CHAPTER X

THE TESTAMENT OF ST. FRANCIS 172

_Chapter I_

_The Problem of St. Francis_

A sketch of St. Francis of Assisi in modern English may be written in

one of three ways. Between these the writer must make his selection; and

the third way, which is adopted here, is in some respects the most

difficult of all. At least, it would be the most difficult if the other

two were not impossible.

First, he may deal with this great and most amazing man as a figure in

secular history and a model of social virtues. He may describe this

divine demagogue as being, as he probably was, the world's one quite

sincere democrat. He may say (what means very little) that St. Francis

was in advance of his age. He may say (what is quite true) that

St. Francis anticipated all that is most liberal and sympathetic in the

modern mood; the love of nature; the love of animals; the sense of

social compassion; the sense of the spiritual dangers of prosperity and

even of property. All those things that nobody understood before

Wordsworth were familiar to St. Francis. All those things that were

first discovered by Tolstoy had been taken for granted by St. Francis.

He could be presented, not only as a human but a humanitarian hero;

indeed as the first hero of humanism. He has been described as a sort of

morning star of the Renaissance. And in comparison with all these

things, his ascetical theology can be ignored or dismissed as a

contemporary accident, which was fortunately not a fatal accident. His

religion can be regarded as a superstition, but an inevitable

superstition, from which not even genius could wholly free itself; in

the consideration of which it would be unjust to condemn St. Francis for

his self-denial or unduly chide him for his chastity. It is quite true

that even from so detached a standpoint his stature would still appear

heroic. There would still be a great deal to be said about the man who

tried to end the Crusades by talking to the Saracens or who interceded

with the Emperor for the birds. The writer might describe in a purely

historical spirit the whole of that great Franciscan inspiration that

was felt in the painting of Giotto, in the poetry of Dante, in the

miracle plays that made possible the modern drama, and in so many other

things that are already appreciated by the modern culture. He may try to

do it, as others have done, almost without raising any religious

question at all. In short, he may try to tell the story of a saint

without God; which is like being told to write the life of Nansen and

forbidden to mention the North Pole.

Second, he may go to the opposite extreme, and decide, as it were, to be

defiantly devotional. He may make the theological enthusiasm as

thoroughly the theme as it was the theme of the first Franciscans. He

may treat religion as the real thing that it was to the real Francis of

Assisi. He can find an austere joy, so to speak, in parading the

paradoxes of asceticism and all the holy topsy-turvydom of humility. He

can stamp the whole history with the Stigmata, record fasts like fights

against a dragon; till in the vague modern mind St. Francis is as dark a

figure as St. Dominic. In short he can produce what many in our world

will regard as a sort of photographic negative, the reversal of all

lights and shades; what the foolish will find as impenetrable as

darkness and even many of the wise will find almost as invisible as if

it were written in silver upon white. Such a study of St. Francis would

be unintelligible to anyone who does not share his religion, perhaps

only partly intelligible to anyone who does not share his vocation.

According to degrees of judgment, it will be regarded as something too

bad or too good for the world. The only difficulty about doing the thing

in this way is that it cannot be done. It would really require a saint

to write the life of a saint. In the present case the objections to such

a course are insuperable.

Third, he may try to do what I have tried to do here; and, as I have

already suggested, the course has peculiar problems of its own. The

writer may put himself in the position of the ordinary modern outsider

and enquirer; as indeed the present writer is still largely and was once

entirely in that position. He may start from the standpoint of a man who

already admires St. Francis, but only for those things which such a man

finds admirable. In other words he may assume that the reader is at

least as enlightened as Renan or Matthew Arnold; but in the light of

that enlightenment he may try to illuminate what Renan and Matthew

Arnold left dark. He may try to use what is understood to explain what

is not understood. He may say to the modern English reader: "Here is an

historical character which is admittedly attractive to many of us

already, by its gaiety, its romantic imagination, its spiritual courtesy

and camaraderie, but which also contains elements (evidently equally

sincere and emphatic) which seem to you quite remote and repulsive. But

after all, this man was a man and not half a dozen men. What seems

inconsistency to you did not seem inconsistency to him. Let us see

whether we can understand, with the help of the existing understanding,

these other things that seem now to be doubly dark, by their intrinsic

gloom and their ironic contrast." I do not mean, of course, that I can

really reach such a psychological completeness in this crude and curt

outline. But I mean that this is the only controversial condition that I

shall here assume; that I am dealing with the sympathetic outsider. I

shall not assume any more or any less agreement than this. A materialist

may not care whether the inconsistencies are reconciled or not. A

Catholic may not see any inconsistencies to reconcile. But I am here

addressing the ordinary modern man, sympathetic but sceptical, and I can

only rather hazily hope that, by approaching the great saint's story

through what is evidently picturesque and popular about it, I may at

least leave the reader understanding a little more than he did before of

the consistency of a complete character; that by approaching it in this

way, we may at least get a glimmering of why the poet who praised his

lord the sun, often hid himself in a dark cavern, of why the saint who

was so gentle with his Brother the Wolf was so harsh to his Brother the

Ass (as he nicknamed his own body), of why the troubadour who said that

love set his heart on fire separated himself from women, of why the

singer who rejoiced in the strength and gaiety of the fire deliberately

rolled himself in the snow, of why the very song which cries with all

the passion of a pagan, "Praised be God for our Sister, Mother Earth,

which brings forth varied fruits and grass and glowing flowers," ends

almost with the words "Praised be God for our Sister, the death of the

body."

Renan and Matthew Arnold failed utterly at this test. They were content

to follow Francis with their praises until they were stopped by their

prejudices; the stubborn prejudices of the sceptic. The moment Francis

began to do something they did not understand or did not like, they did

not try to understand it, still less to like it; they simply turned

their backs on the whole business and "walked no more with him." No man

will get any further along a path of historical enquiry in that fashion.

These sceptics are really driven to drop the whole subject in despair,

to leave the most simple and sincere of all historical characters as a

mass of contradictions, to be praised on the principle of the curate's

egg. Arnold refers to the asceticism of Alverno almost hurriedly, as if

it were an unlucky but undeniable blot on the beauty of the story; or

rather as if it were a pitiable break-down and bathos at the end of the

story. Now this is simply to be stone-blind to the whole point of any

story. To represent Mount Alverno as the mere collapse of Francis is

exactly like representing Mount Calvary as the mere collapse of Christ.

Those mountains are mountains, whatever else they are, and it is

nonsense to say (like the Red Queen) that they are comparative hollows

or negative holes in the ground. They were quite manifestly meant to be

culminations and landmarks. To treat the Stigmata as a sort of scandal,

to be touched on tenderly but with pain, is exactly like treating the

original five wounds of Jesus Christ as five blots on His character. You

may dislike the idea of asceticism; you may dislike equally the idea of

martyrdom; for that matter you may have an honest and natural dislike of

the whole conception of sacrifice symbolised by the cross. But if it is

an intelligent dislike, you will still retain the capacity for seeing

the point of a story; of the story of a martyr or even the story of a

monk. You will not be able rationally to read the Gospel and regard the

Crucifixion as an afterthought or an anti-climax or an accident in the

life of Christ; it is obviously the point of the story like the point of

a sword, the sword that pierced the heart of the Mother of God.

And you will not be able rationally to read the story of a man presented

as a Mirror of Christ without understanding his final phase as a Man of

Sorrows, and at least artistically appreciating the appropriateness of

his receiving, in a cloud of mystery and isolation, inflicted by no

human hand, the unhealed everlasting wounds that heal the world.

