous effects; folk come out from
the villages in procession to meet him, and the biographer gives us to
hear the echo of those religious festivals of Italy--merry, popular,
noisy, bathed in sunshine--which so little resemble the fastidiously
arranged festivals of northern peoples.
From Alviano Francis doubtless went to Narni, one of the most charming
little towns in Umbria, busy with building a cathedral after the
conquest of their communal liberties. He seems to have had a sort of
predilection for this city as well as for its surrounding villages.[2]
From thence he seems to have plunged into the valley of Rieti, where
Greccio, Fonte-Colombo, San Fabiano, Sant-Eleuthero, Poggio-Buscone
retain even stronger traces of him than the environs of Assisi.
Thomas of Celano gives us no particulars of the route followed, but, on
the other hand, he goes at length into the success of the apostle in the
March of Ancona, and especially at Ascoli. Did the people of these
districts still remember the appeals which Francis and Egidio had made
to them six years before (1209), or must we believe that they were
peculiarly prepared to understand the new gospel? However this may be,
nowhere else was a like enthusiasm shown; the effect of the sermons was
so great that some thirty neophytes at once received the habit of the
Order.
The March of Ancona ought to be held to be the Franciscan province _par
excellence_. There are Offida, San-Severino, Macerata, Fornaro, Cingoli,
Fermo, Massa, and twenty other hermitages where, during more than a
century, poverty was to find its heralds and its martyrs; from thence
came Giovanni della Verna, Jacopo di Massa, Conrad di Offida, Angelo
Clareno, and those legions of nameless revolutionists, dreamers, and
prophets, who since the _extirpés_ in 1244 by the general of the Order,
Crescentius of Jesi, never ceased to make new recruits, and by their
proud resistance to all powers filled one of the finest pages of
religious history in the Middle Ages.
This success, which bathed the soul of Francis with joy, did not arouse
in him the smallest movement of pride. Never has man had a greater power
over hearts, because never preacher preached himself less. One day
Brother Masseo desired to put his modesty to the test.
"Why thee? Why thee? Why thee?" he repeated again and again, as
if to make a mock of Francis. "What are you saying?" cried
Francis at last. "I am saying that everybody follows thee,
everyone desires to see thee, hear thee, and obey thee, and yet
for all that thou art neither beautiful, nor learned, nor of
noble family. Whence comes it, then, that it should be thee whom
the world desires to follow?"
On hearing these words the blessed Francis, full of joy, raised
his eyes to heaven, and after remaining a long time absorbed in
contemplation he knelt, praising and blessing God with
extraordinary fervor. Then turning toward Masseo, "Thou wishest
to know why it is I whom men follow? Thou wishest to know? It is
because the eyes of the Most High have willed it thus; he
continually watches the good and the wicked, and as his most
holy eyes have not found among sinners any smaller man, nor any
more insufficient and more sinful, therefore he has chosen me to
accomplish the marvellous work which God has undertaken; he
chose me because he could find no one more worthless, and he
wished here to confound the nobility and grandeur, the strength,
the beauty, and the learning of this world."
This reply throws a ray of light upon St. Francis's heart; the message
which he brought to the world is once again the glad tidings announced
to the poor; its purpose is the taking up again of that Messianic work
which the Virgin of Nazareth caught a glimpse of in her _Magnificat_,
that song of love and liberty, the sighs of which breathe the vision of
a new social state. He comes to remind the world that the welfare of
man, the peace of his heart, the joy of his life, are neither in money,
nor in learning, nor in strength, but in an upright and sincere will.
Peace to men of good will.
The part which he had taken at Assisi in the controversies of his
fellow-citizens he would willingly have taken in all the rest of Italy,
for no man has ever dreamed of a more complete renovation; but if the
end he sought was the same as that of many revolutionaries who came
after him, their methods were completely different; his only weapon was
love.
