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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of St. Francis of Assisi, by G. K. Chesterton
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-Title: St. Francis of Assisi
-
-Author: G. K. Chesterton
-
-Release Date: August 31, 2020 [EBook #63084]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Tim Lindell, Chris Pinfield and the Online
-Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
-file was produced from images generously made available
-by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries).
-
-
-
-
-
-Transcriber's Note:
-
-Obvious printer errors have been corrected. Hyphenation has been
-rationalised.
-
-Small capitals have been replaced by full capitals. Italics are
-indicated by _underscores_.
-
-A list of other books from the same publisher, and a preface to them,
-have been moved to the end of the book.
-
-
-
-
- ST. FRANCIS OF
- ASSISI
-
- BY
- G. K. CHESTERTON
-
- [Illustration: H&S]
-
- HODDER AND STOUGHTON LTD.
- LONDON
- TORONTO
-
-
-
-
- _Contents_
-
-                                                                    PAGE
- CHAPTER I
- THE PROBLEM OF ST. FRANCIS                                            7
-
- CHAPTER II
- THE WORLD ST. FRANCIS FOUND                                          18
-
- CHAPTER III
- FRANCIS THE FIGHTER                                                  40
-
- CHAPTER IV
- FRANCIS THE BUILDER                                                  58
-
- CHAPTER V
- LE JONGLEUR DE DIEU                                                  74
-
- CHAPTER VI
- THE LITTLE POOR MAN                                                  94
-
- CHAPTER VII
- THE THREE ORDERS                                                    113
-
- CHAPTER VIII
- THE MIRROR OF CHRIST                                                133
-
- CHAPTER IX
- MIRACLES AND DEATH                                                  153
-
- CHAPTER X
- THE TESTAMENT OF ST. FRANCIS                                        172
-
-
-
-
- _Chapter I_
- _The Problem of St. Francis_
-
-
-A sketch of St. Francis of Assisi in modern English may be written in
-one of three ways. Between these the writer must make his selection; and
-the third way, which is adopted here, is in some respects the most
-difficult of all. At least, it would be the most difficult if the other
-two were not impossible.
-
-First, he may deal with this great and most amazing man as a figure in
-secular history and a model of social virtues. He may describe this
-divine demagogue as being, as he probably was, the world's one quite
-sincere democrat. He may say (what means very little) that St. Francis
-was in advance of his age. He may say (what is quite true) that
-St. Francis anticipated all that is most liberal and sympathetic in the
-modern mood; the love of nature; the love of animals; the sense of
-social compassion; the sense of the spiritual dangers of prosperity and
-even of property. All those things that nobody understood before
-Wordsworth were familiar to St. Francis. All those things that were
-first discovered by Tolstoy had been taken for granted by St. Francis.
-He could be presented, not only as a human but a humanitarian hero;
-indeed as the first hero of humanism. He has been described as a sort of
-morning star of the Renaissance. And in comparison with all these
-things, his ascetical theology can be ignored or dismissed as a
-contemporary accident, which was fortunately not a fatal accident. His
-religion can be regarded as a superstition, but an inevitable
-superstition, from which not even genius could wholly free itself; in
-the consideration of which it would be unjust to condemn St. Francis for
-his self-denial or unduly chide him for his chastity. It is quite true
-that even from so detached a standpoint his stature would still appear
-heroic. There would still be a great deal to be said about the man who
-tried to end the Crusades by talking to the Saracens or who interceded
-with the Emperor for the birds. The writer might describe in a purely
-historical spirit the whole of that great Franciscan inspiration that
-was felt in the painting of Giotto, in the poetry of Dante, in the
-miracle plays that made possible the modern drama, and in so many other
-things that are already appreciated by the modern culture. He may try to
-do it, as others have done, almost without raising any religious
-question at all. In short, he may try to tell the story of a saint
-without God; which is like being told to write the life of Nansen and
-forbidden to mention the North Pole.
-
-Second, he may go to the opposite extreme, and decide, as it were, to be
-defiantly devotional. He may make the theological enthusiasm as
-thoroughly the theme as it was the theme of the first Franciscans. He
-may treat religion as the real thing that it was to the real Francis of
-Assisi. He can find an austere joy, so to speak, in parading the
-paradoxes of asceticism and all the holy topsy-turvydom of humility. He
-can stamp the whole history with the Stigmata, record fasts like fights
-against a dragon; till in the vague modern mind St. Francis is as dark a
-figure as St. Dominic. In short he can produce what many in our world
-will regard as a sort of photographic negative, the reversal of all
-lights and shades; what the foolish will find as impenetrable as
-darkness and even many of the wise will find almost as invisible as if
-it were written in silver upon white. Such a study of St. Francis would
-be unintelligible to anyone who does not share his religion, perhaps
-only partly intelligible to anyone who does not share his vocation.
-According to degrees of judgment, it will be regarded as something too
-bad or too good for the world. The only difficulty about doing the thing
-in this way is that it cannot be done. It would really require a saint
-to write the life of a saint. In the present case the objections to such
-a course are insuperable.
-
-Third, he may try to do what I have tried to do here; and, as I have
-already suggested, the course has peculiar problems of its own. The
-writer may put himself in the position of the ordinary modern outsider
-and enquirer; as indeed the present writer is still largely and was once
-entirely in that position. He may start from the standpoint of a man who
-already admires St. Francis, but only for those things which such a man
-finds admirable. In other words he may assume that the reader is at
-least as enlightened as Renan or Matthew Arnold; but in the light of
-that enlightenment he may try to illuminate what Renan and Matthew
-Arnold left dark. He may try to use what is understood to explain what
-is not understood. He may say to the modern English reader: "Here is an
-historical character which is admittedly attractive to many of us
-already, by its gaiety, its romantic imagination, its spiritual courtesy
-and camaraderie, but which also contains elements (evidently equally
-sincere and emphatic) which seem to you quite remote and repulsive. But
-after all, this man was a man and not half a dozen men. What seems
-inconsistency to you did not seem inconsistency to him. Let us see
-whether we can understand, with the help of the existing understanding,
-these other things that seem now to be doubly dark, by their intrinsic
-gloom and their ironic contrast." I do not mean, of course, that I can
-really reach such a psychological completeness in this crude and curt
-outline. But I mean that this is the only controversial condition that I
-shall here assume; that I am dealing with the sympathetic outsider. I
-shall not assume any more or any less agreement than this. A materialist
-may not care whether the inconsistencies are reconciled or not. A
-Catholic may not see any inconsistencies to reconcile. But I am here
-addressing the ordinary modern man, sympathetic but sceptical, and I can
-only rather hazily hope that, by approaching the great saint's story
-through what is evidently picturesque and popular about it, I may at
-least leave the reader understanding a little more than he did before of
-the consistency of a complete character; that by approaching it in this
-way, we may at least get a glimmering of why the poet who praised his
-lord the sun, often hid himself in a dark cavern, of why the saint who
-was so gentle with his Brother the Wolf was so harsh to his Brother the
-Ass (as he nicknamed his own body), of why the troubadour who said that
-love set his heart on fire separated himself from women, of why the
-singer who rejoiced in the strength and gaiety of the fire deliberately
-rolled himself in the snow, of why the very song which cries with all
-the passion of a pagan, "Praised be God for our Sister, Mother Earth,
-which brings forth varied fruits and grass and glowing flowers," ends
-almost with the words "Praised be God for our Sister, the death of the
-body."
-
-Renan and Matthew Arnold failed utterly at this test. They were content
-to follow Francis with their praises until they were stopped by their
-prejudices; the stubborn prejudices of the sceptic. The moment Francis
-began to do something they did not understand or did not like, they did
-not try to understand it, still less to like it; they simply turned
-their backs on the whole business and "walked no more with him." No man
-will get any further along a path of historical enquiry in that fashion.
-These sceptics are really driven to drop the whole subject in despair,
-to leave the most simple and sincere of all historical characters as a
-mass of contradictions, to be praised on the principle of the curate's
-egg. Arnold refers to the asceticism of Alverno almost hurriedly, as if
-it were an unlucky but undeniable blot on the beauty of the story; or
-rather as if it were a pitiable break-down and bathos at the end of the
-story. Now this is simply to be stone-blind to the whole point of any
-story. To represent Mount Alverno as the mere collapse of Francis is
-exactly like representing Mount Calvary as the mere collapse of Christ.
-Those mountains are mountains, whatever else they are, and it is
-nonsense to say (like the Red Queen) that they are comparative hollows
-or negative holes in the ground. They were quite manifestly meant to be
-culminations and landmarks. To treat the Stigmata as a sort of scandal,
-to be touched on tenderly but with pain, is exactly like treating the
-original five wounds of Jesus Christ as five blots on His character. You
-may dislike the idea of asceticism; you may dislike equally the idea of
-martyrdom; for that matter you may have an honest and natural dislike of
-the whole conception of sacrifice symbolised by the cross. But if it is
-an intelligent dislike, you will still retain the capacity for seeing
-the point of a story; of the story of a martyr or even the story of a
-monk. You will not be able rationally to read the Gospel and regard the
-Crucifixion as an afterthought or an anti-climax or an accident in the
-life of Christ; it is obviously the point of the story like the point of
-a sword, the sword that pierced the heart of the Mother of God.
-
-And you will not be able rationally to read the story of a man presented
-as a Mirror of Christ without understanding his final phase as a Man of
-Sorrows, and at least artistically appreciating the appropriateness of
-his receiving, in a cloud of mystery and isolation, inflicted by no
-human hand, the unhealed everlasting wounds that heal the world.
-
-The practical reconciliation of the gaiety and austerity I must leave
-the story itself to suggest. But since I have mentioned Matthew Arnold
-and Renan and the rationalistic admirers of St. Francis, I will here
-give the hint of what it seems to me most advisable for such readers to
-keep in mind. These distinguished writers found things like the Stigmata
-a stumbling-block because to them a religion was a philosophy. It was an
-impersonal thing; and it is only the most personal passion that provides
-here an approximate earthly parallel. A man will not roll in the snow
-for a stream of tendency by which all things fulfil the law of their
-being. He will not go without food in the name of something, not
-ourselves, that makes for righteousness. He will do things like this, or
-pretty nearly like this, under quite a different impulse. He will do
-these things when he is in love. The first fact to realise about
-St. Francis is involved in the first fact with which his story starts;
-that when he said from the first that he was a Troubadour, and said
-later that he was a Troubadour of a newer and nobler romance, he was not
-using a mere metaphor, but understood himself much better than the
-scholars understand him. He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a
-Troubadour. He was a Lover. He was a lover of God and he was really and
-truly a lover of men; possibly a much rarer mystical vocation. A lover
-of men is very nearly the opposite of a philanthropist; indeed the
-pedantry of the Greek word carries something like a satire on itself. A
-philanthropist may be said to love anthropoids. But as St. Francis did
-not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ.
-Say, if you think so, that he was a lunatic loving an imaginary person;
-but an imaginary person, not an imaginary idea. And for the modern
-reader the clue to the asceticism and all the rest can best be found in
-the stories of lovers when they seemed to be rather like lunatics. Tell
-it as the tale of one of the Troubadours, and the wild things he would
-do for his lady, and the whole of the modern puzzle disappears. In such
-a romance there would be no contradiction between the poet gathering
-flowers in the sun and enduring a freezing vigil in the snow, between
-his praising all earthly and bodily beauty and then refusing to eat,
-between his glorifying gold and purple and perversely going in rags,
-between his showing pathetically a hunger for a happy life and a thirst
-for a heroic death. All these riddles would easily be resolved in the
-simplicity of any noble love; only this was so noble a love that nine
-men out of ten have hardly even heard of it. We shall see later that
-this parallel of the earthly lover has a very practical relation to the
-problems of his life, as to his relations with his father and with his
-friends and their families. The modern reader will almost always find
-that if he could only feel this kind of love as a reality, he could feel
-this kind of extravagance as a romance. But I only note it here as a
-preliminary point because, though it is very far from being the final
-truth in the matter, it is the best approach to it. The reader cannot
-even begin to see the sense of a story that may well seem to him a very
-wild one, until he understands that to this great mystic his religion
-was not a thing like a theory but a thing like a love-affair. And the
-only purpose of this prefatory chapter is to explain the limits of this
-present book; which is only addressed to that part of the modern world
-which finds in St. Francis a certain modern difficulty; which can admire
-him yet hardly accept him, or which can appreciate the saint almost
-without the sanctity. And my only claim even to attempt such a task is
-that I myself have for so long been in various stages of such a
-condition. Many thousand things that I now partly comprehend I should
-have thought utterly incomprehensible, many things I now hold sacred I
-should have scouted as utterly superstitious, many things that seem to
-me lucid and enlightened now they are seen from the inside I should
-honestly have called dark and barbarous seen from the outside, when long
-ago in those days of boyhood my fancy first caught fire with the glory
-of Francis of Assisi. I too have lived in Arcady; but even in Arcady I
-met one walking in a brown habit who loved the woods better than Pan.
-The figure in the brown habit stands above the hearth in the room where
-I write, and alone among many such images, at no stage of my pilgrimage
-has he ever seemed to me a stranger. There is something of harmony
-between the hearth and the firefight and my own first pleasure in his
-words about his brother fire; for he stands far enough back in my memory
-to mingle with all those more domestic dreams of the first days. Even
-the fantastic shadows thrown by fire make a sort of shadow pantomime
-that belongs to the nursery; yet the shadows were even then the shadows
-of his favourite beasts and birds, as he saw them, grotesque but haloed
-with the love of God. His Brother Wolf and Brother Sheep seemed then
-almost like the Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit of a more Christian Uncle
-Remus. I have come slowly to see many and more marvellous aspects of
-such a man, but I have never lost that one. His figure stands on a sort
-of bridge connecting my boyhood with my conversion to many other things;
-for the romance of his religion had penetrated even the rationalism of
-that vague Victorian time. In so far as I have had this experience, I
-may be able to lead others a little further along that road; but only a
-very little further. Nobody knows better than I do now that it is a road
-upon which angels might fear to tread; but though I am certain of
-failure I am not altogether overcome by fear; for he suffered fools
-gladly.
-
-
-
-
- _Chapter II_
- _The World St. Francis Found_
-
-
-The modern innovation which has substituted journalism for history, or
-for that tradition that is the gossip of history, has had at least one
-definite effect. It has insured that everybody should only hear the end
-of every story. Journalists are in the habit of printing above the very
-last chapters of their serial stories (when the hero and heroine are
-just about to embrace in the last chapter, as only an unfathomable
-perversity prevented them from doing in the first) the rather misleading
-words, "You can begin this story here." But even this is not a complete
-parallel; for the journals do give some sort of a summary of the story,
-while they never give anything remotely resembling a summary of the
-history. Newspapers not only deal with news, but they deal with
-everything as if it were entirely new. Tutankamen, for instance, was
-entirely new. It is exactly in the same fashion that we read that
-Admiral Bangs has been shot, which is the first intimation we have that
-he has ever been born. There is something singularly significant in the
-use which journalism makes of its stores of biography. It never thinks
-of publishing the life until it is publishing the death. As it deals
-with individuals it deals with institutions and ideas. After the Great
-War our public began to be told of all sorts of nations being
-emancipated. It had never been told a word about their being enslaved.
-We were called upon to judge of the justice of the settlements, when we
-had never been allowed to hear of the very existence of the quarrels.
-People would think it pedantic to talk about the Serbian epics and they
-prefer to speak in plain every-day modern language about the
-Yugo-Slavonic international new diplomacy; and they are quite excited
-about something they call Czecho-Slovakia without apparently having ever
-heard of Bohemia. Things that are as old as Europe are regarded as more
-recent than the very latest claims pegged out on the prairies of
-America. It is very exciting; like the last act of a play to people who
-have only come into the theatre just before the curtain falls. But it
-does not conduce exactly to knowing what it is all about. To those
-content with the mere fact of a pistol-shot or a passionate embrace,
-such a leisurely manner of patronising the drama may be recommended. To
-those tormented by a merely intellectual curiosity about who is kissing
-or killing whom, and why, it is unsatisfactory.
-
-Most modern history, especially in England, suffers from the same
-imperfection as journalism. At best it only tells half of the history of
-Christendom; and that the second half without the first half. Men for
-whom reason begins with the Revival of Learning, men for whom religion
-begins with the Reformation, can never give a complete account of
-anything, for they have to start with institutions whose origin they
-cannot explain, or generally even imagine. Just as we hear of the
-admiral being shot but have never heard of his being born, so we all
-heard a great deal about the dissolution of the monasteries, but we
-heard next to nothing about the creation of the monasteries. Now this
-sort of history would be hopelessly insufficient, even for an
-intelligent man who hated the monasteries. It is hopelessly insufficient
-in connection with institutions that many intelligent men do in a quite
-healthy spirit hate. For instance, it is possible that some of us have
-occasionally seen some mention, by our learned leader-writers, of an
-obscure institution called the Spanish Inquisition. Well, it really is
-an obscure institution, according to them and the histories they read.
-It is obscure because its origin is obscure. Protestant history simply
-begins with the horrible thing in possession, as the pantomime begins
-with the demon king in the goblin kitchen. It is likely enough that it
-was, especially towards the end, a horrible thing that might be haunted
-by demons; but if we say this was so, we have no notion why it was so.
-To understand the Spanish Inquisition it would be necessary to discover
-two things that we have never dreamed of bothering about; what Spain was
-and what an Inquisition was. The former would bring in the whole great
-question about the Crusade against the Moors; and by what heroic
-chivalry a European nation freed itself of an alien domination from
-Africa. The latter would bring in the whole business of the other
-Crusade against the Albigensians, and why men loved and hated that
-nihilistic vision from Asia. Unless we understand that there was in
-these things originally the rush and romance of a Crusade, we cannot
-understand how they came to deceive men or drag them on towards evil.
-The Crusaders doubtless abused their victory, but there was a victory to
-abuse. And where there is victory there is valour in the field and
-popularity in the forum. There is some sort of enthusiasm that
-encourages excesses or covers faults. For instance, I for one have
-maintained from very early days the responsibility of the English for
-their atrocious treatment of the Irish. But it would be quite unfair to
-the English to describe even the devilry of '98 and leave out altogether
-all mention of the war with Napoleon. It would be unjust to suggest that
-the English mind was bent on nothing but the death of Emmett, when it
-was more probably full of the glory of the death of Nelson.
-Unfortunately '98 was very far from being the last date of such dirty
-work; and only a few years ago our politicians started trying to rule by
-random robbing and killing, while gently remonstrating with the Irish
-for their memory of old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago. But
-however badly we may think of the Black-and-Tan business, it would be
-unjust to forget that most of us were not thinking of Black-and-Tan but
-of khaki; and that khaki had just then a noble and national connotation
-covering many things. To write of the war in Ireland and leave out the
-war against Prussia, and the English sincerity about it, would be unjust
-to the English. So to talk about the torture-engine as if it had been a
-hideous toy is unjust to the Spanish. It does not tell sensibly from the
-start the story of what the Spaniard did, and why. We may concede to our
-contemporaries that in any case it is not a story that ends well. We do
-not insist that in their version it should begin well. What we complain
-of is that in their version it does not begin at all. They are only in
-at the death; or even, like Lord Tom Noddy, too late for the hanging. It
-is quite true that it was sometimes more horrible than any hanging; but
-they only gather, so to speak, the very ashes of the ashes; the fag-end
-of the faggot.
-
-The case of the Inquisition is here taken at random, for it is one among
-any number illustrating the same thing; and not because it is especially
-connected with St. Francis, in whatever sense it may have been connected
-with St. Dominic. It may well be suggested later indeed that St. Francis
-is unintelligible, just as St. Dominic is unintelligible, unless we do
-understand something of what the thirteenth century meant by heresy and
-a crusade. But for the moment I use it as a lesser example for a much
-larger purpose. It is to point out that to begin the story of
-St. Francis with the birth of St. Francis would be to miss the whole
-point of the story, or rather not to tell the story at all. And it is to
-suggest that the modern tail-foremost type of journalistic history
-perpetually fails us. We learn about reformers without knowing what they
-had to reform, about rebels without a notion of what they rebelled
-against, of memorials that are not connected with any memory and
-restorations of things that had apparently never existed before. Even at
-the expense of this chapter appearing disproportionate, it is necessary
-to say something about the great movements that led up to the entrance
-of the founder of the Franciscans. It may seem to mean describing a
-world, or even a universe, in order to describe a man. It will
-inevitably mean that the world or the universe will be described with a
-few desperate generalisations in a few abrupt sentences. But so far from
-its meaning that we see a very small figure under so large a sky, it
-will mean that we must measure the sky before we can begin to measure
-the towering stature of the man.
-
-And this phrase alone brings me to the preliminary suggestions that seem
-necessary before even a slight sketch of the life of St. Francis. It is
-necessary to realise, in however rude and elementary a fashion, into
-what sort of a world St. Francis entered and what has been the history
-of that world, at least in so far as it affected him. It is necessary to
-have, if only in a few sentences, a sort of preface in the form of an
-Outline of History, if we may borrow the phrase of Mr. Wells. In the
-case of Mr. Wells himself, it is evident that the distinguished novelist
-suffered the same disadvantage as if he had been obliged to write a
-novel of which he hated the hero. To write history and hate Rome, both
-pagan and papal, is practically to hate nearly everything that has
-happened. It comes very near to hating humanity on purely humanitarian
-grounds. To dislike both the priest and the soldier, both the laurels of
-the warrior and the lilies of the saint, is to suffer a division from
-the mass of mankind for which not all the dexterities of the finest and
-most flexible of modern intelligences can compensate. A much wider
-sympathy is needed for the historical setting of St. Francis, himself
-both a soldier and a saint. I will therefore conclude this chapter with
-a few generalisations about the world that St. Francis found.
-
-Men will not believe because they will not broaden their minds. As a
-matter of individual belief, I should of course express it by saying
-that they are not sufficiently catholic to be Catholic. But I am not
-going to discuss here the doctrinal truths of Christianity, but simply
-the broad historical fact of Christianity, as it might appear to a
-really enlightened and imaginative person even if he were not a
-Christian. What I mean at the moment is that the majority of doubts are
-made out of details. In the course of random reading a man comes across
-a pagan custom that strikes him as picturesque or a Christian action
-that strikes him as cruel; but he does not enlarge his mind sufficiently
-to see the main truth about pagan custom or the Christian reaction
-against it. Until we understand, not necessarily in detail, but in their
-big bulk and proportion that pagan progress and that Christian reaction,
-we cannot really understand the point of history at which St. Francis
-appears or what his great popular mission was all about.
-
-Now everybody knows, I imagine, that the twelfth and thirteenth
-centuries were an awakening of the world. They were a fresh flowering of
-culture and the creative arts after a long spell of much sterner and
-even more sterile experience which we call the Dark Ages. They may be
-called an emancipation; they were certainly an end; an end of what may
-at least seem a harsher and more inhuman time. But what was it that was
-ended? From what was it that men were emancipated? That is where there
-is a real collision and point at issue between the different
-philosophies of history. On the merely external and secular side, it has
-been truly said that men awoke from a sleep; but there had been dreams
-in that sleep of a mystical and sometimes of a monstrous kind. In that
-rationalistic routine into which most modern historians have fallen, it
-is considered enough to say that they were emancipated from mere savage
-superstition and advanced towards mere civilised enlightenment. Now this
-is the big blunder that stands as a stumbling-block at the very
-beginning of our story. Anybody who supposes that the Dark Ages were
-plain darkness and nothing else, and that the dawn of the thirteenth
-century was plain daylight and nothing else, will not be able to make
-head or tail of the human story of St. Francis of Assisi. The truth is
-that the joy of St. Francis and his Jongleurs de Dieu was not merely an
-awakening. It was something which cannot be understood without
-understanding their own mystical creed. The end of the Dark Ages was not
-merely the end of a sleep. It was certainly not merely the end of a
-superstitious enslavement. It was the end of something belonging to a
-quite definite but quite different order of ideas.
-
-It was the end of a penance; or, if it be preferred, a purgation. It
-marked the moment when a certain spiritual expiation had been finally
-worked out and certain spiritual diseases had been finally expelled from
-the system. They had been expelled by an era of asceticism, which was
-the only thing that could have expelled them. Christianity had entered
-the world to cure the world; and she had cured it in the only way in
-which it could be cured.
-
-Viewed merely in an external and experimental fashion, the whole of the
-high civilisation of antiquity had ended in the learning of a certain
-lesson; that is, in its conversion to Christianity. But that lesson was
-a psychological fact as well as a theological faith. That pagan
-civilisation had indeed been a very high civilisation. It would not
-weaken our thesis, it might even strengthen it, to say that it was the
-highest that humanity ever reached. It had discovered its still
-unrivalled arts of poetry and plastic representation; it had discovered
-its own permanent political ideals; it had discovered its own clear
-system of logic and of language. But above all, it had discovered its
-own mistake.