The practical reconciliation of the gaiety and austerity I must leave

the story itself to suggest. But since I have mentioned Matthew Arnold

and Renan and the rationalistic admirers of St. Francis, I will here

give the hint of what it seems to me most advisable for such readers to

keep in mind. These distinguished writers found things like the Stigmata

a stumbling-block because to them a religion was a philosophy. It was an

impersonal thing; and it is only the most personal passion that provides

here an approximate earthly parallel. A man will not roll in the snow

for a stream of tendency by which all things fulfil the law of their

being. He will not go without food in the name of something, not

ourselves, that makes for righteousness. He will do things like this, or

pretty nearly like this, under quite a different impulse. He will do

these things when he is in love. The first fact to realise about

St. Francis is involved in the first fact with which his story starts;

that when he said from the first that he was a Troubadour, and said

later that he was a Troubadour of a newer and nobler romance, he was not

using a mere metaphor, but understood himself much better than the

scholars understand him. He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a

Troubadour. He was a Lover. He was a lover of God and he was really and

truly a lover of men; possibly a much rarer mystical vocation. A lover

of men is very nearly the opposite of a philanthropist; indeed the

pedantry of the Greek word carries something like a satire on itself. A

philanthropist may be said to love anthropoids. But as St. Francis did

not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ.

Say, if you think so, that he was a lunatic loving an imaginary person;

but an imaginary person, not an imaginary idea. And for the modern

reader the clue to the asceticism and all the rest can best be found in

the stories of lovers when they seemed to be rather like lunatics. Tell

it as the tale of one of the Troubadours, and the wild things he would

do for his lady, and the whole of the modern puzzle disappears. In such

a romance there would be no contradiction between the poet gathering

flowers in the sun and enduring a freezing vigil in the snow, between

his praising all earthly and bodily beauty and then refusing to eat,

between his glorifying gold and purple and perversely going in rags,

between his showing pathetically a hunger for a happy life and a thirst

for a heroic death. All these riddles would easily be resolved in the

simplicity of any noble love; only this was so noble a love that nine

men out of ten have hardly even heard of it. We shall see later that

this parallel of the earthly lover has a very practical relation to the

problems of his life, as to his relations with his father and with his

friends and their families. The modern reader will almost always find

that if he could only feel this kind of love as a reality, he could feel

this kind of extravagance as a romance. But I only note it here as a

preliminary point because, though it is very far from being the final

truth in the matter, it is the best approach to it. The reader cannot

even begin to see the sense of a story that may well seem to him a very

wild one, until he understands that to this great mystic his religion

was not a thing like a theory but a thing like a love-affair. And the

only purpose of this prefatory chapter is to explain the limits of this

present book; which is only addressed to that part of the modern world

which finds in St. Francis a certain modern difficulty; which can admire

him yet hardly accept him, or which can appreciate the saint almost

without the sanctity. And my only claim even to attempt such a task is

that I myself have for so long been in various stages of such a

condition. Many thousand things that I now partly comprehend I should

have thought utterly incomprehensible, many things I now hold sacred I

should have scouted as utterly superstitious, many things that seem to

me lucid and enlightened now they are seen from the inside I should

honestly have called dark and barbarous seen from the outside, when long

ago in those days of boyhood my fancy first caught fire with the glory

of Francis of Assisi. I too have lived in Arcady; but even in Arcady I

met one walking in a brown habit who loved the woods better than Pan.

The figure in the brown habit stands above the hearth in the room where

I write, and alone among many such images, at no stage of my pilgrimage

has he ever seemed to me a stranger. There is something of harmony

between the hearth and the firefight and my own first pleasure in his

words about his brother fire; for he stands far enough back in my memory

to mingle with all those more domestic dreams of the first days. Even

the fantastic shadows thrown by fire make a sort of shadow pantomime

that belongs to the nursery; yet the shadows were even then the shadows

of his favourite beasts and birds, as he saw them, grotesque but haloed

with the love of God. His Brother Wolf and Brother Sheep seemed then

almost like the Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit of a more Christian Uncle

Remus. I have come slowly to see many and more marvellous aspects of

such a man, but I have never lost that one. His figure stands on a sort

of bridge connecting my boyhood with my conversion to many other things;

for the romance of his religion had penetrated even the rationalism of

that vague Victorian time. In so far as I have had this experience, I

may be able to lead others a little further along that road; but only a

very little further. Nobody knows better than I do now that it is a road

upon which angels might fear to tread; but though I am certain of

failure I am not altogether overcome by fear; for he suffered fools

gladly.

_Chapter II_

_The World St. Francis Found_

The modern innovation which has substituted journalism for history, or

for that tradition that is the gossip of history, has had at least one

definite effect. It has insured that everybody should only hear the end

of every story. Journalists are in the habit of printing above the very

last chapters of their serial stories (when the hero and heroine are

just about to embrace in the last chapter, as only an unfathomable

perversity prevented them from doing in the first) the rather misleading

words, "You can begin this story here." But even this is not a complete

parallel; for the journals do give some sort of a summary of the story,

while they never give anything remotely resembling a summary of the

history. Newspapers not only deal with news, but they deal with

everything as if it were entirely new. Tutankamen, for instance, was

entirely new. It is exactly in the same fashion that we read that

Admiral Bangs has been shot, which is the first intimation we have that

he has ever been born. There is something singularly significant in the

use which journalism makes of its stores of biography. It never thinks

of publishing the life until it is publishing the death. As it deals

with individuals it deals with institutions and ideas. After the Great

War our public began to be told of all sorts of nations being

emancipated. It had never been told a word about their being enslaved.

We were called upon to judge of the justice of the settlements, when we

had never been allowed to hear of the very existence of the quarrels.

People would think it pedantic to talk about the Serbian epics and they

prefer to speak in plain every-day modern language about the

Yugo-Slavonic international new diplomacy; and they are quite excited

about something they call Czecho-Slovakia without apparently having ever

heard of Bohemia. Things that are as old as Europe are regarded as more

recent than the very latest claims pegged out on the prairies of

America. It is very exciting; like the last act of a play to people who

have only come into the theatre just before the curtain falls. But it

does not conduce exactly to knowing what it is all about. To those

content with the mere fact of a pistol-shot or a passionate embrace,

such a leisurely manner of patronising the drama may be recommended. To

those tormented by a merely intellectual curiosity about who is kissing

or killing whom, and why, it is unsatisfactory.

Most modern history, especially in England, suffers from the same

imperfection as journalism. At best it only tells half of the history of

Christendom; and that the second half without the first half. Men for

whom reason begins with the Revival of Learning, men for whom religion

begins with the Reformation, can never give a complete account of

anything, for they have to start with institutions whose origin they

cannot explain, or generally even imagine. Just as we hear of the

admiral being shot but have never heard of his being born, so we all

heard a great deal about the dissolution of the monasteries, but we

heard next to nothing about the creation of the monasteries. Now this

sort of history would be hopelessly insufficient, even for an

intelligent man who hated the monasteries. It is hopelessly insufficient

in connection with institutions that many intelligent men do in a quite

healthy spirit hate. For instance, it is possible that some of us have

occasionally seen some mention, by our learned leader-writers, of an

obscure institution called the Spanish Inquisition. Well, it really is

an obscure institution, according to them and the histories they read.

It is obscure because its origin is obscure. Protestant history simply

begins with the horrible thing in possession, as the pantomime begins

with the demon king in the goblin kitchen. It is likely enough that it

was, especially towards the end, a horrible thing that might be haunted

by demons; but if we say this was so, we have no notion why it was so.

To understand the Spanish Inquisition it would be necessary to discover

two things that we have never dreamed of bothering about; what Spain was

and what an Inquisition was. The former would bring in the whole great

question about the Crusade against the Moors; and by what heroic

chivalry a European nation freed itself of an alien domination from

Africa. The latter would bring in the whole business of the other

Crusade against the Albigensians, and why men loved and hated that

nihilistic vision from Asia. Unless we understand that there was in

these things originally the rush and romance of a Crusade, we cannot

understand how they came to deceive men or drag them on towards evil.

