CHAPTER XI

THE INNER MAN AND WONDER-WORKING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the same way all that is magic and miracle-working occupies in his life an entirely secondary rank. Jesus in the Gospels gave his apostles power to cast out evil spirits, and to heal all sickness and all infirmity.9 Francis surely took literally these words, which made a part of his Rule. He believed that he could work miracles, and he willed to do so; but his religious thought was too pure to permit him to consider miracles otherwise than as an entirely exceptional means of relieving the sufferings of men. Not once do we see him resorting to miracle to prove his apostolate or to bolster up his ideas. His tact taught him that souls are worthy of being won by better means. This almost complete absence of the marvellous10 is by so much the more remarkable that it is in absolute contradiction with the tendencies of his time.11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And often their prayer was heard.