-
-That mistake was too deep to be ideally defined; the short-hand of it is
-to call it the mistake of nature-worship. It might almost as truly be
-called the mistake of being natural; and it was a very natural mistake.
-The Greeks, the great guides and pioneers of pagan antiquity, started
-out with the idea of something splendidly obvious and direct; the idea
-that if man walked straight ahead on the high road of reason and nature,
-he could come to no harm; especially if he was, as the Greek was,
-eminently enlightened and intelligent. We might be so flippant as to say
-that man was simply to follow his nose, so long as it was a Greek nose.
-And the case of the Greeks themselves is alone enough to illustrate the
-strange but certain fatality that attends upon this fallacy. No sooner
-did the Greeks themselves begin to follow their own noses and their own
-notion of being natural, than the queerest thing in history seems to
-have happened to them. It was much too queer to be an easy matter to
-discuss. It may be remarked that our more repulsive realists never give
-us the benefit of their realism. Their studies of unsavoury subjects
-never take note of the testimony which they bear to the truths of a
-traditional morality. But if we had the taste for such things, we could
-cite thousands of such things as part of the case for Christian morals.
-And an instance of this is found in the fact that nobody has written, in
-this sense, a real moral history of the Greeks. Nobody has seen the
-scale or the strangeness of the story. The wisest men in the world set
-out to be natural; and the most unnatural thing in the world was the
-very first thing they did. The immediate effect of saluting the sun and
-the sunny sanity of nature was a perversion spreading like a pestilence.
-The greatest and even the purest philosophers could not apparently avoid
-this low sort of lunacy. Why? It would seem simple enough for the people
-whose poets had conceived Helen of Troy, whose sculptors had carved the
-Venus of Milo, to remain healthy on the point. The truth is that people
-who worship health cannot remain healthy. When Man goes straight he goes
-crooked. When he follows his nose he manages somehow to put his nose out
-of joint, or even to cut off his nose to spite his face; and that in
-accordance with something much deeper in human nature than
-nature-worshippers could ever understand. It was the discovery of that
-deeper thing, humanly speaking, that constituted the conversion to
-Christianity. There is a bias in man like the bias in the bowl; and
-Christianity was the discovery of how to correct the bias and therefore
-hit the mark. There are many who will smile at the saying; but it is
-profoundly true to say that the glad good news brought by the Gospel was
-the news of original sin.
-
-Rome rose at the expense of her Greek teachers largely because she did
-not entirely consent to be taught these tricks. She had a much more
-decent domestic tradition; but she ultimately suffered from the same
-fallacy in her religious tradition; which was necessarily in no small
-degree the heathen tradition of nature-worship. What was the matter with
-the whole heathen civilisation was that there was nothing for the mass
-of men in the way of mysticism, except that concerned with the mystery
-of the nameless forces of nature, such as sex and growth and death. In
-the Roman Empire also, long before the end, we find nature-worship
-inevitably producing things that are against nature. Cases like that of
-Nero have passed into a proverb, when Sadism sat on a throne brazen in
-the broad daylight. But the truth I mean is something much more subtle
-and universal than a conventional catalogue of atrocities. What had
-happened to the human imagination, as a whole, was that the whole world
-was coloured by dangerous and rapidly deteriorating passions; by natural
-passions becoming unnatural passions. Thus the effect of treating sex as
-only one innocent natural thing was that every other innocent natural
-thing became soaked and sodden with sex. For sex cannot be admitted to a
-mere equality among elementary emotions or experiences like eating and
-sleeping. The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant.
-There is something dangerous and disproportionate in its place in human
-nature, for whatever reason; and it does really need a special
-purification and dedication. The modern talk about sex being free like
-any other sense, about the body being beautiful like any tree or flower,
-is either a description of the Garden of Eden or a piece of thoroughly
-bad psychology, of which the world grew weary two thousand years ago.
-
-This is not to be confused with mere self-righteous sensationalism about
-the wickedness of the pagan world. It was not so much that the pagan
-world was wicked as that it was good enough to realise that its paganism
-was becoming wicked, or rather was on the logical high road to
-wickedness. I mean that there was no future for "natural magic"; to
-deepen it was only to darken it into black magic. There was no future
-for it; because in the past it had only been innocent because it was
-young. We might say it had only been innocent because it was shallow.
-Pagans were wiser than paganism; that is why the pagans became
-Christians. Thousands of them had philosophy and family virtues and
-military honour to hold them up; but by this time the purely popular
-thing called religion was certainly dragging them down. When this
-reaction against the evil is allowed for, it is true to repeat that it
-was an evil that was everywhere. In another and more literal sense its
-name was Pan.
-
-It was no metaphor to say that these people needed a new heaven and a
-new earth; for they had really defiled their own earth and even their
-own heaven. How could their case be met by looking at the sky, when
-erotic legends were scrawled in stars across it; how could they learn
-anything from the love of birds and flowers after the sort of love
-stories that were told of them? It is impossible here to multiply
-evidences, and one small example may stand for the rest. We know what
-sort of sentimental associations are called up to us by the phrase "a
-garden"; and how we think mostly of the memory of melancholy and
-innocent romances, or quite as often of some gracious maiden lady or
-kindly old parson pottering under a yew hedge, perhaps in sight of a
-village spire. Then, let anyone who knows a little Latin poetry recall
-suddenly what would once have stood in place of the sun-dial or the
-fountain, obscene and monstrous in the sun; and of what sort was the god
-of their gardens.
-
-Nothing could purge this obsession but a religion that was literally
-unearthly. It was no good telling such people to have a natural religion
-full of stars and flowers; there was not a flower or even a star that
-had not been stained. They had to go into the desert where they could
-find no flowers or even into the cavern where they could see no stars.
-Into that desert and that cavern the highest human intellect entered for
-some four centuries; and it was the very wisest thing it could do.
-Nothing but the stark supernatural stood up for its salvation; if God
-could not save it, certainly the gods could not. The Early Church called
-the gods of paganism devils; and the Early Church was perfectly right.
-Whatever natural religion may have had to do with their beginnings,
-nothing but fiends now inhabited those hollow shrines. Pan was nothing
-but panic. Venus was nothing but venereal vice. I do not mean for a
-moment, of course, that all the individual pagans were of this character
-even to the end; but it was as individuals that they differed from it.
-Nothing distinguishes paganism from Christianity so clearly as the fact
-that the individual thing called philosophy had little or nothing to do
-with the social thing called religion. Anyhow it was no good to preach
-natural religion to people to whom nature had grown as unnatural as any
-religion. They knew much better than we do what was the matter with them
-and what sort of demons at once tempted and tormented them; and they
-wrote across that great space of history the text: "This sort goeth not
-out but by prayer and fasting."
-
-Now the historic importance of St. Francis and the transition from the
-twelfth to the thirteenth century, lies in the fact that they marked the
-end of this expiation. Men at the close of the Dark Ages may have been
-rude and unlettered and unlearned in everything but wars with heathen
-tribes, more barbarous than themselves, but they were clean. They were
-like children; the first beginnings of their rude arts have all the
-clean pleasure of children. We have to conceive them in Europe as a
-whole living under little local governments, feudal in so far as they
-were a survival of fierce wars with the barbarians, often monastic and
-carrying a more friendly and fatherly character, still faintly imperial
-in so far as Rome still ruled as a great legend. But in Italy something
-had survived more typical of the finer spirit of antiquity: the
-republic. Italy was dotted with little states, largely democratic in
-their ideals, and often filled with real citizens. But the city no
-longer lay open as under the Roman peace, but was pent in high walls for
-defence against feudal war and all the citizens had to be soldiers. One
-of these stood in a steep and striking position on the wooded hills of
-Umbria; and its name was Assisi. Out of its deep gate under its high
-turrets was to come the message that was the gospel of the hour, "Your
-warfare is accomplished, your iniquity is pardoned." But it was out of
-all these fragmentary things of feudalism and freedom and remains of
-Roman Law that there was to rise, at the beginning of the thirteenth
-century, vast and almost universal, the mighty civilisation of the
-Middle Ages.
-
-It is an exaggeration to attribute it entirely to the inspiration of any
-one man, even the most original genius of the thirteenth century. Its
-elementary ethics of fraternity and fair play had never been entirely
-extinct and Christendom had never been anything less than Christian. The
-great truisms about justice and pity can be found in the rudest monastic
-records of the barbaric transition or the stiffest maxims of the
-Byzantine decline. And early in the eleventh and twelfth centuries a
-larger moral movement had clearly begun. But what may fairly be said of
-it is this, that over all those first movements there was still
-something of that ancient austerity that came from the long penitential
-period. It was the twilight of morning; but it was still a grey
-twilight. This may be illustrated by the mere mention of two or three of
-these reforms before the Franciscan reform. The monastic institution
-itself, of course, was far older than all these things; indeed it was
-undoubtedly almost as old as Christianity. Its counsels of perfection
-had always taken the form of vows of chastity and poverty and obedience.
-With these unworldly aims it had long ago civilised a great part of the
-world. The monks had taught people to plough and sow as well as to read
-and write; indeed they had taught the people nearly everything that the
-people knew. But it may truly be said that the monks were severely
-practical, in the sense that they were not only practical but also
-severe; though they were generally severe with themselves and practical
-for other people. All this early monastic movement had long ago settled
-down and doubtless often deteriorated; but when we come to the first
-medieval movements this sterner character is still apparent. Three
-examples may be taken to illustrate the point.
-
-First, the ancient social mould of slavery was already beginning to
-melt. Not only was the slave turning into the serf, who was practically
-free as regards his own farm and family life, but many lords were
-freeing slaves and serfs altogether. This was done under the pressure of
-the priests; but especially it was done in the spirit of a penance. In
-one sense, of course, any Catholic society must have an atmosphere of
-penance; but I am speaking of that rather sterner spirit of penance
-which had expiated the excesses of paganism. There was about such
-restitutions the atmosphere of the death-bed; as many of them doubtless
-were examples of death-bed repentance. A very honest atheist with whom I
-once debated made use of the expression, "Men have only been kept in
-slavery by the fear of hell." As I pointed out to him, if he had said
-that men had only been freed from slavery by the fear of hell, he would
-at least have been referring to an unquestionable historical fact.
-
-Another example was the sweeping reform of Church discipline by Pope
-Gregory the Seventh. It really was a reform, undertaken from the highest
-motives and having the healthiest results; it conducted a searching
-inquisition against simony or the financial corruptions of the clergy;
-it insisted on a more serious and self-sacrificing ideal for the life of
-a parish priest. But the very fact that this largely took the form of
-making universal the obligation of celibacy will strike the note of
-something which, however noble, would seem to many to be vaguely
-negative. The third example is in one sense the strongest of all. For
-the third example was a war; a heroic war and for many of us a holy war;
-but still something having all the stark and terrible responsibilities
-of war. There is no space here to say all that should be said about the
-true nature of the Crusades. Everybody knows that in the very darkest
-hour of the Dark Ages a sort of heresy had sprung up in Arabia and
-become a new religion of a military but nomadic sort, invoking the name
-of Mahomet. Intrinsically it had a character found in many heresies from
-the Moslem to the Monist. It seemed to the heretic a sane simplification
-of religion; while it seems to the Catholic an insane simplification of
-religion, because it simplifies all to a single idea and so loses the
-breadth and balance of Catholicism. Anyhow its objective character was
-that of a military danger to Christendom and Christendom had struck at
-the very heart of it, in seeking to reconquer the Holy Places. The great
-Duke Godfrey and the first Christians who stormed Jerusalem were heroes
-if there were ever any in the world; but they were the heroes of a
-tragedy.
-
-Now I have taken these two or three examples of the earlier medieval
-movements in order to note about them one general character, which
-refers back to the penance that followed paganism. There is something in
-all these movements that is bracing even while it is still bleak, like a
-wind blowing between the clefts of the mountains. That wind, austere and
-pure, of which the poet speaks, is really the spirit of the time, for it
-is the wind of a world that has at last been purified. To anyone who can
-appreciate atmospheres there is something clear and clean about the
-atmosphere of this crude and often harsh society. Its very lusts are
-clean; for they have no longer any smell of perversion. Its very
-cruelties are clean; they are not the luxurious cruelties of the
-amphitheatre. They come either of a very simple horror at blasphemy or a
-very simple fury at insult. Gradually against this grey background
-beauty begins to appear, as something really fresh and delicate and
-above all surprising. Love returning is no longer what was once called
-platonic but what is still called chivalric love. The flowers and stars
-have recovered their first innocence. Fire and water are felt to be
-worthy to be the brother and sister of a saint. The purge of paganism is
-complete at last.
-
-For water itself has been washed. Fire itself has been purified as by
-fire. Water is no longer that water into which slaves were flung to feed
-the fishes. Fire is no longer that fire through which children were
-passed to Moloch. Flowers smell no more of the forgotten garlands
-gathered in the garden of Priapus; stars stand no more as signs of the
-far frigidity of gods as cold as those cold fires. They are all like
-things newly made and awaiting new names, from one who shall come to
-name them. Neither the universe nor the earth have now any longer the
-old sinister significance of the world. They await a new reconciliation
-with man, but they are already capable of being reconciled. Man has
-stripped from his soul the last rag of nature-worship, and can return to
-nature.
-
-While it was yet twilight a figure appeared silently and suddenly on a
-little hill above the city, dark against the fading darkness. For it was
-the end of a long and stern night, a night of vigil, not unvisited by
-stars. He stood with his hands lifted, as in so many statues and
-pictures, and about him was a burst of birds singing; and behind him was
-the break of day.
-
-
-
-
- _Chapter III_
- _Francis the Fighter_
-
-
-According to one tale, which if not true would be none the less typical,
-the very name of St. Francis was not so much a name as a nickname. There
-would be something akin to his familiar and popular instinct in the
-notion that he was nicknamed very much as an ordinary schoolboy might be
-called "Frenchy" at school. According to this version, his name was not
-Francis at all but John; and his companions called him "Francesco" or
-"The little Frenchman" because of his passion for the French poetry of
-the Troubadours. The more probable story is that his mother had named
-him John when he was born in the absence of his father, who shortly
-returned from a visit to France, where his commercial success had filled
-him with so much enthusiasm for French taste and social usage that he
-gave his son the new name signifying the Frank or Frenchman. In either
-case the name has a certain significance, as connecting Francis from the
-first with what he himself regarded as the romantic fairyland of the
-Troubadours.
-
-The name of the father was Pietro Bernardone and he was a substantial
-citizen of the guild of the cloth merchants in the town of Assisi. It is
-hard to describe the position of such a man without some appreciation of
-the position of such a guild and even of such a town. It did not exactly
-correspond to anything that is meant in modern times either by a
-merchant or a man of business or a tradesman, or anything that exists
-under the conditions of capitalism. Bernardone may have employed people
-but he was not an employer; that is, he did not belong to an employing
-class as distinct from an employed class. The person we definitely hear
-of his employing is his son Francis; who, one is tempted to guess, was
-about the last person that any man of business would employ if it were
-convenient to employ anybody else. He was rich, as a peasant may be rich
-by the work of his own family; but he evidently expected his own family
-to work in a way almost as plain as a peasant's. He was a prominent
-citizen, but he belonged to a social order which existed to prevent him
-being too prominent to be a citizen. It kept all such people on their
-own simple level, and no prosperity connoted that escape from drudgery
-by which in modern times the lad might have seemed to be a lord or a
-fine gentleman or something other than the cloth merchant's son. This is
-a rule that is proved even in the exception. Francis was one of those
-people who are popular with everybody in any case; and his guileless
-swagger as a Troubadour and leader of French fashions made him a sort of
-romantic ringleader among the young men of the town. He threw money
-about both in extravagance and benevolence, in a way native to a man who
-never, all his life, exactly understood what money was. This moved his
-mother to mingled exultation and exasperation and she said, as any
-tradesman's wife might say anywhere: "He is more like a prince than our
-son." But one of the earliest glimpses we have of him shows him as
-simply selling bales of cloth from a booth in the market; which his
-mother may or may not have believed to be one of the habits of princes.
-This first glimpse of the young man in the market is symbolic in more
-ways than one. An incident occurred which is perhaps the shortest and
-sharpest summary that could be given of certain curious things which
-were a part of his character, long before it was transfigured by
-transcendental faith. While he was selling velvet and fine embroideries
-to some solid merchant of the town, a beggar came imploring alms;
-evidently in a somewhat tactless manner. It was a rude and simple
-society and there were no laws to punish a starving man for expressing
-his need for food, such as have been established in a more humanitarian
-age; and the lack of any organised police permitted such persons to
-pester the wealthy without any great danger. But there was, I believe,
-in many places a local custom of the guild forbidding outsiders to
-interrupt a fair bargain; and it is possible that some such thing put
-the mendicant more than normally in the wrong. Francis had all his life
-a great liking for people who had been put hopelessly in the wrong. On
-this occasion he seems to have dealt with the double interview with
-rather a divided mind; certainly with distraction, possibly with
-irritation. Perhaps he was all the more uneasy because of the almost
-fastidious standard of manners that came to him quite naturally. All are
-agreed that politeness flowed from him from the first, like one of the
-public fountains in such a sunny Italian market place. He might have
-written among his own poems as his own motto that verse of Mr. Belloc's
-poem—
-
-  'Of Courtesy, it is much less
-  Than courage of heart or holiness,
-  Yet in my walks it seems to me
-  That the grace of God is in Courtesy.'
-
-Nobody ever doubted that Francis Bernardone had courage of heart, even
-of the most ordinary manly and military sort; and a time was to come
-when there was quite as little doubt about the holiness and the grace of
-God. But I think that if there was one thing about which he was
-punctilious, it was punctiliousness. If there was one thing of which so
-humble a man could be said to be proud, he was proud of good manners.
-Only behind his perfectly natural urbanity were wider and even wilder
-possibilities, of which we get the first flash in this trivial incident.
-Anyhow Francis was evidently torn two ways with the botheration of two
-talkers, but finished his business with the merchant somehow; and when
-he had finished it, found the beggar was gone. Francis leapt from his
-booth, left all the bales of velvet and embroidery behind him apparently
-unprotected, and went racing across the market place like an arrow from
-the bow. Still running, he threaded the labyrinth of the narrow and
-crooked streets of the little town, looking for his beggar, whom he
-eventually discovered; and loaded that astonished mendicant with money.
-Then he straightened himself, so to speak, and swore before God that he
-would never all his life refuse help to a poor man. The sweeping
-simplicity of this undertaking is extremely characteristic. Never was
-any man so little afraid of his own promises. His life was one riot of
-rash vows; of rash vows that turned out right.
-
-The first biographers of Francis, naturally alive with the great
-religious revolution that he wrought, equally naturally looked back to
-his first years chiefly for omens and signs of such a spiritual
-earthquake. But writing at a greater distance, we shall not decrease
-that dramatic effect, but rather increase it, if we realise that there
-was not at this time any external sign of anything particularly mystical
-about the young man. He had not anything of that early sense of his
-vocation that has belonged to some of the saints. Over and above his
-main ambition to win fame as a French poet, he would seem to have most
-often thought of winning fame as a soldier. He was born kind; he was
-brave in the normal boyish fashion; but he drew the line both in
-kindness and bravery pretty well where most boys would have drawn it;
-for instance, he had the human horror of leprosy of which few normal
-people felt any need to be ashamed. He had the love of gay and bright
-apparel which was inherent in the heraldic taste of medieval times and
-seems altogether to have been rather a festive figure. If he did not
-paint the town red, he would probably have preferred to paint it all the
-colours of the rainbow, as in a medieval picture. But in this story of
-the young man in gay garments scampering after the vanishing beggar in
-rags there are certain notes of his natural individuality that must be
-assumed from first to last.
-
-For instance, there is the spirit of swiftness. In a sense he continued
-running for the rest of his life, as he ran after the beggar. Because
-nearly all the errands he ran on were errands of mercy, there appeared
-in his portraiture a mere element of mildness which was true in the
-truest sense, but is easily misunderstood. A certain precipitancy was
-the very poise of his soul. This saint should be represented among the
-other saints as angels were sometimes represented in pictures of angels;
-with flying feet or even with feathers; in the spirit of the text that
-makes angels winds and messengers a flaming fire. It is a curiosity of
-language that courage actually means running; and some of our sceptics
-will no doubt demonstrate that courage really means running away. But
-his courage was running, in the sense of rushing. With all his
-gentleness, there was originally something of impatience in his
-impetuosity. The psychological truth about it illustrates very well the
-modern muddle about the word "practical." If we mean by what is
-practical what is most immediately practicable, we mean merely what is
-easiest. In that sense St. Francis was very unpractical, and his
-ultimate aims were very unworldly. But if we mean by practicality a
-preference for prompt effort and energy over doubt or delay, he was very
-practical indeed. Some might call him a madman, but he was the very
-reverse of a dreamer. Nobody would be likely to call him a man of
-business; but he was very emphatically a man of action. In some of his
-early experiments he was rather too much of a man of action; he acted
-too soon and was too practical to be prudent. But at every turn of his
-extraordinary career we shall find him flinging himself round corners in
-the most unexpected fashion, as when he flew through the crooked streets
-after the beggar.
-
-Another element implied in the story, which was already partially a
-natural instinct, before it became a supernatural ideal, was something
-that had never perhaps been wholly lost in those little republics of
-medieval Italy. It was something very puzzling to some people; something
-clearer as a rule to Southerners than to Northerners, and I think to
-Catholics than to Protestants; the quite natural assumption of the
-equality of men. It has nothing necessarily to do with the Franciscan
-love for men; on the contrary one of its merely practical tests is the
-equality of the duel. Perhaps a gentleman will never be fully an
-egalitarian until he can really quarrel with his servant. But it was an
-antecedent condition of the Franciscan brotherhood; and we feel it in
-this early and secular incident. Francis, I fancy, felt a real doubt
-about which he must attend to, the beggar or the merchant; and having
-attended to the merchant, he turned to attend to the beggar; he thought
-of them as two men. This is a thing much more difficult to describe, in
-a society from which it is absent, but it was the original basis of the
-whole business; it was why the popular movement arose in that sort of
-place and that sort of man. His imaginative magnanimity afterwards rose
-like a tower to starry heights that might well seem dizzy and even
-crazy; but it was founded on this high table-land of human equality.
-
-I have taken this the first among a hundred tales of the youth of
-St. Francis, and dwelt on its significance a little, because until we
-have learned to look for the significance there will often seem to be
-little but a sort of light sentiment in telling the story. St. Francis
-is not a proper person to be patronised with merely "pretty" stories.
-There are any number of them; but they are too often used so as to be a
-sort of sentimental sediment of the medieval world, instead of being, as
-the saint emphatically is, a challenge to the modern world. We must take
-his real human development somewhat more seriously; and the next story
-in which we get a real glimpse of it is in a very different setting. But
-in exactly the same way it opens, as if by accident, certain abysses of
-the mind and perhaps of the unconscious mind. Francis still looks more
-or less like an ordinary young man; and it is only when we look at him
-as an ordinary young man, that we realise what an extraordinary young
-man he must be.
-
-War had broken out between Assisi and Perugia. It is now fashionable to
-say in a satirical spirit that such wars did not so much break out as go
-on indefinitely between the city-states of medieval Italy. It will be
-enough to say here that if one of these medieval wars had really gone on
-without stopping for a century, it might possibly have come within a
-remote distance of killing as many people as we kill in a year, in one
-of our great modern scientific wars between our great modern industrial
-empires. But the citizens of the medieval republic were certainly under
-the limitation of only being asked to die for the things with which they
-had always lived, the houses they inhabited, the shrines they venerated
-and the rulers and representatives they knew; and had not the larger
-vision calling them to die for the latest rumours about remote colonies
-as reported in anonymous newspapers. And if we infer from our own
-experience that war paralysed civilisation, we must at least admit that
-these warring towns turned out a number of paralytics who go by the
-names of Dante and Michael Angelo, Ariosto and Titian, Leonardo and
-Columbus, not to mention Catherine of Siena and the subject of this
-story. While we lament all this local patriotism as a hubbub of the Dark
-Ages, it must seem a rather curious fact that about three quarters of
-the greatest men who ever lived came out of these little towns and were
-often engaged in these little wars. It remains to be seen what will
-ultimately come out of our large towns; but there has been no sign of
-anything of this sort since they became large; and I have sometimes been
-haunted by a fancy of my youth, that these things will not come till
-there is a city wall round Clapham and the tocsin is rung at night to
-arm the citizens of Wimbledon.
