Asceticism is a thing which, in its very nature, we tend in these days
to misunderstand. Asceticism, in the religious sense, is the repudiation
of the great mass of human joys because of the supreme joyfulness of the
one joy, the religious joy. But asceticism is not in the least confined
to religious asceticism: there is scientific asceticism which asserts
that truth is alone satisfying: there is æsthetic asceticism which
asserts that art is alone satisfying: there is amatory asceticism which
asserts that love is alone satisfying. There is even epicurean
asceticism, which asserts that beer and skittles are alone satisfying.
Wherever the manner of praising anything involves the statement that the
speaker could live with that thing alone, there lies the germ and
essence of asceticism. When William Morris, for example, says that "love
is enough," it is obvious that he asserts in those words that art,
science, politics, ambition, money, houses, carriages, concerts,
gloves, walking-sticks, door-knockers, railway-stations, cathedrals, and
any other things one may choose to tabulate are unnecessary. When Omar
Khayyam says:
"A book of verses underneath the bough,
A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness--
O wilderness were Paradise enow."
It is clear that he speaks fully as much ascetically as he does
æsthetically. He makes a list of things and says that he wants no more.
The same thing was done by a mediæval monk. Examples might, of course,
be multiplied a hundred-fold. One of the most genuinely poetical of our
younger poets says, as the one thing certain, that
"From quiet home and first beginning
Out to the undiscovered ends--
There's nothing worth the wear of winning
But laughter and the love of friends."
Here we have a perfect example of the main important fact, that all true
joy expresses itself in terms of asceticism.
But if, in any case, it should happen that a class or a generation lose
the sense of the peculiar kind of joy which is being celebrated, they
immediately begin to call the enjoyers of that joy gloomy and
self-destroying. The most formidable liberal philosophers have called
the monks melancholy because they denied themselves the pleasures of
liberty and marriage. They might as well call the trippers on a Bank
Holiday melancholy because they deny themselves, as a rule, the
pleasures of silence and meditation. A simpler and stronger example is,
however, to hand. If ever it should happen that the system of English
athletics should vanish from the public schools and the universities, if
science should supply some new and non-competitive manner of perfecting
the physique, if public ethics swung round to an attitude of absolute
contempt and indifference towards the feeling called sport, then it is
easy to see what would happen. Future historians would simply state that
in the dark days of Queen Victoria young men at Oxford and Cambridge
were subjected to a horrible sort of religious torture. They were
forbidden, by fantastic monastic rules, to indulge in wine or tobacco
during certain arbitrarily fixed periods of time, before certain brutal
fights and festivals. Bigots insisted on their rising at unearthly hours
and running violently around fields for no object. Many men ruined their
health in these dens of superstition, many died there. All this is
perfectly true and irrefutable. Athleticism in England is an asceticism,
as much as the monastic rules. Men have overstrained themselves and
killed themselves through English athleticism. There is one difference
and one only: we do feel the love of sport; we do not feel the love of
religious offices. We see only the price in the one case and only the
purchase in the other.
The only question that remains is what was the joy of the old Christian
ascetics of which their asceticism was merely the purchasing price? The
mere possibility of the query is an extraordinary example of the way in
which we miss the main points of human history. We are looking at
humanity too close, and see only the details and not the vast and
dominant features. We look at the rise of Christianity, and conceive it
as a rise of self-abnegation and almost of pessimism. It does not occur
to us that the mere assertion that this raging and confounding universe
is governed by justice and mercy is a piece of staggering optimism fit
to set all men capering. The detail over which these monks went mad with
joy was the universe itself; the only thing really worthy of enjoyment.
The white daylight shone over all the world, the endless forests stood
up in their order. The lightning awoke and the tree fell and the sea
gathered into mountains and the ship went down, and all these
disconnected and meaningless and terrible objects were all part of one
dark and fearful conspiracy of goodness, one merciless scheme of mercy.
That this scheme of Nature was not accurate or well founded is perfectly
tenable, but surely it is not tenable that it was not optimistic. We
insist, however, upon treating this matter tail foremost. We insist that
the ascetics were pessimists because they gave up threescore years and
ten for an eternity of happiness. We forget that the bare proposition of
an eternity of happiness is by its very nature ten thousand times more
optimistic than ten thousand pagan saturnalias.
Mr. Adderley's life of Francis of Assisi does not, of course, bring this
out; nor does it fully bring out the character of Francis. It has rather
the tone of a devotional book. A devotional book is an excellent thing,
but we do not look in it for the portrait of a man, for the same reason
that we do not look in a love-sonnet for the portrait of a woman,
because men in such conditions of mind not only apply all virtues to
their idol, but all virtues in equal quantities. There is no outline,
because the artist cannot bear to put in a black line. This blaze of
benediction, this conflict between lights, has its place in poetry, not
in biography. The successful examples of it may be found, for instance,
in the more idealistic odes of Spenser. The design is sometimes almost
indecipherable, for the poet draws in silver upon white.
