This time Clara became indignant. She went to the few friars attached to her monastery, and thanking them for their services, "Go," she said; "since they deprive us of those who dispense to us spiritual bread, we will not have those who procure for us our material bread." He who wrote that "the necks of kings and princes are bowed at the feet of the priests" was obliged to bow before this woman and raise his prohibition.[33]

St. Damian had too often echoed with St. Francis's hymns of love and liberty to forget him so soon and become an ordinary convent. Clara remained surrounded with the master's early companions; Egidio, Leo, Angelo, Ginepro never ceased to be assiduous visitors. These true lovers of poverty felt themselves at home there, and took liberties which would elsewhere have given surprise. One day an English friar, a celebrated theologian, came according to the minister's orders to preach at St. Damian. Suddenly Egidio, though a simple layman, interrupted him: "Stop, brother, let me speak," he said to him. And the master in theology, bowing his head, covered himself with his cowl as a sign of obedience, and sat down to listen to Egidio.

Clara felt a great joy in this; it seemed to her that she was once again living in St. Francis's days.[34] The little coterie was kept up until her death; she expired in the arms of Brothers Leo, Angelo, and Ginepro. In her last sufferings and her dying visions she had the supreme happiness of being surrounded by those who had devoted their lives to the same ideal as she.[35]

In her will her life shows itself that which we have seen it—a daily struggle for the defence of the Franciscan idea. We see how courageous and brave was this woman who has always been represented as frail, emaciated, blanched like a flower of the cloister.[36]

She defended Francis not only against others, but also against himself. In those hours of dark discouragement which so often and so profoundly disturb the noblest souls and sterilize the grandest efforts, she was beside him to show him his way. When he doubted his mission and thought of fleeing to the heights of repose and solitary prayer, it was she who showed him the ripening harvest with no reapers to gather it in, men going astray with no shepherd to lead them, and drew him once again into the train of the Galilean, into the number of those who give their lives a ransom for many.[37]

Yet this love with which at St. Damian Francis felt himself surrounded frightened him at times. He feared that his death, making too great a void, would imperil the institution itself, and he took pains to remind the sisters that he would not be always with them. One day when he was to preach to them, instead of entering the pulpit he caused some ashes to be brought, and after having spread them around him and scattered some on his head, he intoned the Miserere, thus reminding them that he was but dust and would soon return to dust.[38]

But in general it is at St. Damian that St. Francis is the most himself; it is under the shade of its olive-trees, with Clara caring for him, that he composes his finest work, that which Ernest Renan called the most perfect utterance of modern religious sentiment, the "Canticle of the Sun."

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Easy as it is to seize the large outlines of her life, it is with difficulty that one makes a detailed and documentary study of it. There is nothing surprising in this, for the Clarisses felt the rebound of the struggles which divided and rapidly transformed the Order of the Brothers Minor. The greater number of the documents have disappeared; we give summary indication of those which will most often be cited: 1. Life of St. Clara by an anonymous author. A. SS., Aug., t. ii., pp. 739-768. 2. Her Will, given by Wadding (Annales, 1253, No. 5), but which does not appear to be free from alteration. (Compare, for example, the opening of this will with Chapter VI. of the Rule of the Damianites approved by Innocent IV., August 8, 1253.) 3. The bull of canonization, given September 26, 1255—that is to say, two years after Clara's death; it is much longer than these documents ordinarily are, and relates the principal incidents of her life. A. SS., loc. cit., p. 749; Potthast, 16,025. 4. Her correspondence. Unhappily we have only fragments of it; the Bollandists, without saying whence they drew them, have inserted four of her letters in the Acta of St. Agnes of Bohemia, to whom they were addressed. (A. SS., Martii, t. i., pp. 506-508.)

[2] Reading the Chronicle of Fra Salimbeni, which represents the average Franciscan character about 1250, one sees with what reason the Rule had multiplied minute precautions for keeping the Brothers from all relations with women.

The desire of Celano to present the facts in the life of Francis as the norm of the acts of the friars appears still more in the chapters concerning St. Clara than in all the others. Vide 2 Cel., 3, 132: Non credatis, charissimi (dixit Franciscus), quodeas perfecte non diligam.... Sed exemplum do vobis, ut quemadmodum ego facio, ita et vos faciatis. Cf. ibid., 134.

[3] 2 Cel., 3, 55. Fateor veritatem ... nullam me si aspicerem recogniturum in facie nisi duas. This chapter and the two following give us a sort of caricature, in which Francis is represented as so little sure of himself that he casts down his eyes for fear of yielding to desire. The stories of Francis and Jacqueline of Settesoli give a very different picture of the relations between the Brothers and the women in the origin of the Order from that which was given later. Bernard de Besse (Turin MS., f^o. 113) relates at length the coming of Jacqueline to Portiuncula to be present at St. Francis's death. Cf. Spec., 107; 133; Bon., 112. Also Clara's repast at Portiuncula. Fior., 15; Spec., 139b.; A. SS. Aug. Vita Clar., No. 39 ff.

[4] Isaiah, lxiii., 8 and 9 (Segond's [French] translation). At the Mass on Holy Monday Isaiah lxiii. is read for the Epistle and Mark xiv. for the Gospel.

[5] San Paolo on the Chiasco, near Bastia.

[6] At the present day diocesan seminary of Assisi, "Seminarium seraphicum." In the thirteenth century the north gate of the city was there. The houses which lie between there and the Basilica form the new town, which is rapidly growing and will unite the city with Sacro Convento.

[7] Nam steteramus in alio loco, licet parum. Test. Clar. It is truly strange that there is not a word here for the house where the first days of her religious life were passed. Cf. Vit., no. 10: S. Angelus de Panse ... ubi cum non plene mens ejus quiesceret.

[8] Mittarelli, Annales Camaldulenses (Venice, 1755-1773, 9 vols., f^o.), t. iv., app. 431 and 435. Cf. 156.

[9] The act of donation is still in the archives of Assisi. An analysis of it will be found in Cristofani, t. i., p. 133. Their munificence remained without result; the bull Ab Ecclesia of July 27, 1232, shows that they were suppressed less than twenty years after. Sbaralea, t. 1, p. 81. Potthast, 8984. Cf., ib., p. 195, note c, and 340, note a, and the bulls which are there indicated.

[10] See p. 81, note ii.

[11] 1 Cel., 18; 21; 3 Soc., 24; 2 Cel., 1, 8.

[12] An. Perus., A. SS., p. 600. Cf. 3 Soc., 60. The three Orders are contemporary, one might even say, the four, including among them the one that miscarried among the secular priests (see below).

In a letter St. Clara speaks of her Order as making only a part with that of the Brothers: Sequaris consilia Reverendi Patris nostri fratris Eliae Ministri generalis totius ordinis. A. SS., Martii, t. i., p. 507.

[13] This point of view is brought into relief by an anecdote in the De laudibus of Bernard of Besse (Turin MS., 113a). This is how he ends chap. vii. on the three Orders: Nec Santus his contentus ordinibus satagebat omnium generi salutis et penitentiae viam dare. Unde parochiali cuidam sacerdoti dicenti sibi quod vellet suus, retenta tamen ecclesia. Frater esse, dato vivendi et induendi modo, dicitur indixisse ut annuatim, collectis Eclesiae fructibus daret pro Deo, quod de praeteritis superesset.

[14] See the lovely story in the Fior., 13. Cf. Spec., 65a; Conform., 168b. 1.

[15] The text of it was doubtless formerly inserted in chapter vi. of the Rule granted to the Clarisses of St. Damian, August 9, 1253, by the bull Solet annuere. Potthast, 15,086. But this chapter has been completely changed in many editions. The text of the Speculum, Morin, Rouen 1509, should be read. Tract iii., 226b. The critical study to be made upon this text by comparing the indications given by the bull Angelis guadium of May 11, 1238, Sbaralea, i., p. 242, is too long to find a place here.

[16] 2 Cel., 3, 132. Cf. Test. B. Clar.

[17] In illa gravi infirmitate ... faciebat se erigi ... et sedens filabat. A. SS., 760e. Sic vult eas [sorores] operare manibus suis. Ib. 762a.

[18] Fior. 33.

[19] Rule of 1221, chap xii. Et nulla penitus mulier ab aliquo frater recipiatur ad obedientiam, sed dato sibi consilio spirituali, ubi voluerit agat penitentiam. Cf. below, p. 252, note 1, the remainder of this chapter and the indication of the sources. This proves, 1, that the friars had received women into the Order; 2, that at the beginning they said The Order in the singular, and under this appellation included Sisters as well as Brothers. We see how far the situation was, even at the end of 1221, from being what it became a few years later. It is to be noted that in all the reforming sects of the commencement of the thirteenth century the two sexes were closely united. (Vide Burchardi chronicon, Pertz, 1, 23, p. 376. Cf. Potthast, 2611, bull Cum otim of Nov. 25, 1205.)

On the 7th of June, 1201 (bull Incunubit nobis), Innocent III. had approved the Rule of the Humiliants. This was a religious association whose members continued to live in their own homes, and who offer surprising points of contact with the Franciscan Order, though they took no vow of poverty. From them issued a more restricted association which founded convents where they worked in wool; these convents received both men and women. Vide Jacques de Vitry, Hist. Occidentalis, cap. 28. De religione et regula Humiliatorum (Douai, 1597, pp. 334-337). The time came when from these two Orders issued a third, composed solely of priests. These Humiliati are too little known, though they have had a historian whose book is one of the noble works of the eighteenth century: Tiraboschi, Vetera Humiliatorum monumenta (Milan, 3 vols., 4to, 1766-1768). Toward 1200 they had monopolized l'arte della lana in all upper Italy as far as to Florence; it is evident, therefore, that Francis's father must have had relations with them.

[20] The bull approving the Rule of St. Damian is of August 9, 1253. Clara died two days later.

[21] 1 Cel., 122. Cf. Potthast, 8194 ff.; cf. ib., 709.

[22] A. SS., Vita Cl., p. 758. Cf. bull of canonization.