-
-Anyhow, the tocsin was rung in Assisi and the citizens armed, and among
-them Francis the son of the cloth merchant. He went out to fight with
-some company of lancers and in some fight or foray or other he and his
-little band were taken prisoners. To me it seems most probable that
-there had been some tale of treason or cowardice about the disaster; for
-we are told that there was one of the captives with whom his
-fellow-prisoners flatly refused to associate even in prison; and when
-this happens in such circumstances, it is generally because the military
-blame for the surrender is thrown on some individual. Anyhow, somebody
-noted a small but curious thing, though it might seem rather negative
-than positive. Francis, we are told, moved among his captive companions
-with all his characteristic courtesy and even conviviality, "liberal and
-hilarious" as somebody said of him, resolved to keep up their spirits
-and his own. And when he came across the mysterious outcast, traitor or
-coward or whatever he was called, he simply treated him exactly like all
-the rest, neither with coldness nor compassion, but with the same
-unaffected gaiety and good fellowship. But if there had been present in
-that prison someone with a sort of second sight about the truth and
-trend of spiritual things, he might have known he was in the presence of
-something new and seemingly almost anarchic; a deep tide driving out to
-uncharted seas of charity. For in this sense there was really something
-wanting in Francis of Assisi, something to which he was blind that he
-might see better and more beautiful things. All those limits in good
-fellowship and good form, all those landmarks of social life that divide
-the tolerable and the intolerable, all those social scruples and
-conventional conditions that are normal and even noble in ordinary men,
-all those things that hold many decent societies together, could never
-hold this man at all. He liked as he liked; he seems to have liked
-everybody, but especially those whom everybody disliked him for liking.
-Something very vast and universal was already present in that narrow
-dungeon; and such a seer might have seen in its darkness that red halo
-of _caritas caritatum_ which marks one saint among saints as well as
-among men. He might have heard the first whisper of that wild blessing
-that afterwards took the form of a blasphemy; "He listens to those to
-whom God himself will not listen."
-
-But though such a seer might have seen such a truth, it is exceedingly
-doubtful if Francis himself saw it. He had acted out of an unconscious
-largeness, or in the fine medieval phrase largesse, within himself,
-something that might almost have been lawless if it had not been
-reaching out to a more divine law; but it is doubtful whether he yet
-knew that the law was divine. It is evident that he had not at this time
-any notion of abandoning the military, still less of adopting the
-monastic life. It is true that there is not, as pacifists and prigs
-imagine, the least inconsistency between loving men and fighting them,
-if we fight them fairly and for a good cause. But it seems to me that
-there was more than this involved; that the mind of the young man was
-really running towards a military morality in any case. About this time
-the first calamity crossed his path in the form of a malady which was to
-revisit him many times and hamper his headlong career. Sickness made him
-more serious; but one fancies it would only have made him a more serious
-soldier, or even more serious about soldiering. And while he was
-recovering, something rather larger than the little feuds and raids of
-the Italian towns opened an avenue of adventure and ambition. The crown
-of Sicily, a considerable centre of controversy at the time, was
-apparently claimed by a certain Gauthier de Brienne, and the Papal cause
-to aid which Gauthier was called in aroused enthusiasm among a number of
-young Assisians, including Francis, who proposed to march into Apulia on
-the count's behalf; perhaps his French name had something to do with it.
-For it must never be forgotten that though that world was in one sense a
-world of little things, it was a world of little things concerned about
-great things. There was more internationalism in the lands dotted with
-tiny republics than in the huge homogeneous impenetrable national
-divisions of to-day. The legal authority of the Assisian magistrates
-might hardly reach further than a bow-shot from their high embattled
-city walls. But their sympathies might be with the ride of the Normans
-through Sicily or the palace of the Troubadours at Toulouse; with the
-Emperor throned in the German forests or the great Pope dying in the
-exile of Salerno. Above all, it must be remembered that when the
-interests of an age are mainly religious they must be universal. Nothing
-can be more universal than the universe. And there are several things
-about the religious position at that particular moment which modern
-people not unnaturally fail to realise. For one thing, modern people
-naturally think of people so remote as ancient people, and even early
-people. We feel vaguely that these things happened in the first ages of
-the Church. The Church was already a good deal more than a thousand
-years old. That is, the Church was then rather older than France is now,
-a great deal older than England is now. And she looked old then; almost
-as old as she does now; possibly older than she does now. The Church
-looked like great Charlemagne with the long white beard, who had already
-fought a hundred wars with the heathen, and in the legend was bidden by
-an angel to go forth and fight once more though he was two hundred years
-old. The Church had topped her thousand years and turned the corner of
-the second thousand; she had come through the Dark Ages in which nothing
-could be done except desperate fighting against the barbarians and the
-stubborn repetition of the creed. The creed was still being repeated
-after the victory or escape; but it is not unnatural to suppose that
-there was something a little monotonous about the repetition. The Church
-looked old then as now; and there were some who thought her dying then
-as now. In truth orthodoxy was not dead but it may have been dull; it is
-certain that some people began to think it dull. The Troubadours of the
-Provençal movement had already begun to take that turn or twist towards
-Oriental fancies and the paradox of pessimism, which always come to
-Europeans as something fresh when their own sanity seems to be something
-stale. It is likely enough that after all those centuries of hopeless
-war without and ruthless asceticism within, the official orthodoxy
-seemed to be something stale. The freshness and freedom of the first
-Christians seemed then as much as now a lost and almost prehistoric age
-of gold. Rome was still more rational than anything else; the Church was
-really wiser but it may well have seemed wearier than the world. There
-was something more adventurous and alluring, perhaps, about the mad
-metaphysics that had been blown across out of Asia. Dreams were
-gathering like dark clouds over the Midi to break in a thunder of
-anathema and civil war. Only the light lay on the great plain round
-Rome; but the light was blank and the plain was flat; and there was no
-stir in the still air and the immemorial silence about the sacred town.
-
-High in the dark house of Assisi Francesco Bernardone slept and dreamed
-of arms. There came to him in the darkness a vision splendid with
-swords, patterned after the cross in the Crusading fashion, of spears
-and shields and helmets hung in a high armoury, all bearing the sacred
-sign. When he awoke he accepted the dream as a trumpet bidding him to
-the battlefield, and rushed out to take horse and arms. He delighted in
-all the exercises of chivalry; and was evidently an accomplished
-cavalier and fighting man by the tests of the tournament and the camp.
-He would doubtless at any time have preferred a Christian sort of
-chivalry; but it seems clear that he was also in a mood which thirsted
-for glory, though in him that glory would always have been identical
-with honour. He was not without some vision of that wreath of laurel
-which Cæsar has left for all the Latins. As he rode out to war the great
-gate in the deep wall of Assisi resounded with his last boast, "I shall
-come back a great prince."
-
-A little way along his road his sickness rose again and threw him. It
-seems highly probable, in the light of his impetuous temper, that he had
-ridden away long before he was fit to move. And in the darkness of this
-second and far more desolating interruption, he seems to have had
-another dream in which a voice said to him, "You have mistaken the
-meaning of the vision. Return to your own town." And Francis trailed
-back in his sickness to Assisi, a very dismal and disappointed and
-perhaps even derided figure, with nothing to do but to wait for what
-should happen next. It was his first descent into a dark ravine that is
-called the valley of humiliation, which seemed to him very rocky and
-desolate, but in which he was afterwards to find many flowers.
-
-But he was not only disappointed and humiliated; he was also very much
-puzzled and bewildered. He still firmly believed that his two dreams
-must have meant something; and he could not imagine what they could
-possibly mean. It was while he was drifting, one may even say mooning,
-about the streets of Assisi and the fields outside the city wall, that
-an incident occurred to him which has not always been immediately
-connected with the business of the dreams, but which seems to me the
-obvious culmination of them. He was riding listlessly in some wayside
-place, apparently in the open country, when he saw a figure coming along
-the road towards him and halted; for he saw it was a leper. And he knew
-instantly that his courage was challenged, not as the world challenges,
-but as one would challenge who knew the secrets of the heart of a man.
-What he saw advancing was not the banner and spears of Perugia, from
-which it never occurred to him to shrink; not the armies that fought for
-the crown of Sicily, of which he had always thought as a courageous man
-thinks of mere vulgar danger. Francis Bernardone saw his fear coming up
-the road towards him; the fear that comes from within and not without;
-though it stood white and horrible in the sunlight. For once in the long
-rush of his life his soul must have stood still. Then he sprang from his
-horse, knowing nothing between stillness and swiftness, and rushed on
-the leper and threw his arms round him. It was the beginning of a long
-vocation of ministry among many lepers, for whom he did many services;
-to this man he gave what money he could and mounted and rode on. We do
-not know how far he rode, or with what sense of the things around him;
-but it is said that when he looked back, he could see no figure on the
-road.
-
-
-
-
- _Chapter IV_
- _Francis the Builder_
-
-
-We have now reached the great break in the life of Francis of Assisi;
-the point at which something happened to him that must remain greatly
-dark to most of us, who are ordinary and selfish men whom God has not
-broken to make anew.
-
-In dealing with this difficult passage, especially for my own purpose of
-making things moderately easy for the more secular sympathiser, I have
-hesitated as to the proper course; and have eventually decided to state
-first of all what happened, with little more than a hint of what I
-imagine to have been the meaning of what happened. The fuller meaning
-may be debated more easily afterwards, when it was unfolded in the full
-Franciscan life. Anyhow what happened was this. The story very largely
-revolves round the ruins of the Church of St. Damian, an old shrine in
-Assisi which was apparently neglected and falling to pieces. Here
-Francis was in the habit of praying before the crucifix during these
-dark and aimless days of transition that followed the tragical collapse
-of all his military ambitions, probably made bitter by some loss of
-social prestige terrible to his sensitive spirit. As he did so he heard
-a voice saying to him, "Francis, seest thou not that my house is in
-ruins? Go and restore it for me."
-
-Francis sprang up and went. To go and do something was one of the
-driving demands of his nature; probably he had gone and done it before
-he had at all thoroughly thought out what he had done. In any case what
-he had done was something very decisive and immediately very disastrous
-for his singular social career. In the coarse conventional language of
-the uncomprehending world, he stole. From his own enthusiastic point of
-view, he extended to his venerable father Peter Bernardone the exquisite
-excitement and inestimable privilege of assisting, more or less
-unconsciously, in the rebuilding of St. Damian's Church. In point of
-fact what he did was first to sell his own horse and then to go off and
-sell several bales of his father's cloth, making the sign of the cross
-over them to indicate their pious and charitable destination. Peter
-Bernardone did not see things in this light. Peter Bernardone indeed had
-not very much light to see by, so far as understanding the genius and
-temperament of his extraordinary son was concerned. Instead of
-understanding in what sort of a wind and flame of abstract appetites the
-lad was living, instead of simply telling him (as the priest practically
-did later) that he had done an indefensible thing with the best
-intentions, old Bernardone took up the matter in the hardest style; in a
-legal and literal fashion. He used absolute political powers like a
-heathen father, and himself put his son under lock and key as a vulgar
-thief. It would appear that the cry was caught up among many with whom
-the unlucky Francis had once been popular; and altogether, in his
-efforts to build up the house of God he had only succeeded in bringing
-his own house about his ears and lying buried under the ruins. The
-quarrel dragged drearily through several stages; at one time the
-wretched young man seems to have disappeared underground, so to speak,
-into some cavern or cellar where he remained huddled hopelessly in the
-darkness. Anyhow, it was his blackest moment; the whole world had turned
-over; the whole world was on top of him.
-
-When he came out, it was only perhaps gradually that anybody grasped
-that something had happened. He and his father were summoned in the
-court of the bishop; for Francis had refused the authority of all legal
-tribunals. The bishop addressed some remarks to him, full of that
-excellent common sense which the Catholic Church keeps permanently as
-the background for all the fiery attitudes of her saints. He told
-Francis that he must unquestionably restore the money to his father;
-that no blessing could follow a good work done by unjust methods; and in
-short (to put it crudely) if the young fanatic would give back his money
-to the old fool, the incident would then terminate. There was a new air
-about Francis. He was no longer crushed, still less crawling, so far as
-his father was concerned; yet his words do not, I think, indicate either
-just indignation or wanton insult or anything in the nature of a mere
-continuation of the quarrel. They are rather remotely akin to mysterious
-utterances of his great model, "What have I to do with thee?" or even
-the terrible "Touch me not."
-
-He stood up before them all and said, "Up to this time I have called
-Pietro Bernardone father, but now I am the servant of God. Not only the
-money but everything that can be called his I will restore to my father,
-even the very clothes he has given me." And he rent off all his garments
-except one; and they saw that that was a hair-shirt.
-
-He piled the garments in a heap on the floor and tossed the money on top
-of them. Then he turned to the bishop, and received his blessing, like
-one who turns his back on society; and, according to the account, went
-out as he was into the cold world. Apparently it was literally a cold
-world at the moment, and snow was on the ground. A curious detail, very
-deep in its significance, I fancy, is given in the same account of this
-great crisis in his life. He went out half-naked in his hair-shirt into
-the winter woods, walking the frozen ground between the frosty trees; a
-man without a father. He was penniless, he was parentless, he was to all
-appearance without a trade or a plan or a hope in the world; and as he
-went under the frosty trees, he burst suddenly into song.
-
-It was apparently noted as remarkable that the language in which he sang
-was French, or that Provençal which was called for convenience French.
-It was not his native language; and it was in his native language that
-he ultimately won fame as a poet; indeed St. Francis is one of the very
-first of the national poets in the purely national dialects of Europe.
-But it was the language with which all his most boyish ardours and
-ambitions had been identified; it was for him pre-eminently the language
-of romance. That it broke from him in this extraordinary extremity seems
-to me something at first sight very strange and in the last analysis
-very significant. What that significance was, or may well have been, I
-will try to suggest in the subsequent chapter; it is enough to indicate
-here that the whole philosophy of St. Francis revolved round the idea of
-a new supernatural light on natural things, which meant the ultimate
-recovery not the ultimate refusal of natural things. And for the purpose
-of this purely narrative part of the business, it is enough to record
-that while he wandered in the winter forest in his hair-shirt, like the
-very wildest of the hermits, he sang in the tongue of the Troubadours.
-
-Meanwhile the narrative naturally reverts to the problem of the ruined
-or at least neglected church, which had been the starting point of the
-saint's innocent crime and beatific punishment. That problem still
-predominated in his mind and was soon engaging his insatiable
-activities; but they were activities of a new sort; and he made no more
-attempts to interfere with the commercial ethics of the town of Assisi.
-There had dawned on him one of those great paradoxes that are also
-platitudes. He realised that the way to build a church is not to become
-entangled in bargains and, to him, rather bewildering questions of legal
-claim. The way to build a church is not to pay for it, certainly not
-with somebody else's money. The way to build a church is not even to pay
-for it with your own money. The way to build a church is to build it.
-
-He went about by himself collecting stones. He begged all the people he
-met to give him stones. In fact he became a new sort of beggar,
-reversing the parable; a beggar who asks not for bread but a stone.
-Probably, as happened to him again and again throughout his
-extraordinary existence, the very queerness of the request gave it a
-sort of popularity; and all sorts of idle and luxurious people fell in
-with the benevolent project, as they would have done with a bet. He
-worked with his own hands at the rebuilding of the church, dragging the
-material like a beast of burden and learning the very last and lowest
-lessons of toil. A vast number of stories are told about Francis at this
-as at every other period of his life; but for the purpose here, which is
-one of simplification, it is best to dwell on this definite re-entrance
-of the saint into the world by the low gate of manual labour. There does
-indeed run through the whole of his life a sort of double meaning, like
-his shadow thrown upon the wall. All his action had something of the
-character of an allegory; and it is likely enough that some
-leaden-witted scientific historian may some day try to prove that he
-himself was never anything but an allegory. It is true enough in this
-sense that he was labouring at a double task, and rebuilding something
-else as well as the church of St. Damian. He was not only discovering
-the general lesson that his glory was not to be in overthrowing men in
-battle but in building up the positive and creative monuments of peace.
-He was truly building up something else, or beginning to build it up;
-something that has often enough fallen into ruin but has never been past
-rebuilding; a church that could always be built anew though it had
-rotted away to its first foundation-stone, against which the gates of
-hell shall not prevail.
-
-The next stage in his progress is probably marked by his transferring
-the same energies of architectural reconstruction to the little church
-of St. Mary of the Angels at the Portiuncula. He had already done
-something of the same kind at a church dedicated to St. Peter; and that
-quality in his life noted above, which made it seem like a symbolical
-drama, led many of his most devout biographers to note the numerical
-symbolism of the three churches. There was at any rate a more historical
-and practical symbolism about two of them. For the original church of
-St. Damian afterwards became the seat of his striking experiment of a
-female order, and of the pure and spiritual romance of St. Clare. And
-the church of the Portiuncula will remain for ever as one of the great
-historic buildings of the world; for it was there that he gathered the
-little knot of friends and enthusiasts; it was the home of many homeless
-men. At this time, however, it is not clear that he had the definite
-idea of any such monastic developments. How early the plan appeared in
-his own mind it is of course impossible to say; but on the face of
-events it first takes the form of a few friends who attached themselves
-to him one by one because they shared his own passion for simplicity.
-The account given of the form of their dedication is, however, very
-significant; for it was that of an invocation of the simplification of
-life as suggested in the New Testament. The adoration of Christ had been
-a part of the man's passionate nature for a long time past. But the
-imitation of Christ, as a sort of plan or ordered scheme of life, may in
-that sense be said to begin here.
-
-The two men who have the credit, apparently, of having first perceived
-something of what was happening in the world of the soul were a solid
-and wealthy citizen named Bernard of Quintavalle and a canon from a
-neighbouring church named Peter. It is the more to their credit because
-Francis, if one may put it so, was by this time wallowing in poverty and
-association with lepers and ragged mendicants; and these two were men
-with much to give up; the one of comforts in the world and the other of
-ambition in the Church. Bernard the rich burgher did quite literally and
-finally sell all he had and give to the poor. Peter did even more; for
-he descended from a chair of spiritual authority, probably when he was
-already a man of mature years and therefore of fixed mental habits, to
-follow an extravagant young eccentric whom most people probably regarded
-as a maniac. What it was of which they had caught a glimpse, of which
-Francis had seen the glory, may be suggested later so far as it can be
-suggested at all. At this stage we need profess to see no more than all
-Assisi saw, and that something not altogether unworthy of comment. The
-citizens of Assisi only saw the camel go in triumph through the eye of
-the needle and God doing impossible things because to him all things
-were possible; only a priest who rent his robes like the Publican and
-not like the Pharisee and a rich man who went away joyful, for he had no
-possessions.
-
-These three strange figures are said to have built themselves a sort of
-hut or den adjoining the leper hospital. There they talked to each
-other, in the intervals of drudgery and danger (for it needed ten times
-more courage to look after a leper than to fight for the crown of
-Sicily), in the terms of their new life, almost like children talking a
-secret language. Of these individual elements on their first friendship
-we can say little with certainty; but it is certain that they remained
-friends to the end. Bernard of Quintavalle occupies in the story
-something of the position of Sir Bedivere, "first made and latest left
-of Arthur's knights," for he reappears again at the right hand of the
-saint on his death-bed and receives some sort of special blessing. But
-all those things belong to another historical world and were quite
-remote from the ragged and fantastic trio in their tumble-down hut. They
-were not monks except perhaps in the most literal and archaic sense
-which was identical with hermits. They were, so to speak, three
-solitaries living together socially, but not as a society. The whole
-thing seems to have been intensely individual, as seen from the outside
-doubtless individual to the point of insanity. The stir of something
-that had in it the promise of a movement or a mission can first be felt
-as I have said in the affair of the appeal to the New Testament.
-
-It was a sort of _sors virgiliana_ applied to the Bible; a practice not
-unknown among Protestants though open to their criticism, one would
-think, as being rather a superstition of pagans. Anyhow it seems almost
-the opposite of searching the Scriptures to open them at random; but
-St. Francis certainly opened them at random. According to one story, he
-merely made the sign of the cross over the volume of the Gospel and
-opened it at three places reading three texts. The first was the tale of
-the rich young man whose refusal to sell all his goods was the occasion
-of the great paradox about the camel and the needle. The second was the
-commandment to the disciples to take nothing with them on their journey,
-neither scrip nor staff nor any money. The third was that saying,
-literally to be called crucial, that the follower of Christ must also
-carry his cross. There is a somewhat similar story of Francis finding
-one of these texts, almost as accidentally, merely in listening to what
-happened to be the Gospel of the day. But from the former version at
-least it would seem that the incident occurred very early indeed in his
-new life, perhaps soon after his breach with his father; for it was
-after this oracle, apparently, that Bernard the first disciple rushed
-forth and scattered all his goods among the poor. If this be so, it
-would seem that nothing followed it for the moment except the individual
-ascetical life with the hut for a hermitage. It must of course have been
-a rather public sort of hermitage, but it was none the less in a very
-real sense withdrawn from the world. St. Simeon Stylites on the top of
-his pillar was in one sense an exceedingly public character; but there
-was something a little singular in his situation for all that. It may be
-presumed that most people thought the situation of Francis singular,
-that some even thought it too singular. There was inevitably indeed in
-any Catholic society something ultimate and even subconscious that was
-at least capable of comprehending it better than a pagan or puritan
-society could comprehend it. But we must not at this stage, I think,
-exaggerate this potential public sympathy. As has already been
-suggested, the Church and all its institutions had already the air of
-being old and settled and sensible things, the monastic institutions
-among the rest. Common sense was commoner in the Middle Ages, I think,
-than in our own rather jumpy journalistic age; but men like Francis are
-not common in any age, nor are they to be fully understood merely by the
-exercise of common sense. The thirteenth century was certainly a
-progressive period; perhaps the only really progressive period in human
-history. But it can truly be called progressive precisely because its
-progress was very orderly. It is really and truly an example of an epoch
-of reforms without revolutions. But the reforms were not only
-progressive but very practical; and they were very much to the advantage
-of highly practical institutions; the towns and the trading guilds and
-the manual crafts. Now the solid men of town and guild in the time of
-Francis of Assisi were probably very solid indeed. They were much more
-economically equal, they were much more justly governed in their own
-economic environment, than the moderns who struggle madly between
-starvation and the monopolist prizes of capitalism; but it is likely
-enough that the majority of such citizens were as hard-headed as
-peasants. Certainly the behaviour of the venerable Peter Bernardone does
-not indicate a delicate sympathy with the fine and almost fanciful
-subtleties of the Franciscan spirit. And we cannot measure the beauty
-and originality of this strange spiritual adventure, unless we have the
-humour and human sympathy to put into plain words how it would have
-looked to such an unsympathetic person at the time when it happened. In
-the next chapter I shall make an attempt, inevitably inadequate, to
-indicate the inside of this story of the building of the three churches
-and the little hut. In this chapter I have but outlined it from the
-outside. And in concluding that chapter I ask the reader to remember and
-realise what that story really looked like, when thus seen from the
-outside. Given a critic of rather coarse common sense, with no feeling
-about the incident except annoyance, and how would the story seem to
-stand?
-
-A young fool or rascal is caught robbing his father and selling goods
-which he ought to guard; and the only explanation he will offer is that
-a loud voice from nowhere spoke in his ear and told him to mend the
-cracks and holes in a particular wall. He then declares himself
-naturally independent of all powers corresponding to the police or the
-magistrates, and takes refuge with an amiable bishop who is forced to
-remonstrate with him and tell him he is wrong. He then proceeds to take
-off his clothes in public and practically throw them at his father;
-announcing at the same time that his father is not his father at all. He
-then runs about the town asking everybody he meets to give him fragments
-of buildings or building materials, apparently with reference to his old
-monomania about mending the wall. It may be an excellent thing that
-cracks should be filled up, but preferably not by somebody who is
-himself cracked; and architectural restoration like other things is not
-best performed by builders who, as we should say, have a tile loose.
-Finally the wretched youth relapses into rags and squalor and
-practically crawls away into the gutter. That is the spectacle that
-Francis must have presented to a very large number of his neighbours and
-friends.
-
-How he lived at all must have seemed to them dubious; but presumably he
-already begged for bread as he had begged for building materials. But he
-was always very careful to beg for the blackest or worst bread he could
-get, for the stalest crusts or something rather less luxurious than the
-crumbs which the dogs eat, and which fall from the rich man's table.
