Life of St. Francis of Assisi
and death, as a robust organism casts out morbid substances.
I have already endeavored to show the strong analogy between the initial
efforts of Francis and those of the Poor Men of Lyons. His thought
ripened in an atmosphere thoroughly saturated with their ideas;
unconsciously to himself they entered into his being.
The prophecies of the Calabrian abbot exerted upon him an influence
quite as difficult to appreciate, but no less profound.
Standing on the confines of Italy and as it were at the threshold of
Greece, Gioacchino di Fiore[35] was the last link in a chain of monastic
prophets, who during nearly four hundred years succeeded one another in
the monasteries and hermitages of Southern Italy. The most famous among
them had been St. Nilo, a sort of untamed John the Baptist, living in
desert places, but suddenly emerging from them when his duties of
maintaining the right called him elsewhere. We see him on one occasion
appearing in Rome itself, to announce to pope and emperor the unloosing
of the divine wrath.[36]
Scattered in the Alpine solitudes of Basilicata these Calabrian hermits
were continually obliged to retreat higher and higher into the mountain
fastnesses to escape the populace, who, pursued by pirates, were taking
refuge in these mountains. They thus passed their lives between heaven
and earth, with two seas for their horizon. Disquieted by fear of the
corsairs, and by the war-cries whose echoes reached even to them, they
turned their thoughts toward the future. The ages of great terror are
also the ages of great hope; it is to the captivity of Babylon that we
owe, with the second part of Isaiah, those pictures of the future which
have not yet ceased to charm the soul of man; Nero's persecutions gave
us the Apocalypse of St. John, and the paroxysms of the twelfth century
the eternal Gospel.
Converted after a life of dissipation, Gioacchino di Fiore travelled
extensively in the Holy Land, Greece, and Constantinople. Returning to
Italy he began, though a layman, to preach in the outskirts of Rende and
Cosenza. Later on he joined the Cistercians of Cortale, near Catanzaro,
and there took vows. Shortly after elected abbot of the monastery in
spite of refusal and even flight, he was seized after a few years with
the nostalgia of solitude, and sought from Pope Lucius III. a discharge
from his functions (1181), that he might consecrate all his time to the
works which he had in mind. The pope granted his request, and even
permitted him to go wherever he might deem best in the interest of his
work. Then began for Gioacchino a life of wandering from convent to
convent, which carried him even as far as Lombardy, to Verona, where we
find him with Pope Urban III.
When he returned to the south, a group of disciples gathered around him
to hear his explanations of the most obscure passages of the Bible.
Whether he would or no he was obliged to receive them, to talk with
them, to give them a rule, and, finally, to instal them in the very
heart of the Sila, the Black Forest of Italy,[37] over against the
highest peak, in gorges where the silence is interrupted only by the
murmurs of the Arvo and the Neto, which have their source not far from
there. The new Athos received the name of Fiore (flower), transparent
symbol of the hopes of its founder.[38] It was there that he put the
finishing touch to writings which, after fifty years of neglect, were to
become the starting-point of all heresies, and the aliment of all souls
burdened with the salvation of Christendom. The men of the first half of
the thirteenth century, too much occupied with other things, did not
perceive that the spiritual streams at which they were drinking
descended from the snowy mountain-tops of Calabria.
It is always thus with mystical influences. There is in them something
vague, tenuous, and penetrating which escapes an exact estimation. Let
two choice souls meet, and they will find it a difficult thing to
analyze and name the impressions which each has received from the other.
It is so with an epoch; it is not always those who speak to her the
oftenest and loudest whom she best understands; nor even those at whose
feet she sits, a faithful pupil, day after day. Sometimes, while on the
way to her accustomed masters, she suddenly meets a stranger; she barely
catches a few words of what he says; she knows not whence he comes nor
whither he goes; she never sees him again, but those few words of his go
on surging in the depths of her soul, agitating and disquieting her.
Thus it was for a long while with Gioacchino di Fiore. His teachings,
scattered here and there by enthusiastic disciples, were germinating
silently in many hearts.[39] Giving back hope to men, they restored to
them strength also. To think is already to act; alone under the shadow
of the hoary pines which surrounded his cell, the cenobite of Fiore was
laboring for the renovation of the Church with as much vigor as the
reformers who came after him.
He was, however, far from attaining the height of the prophets of
Israel; instead of soaring like them to the very heavens, he always
remained riveted to the text, upon which he commented in the allegorical
method, and whence by this method he brought out the most fantastic
improbabilities. A few pages of his books would wear out the most
patient reader, but in these fields, burnt over by theological arguments
more drying than the winds of the desert, fields where one at first
perceives only stones and thistles, one comes at last to the charming
oasis, with repose and dreams in its shade.