The event has decided against him. Apart from the _illuminati_ of the
March of Ancona and the _Fraticelli_ of our own Provence his disciples
have vied with one another to misunderstand his thought.[3]
Who knows if some one will not arise to take up his work? Has not the
passion for worm-eaten speculations yet made victims enough? Are there
not many among us who perceive that luxury is a delusion, that if life
is a battle, it is not a slaughter-house where ferocious beasts wrangle
over their prey, but a wrestling with the divine, under whatever form it
may present itself--truth, beauty, or love? Who knows whether this
expiring nineteenth century will not arise from its winding-sheet to
make _amende honorable_ and bequeath to its successor one manly word of
faith?
Yes, the Messiah will come. He who was announced by Gioacchino di Fiore
and who is to inaugurate a new epoch in the history of humanity will
appear. _Hope maketh not ashamed._ In our modern Babylons and in the
huts on our mountains are too many souls who mysteriously sigh the hymn
of the great vigil, _Rorate coeli desuper et nubes pluant
Justum_,[4] for us not to be on the eve of a divine birth.
All origins are mysterious. This is true of matter, but yet more true of
that life, superior to all others, which we call holiness; it was in
prayer that Francis found the spiritual strength which he needed; he
therefore sought for silence and solitude. If he knew how to do battle
in the midst of men in order to win them to the faith, he loved, as
Celano says, to fly away like a bird going to make its nest upon the
mountain.[5]
With men truly pious the prayer of the lips, the formulated prayer, is
hardly other than an inferior form of true prayer. Even when it is
sincere and attentive, and not a mechanical repetition, it is only a
prelude for souls not dead of religious materialism.
Nothing resembles piety so much as love. Formularies of prayer are as
incapable of speaking the emotions of the soul as model love-letters of
speaking the transports of an impassioned heart. To true piety as well
as to profound love, the formula is a sort of profanation.
To pray is to talk with God, to lift ourselves up to him, to converse
with him that he may come down to us. It is an act of meditation, of
reflection, which presupposes the effort of all that is most personal in
us.
Looked at in this sense, prayer is the mother of all liberty and all
freedom.
Whether or no it be a soliloquy of the soul with itself, the soliloquy
would be none the less the very foundation of a strong individuality.
With St. Francis as with Jesus, prayer has this character of effort
which makes of it the greatest moral act. In order to truly know such
men one must have been able to go with them, to follow Jesus up to the
mountain where he passed his nights. Three favored ones, Peter, James,
John, followed him thither one day; but to describe what they saw, all
that a manly _sursum corda_ added to the radiance and the mysterious
grandeur of him whom they adored, they were obliged to resort to the
language of symbols.
It was so with St. Francis. For him as for his Master the end of prayer
is communion with the heavenly Father, the accord of the divine with the
human; or rather it is man who puts forth his strength to do the work of
God, not saying to him a mere passive, resigned, powerless _Fiat_, but
courageously raising his head: "Behold me, Lord, I delight to do thy
will."
"There are unfathomable depths in the human soul, because at the bottom
is God himself." Whether this God be transcendent or immanent, whether
he be One, the Creator, the eternal and immutable Principle, or whether
he be, as say the doctors beyond the Rhine, the ideal objectivation of
our Me, is not the question for the heroes of humanity. The soldier in
the thick of battle does not philosophize as to how much truth or
falsehood there is in the patriotic sentiment; he takes his arms and
fights at the peril of his life. So the soldiers of spiritual conflicts
seek for strength in prayer, in reflection, contemplation, inspiration;
all, poets, artists, teachers, saints, legislators, prophets, leaders of
the people, learned men, philosophers, all draw from this same source.
But it is not without difficulty that the soul unites itself to God, or
if one prefers, that it finds itself. A prayer ends at last in divine
communion only when it began by a struggle. The patriarch of Israel,
asleep near Bethel, had already divined this: the God who passes by
tells his name only to those who stop him and do him violence to learn
it. He blesses only after long hours of conflict.