[23] Vit. S. Clar., A. SS., p. 758. This petition was surely made by the medium of Francis; and there are several indications of his presence in Perugia in the latter part of the life of Innocent III. In obitu suo [Alexandri papae] omnes familiares sui deseruerunt eum praeter fratres Minores. Et similiter Papam Gregorium et Honorium et Innocentium in cujus obitu fuit praesentialiter S. Franciscus. Eccl. xv. Mon. Germ. hist. Script., t. 28 p. 568. Sbaralea puts forth doubts as to the authenticity of this privilege, the text of which he gives; wrongly, I think, for Clara alludes to it in her will, A. SS., p. 747.

[24] He was born about 1147, created cardinal in 1198. Vide Raynald, ann., 1217, Sec. 88, the eulogy made upon him by Honorius III. Forma decorus et venustus aspectu ... zelator fidei, disciplina virtutis, ... castitatis amator et totius sanctitatis exemplar: Muratori, Scriptores rer. Ital., iii., 1, 575.

[25] 1 Cel., 74.

[26] The bull Litterae tuae of August 27, 1218, shows him already favoring the Clarisses. Sbaralea, i., p. 1. Vide 3 Soc., 61. Offero me ipsum, dixit Hugolinus, vobis, auxilium et consilium, atque protectionem paratus impendere.

[27] In the Conformities, 107a, 2, there is a curious story which shows Ugolini going to the Carceri to find Francis, and asking him if he ought to enter his Order. Cf. Spec., 217.

[28] He succeeded so well that Thomas of Celano himself seems to forget that, at least at St. Damian, the Clarisses followed the Rule given by St. Francis himself: Ipsorum vita mirifica et institutio gloriosa a domino Papa Gregorio, tunc Hostiensi episcopo. 1 Cel. 20. Cf. Honorii Opera Horoy, t. iii., col. 363; t. iv., col. 218; Potthast, 6179 and 6879 ff.

[29] This privilege is inserted in the bull Sacrosancta of December 9, 1219. Honorii opera, Horoy, t. iii., col. 363 ff.

[30] G. Levi, Registri dei Cardinali, no. 125. Vide below, p. 400. Cf. Campi, Hist. eccl. di Piacenza, ii., 390.

[31] See, for example, the letter given by Wadding: Annals, ii., p. 16 (Rome, 1732). Tanta me amaritudo cordis, abundantia lacrymarum et immanitas doloris invasit, quod nisi ad pedes Jesu, consolationem solitae pietatis invenirem, spiritus meus forte deficeret et penitus anima liquefieret. Wadding's text should be corrected by that of the Riccardi MS., 279. f^o 80a and b. Cf. Mark of Lisbon, t. i., p. 185; Sbaralea, i., p. 37.

[32] Bull Angelis gaudium of May 11, 1238; it may be found in Sbaralea, i., p. 242. Cf. Palacky, Literarische Reise nach Italien, Prague, 1838, 4to, no. 147. Potthast, 10,596; cf. 11,175.

[33] A. SS., Vit. Clar., p. 762. Cf. Conform., 84b, 2.

[34] A. SS., Aprilis, t. iii., p. 239a; Conform., 54a, 1; 177a, 2.

[35] A. SS., Vit. Clar., p. 764d.

[36] The bull of canonization says nothing of the Saracens whom she put to flight. Her life in the A. SS. relates the fact, but shows her simply in prayer before the Holy Sacrament. Cf. Conform., 84b, 1. Mark of Lisbon t. i., part 2, pp. 179-181. None of these accounts represents Clara as going to meet them with a monstrance.

[37] Bon., 173; Fior. 16; Spec., 62b; Conform., 84b, 2; 110b 1; 49a, 1. With these should be compared Spec., 220b: Frater Leo narravit quod Sanctus Franciscus surgens orare (sic) venit ad fratres suos dicens: "Ite ad saeculum et dimittatis habitum, licentio vos."

[38] 2 Cel., 3, 134.

* * * * *



CHAPTER X

FIRST ATTEMPTS TO REACH THE INFIDELS

Autumn, 1212-Summer, 1215

The early Brothers Minor had too much need of the encouragement and example of Francis not to have very early agreed with him upon certain fixed periods when they would be sure to find him at Portiuncula. Still it appears probable that these meetings did not become true Chapters-General until toward 1216. There were at first two a year, one at Whitsunday, the other at Michaelmas (September 29th). Those of Whitsunday were the most important; all the Brothers came together to gain new strength in the society of Francis, to draw generous ardor and grand hopes from him with his counsels and directions.

The members of the young association had everything in common, their joys as well as their sorrows; their uncertainties as well as the results of their experiences. At these meetings they were particularly occupied with the Rule, the changes that needed to be made in it, and above all, how they might better and better observe it;[1] then, in perfect harmony, they settled the allotment of the friars to the various provinces.

One of Francis's most frequent counsels bore upon the respect due to the clergy; he begged his disciples to show a very particular deference to the priests, and never to meet them without kissing their hands. He saw only too well that the Brothers, having renounced everything, were in danger of being unjust or severe toward the rich and powerful of the earth; he, therefore, sought to arm them against this tendency, often concluding his counsels with these noble words: "There are men who to-day appear to us to be members of the devil who one day shall be members of Christ."

"Our life in the midst of the world," said he again, "ought to be such that, on hearing or seeing us, every one shall feel constrained to praise our heavenly Father. You proclaim peace; have it in your hearts. Be not an occasion of wrath or scandal to anyone, but by your gentleness may all be led to peace, concord, and good works."

It was especially when he undertook to cheer his disciples, to fortify them against temptations and deliver them from their power, that Francis was most successful. However anxious a soul might be, his words brought it back to serenity. The earnestness which he showed in calming sadness became fiery and terrible in reproving those who fell away, but in these days of early fervor he seldom had occasion to show severity; more often he needed gently to reprove the Brothers whose piety led them to exaggerate penances and macerations.

When all was finished and each one had had his part in this banquet of love, Francis would bless them, and they would disperse in all directions like strangers and travellers. They had nothing, but already they thought they saw the signs of the grand and final regeneration. Like the exile on Patmos they saw "the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, like a bride adorned for her husband ... and the throne upon which is seated the Desired of all nations, the Messiah of the new times, he who is to make all things new."[2]

Yet all eyes were turned toward Syria, where a French knight, Jean de Brienne, had just been declared King of Jerusalem (1210), and toward which were hastening the bands of the children's crusade.

The conversion of Francis, radical as it was, giving a new direction to his thoughts and will, had not had power to change the foundation of his character. "In a great heart everything is great." In vain is one changed at conversion—he remains the same. That which changes is not he who is converted, but his surroundings; he is suddenly introduced into a new path, but he runs in it with the same ardor. Francis still remained a knight, and it is perhaps this which won for him in so high a degree the worship of the finest souls of the Middle Ages. There was in him that longing for the unknown, that thirst for adventures and sacrifices, which makes the history of his century so grand and so attractive, in spite of many dark features.

Those who have a genius for religion have generally the privilege of illusion. They never quite see how large the world is. When their faith has moved a mountain they thrill with rapture, like the old Hebrew prophets, and it seems to them that they see the dawning of the day "when the glory of the Lord will appear, when the wolf and the lamb will feed together." Blessed illusion, that fires the blood like a generous wine, so that the soldiers of righteousness hurl themselves against the most terrific fortresses, believing that these once taken the war will be ended.

Francis had found such joys in his union with poverty that he held it for proven that one needed only to be a man to aspire after the same happiness, and that the Saracens would be converted in crowds to the gospel of Jesus, if only it were announced to them in all its simplicity. He therefore quitted Portiuncula for this new kind of crusade. It is not known from what port he embarked. It was probably in the autumn of 1212. A tempest having cast the ship upon the coast of Slavonia, he was obliged to resign himself either to remain several months in those parts or to return to Italy; he decided to return, but found much difficulty in securing a passage on a ship which was about to sail for Ancona. He had no ill-will against the sailors, however, and the stock of food falling short he shared with them the provisions with which his friends had overloaded him.

No sooner had he landed than he set out on a preaching tour, in which souls responded to his appeals[3] with even more eagerness than in times past. We may suppose that he returned from Slavonia in the winter of 1212-1213, and that he employed the following spring in evangelizing Central Italy. It was perhaps during this Lent that he retired to an island in Lake Trasimeno, making a sojourn there which afterward became famous in his legend.[4] However that may be, a perfectly reliable document shows him to have been in the Romagna in the month of May, 1213.[5] One day Francis and his companion, perhaps Brother Leo, arrived at the chateau of Montefeltro,[6] between Macerata and San Marino. A grand fete was being given for the reception of a new knight, but the noise and singing did not affright them, and without hesitation they entered the court, where all the nobility of the country was assembled. Francis then taking for his text the two lines,

Tanto e il bene ch' aspetto Ch'ogni pena m'e diletto,[7]

preached so touching a sermon that several of those present forgot for a moment the tourney for which they had come. One of them, Orlando dei Cattani, Count of Chiusi in Casentino, was so much moved that, drawing Francis aside, "Father," he said to him, "I desire much to converse with you about the salvation of my soul." "Very willingly," replied Francis; "but go for this morning, do honor to those friends who have invited you, eat with them, and after that we will converse as much as you please."

So it was done. The count came back and concluded the interview by saying, "I have in Tuscany a mountain especially favorable to contemplation; it is entirely isolated and would well suit anyone who desired to do penance far from the noises of the world; if it pleased you I would willingly give it to you and your brethren for the salvation of my soul."

Francis accepted it joyfully, but as he was obliged to be at Portiuncula for the Whitsunday chapter he postponed the visit to the Verna[8] to a more favorable time.

It was perhaps in this circuit that he went to Imola; at least nothing forbids the supposition. Always courteous, he had gone immediately on his arrival to present himself to the bishop, and ask of him authority to preach. "I am not in need of anyone to aid me in my task," replied the bishop dryly. Francis bowed and retired, more polite and even more gentle than usual. But in less than hour he had returned. "What is it, brother, what do you want of me again?" "Monsignor," replied Francis, "when a father drives his son out at the door he returns by the window."

The bishop, disarmed by such pious persistence, gave the desired authorization.[9]

The aim of Francis at that time, however, was not to evangelize Italy; his friars were already scattered over it in great numbers; and he desired rather to gain them access to new countries.

