Part 17 (1/2)
He felt that in this respect the Rule could not be too absolute, and that if unfortunately the door was opened to various interpretations of it, there would be no stopping-point. The course of events and the periodical convulsions which shook his Order show clearly enough how rightly he judged.
I do not know nor desire to know if theologians have yet come to a scientific conclusion with regard to the poverty of Jesus, but it seems evident to me that poverty with the labor of the hands is the ideal held up by the Galilean to the efforts of his disciples.
Still it is easy to see that Franciscan poverty is neither to be confounded with the unfeeling pride of the stoic, nor with the stupid horror of all joy felt by certain devotees; St. Francis renounced everything only that he might the better possess everything. The lives of the immense majority of our contemporaries are ruled by the fatal error that the more one possesses the more one enjoys. Our exterior, civil liberties continually increase, but at the same time our inward freedom is taking flight; how many are there among us who are literally possessed by what they possess?[9]
Poverty not only permitted the Brothers to mingle with the poor and speak to them with authority, but, removing from them all material anxiety, it left them free to enjoy without hindrance those hidden treasures which nature reserves for pure idealists.
The ever-thickening barriers which modern life, with its sickly search for useless comfort, has set up between us and nature did not exist for these men, so full of youth and life, eager for wide s.p.a.ces and the outer air. This is what gave St. Francis and his companions that quick susceptibility to Nature which made them thrill in mysterious harmony with her. Their communion with Nature was so intimate, so ardent, that Umbria, with the harmonious poetry of its skies, the joyful outburst of its spring-time, is still the best doc.u.ment from which to study them.
The tie between the two is so indissoluble, that after having lived a certain time in company with St. Francis, one can hardly, on reading certain pa.s.sages of his biographers, help _seeing_ the spot where the incident took place, hearing the vague sounds of creatures and things, precisely as, when reading certain pages of a beloved author, one hears the sound of his voice.
The wors.h.i.+p of Poverty of the early Franciscans had in it, then, nothing ascetic or barbarous, nothing which recalls the Stylites or the n.a.z.irs.
She was their bride, and like true lovers they felt no fatigues which they might endure to find and remain near her.
La lor concordia e lor lieti sembianti, Amor e maraviglia e dolce sguardo Facean esser cagion de' pensier santi.[10]
To draw the portrait of an ideal knight at the beginning of the thirteenth century is to draw Francis's very portrait, with this difference, that what the knight did for his lady, he did for Poverty.
This comparison is not a mere caprice; he himself profoundly felt it and expressed it with perfect clearness, and it is only by keeping it clearly present in the mind that we can see into the very depth of his heart.[11]
To find any other souls of the same nature one must come down to Giovanni di Parma and Jacoponi di Todi. The life of St. Francis as troubadour has been written; it would have been better to write it as knight, for this is the explanation of his whole life, and as it were the heart of his heart. From the day when, forgetting the songs of his friends and suddenly stopped in the public place of a.s.sisi, he met Poverty, his bride, and swore to her faith and love, down to that evening when, naked upon the naked earth of Portiuncula, he breathed out his life, it may be said that all his thoughts went out to this lady of his chaste loves. For twenty years he served her without faltering, sometimes with an artlessness which would appear infantine, if something infinitely sincere and sublime did not arrest the smile upon the most sceptical lips.
Poverty agreed marvellously with that need which men had at that time, and which perhaps they have lost less than they suppose, the need of an ideal very high, very pure, mysterious, inaccessible, which yet they may picture to themselves in concrete form. Sometimes a few privileged disciples saw the lovely and pure Lady descend from heaven to salute her spouse, but, whether visible or not, she always kept close beside her Umbrian lover, as she kept close beside the Galilean; in the stable of the nativity, upon the cross at Golgotha, and even in the borrowed tomb where his body lay.
During several years this ideal was not alone that of St. Francis, but also of all the Brothers. In poverty the _gente poverelle_ had found safety, love, liberty; and all the efforts of the new apostles are directed to the keeping of this precious treasure.
Their wors.h.i.+p sometimes might seem excessive. They showed their spouse those delicate attentions, those refinements of courtesy so frequent in the morning light of a betrothal, but which one gradually forgets till they become incomprehensible.[12]
The number of disciples continually increased; almost every week brought new recruits; the year 1211 was without doubt devoted by Francis to a tour in Umbria and the neighboring provinces. His sermons were short appeals to conscience; his heart went out to his hearers in ineffable tones, so that when men tried to repeat what they had heard they found themselves incapable.[13] The Rule of 1221 has preserved for us a summary of these appeals:
”Here is an exhortation which all the Brothers may make when they think best: Fear and honor G.o.d, praise and bless him. Give thanks unto him. Adore the Lord, Almighty G.o.d, in Trinity and unity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Repent and make fruits meet for repentance, for you know that we shall soon die.
Give, and it shall be given unto you. Forgive, and you shall be forgiven; for if you forgive not, G.o.d will not forgive you.
Blessed are they who die repenting, for they shall be in the kingdom of heaven.... Abstain carefully from all evil, and persevere in the good until the end.”[14]
We see how simple and purely ethical was the early Franciscan preaching.
The complications of dogma and scholasticism are entirely absent from it. To understand how new this was and how refres.h.i.+ng to the soul we must study the disciples that came after him.
With St. Anthony of Padua ([Cross] June 13, 1231; canonized in 1233[15]), the most ill.u.s.trious of them all, the descent is immense. The distance between these two men is as great as that which separates Jesus from St. Paul.
I do not judge the disciple; he was of his time in not knowing how to say simply what he thought, in always desiring to subtilize it, to extract it from pa.s.sages in the Bible turned from their natural meaning by efforts at once laborious and puerile; what the alchemists did in their continual making of strange mixtures from which they fancied that they should bring out gold, the preachers did to the texts, in order to bring out the truth.
The originality of St. Francis is only the more brilliant and meritorious; with him gospel simplicity reappeared upon the earth.[16]
Like the lark with which he so much loved to compare himself,[17] he was at his ease only in the open sky. He remained thus until his death.
The epistle to all Christians which he dictated in the last weeks of his life repeats the same ideas in the same terms, perhaps with a little more feeling and a shade of sadness. The evening breeze which breathed upon his face and bore away his words was their symbolical accompaniment.
”I, Brother Francis, the least of your servants, pray and conjure you by that Love which is G.o.d himself, willing to throw myself at your feet and kiss them, to receive with humility and love these words and all others of our Lord Jesus Christ, to put them to profit and carry them out.”
This was not a more or less oratorical formula. Hence conversions multiplied with an incredible rapidity. Often, as formerly with Jesus, a look, a word sufficed Francis to attach to himself men who would follow him until their death. It is impossible, alas! to a.n.a.lyze the best of this eloquence, all made of love, intimate apprehension, and fire. The written word can no more give an idea of it than it can give us an idea of a sonata of Beethoven or a painting by Rembrandt. We are often amazed, on reading the memoirs of those who have been great conquerors of souls, to find ourselves remaining cold, finding in them all no trace of animation or originality. It is because we have only a lifeless relic in the hand; the soul is gone. It is the white wafer of the sacrament, but how shall that rouse in us the emotions of the beloved disciple lying on the Lord's breast on the night of the Last Supper?