The gospel has found an untranslatable word to characterize the prayers
of Jesus, it compares the conflict which preceded the voluntary
immolation of Christ to the death-struggle: _Factus in agonia_.[6] We
might say of his life that it had been a long temptation, a struggle, a
prayer, since these words only express different moments of spiritual
activity.
Like their Master, the disciples and successors of Christ can conquer
their own souls only through perseverance. But these words, empty of
meaning for devout conventicles, have had a tragic sense for men of
religious genius.
Nothing is more false, historically, than the saints that adorn our
churches, with their mincing attitude, their piteous expression, that
indescribably anæmic and emaciated--one may almost say emasculated--air
which shows in their whole nature; they are pious seminarists brought up
under the direction of St. Alphonso di Liguori or of St. Louis di
Gonzagua; they are not saints, not the violent who take the kingdom of
heaven by force.
We have come to one of the most delicate features of the life of
Francis--his relations with diabolical powers. Customs and ideas have so
profoundly changed in all that concerns the existence of the devil and
his relations with men, that it is almost impossible to picture to
oneself the enormous place which the thought of demons occupied at that
time in the minds of men.
The best minds of the Middle Ages believed without a doubt in the
existence of the perverse spirit, in his perpetual transformations in
the endeavor to tempt men and cause them to fall into his snares. Even
in the sixteenth century, Luther, who undermined so many beliefs, had no
more doubt of the personal existence of Satan than of sorcery,
conjurations, or possessions.[7]
Finding in their souls a wide background of grandeur and wretchedness,
whence they sometimes heard a burst of distant harmonies calling them to
a higher life, soon to be overpowered by the clamors of the brute, our
ancestors could not refrain from seeking the explanation of this duel.
They found it in the conflict of the demons with God.
The devil is the prince of the demons, as God is the prince of the
angels; capable of all transformations, they carry on to the end of time
terrible battles which will end in the victory of God, but meantime each
man his whole life long is contended for by these two adversaries, and
the noblest souls are naturally the most disputed.
This is how St. Francis, with all men of his time, explained the
disquietudes, terrors, anguish, with which his heart was at times
assailed, as well as the hopes, consolations, joys in which in general
his soul was bathed. Wherever we follow his steps local tradition has
preserved the memory of rude assaults of the tempter which he had to
undergo.
It is no doubt useless to recall here the elementary fact that if
manners change with the times, man himself is quite as strangely
modified. If, according to education, and the manner of life, such or
such a sense may develop an acuteness which confounds common
experience--hearing in the musician, touch with the blind, etc.--we may
estimate by this how much sharper certain senses may have been then than
now. Several centuries ago visual delusion was with adults what it is
now with children in remotest country parts. A quivering leaf, a
nothing, a breath, an unexplained sound creates an image which they see
and in the reality of which they believe absolutely. Man is all of a
piece; the hyperæsthesia of the will presupposes that of the
sensibility, one is conditioned on the other, and it is this which makes
men of revolutionary epochs so much greater than nature. It would be
absurd under pretext of truth to try to bring them back to the common
measures of our contemporary society, for they were veritably demigods
for good as for evil.
Legends are not always absurd. The men of '93 are still near to us, but
it is nevertheless with good right that legend has taken possession of
them, and it is pitiable to see these men who, ten times a day, had to
take resolutions where everything was at stake--their destiny, that of
their ideas, and sometimes that of their country--judged as if they had
been mere worthy citizens, with leisure to discuss at length every
morning the garments they were to wear or the _menu_ of a dinner. Most
of the time historians have perceived only a part of the truth about
them; for not only were there two men in them, almost all of them are at
the same time poets, demagogues, prophets, heroes, martyrs. To write
history, then, is to translate and transpose almost continually. The men
of the thirteenth century could not bring themselves to not refer to an
exterior cause the inner motions of their souls. In what appears to us
as the result of our own reflections they saw inspiration; where we say
desires, instincts, passions, they said temptation, but we must not
permit these differences of language to make us overlook or tax with
trickery a part of their spiritual life, bringing us thus to the
conclusions of a narrow and ignorant rationalism.