The Crusaders doubtless abused their victory, but there was a victory to

abuse. And where there is victory there is valour in the field and

popularity in the forum. There is some sort of enthusiasm that

encourages excesses or covers faults. For instance, I for one have

maintained from very early days the responsibility of the English for

their atrocious treatment of the Irish. But it would be quite unfair to

the English to describe even the devilry of '98 and leave out altogether

all mention of the war with Napoleon. It would be unjust to suggest that

the English mind was bent on nothing but the death of Emmett, when it

was more probably full of the glory of the death of Nelson.

Unfortunately '98 was very far from being the last date of such dirty

work; and only a few years ago our politicians started trying to rule by

random robbing and killing, while gently remonstrating with the Irish

for their memory of old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago. But

however badly we may think of the Black-and-Tan business, it would be

unjust to forget that most of us were not thinking of Black-and-Tan but

of khaki; and that khaki had just then a noble and national connotation

covering many things. To write of the war in Ireland and leave out the

war against Prussia, and the English sincerity about it, would be unjust

to the English. So to talk about the torture-engine as if it had been a

hideous toy is unjust to the Spanish. It does not tell sensibly from the

start the story of what the Spaniard did, and why. We may concede to our

contemporaries that in any case it is not a story that ends well. We do

not insist that in their version it should begin well. What we complain

of is that in their version it does not begin at all. They are only in

at the death; or even, like Lord Tom Noddy, too late for the hanging. It

is quite true that it was sometimes more horrible than any hanging; but

they only gather, so to speak, the very ashes of the ashes; the fag-end

of the faggot.

The case of the Inquisition is here taken at random, for it is one among

any number illustrating the same thing; and not because it is especially

connected with St. Francis, in whatever sense it may have been connected

with St. Dominic. It may well be suggested later indeed that St. Francis

is unintelligible, just as St. Dominic is unintelligible, unless we do

understand something of what the thirteenth century meant by heresy and

a crusade. But for the moment I use it as a lesser example for a much

larger purpose. It is to point out that to begin the story of

St. Francis with the birth of St. Francis would be to miss the whole

point of the story, or rather not to tell the story at all. And it is to

suggest that the modern tail-foremost type of journalistic history

perpetually fails us. We learn about reformers without knowing what they

had to reform, about rebels without a notion of what they rebelled

against, of memorials that are not connected with any memory and

restorations of things that had apparently never existed before. Even at

the expense of this chapter appearing disproportionate, it is necessary

to say something about the great movements that led up to the entrance

of the founder of the Franciscans. It may seem to mean describing a

world, or even a universe, in order to describe a man. It will

inevitably mean that the world or the universe will be described with a

few desperate generalisations in a few abrupt sentences. But so far from

its meaning that we see a very small figure under so large a sky, it

will mean that we must measure the sky before we can begin to measure

the towering stature of the man.

And this phrase alone brings me to the preliminary suggestions that seem

necessary before even a slight sketch of the life of St. Francis. It is

necessary to realise, in however rude and elementary a fashion, into

what sort of a world St. Francis entered and what has been the history

of that world, at least in so far as it affected him. It is necessary to

have, if only in a few sentences, a sort of preface in the form of an

Outline of History, if we may borrow the phrase of Mr. Wells. In the

case of Mr. Wells himself, it is evident that the distinguished novelist

suffered the same disadvantage as if he had been obliged to write a

novel of which he hated the hero. To write history and hate Rome, both

pagan and papal, is practically to hate nearly everything that has

happened. It comes very near to hating humanity on purely humanitarian

grounds. To dislike both the priest and the soldier, both the laurels of

the warrior and the lilies of the saint, is to suffer a division from

the mass of mankind for which not all the dexterities of the finest and

most flexible of modern intelligences can compensate. A much wider

sympathy is needed for the historical setting of St. Francis, himself

both a soldier and a saint. I will therefore conclude this chapter with

a few generalisations about the world that St. Francis found.

Men will not believe because they will not broaden their minds. As a

matter of individual belief, I should of course express it by saying

that they are not sufficiently catholic to be Catholic. But I am not

going to discuss here the doctrinal truths of Christianity, but simply

the broad historical fact of Christianity, as it might appear to a

really enlightened and imaginative person even if he were not a

Christian. What I mean at the moment is that the majority of doubts are

made out of details. In the course of random reading a man comes across

a pagan custom that strikes him as picturesque or a Christian action

that strikes him as cruel; but he does not enlarge his mind sufficiently

to see the main truth about pagan custom or the Christian reaction

against it. Until we understand, not necessarily in detail, but in their

big bulk and proportion that pagan progress and that Christian reaction,

we cannot really understand the point of history at which St. Francis

appears or what his great popular mission was all about.

Now everybody knows, I imagine, that the twelfth and thirteenth

centuries were an awakening of the world. They were a fresh flowering of

culture and the creative arts after a long spell of much sterner and

even more sterile experience which we call the Dark Ages. They may be

called an emancipation; they were certainly an end; an end of what may

at least seem a harsher and more inhuman time. But what was it that was

ended? From what was it that men were emancipated? That is where there

is a real collision and point at issue between the different

philosophies of history. On the merely external and secular side, it has

been truly said that men awoke from a sleep; but there had been dreams

in that sleep of a mystical and sometimes of a monstrous kind. In that

rationalistic routine into which most modern historians have fallen, it

is considered enough to say that they were emancipated from mere savage

superstition and advanced towards mere civilised enlightenment. Now this

is the big blunder that stands as a stumbling-block at the very

beginning of our story. Anybody who supposes that the Dark Ages were

plain darkness and nothing else, and that the dawn of the thirteenth

century was plain daylight and nothing else, will not be able to make

head or tail of the human story of St. Francis of Assisi. The truth is

that the joy of St. Francis and his Jongleurs de Dieu was not merely an

awakening. It was something which cannot be understood without

understanding their own mystical creed. The end of the Dark Ages was not

merely the end of a sleep. It was certainly not merely the end of a

superstitious enslavement. It was the end of something belonging to a

quite definite but quite different order of ideas.

It was the end of a penance; or, if it be preferred, a purgation. It

marked the moment when a certain spiritual expiation had been finally

worked out and certain spiritual diseases had been finally expelled from

the system. They had been expelled by an era of asceticism, which was

the only thing that could have expelled them. Christianity had entered

the world to cure the world; and she had cured it in the only way in

which it could be cured.

Viewed merely in an external and experimental fashion, the whole of the

high civilisation of antiquity had ended in the learning of a certain

lesson; that is, in its conversion to Christianity. But that lesson was

a psychological fact as well as a theological faith. That pagan

civilisation had indeed been a very high civilisation. It would not

weaken our thesis, it might even strengthen it, to say that it was the

highest that humanity ever reached. It had discovered its still

unrivalled arts of poetry and plastic representation; it had discovered

its own permanent political ideals; it had discovered its own clear

system of logic and of language. But above all, it had discovered its

own mistake.

That mistake was too deep to be ideally defined; the short-hand of it is

to call it the mistake of nature-worship. It might almost as truly be

called the mistake of being natural; and it was a very natural mistake.

The Greeks, the great guides and pioneers of pagan antiquity, started

out with the idea of something splendidly obvious and direct; the idea

that if man walked straight ahead on the high road of reason and nature,

he could come to no harm; especially if he was, as the Greek was,

eminently enlightened and intelligent. We might be so flippant as to say

that man was simply to follow his nose, so long as it was a Greek nose.

And the case of the Greeks themselves is alone enough to illustrate the

strange but certain fatality that attends upon this fallacy. No sooner

did the Greeks themselves begin to follow their own noses and their own

notion of being natural, than the queerest thing in history seems to

have happened to them. It was much too queer to be an easy matter to

discuss. It may be remarked that our more repulsive realists never give

us the benefit of their realism. Their studies of unsavoury subjects

never take note of the testimony which they bear to the truths of a

traditional morality. But if we had the taste for such things, we could

cite thousands of such things as part of the case for Christian morals.