-Thus he probably fared worse than an ordinary beggar; for the beggar
-would eat the best he could get and the saint ate the worst he could
-get. In plain fact he was ready to live on refuse; and it was probably
-something much uglier as an experience than the refined simplicity which
-vegetarians and water-drinkers would call the simple life. As he dealt
-with the question of food, so he apparently dealt with the question of
-clothing. He dealt with it, that is, upon the same principle of taking
-what he could get, and not even the best of what he could get. According
-to one story he changed clothes with a beggar; and he would doubtless
-have been content to change them with a scarecrow. In another version he
-got hold of the rough brown tunic of a peasant, but presumably only
-because the peasant gave him his very oldest brown tunic, which was
-probably very old indeed. Most peasants have few changes of clothing to
-give away; and some peasants are not specially inclined to give them
-away until it is absolutely necessary. It is said that in place of the
-girdle which he had flung off (perhaps with the more symbolic scorn
-because it probably carried the purse or wallet by the fashion of the
-period) he picked up a rope more or less at random, because it was lying
-near, and tied it round his waist. He undoubtedly meant it as a shabby
-expedient; rather as the very destitute tramp will sometimes tie his
-clothes together with a piece of string. He meant to strike the note of
-collecting his clothes anyhow, like rags from a succession of dust-bins.
-Ten years later that make-shift costume was the uniform of five thousand
-men; and a hundred years later, in that, for a pontifical panoply, they
-laid great Dante in the grave.
-
-
-
-
- _Chapter V_
- _Le Jongleur de Dieu_
-
-
-Many signs and symbols might be used to give a hint of what really
-happened in the mind of the young poet of Assisi. Indeed they are at
-once too numerous for selection and yet too slight for satisfaction. But
-one of them may be adumbrated in this small and apparently accidental
-fact: that when he and his secular companions carried their pageant of
-poetry through the town, they called themselves Troubadours. But when he
-and his spiritual companions came out to do their spiritual work in the
-world, they were called by their leader the Jongleurs de Dieu.
-
-Nothing has been said here at any length of the great culture of the
-Troubadours as it appeared in Provence or Languedoc, great as was their
-influence in history and their influence on St. Francis. Something more
-may be said of them when we come to summarise his relation to history;
-it is enough to note here in a few sentences the facts about them that
-were relevant to him, and especially the particular point now in
-question, which was the most relevant of all. Everybody knows who the
-Troubadours were; everybody knows that very early in the Middle Ages, in
-the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, there arose a civilisation
-in Southern France which threatened to rival or eclipse the rising
-tradition of Paris. Its chief product was a school of poetry, or rather
-more especially a school of poets. They were primarily love-poets,
-though they were often also satirists and critics of things in general.
-Their picturesque posture in history is largely due to the fact that
-they sang their own poems and often played their own accompaniments, on
-the light musical instruments of the period; they were minstrels as well
-as men of letters. Allied to their love-poetry were other institutions
-of a decorative and fanciful kind concerned with the same theme. There
-was what was called the "Gay Science," the attempt to reduce to a sort
-of system the fine shades of flirtation and philandering. There were the
-things called Courts of Love, in which the same delicate subjects were
-dealt with with legal pomp and pedantry. There is one point in this part
-of the business that must be remembered in relation to St. Francis.
-There were manifest moral dangers in all this superb sentimentalism; but
-it is a mistake to suppose that its only danger of exaggeration was in
-the direction of sensualism. There was a strain in the southern romance
-that was actually an excess of spirituality; just as the pessimist
-heresy it produced was in one sense an excess of spirituality. The love
-was not always animal; sometimes it was so airy as to be almost
-allegorical. The reader realises that the lady is the most beautiful
-being that can possibly exist, only he has occasional doubts as to
-whether she does exist. Dante owed something to the Troubadours; and the
-critical debates about his ideal woman are an excellent example of these
-doubts. We know that Beatrice was not his wife, but we should in any
-case be equally sure that she was not his mistress; and some critics
-have even suggested that she was nothing at all, so to speak, except his
-muse. This idea of Beatrice as an allegorical figure is, I believe,
-unsound; it would seem unsound to any man who has read the _Vita Nuova_
-and has been in love. But the very fact that it is possible to suggest
-it illustrates something abstract and scholastic in these medieval
-passions. But though they were abstract passions they were very
-passionate passions. These men could feel almost like lovers, even about
-allegories and abstractions. It is necessary to remember this in order
-to realise that St. Francis was talking the true language of a
-troubadour when he said that he also had a most glorious and gracious
-lady and that her name was Poverty.
-
-But the particular point to be noted here is not concerned so much with
-the word Troubadour as with the word Jongleur. It is especially
-concerned with the transition from one to the other; and for this it is
-necessary to grasp another detail about the poets of the Gay Science. A
-jongleur was not the same thing as a troubadour, even if the same man
-were both a troubadour and a jongleur. More often, I believe, they were
-separate men as well as separate trades. In many cases apparently the
-two men would walk the world together like companions in arms, or rather
-companions in arts. The jongleur was properly a joculator or jester;
-sometimes he was what we should call a juggler. This is the point, I
-imagine, of the tale about Taillefer the Jongleur at the battle of
-Hastings, who sang of the death of Roland while he tossed up his sword
-and caught it, as a juggler catches balls. Sometimes he may have been
-even a tumbler; like that acrobat in the beautiful legend who was called
-"The Tumbler of Our Lady," because he turned head over heels and stood
-on his head before the image of the Blessed Virgin, for which he was
-nobly thanked and comforted by her and the whole company of heaven. In
-the ordinary way, we may imagine, the troubadour would exalt the company
-with earnest and solemn strains of love and then the jongleur would do
-his turn as a sort of comic relief. A glorious medieval romance remains
-to be written about two such companions wandering through the world. At
-any rate, if there is one place in which the true Franciscan spirit can
-be found outside the true Franciscan story, it is in that tale of the
-Tumbler of Our Lady. And when St. Francis called his followers the
-Jongleurs de Dieu, he meant something very like the Tumblers of Our Lord.
-
-Somewhere in that transition from the ambition of the Troubadour to the
-antics of the Tumbler is hidden, as under a parable, the truth of
-St. Francis. Of the two minstrels or entertainers, the jester was
-presumably the servant or at least the secondary figure. St. Francis
-really meant what he said when he said he had found the secret of life
-in being the servant and the secondary figure. There was to be found
-ultimately in such service a freedom almost amounting to frivolity. It
-was comparable to the condition of the jongleur because it almost
-amounted to frivolity. The jester could be free when the knight was
-rigid; and it was possible to be a jester in the service which is
-perfect freedom. This parallel of the two poets or minstrels is perhaps
-the best preliminary and external statement of the Franciscan change of
-heart, being conceived under an image with which the imagination of the
-modern world has a certain sympathy. There was, of course, a great deal
-more than this involved; and we must endeavour however insufficiently to
-penetrate past the image to the idea. It is so far like the tumblers
-that it is really to many people a topsy-turvy idea.
-
-Francis, at the time or somewhere about the time when he disappeared
-into the prison or the dark cavern, underwent a reversal of a certain
-psychological kind; which was really like the reversal of a complete
-somersault, in that by coming full circle it came back, or apparently
-came back, to the same normal posture. It is necessary to use the
-grotesque simile of an acrobatic antic, because there is hardly any
-other figure that will make the fact clear. But in the inward sense it
-was a profound spiritual revolution. The man who went into the cave was
-not the man who came out again; in that sense he was almost as different
-as if he were dead, as if he were a ghost or a blessed spirit. And the
-effects of this on his attitude towards the actual world were really as
-extravagant as any parallel can make them. He looked at the world as
-differently from other men as if he had come out of that dark hole
-walking on his hands.
-
-If we apply this parable of Our Lady's Tumbler to the case, we shall
-come very near to the point of it. Now it really is a fact that any
-scene such as a landscape can sometimes be more clearly and freshly seen
-if it is seen upside down. There have been landscape-painters who
-adopted the most startling and pantomimic postures in order to look at
-it for a moment in that fashion. Thus that inverted vision, so much more
-bright and quaint and arresting, does bear a certain resemblance to the
-world which a mystic like St. Francis sees every day. But herein is the
-essential part of the parable. Our Lady's Tumbler did not stand on his
-head _in order_ to see flowers and trees as a clearer or quainter
-vision. He did not do so; and it would never have occurred to him to do
-so. Our Lady's Tumbler stood on his head to please Our Lady. If
-St. Francis had done the same thing, as he was quite capable of doing,
-it would originally have been from the same motive; a motive of a purely
-supernatural thought. It would be _after_ this that his enthusiasm would
-extend itself and give a sort of halo to the edges of all earthly
-things. This is why it is not true to represent St. Francis as a mere
-romantic forerunner of the Renaissance and a revival of natural
-pleasures for their own sake. The whole point of him was that the secret
-of recovering the natural pleasures lay in regarding them in the light
-of a supernatural pleasure. In other words, he repeated in his own
-person that historic process noted in the introductory chapter; the
-vigil of asceticism which ends in the vision of a natural world made
-new. But in the personal case there was even more than this; there were
-elements that make the parallel of the Jongleur or Tumbler even more
-appropriate than this.
-
-It may be suspected that in that black cell or cave Francis passed the
-blackest hours of his life. By nature he was the sort of man who has
-that vanity which is the opposite of pride; that vanity which is very
-near to humility. He never despised his fellow creatures and therefore
-he never despised the opinion of his fellow creatures; including the
-admiration of his fellow creatures. All that part of his human nature
-had suffered the heaviest and most crushing blows. It is possible that
-after his humiliating return from his frustrated military campaign he
-was called a coward. It is certain that after his quarrel with his
-father about the bales of cloth he was called a thief. And even those
-who had sympathised most with him, the priest whose church he had
-restored, the bishop whose blessing he had received, had evidently
-treated him with an almost humorous amiability which left only too clear
-the ultimate conclusion of the matter. He had made a fool of himself.
-Any man who has been young, who has ridden horses or thought himself
-ready for a fight, who has fancied himself as a troubadour and accepted
-the conventions of comradeship, will appreciate the ponderous and
-crushing weight of that simple phrase. The conversion of St. Francis,
-like the conversion of St. Paul, involved his being in some sense flung
-suddenly from a horse; but in a sense it was an even worse fall; for it
-was a war-horse. Anyhow, there was not a rag of him left that was not
-ridiculous. Everybody knew that at the best he had made a fool of
-himself. It was a solid objective fact, like the stones in the road,
-that he had made a fool of himself. He saw himself as an object, very
-small and distinct like a fly walking on a clear window pane; and it was
-unmistakably a fool. And as he stared at the word "fool" written in
-luminous letters before him, the word itself began to shine and change.
-
-We used to be told in the nursery that if a man were to bore a hole
-through the centre of the earth and climb continually down and down,
-there would come a moment at the centre when he would seem to be
-climbing up and up. I do not know whether this is true. The reason I do
-not know whether it is true is that I never happened to bore a hole
-through the centre of the earth, still less to crawl through it. If I do
-not know what this reversal or inversion feels like, it is because I
-have never been there. And this also is an allegory. It is certain that
-the writer, it is even possible that the reader, is an ordinary person
-who has never been there. We cannot follow St. Francis to that final
-spiritual overturn in which complete humiliation becomes complete
-holiness or happiness, because we have never been there. I for one do
-not profess to follow it any further than that first breaking down of
-the romantic barricades of boyish vanity, which I have suggested in the
-last paragraph. And even that paragraph, of course, is merely
-conjectural, an individual guess at what he may have felt; but he may
-have felt something quite different. But whatever else it was, it was so
-far analogous to the story of the man making a tunnel through the earth
-that it did mean a man going down and down until at some mysterious
-moment he begins to go up and up. We have never gone up like that
-because we have never gone down like that; we are obviously incapable of
-saying that it does not happen; and the more candidly and calmly we read
-human history, and especially the history of the wisest men, the more we
-shall come to the conclusion that it does happen. Of the intrinsic
-internal essence of the experience I make no pretence of writing at all.
-But the external effect of it, for the purpose of this narrative, may be
-expressed by saying that when Francis came forth from his cave of
-vision, he was wearing the same word "fool" as a feather in his cap; as
-a crest or even a crown. He would go on being a fool; he would become
-more and more of a fool; he would be the court fool of the King of
-Paradise.
-
-This state can only be represented in symbol; but the symbol of
-inversion is true in another way. If a man saw the world upside down,
-with all the trees and towers hanging head downwards as in a pool, one
-effect would be to emphasise the idea of _dependence_. There is a Latin
-and literal connection; for the very word dependence only means hanging.
-It would make vivid the Scriptural text which says that God has hanged
-the world upon nothing. If St. Francis had seen, in one of his strange
-dreams, the town of Assisi upside down, it need not have differed in a
-single detail from itself except in being entirely the other way round.
-But the point is this: that whereas to the normal eye the large masonry
-of its walls or the massive foundations of its watchtowers and its high
-citadel would make it seem safer and more permanent, the moment it was
-turned over the very same weight would make it seem more helpless and
-more in peril. It is but a symbol; but it happens to fit the
-psychological fact. St. Francis might love his little town as much as
-before, or more than before; but the nature of the love would be altered
-even in being increased. He might see and love every tile on the steep
-roofs or every bird on the battlements; but he would see them all in a
-new and divine light of eternal danger and dependence. Instead of being
-merely proud of his strong city because it could not be moved, he would
-be thankful to God Almighty that it had not been dropped; he would be
-thankful to God for not dropping the whole cosmos like a vast crystal to
-be shattered into falling stars. Perhaps St. Peter saw the world so,
-when he was crucified head-downwards.
-
-It is commonly in a somewhat cynical sense that men have said, "Blessed
-is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed." It was
-in a wholly happy and enthusiastic sense that St. Francis said, "Blessed
-is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall enjoy everything." It was by
-this deliberate idea of starting from zero, from the dark nothingness of
-his own deserts, that he did come to enjoy even earthly things as few
-people have enjoyed them; and they are in themselves the best working
-example of the idea. For there is no way in which a man can earn a star
-or deserve a sunset. But there is more than this involved, and more
-indeed than is easily to be expressed in words. It is not only true that
-the less a man thinks of himself, the more he thinks of his good luck
-and of all the gifts of God. It is also true that he sees more of the
-things themselves when he sees more of their origin; for their origin is
-a part of them and indeed the most important part of them. Thus they
-become more extraordinary by being explained. He has more wonder at them
-but less fear of them; for a thing is really wonderful when it is
-significant and not when it is insignificant; and a monster, shapeless
-or dumb or merely destructive, may be larger than the mountains, but is
-still in a literal sense insignificant. For a mystic like St. Francis
-the monsters had a meaning; that is, they had delivered their message.
-They spoke no longer in an unknown tongue. That is the meaning of all
-those stories, whether legendary or historical, in which he appears as a
-magician speaking the language of beasts and birds. The mystic will have
-nothing to do with mere mystery; mere mystery is generally a mystery of
-iniquity.
-
-The transition from the good man to the saint is a sort of revolution;
-by which one for whom all things illustrate and illuminate God becomes
-one for whom God illustrates and illuminates all things. It is rather
-like the reversal whereby a lover might say at first sight that a lady
-looked like a flower, and say afterwards that all flowers reminded him
-of his lady. A saint and a poet standing by the same flower might seem
-to say the same thing; but indeed though they would both be telling the
-truth, they would be telling different truths. For one the joy of life
-is a cause of faith, for the other rather a result of faith. But one
-effect of the difference is that the sense of a divine dependence, which
-for the artist is like the brilliant levin-blaze, for the saint is like
-the broad daylight. Being in some mystical sense on the other side of
-things, he sees things go forth from the divine as children going forth
-from a familiar and accepted home, instead of meeting them as they come
-out, as most of us do, upon the roads of the world. And it is the
-paradox that by this privilege he is more familiar, more free and
-fraternal, more carelessly hospitable than we. For us the elements are
-like heralds who tell us with trumpet and tabard that we are drawing
-near the city of a great king; but he hails them with an old familiarity
-that is almost an old frivolity. He calls them his Brother Fire and his
-Sister Water.
-
-So arises out of this almost nihilistic abyss the noble thing that is
-called Praise; which no one will ever understand while he identifies it
-with nature-worship or pantheistic optimism. When we say that a poet
-praises the whole creation, we commonly mean only that he praises the
-whole cosmos. But this sort of poet does really praise creation, in the
-sense of the act of creation. He praises the passage or transition from
-nonentity to entity; there falls here also the shadow of that archetypal
-image of the bridge, which has given to the priest his archaic and
-mysterious name. The mystic who passes through the moment when there is
-nothing but God does in some sense behold the beginningless beginnings
-in which there was really nothing else. He not only appreciates
-everything but the nothing of which everything was made. In a fashion he
-endures and answers even the earthquake irony of the Book of Job; in
-some sense he is there when the foundations of the world are laid, with
-the morning stars singing together and the sons of God shouting for joy.
-That is but a distant adumbration of the reason why the Franciscan,
-ragged, penniless, homeless and apparently hopeless, did indeed come
-forth singing such songs as might come from the stars of morning; and
-shouting, a son of God.
-
-This sense of the great gratitude and the sublime dependence was not a
-phrase or even a sentiment; it is the whole point that this was the very
-rock of reality. It was not a fancy but a fact; rather it is true that
-beside it all facts are fancies. That we all depend in every detail, at
-every instant, as a Christian would say upon God, as even an agnostic
-would say upon existence and the nature of things, is not an illusion of
-imagination; on the contrary, it is the fundamental fact which we cover
-up, as with curtains, with the illusion of ordinary life. That ordinary
-life is an admirable thing in itself, just as imagination is an
-admirable thing in itself. But it is much more the ordinary life that is
-made of imagination than the contemplative life. He who has seen the
-whole world hanging on a hair of the mercy of God has seen the truth; we
-might almost say the cold truth. He who has seen the vision of his city
-upside down has seen it the right way up.
-
-Rossetti makes the remark somewhere, bitterly but with great truth, that
-the worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has
-nobody to thank. The converse of this proposition is also true; and it
-is certain that this gratitude produced, in such men as we are here
-considering, the most purely joyful moments that have been known to man.
-The great painter boasted that he mixed all his colours with brains, and
-the great saint may be said to mix all his thoughts with thanks. All
-goods look better when they look like gifts. In this sense it is certain
-that the mystical method establishes a very healthy external relation to
-everything else. But it must always be remembered that everything else
-has for ever fallen into a second place, in comparison with this simple
-fact of dependence on the divine reality. In so far as ordinary social
-relations have in them something that seems solid and self-supporting,
-some sense of being at once buttressed and cushioned; in so far as they
-establish sanity in the sense of security and security in the sense of
-self-sufficiency, the man who has seen the world hanging on a hair does
-have some difficulty in taking them so seriously as that. In so far as
-even the secular authorities and hierarchies, even the most natural
-superiorities and the most necessary subordinations, tend at once to put
-a man in his place, and to make him sure of his position, the man who
-has seen the human hierarchy upside down will always have something of a
-smile for its superiorities. In this sense the direct vision of divine
-reality does disturb solemnities that are sane enough in themselves. The
-mystic may have added a cubit to his stature; but he generally loses
-something of his status. He can no longer take himself for granted,
-merely because he can verify his own existence in a parish register or a
-family Bible. Such a man may have something of the appearance of the
-lunatic who has lost his name while preserving his nature; who
-straightway forgets what manner of man he was. "Hitherto I have called
-Pietro Bernardone father; but now I am the servant of God."
-
-All these profound matters must be suggested in short and imperfect
-phrases; and the shortest statement of one aspect of this illumination
-is to say that it is the discovery of an infinite debt. It may seem a
-paradox to say that a man may be transported with joy to discover that
-he is in debt. But this is only because in commercial cases the creditor
-does not generally share the transports of joy; especially when the debt
-is by hypothesis infinite and therefore unrecoverable. But here again
-the parallel of a natural love-story of the nobler sort disposes of the
-difficulty in a flash. There the infinite creditor does share the joy of
-the infinite debtor; for indeed they are both debtors and both
-creditors. In other words debt and dependence do become pleasures in the
-presence of unspoilt love; the word is used too loosely and luxuriously
-in popular simplifications like the present; but here the word is really
-the key. It is the key of all the problems of Franciscan morality which
-puzzle the merely modern mind; but above all it is the key of
-asceticism. It is the highest and holiest of the paradoxes that the man
-who really knows he cannot pay his debt will be for ever paying it. He
-will be for ever giving back what he cannot give back, and cannot be
-expected to give back. He will be always throwing things away into a
-bottomless pit of unfathomable thanks. Men who think they are too modern
-to understand this are in fact too mean to understand it; we are most of
-us too mean to practise it. We are not generous enough to be ascetics;
-one might almost say not genial enough to be ascetics. A man must have
-magnanimity of surrender, of which he commonly only catches a glimpse in
-first love, like a glimpse of our lost Eden. But whether he sees it or
-not, the truth is in that riddle; that the whole world has, or is, only
-one good thing; and it is a bad debt.
-
-If ever that rarer sort of romantic love, which was the truth that
-sustained the Troubadours, falls out of fashion and is treated as
-fiction, we may see some such misunderstanding as that of the modern
-world about asceticism. For it seems conceivable that some barbarians
-might try to destroy chivalry in love, as the barbarians ruling in
-Berlin destroyed chivalry in war. If that were ever so, we should have
-the same sort of unintelligent sneers and unimaginative questions. Men
-will ask what selfish sort of woman it must have been who ruthlessly
-exacted tribute in the form of flowers, or what an avaricious creature
-she can have been to demand solid gold in the form of a ring; just as
-they ask what cruel kind of God can have demanded sacrifice and
-self-denial. They will have lost the clue to all that lovers have meant
-by love; and will not understand that it was because the thing was not
-demanded that it was done. But whether or no any such lesser things will
-throw a light on the greater, it is utterly useless to study a great
-thing like the Franciscan movement while remaining in the modern mood
-that murmurs against gloomy asceticism. The whole point about
-St. Francis of Assisi is that he certainly was ascetical and he
-certainly was not gloomy. As soon as ever he had been unhorsed by the
-glorious humiliation of his vision of dependence on the divine love, he
-flung himself into fasting and vigil exactly as he had flung himself
-furiously into battle. He had wheeled his charger clean round, but there
-was no halt or check in the thundering impetuosity of his charge. There
-was nothing negative about it; it was not a regimen or a stoical
-simplicity of life. It was not self-denial merely in the sense of
-self-control. It was as positive as a passion; it had all the air of
-being as positive as a pleasure. He devoured fasting as a man devours
-food. He plunged after poverty as men have dug madly for gold. And it is
-precisely the positive and passionate quality of this part of his
-personality that is a challenge to the modern mind in the whole problem
-of the pursuit of pleasure. There undeniably is the historical fact; and
-there attached to it is another moral fact almost as undeniable. It is
-certain that he held on this heroic or unnatural course from the moment
-when he went forth in his hair-shirt into the winter woods to the moment
-when he desired even in his death agony to lie bare upon the bare
-ground, to prove that he had and that he was nothing. And we can say,
-with almost as deep a certainty, that the stars which passed above that
-gaunt and wasted corpse stark upon the rocky floor had for once, in all
-their shining cycles round the world of labouring humanity, looked down
-upon a happy man.
-
-
-
-
- _Chapter VI_
- _The Little Poor Man_
-
-
-From that cavern, that was a furnace of glowing gratitude and humility,
-there came forth one of the strongest and strangest and most original
-personalities that human history has known. He was, among other things,
-emphatically what we call a character; almost as we speak of a character
-in a good novel or play. He was not only a humanist but a humorist; a
-humorist especially in the old English sense of a man always in his
-humour, going his own way and doing what nobody else would have done.
-The anecdotes about him have a certain biographical quality of which the
-most familiar example is Dr. Johnson; which belongs in another way to
-William Blake or to Charles Lamb. The atmosphere can only be defined by
-a sort of antithesis; the act is always unexpected and never
-inappropriate. Before the thing is said or done it cannot even be
-conjectured; but after it is said or done it is felt to be merely
-characteristic. It is surprisingly and yet inevitably individual. This
-quality of abrupt fitness and bewildering consistency belongs to
-St. Francis in a way that marks him out from most men of his time. Men
-are learning more and more of the solid social virtues of medieval
-civilisation; but those impressions are still social rather than
-individual. The medieval world was far ahead of the modern world in its
-sense of the things in which all men are at one: death and the daylight
-of reason and the common conscience that holds communities together. Its
-generalisations were saner and sounder than the mad materialistic
-theories of to-day; nobody would have tolerated a Schopenhauer scorning
-life or a Nietzsche living only for scorn. But the modern world is more
-subtle in its sense of the things in which men are not at one; in the
-temperamental varieties and differentiations that make up the personal
-problems of life. All men who can think themselves now realise that the
-great schoolmen had a type of thought that was wonderfully clear; but it
-was as it were deliberately colourless. All are now agreed that the
-greatest art of the age was the art of public buildings; the popular and
-communal art of architecture. But it was not an age for the art of
-portrait-painting. Yet the friends of St. Francis have really contrived
-to leave behind a portrait; something almost resembling a devout and
-affectionate caricature. There are lines and colours in it that are
-personal almost to the extent of being perverse, if one can use the word
-perversity of an inversion that was also a conversion. Even among the
-saints he has the air of a sort of eccentric, if one may use the word of
-one whose eccentricity consisted in always turning towards the centre.