Not having been able to reach the infidels in Syria, he resolved to seek them in Morocco. Some little time before (July, 1212), the troops of the Almohades had met an irreparable defeat in the plains of Tolosa; beaten by the coalition of the Kings of Aragon, Navarre, and Castile, Mohammed-el-Naser had returned to Morocco to die. Francis felt that this victory of arms would be nothing if it were not followed by a peaceful victory of the gospel spirit.

He was so full of his project, so much in haste to arrive at the end of his journey, that very often he would forget his companion, and hastening forward would leave him far behind. The biographers are unfortunately most laconic with regard to this expedition; they merely say that on arriving in Spain he was so seriously ill that a return home was imperative. Beyond a few local legends, not very well attested, we possess no other information upon the labors of the Saint in this country, nor upon the route which he followed either in going or returning.[10]

This silence is not at all surprising, and ought not to make us undervalue the importance of this mission. The one to Egypt, which took place six years later, with a whole train of friars, and at a time when the Order was much more developed, is mentioned only in a few lines by Thomas of Celano; but for the recent discovery of the Chronicle of Brother Giordano di Giano and the copious details given by Jacques de Vitry, we should be reduced to conjectures upon that journey also. The Spanish legends, to which allusion has just been made, cannot be altogether without foundation, any more than those which concern the journey of St. Francis through Languedoc and Piedmont; but in the actual condition of the sources it is impossible to make a choice, with any sort of authority, between the historic basis and additions to it wholly without value.

The mission in Spain doubtless took place between the Whitsunday of 1214 and that of 1215.[11] Francis, I think, had passed the previous year[12] in Italy. Perhaps he was then going to see the Verna. The March of Ancona and the Valley of Rieti would naturally have attracted him equally about this epoch, and finally the growth of the two branches of the Order must have made necessary his presence at Portiuncula and St. Damian. The rapidity and importance of these missions ought in no sense to give surprise, nor awaken exaggerated critical doubts. It took only a few hours to become a member of the fraternity, and we may not doubt the sincerity of these vocations, since their condition was the immediate giving up of all property of whatever kind, for the benefit of the poor. The new friars were barely received when they in their turn began to receive others, often becoming the heads of the movement in whatever place they happened to be. The way in which we see things going on in Germany in 1221, and in England in 1224, gives a very living picture of this spiritual germination.

To found a monastery it was enough that two or three Brothers should have at their disposition some sort of a shelter, whence they radiated out into the city and the neighboring country. It would, therefore, be as much an exaggeration to describe St. Francis as a man who passed his life in founding convents, as to deny altogether the local traditions which attribute to him the erection of a hundred monasteries. In many cases a glance is enough to show whether these claims of antiquity are justified; before 1220 the Order had only hermitages after the pattern of the Verna or the Carceri, solely intended for the Brothers who desired to pass some time in retreat.

Returned to Assisi, Francis admitted to the Order a certain number of learned men, among whom was perhaps Thomas of Celano. The latter, in fact, says that God at that time mercifully remembered him, and he adds further on: "The blessed Francis was of an exquisite nobility of heart and full of discernment; with the greatest care he rendered to each one what was due him, with wisdom considering in each case the degree of their dignities."

This does not harmonize very well with the character of Francis as we have sketched it; one can hardly imagine him preserving in his Order such profound distinctions as were at that time made between the different social ranks, but he had that true and eternal politeness which has its roots in the heart, and which is only an expression of tact and love. It could not be otherwise with a man who saw in courtesy one of the qualities of God.

We are approaching one of the most obscure periods of his life. After the chapter of 1215 he seems to have passed through one of those crises of discouragement so frequent with those who long to realize the ideal in this world. Had he discovered the warning signs of the misfortunes which were to come upon his family? Had he come to see that the necessities of life were to sully and blight his dream? Had he seen in the check of his missions in Syria and Morocco a providential indication that he had to change his method? We do not know. But about this time he felt the need of turning to St. Clara and Brother Silvestro for counsel on the subject of the doubts and hesitations which assailed him; their reply restored to him peace and joy. God by their mouth commanded him to continue his apostolate.[13]

Immediately he rose and set forth in the direction of Bevagna,[14] with an ardor which he had never yet shown. In encouraging him to persevere Clara had in some sort inoculated him with a new enthusiasm. One word from her had sufficed to give him back all his courage, and from this point in his life we find in him more poetry, more love, than ever before.

Full of joy, he was going on his way when, perceiving some flocks of birds, he turned aside a little from the road to go to them. Far from taking flight, they flocked around him as if to bid him welcome. "Brother birds," he said to them then, "you ought to praise and love your Creator very much. He has given you feathers for clothing, wings for flying, and all that is needful for you. He has made you the noblest of his creatures; he permits you to live in the pure air; you have neither to sow nor to reap, and yet he takes care of you, watches over you and guides you." Then the birds began to arch their necks, to spread out their wings, to open their beaks, to look at him, as if to thank him, while he went up and down in their midst stroking them with the border of his tunic, sending them away at last with his blessing.[15]

In this same evangelizing tour, passing through Alviano,[16] he spoke a few exhortations to the people, but the swallows so filled the air with their chirping that he could not make himself heard. "It is my turn to speak," he said to them; "little sister swallows, hearken to the word of God; keep silent and be very quiet until I have finished."[17]

We see how Francis's love extended to all creation, how the diffused life shed abroad upon all things inspired and moved him. From the sun to the earthworm which we trample under foot, everything breathed in his ear the ineffable sigh of beings that live and suffer and die, and in their life as in their death have a part in the divine work.

"Praised be thou, Lord, with all thy creatures, especially for my brother Sun which gives us the day and by him thou showest thy light. He is beautiful and radiant with great splendor; of thee, Most High, he is the symbol."

Here again, Francis revives the Hebrew inspiration, the simple and grandiose view of the prophets of Israel. "Praise the Lord!" the royal Psalmist had sung, "praise the Lord, fire and frost, snow and mists, stormy winds that do his will, mountains and all hills, fruit-trees and all cedars, beasts and all cattle, creeping things and fowls with wings, kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all judges of the earth, young men and maidens, old men and children, praise the Lord, praise ye the Lord!"

The day of the birds of Bevagna remained in his memory as one of the most beautiful of his whole life, and though usually so reserved he always loved to tell of it;[18] it was because he owed to Clara these pure ardors which brought him into a secret and delicious communion with all beings; it was she who had revived him from sadness and hesitation; in his heart he bore an immense gratitude to her who, just when he needed it, had known how to return to him love for love, inspiration for inspiration.

Francis's sympathy for animals, as we see it shining forth here, has none of that sentimentalism, so often artificial and exclusive of all other love, which certain associations of his time noisily displayed; in him it is only a manifestation of his feeling for nature, a deeply mystical, one might say pantheistic, sentiment, if the word had not a too definitely philosophical sense, quite opposite to the Franciscan thought.

This sentiment, which in the poets of the thirteenth century is so often false and affected, was in him not only true, but had in it something alive, healthy, robust.[19] It is this vein of poetry which awoke Italy to self-consciousness, made her in a few years forget the nightmare of Catharist ideas, and rescued her from pessimism. By it Francis became the forerunner of the artistic movement which preceded the Renaissance, the inspirer of that group of Pre-Raphaelites, awkward, grotesque in drawing though at times they were, to whom we turn to-day with a sort of piety, finding in their ungraceful saints an inner life, a moral feeling which we seek for elsewhere in vain.

If the voice of the Poverello of Assisi was so well understood it was because in this matter, as in all others, it was entirely unconventional. How far we are, with him, from the fierce or Pharisaic piety of those monks which forbids even the females of animals to enter their convent! His notion of chastity in no sense resembles this excessive prudery. One day at Sienna he asked for some turtle-doves, and holding them in the skirt of his tunic, he said: "Little sisters turtle-doves, you are simple, innocent, and chaste; why did you let yourselves be caught? I shall save you from death, and have nests made for you, so that you may bring forth young and multiply according to the commandment of our Creator."

And he went and made nests for them all, and the turtle-doves began to lay eggs and bring up their broods under the eyes of the Brothers.[20]

At Rieti a family of red-breasts were the guests of the monastery, and the young birds made marauding expeditions on the very table where the Brothers were eating.[21] Not far from there, at Greccio,[22] they brought to Francis a leveret that had been taken alive in a trap. "Come to me, brother leveret," he said to it. And as the poor creature, being set free, ran to him for refuge, he took it up, caressed it, and finally put it on the ground that it might run away; but it returned to him again and again, so that he was obliged to send it to the neighboring forest before it would consent to return to freedom.[23]

One day he was crossing the Lake of Rieti. The boatman in whose bark he was making the passage offered him a tench of uncommon size. Francis accepted it with joy, but to the great amazement of the fisherman put it back into the water, bidding it bless God.[24]

We should never have done if we were to relate all the incidents of this kind,[25] for the sentiment of nature was innate with him; it was a perpetual communion which made him love the whole creation.[26] He is ravished with the witchery of great forests; he has the terrors of a child when he is alone at prayer in a deserted chapel, but he tastes ineffable joy merely in inhaling the perfume of a flower, or gazing into the limpid water of a brook.[27]

This perfect lover of poverty permitted one luxury—he even commanded it at Portiuncula—that of flowers; the Brother was bidden not to sow vegetables and useful plants only; he must reserve one corner of good ground for our sisters, the flowers of the fields. Francis talked with them also, or rather he replied to them, for their mysterious and gentle language crept into the very depth of his heart.[28]

The thirteenth century was prepared to understand the voice of the Umbrian poet; the sermon to the birds[29] closed the reign of Byzantine art and of the thought of which it was the image. It is the end of dogmatism and authority; it is the coming in of individualism and inspiration; very uncertain, no doubt, and to be followed by obstinate reactions, but none the less marking a date in the history of the human conscience.[30] Many among the companions of Francis were too much the children of their century, too thoroughly imbued with its theological and metaphysical methods, to quite understand a sentiment so simple and profound.[31] But each in his degree felt its charm. Here Thomas of Celano's language rises to an elevation which we find in no other part of his works, closing with a picture of Francis which makes one think of the Song of Songs.[32]

Of more than middle height, Francis had a delicate and kindly face, black eyes, a soft and sonorous voice. There was in his whole person a delicacy and grace which made him infinitely lovely. All these characteristics are found in the most ancient portraits.[33]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] 3 Soc., 57; cf. An. Perus., A. SS., p. 599.