And an instance of this is found in the fact that nobody has written, in

this sense, a real moral history of the Greeks. Nobody has seen the

scale or the strangeness of the story. The wisest men in the world set

out to be natural; and the most unnatural thing in the world was the

very first thing they did. The immediate effect of saluting the sun and

the sunny sanity of nature was a perversion spreading like a pestilence.

The greatest and even the purest philosophers could not apparently avoid

this low sort of lunacy. Why? It would seem simple enough for the people

whose poets had conceived Helen of Troy, whose sculptors had carved the

Venus of Milo, to remain healthy on the point. The truth is that people

who worship health cannot remain healthy. When Man goes straight he goes

crooked. When he follows his nose he manages somehow to put his nose out

of joint, or even to cut off his nose to spite his face; and that in

accordance with something much deeper in human nature than

nature-worshippers could ever understand. It was the discovery of that

deeper thing, humanly speaking, that constituted the conversion to

Christianity. There is a bias in man like the bias in the bowl; and

Christianity was the discovery of how to correct the bias and therefore

hit the mark. There are many who will smile at the saying; but it is

profoundly true to say that the glad good news brought by the Gospel was

the news of original sin.

Rome rose at the expense of her Greek teachers largely because she did

not entirely consent to be taught these tricks. She had a much more

decent domestic tradition; but she ultimately suffered from the same

fallacy in her religious tradition; which was necessarily in no small

degree the heathen tradition of nature-worship. What was the matter with

the whole heathen civilisation was that there was nothing for the mass

of men in the way of mysticism, except that concerned with the mystery

of the nameless forces of nature, such as sex and growth and death. In

the Roman Empire also, long before the end, we find nature-worship

inevitably producing things that are against nature. Cases like that of

Nero have passed into a proverb, when Sadism sat on a throne brazen in

the broad daylight. But the truth I mean is something much more subtle

and universal than a conventional catalogue of atrocities. What had

happened to the human imagination, as a whole, was that the whole world

was coloured by dangerous and rapidly deteriorating passions; by natural

passions becoming unnatural passions. Thus the effect of treating sex as

only one innocent natural thing was that every other innocent natural

thing became soaked and sodden with sex. For sex cannot be admitted to a

mere equality among elementary emotions or experiences like eating and

sleeping. The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant.

There is something dangerous and disproportionate in its place in human

nature, for whatever reason; and it does really need a special

purification and dedication. The modern talk about sex being free like

any other sense, about the body being beautiful like any tree or flower,

is either a description of the Garden of Eden or a piece of thoroughly

bad psychology, of which the world grew weary two thousand years ago.

This is not to be confused with mere self-righteous sensationalism about

the wickedness of the pagan world. It was not so much that the pagan

world was wicked as that it was good enough to realise that its paganism

was becoming wicked, or rather was on the logical high road to

wickedness. I mean that there was no future for "natural magic"; to

deepen it was only to darken it into black magic. There was no future

for it; because in the past it had only been innocent because it was

young. We might say it had only been innocent because it was shallow.

Pagans were wiser than paganism; that is why the pagans became

Christians. Thousands of them had philosophy and family virtues and

military honour to hold them up; but by this time the purely popular

thing called religion was certainly dragging them down. When this

reaction against the evil is allowed for, it is true to repeat that it

was an evil that was everywhere. In another and more literal sense its

name was Pan.

It was no metaphor to say that these people needed a new heaven and a

new earth; for they had really defiled their own earth and even their

own heaven. How could their case be met by looking at the sky, when

erotic legends were scrawled in stars across it; how could they learn

anything from the love of birds and flowers after the sort of love

stories that were told of them? It is impossible here to multiply

evidences, and one small example may stand for the rest. We know what

sort of sentimental associations are called up to us by the phrase "a

garden"; and how we think mostly of the memory of melancholy and

innocent romances, or quite as often of some gracious maiden lady or

kindly old parson pottering under a yew hedge, perhaps in sight of a

village spire. Then, let anyone who knows a little Latin poetry recall

suddenly what would once have stood in place of the sun-dial or the

fountain, obscene and monstrous in the sun; and of what sort was the god

of their gardens.

Nothing could purge this obsession but a religion that was literally

unearthly. It was no good telling such people to have a natural religion

full of stars and flowers; there was not a flower or even a star that

had not been stained. They had to go into the desert where they could

find no flowers or even into the cavern where they could see no stars.

Into that desert and that cavern the highest human intellect entered for

some four centuries; and it was the very wisest thing it could do.

Nothing but the stark supernatural stood up for its salvation; if God

could not save it, certainly the gods could not. The Early Church called

the gods of paganism devils; and the Early Church was perfectly right.

Whatever natural religion may have had to do with their beginnings,

nothing but fiends now inhabited those hollow shrines. Pan was nothing

but panic. Venus was nothing but venereal vice. I do not mean for a

moment, of course, that all the individual pagans were of this character

even to the end; but it was as individuals that they differed from it.

Nothing distinguishes paganism from Christianity so clearly as the fact

that the individual thing called philosophy had little or nothing to do

with the social thing called religion. Anyhow it was no good to preach

natural religion to people to whom nature had grown as unnatural as any

religion. They knew much better than we do what was the matter with them

and what sort of demons at once tempted and tormented them; and they

wrote across that great space of history the text: "This sort goeth not

out but by prayer and fasting."

Now the historic importance of St. Francis and the transition from the

twelfth to the thirteenth century, lies in the fact that they marked the

end of this expiation. Men at the close of the Dark Ages may have been

rude and unlettered and unlearned in everything but wars with heathen

tribes, more barbarous than themselves, but they were clean. They were

like children; the first beginnings of their rude arts have all the

clean pleasure of children. We have to conceive them in Europe as a

whole living under little local governments, feudal in so far as they

were a survival of fierce wars with the barbarians, often monastic and

carrying a more friendly and fatherly character, still faintly imperial

in so far as Rome still ruled as a great legend. But in Italy something

had survived more typical of the finer spirit of antiquity: the

republic. Italy was dotted with little states, largely democratic in

their ideals, and often filled with real citizens. But the city no

longer lay open as under the Roman peace, but was pent in high walls for

defence against feudal war and all the citizens had to be soldiers. One

of these stood in a steep and striking position on the wooded hills of

Umbria; and its name was Assisi. Out of its deep gate under its high

turrets was to come the message that was the gospel of the hour, "Your

warfare is accomplished, your iniquity is pardoned." But it was out of

all these fragmentary things of feudalism and freedom and remains of

Roman Law that there was to rise, at the beginning of the thirteenth

century, vast and almost universal, the mighty civilisation of the

Middle Ages.

It is an exaggeration to attribute it entirely to the inspiration of any

one man, even the most original genius of the thirteenth century. Its

elementary ethics of fraternity and fair play had never been entirely

extinct and Christendom had never been anything less than Christian. The

great truisms about justice and pity can be found in the rudest monastic

records of the barbaric transition or the stiffest maxims of the

Byzantine decline. And early in the eleventh and twelfth centuries a

larger moral movement had clearly begun. But what may fairly be said of

it is this, that over all those first movements there was still

something of that ancient austerity that came from the long penitential

period. It was the twilight of morning; but it was still a grey

twilight. This may be illustrated by the mere mention of two or three of

these reforms before the Franciscan reform. The monastic institution

itself, of course, was far older than all these things; indeed it was

undoubtedly almost as old as Christianity. Its counsels of perfection

had always taken the form of vows of chastity and poverty and obedience.

With these unworldly aims it had long ago civilised a great part of the

world. The monks had taught people to plough and sow as well as to read

and write; indeed they had taught the people nearly everything that the

people knew. But it may truly be said that the monks were severely

practical, in the sense that they were not only practical but also

severe; though they were generally severe with themselves and practical

for other people. All this early monastic movement had long ago settled

down and doubtless often deteriorated; but when we come to the first

medieval movements this sterner character is still apparent. Three

examples may be taken to illustrate the point.