-
-Before resuming the narrative of his first adventures, and the building
-of the great brotherhood which was the beginning of so merciful a
-revolution, I think it well to complete this imperfect personal portrait
-here; and having attempted in the last chapter a tentative description
-of the process, to add in this chapter a few touches to describe the
-result. I mean by the result the real man as he was after his first
-formative experiences; the man whom men met walking about on the Italian
-roads in his brown tunic tied with a rope. For that man, saving the
-grace of God, is the explanation of all that followed; men acted quite
-differently according to whether they had met him or not. If we see
-afterwards a vast tumult, an appeal to the Pope, mobs of men in brown
-habits besieging the seats of authority, Papal pronouncements, heretical
-sessions, trial and triumphant survival, the world full of a new
-movement, the friar a household word in every corner of Europe, and if we
-ask _why_ all this happened, we can only approximate to any answer to
-our own question if we can, in some faint and indirect imaginative
-fashion, hear one human voice or see one human face under a hood. There
-is no answer except that Francis Bernardone had happened; and we must
-try in some sense to see what we should have seen if he had happened to
-us. In other words, after some groping suggestions about his life from
-the inside, we must again consider it from the outside; as if he were a
-stranger coming up the road towards us, along the hills of Umbria,
-between the olives or the vines.
-
-Francis of Assisi was slight in figure with that sort of slightness
-which, combined with so much vivacity, gives the impression of
-smallness. He was probably taller than he looked; middle-sized, his
-biographers say; he was certainly very active and, considering what he
-went through, must have been tolerably tough. He was of the brownish
-Southern colouring, with a dark beard thin and pointed such as appears
-in pictures under the hoods of elves; and his eyes glowed with the fire
-that fretted him night and day. There is something about the description
-of all he said and did which suggests that, even more than most
-Italians, he turned naturally to a passionate pantomime of gestures. If
-this was so it is equally certain that with him, even more than with
-most Italians, the gestures were all gestures of politeness or
-hospitality. And both these facts, the vivacity and the courtesy, are
-the outward signs of something that mark him out very distinctively from
-many who might appear to be more of his kind than they really are. It is
-truly said that Francis of Assisi was one of the founders of the
-medieval drama, and therefore of the modern drama. He was the very
-reverse of a theatrical person in the selfish sense; but for all that he
-was pre-eminently a dramatic person. This side of him can best be
-suggested by taking what is commonly regarded as a reposeful quality;
-what is commonly described as a love of nature. We are compelled to use
-the term; and it is entirely the wrong term.
-
-St. Francis was not a lover of nature. Properly understood, a lover of
-nature was precisely what he was not. The phrase implies accepting the
-material universe as a vague environment, a sort of sentimental
-pantheism. In the romantic period of literature, in the age of Byron and
-Scott, it was easy enough to imagine that a hermit in the ruins of a
-chapel (preferably by moonlight) might find peace and a mild pleasure in
-the harmony of solemn forests and silent stars, while he pondered over
-some scroll or illuminated volume, about the liturgical nature of which
-the author was a little vague. In short, the hermit might love nature as
-a background. Now for St. Francis nothing was ever in the background. We
-might say that his mind had no background, except perhaps that divine
-darkness out of which the divine love had called up every coloured
-creature one by one. He saw everything as dramatic, distinct from its
-setting, not all of a piece like a picture but in action like a play. A
-bird went by him like an arrow; something with a story and a purpose,
-though it was a purpose of life and not a purpose of death. A bush could
-stop him like a brigand; and indeed he was as ready to welcome the
-brigand as the bush.
-
-In a word, we talk about a man who cannot see the wood for the trees.
-St. Francis was a man who did not want to see the wood for the trees. He
-wanted to see each tree as a separate and almost a sacred thing, being a
-child of God and therefore a brother or sister of man. But he did not
-want to stand against a piece of stage scenery used merely as a
-background, and inscribed in a general fashion: "Scene; a wood." In this
-sense we might say that he was too dramatic for the drama. The scenery
-would have come to life in his comedies; the walls would really have
-spoken like Snout the Tinker and the trees would really have come
-walking to Dunsinane. Everything would have been in the foreground; and
-in that sense in the footlights. Everything would be in every sense a
-character. This is the quality in which, as a poet, he is the very
-opposite of a pantheist. He did not call nature his mother; he called a
-particular donkey his brother or a particular sparrow his sister. If he
-had called a pelican his aunt or an elephant his uncle, as he might
-possibly have done, he would still have meant that they were particular
-creatures assigned by their Creator to particular places; not mere
-expressions of the evolutionary energy of things. That is where his
-mysticism is so close to the common sense of the child. A child has no
-difficulty about understanding that God made the dog and the cat; though
-he is well aware that the making of dogs and cats out of nothing is a
-mysterious process beyond his own imagination. But no child would
-understand what you meant if you mixed up the dog and the cat and
-everything else into one monster with a myriad legs and called it
-nature. The child would resolutely refuse to make head or tail of any
-such animal. St. Francis was a mystic, but he believed in mysticism and
-not in mystification. As a mystic he was the mortal enemy of all those
-mystics who melt away the edges of things and dissolve an entity into
-its environment. He was a mystic of the daylight and the darkness; but
-not a mystic of the twilight. He was the very contrary of that sort of
-oriental visionary who is only a mystic because he is too much of a
-sceptic to be a materialist. St. Francis was emphatically a realist,
-using the word realist in its much more real medieval sense. In this
-matter he really was akin to the best spirit of his age, which had just
-won its victory over the nominalism of the twelfth century. In this
-indeed there was something symbolic in the contemporary art and
-decoration of his period; as in the art of heraldry. The Franciscan
-birds and beasts were really rather like heraldic birds and beasts; not
-in the sense of being fabulous animals but in the sense of being treated
-as if they were facts, clear and positive and unaffected by the
-illusions of atmosphere and perspective. In that sense he did see a bird
-sable on a field azure or a sheep argent on a field vert. But the
-heraldry of humility was richer than the heraldry of pride; for it saw
-all these things that God had given as something more precious and
-unique than the blazonry that princes and peers had only given to
-themselves. Indeed out of the depths of that surrender it rose higher
-than the highest titles of the feudal age; than the laurel of Cæsar or
-the Iron Crown of Lombardy. It is an example of extremes that meet, that
-the Little Poor Man, who had stripped himself of everything and named
-himself as nothing, took the same title that has been the wild vaunt of
-the vanity of the gorgeous Asiatic autocrat, and called himself the
-Brother of the Sun and Moon.
-
-This quality, of something outstanding and even startling in things as
-St. Francis saw them, is here important as illustrating a character in
-his own life. As he saw all things dramatically, so he himself was
-always dramatic. We have to assume throughout, needless to say, that he
-was a poet and can only be understood as a poet. But he had one poetic
-privilege denied to most poets. In that respect indeed he might be
-called the one happy poet among all the unhappy poets of the world. He
-was a poet whose whole life was a poem. He was not so much a minstrel
-merely singing his own songs as a dramatist capable of acting the whole
-of his own play. The things he said were more imaginative than the
-things he wrote. The things he did were more imaginative than the things
-he said. His whole course through life was a series of scenes in which
-he had a sort of perpetual luck in bringing things to a beautiful
-crisis. To talk about the art of living has come to sound rather
-artificial than artistic. But St. Francis did in a definite sense make
-the very act of living an art, though it was an unpremeditated art. Many
-of his acts will seem grotesque and puzzling to a rationalistic taste.
-But they were always acts and not explanations; and they always meant
-what he meant them to mean. The amazing vividness with which he stamped
-himself on the memory and imagination of mankind is very largely due to
-the fact that he was seen again and again under such dramatic
-conditions. From the moment when he rent his robes and flung them at his
-father's feet to the moment when he stretched himself in death on the
-bare earth in the pattern of the cross, his life was made up of these
-unconscious attitudes and unhesitating gestures. It would be easy to
-fill page after page with examples; but I will here pursue the method
-found convenient everywhere in this short sketch, and take one typical
-example, dwelling on it with a little more detail than would be possible
-in a catalogue, in the hope of making the meaning more clear. The
-example taken here occurred in the last days of his life, but it refers
-back in a rather curious fashion to the first; and rounds off the
-remarkable unity of that romance of religion.
-
-The phrase about his brotherhood with the sun and moon, and with the
-water and the fire, occurs of course in his famous poem called the
-Canticle of the Creatures or the Canticle of the Sun. He sang it
-wandering in the meadows in the sunnier season of his own career, when
-he was pouring upwards into the sky all the passions of a poet. It is a
-supremely characteristic work, and much of St. Francis could be
-reconstructed from that work alone. Though in some ways the thing is as
-simple and straightforward as a ballad, there is a delicate instinct of
-differentiation in it. Notice, for instance, the sense of sex in
-inanimate things, which goes far beyond the arbitrary genders of a
-grammar. It was not for nothing that he called fire his brother, fierce
-and gay and strong, and water his sister, pure and clear and inviolate.
-Remember that St. Francis was neither encumbered nor assisted by all
-that Greek and Roman polytheism turned into allegory, which has been to
-European poetry often an inspiration, too often a convention. Whether he
-gained or lost by his contempt of learning, it never occurred to him to
-connect Neptune and the nymphs with the water or Vulcan and the Cyclops
-with the flame. This point exactly illustrates what has already been
-suggested; that, so far from being a revival of paganism, the Franciscan
-renascence was a sort of fresh start and first awakening after a
-forgetfulness of paganism. Certainly it is responsible for a certain
-freshness in the thing itself. Anyhow St. Francis was, as it were, the
-founder of a new folk-lore; but he could distinguish his mermaids from
-his mermen and his witches from his wizards. In short, he had to make
-his own mythology; but he knew at a glance the goddesses from the gods.
-This fanciful instinct for the sexes is not the only example of an
-imaginative instinct of the kind. There is just the same quaint felicity
-in the fact that he singles out the sun with a slightly more courtly
-title besides that of brother; a phrase that one king might use of
-another, corresponding to "Monsieur notre frère." It is like a faint
-half ironic shadow of the shining primacy that it had held in the pagan
-heavens. A bishop is said to have complained of a Nonconformist saying
-Paul instead of Saint Paul; and to have added "He might at least have
-called him Mr. Paul." So St. Francis is free of all obligation to cry
-out in praise or terror on the Lord God Apollo, but in his new nursery
-heavens, he salutes him as Mr. Sun. Those are the things in which he has
-a sort of inspired infancy, only to be paralleled in nursery tales.
-Something of the same hazy but healthy awe makes the story of Brer Fox
-and Brer Rabbit refer respectfully to Mr. Man.
-
-This poem, full of the mirth of youth and the memories of childhood,
-runs through his whole life like a refrain, and scraps of it turn up
-continually in the ordinary habit of his talk. Perhaps the last
-appearance of its special language was in an incident that has always
-seemed to me intensely impressive, and is at any rate very illustrative
-of the great manner and gesture of which I speak. Impressions of that
-kind are a matter of imagination and in that sense of taste. It is idle
-to argue about them; for it is the whole point of them that they have
-passed beyond words; and even when they use words, seem to be completed
-by some ritual movement like a blessing or a blow. So, in a supreme
-example, there is something far past all exposition, something like the
-sweeping movement and mighty shadow of a hand, darkening even the
-darkness of Gethsemane; "Sleep on now, and take your rest...." Yet there
-are people who have started to paraphrase and expand the story of the
-Passion.
-
-St. Francis was a dying man. We might say he was an old man, at the time
-this typical incident occurred; but in fact he was only prematurely old;
-for he was not fifty when he died, worn out with his fighting and
-fasting life. But when he came down from the awful asceticism and more
-awful revelation of Alverno, he was a broken man. As will be apparent
-when these events are touched on in their turn, it was not only sickness
-and bodily decay that may well have darkened his life; he had been
-recently disappointed in his main mission to end the Crusades by the
-conversion of Islam; he had been still more disappointed by the signs of
-compromise and a more political or practical spirit in his own order; he
-had spent his last energies in protest. At this point he was told that
-he was going blind. If the faintest hint has been given here of what
-St. Francis felt about the glory and pageantry of earth and sky, about
-the heraldic shape and colour and symbolism of birds and beasts and
-flowers, some notion may be formed of what it meant to him to go blind.
-Yet the remedy might well have seemed worse than the disease. The
-remedy, admittedly an uncertain remedy, was to cauterise the eye, and
-that without any anæsthetic. In other words it was to burn his living
-eyeballs with a red-hot iron. Many of the tortures of martyrdom, which
-he envied in martyrology and sought vainly in Syria, can have been no
-worse. When they took the brand from the furnace, he rose as with an
-urbane gesture and spoke as to an invisible presence: "Brother Fire, God
-made you beautiful and strong and useful; I pray you be courteous with
-me."
-
-If there be any such thing as the art of life, it seems to me that such
-a moment was one of its masterpieces. Not to many poets has it been
-given to remember their own poetry at such a moment, still less to live
-one of their own poems. Even William Blake would have been disconcerted
-if, while he was re-reading the noble lines "Tiger, tiger, burning
-bright," a real large live Bengal tiger had put his head in at the
-window of the cottage in Felpham, evidently with every intention of
-biting his head off. He might have wavered before politely saluting it,
-above all by calmly completing the recitation of the poem to the
-quadruped to whom it was dedicated. Shelley, when he wished to be a
-cloud or a leaf carried before the wind, might have been mildly
-surprised to find himself turning slowly head over heels in mid air a
-thousand feet above the sea. Even Keats, knowing that his hold on life
-was a frail one, might have been disturbed to discover that the true,
-the blushful Hippocrene of which he had just partaken freely had indeed
-contained a drug, which really ensured that he should cease upon the
-midnight with no pain. For Francis there was no drug; and for Francis
-there was plenty of pain. But his first thought was one of his first
-fancies from the songs of his youth. He remembered the time when a flame
-was a flower, only the most glorious and gaily coloured of the flowers
-in the garden of God; and when that shining thing returned to him in the
-shape of an instrument of torture, he hailed it from afar like an old
-friend, calling it by the nickname which might most truly be called its
-Christian name.
-
-That is only one incident out of a life of such incidents; and I have
-selected it partly because it shows what is meant here by that shadow of
-gesture there is in all his words, the dramatic gesture of the south;
-and partly because its special reference to courtesy covers the next
-fact to be noted. The popular instinct of St. Francis, and his perpetual
-preoccupation with the idea of brotherhood, will be entirely
-misunderstood if it is understood in the sense of what is often called
-camaraderie; the back-slapping sort of brotherhood. Frequently from the
-enemies and too frequently from the friends of the democratic ideal,
-there has come a notion that this note is necessary to that ideal. It is
-assumed that equality means all men being equally uncivil, whereas it
-obviously ought to mean all men being equally civil. Such people have
-forgotten the very meaning and derivation of the word civility, if they
-do not see that to be uncivil is to be uncivic. But anyhow that was not
-the equality which Francis of Assisi encouraged; but an equality of the
-opposite kind; it was a camaraderie actually founded on courtesy.
-
-Even in that fairy borderland of his mere fancies about flowers and
-animals and even inanimate things, he retained this permanent posture of
-a sort of deference. A friend of mine said that somebody was the sort of
-man who apologises to the cat. St. Francis really would have apologised
-to the cat. When he was about to preach in a wood full of the chatter of
-birds, he said, with a gentle gesture "Little sisters, if you have now
-had your say, it is time that I also should be heard." And all the birds
-were silent; as I for one can very easily believe. In deference to my
-special design of making matters intelligible to average modernity, I
-have treated separately the subject of the miraculous powers that
-St. Francis most certainly possessed. But even apart from any miraculous
-powers, men of that magnetic sort, with that intense interest in
-animals, often have an extraordinary power over them. St. Francis's
-power was always exercised with this elaborate politeness. Much of it
-was doubtless a sort of symbolic joke, a pious pantomime intended to
-convey the vital distinction in his divine mission, that he not only
-loved but reverenced God in all his creatures. In this sense he had the
-air not only of apologising to the cat or to the birds, but of
-apologising to a chair for sitting on it or to a table for sitting down
-at it. Anyone who had followed him through life merely to laugh at him,
-as a sort of lovable lunatic, might easily have had an impression as of
-a lunatic who bowed to every post or took off his hat to every tree.
-This was all a part of his instinct for imaginative gesture. He taught
-the world a large part of its lesson by a sort of divine dumb alphabet.
-But if there was this ceremonial element even in lighter or lesser
-matters, its significance became far more serious in the serious work of
-his life, which was an appeal to humanity, or rather to human beings.
-
-I have said that St. Francis deliberately did not see the wood for the
-trees. It is even more true that he deliberately did not see the mob for
-the men. What distinguishes this very genuine democrat from any mere
-demagogue is that he never either deceived or was deceived by the
-illusion of mass-suggestion. Whatever his taste in monsters, he never
-saw before him a many-headed beast. He only saw the image of God
-multiplied but never monotonous. To him a man was always a man and did
-not disappear in a dense crowd any more than in a desert. He honoured
-all men; that is, he not only loved but respected them all. What gave
-him his extraordinary personal power was this; that from the Pope to the
-beggar, from the sultan of Syria in his pavilion to the ragged robbers
-crawling out of the wood, there was never a man who looked into those
-brown burning eyes without being certain that Francis Bernardone was
-really interested in _him_; in his own inner individual life from the
-cradle to the grave; that he himself was being valued and taken
-seriously, and not merely added to the spoils of some social policy or
-the names in some clerical document. Now for this particular moral and
-religious idea there is no external expression except courtesy.
-Exhortation does not express it, for it is not mere abstract enthusiasm;
-beneficence does not express it, for it is not mere pity. It can only be
-conveyed by a certain grand manner which may be called good manners. We
-may say if we like that St. Francis, in the bare and barren simplicity
-of his life, had clung to one rag of luxury; the manners of a court. But
-whereas in a court there is one king and a hundred courtiers, in this
-story there was one courtier, moving among a hundred kings. For he
-treated the whole mob of men as a mob of kings. And this was really and
-truly the only attitude that will appeal to that part of man to which he
-wished to appeal. It cannot be done by giving gold or even bread; for it
-is a proverb that any reveller may fling largesse in mere scorn. It
-cannot even be done by giving time and attention; for any number of
-philanthropists and benevolent bureaucrats do such work with a scorn far
-more cold and horrible in their hearts. No plans or proposals or
-efficient rearrangements will give back to a broken man his self-respect
-and sense of speaking with an equal. One gesture will do it.
-
-With that gesture Francis of Assisi moved among men; and it was soon
-found to have something in it of magic and to act, in a double sense,
-like a charm. But it must always be conceived as a completely natural
-gesture; for indeed it was almost a gesture of apology. He must be
-imagined as moving thus swiftly through the world with a sort of
-impetuous politeness; almost like the movement of a man who stumbles on
-one knee half in haste and half in obeisance. The eager face under the
-brown hood was that of a man always going somewhere, as if he followed
-as well as watched the flight of the birds. And this sense of motion is
-indeed the meaning of the whole revolution that he made; for the work
-that has now to be described was of the nature of an earthquake or a
-volcano, an explosion that drove outwards with dynamic energy the forces
-stored up by ten centuries in the monastic fortress or arsenal and
-scattered all its riches recklessly to the ends of the earth. In a
-better sense than the antithesis commonly conveys, it is true to say
-that what St. Benedict had stored St. Francis scattered; but in the
-world of spiritual things what had been stored into the barns like grain
-was scattered over the world as seed. The servants of God who had been a
-besieged garrison became a marching army; the ways of the world were
-filled as with thunder with the trampling of their feet and far ahead of
-that ever swelling host went a man singing; as simply he had sung that
-morning in the winter woods, where he walked alone.
-
-
-
-
- _Chapter VII_
- _The Three Orders_
-
-
-There is undoubtedly a sense in which two is company and three is none;
-there is also another sense in which three is company and four is none,
-as is proved by the procession of historic and fictitious figures moving
-three deep, the famous trios like the Three Musketeers or the Three
-Soldiers of Kipling. But there is yet another and a different sense in
-which four is company and three is none; if we use the word company in
-the vaguer sense of a crowd or a mass. With the fourth man enters the
-shadow of a mob; the group is no longer one of three individuals only
-conceived individually. That shadow of the fourth man fell across the
-little hermitage of the Portiuncula when a man named Egidio, apparently
-a poor workman, was invited by St. Francis to enter. He mingled without
-difficulty with the merchant and the canon who had already become the
-companions of Francis; but with his coming an invisible line was
-crossed; for it must have been felt by this time that the growth of that
-small group had become potentially infinite, or at least that its
-outline had become permanently indefinite. It may have been in the time
-of that transition that Francis had another of his dreams full of
-voices; but now the voices were a clamour of the tongues of all nations,
-Frenchmen and Italians and English and Spanish and Germans, telling of
-the glory of God each in his own tongue; a new Pentecost and a happier
-Babel.
-
-Before describing the first steps he took to regularise the growing
-group, it is well to have a rough grasp of what he conceived that group
-to be. He did not call his followers monks; and it is not clear, at this
-time at least, that he even thought of them as monks. He called them by
-a name which is generally rendered in English as the Friars Minor; but
-we shall be much closer to the atmosphere of his own mind if we render
-it almost literally as The Little Brothers. Presumably he was already
-resolved, indeed, that they should take the three vows of poverty,
-chastity and obedience which had always been the mark of a monk. But it
-would seem that he was not so much afraid of the idea of a monk as of
-the idea of an abbot. He was afraid that the great spiritual
-magistracies which had given even to their holiest possessors at least a
-sort of impersonal and corporate pride, would import an element of
-pomposity that would spoil his extremely and almost extravagantly simple
-version of the life of humility. But the supreme difference between his
-discipline and the discipline of the old monastic system was concerned,
-of course, with the idea that the monks were to become migratory and
-almost nomadic instead of stationary. They were to mingle with the
-world; and to this the more old-fashioned monk would naturally reply by
-asking how they were to mingle with the world without becoming entangled
-with the world. It was a much more real question than a loose
-religiosity is likely to realise; but St. Francis had his answer to it,
-of his own individual sort; and the interest of the problem is in that
-highly individual answer.
-
-The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life
-which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts,
-without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow
-on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost
-stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club
-of stone. He said, "If we had any possessions, we should need weapons
-and laws to defend them." That sentence is the clue to the whole policy
-that he pursued. It rested upon a real piece of logic; and about that he
-was never anything but logical. He was ready to own himself wrong about
-anything else; but he was quite certain he was right about this
-particular rule. He was only once seen angry; and that was when there
-was talk of an exception to the rule.
-
-His argument was this: that the dedicated man might go anywhere among
-any kind of men, even the worst kind of men, so long as there was
-nothing by which they could hold him. If he had any ties or needs like
-ordinary men, he would become like ordinary men. St. Francis was the
-last man in the world to think any the worse of ordinary men for being
-ordinary. They had more affection and admiration from him than they are
-ever likely to have again. But for his own particular purpose of
-stirring up the world to a new spiritual enthusiasm, he saw with a
-logical clarity that was quite reverse of fanatical or sentimental, that
-friars must not become like ordinary men; that the salt must not lose
-its savour even to turn into human nature's daily food. And the
-difference between a friar and an ordinary man was really that a friar
-was freer than an ordinary man. It was necessary that he should be free
-from the cloister; but it was even more important that he should be free
-from the world. It is perfectly sound common sense to say that there is
-a sense in which the ordinary man cannot be free from the world; or
-rather ought not to be free from the world. The feudal world in
-particular was one labyrinthine system of dependence; but it was not
-only the feudal world that went to make up the medieval world nor the
-medieval world that went to make up the whole world; and the whole world
-is full of this fact. Family life as much as feudal life is in its
-nature a system of dependence. Modern trade unions as much as medieval
-guilds are interdependent among themselves even in order to be
-independent of others. In medieval as in modern life, even where these
-limitations do exist for the sake of liberty, they have in them a
-considerable element of luck. They are partly the result of
-circumstances; sometimes the almost unavoidable result of circumstances.
-So the twelfth century had been the age of vows; and there was something
-of relative freedom in that feudal gesture of the vow; for no man asks
-vows from slaves any more than from spades. Still, in practice, a man
-rode to war in support of the ancient house of the Column or behind the
-Great Dog of the Stairway largely because he had been born in a certain
-city or countryside. But no man need obey little Francis in the old
-brown coat unless he chose. Even in his relations with his chosen leader
-he was in one sense relatively free, compared with the world around him.