[2] Rev. xxi.; 1 Cel., 46; 3 Soc., 57-59; An. Perus., A. SS., p. 600.

[3] 1 Cel., 55 and 56; Bon., 129-132.

[4] Fior., 7; Spec., 96; Conform., 223a, 2. The fact of Francis's sojourn on an island in this lake is made certain by 1 Cel., 60.

[5] Vide below, p. 400. Cf. A. SS., pp. 823 f.

[6] At present Sasso-Feltrio, between Conca and Marecchio, south of and about two hours' walk from San Marino.

[7] The happiness that I expect is so great that all pain is joyful to me. All the documents give Francis's text in Italian, which is enough to prove that it was the language not only of his poems but also of his sermons. Spec. 92a ff. Conform. 113a, 2; 231a, 1; Fior., Prima consid.

[8] See p. 400.

[9] 2 Cel., 3, 85; Bon., 82.

[10] 1 Cel., 56; Bon., 132.

[11] Vide Wadding, ann. 1213-1215. Cf. A. SS., pp. 602, 603, 825-831. Mark of Lisbon, lib. i., cap. 45, pp. 78-80; Papini, Storia di S. Francesco, i., p. 79 ff. (Foligno, 1825, 2 vols., 4to). It is surprising to see Father Suysken giving so much weight to the argumentum a silentio.

[12] From Pentecost, 1213, to that of 1214.—Post non multum vero temporis versus Marochium iter arripuit, says Thomas of Celano (1 Cel., 56), after having mentioned the return from Slavonia. Taking into account the author's usus loquendi the phrase appears to establish a certain interval between the two missions.

[13] Conform., 110b, 1; Spec., 62b; Fior., 16; Bon., 170-174.

[14] Village about two leagues S. W. from Assisi. The time is indirectly fixed by Bon., 173, and 1 Cel., 58.

[15] 1 Cel. 58; Bon., 109 and 174; Fior., 16; Spec., 62b; Conform., 114b, 2.

[16] About halfway between Orvieto and Narni.

[17] 1 Cel., 59; Bon., 175.

[18] Ad haec, ut ipse dicebat ... 1 Cel., 58.

[19] Francis has been compared in this regard to certain of his contemporaries, but the similarity of the words only makes more evident the diversity of inspiration. Honorius III. may say: Forma rosae est inferius angusta, superius ampla et significat quod Christus pauper fuit in mundo, sed est Dominus super omnia et implet universa. Nam sicut forma rosae, etc. (Horoy, t. i., col. xxiv. and 804), and make a whole sermon on the symbolism of the rose; these overstrained dissertations have nothing to do with the feeling for nature. It is the arsenal of mediaeval rhetoric used to dissect a word. It is an intellectual effort, not a song of love. The Imitation would say: If thy heart were right all creatures would be for thee a mirror of life and a volume of holy doctrine, lib. ii., cap. 2. The simple sentiment of the beauty of creation is absent here also; the passage is a pedagogue in disguise.

[20] Spec., 157. Fior.; 22.

[21] 2 Cel., 2, 16; Conform., 148a, 1, 183b, 2. Cf. the story of the sheep of Portiuncula: Bon., 111.

[22] Village in the valley of Rieti, two hours' walk from that town, on the road to Terni.

[23] 1 Cel., 60; Bon., 113.

[24] 1 Cel., 61; Bon., 114.

[25] 2 Cel., 3, 54; Bon., 109; 2 Cel., 3; 103 ff.; Bon., 116 ff.; Bon., 110; 1 Cel., 61; Bon., 114, 113, 115; 1 Cel., 79; Fior., 13, etc.

[26] 2 Cel., 3, 101 ff.; Bon., 123.

[27] 2 Cel., 3, 59; 1 Cel., 80 and 81.

[28] 2 Cel., 3, 101; Spec., 136a; 1 Cel., 81.

[29] This is the scene in his life most often reproduced by the predecessors of Giotto. The unknown artist who (before 1236) decorated the nave of the Lower Church of Assisi gives five frescos to the history of Jesus and five to the life of St. Francis. Upon the latter he represents: 1, the renunciation of the paternal inheritance; 2, Francis upholding the Lateran church; 3, the sermon to the birds; 4, the stigmata; 5, the funeral. This work, unhappily very badly lighted, and about half of it destroyed at the time of the construction of the chapels of the nave, ought to be engraved before it completely disappears. The history of art in the time of Giunta Pisano is still too much enveloped in obscurity for us to neglect such a source of information. M. Thode (Franz von Assisi und die Anfaenge der Kunst, Berlin, 1885, 8vo. illust.) and the Rev. Father Fratini (Storia della Basilica d'Assisi, Prato, 1882, 8vo) are much too brief so far as these frescos are concerned.

[30] It is needless to say that I do not claim that Francis was the only initiator of this movement, still less that he was its creator; he was its most inspired singer, and that may suffice for his glory. If Italy was awakened it was because her sleep was not so sound as in the tenth century; the mosaics of the facade of the Cathedral of Spoleto (the Christ between the Virgin and St. John) already belong to the new art. Still, the victory was so little final that the mural paintings of St. Lawrence without the walls and of the Quattro Coronate, which are subsequent to it by half a score of years, relapse into a coarse Byzantinism. See also those of the Baptistery of Florence.

[31] Hence the more or less subtile explanations with which they adorn these incidents.—As to the part of animals in thirteenth century legends consult Caesar von Heisterbach, Strange's edition, t. ii., pp. 257 ff.

[32] 1 Cel., 80-83.

[33] 1 Cel., 83; Conform., 111a. M. Thode (Anfaenge, pp. 76-94) makes a study of some thirty portraits. The most important are reproduced in Saint Francois (1 vol., 4to, Paris, 1885); 1, contemporary portrait, by Brother Eudes, now at Subiaco (loc. cit., p. 30); 2, portrait dating about 1230, by Giunta Pisano (?); preserved at Portiuncula (loc. cit., p. 384); 3, finally, portrait dated 1235, by Bon. Berlinghieri, and preserved at Pescia, in Tuscany (loc. cit., p. 277). In 1886 Prof. Carattoli studied with great care a portrait which dates from about those years and of which he gives a picture (also preserved of late years at Portiuncula). Miscellanea francescana t. i., pp. 44-48; cf. pp. 160, 190, and 1887, p. 32. M. Bonghi has written some interesting papers on the iconography of St. Francis (Francesco di Assisi, 1 vol., 12mo, Citta di Castello, Lapi, 1884. Vide pp. 103-113).

* * * * *



CHAPTER XI

THE INNER MAN AND WONDER-WORKING

The missionary journey, undertaken under the encouragement of St. Clara and so poetically inaugurated by the sermon to the birds of Bevagna, appears to have been a continual triumph for Francis.[1] Legend definitively takes possession of him; whether he will or no, miracles burst forth under his footsteps; quite unawares to himself the objects of which he has made use produce marvellous effects; folk come out from the villages in procession to meet him, and the biographer gives us to hear the echo of those religious festivals of Italy—merry, popular, noisy, bathed in sunshine—which so little resemble the fastidiously arranged festivals of northern peoples.

From Alviano Francis doubtless went to Narni, one of the most charming little towns in Umbria, busy with building a cathedral after the conquest of their communal liberties. He seems to have had a sort of predilection for this city as well as for its surrounding villages.[2] From thence he seems to have plunged into the valley of Rieti, where Greccio, Fonte-Colombo, San Fabiano, Sant-Eleuthero, Poggio-Buscone retain even stronger traces of him than the environs of Assisi.

Thomas of Celano gives us no particulars of the route followed, but, on the other hand, he goes at length into the success of the apostle in the March of Ancona, and especially at Ascoli. Did the people of these districts still remember the appeals which Francis and Egidio had made to them six years before (1209), or must we believe that they were peculiarly prepared to understand the new gospel? However this may be, nowhere else was a like enthusiasm shown; the effect of the sermons was so great that some thirty neophytes at once received the habit of the Order.

The March of Ancona ought to be held to be the Franciscan province par excellence. There are Offida, San-Severino, Macerata, Fornaro, Cingoli, Fermo, Massa, and twenty other hermitages where, during more than a century, poverty was to find its heralds and its martyrs; from thence came Giovanni della Verna, Jacopo di Massa, Conrad di Offida, Angelo Clareno, and those legions of nameless revolutionists, dreamers, and prophets, who since the extirpes in 1244 by the general of the Order, Crescentius of Jesi, never ceased to make new recruits, and by their proud resistance to all powers filled one of the finest pages of religious history in the Middle Ages.

This success, which bathed the soul of Francis with joy, did not arouse in him the smallest movement of pride. Never has man had a greater power over hearts, because never preacher preached himself less. One day Brother Masseo desired to put his modesty to the test.

"Why thee? Why thee? Why thee?" he repeated again and again, as if to make a mock of Francis. "What are you saying?" cried Francis at last. "I am saying that everybody follows thee, everyone desires to see thee, hear thee, and obey thee, and yet for all that thou art neither beautiful, nor learned, nor of noble family. Whence comes it, then, that it should be thee whom the world desires to follow?"

On hearing these words the blessed Francis, full of joy, raised his eyes to heaven, and after remaining a long time absorbed in contemplation he knelt, praising and blessing God with extraordinary fervor. Then turning toward Masseo, "Thou wishest to know why it is I whom men follow? Thou wishest to know? It is because the eyes of the Most High have willed it thus; he continually watches the good and the wicked, and as his most holy eyes have not found among sinners any smaller man, nor any more insufficient and more sinful, therefore he has chosen me to accomplish the marvellous work which God has undertaken; he chose me because he could find no one more worthless, and he wished here to confound the nobility and grandeur, the strength, the beauty, and the learning of this world."