First, the ancient social mould of slavery was already beginning to

melt. Not only was the slave turning into the serf, who was practically

free as regards his own farm and family life, but many lords were

freeing slaves and serfs altogether. This was done under the pressure of

the priests; but especially it was done in the spirit of a penance. In

one sense, of course, any Catholic society must have an atmosphere of

penance; but I am speaking of that rather sterner spirit of penance

which had expiated the excesses of paganism. There was about such

restitutions the atmosphere of the death-bed; as many of them doubtless

were examples of death-bed repentance. A very honest atheist with whom I

once debated made use of the expression, "Men have only been kept in

slavery by the fear of hell." As I pointed out to him, if he had said

that men had only been freed from slavery by the fear of hell, he would

at least have been referring to an unquestionable historical fact.

Another example was the sweeping reform of Church discipline by Pope

Gregory the Seventh. It really was a reform, undertaken from the highest

motives and having the healthiest results; it conducted a searching

inquisition against simony or the financial corruptions of the clergy;

it insisted on a more serious and self-sacrificing ideal for the life of

a parish priest. But the very fact that this largely took the form of

making universal the obligation of celibacy will strike the note of

something which, however noble, would seem to many to be vaguely

negative. The third example is in one sense the strongest of all. For

the third example was a war; a heroic war and for many of us a holy war;

but still something having all the stark and terrible responsibilities

of war. There is no space here to say all that should be said about the

true nature of the Crusades. Everybody knows that in the very darkest

hour of the Dark Ages a sort of heresy had sprung up in Arabia and

become a new religion of a military but nomadic sort, invoking the name

of Mahomet. Intrinsically it had a character found in many heresies from

the Moslem to the Monist. It seemed to the heretic a sane simplification

of religion; while it seems to the Catholic an insane simplification of

religion, because it simplifies all to a single idea and so loses the

breadth and balance of Catholicism. Anyhow its objective character was

that of a military danger to Christendom and Christendom had struck at

the very heart of it, in seeking to reconquer the Holy Places. The great

Duke Godfrey and the first Christians who stormed Jerusalem were heroes

if there were ever any in the world; but they were the heroes of a

tragedy.

Now I have taken these two or three examples of the earlier medieval

movements in order to note about them one general character, which

refers back to the penance that followed paganism. There is something in

all these movements that is bracing even while it is still bleak, like a

wind blowing between the clefts of the mountains. That wind, austere and

pure, of which the poet speaks, is really the spirit of the time, for it

is the wind of a world that has at last been purified. To anyone who can

appreciate atmospheres there is something clear and clean about the

atmosphere of this crude and often harsh society. Its very lusts are

clean; for they have no longer any smell of perversion. Its very

cruelties are clean; they are not the luxurious cruelties of the

amphitheatre. They come either of a very simple horror at blasphemy or a

very simple fury at insult. Gradually against this grey background

beauty begins to appear, as something really fresh and delicate and

above all surprising. Love returning is no longer what was once called

platonic but what is still called chivalric love. The flowers and stars

have recovered their first innocence. Fire and water are felt to be

worthy to be the brother and sister of a saint. The purge of paganism is

complete at last.

For water itself has been washed. Fire itself has been purified as by

fire. Water is no longer that water into which slaves were flung to feed

the fishes. Fire is no longer that fire through which children were

passed to Moloch. Flowers smell no more of the forgotten garlands

gathered in the garden of Priapus; stars stand no more as signs of the

far frigidity of gods as cold as those cold fires. They are all like

things newly made and awaiting new names, from one who shall come to

name them. Neither the universe nor the earth have now any longer the

old sinister significance of the world. They await a new reconciliation

with man, but they are already capable of being reconciled. Man has

stripped from his soul the last rag of nature-worship, and can return to

nature.

While it was yet twilight a figure appeared silently and suddenly on a

little hill above the city, dark against the fading darkness. For it was

the end of a long and stern night, a night of vigil, not unvisited by

stars. He stood with his hands lifted, as in so many statues and

pictures, and about him was a burst of birds singing; and behind him was

the break of day.

_Chapter III_

_Francis the Fighter_

According to one tale, which if not true would be none the less typical,

the very name of St. Francis was not so much a name as a nickname. There

would be something akin to his familiar and popular instinct in the

notion that he was nicknamed very much as an ordinary schoolboy might be

called "Frenchy" at school. According to this version, his name was not

Francis at all but John; and his companions called him "Francesco" or

"The little Frenchman" because of his passion for the French poetry of

the Troubadours. The more probable story is that his mother had named

him John when he was born in the absence of his father, who shortly

returned from a visit to France, where his commercial success had filled

him with so much enthusiasm for French taste and social usage that he

gave his son the new name signifying the Frank or Frenchman. In either

case the name has a certain significance, as connecting Francis from the

first with what he himself regarded as the romantic fairyland of the

Troubadours.

The name of the father was Pietro Bernardone and he was a substantial

citizen of the guild of the cloth merchants in the town of Assisi. It is

hard to describe the position of such a man without some appreciation of

the position of such a guild and even of such a town. It did not exactly

correspond to anything that is meant in modern times either by a

merchant or a man of business or a tradesman, or anything that exists

under the conditions of capitalism. Bernardone may have employed people

but he was not an employer; that is, he did not belong to an employing

class as distinct from an employed class. The person we definitely hear

of his employing is his son Francis; who, one is tempted to guess, was

about the last person that any man of business would employ if it were

convenient to employ anybody else. He was rich, as a peasant may be rich

by the work of his own family; but he evidently expected his own family

to work in a way almost as plain as a peasant's. He was a prominent

citizen, but he belonged to a social order which existed to prevent him

being too prominent to be a citizen. It kept all such people on their

own simple level, and no prosperity connoted that escape from drudgery

by which in modern times the lad might have seemed to be a lord or a

fine gentleman or something other than the cloth merchant's son. This is

a rule that is proved even in the exception. Francis was one of those

people who are popular with everybody in any case; and his guileless

swagger as a Troubadour and leader of French fashions made him a sort of

romantic ringleader among the young men of the town. He threw money

about both in extravagance and benevolence, in a way native to a man who

never, all his life, exactly understood what money was. This moved his

mother to mingled exultation and exasperation and she said, as any

tradesman's wife might say anywhere: "He is more like a prince than our

son." But one of the earliest glimpses we have of him shows him as

simply selling bales of cloth from a booth in the market; which his

mother may or may not have believed to be one of the habits of princes.

This first glimpse of the young man in the market is symbolic in more

ways than one. An incident occurred which is perhaps the shortest and

sharpest summary that could be given of certain curious things which

were a part of his character, long before it was transfigured by

transcendental faith. While he was selling velvet and fine embroideries

to some solid merchant of the town, a beggar came imploring alms;

evidently in a somewhat tactless manner. It was a rude and simple

society and there were no laws to punish a starving man for expressing

his need for food, such as have been established in a more humanitarian

age; and the lack of any organised police permitted such persons to

pester the wealthy without any great danger. But there was, I believe,

in many places a local custom of the guild forbidding outsiders to

interrupt a fair bargain; and it is possible that some such thing put

the mendicant more than normally in the wrong. Francis had all his life

a great liking for people who had been put hopelessly in the wrong. On

this occasion he seems to have dealt with the double interview with

rather a divided mind; certainly with distraction, possibly with

irritation. Perhaps he was all the more uneasy because of the almost

fastidious standard of manners that came to him quite naturally. All are

agreed that politeness flowed from him from the first, like one of the

public fountains in such a sunny Italian market place. He might have

written among his own poems as his own motto that verse of Mr. Belloc's

poem—

'Of Courtesy, it is much less

Than courage of heart or holiness,

Yet in my walks it seems to me

That the grace of God is in Courtesy.'