-He was obedient but not dependent. And he was as free as the wind, he
-was almost wildly free, in his relation to that world around him. The
-world around him was, as has been noted, a network of feudal and family
-and other forms of dependence. The whole idea of St. Francis was that
-the Little Brothers should be like little fishes who could go freely in
-and out of that net. They could do so precisely because they were small
-fishes and in that sense even slippery fishes. There was nothing that
-the world could hold them by; for the world catches us mostly by the
-fringes of our garments, the futile externals of our lives. One of the
-Franciscans says later, "A monk should own nothing but his harp";
-meaning, I suppose, that he should value nothing but his song, the song
-with which it was his business as a minstrel to serenade every castle
-and cottage, the song of the joy of the Creator in his creation and the
-beauty of the brotherhood of men. In imagining the life of this sort of
-visionary vagabond, we may already get a glimpse also of the practical
-side of that asceticism which puzzles those who think themselves
-practical. A man had to be thin to pass always through the bars and out
-of the cage; he had to travel light in order to ride so fast and so far.
-It was the whole calculation, so to speak, of that innocent cunning,
-that the world was to be outflanked and outwitted by him, and be
-embarrassed about what to do with him. You could not threaten to starve
-a man who was ever striving to fast. You could not ruin him and reduce
-him to beggary, for he was already a beggar. There was a very lukewarm
-satisfaction even in beating him with a stick, when he only indulged in
-little leaps and cries of joy because indignity was his only dignity.
-You could not put his head in a halter without the risk of putting it in
-a halo.
-
-But one distinction between the old monks and the new friars counted
-especially in the matter of practicality and especially of promptitude.
-The old fraternities with their fixed habitations and enclosed existence
-had the limitations of ordinary householders. However simply they lived
-there must be a certain number of cells or a certain number of beds or
-at least a certain cubic space for a certain number of brothers; their
-numbers therefore depended on their land and building material. But
-since a man could become a Franciscan by merely promising to take his
-chance of eating berries in a lane or begging a crust from a kitchen, of
-sleeping under a hedge or sitting patiently on a doorstep, there was no
-economic reason why there should not be any number of such eccentric
-enthusiasts within any short period of time. It must also be remembered
-that the whole of this rapid development was full of a certain kind of
-democratic optimism that really was part of the personal character of
-St. Francis. His very asceticism was in one sense the height of
-optimism. He demanded a great deal of human nature not because he
-despised it but rather because he trusted it. He was expecting a very
-great deal from the extraordinary men who followed him; but he was also
-expecting a good deal from the ordinary men to whom he sent them. He
-asked the laity for food as confidently as he asked the fraternity for
-fasting. But he counted on the hospitality of humanity because he really
-did regard every house as the house of a friend. He really did love and
-honour ordinary men and ordinary things; indeed we may say that he only
-sent out the extraordinary men to encourage men to be ordinary.
-
-This paradox may be more exactly stated or explained when we come to
-deal with the very interesting matter of the Third Order, which was
-designed to assist ordinary men to be ordinary with an extraordinary
-exultation. The point at issue at present is the audacity and simplicity
-of the Franciscan plan for quartering its spiritual soldiery upon the
-population; not by force but by persuasion, and even by the persuasion
-of impotence. It was an act of confidence and therefore a compliment. It
-was completely successful. It was an example of something that clung
-about St. Francis always; a kind of tact that looked like luck because
-it was as simple and direct as a thunderbolt. There are many examples in
-his private relations of this sort of tactless tact; this surprise
-effected by striking at the heart of the matter. It is said that a young
-friar was suffering from a sort of sulks between morbidity and humility,
-common enough in youth and hero-worship, in which he had got it into his
-head that his hero hated or despised him. We can imagine how tactfully
-social diplomatists would steer clear of scenes and excitements, how
-cautiously psychologists would watch and handle such delicate cases.
-Francis suddenly walked up to the young man, who was of course secretive
-and silent as the grave, and said, "Be not troubled in your thoughts for
-you are dear to me, and even among the number of those who are most
-dear. You know that you are worthy of my friendship and society;
-therefore come to me, in confidence, whensoever you will, and from
-friendship learn faith." Exactly as he spoke to that morbid boy he spoke
-to all mankind. He always went to the point; he always seemed at once
-more right and more simple than the person he was speaking to. He seemed
-at once to be laying open his guard and yet lunging at the heart.
-Something in this attitude disarmed the world as it has never been
-disarmed again. He was better than other men; he was a benefactor of
-other men; and yet he was not hated. The world came into church by a
-newer and nearer door; and by friendship it learnt faith.
-
-It was while the little knot of people at the Portiuncula was still
-small enough to gather in a small room that St. Francis resolved on his
-first important and even sensational stroke. It is said that there were
-only twelve Franciscans in the whole world when he decided to march, as
-it were, on Rome and found a Franciscan order. It would seem that this
-appeal to remote headquarters was not generally regarded as necessary;
-possibly something could have been done in a secondary way under the
-Bishop of Assisi and the local clergy. It would seem even more probable
-that people thought it somewhat unnecessary to trouble the supreme
-tribunal of Christendom about what a dozen chance men chose to call
-themselves. But Francis was obstinate and as it were blind on this
-point; and his brilliant blindness is exceedingly characteristic of him.
-A man satisfied with small things, or even in love with small things, he
-yet never felt quite as we do about the disproportion between small
-things and large. He never saw things to scale in our sense, but with a
-dizzy disproportion which makes the mind reel. Sometimes it seems merely
-out of drawing like a gaily coloured medieval map; and then again it
-seems to have escaped from everything like a short cut in the fourth
-dimension. He is said to have made a journey to interview the Emperor,
-throned among his armies under the eagle of the Holy Roman Empire, to
-intercede for the lives of certain little birds. He was quite capable of
-facing fifty emperors to intercede for one bird. He started out with two
-companions to convert the Mahomedan world. He started out with eleven
-companions to ask the Pope to make a new monastic world.
-
-Innocent III., the great Pope, according to Bonaventura, was walking on
-the terrace of St. John Lateran, doubtless revolving the great political
-questions which troubled his reign, when there appeared abruptly before
-him a person in peasant costume whom he took to be some sort of
-shepherd. He appears to have got rid of the shepherd with all convenient
-speed; possibly he formed the opinion that the shepherd was mad. Anyhow
-he thought no more about it until, says the great Franciscan biographer,
-he dreamed that night a strange dream. He fancied that he saw the whole
-huge ancient temple of St. John Lateran, on whose high terraces he had
-walked so securely, leaning horribly and crooked against the sky as if
-all its domes and turrets were stooping before an earthquake. Then he
-looked again and saw that a human figure was holding it up like a living
-caryatid; and the figure was that of the ragged shepherd or peasant from
-whom he had turned away on the terrace. Whether this be a fact or a
-figure it is a very true figure of the abrupt simplicity with which
-Francis won the attention and the favour of Rome. His first friend seems
-to have been the Cardinal Giovanni di San Paolo who pleaded for the
-Franciscan idea before a conclave of Cardinals summoned for the purpose.
-It is interesting to note that the doubts thrown upon it seem to have
-been chiefly doubts about whether the rule was not too hard for
-humanity, for the Catholic Church is always on the watch against
-excessive asceticism and its evils. Probably they meant, especially when
-they said it was unduly hard, that it was unduly dangerous. For a
-certain element that can only be called danger is what marks the
-innovation as compared with older institutions of the kind. In one sense
-indeed the friar was almost the opposite of the monk. The value of the
-old monasticism had been that there was not only an ethical but an
-economic repose. Out of that repose had come the works for which the
-world will never be sufficiently grateful, the preservation of the
-classics, the beginning of the Gothic, the schemes of science and
-philosophies, the illuminated manuscripts and the coloured glass. The
-whole point of a monk was that his economic affairs were settled for
-good; he knew where he would get his supper, though it was a very plain
-supper. But the whole point of a friar was that he did not know where he
-would get his supper. There was always a possibility that he might get
-no supper. There was an element of what would be called romance, as of
-the gipsy or adventurer. But there was also an element of potential
-tragedy, as of the tramp or the casual labourer. So the Cardinals of the
-thirteenth century were filled with compassion, seeing a few men
-entering of their own free will that estate to which the poor of the
-twentieth century are daily driven by cold coercion and moved on by the
-police.
-
-Cardinal San Paolo seems to have argued more or less in this manner: it
-may be a hard life, but after all it is the life apparently described as
-ideal in the Gospel; make what compromises you think wise or humane
-about that ideal; but do not commit yourselves to saying that men shall
-_not_ fulfil that ideal if they can. We shall see the importance of this
-argument when we come to the whole of that higher aspect of the life of
-St. Francis which may be called the Imitation of Christ. The upshot of
-the discussion was that the Pope gave his verbal approval to the project
-and promised a more definite endorsement, if the movement should grow to
-more considerable proportions. It is probable that Innocent, who was
-himself a man of no ordinary mentality, had very little doubt that it
-would do so; anyhow he was not left long in doubt before it did do so.
-The next passage in the history of the order is simply the story of more
-and more people flocking to its standard; and as has already been
-remarked, once it had begun to grow, it could in its nature grow much
-more quickly than any ordinary society requiring ordinary funds and
-public buildings. Even the return of the twelve pioneers from their
-papal audience seems to have been a sort of triumphal procession. In one
-place in particular, it is said, the whole population of a town, men,
-women and children, turned out, leaving their work and wealth and homes
-exactly as they stood and begging to be taken into the army of God on
-the spot. According to the story, it was on this occasion that
-St. Francis first foreshadowed his idea of the Third Order which enabled
-men to share in the movement without leaving the homes and habits of
-normal humanity. For the moment it is most important to regard this
-story as one example of the riot of conversion with which he was already
-filling all the roads of Italy. It was a world of wandering; friars
-perpetually coming and going in all the highways and byways, seeking to
-ensure that any man who met one of them by chance should have a
-spiritual adventure. The First Order of St. Francis had entered history.
-
-This rough outline can only be rounded off here with some description of
-the Second and Third Orders, though they were founded later and at
-separate times. The former was an order for women and owed its
-existence, of course, to the beautiful friendship of St. Francis and
-St. Clare. There is no story about which even the most sympathetic
-critics of another creed have been more bewildered and misleading. For
-there is no story that more clearly turns on that simple test which I
-have taken as crucial throughout this criticism. I mean that what is the
-matter with these critics is that they will not believe that a heavenly
-love can be as real as an earthly love. The moment it is treated as
-real, like an earthly love, their whole riddle is easily resolved. A
-girl of seventeen, named Clare and belonging to one of the noble
-families of Assisi, was filled with an enthusiasm for the conventual
-life; and Francis helped her to escape from her home and to take up the
-conventual life. If we like to put it so, he helped her to elope into
-the cloister, defying her parents as he had defied his father. Indeed
-the scene had many of the elements of a regular romantic elopement; for
-she escaped through a hole in the wall, fled through a wood and was
-received at midnight by the light of torches. Even Mrs. Oliphant, in her
-fine and delicate study of St. Francis, calls it "an incident which we
-can hardly record with satisfaction."
-
-Now about that incident I will here only say this. If it had really been
-a romantic elopement and the girl had become a bride instead of a nun,
-practically the whole modern world would have made her a heroine. If the
-action of the Friar towards Clare had been the action of the Friar
-towards Juliet, everybody would be sympathising with her exactly as they
-sympathise with Juliet. It is not conclusive to say that Clare was only
-seventeen. Juliet was only fourteen. Girls married and boys fought in
-battles at such early ages in medieval times; and a girl of seventeen in
-the thirteenth century was certainly old enough to know her own mind.
-There cannot be the shadow of a doubt, for any sane person considering
-subsequent events, that St. Clare did know her own mind. But the point
-for the moment is that modern romanticism entirely encourages such
-defiance of parents when it is done in the name of romantic love. For it
-knows that romantic love is a reality, but it does not know that divine
-love is a reality. There may have been something to be said for the
-parents of Clare; there may have been something to be said for Peter
-Bernardone. So there may have been a great deal to be said for the
-Montagues or the Capulets; but the modern world does not want it said;
-and does not say it. The fact is that as soon as we assume for a moment
-as a hypothesis, what St. Francis and St. Clare assumed all the time as
-an absolute, that there is a direct divine relation more glorious than
-any romance, the story of St. Clare's elopement is simply a romance with
-a happy ending; and St. Francis is the St. George or knight-errant who
-gave it a happy ending. And seeing that some millions of men and women
-have lived and died treating this relation as a reality, a man is not
-much of a philosopher if he cannot even treat it as a hypothesis.
-
-For the rest, we may at least assume that no friend of what is called
-the emancipation of women will regret the revolt of St. Clare. She did
-most truly, in the modern jargon, live her own life, the life that she
-herself wanted to lead, as distinct from the life into which parental
-commands and conventional arrangements would have forced her. She became
-the foundress of a great feminine movement which still profoundly
-affects the world; and her place is with the powerful women of history.
-It is not clear that she would have been so great or so useful if she
-had made a runaway match, or even stopped at home and made a _mariage de
-convenance_. So much any sensible man may well say considering the
-matter merely from the outside; and I have no intention of attempting to
-consider it from the inside. If a man may well doubt whether he is
-worthy to write a word about St. Francis, he will certainly want words
-better than his own to speak of the friendship of St. Francis and
-St. Clare. I have often remarked that the mysteries of this story are
-best expressed symbolically in certain silent attitudes and actions. And
-I know no better symbol than that found by the felicity of popular
-legend, which says that one night the people of Assisi thought the trees
-and the holy house were on fire, and rushed up to extinguish the
-conflagration. But they found all quiet within, where St. Francis broke
-bread with St. Clare at one of their rare meetings, and talked of the
-love of God. It would be hard to find a more imaginative image, for some
-sort of utterly pure and disembodied passion, than that red halo round
-the unconscious figures on the hill; a flame feeding on nothing and
-setting the very air on fire.
-
-But if the Second Order was the memorial of such an unearthly love, the
-Third Order was as solid a memorial of a very solid sympathy with
-earthly loves and earthly lives. The whole of this feature in Catholic
-life, the lay orders in touch with clerical orders, is very little
-understood in Protestant countries and very little allowed for in
-Protestant history. The vision which has been so faintly suggested in
-these pages has never been confined to monks or even to friars. It has
-been an inspiration to innumerable crowds of ordinary married men and
-women; living lives like our own, only entirely different. That morning
-glory which St. Francis spread over earth and sky has lingered as a
-secret sunshine under a multitude of roofs and in a multitude of rooms.
-In societies like ours nothing is known of such a Franciscan following.
-Nothing is known of such obscure followers; and if possible less is
-known of the well-known followers. If we imagine passing us in the
-street a pageant of the Third Order of St. Francis, the famous figures
-would surprise us more than the strange ones. For us it would be like
-the unmasking of some mighty secret society. There rides St. Louis, the
-great king, lord of the higher justice whose scales hang crooked in
-favour of the poor. There is Dante crowned with laurel, the poet who in
-his life of passions sang the praises of the Lady Poverty, whose grey
-garment is lined with purple and all glorious within. All sorts of great
-names from the most recent and rationalistic centuries would stand
-revealed; the great Galvani, for instance, the father of all
-electricity, the magician who has made so many modern systems of stars
-and sounds. So various a following would alone be enough to prove that
-St. Francis had no lack of sympathy with normal men, if the whole of his
-own life did not prove it.
-
-But in fact his life did prove it, and that possibly in a more subtle
-sense. There is, I fancy, some truth in the hint of one of his modern
-biographers, that even his natural passions were singularly normal and
-even noble, in the sense of turning towards things not unlawful in
-themselves but only unlawful for him. Nobody ever lived of whom we could
-less fitly use the word "regret" than Francis of Assisi. Though there
-was much that was romantic, there was nothing in the least sentimental
-about his mood. It was not melancholy enough for that. He was of far too
-swift and rushing a temper to be troubled with doubts and
-reconsiderations about the race he ran; though he had any amount of
-self-reproach about not running faster. But it is true, one suspects,
-that when he wrestled with the devil, as every man must to be worth
-calling a man, the whispers referred mostly to those healthy instincts
-that he would have approved for others; they bore no resemblance to that
-ghastly painted paganism which sent its demoniac courtesans to plague
-St. Anthony in the desert. If St. Francis had only pleased himself, it
-would have been with simpler pleasures. He was moved to love rather than
-lust, and by nothing wilder than wedding-bells. It is suggested in that
-strange story of how he defied the devil by making images in the snow,
-and crying out that these sufficed him for a wife and family. It is
-suggested in the saying he used when disclaiming any security from sin,
-"I may yet have children"; almost as if it was of the children rather
-than the woman that he dreamed. And this, if it be true, gives a final
-touch to the truth about his character. There was so much about him of
-the spirit of the morning, so much that was curiously young and clean,
-that even what was bad in him was good. As it was said of others that
-the light in their body was darkness, so it may be said of this luminous
-spirit that the very shadows in his soul were of light. Evil itself
-could not come to him save in the form of a forbidden good; and he could
-only be tempted by a sacrament.
-
-
-
-
- _Chapter VIII_
- _The Mirror of Christ_
-
-
-No man who has been given the freedom of the Faith is likely to fall
-into those hole-and-corner extravagances in which later degenerate
-Franciscans, or rather Fraticelli, sought to concentrate entirely on
-St. Francis as a second Christ, the creator of a new gospel. In fact any
-such notion makes nonsense of every motive in the man's life; for no man
-would reverently magnify what he was meant to rival, or only profess to
-follow what he existed to supplant. On the contrary, as will appear
-later, this little study would rather specially insist that it was
-really the papal sagacity that saved the great Franciscan movement for
-the whole world and the universal Church, and prevented it from petering
-out as that sort of stale and second-rate sect that is called a new
-religion. Everything that is written here must be understood not only as
-distinct from but diametrically opposed to the idolatry of the
-Fraticelli. The difference between Christ and St. Francis was the
-difference between the Creator and the creature; and certainly no
-creature was ever so conscious of that colossal contrast as St. Francis
-himself. But subject to this understanding, it is perfectly true and it
-is vitally important that Christ was the pattern on which St. Francis
-sought to fashion himself; and that at many points their human and
-historical lives were even curiously coincident; and above all, that
-compared to most of us at least St. Francis is a most sublime
-approximation to his Master, and, even in being an intermediary and a
-reflection, is a splendid and yet a merciful Mirror of Christ. And this
-truth suggests another, which I think has hardly been noticed; but which
-happens to be a highly forcible argument for the authority of Christ
-being continuous in the Catholic Church.
-
-Cardinal Newman wrote in his liveliest controversial work a sentence
-that might be a model of what we mean by saying that his creed tends to
-lucidity and logical courage. In speaking of the ease with which truth
-may be made to look like its own shadow or sham, he said, "And if
-Antichrist is like Christ, Christ I suppose is like Antichrist." Mere
-religious sentiment might well be shocked at the end of the sentence;
-but nobody could object to it except the logician who said that Cæsar
-and Pompey were very much alike, especially Pompey. It may give a much
-milder shock if I say here, what most of us have forgotten, that if
-St. Francis was like Christ, Christ was to that extent like St. Francis.
-And my present point is that it is really very enlightening to realise
-that Christ was like St. Francis. What I mean is this; that if men find
-certain riddles and hard sayings in the story of Galilee, and if they
-find the answers to those riddles in the story of Assisi, it really does
-show that a secret has been handed down in one religious tradition and
-no other. It shows that the casket that was locked in Palestine can be
-unlocked in Umbria; for the Church is the keeper of the keys.
-
-Now in truth while it has always seemed natural to explain St. Francis
-in the light of Christ, it has not occurred to many people to explain
-Christ in the light of St. Francis. Perhaps the word "light" is not here
-the proper metaphor; but the same truth is admitted in the accepted
-metaphor of the mirror. St. Francis is the mirror of Christ rather as
-the moon is the mirror of the sun. The moon is much smaller than the
-sun, but it is also much nearer to us; and being less vivid it is more
-visible. Exactly in the same sense St. Francis is nearer to us, and
-being a mere man like ourselves is in that sense more imaginable. Being
-necessarily less of a mystery, he does not, for us, so much open his
-mouth in mysteries. Yet as a matter of fact, many minor things that seem
-mysteries in the mouth of Christ would seem merely characteristic
-paradoxes in the mouth of St. Francis. It seems natural to re-read the
-more remote incidents with the help of the more recent ones. It is a
-truism to say that Christ lived before Christianity; and it follows that
-as an historical figure He is a figure in heathen history. I mean that
-the medium in which He moved was not the medium of Christendom but of
-the old pagan empire; and from that alone, not to mention the distance
-of time, it follows that His circumstances are more alien to us than
-those of an Italian monk such as we might meet even to-day. I suppose
-the most authoritative commentary can hardly be certain of the current
-or conventional weight of all His words or phrases; of which of them
-would then have seemed a common allusion and which a strange fancy. This
-archaic setting has left many of the sayings standing like hieroglyphics
-and subject to many and peculiar individual interpretations. Yet it is
-true of almost any of them that if we simply translate them into the
-Umbrian dialect of the first Franciscans, they would seem like any other
-part of the Franciscan story; doubtless in one sense fantastic, but
-quite familiar. All sorts of critical controversies have revolved round
-the passage which bids men consider the lilies of the field and copy
-them in taking no thought for the morrow. The sceptic has alternated
-between telling us to be true Christians and do it, and explaining that
-it is impossible to do. When he is a communist as well as an atheist, he
-is generally doubtful whether to blame us for preaching what is
-impracticable or for not instantly putting it into practice. I am not
-going to discuss here the point of ethics and economics; I merely remark
-that even those who are puzzled at the saying of Christ would hardly
-pause in accepting it as a saying of St. Francis. Nobody would be
-surprised to find that he had said, "I beseech you, little brothers,
-that you be as wise as Brother Daisy and Brother Dandelion; for never do
-they lie awake thinking of to-morrow, yet they have gold crowns like
-kings and emperors or like Charlemagne in all his glory." Even more
-bitterness and bewilderment has arisen about the command to turn the
-other cheek and to give the coat to the robber who has taken the cloak.
-It is widely held to imply the wickedness of war among nations; about
-which, in itself, not a word seems to have been said. Taken thus
-literally and universally, it much more clearly implies the wickedness
-of all law and government. Yet there are many prosperous peacemakers who
-are much more shocked at the idea of using the brute force of soldiers
-against a powerful foreigner than they are at using the brute force of
-policemen against a poor fellow-citizen. Here again I am content to
-point out that the paradox becomes perfectly human and probable if
-addressed by Francis to Franciscans. Nobody would be surprised to read
-that Brother Juniper did then run after the thief that had stolen his
-hood, beseeching him to take his gown also; for so St. Francis had
-commanded him. Nobody would be surprised if St. Francis told a young
-noble, about to be admitted to his company, that so far from pursuing a
-brigand to recover his shoes, he ought to pursue him to make him a
-present of his stockings. We may like or not the atmosphere these things
-imply; but we know what atmosphere they do imply. We recognise a certain
-note as natural and clear as the note of a bird; the note of
-St. Francis. There is in it something of gentle mockery of the very idea
-of possessions; something of a hope of disarming the enemy by
-generosity; something of a humorous sense of bewildering the worldly
-with the unexpected; something of the joy of carrying an enthusiastic
-conviction to a logical extreme. But anyhow we have no difficulty in
-recognising it, if we have read any of the literature of the Little
-Brothers and the movement that began in Assisi. It seems reasonable to
-infer that if it was this spirit that made such strange things possible
-in Umbria, it was the same spirit that made them possible in Palestine.
-If we hear the same unmistakable note and sense the same indescribable
-savour in two things at such a distance from each other, it seems
-natural to suppose that the case that is more remote from our experience
-was like the case that is closer to our experience. As the thing is
-explicable on the assumption that Francis was speaking to Franciscans,
-it is not an irrational explanation to suggest that Christ also was
-speaking to some dedicated band that had much the same function as
-Franciscans. In other words, it seems only natural to hold, as the
-Catholic Church has held, that these counsels of perfection were part of
-a particular vocation to astonish and awaken the world. But in any case
-it is important to note that when we do find these particular features,
-with their seemingly fantastic fitness, reappearing after more than a
-thousand years, we find them produced by the same religious system which
-claims continuity and authority from the scenes in which they first
-appeared. Any number of philosophies will repeat the platitudes of
-Christianity. But it is the ancient Church that can again startle the
-world with the paradoxes of Christianity. _Ubi Petrus ibi Franciscus._
-
-But if we understand that it was truly under the inspiration of his
-divine Master that St. Francis did these merely quaint or eccentric acts
-of charity, we must understand that it was under the same inspiration
-that he did acts of self-denial and austerity. It is clear that these
-more or less playful parables of the love of men were conceived after a
-close study of the Sermon on the Mount. But it is evident that he made
-an even closer study of the silent sermon on that other mountain; the
-mountain that was called Golgotha. Here again he was speaking the strict
-historical truth, when he said that in fasting or suffering humiliation
-he was but trying to do something of what Christ did; and here again it
-seems probable that as the same truth appears at the two ends of a chain
-of tradition, the tradition has preserved the truth. But the import of
-this fact at the moment affects the next phase in the personal history
-of the man himself.