This reply throws a ray of light upon St. Francis's heart; the message which he brought to the world is once again the glad tidings announced to the poor; its purpose is the taking up again of that Messianic work which the Virgin of Nazareth caught a glimpse of in her Magnificat, that song of love and liberty, the sighs of which breathe the vision of a new social state. He comes to remind the world that the welfare of man, the peace of his heart, the joy of his life, are neither in money, nor in learning, nor in strength, but in an upright and sincere will. Peace to men of good will.

The part which he had taken at Assisi in the controversies of his fellow-citizens he would willingly have taken in all the rest of Italy, for no man has ever dreamed of a more complete renovation; but if the end he sought was the same as that of many revolutionaries who came after him, their methods were completely different; his only weapon was love.

The event has decided against him. Apart from the illuminati of the March of Ancona and the Fraticelli of our own Provence his disciples have vied with one another to misunderstand his thought.[3]

Who knows if some one will not arise to take up his work? Has not the passion for worm-eaten speculations yet made victims enough? Are there not many among us who perceive that luxury is a delusion, that if life is a battle, it is not a slaughter-house where ferocious beasts wrangle over their prey, but a wrestling with the divine, under whatever form it may present itself—truth, beauty, or love? Who knows whether this expiring nineteenth century will not arise from its winding-sheet to make amende honorable and bequeath to its successor one manly word of faith?

Yes, the Messiah will come. He who was announced by Gioacchino di Fiore and who is to inaugurate a new epoch in the history of humanity will appear. Hope maketh not ashamed. In our modern Babylons and in the huts on our mountains are too many souls who mysteriously sigh the hymn of the great vigil, Rorate coeli desuper et nubes pluant Justum,[4] for us not to be on the eve of a divine birth.

All origins are mysterious. This is true of matter, but yet more true of that life, superior to all others, which we call holiness; it was in prayer that Francis found the spiritual strength which he needed; he therefore sought for silence and solitude. If he knew how to do battle in the midst of men in order to win them to the faith, he loved, as Celano says, to fly away like a bird going to make its nest upon the mountain.[5]

With men truly pious the prayer of the lips, the formulated prayer, is hardly other than an inferior form of true prayer. Even when it is sincere and attentive, and not a mechanical repetition, it is only a prelude for souls not dead of religious materialism.

Nothing resembles piety so much as love. Formularies of prayer are as incapable of speaking the emotions of the soul as model love-letters of speaking the transports of an impassioned heart. To true piety as well as to profound love, the formula is a sort of profanation.

To pray is to talk with God, to lift ourselves up to him, to converse with him that he may come down to us. It is an act of meditation, of reflection, which presupposes the effort of all that is most personal in us.

Looked at in this sense, prayer is the mother of all liberty and all freedom.

Whether or no it be a soliloquy of the soul with itself, the soliloquy would be none the less the very foundation of a strong individuality.

With St. Francis as with Jesus, prayer has this character of effort which makes of it the greatest moral act. In order to truly know such men one must have been able to go with them, to follow Jesus up to the mountain where he passed his nights. Three favored ones, Peter, James, John, followed him thither one day; but to describe what they saw, all that a manly sursum corda added to the radiance and the mysterious grandeur of him whom they adored, they were obliged to resort to the language of symbols.

It was so with St. Francis. For him as for his Master the end of prayer is communion with the heavenly Father, the accord of the divine with the human; or rather it is man who puts forth his strength to do the work of God, not saying to him a mere passive, resigned, powerless Fiat, but courageously raising his head: "Behold me, Lord, I delight to do thy will."

"There are unfathomable depths in the human soul, because at the bottom is God himself." Whether this God be transcendent or immanent, whether he be One, the Creator, the eternal and immutable Principle, or whether he be, as say the doctors beyond the Rhine, the ideal objectivation of our Me, is not the question for the heroes of humanity. The soldier in the thick of battle does not philosophize as to how much truth or falsehood there is in the patriotic sentiment; he takes his arms and fights at the peril of his life. So the soldiers of spiritual conflicts seek for strength in prayer, in reflection, contemplation, inspiration; all, poets, artists, teachers, saints, legislators, prophets, leaders of the people, learned men, philosophers, all draw from this same source.

But it is not without difficulty that the soul unites itself to God, or if one prefers, that it finds itself. A prayer ends at last in divine communion only when it began by a struggle. The patriarch of Israel, asleep near Bethel, had already divined this: the God who passes by tells his name only to those who stop him and do him violence to learn it. He blesses only after long hours of conflict.

The gospel has found an untranslatable word to characterize the prayers of Jesus, it compares the conflict which preceded the voluntary immolation of Christ to the death-struggle: Factus in agonia.[6] We might say of his life that it had been a long temptation, a struggle, a prayer, since these words only express different moments of spiritual activity.

Like their Master, the disciples and successors of Christ can conquer their own souls only through perseverance. But these words, empty of meaning for devout conventicles, have had a tragic sense for men of religious genius.

Nothing is more false, historically, than the saints that adorn our churches, with their mincing attitude, their piteous expression, that indescribably anaemic and emaciated—one may almost say emasculated—air which shows in their whole nature; they are pious seminarists brought up under the direction of St. Alphonso di Liguori or of St. Louis di Gonzagua; they are not saints, not the violent who take the kingdom of heaven by force.

We have come to one of the most delicate features of the life of Francis—his relations with diabolical powers. Customs and ideas have so profoundly changed in all that concerns the existence of the devil and his relations with men, that it is almost impossible to picture to oneself the enormous place which the thought of demons occupied at that time in the minds of men.

The best minds of the Middle Ages believed without a doubt in the existence of the perverse spirit, in his perpetual transformations in the endeavor to tempt men and cause them to fall into his snares. Even in the sixteenth century, Luther, who undermined so many beliefs, had no more doubt of the personal existence of Satan than of sorcery, conjurations, or possessions.[7]

Finding in their souls a wide background of grandeur and wretchedness, whence they sometimes heard a burst of distant harmonies calling them to a higher life, soon to be overpowered by the clamors of the brute, our ancestors could not refrain from seeking the explanation of this duel. They found it in the conflict of the demons with God.

The devil is the prince of the demons, as God is the prince of the angels; capable of all transformations, they carry on to the end of time terrible battles which will end in the victory of God, but meantime each man his whole life long is contended for by these two adversaries, and the noblest souls are naturally the most disputed.

This is how St. Francis, with all men of his time, explained the disquietudes, terrors, anguish, with which his heart was at times assailed, as well as the hopes, consolations, joys in which in general his soul was bathed. Wherever we follow his steps local tradition has preserved the memory of rude assaults of the tempter which he had to undergo.

It is no doubt useless to recall here the elementary fact that if manners change with the times, man himself is quite as strangely modified. If, according to education, and the manner of life, such or such a sense may develop an acuteness which confounds common experience—hearing in the musician, touch with the blind, etc.—we may estimate by this how much sharper certain senses may have been then than now. Several centuries ago visual delusion was with adults what it is now with children in remotest country parts. A quivering leaf, a nothing, a breath, an unexplained sound creates an image which they see and in the reality of which they believe absolutely. Man is all of a piece; the hyperaesthesia of the will presupposes that of the sensibility, one is conditioned on the other, and it is this which makes men of revolutionary epochs so much greater than nature. It would be absurd under pretext of truth to try to bring them back to the common measures of our contemporary society, for they were veritably demigods for good as for evil.

Legends are not always absurd. The men of '93 are still near to us, but it is nevertheless with good right that legend has taken possession of them, and it is pitiable to see these men who, ten times a day, had to take resolutions where everything was at stake—their destiny, that of their ideas, and sometimes that of their country—judged as if they had been mere worthy citizens, with leisure to discuss at length every morning the garments they were to wear or the menu of a dinner. Most of the time historians have perceived only a part of the truth about them; for not only were there two men in them, almost all of them are at the same time poets, demagogues, prophets, heroes, martyrs. To write history, then, is to translate and transpose almost continually. The men of the thirteenth century could not bring themselves to not refer to an exterior cause the inner motions of their souls. In what appears to us as the result of our own reflections they saw inspiration; where we say desires, instincts, passions, they said temptation, but we must not permit these differences of language to make us overlook or tax with trickery a part of their spiritual life, bringing us thus to the conclusions of a narrow and ignorant rationalism.

St. Francis believed himself to have many a time fought with the devil; the horrible demons of the Etruscan Inferno still haunted the forests of Umbria and Tuscany; but while for his contemporaries and some of his disciples apparitions, prodigies, possessions, are daily phenomena, for him they are exceptional, and remain entirely in the background. In the iconography of St. Benedict, as in that of most of the popular saints, the devil occupies a preponderant place; in that of St. Francis he disappears so completely that in the long series of Giotto's frescos at Assisi he is not seen a single time.[8]

In the same way all that is magic and miracle-working occupies in his life an entirely secondary rank. Jesus in the Gospels gave his apostles power to cast out evil spirits, and to heal all sickness and all infirmity.[9] Francis surely took literally these words, which made a part of his Rule. He believed that he could work miracles, and he willed to do so; but his religious thought was too pure to permit him to consider miracles otherwise than as an entirely exceptional means of relieving the sufferings of men. Not once do we see him resorting to miracle to prove his apostolate or to bolster up his ideas. His tact taught him that souls are worthy of being won by better means. This almost complete absence of the marvellous[10] is by so much the more remarkable that it is in absolute contradiction with the tendencies of his time.[11]

Open the life of his disciple, St. Anthony of Padua ([Cross] 1231); it is a tiresome catalogue of prodigies, healings, resurrections. One would say it was rather the prospectus of some druggist who had invented a new drug than a call to men to conversion and a higher life. It may interest invalids or devotees, but neither the heart nor the conscience is touched by it. It must be said in justice to Anthony of Padua that his relations with Francis appear to have been very slight. Among the earliest disciples who had time to fathom their master's thought to the very depths we find traces of this noble disdain of the marvellous; they knew too well that the perfect joy is not to astound the world with prodigies, to give sight to the blind, nor even to revive those who have been four days dead, but that it lives in the love that goes even to self-immolation. Mihi absit gloriari nisi in cruce Domini.[12]

Thus Brother Egidio asked of God grace not to perform miracles; he saw in them, as in the passion for learning, a snare in which the proud would be taken, and which would distract the Order from its true mission.[13]

St. Francis's miracles are all acts of love; the greater number of them are found in the healing of nervous maladies, those apparently inexplicable disquietudes which are the cruel afflictions of critical times. His gentle glance, at once so compassionate and so strong, which seemed like a messenger from his heart, often sufficed to make those who met it forget all their suffering.