Nobody ever doubted that Francis Bernardone had courage of heart, even

of the most ordinary manly and military sort; and a time was to come

when there was quite as little doubt about the holiness and the grace of

God. But I think that if there was one thing about which he was

punctilious, it was punctiliousness. If there was one thing of which so

humble a man could be said to be proud, he was proud of good manners.

Only behind his perfectly natural urbanity were wider and even wilder

possibilities, of which we get the first flash in this trivial incident.

Anyhow Francis was evidently torn two ways with the botheration of two

talkers, but finished his business with the merchant somehow; and when

he had finished it, found the beggar was gone. Francis leapt from his

booth, left all the bales of velvet and embroidery behind him apparently

unprotected, and went racing across the market place like an arrow from

the bow. Still running, he threaded the labyrinth of the narrow and

crooked streets of the little town, looking for his beggar, whom he

eventually discovered; and loaded that astonished mendicant with money.

Then he straightened himself, so to speak, and swore before God that he

would never all his life refuse help to a poor man. The sweeping

simplicity of this undertaking is extremely characteristic. Never was

any man so little afraid of his own promises. His life was one riot of

rash vows; of rash vows that turned out right.

The first biographers of Francis, naturally alive with the great

religious revolution that he wrought, equally naturally looked back to

his first years chiefly for omens and signs of such a spiritual

earthquake. But writing at a greater distance, we shall not decrease

that dramatic effect, but rather increase it, if we realise that there

was not at this time any external sign of anything particularly mystical

about the young man. He had not anything of that early sense of his

vocation that has belonged to some of the saints. Over and above his

main ambition to win fame as a French poet, he would seem to have most

often thought of winning fame as a soldier. He was born kind; he was

brave in the normal boyish fashion; but he drew the line both in

kindness and bravery pretty well where most boys would have drawn it;

for instance, he had the human horror of leprosy of which few normal

people felt any need to be ashamed. He had the love of gay and bright

apparel which was inherent in the heraldic taste of medieval times and

seems altogether to have been rather a festive figure. If he did not

paint the town red, he would probably have preferred to paint it all the

colours of the rainbow, as in a medieval picture. But in this story of

the young man in gay garments scampering after the vanishing beggar in

rags there are certain notes of his natural individuality that must be

assumed from first to last.

For instance, there is the spirit of swiftness. In a sense he continued

running for the rest of his life, as he ran after the beggar. Because

nearly all the errands he ran on were errands of mercy, there appeared

in his portraiture a mere element of mildness which was true in the

truest sense, but is easily misunderstood. A certain precipitancy was

the very poise of his soul. This saint should be represented among the

other saints as angels were sometimes represented in pictures of angels;

with flying feet or even with feathers; in the spirit of the text that

makes angels winds and messengers a flaming fire. It is a curiosity of

language that courage actually means running; and some of our sceptics

will no doubt demonstrate that courage really means running away. But

his courage was running, in the sense of rushing. With all his

gentleness, there was originally something of impatience in his

impetuosity. The psychological truth about it illustrates very well the

modern muddle about the word "practical." If we mean by what is

practical what is most immediately practicable, we mean merely what is

easiest. In that sense St. Francis was very unpractical, and his

ultimate aims were very unworldly. But if we mean by practicality a

preference for prompt effort and energy over doubt or delay, he was very

practical indeed. Some might call him a madman, but he was the very

reverse of a dreamer. Nobody would be likely to call him a man of

business; but he was very emphatically a man of action. In some of his

early experiments he was rather too much of a man of action; he acted

too soon and was too practical to be prudent. But at every turn of his

extraordinary career we shall find him flinging himself round corners in

the most unexpected fashion, as when he flew through the crooked streets

after the beggar.

Another element implied in the story, which was already partially a

natural instinct, before it became a supernatural ideal, was something

that had never perhaps been wholly lost in those little republics of

medieval Italy. It was something very puzzling to some people; something

clearer as a rule to Southerners than to Northerners, and I think to

Catholics than to Protestants; the quite natural assumption of the

equality of men. It has nothing necessarily to do with the Franciscan

love for men; on the contrary one of its merely practical tests is the

equality of the duel. Perhaps a gentleman will never be fully an

egalitarian until he can really quarrel with his servant. But it was an

antecedent condition of the Franciscan brotherhood; and we feel it in

this early and secular incident. Francis, I fancy, felt a real doubt

about which he must attend to, the beggar or the merchant; and having

attended to the merchant, he turned to attend to the beggar; he thought

of them as two men. This is a thing much more difficult to describe, in

a society from which it is absent, but it was the original basis of the

whole business; it was why the popular movement arose in that sort of

place and that sort of man. His imaginative magnanimity afterwards rose

like a tower to starry heights that might well seem dizzy and even

crazy; but it was founded on this high table-land of human equality.

I have taken this the first among a hundred tales of the youth of

St. Francis, and dwelt on its significance a little, because until we

have learned to look for the significance there will often seem to be

little but a sort of light sentiment in telling the story. St. Francis

is not a proper person to be patronised with merely "pretty" stories.

There are any number of them; but they are too often used so as to be a

sort of sentimental sediment of the medieval world, instead of being, as

the saint emphatically is, a challenge to the modern world. We must take

his real human development somewhat more seriously; and the next story

in which we get a real glimpse of it is in a very different setting. But

in exactly the same way it opens, as if by accident, certain abysses of

the mind and perhaps of the unconscious mind. Francis still looks more

or less like an ordinary young man; and it is only when we look at him

as an ordinary young man, that we realise what an extraordinary young

man he must be.

War had broken out between Assisi and Perugia. It is now fashionable to

say in a satirical spirit that such wars did not so much break out as go

on indefinitely between the city-states of medieval Italy. It will be

enough to say here that if one of these medieval wars had really gone on

without stopping for a century, it might possibly have come within a

remote distance of killing as many people as we kill in a year, in one

of our great modern scientific wars between our great modern industrial

empires. But the citizens of the medieval republic were certainly under

the limitation of only being asked to die for the things with which they

had always lived, the houses they inhabited, the shrines they venerated

and the rulers and representatives they knew; and had not the larger

vision calling them to die for the latest rumours about remote colonies

as reported in anonymous newspapers. And if we infer from our own

experience that war paralysed civilisation, we must at least admit that

these warring towns turned out a number of paralytics who go by the

names of Dante and Michael Angelo, Ariosto and Titian, Leonardo and

Columbus, not to mention Catherine of Siena and the subject of this

story. While we lament all this local patriotism as a hubbub of the Dark

Ages, it must seem a rather curious fact that about three quarters of

the greatest men who ever lived came out of these little towns and were

often engaged in these little wars. It remains to be seen what will

ultimately come out of our large towns; but there has been no sign of

anything of this sort since they became large; and I have sometimes been

haunted by a fancy of my youth, that these things will not come till

there is a city wall round Clapham and the tocsin is rung at night to

arm the citizens of Wimbledon.

Anyhow, the tocsin was rung in Assisi and the citizens armed, and among

them Francis the son of the cloth merchant. He went out to fight with

some company of lancers and in some fight or foray or other he and his

little band were taken prisoners. To me it seems most probable that

there had been some tale of treason or cowardice about the disaster; for

we are told that there was one of the captives with whom his

fellow-prisoners flatly refused to associate even in prison; and when

this happens in such circumstances, it is generally because the military

blame for the surrender is thrown on some individual. Anyhow, somebody

noted a small but curious thing, though it might seem rather negative

than positive. Francis, we are told, moved among his captive companions

with all his characteristic courtesy and even conviviality, "liberal and

hilarious" as somebody said of him, resolved to keep up their spirits

and his own. And when he came across the mysterious outcast, traitor or

coward or whatever he was called, he simply treated him exactly like all

the rest, neither with coldness nor compassion, but with the same

unaffected gaiety and good fellowship. But if there had been present in

that prison someone with a sort of second sight about the truth and

trend of spiritual things, he might have known he was in the presence of

something new and seemingly almost anarchic; a deep tide driving out to

uncharted seas of charity. For in this sense there was really something

wanting in Francis of Assisi, something to which he was blind that he

might see better and more beautiful things. All those limits in good

fellowship and good form, all those landmarks of social life that divide

the tolerable and the intolerable, all those social scruples and

conventional conditions that are normal and even noble in ordinary men,

all those things that hold many decent societies together, could never

hold this man at all. He liked as he liked; he seems to have liked

everybody, but especially those whom everybody disliked him for liking.