-
-For as it becomes clearer that his great communal scheme is an
-accomplished fact and past the peril of an early collapse, as it becomes
-evident that there already is such a thing as an Order of the Friars
-Minor, this more individual and intense ambition of St. Francis emerges
-more and more. So soon as he certainly has followers, he does not
-compare himself with his followers, towards whom he might appear as a
-master; he compares himself more and more with his Master, towards whom
-he appears only as a servant. This, it may be said in passing, is one of
-the moral and even practical conveniences of the ascetical privilege.
-Every other sort of superiority may be superciliousness. But the saint
-is never supercilious, for he is always by hypothesis in the presence of
-a superior. The objection to an aristocracy is that it is a priesthood
-without a god. But in any case the service to which St. Francis had
-committed himself was one which, about this time, he conceived more and
-more in terms of sacrifice and crucifixion. He was full of the sentiment
-that he had not suffered enough to be worthy even to be a distant
-follower of his suffering God. And this passage in his history may
-really be roughly summarised as the Search for Martyrdom.
-
-This was the ultimate idea in the remarkable business of his expedition
-among the Saracens in Syria. There were indeed other elements in his
-conception, which are worthy of more intelligent understanding than they
-have often received. His idea, of course, was to bring the Crusades in a
-double sense to their end; that is, to reach their conclusion and to
-achieve their purpose. Only he wished to do it by conversion and not by
-conquest; that is, by intellectual and not material means. The modern
-mind is hard to please; and it generally calls the way of Godfrey
-ferocious and the way of Francis fanatical. That is, it calls any moral
-method unpractical, when it has just called any practical method
-immoral. But the idea of St. Francis was far from being a fanatical or
-necessarily even an unpractical idea; though perhaps he saw the problem
-as rather too simple, lacking the learning of his great inheritor
-Raymond Lully, who understood more but has been quite as little
-understood. The way he approached the matter was indeed highly personal
-and peculiar; but that was true of almost everything he did. It was in
-one way a simple idea, as most of his ideas were simple ideas. But it
-was not a silly idea; there was a great deal to be said for it and it
-might have succeeded. It was, of course, simply the idea that it is
-better to create Christians than to destroy Moslems. If Islam had been
-converted, the world would have been immeasurably more united and happy;
-for one thing, three quarters of the wars of modern history would never
-have taken place. It was not absurd to suppose that this might be
-effected, without military force, by missionaries who were also martyrs.
-The Church had conquered Europe in that way and may yet conquer Asia or
-Africa in that way. But when all this is allowed for, there is still
-another sense in which St. Francis was not thinking of Martyrdom as a
-means to an end, but almost as an end in itself; in the sense that to
-him the supreme end was to come closer to the example of Christ. Through
-all his plunging and restless days ran the refrain: I have not suffered
-enough; I have not sacrificed enough; I am not yet worthy even of the
-shadow of the crown of thorns. He wandered about the valleys of the
-world looking for the hill that has the outline of a skull.
-
-A little while before his final departure for the East a vast and
-triumphant assembly of the whole order had been held near the
-Portiuncula; and called The Assembly of the Straw Huts, from the manner
-in which that mighty army encamped in the field. Tradition says that it
-was on this occasion that St. Francis met St. Dominic for the first and
-last time. It also says, what is probable enough, that the practical
-spirit of the Spaniard was almost appalled at the devout
-irresponsibility of the Italian, who had assembled such a crowd without
-organising a commissariat. Dominic the Spaniard was, like nearly every
-Spaniard, a man with the mind of a soldier. His charity took the
-practical form of provision and preparation. But, apart from the
-disputes about faith which such incidents open, he probably did not
-understand in this case the power of mere popularity produced by mere
-personality. In all his leaps in the dark, Francis had an extraordinary
-faculty of falling on his feet. The whole countryside came down like a
-landslide to provide food and drink for this sort of pious picnic.
-Peasants brought waggons of wine and game; great nobles walked about
-doing the work of footmen. It was a very real victory for the Franciscan
-spirit of a reckless faith not only in God but in man. Of course there
-is much doubt and dispute about the whole story and the whole relation
-of Francis and Dominic; and the story of the Assembly of the Straw Huts
-is told from the Franciscan side. But the alleged meeting is worth
-mentioning, precisely because it was immediately before St. Francis set
-forth on his bloodless crusade that he is said to have met St. Dominic,
-who has been so much criticised for lending himself to a more bloody
-one. There is no space in this little book to explain how St. Francis,
-as much as St. Dominic, would ultimately have defended the defence of
-Christian unity by arms. Indeed it would need a large book instead of a
-little book to develop that point alone from its first principles. For
-the modern mind is merely a blank about the philosophy of toleration;
-and the average agnostic of recent times has really had no notion of
-what he meant by religious liberty and equality. He took his own ethics
-as self-evident and enforced them; such as decency or the error of the
-Adamite heresy. Then he was horribly shocked if he heard of anybody
-else, Moslem or Christian, taking _his_ ethics as self-evident and
-enforcing _them_; such as reverence or the error of the Atheist heresy.
-And then he wound up by taking all this lop-sided illogical deadlock, of
-the unconscious meeting the unfamiliar, and called it the liberality of
-his own mind. Medieval men thought that if a social system was founded
-on a certain idea it must fight for that idea, whether it was as simple
-as Islam or as carefully balanced as Catholicism. Modern men really
-think the same thing, as is clear when communists attack their ideas of
-property. Only they do not think it so clearly, because they have not
-really thought out their idea of property. But while it is probable that
-St. Francis would have reluctantly agreed with St. Dominic that war for
-the truth was right in the last resort, it is certain that St. Dominic
-did enthusiastically agree with St. Francis that it was far better to
-prevail by persuasion and enlightenment if it were possible. St. Dominic
-devoted himself much more to persuading than to persecuting; but there
-was a difference in the methods simply because there was a difference in
-the men. About everything St. Francis did there was something that was
-in a good sense childish, and even in a good sense wilful. He threw
-himself into things abruptly, as if they had just occurred to him. He
-made a dash for his Mediterranean enterprise with something of the air
-of a schoolboy running away to sea.
-
-In the first act of that attempt he characteristically distinguished
-himself by becoming the Patron Saint of Stowaways. He never thought of
-waiting for introductions or bargains or any of the considerable backing
-that he already had from rich and responsible people. He simply saw a
-boat and threw himself into it, as he threw himself into everything
-else. It has all that air of running a race which makes his whole life
-read like an escapade or even literally an escape. He lay like lumber
-among the cargo, with one companion whom he had swept with him in his
-rush; but the voyage was apparently unfortunate and erratic and ended in
-an enforced return to Italy. Apparently it was after this first false
-start that the great re-union took place at the Portiuncula, and between
-this and the final Syrian journey there was also an attempt to meet the
-Moslem menace by preaching to the Moors in Spain. In Spain indeed
-several of the first Franciscans had already succeeded gloriously in
-being martyred. But the great Francis still went about stretching out
-his arms for such torments and desiring that agony in vain. No one would
-have said more readily than he that he was probably less like Christ
-than those others who had already found their Calvary; but the thing
-remained with him like a secret; the strangest of the sorrows of man.
-
-His later voyage was more successful, so far as arriving at the scene of
-operations was concerned. He arrived at the headquarters of the Crusade
-which was in front of the besieged city of Damietta, and went on in his
-rapid and solitary fashion to seek the headquarters of the Saracens. He
-succeeded in obtaining an interview with the Sultan; and it was at that
-interview that he evidently offered, and as some say proceeded, to fling
-himself into the fire as a divine ordeal, defying the Moslem religious
-teachers to do the same. It is quite certain that he would have done so
-at a moment's notice. Indeed throwing himself into the fire was hardly
-more desperate, in any case, than throwing himself among the weapons and
-tools of torture of a horde of fanatical Mahomedans and asking them to
-renounce Mahomet. It is said further that the Mahomedan muftis showed
-some coldness towards the proposed competition, and that one of them
-quietly withdrew while it was under discussion; which would also appear
-credible. But for whatever reason Francis evidently returned as freely
-as he came. There may be something in the story of the individual
-impression produced on the Sultan, which the narrator represents as a
-sort of secret conversion. There may be something in the suggestion that
-the holy man was unconsciously protected among half-barbarous orientals
-by the halo of sanctity that is supposed in such places to surround an
-idiot. There is probably as much or more in the more generous
-explanation of that graceful though capricious courtesy and compassion
-which mingled with wilder things in the stately Soldans of the type and
-tradition of Saladin. Finally, there is perhaps something in the
-suggestion that the tale of St. Francis might be told as a sort of
-ironic tragedy and comedy called The Man Who Could Not Get Killed. Men
-liked him too much for himself to let him die for his faith; and the man
-was received instead of the message. But all these are only converging
-guesses at a great effort that is hard to judge, because it broke off
-short like the beginnings of a great bridge that might have united East
-and West, and remains one of the great might-have-beens of history.
-
-Meanwhile the great movement in Italy was making giant strides. Backed
-now by papal authority as well as popular enthusiasm, and creating a
-kind of comradeship among all classes, it had started a riot of
-reconstruction on all sides of religious and social life; and especially
-began to express itself in that enthusiasm for building which is the
-mark of all the resurrections of Western Europe. There had notably been
-established at Bologna a magnificent mission house of the Friars Minor;
-and a vast body of them and their sympathisers surrounded it with a
-chorus of acclamation. Their unanimity had a strange interruption. One
-man alone in that crowd was seen to turn and suddenly denounce the
-building as if it had been a Babylonian temple; demanding indignantly
-since when the Lady Poverty had thus been insulted with the luxury of
-palaces. It was Francis, a wild figure, returned from his Eastern
-Crusade; and it was the first and last time that he spoke in wrath to
-his children.
-
-A word must be said later about this serious division of sentiment and
-policy, about which many Franciscans, and to some extent Francis
-himself, parted company with the more moderate policy which ultimately
-prevailed. At this point we need only note it as another shadow fallen
-upon his spirit after his disappointment in the desert; and as in some
-sense the prelude to the next phase of his career, which is the most
-isolated and the most mysterious. It is true that everything about this
-episode seems to be covered with some cloud of dispute, even including
-its date; some writers putting it much earlier in the narrative than
-this. But whether or no it was chronologically it was certainly
-logically the culmination of the story, and may best be indicated here.
-I say indicated for it must be a matter of little more than indication;
-the thing being a mystery both in the higher moral and the more trivial
-historical sense. Anyhow the conditions of the affair seem to have been
-these. Francis and a young companion, in the course of their common
-wandering, came past a great castle all lighted up with the festivities
-attending a son of the house receiving the honour of knighthood. This
-aristocratic mansion, which took its name from Monte Feltro, they
-entered in their beautiful and casual fashion and began to give their
-own sort of good news. There were some at least who listened to the
-saint "as if he had been an angel of God"; among them a gentleman named
-Orlando of Chiusi, who had great lands in Tuscany, and who proceeded to
-do St. Francis a singular and somewhat picturesque act of courtesy. He
-gave him a mountain; a thing somewhat unique among the gifts of the
-world. Presumably the Franciscan rule which forbade a man to accept
-money had made no detailed provision about accepting mountains. Nor
-indeed did St. Francis accept it save as he accepted everything, as a
-temporary convenience rather than a personal possession; but he turned
-it into a sort of refuge for the eremitical rather than the monastic
-life; he retired there when he wished for a life of prayer and fasting
-which he did not ask even his closest friends to follow. This was
-Alverno of the Apennines, and upon its peak there rests for ever a dark
-cloud that has a rim or halo of glory.
-
-What it was exactly that happened there may never be known. The matter
-has been, I believe, a subject of dispute among the most devout students
-of the saintly life as well as between such students and others of the
-more secular sort. It may be that St. Francis never spoke to a soul on
-the subject; it would be highly characteristic, and it is certain in any
-case that he said very little; I think he is only alleged to have spoken
-of it to one man. Subject however to such truly sacred doubts, I will
-confess that to me personally this one solitary and indirect report that
-has come down to us reads very like the report of something real; of
-some of those things that are more real than what we call daily
-realities. Even something as it were double and bewildering about the
-image seems to carry the impression of an experience shaking the senses;
-as does the passage in Revelations about the supernatural creatures full
-of eyes. It would seem that St. Francis beheld the heavens above him
-occupied by a vast winged being like a seraph spread out like a cross.
-There seems some mystery about whether the winged figure was itself
-crucified or in the posture of crucifixion, or whether it merely
-enclosed in its frame of wings some colossal crucifix. But it seems
-clear that there was some question of the former impression; for
-St. Bonaventura distinctly says that St. Francis doubted how a seraph
-could be crucified, since those awful and ancient principalities were
-without the infirmity of the Passion. St. Bonaventura suggests that the
-seeming contradiction may have meant that St. Francis was to be
-crucified as a spirit since he could not be crucified as a man; but
-whatever the meaning of the vision, the general idea of it is very vivid
-and overwhelming. St. Francis saw above him, filling the whole heavens,
-some vast immemorial unthinkable power, ancient like the Ancient of
-Days, whose calm men had conceived under the forms of winged bulls or
-monstrous cherubim, and all that winged wonder was in pain like a
-wounded bird. This seraphic suffering, it is said, pierced his soul with
-a sword of grief and pity; it may be inferred that some sort of mounting
-agony accompanied the ecstasy. Finally after some fashion the apocalypse
-faded from the sky and the agony within subsided; and silence and the
-natural air filled the morning twilight and settled slowly in the purple
-chasms and cleft abysses of the Apennines.
-
-The head of the solitary sank, amid all that relaxation and quiet in
-which time can drift by with the sense of something ended and complete;
-and as he stared downwards, he saw the marks of nails in his own hands.
-
-
-
-
- _Chapter IX_
- _Miracles and Death_
-
-
-The tremendous story of the Stigmata of St. Francis, which was the end
-of the last chapter, was in some sense the end of his life. In a logical
-sense, it would have been the end even if it had happened at the
-beginning. But truer traditions refer it to a later date and suggest
-that his remaining days on the earth had something about them of the
-fingering of a shadow. Whether St. Bonaventura was right in his hint
-that St. Francis saw in that seraphic vision something almost like a
-vast mirror of his own soul, that could at least suffer like an angel
-though not like a god, or whether it expressed under an imagery more
-primitive and colossal than common Christian art the primary paradox of
-the death of God, it is evident from its traditional consequences that
-it was meant for a crown and for a seal. It seems to have been after
-seeing this vision that he began to go blind.
-
-But the incident has another and much less important place in this rough
-and limited outline. It is the natural occasion for considering briefly
-and collectively all the facts or fables of another aspect of the life
-of St. Francis; an aspect which is, I will not say more disputable, but
-certainly more disputed. I mean all that mass of testimony and tradition
-that concerns his miraculous powers and supernatural experiences, with
-which it would have been easy to stud and bejewel every page of the
-story; only that certain circumstances necessary to the conditions of
-this narration make it better to gather, somewhat hastily, all such
-jewels into a heap.
-
-I have here adopted this course in order to make allowance for a
-prejudice. It is indeed to a great extent a prejudice of the past; a
-prejudice that is plainly disappearing in days of greater enlightenment,
-and especially of a greater range of scientific experiment and
-knowledge. But it is a prejudice that is still tenacious in many of an
-older generation and still traditional in many of the younger. I mean,
-of course, what used to be called the belief "that miracles do not
-happen," as I think Matthew Arnold expressed it, in expressing the
-standpoint of so many of our Victorian uncles and great-uncles. In other
-words it was the remains of that sceptical simplification by which some
-of the philosophers of the early eighteenth century had popularised the
-impression (for a very short time) that we had discovered the
-regulations of the cosmos like the works of a clock, of so very simple a
-clock that it was possible to distinguish almost at a glance what could
-or could not have happened in human experience. It should be remembered
-that these real sceptics, of the golden age of scepticism, were quite as
-scornful of the first fancies of science as of the lingering legends of
-religion. Voltaire, when he was told that a fossil fish had been found
-on the peaks of the Alps, laughed openly at the tale and said that some
-fasting monk or hermit had dropped his fish-bones there; possibly in
-order to effect another monkish fraud. Everybody knows by this time that
-science has had its revenge on scepticism. The border between the
-credible and the incredible has not only become once more as vague as in
-any barbaric twilight; but the credible is obviously increasing and the
-incredible shrinking. A man in Voltaire's time did not know what miracle
-he would next have to throw up. A man in our time does not know what
-miracle he will next have to swallow.
-
-But long before these things had happened, in those days of my boyhood
-when I first saw the figure of St. Francis far away in the distance and
-drawing me even at that distance, in those Victorian days which did
-seriously separate the virtues from the miracles of the saints—even in
-those days I could not help feeling vaguely puzzled about how this
-method could be applied to history. Even then I did not quite
-understand, and even now I do not quite understand, on what principle
-one is to pick and choose in the chronicles of the past which seem to be
-all of a piece. All our knowledge of certain historical periods, and
-notably of the whole medieval period, rests on certain connected
-chronicles written by people who are some of them nameless and all of
-them dead, who cannot in any case be cross-examined and cannot in some
-cases be corroborated. I have never been quite clear about the nature of
-the right by which historians accepted masses of detail from them as
-definitely true, and suddenly denied their truthfulness when one detail
-was preternatural. I do not complain of their being sceptics; I am
-puzzled about why the sceptics are not more sceptical. I can understand
-their saying that these details would never have been included in a
-chronicle except by lunatics or liars; but in that case the only
-inference is that the chronicle was written by liars or lunatics. They
-will write for instance: "Monkish fanaticism found it easy to spread the
-report that miracles were already being worked at the tomb of Thomas
-Becket." Why should they not say equally well, "Monkish fanaticism found
-it easy to spread the slander that four knights from King Henry's court
-had assassinated Thomas Becket in the cathedral"? They would write
-something like this: "The credulity of the age readily believed that
-Joan of Arc had been inspired to point out the Dauphin although he was
-in disguise." Why should they not write on the same principle: "The
-credulity of the age was such as to suppose that an obscure peasant girl
-could get an audience at the court of the Dauphin"? And so, in the
-present case, when they tell us there is a wild story that St. Francis
-flung himself into the fire and emerged scathless, upon what precise
-principle are they forbidden to tell us of a wild story that St. Francis
-flung himself into the camp of the ferocious Moslems and returned safe?
-I only ask for information; for I do not see the rationale of the thing
-myself. I will undertake to say there was not a word written of
-St. Francis by any contemporary who was himself incapable of believing
-and telling a miraculous story. Perhaps it is all monkish fables and
-there never was any St. Francis or any St. Thomas Becket or any Joan of
-Arc. This is undoubtedly a _reductio ad absurdum_; but it is a _reductio
-ad absurdum_ of the view which thought all miracles absurd.
-
-And in abstract logic this method of selection would lead to the wildest
-absurdities. An intrinsically incredible story could only mean that the
-authority was unworthy of credit. It could not mean that other parts of
-his story must be received with complete credulity. If somebody said he
-had met a man in yellow trousers, who proceeded to jump down his own
-throat, we should not exactly take our Bible oath or be burned at the
-stake for the statement that he wore yellow trousers. If somebody
-claimed to have gone up in a blue balloon and found that the moon was
-made of green cheese, we should not exactly take an affidavit that the
-balloon was blue any more than that the moon was green. And the really
-logical conclusion from throwing doubts on all tales like the miracles
-of St. Francis was to throw doubts on the existence of men like
-St. Francis. And there really was a modern moment, a sort of high-water
-mark of insane scepticism, when this sort of thing was really said or
-done. People used to go about saying that there was no such person as
-St. Patrick; which is every bit as much of a human and historical howler
-as saying there was no such person as St. Francis. There was a time, for
-instance, when the madness of mythological explanation had dissolved a
-large part of solid history under the universal and luxuriant warmth and
-radiance of the Sun-Myth. I believe that that particular sun has already
-set, but there have been any number of moons and meteors to take its
-place.
-
-St. Francis, of course, would make a magnificent Sun-Myth. How could
-anybody miss the chance of being a Sun-Myth when he is actually best
-known by a song called The Canticle of the Sun? It is needless to point
-out that the fire in Syria was the dawn in the East and the bleeding
-wounds in Tuscany the sunset in the West. I could expound this theory at
-considerable length; only, as so often happens to such fine theorists,
-another and more promising theory occurs to me. I cannot think how
-everybody, including myself, can have overlooked the fact that the whole
-tale of St. Francis is of Totemistic origin. It is unquestionably a tale
-that simply swarms with totems. The Franciscan woods are as full of them
-as any Red Indian fable. Francis is made to call himself an ass, because
-in the original mythos Francis was merely the name given to the real
-four-footed donkey, afterwards vaguely evolved into a half-human god or
-hero. And that, no doubt, is why I used to feel that the Brother Wolf
-and Sister Bird of St. Francis were somehow like the Brer Fox and Sis
-Cow of Uncle Remus. Some say there is an innocent stage of infancy in
-which we do really believe that a cow talked or a fox made a tar baby.
-Anyhow there is an innocent period of intellectual growth in which we do
-sometimes really believe that St. Patrick was a Sun-Myth or St. Francis
-a Totem. But for the most of us both those phases of paradise are past.
-
-As I shall suggest in a moment, there is one sense in which we can for
-practical purposes distinguish between probable and improbable things in
-such a story. It is not so much a question of cosmic criticism about the
-nature of the event as of literary criticism about the nature of the
-story. Some stories are told much more seriously than others. But apart
-from this, I shall not attempt here any definite differentiation between
-them. I shall not do so for a practical reason affecting the utility of
-the proceeding; I mean the fact that in a practical sense the whole of
-this matter is again in the melting pot, from which many things may
-emerge moulded into what rationalism would have called monsters. The
-fixed points of faith and philosophy do indeed remain always the same.
-Whether a man believes that fire in one case could fail to burn, depends
-on why he thinks it generally does burn. If it burns nine sticks out of
-ten because it is its nature or doom to do so, then it will burn the
-tenth stick as well. If it burns nine sticks because it is the will of
-God that it should, then it might be the will of God that the tenth
-should be unburned. Nobody can get behind that fundamental difference
-about the reason of things; and it is as rational for a theist to
-believe in miracles as for an atheist to disbelieve in them. In other
-words there is only one intelligent reason why a man does not believe in
-miracles and that is that he does believe in materialism. But these
-fixed points of faith and philosophy are things for a theoretical work
-and have no particular place here. And in the matter of history and
-biography, which have their place here, nothing is fixed at all. The
-world is in a welter of the possible and impossible, and nobody knows
-what will be the next scientific hypothesis to support some ancient
-superstition. Three quarters of the miracles attributed to St. Francis
-would already be explained by psychologists, not indeed as a Catholic
-explains them, but as a materialist must necessarily refuse to explain
-them. There is one whole department of the miracles of St. Francis; the
-miracles of healing. What is the good of a superior sceptic throwing
-them away as unthinkable, at the moment when faith-healing is already a
-big booming Yankee business like Barnum's Show? There is another whole
-department analogous to the tales of Christ "perceiving men's thoughts."
-What is the use of censoring them and blacking them out because they are
-marked "miracles," when thought-reading is already a parlour game like
-musical chairs? There is another whole department, to be studied
-separately if such scientific study were possible, of the well-attested
-wonders worked from his relics and fragmentary possessions. What is the
-use of dismissing all that as inconceivable, when even these common
-psychical parlour tricks turn perpetually upon touching some familiar
-object or holding in the hand some personal possession? I do not
-believe, of course, that these tricks are of the same type as the good
-works of the saint; save perhaps in the sense of _Diabolus simius Dei_.
-But it is not a question of what I believe and why, but of what the
-sceptic disbelieves and why. And the moral for the practical biographer
-and historian is that he must wait till things settle down a little
-more, before he claims to disbelieve anything.