The evil eye is perhaps a less stupid superstition than is generally fancied. Jesus was right in saying that a look sufficed to make one an adulterer; but there is also a look—that of the contemplative Mary, for example—which is worth all sacrifices, because it includes them all, because it gives, consecrates, immolates him who looks.

Civilization dulls this power of the glance. A part of the education the world gives us consists in teaching our eyes to deceive, in making them expressionless, in extinguishing their flames; but simple and straightforward natures never give up using this language of the heart, "which brings life and health in its beams."

"A Brother was suffering unspeakable tortures; sometimes he would roll upon the ground, striking against whatever lay in his way, frothing at the mouth, horrible to see; at times he would become rigid, and again, after remaining stark outstretched for a moment, would roll about in horrible contortions; sometimes lying in a heap on the ground, his feet touching his head, he would bound upward as high as a man's head." Francis came to see him and healed him.[14]

But these are exceptions, and the greater part of the time the Saint withdrew himself from the entreaties of his companions when they asked miracles at his hands.

To sum up, if we take a survey of the whole field of Francis's piety, we see that it proceeds from the secret union of his soul with the divine by prayer; this intuitive power of seeing the ideal classes him with the mystics. He knew, indeed, both the ecstasy and the liberty of mysticism, but we must not forget those features of character which separate him from it, particularly his apostolic fervor. Besides this his piety had certain peculiar qualities which it is necessary to point out.

And first, liberty with respect of observances: Francis felt all the emptiness and pride of most religious observance. He saw the snare that lies hidden there, for the man who carefully observes all the minutiae of a religious code risks forgetting the supreme law of love. More than this, the friar who lays upon himself a certain number of supererogatory facts gains the admiration of the ignorant, but the pleasure which he finds in this admiration actually transforms his pious act into sin. Thus, strangely enough, contrary to other founders of orders, he was continually easing the strictness of the various rules which he laid down.[15] We may not take this to be a mere accident, for it was only after a struggle with his disciples that he made his will prevail; and it was precisely those who were most disposed to relax their vow of poverty who were the most anxious to display certain bigoted observances before the public eye.

"The sinner can fast," Francis would say at such times; "he can pray, weep, macerate himself, but one thing he cannot do, he cannot be faithful to God." Noble words, not unworthy to fall from the lips of him who came to preach a worship in spirit and in truth, without temple or priest; or rather that every fireside shall be a temple and every believer a priest.

Religious formalism, in whatever form of worship, always takes on a forced and morose manner. Pharisees of every age disfigure their faces that no one may be unaware of their godliness. Francis not merely could not endure these grimaces of false piety, he actually counted mirth and joy in the number of religious duties.

How shall one be melancholy who has in the heart an inexhaustible treasure of life and truth which only increases as one draws upon it? How be sad when in spite of falls one never ceases to make progress? The pious soul which grows and develops has a joy like that of the child, happy in feeling its weak little limbs growing strong and permitting it every day a further exertion.

The word joy is perhaps that which comes most often to the pen of the Franciscan authors;[16] the master went so far as to make it one of the precepts of the Rule.[17] He was too good a general not to know that a joyous army is always a victorious army. In the history of the early Franciscan missions there are bursts of laughter which ring out high and clear.[18]

For that matter, we are apt to imagine the Middle Ages as much more melancholy than they really were. Men suffered much in those days, but the idea of grief being never separated from that of penalty, suffering was either an expiation or a test, and sorrow thus regarded loses its sting; light and hope shine through it.

Francis drew a part of his joy from the communion. He gave to the sacrament of the eucharist that worship imbued with unutterable emotion, with joyful tears, which has aided some of the noblest of human souls to endure the burden and heat of the day.[19] The letter of the dogma was not fixed in the thirteenth century as it is to-day, but all that is beautiful, true, potent, eternal in the mystical feast instituted by Jesus was then alive in every heart.

The eucharist was truly the viaticum of the soul. Like the pilgrims of Emmaus long ago, in the hour when the shades of evening fall and a vague sadness invades the soul, when the phantoms of the night awake and seem to loom up behind all our thoughts, our fathers saw the divine and mysterious Companion coming toward them; they drank in his words, they felt his strength descending upon their hearts, all their inward being warmed again, and again they whispered, "Abide with us, Lord, for the day is far spent and the night approacheth."

And often their prayer was heard.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] 1 Cel., 62.

[2] 1 Cel., 66; cf. Bon., 180; 1 Cel., 67; cf. Bon., 182; 1 Cel., 69; Bon., 183. After St. Francis's death the Narniates were the first to come to pray at his tomb. 1 Cel., 128, 135, 136, 138, 141; Bon., 275.

[3] As concerning: 1, fidelity to Poverty; 2, prohibition of modifying the Rule; 3, the equal authority of the Will and the Rule; 4, the request for privileges at the court of Rome; 5, the elevation of the friars to high ecclesiastical charges; 6, the absolute prohibition of putting themselves in opposition to the secular clergy; 7, the interdiction of great churches and rich convents. On all these points and many others infidelity to Francis's will was complete in the Order less than twenty-five years after his death. We might expatiate on all this; the Holy See in interpreting the Rule had canonical right on its side, but Ubertino di Casali in saying that it was perfectly clear and had no need of interpretation had good sense on his side; let that suffice! Et est stupor quare queritur expositio super litteram sic apertam quia nulla est difficultas in regulae intelligentia. Arbor vitae crucifixae, Venice, 1485. lib. v., cap. 3. Sanctus vir Egidius tanto ejulatu clamabat super regulae destructionem quam videbat quod ignorantibus viam spiritus quasi videbatur insanus. Id. ibid.

[4] Heavens drop down your dew, and let the clouds rain down the Just One. Anthem for Advent.

[5] In foramibus petrae nidificabat. 1 Cel., 71. Upon the prayers of Francis vide ibid., 71 and 72; 2 Cel., 3, 38-43; Ben., 139-148. Cf. 1 Cel., 6; 91; 103; 3 Soc., 8; 12; etc.

[6] Luke, xxii. 44.

[7] Felix Kuhn: Luther, sa vie et son oeuvre, Paris, 1883, 3 vols., 8vo. t. i., p. 128; t. ii., p. 9; t. iii., p. 257. Benvenuto Cellini does not hesitate to describe a visit which he made one day to the Coliseum in company with a magician whose words evoked clouds of devils who filled the whole place. B. Cellini, La vita scritta da lui medesimo, Bianchi's edition, Florence, 1890, 12mo, p. 33.

[8] On the devil and Francis vide 1 Cel., 68, 72; 3 Soc., 12; 2 Cel., 1, 6; 3, 10; 53; 58-65; Bon., 59-62. Cf. Eccl., 3; 5; 13; Fior., 29; Spec., 110b. To form an idea of the part taken by the devil in the life of a monk at the beginning of the thirteenth century, one must read the Dialogus miraculorium of Caesar von Heisterbach.

[9] Matthew, x. 1.

[10] Miracles occupy only ten paragraphs (61-70) in 1 Cel., and of this number there are several which can hardly be counted as Francis's miracles, since they were performed by objects which had belonged to him.

[11] Heretics often took advantage of this thirst for the marvellous to dupe the catholics. The Cathari of Moncoul made a portrait of the Virgin representing her as one eyed and toothless, saying that in his humility Christ had chosen a very ugly woman for mother. They had no difficulty in healing several cases of disease by its means; the image became famous, was venerated almost everywhere, and accomplished many miracles until the day when the heretics divulged the deception, to the great scandal of the faithful. Egbert von Schoenau, Contra Catharos. Serm. I. cap. 2. (Patrol. lat. Migne t. 195.) Cf. Heisterbach, loc. cit., v. 18. Luc de Tuy, De altera Vita, lib. ii. 9; iii. 9, 18 (Patrol. Migne., 208).

[12] "But God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ." Gal. vi. 14. This is to this day the motto of the Brothers Minor.

[13] Spec., 182a; 200a; 232a. Cf. 199a.

[14] 1 Cel., 67.

[15] Secundum primam regulam fratres feria quarta et sexta et per licentiam beati Francisci feria secunda et sabbato jejunabant. Giord. 11. cf. Reg. 1221, cap. 3 and Reg. 1223, cap. 3, where Friday is the only fast day retained.

[16] 1 Cel., 10; 22; 27; 31; 42; 80; 2 Cel., 1, 1; 3, 65-68; Eccl., 5; 6; Giord., 21; Spec., 119a; Conform., 143a, 2.

[17] Caveant fratres quod non ostendant se tristes extrinsecus nubilosos et hypocritas; sed ostendant se gaudentis in Domine, hilares et convenientes gratiosos.

[18] Eccl., loc. cit.; Giord., loc. cit.

[19] Vide Test.; 1 Cel., 46; 62; 75; 2 Cel., 3, 129; Spec., 44a.

* * * * *



CHAPTER XII

THE CHAPTER-GENERAL OF 1217[1]

After Whitsunday of 1217 chronological notes of Francis's life are numerous enough to make error almost impossible. Unhappily, this is not the case for the eighteen months which precede it (autumn of 1215-Whitsunday, 1217). For this period we are reduced to conjecture, or little better.

As Francis at that time undertook no foreign mission, he doubtless employed his time in evangelizing Central Italy and in consolidating the foundations of his institution. His presence at Rome during the Lateran Council (November 11-30, 1215) is possible, but it has left no trace in the earliest biographies. The Council certainly took the new Order into consideration,[2] but it was to renew the invitation made to it five years before by the supreme pontiff, to choose one of the Rules already approved by the Church.[3] St. Dominic, who was then at Rome to beg for the confirmation of his institute, received the same counsel and immediately conformed to it. The Holy See would willingly have conceded special constitutions to the Brothers Minor, if they had adopted for a base the Rule of St. Benedict; thus the Clarisses, except those of St. Damian, while preserving their name and a certain number of their customs, were obliged to profess the Benedictine rule.