Something very vast and universal was already present in that narrow

dungeon; and such a seer might have seen in its darkness that red halo

of _caritas caritatum_ which marks one saint among saints as well as

among men. He might have heard the first whisper of that wild blessing

that afterwards took the form of a blasphemy; "He listens to those to

whom God himself will not listen."

But though such a seer might have seen such a truth, it is exceedingly

doubtful if Francis himself saw it. He had acted out of an unconscious

largeness, or in the fine medieval phrase largesse, within himself,

something that might almost have been lawless if it had not been

reaching out to a more divine law; but it is doubtful whether he yet

knew that the law was divine. It is evident that he had not at this time

any notion of abandoning the military, still less of adopting the

monastic life. It is true that there is not, as pacifists and prigs

imagine, the least inconsistency between loving men and fighting them,

if we fight them fairly and for a good cause. But it seems to me that

there was more than this involved; that the mind of the young man was

really running towards a military morality in any case. About this time

the first calamity crossed his path in the form of a malady which was to

revisit him many times and hamper his headlong career. Sickness made him

more serious; but one fancies it would only have made him a more serious

soldier, or even more serious about soldiering. And while he was

recovering, something rather larger than the little feuds and raids of

the Italian towns opened an avenue of adventure and ambition. The crown

of Sicily, a considerable centre of controversy at the time, was

apparently claimed by a certain Gauthier de Brienne, and the Papal cause

to aid which Gauthier was called in aroused enthusiasm among a number of

young Assisians, including Francis, who proposed to march into Apulia on

the count's behalf; perhaps his French name had something to do with it.

For it must never be forgotten that though that world was in one sense a

world of little things, it was a world of little things concerned about

great things. There was more internationalism in the lands dotted with

tiny republics than in the huge homogeneous impenetrable national

divisions of to-day. The legal authority of the Assisian magistrates

might hardly reach further than a bow-shot from their high embattled

city walls. But their sympathies might be with the ride of the Normans

through Sicily or the palace of the Troubadours at Toulouse; with the

Emperor throned in the German forests or the great Pope dying in the

exile of Salerno. Above all, it must be remembered that when the

interests of an age are mainly religious they must be universal. Nothing

can be more universal than the universe. And there are several things

about the religious position at that particular moment which modern

people not unnaturally fail to realise. For one thing, modern people

naturally think of people so remote as ancient people, and even early

people. We feel vaguely that these things happened in the first ages of

the Church. The Church was already a good deal more than a thousand

years old. That is, the Church was then rather older than France is now,

a great deal older than England is now. And she looked old then; almost

as old as she does now; possibly older than she does now. The Church

looked like great Charlemagne with the long white beard, who had already

fought a hundred wars with the heathen, and in the legend was bidden by

an angel to go forth and fight once more though he was two hundred years

old. The Church had topped her thousand years and turned the corner of

the second thousand; she had come through the Dark Ages in which nothing

could be done except desperate fighting against the barbarians and the

stubborn repetition of the creed. The creed was still being repeated

after the victory or escape; but it is not unnatural to suppose that

there was something a little monotonous about the repetition. The Church

looked old then as now; and there were some who thought her dying then

as now. In truth orthodoxy was not dead but it may have been dull; it is

certain that some people began to think it dull. The Troubadours of the

Provençal movement had already begun to take that turn or twist towards

Oriental fancies and the paradox of pessimism, which always come to

Europeans as something fresh when their own sanity seems to be something

stale. It is likely enough that after all those centuries of hopeless

war without and ruthless asceticism within, the official orthodoxy

seemed to be something stale. The freshness and freedom of the first

Christians seemed then as much as now a lost and almost prehistoric age

of gold. Rome was still more rational than anything else; the Church was

really wiser but it may well have seemed wearier than the world. There

was something more adventurous and alluring, perhaps, about the mad

metaphysics that had been blown across out of Asia. Dreams were

gathering like dark clouds over the Midi to break in a thunder of

anathema and civil war. Only the light lay on the great plain round

Rome; but the light was blank and the plain was flat; and there was no

stir in the still air and the immemorial silence about the sacred town.

High in the dark house of Assisi Francesco Bernardone slept and dreamed

of arms. There came to him in the darkness a vision splendid with

swords, patterned after the cross in the Crusading fashion, of spears

and shields and helmets hung in a high armoury, all bearing the sacred

sign. When he awoke he accepted the dream as a trumpet bidding him to

the battlefield, and rushed out to take horse and arms. He delighted in

all the exercises of chivalry; and was evidently an accomplished

cavalier and fighting man by the tests of the tournament and the camp.

He would doubtless at any time have preferred a Christian sort of

chivalry; but it seems clear that he was also in a mood which thirsted

for glory, though in him that glory would always have been identical

with honour. He was not without some vision of that wreath of laurel

which Cæsar has left for all the Latins. As he rode out to war the great

gate in the deep wall of Assisi resounded with his last boast, "I shall

come back a great prince."

A little way along his road his sickness rose again and threw him. It

seems highly probable, in the light of his impetuous temper, that he had

ridden away long before he was fit to move. And in the darkness of this

second and far more desolating interruption, he seems to have had

another dream in which a voice said to him, "You have mistaken the

meaning of the vision. Return to your own town." And Francis trailed

back in his sickness to Assisi, a very dismal and disappointed and

perhaps even derided figure, with nothing to do but to wait for what

should happen next. It was his first descent into a dark ravine that is

called the valley of humiliation, which seemed to him very rocky and

desolate, but in which he was afterwards to find many flowers.

But he was not only disappointed and humiliated; he was also very much

puzzled and bewildered. He still firmly believed that his two dreams

must have meant something; and he could not imagine what they could

possibly mean. It was while he was drifting, one may even say mooning,

about the streets of Assisi and the fields outside the city wall, that

an incident occurred to him which has not always been immediately

connected with the business of the dreams, but which seems to me the

obvious culmination of them. He was riding listlessly in some wayside

place, apparently in the open country, when he saw a figure coming along

the road towards him and halted; for he saw it was a leper. And he knew

instantly that his courage was challenged, not as the world challenges,

but as one would challenge who knew the secrets of the heart of a man.

What he saw advancing was not the banner and spears of Perugia, from

which it never occurred to him to shrink; not the armies that fought for

the crown of Sicily, of which he had always thought as a courageous man

thinks of mere vulgar danger. Francis Bernardone saw his fear coming up

the road towards him; the fear that comes from within and not without;

though it stood white and horrible in the sunlight. For once in the long

rush of his life his soul must have stood still. Then he sprang from his

horse, knowing nothing between stillness and swiftness, and rushed on

the leper and threw his arms round him. It was the beginning of a long

vocation of ministry among many lepers, for whom he did many services;

to this man he gave what money he could and mounted and rode on. We do

not know how far he rode, or with what sense of the things around him;

but it is said that when he looked back, he could see no figure on the

road.

_Chapter IV_

_Francis the Builder_

We have now reached the great break in the life of Francis of Assisi;

the point at which something happened to him that must remain greatly

dark to most of us, who are ordinary and selfish men whom God has not

broken to make anew.