St. Francis believed himself to have many a time fought with the devil;
the horrible demons of the Etruscan Inferno still haunted the forests of
Umbria and Tuscany; but while for his contemporaries and some of his
disciples apparitions, prodigies, possessions, are daily phenomena, for
him they are exceptional, and remain entirely in the background. In the
iconography of St. Benedict, as in that of most of the popular saints,
the devil occupies a preponderant place; in that of St. Francis he
disappears so completely that in the long series of Giotto's frescos at
Assisi he is not seen a single time.[8]
In the same way all that is magic and miracle-working occupies in his
life an entirely secondary rank. Jesus in the Gospels gave his apostles
power to cast out evil spirits, and to heal all sickness and all
infirmity.[9] Francis surely took literally these words, which made a
part of his Rule. He believed that he could work miracles, and he willed
to do so; but his religious thought was too pure to permit him to
consider miracles otherwise than as an entirely exceptional means of
relieving the sufferings of men. Not once do we see him resorting to
miracle to prove his apostolate or to bolster up his ideas. His tact
taught him that souls are worthy of being won by better means. This
almost complete absence of the marvellous[10] is by so much the more
remarkable that it is in absolute contradiction with the tendencies of
his time.[11]
Open the life of his disciple, St. Anthony of Padua ([Cross] 1231); it is a
tiresome catalogue of prodigies, healings, resurrections. One would say
it was rather the prospectus of some druggist who had invented a new
drug than a call to men to conversion and a higher life. It may interest
invalids or devotees, but neither the heart nor the conscience is
touched by it. It must be said in justice to Anthony of Padua that his
relations with Francis appear to have been very slight. Among the
earliest disciples who had time to fathom their master's thought to the
very depths we find traces of this noble disdain of the marvellous; they
knew too well that the perfect joy is not to astound the world with
prodigies, to give sight to the blind, nor even to revive those who have
been four days dead, but that it lives in the love that goes even to
self-immolation. _Mihi absit gloriari nisi in cruce Domini._[12]
Thus Brother Egidio asked of God grace not to perform miracles; he saw
in them, as in the passion for learning, a snare in which the proud
would be taken, and which would distract the Order from its true
mission.[13]
St. Francis's miracles are all acts of love; the greater number of them
are found in the healing of nervous maladies, those apparently
inexplicable disquietudes which are the cruel afflictions of critical
times. His gentle glance, at once so compassionate and so strong, which
seemed like a messenger from his heart, often sufficed to make those who
met it forget all their suffering.
The evil eye is perhaps a less stupid superstition than is generally
fancied. Jesus was right in saying that a look sufficed to make one an
adulterer; but there is also a look--that of the contemplative Mary, for
example--which is worth all sacrifices, because it includes them all,
because it gives, consecrates, immolates him who looks.
Civilization dulls this power of the glance. A part of the education the
world gives us consists in teaching our eyes to deceive, in making them
expressionless, in extinguishing their flames; but simple and
straightforward natures never give up using this language of the heart,
"which brings life and health in its beams."
"A Brother was suffering unspeakable tortures; sometimes he would roll
upon the ground, striking against whatever lay in his way, frothing at
the mouth, horrible to see; at times he would become rigid, and again,
after remaining stark outstretched for a moment, would roll about in
horrible contortions; sometimes lying in a heap on the ground, his feet
touching his head, he would bound upward as high as a man's head."
Francis came to see him and healed him.[14]
But these are exceptions, and the greater part of the time the Saint
withdrew himself from the entreaties of his companions when they asked
miracles at his hands.
To sum up, if we take a survey of the whole field of Francis's piety, we
see that it proceeds from the secret union of his soul with the divine
by prayer; this intuitive power of seeing the ideal classes him with the
mystics. He knew, indeed, both the ecstasy and the liberty of mysticism,
but we must not forget those features of character which separate him
from it, particularly his apostolic fervor. Besides this his piety had
certain peculiar qualities which it is necessary to point out.