In spite of all solicitations, Francis insisted upon retaining his own Rule. One is led to believe that it was to confer upon these questions that we find him at Perugia in July, 1216, when Innocent III. died.[4]

However this may be, about this epoch the chapters took on a great importance. The Church, which had looked on at the foundation of the Order with somewhat mixed feelings, could no longer rest content with being the mere spectator of so profound a movement; it saw the need of utilizing it.

Ugolini was marvellously well prepared for such a task. Giovanni di San Paolo, Bishop of the Sabine, charged by Innocent III. to look after the Brothers, died in 1216, and Ugolini was not slow to offer his protection to Francis, who accepted it with gratitude. This extraordinary offer is recounted at length by the Three Companions.[5] It must certainly be fixed in the summer of 1216[6] immediately after the death of Giovanni di San Paolo.

It is very possible that the first chapter held in the presence of this cardinal took place on May 29, 1216. By an error very common in history, most of the Franciscan writers have referred to a single date all the scattered incidents concerning the first solemn assizes of the Order, and have called this typical assembly the Chapter of the Mats. In reality for long years all the gatherings of the Brothers Minor deserved this name.[7]

Coming together at the season of the greatest heat, they slept in the open air or sheltered themselves under booths of reeds. We need not pity them. There is nothing like the glorious transparency of the summer night in Umbria; sometimes in Provence one may enjoy a foretaste of it, but if at Baux, upon the rock of Doms, or at St. Baume, the sight is equally solemn and grandiose, it still wants the caressing sweetness, the effluence of life which in Umbria give the night a bewitching charm.

The inhabitants of the neighboring towns and villages flocked to these meetings in crowds, at once to see the ceremonies, to be present when their relatives or friends assumed the habit, to listen to the appeals of the Saint and to furnish to the friars the provisions of which they might have need. All this is not without some analogy with the camp-meeting so dear to Americans. As to the figures of several thousands of attendants given in the legends, and furnishing even to a Franciscan, Father Papini, the occasion for pleasantries of doubtful taste, it is perhaps not so surprising as might be supposed.[8]

These first meetings, to which all the Brothers eagerly hastened, held in the open air in the presence of crowds come together from distant places, have then nothing in common with the subsequent chapters-general, which were veritable conclaves attended by a small number of delegates, and the majority of the work of which, done in secret, was concerned only with the affairs of the Order.

During Francis's lifetime the purpose of these assemblies was essentially religious. Men attended them not to talk business, or proceed to the nomination of the minister-general, but in mutual communion to gain new strength from the joys, the example, and the sufferings of the other brethren.[9]

The four years which followed the Whitsunday of 1216 form a stage in the evolution of the Umbrian movement; that during which Francis was battling for autonomy. We find here pretty delicate shades of distinction, which have been misunderstood by Church writers as much as by their adversaries, for if Francis was particular not to put himself in the attitude of revolt, he would not compromise his independence, and he felt with an exquisite divination that all the privileges which the court of Rome could heap upon him were worth nothing in comparison with liberty. Alas, he was soon forced to resign himself to these gilded bonds, against which he never ceased to protest, even to his last sigh;[10] but to shut one's eyes to the moral violence which the papacy did him in this matter is to condemn oneself to an entire misapprehension of his work.

A glance over the collection of bulls addressed to the Franciscans suffices to show with what ardor he struggled against favors so eagerly sought by the monastic orders.[11]

A great number of legendary anecdotes put Francis's disdain of privileges in the clearest light. Even his dearest friends did not always understand his scruples.

"Do you not see," they said to him one day, "that often the bishops do not permit us to preach, and make us remain several days without doing anything before we are permitted to proclaim the word of God? It would be better worth while to obtain for this end a privilege from the pope, and it would be for the good of souls."

"I would first convert the prelates by humility and respect," he replied quickly; "for when they have seen us humble and respectful toward them, they themselves will beg us to preach and convert the people. As for me, I ask of God no privilege unless it be that I may have none, to be full of respect for all men, and to convert them, as our Rule ordains, more by our example than by our speech."[12]

The question whether Francis was right or wrong in his antipathy to the privileges of the curia does not come within the domain of history; it is evident that this attitude could not long continue; the Church knows only the faithful and rebels. But the noblest hearts often make a stand at compromises of this kind; they desire that the future should grow out of the past without convulsion and without a crisis.

The chapter of 1217 was notable for the definitive organization of the Franciscan missions. Italy and the other countries were divided off into a certain number of provinces, having each its provincial minister. Immediately upon his accession Honorius III. had sought to revive the popular zeal for the crusades. He had not stopped at preaching it, but appealed to prophecies which had proclaimed that under his pontificate the Holy Land would be reconquered.[13] The renewal of fervor which ensued, and of which the rebound was felt as far as Germany, had a profound influence on the Brothers Minor. This time Francis, perhaps from humility, did not put himself at the head of the friars charged with a mission to Syria; for leader he gave them the famous Elias, formerly at Florence, where he had had opportunity to show his high qualities.[14]

This Brother, who from this time appears in the foreground of this history, came from the most humble ranks of society; the date and the circumstances of his entrance into the Order are unknown, and hence conjecture has come to see in him that friend of the grotto who had been Francis's confidant shortly before his decisive conversion. However this may be, in his youth he had earned his living in Assisi, making mattresses and teaching a few children to read; then he had spent some time in Bologna as scriptor; then suddenly we find him among the Brothers Minor, charged with the most difficult missions.

His adversaries vie with one another in asserting that he was the finest mind of his century, but unhappily it is very difficult, in the existing state of the documents, to pronounce as to his actions; learned and energetic, eager to play the leading part in the work of the reformation of religion, and having made his plan beforehand as to the proper mode of realizing it, he made straight for his goal, half political, half religious. Full of admiration for Francis and gratitude toward him, he desired to regulate and consolidate the movement for renovation. In the inner Franciscan circle, where Leo, Ginepro, Egidio, and many others represent the spirit of liberty, the religion of the humble and the simple, Elias represents the scientific and ecclesiastical spirit, prudence and reason.

He had great success in Syria and received into the Order one of the disciples most dear to Francis, Caesar of Speyer, who later on was to make the conquest of all Southern Germany in less than two years (1221-1223), and who in the end sealed with his blood his fidelity to the strict observance, which he defended against the attacks of Brother Elias himself.[15]

Caesar of Speyer offers a brilliant example of those suffering souls athirst for the ideal, so numerous in the thirteenth century, who everywhere went up and down, seeking first in learning, then in the religious life, that which should assuage the mysterious thirst which tortured them. Disciple of the scholastic Conrad, he had felt himself overpowered with the desire to reform the Church; while still a layman he had preached his ideas, not without some success, since a certain number of ladies of Speyer had begun to lead a new life; but their husbands disapproving, he was obliged to escape their vengeance by taking refuge at Paris, and thence he went to the East, where in the preaching of the Brothers Minor he found again his hopes and his dreams. This instance shows how general was the waiting condition of souls when the Franciscan gospel blazed forth, and how its way had been everywhere prepared.

But it is time to return to the chapter of 1217: the friars who went to Germany under conduct of Giovanni di Penna were far from having the success of Elias and his companions; they were completely ignorant of the language of the country which they had undertaken to evangelize. Perhaps Francis had not taken into account the fact that though Italian might, in case of need, suffice in all the countries bathed by the Mediterranean, this could not be the case in Central Europe.[16]

The lot of the party going to Hungary was not more happy. Very often it came to pass that the missionaries were fain to give up their very garments in the effort to appease the peasants and shepherds who maltreated them. But no less incapable of understanding what was said to them than of making themselves understood, they were soon obliged to think of returning to Italy. We may thank the Franciscan authors for preserving for us the memory of these checks, and not attempting to picture the friars as suddenly knowing all languages by a divine inspiration, as later on was so often related.[17]

Those who had been sent to Spain had also to undergo persecutions. This country, like the south of France, was ravaged by heresy; but already at that time it was vigorously repressed. The Franciscans, suspected of being false Catholics and therefore eagerly hunted out, found a refuge with Queen Urraca of Portugal, who permitted them to establish themselves at Coimbra, Guimarraens, Alenquero, and Lisbon.[18]

Francis himself made preparations for going to France.[19] This country had a peculiar charm for him because of his fervent love of the Holy Sacrament. Perhaps also he was unwittingly drawn toward this country to which he owed his name, the chivalrous dreams of his youth, all of poetry, song, music, delicious dream that had come into his life.

Something of the emotion that thrilled through him on undertaking this new mission has passed into the story of his biographers; one feels there the thrill at once sweet and agonizing, the heart-throb of the brave knight who goes forth all harnessed in the early dawn to scan the horizon, dreading the unknown and yet overflowing with joy, for he knows that the day will be consecrated to love and to the right.

The Italian poet has given the one name of "pilgrimages of love" to the farings forth of chivalry and the journeys undertaken by dreamers, artists, or saints to those parts of the earth which forever mirror themselves before their imagination and remain their chosen fatherland.[20] Such a pilgrimage as this was Francis undertaking.

"Set forth," said he to the Brothers who accompanied him, "and walk two and two, humble and gentle, keeping silence until after tierce, praying to God in your hearts, carefully avoiding every vain or useless word. Meditate as much while on this journey as if you were shut up in a hermitage or in your cell, for wherever we are, wherever we go, we carry our cell with us; Brother body is our cell, and the soul is the hermit who dwells in it, there to pray to the Lord and to meditate."

Arrived at Florence he found there Cardinal Ugolini, sent by the pope as legate to Tuscany to preach the crusade and take all needful measures for assuring its success.[21] Francis was surely far from expecting the reception which the prelate gave him. Instead of encouraging him, the cardinal urged him to give up his project.

"I am not willing, my brother, that you should cross the mountains; there are many prelates who ask nothing better than to stir up difficulties for you with the court of Rome. But I and the other cardinals who love your Order desire to protect and aid you, on the condition, however, that you do not quit this province."

"But, monsignor, it would be a great disgrace for me to send my brethren far away while I remained idly here, sharing none of the tribulations which they must undergo."

"Wherefore, then, have you sent your brethren so far away, exposing them thus to starvation and all sorts of perils?"