In dealing with this difficult passage, especially for my own purpose of

making things moderately easy for the more secular sympathiser, I have

hesitated as to the proper course; and have eventually decided to state

first of all what happened, with little more than a hint of what I

imagine to have been the meaning of what happened. The fuller meaning

may be debated more easily afterwards, when it was unfolded in the full

Franciscan life. Anyhow what happened was this. The story very largely

revolves round the ruins of the Church of St. Damian, an old shrine in

Assisi which was apparently neglected and falling to pieces. Here

Francis was in the habit of praying before the crucifix during these

dark and aimless days of transition that followed the tragical collapse

of all his military ambitions, probably made bitter by some loss of

social prestige terrible to his sensitive spirit. As he did so he heard

a voice saying to him, "Francis, seest thou not that my house is in

ruins? Go and restore it for me."

Francis sprang up and went. To go and do something was one of the

driving demands of his nature; probably he had gone and done it before

he had at all thoroughly thought out what he had done. In any case what

he had done was something very decisive and immediately very disastrous

for his singular social career. In the coarse conventional language of

the uncomprehending world, he stole. From his own enthusiastic point of

view, he extended to his venerable father Peter Bernardone the exquisite

excitement and inestimable privilege of assisting, more or less

unconsciously, in the rebuilding of St. Damian's Church. In point of

fact what he did was first to sell his own horse and then to go off and

sell several bales of his father's cloth, making the sign of the cross

over them to indicate their pious and charitable destination. Peter

Bernardone did not see things in this light. Peter Bernardone indeed had

not very much light to see by, so far as understanding the genius and

temperament of his extraordinary son was concerned. Instead of

understanding in what sort of a wind and flame of abstract appetites the

lad was living, instead of simply telling him (as the priest practically

did later) that he had done an indefensible thing with the best

intentions, old Bernardone took up the matter in the hardest style; in a

legal and literal fashion. He used absolute political powers like a

heathen father, and himself put his son under lock and key as a vulgar

thief. It would appear that the cry was caught up among many with whom

the unlucky Francis had once been popular; and altogether, in his

efforts to build up the house of God he had only succeeded in bringing

his own house about his ears and lying buried under the ruins. The

quarrel dragged drearily through several stages; at one time the

wretched young man seems to have disappeared underground, so to speak,

into some cavern or cellar where he remained huddled hopelessly in the

darkness. Anyhow, it was his blackest moment; the whole world had turned

over; the whole world was on top of him.

When he came out, it was only perhaps gradually that anybody grasped

that something had happened. He and his father were summoned in the

court of the bishop; for Francis had refused the authority of all legal

tribunals. The bishop addressed some remarks to him, full of that

excellent common sense which the Catholic Church keeps permanently as

the background for all the fiery attitudes of her saints. He told

Francis that he must unquestionably restore the money to his father;

that no blessing could follow a good work done by unjust methods; and in

short (to put it crudely) if the young fanatic would give back his money

to the old fool, the incident would then terminate. There was a new air

about Francis. He was no longer crushed, still less crawling, so far as

his father was concerned; yet his words do not, I think, indicate either

just indignation or wanton insult or anything in the nature of a mere

continuation of the quarrel. They are rather remotely akin to mysterious

utterances of his great model, "What have I to do with thee?" or even

the terrible "Touch me not."

He stood up before them all and said, "Up to this time I have called

Pietro Bernardone father, but now I am the servant of God. Not only the

money but everything that can be called his I will restore to my father,

even the very clothes he has given me." And he rent off all his garments

except one; and they saw that that was a hair-shirt.

He piled the garments in a heap on the floor and tossed the money on top

of them. Then he turned to the bishop, and received his blessing, like

one who turns his back on society; and, according to the account, went

out as he was into the cold world. Apparently it was literally a cold

world at the moment, and snow was on the ground. A curious detail, very

deep in its significance, I fancy, is given in the same account of this

great crisis in his life. He went out half-naked in his hair-shirt into

the winter woods, walking the frozen ground between the frosty trees; a

man without a father. He was penniless, he was parentless, he was to all

appearance without a trade or a plan or a hope in the world; and as he

went under the frosty trees, he burst suddenly into song.

It was apparently noted as remarkable that the language in which he sang

was French, or that Provençal which was called for convenience French.

It was not his native language; and it was in his native language that

he ultimately won fame as a poet; indeed St. Francis is one of the very

first of the national poets in the purely national dialects of Europe.

But it was the language with which all his most boyish ardours and

ambitions had been identified; it was for him pre-eminently the language

of romance. That it broke from him in this extraordinary extremity seems

to me something at first sight very strange and in the last analysis

very significant. What that significance was, or may well have been, I

will try to suggest in the subsequent chapter; it is enough to indicate

here that the whole philosophy of St. Francis revolved round the idea of

a new supernatural light on natural things, which meant the ultimate

recovery not the ultimate refusal of natural things. And for the purpose

of this purely narrative part of the business, it is enough to record

that while he wandered in the winter forest in his hair-shirt, like the

very wildest of the hermits, he sang in the tongue of the Troubadours.

Meanwhile the narrative naturally reverts to the problem of the ruined

or at least neglected church, which had been the starting point of the

saint's innocent crime and beatific punishment. That problem still

predominated in his mind and was soon engaging his insatiable

activities; but they were activities of a new sort; and he made no more

attempts to interfere with the commercial ethics of the town of Assisi.

There had dawned on him one of those great paradoxes that are also

platitudes. He realised that the way to build a church is not to become

entangled in bargains and, to him, rather bewildering questions of legal

claim. The way to build a church is not to pay for it, certainly not

with somebody else's money. The way to build a church is not even to pay

for it with your own money. The way to build a church is to build it.

He went about by himself collecting stones. He begged all the people he

met to give him stones. In fact he became a new sort of beggar,

reversing the parable; a beggar who asks not for bread but a stone.

Probably, as happened to him again and again throughout his

extraordinary existence, the very queerness of the request gave it a

sort of popularity; and all sorts of idle and luxurious people fell in

with the benevolent project, as they would have done with a bet. He

worked with his own hands at the rebuilding of the church, dragging the

material like a beast of burden and learning the very last and lowest

lessons of toil. A vast number of stories are told about Francis at this

as at every other period of his life; but for the purpose here, which is

one of simplification, it is best to dwell on this definite re-entrance

of the saint into the world by the low gate of manual labour. There does

indeed run through the whole of his life a sort of double meaning, like

his shadow thrown upon the wall. All his action had something of the

character of an allegory; and it is likely enough that some

leaden-witted scientific historian may some day try to prove that he

himself was never anything but an allegory. It is true enough in this

sense that he was labouring at a double task, and rebuilding something

else as well as the church of St. Damian. He was not only discovering

the general lesson that his glory was not to be in overthrowing men in

battle but in building up the positive and creative monuments of peace.

He was truly building up something else, or beginning to build it up;

something that has often enough fallen into ruin but has never been past

rebuilding; a church that could always be built anew though it had

rotted away to its first foundation-stone, against which the gates of

hell shall not prevail.

The next stage in his progress is probably marked by his transferring

the same energies of architectural reconstruction to the little church

of St. Mary of the Angels at the Portiuncula. He had already done

something of the same kind at a church dedicated to St. Peter; and that

quality in his life noted above, which made it seem like a symbolical

drama, led many of his most devout biographers to note the numerical

symbolism of the three churches. There was at any rate a more historical

and practical symbolism about two of them. For the original church of

St. Damian afterwards became the seat of his striking experiment of a

female order, and of the pure and spiritual romance of St. Clare. And

the church of the Portiuncula will remain for ever as one of the great

historic buildings of the world; for it was there that he gathered the

little knot of friends and enthusiasts; it was the home of many homeless

men. At this time, however, it is not clear that he had the definite

idea of any such monastic developments. How early the plan appeared in

his own mind it is of course impossible to say; but on the face of

events it first takes the form of a few friends who attached themselves

to him one by one because they shared his own passion for simplicity.

The account given of the form of their dedication is, however, very

significant; for it was that of an invocation of the simplification of

life as suggested in the New Testament. The adoration of Christ had been

a part of the man's passionate nature for a long time past. But the

imitation of Christ, as a sort of plan or ordered scheme of life, may in

that sense be said to begin here.