-
-This being so he can choose between two courses; and not without some
-hesitation, I have here chosen between them. The best and boldest course
-would be to tell the whole story in a straightforward way, miracles and
-all, as the original historians told it. And to this sane and simple
-course the new historians will probably have to return. But it must be
-remembered that this book is avowedly only an introduction to
-St. Francis or the study of St. Francis. Those who need an introduction
-are in their nature strangers. With them the object is to get them to
-listen to St. Francis at all; and in doing so it is perfectly legitimate
-so to arrange the order of the facts that the familiar come before the
-unfamiliar and those they can at once understand before those they have
-a difficulty in understanding. I should only be too thankful if this
-thin and scratchy sketch contains a line or two that attracts men to
-study St. Francis for themselves; and if they do study him for
-themselves, they will soon find that the supernatural part of the story
-seems quite as natural as the rest. But it was necessary that my outline
-should be a merely human one, since I was only presenting his claim on
-all humanity, including sceptical humanity. I therefore adopted the
-alternative course, of showing first that nobody but a born fool could
-fail to realise that Francis of Assisi was a very real historical human
-being; and then summarising briefly in this chapter the superhuman
-powers that were certainly a part of that history and humanity. It only
-remains to say a few words about some distinctions that may reasonably
-be observed in the matter by any man of any views; that he may not
-confuse the point and climax of the saint's life with the fancies or
-rumours that were really only the fringes of his reputation.
-
-There is so immense a mass of legends and anecdotes about St. Francis of
-Assisi, and there are so many admirable compilations that cover nearly
-all of them, that I have been compelled within these narrow limits to
-pursue a somewhat narrow policy; that of following one line of
-explanation and only mentioning one anecdote here or there because it
-illustrates that explanation. If this is true about all the legends and
-stories, it is especially true about the miraculous legends and the
-supernatural stories. If we were to take some stories as they stand, we
-should receive a rather bewildered impression that the biography
-contains more supernatural events than natural ones. Now it is clean
-against Catholic tradition, co-incident in so many points with common
-sense, to suppose that this is really the proportion of these things in
-practical human life. Moreover, even considered as supernatural or
-preternatural stories, they obviously fall into certain different
-classes, not so much by our experience of miracles as by our experience
-of stories. Some of them have the character of fairy stories, in their
-form even more than their incident. They are obviously tales told by the
-fire to peasants or the children of peasants, under conditions in which
-nobody thinks he is propounding a religious doctrine to be received or
-rejected, but only rounding off a story in the most symmetrical way,
-according to that sort of decorative scheme or pattern that runs through
-all fairy stories. Others are obviously in their form most emphatically
-evidence; that is they are testimony that is truth or lies; and it will
-be very hard for any judge of human nature to think they are lies.
-
-It is admitted that the story of the Stigmata is not a legend but can
-only be a lie. I mean that it is certainly not a late legendary
-accretion added afterwards to the fame of St. Francis; but is something
-that started almost immediately with his earliest biographers. It is
-practically necessary to suggest that it was a conspiracy; indeed there
-has been some disposition to put the fraud upon the unfortunate Elias,
-whom so many parties have been disposed to treat as a useful universal
-villain. It has been said, indeed, that these early biographers,
-St. Bonaventura and Celano and the Three Companions, though they declare
-that St. Francis received the mystical wounds, do not say that they
-themselves saw those wounds. I do not think this argument conclusive;
-because it only arises out of the very nature of the narrative. The
-Three Companions are not in any case making an affidavit; and therefore
-none of the admitted parts of their story are in the form of an
-affidavit. They are writing a chronicle of a comparatively impersonal
-and very objective description. They do not say, "I saw St. Francis's
-wounds"; they say, "St. Francis received wounds." But neither do they
-say, "I saw St. Francis go into the Portiuncula"; they say, "St. Francis
-went into the Portiuncula." But I still cannot understand why they
-should be trusted as eye-witnesses about the one fact and not trusted as
-eye-witnesses about the other. It is all of a piece; it would be a most
-abrupt and abnormal interruption in their way of telling the story if
-they suddenly began to curse and to swear, and give their names and
-addresses, and take their oath that they themselves saw and verified the
-physical facts in question. It seems to me, therefore, that this
-particular discussion goes back to the general question I have already
-mentioned; the question of why these chronicles should be credited at
-all, if they are credited with abounding in the incredible. But that
-again will probably be found to revert, in the last resort, to the mere
-fact that some men cannot believe in miracles because they are
-materialists. That is logical enough; but they are bound to deny the
-preternatural as much in the testimony of a modern scientific professor
-as in that of a medieval monkish chronicler. And there are plenty of
-professors for them to contradict by this time.
-
-But whatever may be thought of such supernaturalism in the comparatively
-material and popular sense of supernatural acts, we shall miss the whole
-point of St. Francis, especially of St. Francis after Alverno, if we do
-not realise that he was living a supernatural life. And there is more
-and more of such supernaturalism in his life as he approaches towards
-his death. This element of the supernatural did not separate him from
-the natural; for it was the whole point of his position that it united
-him more perfectly to the natural. It did not make him dismal or
-dehumanised; for it was the whole meaning of his message that such
-mysticism makes a man cheerful and humane. But it was the whole point of
-his position, and it was the whole meaning of his message, that the
-power that did it was a supernatural power. If this simple distinction
-were not apparent from the whole of his life, it would be difficult for
-anyone to miss it in reading the account of his death.
-
-In a sense he may be said to have wandered as a dying man, just as he
-had wandered as a living one. As it became more and more apparent that
-his health was failing, he seems to have been carried from place to
-place like a pageant of sickness or almost like a pageant of mortality.
-He went to Rieti, to Nursia, perhaps to Naples, certainly to Cortona by
-the lake of Perugia. But there is something profoundly pathetic, and
-full of great problems, in the fact that at last, as it would seem, his
-flame of life leapt up and his heart rejoiced when they saw afar off on
-the Assisian hill the solemn pillars of the Portiuncula. He who had
-become a vagabond for the sake of a vision, he who had denied himself
-all sense of place and possession, he whose whole gospel and glory it
-was to be homeless, received like a Parthian shot from nature, the sting
-of the sense of home. He also had his _maladie du clocher_, his sickness
-of the spire; though his spire was higher than ours. "Never," he cried
-with the sudden energy of strong spirits in death, "never give up this
-place. If you would go anywhere or make any pilgrimage, return always to
-your home; for this is the holy house of God." And the procession passed
-under the arches of his home; and he laid down on his bed and his
-brethren gathered round him for the last long vigil. It seems to me no
-moment for entering into the subsequent disputes about which successors
-he blessed or in what form and with what significance. In that one
-mighty moment he blessed us all.
-
-After he had taken farewell of some of his nearest and especially some
-of his oldest friends, he was lifted at his own request off his own rude
-bed and laid on the bare ground; as some say clad only in a hair-shirt,
-as he had first gone forth into the wintry woods from the presence of
-his father. It was the final assertion of his great fixed idea; of
-praise and thanks springing to their most towering height out of
-nakedness and nothing. As he lay there we may be certain that his seared
-and blinded eyes saw nothing but their object and their origin. We may
-be sure that the soul, in its last inconceivable isolation, was face to
-face with nothing less than God Incarnate and Christ Crucified. But for
-the men standing around him there must have been other thoughts mingling
-with these; and many memories must have gathered like ghosts in the
-twilight, as that day wore on and that great darkness descended in which
-we all lost a friend.
-
-For what lay dying there was not Dominic of the Dogs of God, a leader in
-logical and controversial wars that could be reduced to a plan and
-handed on like a plan; a master of a machine of democratic discipline by
-which others could organise themselves. What was passing from the world
-was a person; a poet; an outlook on life like a light that was never
-after on sea or land; a thing not to be replaced or repeated while the
-earth endures. It has been said that there was only one Christian, who
-died on the cross; it is truer to say in this sense that there was only
-one Franciscan, whose name was Francis. Huge and happy as was the
-popular work he left behind him, there was something that he could not
-leave behind, any more than a landscape painter can leave his eyes in
-his will. It was an artist in life who was here called to be an artist
-in death; and he had a better right than Nero, his anti-type, to say
-_Qualis artifex pereo_. For Nero's life was full of posing for the
-occasion like that of an actor; while the Umbrian's had a natural and
-continuous grace like that of an athlete. But St. Francis had better
-things to say and better things to think about, and his thoughts were
-caught upwards where we cannot follow them, in divine and dizzy heights
-to which death alone can lift us up.
-
-Round about him stood the brethren in their brown habits, those that had
-loved him even if they afterwards disputed with each other. There was
-Bernard his first friend and Angelo who had served as his secretary and
-Elias his successor, whom tradition tried to turn into a sort of Judas,
-but who seems to have been little worse than an official in the wrong
-place. His tragedy was that he had a Franciscan habit without a
-Franciscan heart, or at any rate with a very un-Franciscan head. But
-though he made a bad Franciscan, he might have made a decent Dominican.
-Anyhow, there is no reason to doubt that he loved Francis, for ruffians
-and savages did that. Anyhow he stood among the rest as the hours passed
-and the shadows lengthened in the house of the Portiuncula; and nobody
-need think so ill of him as to suppose that his thoughts were then in
-the tumultuous future, in the ambitions and controversies of his later
-years.
-
-A man might fancy that the birds must have known when it happened; and
-made some motion in the evening sky. As they had once, according to the
-tale, scattered to the four winds of heaven in the pattern of a cross at
-his signal of dispersion, they might now have written in such dotted
-lines a more awful augury across the sky. Hidden in the woods perhaps
-were little cowering creatures never again to be so much noticed and
-understood; and it has been said that animals are sometimes conscious of
-things to which man their spiritual superior is for the moment blind. We
-do not know whether any shiver passed through all the thieves and the
-outcasts and the outlaws, to tell them what had happened to him who
-never knew the nature of scorn. But at least in the passages and porches
-of the Portiuncula there was a sudden stillness, where all the brown
-figures stood like bronze statues; for the stopping of the great heart
-that had not broken till it held the world.
-
-
-
-
- _Chapter X_
- _The Testament of St. Francis_
-
-
-In one sense doubtless it is a sad irony that St. Francis, who all his
-life had desired all men to agree, should have died amid increasing
-disagreements. But we must not exaggerate this discord, as some have
-done, so as to turn it into a mere defeat of all his ideals. There are
-some who represent his work as having been merely ruined by the
-wickedness of the world, or what they always assume to be the even
-greater wickedness of the Church.
-
-This little book is an essay on St. Francis and not on the Franciscan
-Order, still less on the Catholic Church or the Papacy or the policy
-pursued towards the extreme Franciscans or the Fraticelli. It is
-therefore only necessary to note in a very few words what was the
-general nature of the controversy that raged after the great saint's
-death, and to some extent troubled the last days of his life. The
-dominant detail was the interpretation of the vow of poverty, or the
-refusal of all possessions. Nobody so far as I know ever proposed to
-interfere with the vow of the individual friar that he would have no
-individual possessions. Nobody, that is, proposed to interfere with his
-negation of private property. But some Franciscans, invoking the
-authority of Francis on their side, went further than this and further I
-think than anybody else has ever gone. They proposed to abolish not only
-private property but property. That is, they refused to be corporately
-responsible for anything at all; for any buildings or stores or tools;
-they refused to own them collectively even when they used them
-collectively. It is perfectly true that many, especially among the first
-supporters of this view, were men of a splendid and selfless spirit,
-wholly devoted to the great saint's ideal. It is also perfectly true
-that the Pope and the authorities of the Church did not think this
-conception was a workable arrangement, and went so far in modifying it
-as to set aside certain clauses in the great saint's will. But it is not
-at all easy to see that it _was_ a workable arrangement or even an
-arrangement at all; for it was really a refusal to arrange anything.
-Everybody knew of course that Franciscans were communists; but this was
-not so much being a communist as being an anarchist. Surely upon any
-argument somebody or something must be answerable for what happened to
-or in or concerning a number of historic edifices and ordinary goods and
-chattels. Many idealists of a socialistic sort, notably of the school of
-Mr. Shaw or Mr. Wells, have treated this dispute as if it were merely a
-case of the tyranny of wealthy and wicked pontiffs crushing the true
-Christianity of Christian Socialists. But in truth this extreme ideal
-was in a sense the very reverse of Socialist, or even social. Precisely
-the thing which these enthusiasts refused was that social ownership on
-which Socialism is built; what they primarily refused to do was what
-Socialists primarily exist to do; to own legally in their corporate
-capacity. Nor is it true that the tone of the Popes towards the
-enthusiasts was merely harsh and hostile. The Pope maintained for a long
-time a compromise which he had specially designed to meet their own
-conscientious objections; a compromise by which the Papacy itself held
-the property in a kind of trust for the owners who refused to touch it.
-The truth is that this incident shows two things which are common enough
-in Catholic history, but very little understood by the journalistic
-history of industrial civilisation. It shows that the Saints were
-sometimes great men when the Popes were small men. But it also shows
-that great men are sometimes wrong when small men are right. And it will
-be found, after all, very difficult for any candid and clear-headed
-outsider to deny that the Pope was right, when he insisted that the
-world was not made only for Franciscans.
-
-For that was what was behind the quarrel. At the back of this particular
-practical question there was something much larger and more momentous,
-the stir and wind of which we can feel as we read the controversy. We
-might go so far as to put the ultimate truth thus. St. Francis was so
-great and original a man that he had something in him of what makes the
-founder of a religion. Many of his followers were more or less ready, in
-their hearts, to treat him as the founder of a religion. They were
-willing to let the Franciscan spirit escape from Christendom as the
-Christian spirit had escaped from Israel. They were willing to let it
-eclipse Christendom as the Christian spirit had eclipsed Israel.
-Francis, the fire that ran through the roads of Italy, was to be the
-beginning of a conflagration in which the old Christian civilisation was
-to be consumed. That was the point the Pope had to settle; whether
-Christendom should absorb Francis or Francis Christendom. And he decided
-rightly, apart from the duties of his place; for the Church could
-include all that was good in the Franciscans and the Franciscans could
-not include all that was good in the Church.
-
-There is one consideration which, though sufficiently clear in the whole
-story, has not perhaps been sufficiently noted, especially by those who
-cannot see the case for a certain Catholic common sense larger even than
-Franciscan enthusiasm. Yet it arises out of the very merits of the man
-whom they so rightly admire. Francis of Assisi, as has been said again
-and again, was a poet; that is, he was a person who could express his
-personality. Now it is everywhere the mark of this sort of man that his
-very limitations make him larger. He is what he is, not only by what he
-has, but in some degree by what he has not. But the limits that make the
-lines of such a personal portrait cannot be made the limits of all
-humanity. St. Francis is a very strong example of this quality in the
-man of genius, that in him even what is negative is positive, because it
-is part of a character. An excellent example of what I mean may be found
-in his attitude towards learning and scholarship. He ignored and in some
-degree discouraged books and book-learning; and from his own point of
-view and that of his own work in the world he was absolutely right. The
-whole point of his message was to be so simple that the village idiot
-could understand it. The whole point of his point of view was that it
-looked out freshly upon a fresh world, that might have been made that
-morning. Save for the great primal things, the Creation and the Story of
-Eden, the first Christmas and the first Easter, the world had no
-history. But is it desired or desirable that the whole Catholic Church
-should have no history?
-
-It is perhaps the chief suggestion of this book that St. Francis walked
-the world like the Pardon of God. I mean that his appearance marked the
-moment when men could be reconciled not only to God but to nature and,
-most difficult of all, to themselves. For it marked the moment when all
-the stale paganism that had poisoned the ancient world was at last
-worked out of the social system. He opened the gates of the Dark Ages as
-of a prison of purgatory, where men had cleansed themselves as hermits
-in the desert or heroes in the barbarian wars. It was in fact his whole
-function to tell men to start afresh and, in that sense, to tell them to
-forget. If they were to turn over a new leaf and begin a fresh page with
-the first large letters of the alphabet, simply drawn and brilliantly
-coloured in the early medieval manner, it was clearly a part of that
-particular childlike cheerfulness that they should paste down the old
-page that was all black and bloody with horrid things. For instance, I
-have already noted that there is not a trace in the poetry of this first
-Italian poet of all that pagan mythology which lingered long after
-paganism. The first Italian poet seems the only man in the world who has
-never even heard of Virgil. This was exactly right for the special sense
-in which he is the first Italian poet. It is quite right that he should
-call a nightingale a nightingale, and not have its song spoilt or
-saddened by the terrible tales of Itylus or Procne. In short, it is
-really quite right and quite desirable that St. Francis should never
-have heard of Virgil. But do we really desire that Dante should never
-have heard of Virgil? Do we really desire that Dante should never have
-read any pagan mythology? It has been truly said that the use that Dante
-makes of such fables is altogether part of a deeper orthodoxy; that his
-huge heathen fragments, his gigantic figures of Minos or of Charon, only
-give a hint of some enormous natural religion behind all history and
-from the first foreshadowing the Faith. It is well to have the Sybil as
-well as David in the Dies Irae. That St. Francis would have burned all
-the leaves of all the books of the Sybil, in exchange for one fresh leaf
-from the nearest tree, is perfectly true; and perfectly proper to
-St. Francis. But it is good to have the Dies Irae as well as the
-Canticle of the Sun.
-
-By this thesis, in short, the coming of St. Francis was like the birth
-of a child in a dark house, lifting its doom; a child that grows up
-unconscious of the tragedy and triumphs over it by his innocence. In him
-it is necessarily not only innocence but ignorance. It is the essence of
-the story that _he_ should pluck at the green grass without knowing it
-grows over a murdered man or climb the apple-tree without knowing it was
-the gibbet of a suicide. It was such an amnesty and reconciliation that
-the freshness of the Franciscan spirit brought to all the world. But it
-does not follow that it ought to impose its ignorance on all the world.
-And I think it would have tried to impose it on all the world. For some
-Franciscans it would have seemed right that Franciscan poetry should
-expel Benedictine prose. For the symbolic child it was quite rational.
-It was right enough that for such a child the world should be a large
-new nursery with blank white-washed walls, on which he could draw his
-own pictures in chalk in the childish fashion, crude in outline and gay
-in colour; the beginnings of all our art. It was right enough that to
-him such a nursery should seem the most magnificent mansion of the
-imagination of man. But in the Church of God are many mansions.
-
-Every heresy has been an effort to narrow the Church. If the Franciscan
-movement had turned into a new religion, it would after all have been a
-narrow religion. In so far as it did turn here and there into a heresy,
-it was a narrow heresy. It did what heresy always does; it set the mood
-against the mind. The mood was indeed originally the good and glorious
-mood of the great St. Francis, but it was not the whole mind of God or
-even of man. And it is a fact that the mood itself degenerated, as the
-mood turned into a monomania. A sect that came to be called the
-Fraticelli declared themselves the true sons of St. Francis and broke
-away from the compromises of Rome in favour of what they would have
-called the complete programme of Assisi. In a very little while these
-loose Franciscans began to look as ferocious as Flagellants. They
-launched new and violent vetoes; they denounced marriage; that is, they
-denounced mankind. In the name of the most human of saints they declared
-war upon humanity. They did not perish particularly through being
-persecuted; many of them were eventually persuaded; and the
-unpersuadable rump of them that remained remained without producing
-anything in the least calculated to remind anybody of the real
-St. Francis. What was the matter with these people was that they were
-mystics; mystics and nothing else but mystics; mystics and not
-Catholics; mystics and not Christians; mystics and not men. They rotted
-away because, in the most exact sense, they would not listen to reason.
-And St. Francis, however wild and romantic his gyrations might appear to
-many, always hung on to reason by one invisible and indestructible hair.
-
-The great saint was sane; and with the very sound of the word sanity, as
-at a deeper chord struck upon a harp, we come back to something that was
-indeed deeper than everything about him that seemed an almost elvish
-eccentricity. He was not a mere eccentric because he was always turning
-towards the centre and heart of the maze; he took the queerest and most
-zigzag short cuts through the wood, but he was always going home. He was
-not only far too humble to be an heresiarch, but he was far too human to
-desire to be an extremist, in the sense of an exile at the ends of the
-earth. The sense of humour which salts all the stories of his escapades
-alone prevented him from ever hardening into the solemnity of sectarian
-self-righteousness. He was by nature ready to admit that he was wrong;
-and if his followers had on some practical points to admit that he was
-wrong, they only admitted that he was wrong in order to prove that he
-was right. For it is they, his real followers, who have really proved
-that he was right and even in transcending some of his negations have
-triumphantly extended and interpreted his truth. The Franciscan order
-did not fossilise or break off short like something of which the true
-purpose has been frustrated by official tyranny or internal treason. It
-was this, the central and orthodox trunk of it, that afterwards bore
-fruit for the world. It counted among its sons Bonaventura the great
-mystic and Bernardino the popular preacher, who filled Italy with the
-very beatific buffooneries of a Jongleur de Dieu. It counted Raymond
-Lully with his strange learning and his large and daring plans for the
-conversion of the world; a man intensely individual exactly as
-St. Francis was intensely individual. It counted Roger Bacon, the first
-naturalist whose experiments with light and water had all the luminous
-quaintness that belongs to the beginnings of natural history; and whom
-even the most material scientists have hailed as a father of science. It
-is not merely true that these were great men who did great work for the
-world; it is also true that they were a certain kind of men keeping the
-spirit and savour of a certain kind of man, that we can recognise in
-them a taste and tang of audacity and simplicity, and know them for the
-sons of St. Francis.
-
-For that is the full and final spirit in which we should turn to
-St. Francis; in the spirit of thanks for what he has done. He was above
-all things a great giver; and he cared chiefly for the best kind of
-giving which is called thanksgiving. If another great man wrote a
-grammar of assent, he may well be said to have written a grammar of
-acceptance; a grammar of gratitude. He understood down to its very
-depths the theory of thanks; and its depths are a bottomless abyss. He
-knew that the praise of God stands on its strongest ground when it
-stands on nothing. He knew that we can best measure the towering miracle
-of the mere fact of existence if we realise that but for some strange
-mercy we should not even exist. And something of that larger truth is
-repeated in a lesser form in our own relations with so mighty a maker of
-history. He also is a giver of things we could not have even thought of
-for ourselves; he also is too great for anything but gratitude. From him
-came a whole awakening of the world and a dawn in which all shapes and
-colours could be seen anew. The mighty men of genius who made the
-Christian civilisation that we know appear in history almost as his
-servants and imitators. Before Dante was, he had given poetry to Italy;
-before St. Louis ruled, he had risen as the tribune of the poor; and
-before Giotto had painted the pictures, he had enacted the scenes. That
-great painter who began the whole human inspiration of European painting
-had himself gone to St. Francis to be inspired. It is said that when
-St. Francis staged in his own simple fashion a Nativity Play of
-Bethlehem, with kings and angels in the stiff and gay medieval garments
-and the golden wigs that stood for haloes, a miracle was wrought full of
-the Franciscan glory. The Holy Child was a wooden doll or bambino, and
-it was said that he embraced it and that the image came to life in his
-arms. He assuredly was not thinking of lesser things; but we may at
-least say that one thing came to life in his arms; and that was the
-thing that we call the drama. Save for his intense individual love of
-song, he did not perhaps himself embody this spirit in any of these
-arts. He was the spirit that was embodied. He was the spiritual essence
-and substance that walked the world, before anyone had seen these things
-in visible forms derived from it: a wandering fire as if from nowhere,
-at which men more material could light both torches and tapers. He was
-the soul of medieval civilisation before it even found a body. Another
-and quite different stream of spiritual inspiration derives largely from
-him; all that reforming energy of medieval and modern times that goes to
-the burden of _Deus est Deus Pauperum_. His abstract ardour for human
-beings was in a multitude of just medieval laws against the pride and
-cruelty of riches; it is to-day behind much that is loosely called
-Christian Socialist and can more correctly be called Catholic Democrat.
-Neither on the artistic nor the social side would anybody pretend that
-these things would not have existed without him; yet it is strictly true
-to say that we cannot now imagine them without him; since he has lived
-and changed the world.
-
-And something of that sense of impotence which was more than half his
-power will descend on anyone who knows what that inspiration has been in
-history, and can only record it in a series of straggling and meagre
-sentences. He will know something of what St. Francis meant by the great
-and good debt that cannot be paid. He will feel at once the desire to
-have done infinitely more and the futility of having done anything. He
-will know what it is to stand under such a deluge of a dead man's
-marvels, and have nothing in return to establish against it; to have
-nothing to set up under the overhanging, overwhelming arches of such a
-temple of time and eternity, but this brief candle burnt out so quickly
-before his shrine.
-
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- ST. PAUL'S HOUSE, WARWICK SQUARE, E.C.4
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-ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI. By GILBERT K. CHESTERTON.
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-VICTORIAN POETRY. By JOHN DRINKWATER.
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-EVERYDAY BIOLOGY. By J. ARTHUR THOMSON.
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-HOW TO ENJOY THE BIBLE. By CANON ANTHONY C. DEANE, M.A.
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