"Do you think," replied Francis warmly, and as if moved by prophetic inspiration, "that God raised up the Brothers for the sake of this country alone? Verily, I say unto you, God has raised them up for the awakening and the salvation of all men, and they shall win souls not only in the countries of those who believe, but also in the very midst of the infidels."[22]

The surprise and admiration which these words awoke in Ugolini were not enough to make him change his mind. He insisted so strongly that Francis turned back to Portiuncula, the inspiration of his work not even shaken. Who knows whether the joy which he would have felt in seeing France did not confirm him in the idea that he ought to renounce this plan? Souls athirst with the longing for sacrifice often have scruples such as these; they refuse the most lawful joys that they may offer them to God. We cannot tell whether it was immediately after this interview or not till the following year that Francis put Brother Pacifico at the head of the missionaries sent into France.[23]

Pacifico, who was a poet of talent, had before his conversion been surnamed Prince of Poesy and crowned at the capital by the emperor. One day while visiting a relative who was a nun at San Severino in the March of Ancona, Francis also arrived at the monastery, and preached with such a holy impetuosity that the poet felt himself pierced with the sword of which the Bible speaks, which penetrates between the very joints and marrow, and discerns the thoughts and intents of the heart.[24] On the morrow he assumed the habit and received his symbolical surname.[25]

He was accompanied to France by Brother Agnello di Pisa, who was destined to be put at the head of the first mission to England in 1224.[26]

Francis, on sending them forth, was far from dreaming that from this country, which exerted such a fascination over him, was to come forth the influence which was to compromise his dream—that Paris would be the destruction of Assisi; and yet the time was not very far distant; a few years more and the Poverello would see a part of his spiritual family forgetting the humility of their name, their origin, and their aspirations, to run after the ephemeral laurels of learning.

We have already seen that the habit of the Franciscans of this time was to make their abode within easy reach of great cities; Pacifico and his companions established themselves at St. Denis.[27] We have no particulars of their work; it was singularly fruitful, since it permitted them a few years later to attack England with full success.

Francis passed the following year (1218) in evangelizing tours in Italy. It is naturally impossible to follow him in these travels, the itinerary of which was fixed by his daily inspirations, or by indications as fanciful as the one which had formerly determined his going to Sienna. Bologna,[28] the Verna, the valley of Rieti, the Sacro-Speco of St. Benedict at Subiaco,[29] Gaeta;[30] San Michele on Mount Gargano[31] perhaps received him at this time, but the notes of his presence in these places are too sparse and vague to permit their being included in any scheme of history.

It is very possible that he also paid a visit to Rome during this time; his communications with Ugolini were much more frequent than is generally supposed. We must not permit the stories of biographers to deceive us in this matter; it is a natural tendency to refer all that we know of a man to three or four especially striking dates. We forget entire years of the life of those whom we have known the best and loved the most and group our memories of them around a few salient events which shine all the more brilliantly the deeper we make the surrounding obscurity. The words of Jesus spoken on a hundred different occasions came at last to be formed into a single discourse, the Sermon on the Mount. It is in such cases that criticism needs to be delicate, to mingle a little divination with the heavy artillery of scientific argument.

The texts are sacred, but we must not make fetiches of them; notwithstanding St. Matthew, no one to-day dreams of representing Jesus as uttering the Sermon on the Mount all at one time. In the same way, in the narratives concerning the relations between St. Francis and Ugolini, we find ourselves every moment shut up in no-thoroughfares, coming up against contradictory indications, just so long as we try to refer everything to two or three meetings, as we are at first led to do.

With a simple act of analysis these difficulties disappear and we find each of the different narratives bringing us fragments which, being pieced together, furnish an organic story, living, psychologically true.

From the moment at which we have now arrived, we must make a much larger place for Ugolini than in the past; the struggle has definitively opened between the Franciscan ideal—chimerical, perhaps, but sublime—and the ecclesiastical policy, to go on until the day when, half in humility, half in discouragement, Francis, heartsick, abdicates the direction of his spiritual family.

Ugolini returned to Rome at the end of 1217. During the following winter his countersign is found at the bottom of the most important bulls;[32] he devoted this time to the special study of the question of the new orders, and summoned Francis before him. We have seen with what frankness he had declared to him at Florence that many of the prelates would do anything to discredit him with the pope.[33] It is evident the success of the Order, its methods, which in spite of all protestations to the contrary seemed to savor of heresy, the independence of Francis, who had scattered his friars in all the four corners of the globe without trying to gain a confirmation of the verbal and entirely provisional authorization accorded him by Innocent III.—all these things were calculated to startle the clergy.

Ugolini, who better than any one else knew Umbria, Tuscany, Emilia, the March of Ancona, all those regions where the Franciscan preaching had been most successful, was able by himself to judge of the power of the new movement and the imperious necessity of directing it; he felt that the best way to allay the prejudices which the pope and the sacred college might have against Francis was to present him before the curia.

Francis was at first much abashed at the thought of preaching before the Vicar of Jesus Christ, but upon the entreaties of his protector he consented, and for greater security he learned by heart what he had to say.

Ugolini himself was not entirely at ease as to the result of this step; Thomas of Celano pictures him as devoured with anxiety; he was troubled about Francis, whose artless eloquence ran many a risk in the halls of the Lateran Palace; he was also not without some more personal anxieties, for the failure of his protege might be most damaging to himself. He was in all the greater anxiety when, on arriving at the feet of the pontiff, Francis forgot all he had intended to say; but he frankly avowed it, and seeking a new discourse from the inspiration of the moment, spoke with so much warmth and simplicity that the assembly was won.[34]

The biographers are mute as to the practical result of this audience. We are not to be surprised at this, for they write with the sole purpose of edification. They wrote after the apotheosis of their master, and would with very bad grace have dwelt upon the difficulties which he met during the early years.[35]

The Holy See must have been greatly perplexed by this strange man, whose faith and humility were evident, but whom it was impossible to teach ecclesiastical obedience.

St. Dominic happened to be in Rome at the same time,[36] and was overwhelmed with favors by the pope. It is a matter of history that Innocent III. having asked him to choose one of the Rules already approved by the Church, he had returned to his friars at Notre Dame de Prouille, and after conferring with them had adopted that of St. Augustine; Honorius therefore was not sparing of privileges for him. It is hardly possible that Ugolini did not try to use the influence of his example with St. Francis.

The curia saw clearly that Dominic, whose Order barely comprised a few dozen members, was not one of the moral powers of the time, but its sentiments toward him were by no means so mixed as those it experienced with regard to Francis.

To unite the two Orders, to throw over the shoulders of the Dominicans the brown cassock of the Poor Men of Assisi, and thus make a little of the popularity of the Brothers Minor to be reflected upon them, to leave to the latter their name, their habit, and even a semblance of their Rule, only completing it with that of St. Augustine, such a project would have been singularly pleasing to Ugolini, and with Francis's humility would seem to have some chance of success.

One day Dominic by dint of pious insistance induced Francis to give him his cord, and immediately girded himself with it. "Brother," said he, "I earnestly long that your Order and mine might unite to form one sole and same institute[37] in the Church." But the Brother Minor wished to remain as he was, and declined the proposition. So truly was he inspired with the needs of his time and of the Church that less than three years after this Dominic was drawn by an irresistible influence to transform his Order of Canons of St. Augustine into an order of mendicant monks, whose constitutions were outlined upon those of the Franciscans.[38]

A few years later the Dominicans took, so to speak, their revenge, and obliged the Brothers Minor to give learning a large place in their work. Thus, while hardly come to youth's estate, the two religious families rivalled one another, impressed, influenced one another, yet never so much so as to lose all traces of their origin—summed up for the one in poverty and lay preaching, for the other in learning and the preaching of the clergy.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The commencement of the great missions and the institution of provincial ministers is usually fixed either at 1217 or 1219, but both these dates present great difficulties. I confess that I do not understand the vehemence with which partisans of either side defend their opinions. The most important text is a passage in the 3 Soc., 62: Expletis itaque undecim annis ab inceptione religionis, et multiplicatis numero et merito fratribus, electi fuerant ministri, et missi cum aliquot fratribus quasi per universas mundi provincias in quibus fides catholica colitur et servatur. What does this expression, inceptio religionis, mean? At a first reading one unhesitatingly takes it to refer to the foundation of the Order, which occurred in April, 1209, by the reception of the first Brothers; but on adding eleven full years to this date we reach the summer of 1220. This is manifestly too late, for the 3 Soc. say that the brethren who went out were persecuted in most of the countries beyond the mountains, as being accredited by no pontifical letter; but the bull Cum dilecti, bears the date of June 11, 1219. We are thus led to think that the eleven years are not to be counted from the reception of the first Brothers, but from Francis's conversion, which the authors might well speak of as inceptio religionis, and 1206 + 11 = 1217. The use of this expression to designate conversion is not entirely without example. Glassberger says (An. fr., p. 9): Ordinem minorum incepit anno 1206. Those who admit 1219 are obliged (like the Bollandists, for example), to attribute an inaccuracy to the text of the 3 Soc., that of having counted eleven years as having passed when there had been only ten. We should notice that in the two other chronological indications given by the 3 Soc. (27 and 62) they count from the conversion, that is from 1206, as also Thomas of Celano, 88, 105, 119, 97, 88, 57, 55, 21. Curiously, the Conformities reproduce the passage of the 3 Soc. (118b, 1), but with the alteration: Nono anno ab inceptione religionis. Giordano di Giano opens the door to many scruples: Anno vero Domini 1219 et anno conversionis ejus decimo frater Franciscus ... misit fratres in Franciam, in Theutoniam, in Hungariam, in Hespaniam, Giord., 3. As a little later the same author properly harmonizes 1219 with the thirteenth year from Francis's conversion, everyone is in agreement in admitting that the passage cited needs correction; we have unfortunately only one manuscript of this chronicle. Glassberger, who doubtless had another before him, substitutes 1217, but he may have drawn this date from another document. It is noteworthy that Brother Giordano gives as simultaneous the departure of the friars for Germany, Hungary, and France; but, as to the latter country, it certainly took place in 1217. So the Speculum, 44a.