It is natural, of course, that Mr. Adderley should see Francis primarily
as the founder of the Franciscan Order. We suspect this was only one,
perhaps a minor one, of the things that he was; we suspect that one of
the minor things that Christ did was to found Christianity. But the vast
practical work of Francis is assuredly not to be ignored, for this
amazingly unworldly and almost maddeningly simple-minded infant was one
of the most consistently successful men that ever fought with this
bitter world. It is the custom to say that the secret of such men is
their profound belief in themselves, and this is true, but not all the
truth. Workhouses and lunatic asylums are thronged with men who believe
in themselves. Of Francis it is far truer to say that the secret of his
success was his profound belief in other people, and it is the lack of
this that has commonly been the curse of these obscure Napoleons.
Francis always assumed that everyone must be just as anxious about their
common relative, the water-rat, as he was. He planned a visit to the
Emperor to draw his attention to the needs of "his little sisters the
larks." He used to talk to any thieves and robbers he met about their
misfortune in being unable to give rein to their desire for holiness. It
was an innocent habit, and doubtless the robbers often "got round him,"
as the phrase goes. Quite as often, however, they discovered that he had
"got round" them, and discovered the other side, the side of secret
nobility.
Conceiving of St. Francis as primarily the founder of the Franciscan
Order, Mr. Adderley opens his narrative with an admirable sketch of the
history of Monasticism in Europe, which is certainly the best thing in
the book. He distinguishes clearly and fairly between the Manichæan
ideal that underlies so much of Eastern Monasticism and the ideal of
self-discipline which never wholly vanished from the Christian form. But
he does not throw any light on what must be for the outsider the
absorbing problem of this Catholic asceticism, for the excellent reason
that, not being an outsider, he does not find it a problem at all.
To most people, however, there is a fascinating inconsistency in the
position of St. Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language
than any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as
tears. He called his monks the mountebanks of God. He never forgot to
take pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water, as
it fell from his finger: he was, perhaps, the happiest of the sons of
men. Yet this man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation
of what we think the most imperious necessities; in his three vows of
poverty, chastity, and obedience, he denied to himself and those he
loved most, property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most
large-hearted and poetic spirits in that age found their most congenial
atmosphere in these awful renunciations? Why did he who loved where all
men were blind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? Why was he a
monk, and not a troubadour? These questions are far too large to be
answered fully here, but in any life of Francis they ought at least to
have been asked; we have a suspicion that if they were answered, we
should suddenly find that much of the enigma of this sullen time of ours
was answered also. So it was with the monks. The two great parties in
human affairs are only the party which sees life black against white,
and the party which sees it white against black, the party which
macerates and blackens itself with sacrifice because the background is
full of the blaze of an universal mercy, and the party which crowns
itself with flowers and lights itself with bridal torches because it
stands against a black curtain of incalculable night. The revellers are
old, and the monks are young. It was the monks who were the spendthrifts
of happiness, and we who are its misers.
Doubtless, as is apparent from Mr. Adderley's book, the clear and
tranquil life of the Three Vows had a fine and delicate effect on the
genius of Francis. He was primarily a poet. The perfection of his
literary instinct is shown in his naming the fire "brother," and the
water "sister," in the quaint demagogic dexterity of the appeal in the
sermon to the fishes "that they alone were saved in the Flood." In the
amazingly minute and graphic dramatisation of the life, disappointments,
and excuses of any shrub or beast that he happened to be addressing, his
genius has a curious resemblance to that of Burns. But if he avoided the
weakness of Burns' verses to animals, the occasional morbidity, bombast,
and moralisation on himself, the credit is surely due to a cleaner and
more transparent life.
The general attitude of St. Francis, like that of his Master, embodied a
kind of terrible common sense. The famous remark of the Caterpillar in
"Alice in Wonderland"--"Why not?" impresses us as his general motto. He
could not see why he should not be on good terms with all things. The
pomp of war and ambition, the great empire of the Middle Ages, and all
its fellows begin to look tawdry and top-heavy, under the rationality of
that innocent stare. His questions were blasting and devastating, like
the questions of a child. He would not have been afraid even of the
nightmares of cosmogony, for he had no fear in him. To him the world
was small, not because he had any views as to its size, but for the
reason that gossiping ladies find it small, because so many relatives
were to be found in it. If you had taken him to the loneliest star that
the madness of an astronomer can conceive, he would have only beheld in
it the features of a new friend.