And first, liberty with respect of observances: Francis felt all the
emptiness and pride of most religious observance. He saw the snare that
lies hidden there, for the man who carefully observes all the minutiæ of
a religious code risks forgetting the supreme law of love. More than
this, the friar who lays upon himself a certain number of supererogatory
facts gains the admiration of the ignorant, but the pleasure which he
finds in this admiration actually transforms his pious act into sin.
Thus, strangely enough, contrary to other founders of orders, he was
continually easing the strictness of the various rules which he laid
down.[15] We may not take this to be a mere accident, for it was only
after a struggle with his disciples that he made his will prevail; and
it was precisely those who were most disposed to relax their vow of
poverty who were the most anxious to display certain bigoted observances
before the public eye.
"The sinner can fast," Francis would say at such times; "he can pray,
weep, macerate himself, but one thing he cannot do, he cannot be
faithful to God." Noble words, not unworthy to fall from the lips of him
who came to preach a worship in spirit and in truth, without temple or
priest; or rather that every fireside shall be a temple and every
believer a priest.
Religious formalism, in whatever form of worship, always takes on a
forced and morose manner. Pharisees of every age disfigure their faces
that no one may be unaware of their godliness. Francis not merely could
not endure these grimaces of false piety, he actually counted mirth and
joy in the number of religious duties.
How shall one be melancholy who has in the heart an inexhaustible
treasure of life and truth which only increases as one draws upon it?
How be sad when in spite of falls one never ceases to make progress?
The pious soul which grows and develops has a joy like that of the
child, happy in feeling its weak little limbs growing strong and
permitting it every day a further exertion.
The word joy is perhaps that which comes most often to the pen of the
Franciscan authors;[16] the master went so far as to make it one of the
precepts of the Rule.[17] He was too good a general not to know that a
joyous army is always a victorious army. In the history of the early
Franciscan missions there are bursts of laughter which ring out high and
clear.[18]
For that matter, we are apt to imagine the Middle Ages as much more
melancholy than they really were. Men suffered much in those days, but
the idea of grief being never separated from that of penalty, suffering
was either an expiation or a test, and sorrow thus regarded loses its
sting; light and hope shine through it.
Francis drew a part of his joy from the communion. He gave to the
sacrament of the eucharist that worship imbued with unutterable emotion,
with joyful tears, which has aided some of the noblest of human souls to
endure the burden and heat of the day.[19] The letter of the dogma was
not fixed in the thirteenth century as it is to-day, but all that is
beautiful, true, potent, eternal in the mystical feast instituted by
Jesus was then alive in every heart.
The eucharist was truly the viaticum of the soul. Like the pilgrims of
Emmaus long ago, in the hour when the shades of evening fall and a vague
sadness invades the soul, when the phantoms of the night awake and seem
to loom up behind all our thoughts, our fathers saw the divine and
mysterious Companion coming toward them; they drank in his words, they
felt his strength descending upon their hearts, all their inward being
warmed again, and again they whispered, "Abide with us, Lord, for the
day is far spent and the night approacheth."
And often their prayer was heard.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 1 Cel., 62.
[2] 1 Cel., 66; cf. Bon., 180; 1 Cel., 67; cf. Bon., 182; 1
Cel., 69; Bon., 183. After St. Francis's death the Narniates
were the first to come to pray at his tomb. 1 Cel., 128, 135,
136, 138, 141; Bon., 275.
[3] As concerning: 1, fidelity to Poverty; 2, prohibition of
modifying the Rule; 3, the equal authority of the Will and the
Rule; 4, the request for privileges at the court of Rome; 5, the
elevation of the friars to high ecclesiastical charges; 6, the
absolute prohibition of putting themselves in opposition to the
secular clergy; 7, the interdiction of great churches and rich
convents. On all these points and many others infidelity to
Francis's will was complete in the Order less than twenty-five
years after his death. We might expatiate on all this; the Holy
See in interpreting the Rule had canonical right on its side,
but Ubertino di Casali in saying that it was perfectly clear and
had no need of interpretation had good sense on his side; let
that suffice! _Et est stupor quare queritur expositio super
litteram sic apertam quia nulla est difficultas in regulæ
intelligentia. Arbor vitæ crucifixæ_, Venice, 1485. lib. v.,
cap. 3. _Sanctus vir Egidius tanto ejulatu clamabat super regulæ
destructionem quam videbat quod ignorantibus viam spiritus quasi
videbatur insanus. Id. ibid._
[4] _Heavens drop down your dew, and let the clouds rain down
the Just One._ Anthem for Advent.
[5] _In foramibus petræ nidificabat._ 1 Cel., 71. Upon the
prayers of Francis vide ibid., 71 and 72; 2 Cel., 3, 38-43;
Ben., 139-148. Cf. 1 Cel., 6; 91; 103; 3 Soc., 8; 12; etc.
[6] Luke, xxii. 44.
[7] Felix Kuhn: _Luther, sa vie et son oeuvre_, Paris, 1883, 3
vols., 8vo. t. i., p. 128; t. ii., p. 9; t. iii., p. 257.
Benvenuto Cellini does not hesitate to describe a visit which he
made one day to the Coliseum in company with a magician whose
words evoked clouds of devils who filled the whole place. B.
Cellini, _La vita scritta da lui medesimo_, Bianchi's edition,
Florence, 1890, 12mo, p. 33.
[8] On the devil and Francis vide 1 Cel., 68, 72; 3 Soc., 12; 2
Cel., 1, 6; 3, 10; 53; 58-65; Bon., 59-62. Cf. Eccl., 3; 5; 13;
_Fior._, 29; _Spec._, 110b. To form an idea of the part taken by
the devil in the life of a monk at the beginning of the
thirteenth century, one must read the _Dialogus miraculorium_ of
Cæsar von Heisterbach.
[9] Matthew, x. 1.
[10] Miracles occupy only ten paragraphs (61-70) in 1 Cel., and
of this number there are several which can hardly be counted as
Francis's miracles, since they were performed by objects which
had belonged to him.
[11] Heretics often took advantage of this thirst for the
marvellous to dupe the catholics. The Cathari of Moncoul made a
portrait of the Virgin representing her as one eyed and
toothless, saying that in his humility Christ had chosen a very
ugly woman for mother. They had no difficulty in healing several
cases of disease by its means; the image became famous, was
venerated almost everywhere, and accomplished many miracles
until the day when the heretics divulged the deception, to the
great scandal of the faithful. Egbert von Schönau, _Contra
Catharos_. Serm. I. cap. 2. (Patrol. lat. Migne t. 195.) Cf.
Heisterbach, _loc. cit._, v. 18. Luc de Tuy, _De altera Vita_,
lib. ii. 9; iii. 9, 18 (Patrol. Migne., 208).
[12] "But God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of
our Lord Jesus Christ." Gal. vi. 14. This is to this day the
motto of the Brothers Minor.
[13] _Spec._, 182a; 200a; 232a. Cf. 199a.
[14] 1 Cel., 67.
[15] _Secundum primam regulam fratres feria quarta et sexta et
per licentiam beati Francisci feria secunda et sabbato
jejunabant. Giord. 11. cf. Reg. 1221, cap. 3_ and _Reg. 1223,
cap. 3_, where Friday is the only fast day retained.
[16] 1 Cel., 10; 22; 27; 31; 42; 80; 2 Cel., 1, 1; 3, 65-68;
Eccl., 5; 6; _Giord._, 21; _Spec._, 119a; _Conform._, 143a, 2.
[17] _Caveant fratres quod non ostendant se tristes extrinsecus
nubilosos et hypocritas; sed ostendant se gaudentis in Domine,
hilares et convenientes gratiosos._
[18] Eccl., _loc. cit._; Giord., _loc. cit._
[19] Vide _Test._; 1 Cel., 46; 62; 75; 2 Cel., 3, 129; _Spec._,
44a.
* * * * *