The exegesis of Gioacchino di Fiore in fact led up to a sort of
philosophy of history; its grand lines were calculated to make a
striking appeal to the imagination. The life of humanity is divided into
three periods: in the first, under the reign of the Father, men lived
under the rigor of the law; in the second, reigned over by the Son, men
live under the rule of grace; in the third, the Spirit shall reign and
men shall live in the plenitude of love. The first is the period of
servile obedience; the second, that of filial obedience; the third, that
of liberty. In the first, men lived in fear; in the second, they rest in
faith; in the third, they shall burn with love. The first saw the
shining of the stars; the second sees the whitening of the dawn; the
third will behold the glory of the day. The first produced nettles, the
second gives roses, the third will be the age of lilies.
If now we consider that in the thought of Gioacchino the third period,
the Age of the Spirit, was about to open, we shall understand with what
enthusiasm men hailed the words which restored joy to hearts still
disturbed with millenarian fears.
It is evident that St. Francis knew these radiant hopes. Who knows even
that it was not the Calabrian Seer who awoke his heart to its transports
of love? If this be so, Gioacchino was not merely his precursor; he was
his true spiritual father. However this may be, St. Francis found in
Gioacchino's thought many of the elements which, unconsciously to
himself, were to become the foundation of his institute.
The noble disdain which he shows for all men of learning, and which he
sought to inculcate upon his Order, was for Gioacchino one of the
characteristics of the new era. "The truth which remains hidden to the
wise," he says, "is revealed to babes; dialectics closes that which is
open, obscures that which is clear; it is the mother of useless talk, of
rivalries and blasphemy. Learning does not edify, and it may destroy, as
is proved by the scribes of the Church, swollen with pride and
arrogance, who by dint of reasoning fall into heresy."[40]
We have seen that the return to evangelical simplicity had become a
necessity; all the heretical sects were on this point in accord with
pious Catholics, but no one spoke in a manner so Franciscan as
Gioacchino di Fiore. Not only did he make voluntary poverty one of the
characteristics of the age of lilies, but he speaks of it in his pages
with so profound, so living an emotion, that St. Francis could do little
more than repeat his words. The ideal monk whom he describes,[41] whose
only property is a lyre, is a true Franciscan before the letter, him of
whom the _Poverello_ of Assisi always dreamed.
The feeling for nature also bursts forth in him with incomparable vigor.
One day he was preaching in a chapel which was plunged in almost total
darkness, the sky being quite overcast with clouds. Suddenly the clouds
broke away, the sun shone, the church was flooded with light. Gioacchino
paused, saluted the sun, intoned the _Veni Creator_, and led his
congregation out to gaze upon the landscape.
It would be by no means surprising if toward 1205 Francis should have
heard of this prophet, toward whom so many hearts were turning, this
anchorite who, gazing up into heaven, spoke with Jesus as a friend talks
with his friend, yet knew also how to come down to console men and warm
the faces of the dying at his own breast.
At the other end of Europe, in the heart of Germany, the same causes had
produced the same effects. From the excess of the people's sufferings
and the despair of religious souls was being born a movement of
apocalyptic mysticism which seemed to have secret communication with
that which was rousing the Peninsula. They had the same views of the
future, the same anxious expectation of new cataclysms, joined with a
prospect of a reviving of the Church.
"Cry with a loud voice," said her guardian angel to St. Elizabeth of
Schonau ([Cross] 1164), "cry to all nations: Woe! for the whole world has
become darkness. The Lord's vine has withered, there is no one to tend
it. The Lord has sent laborers, but they have all been found idle. The
head of the Church is ill and her members are dead.... Shepherds of my
Church, you are sleeping, but I shall awaken you! Kings of the earth,
the cry of your iniquity has risen even to me."[42]
"Divine justice," said St. Hildegarde ([Cross] 1178), "shall have its hour;
the last of the seven epochs symbolized by the seven days of creation
has arrived, the judgments of God are about to be accomplished; the
empire and the papacy, sunk into impiety, shall crumble away
together.... But upon their ruins shall appear a new nation of God, a
nation of prophets illuminated from on high, living in poverty and
solitude. Then the divine mysteries shall be revealed, and the saying
of Joel shall be fulfilled; the Holy Spirit shall shed abroad upon the
people the dew of his prophecies, of his wisdom and holiness; the
heathen, the Jews, the worldly and the unbelieving shall be converted
together, spring-time and peace shall reign over a regenerated world,
and the angels will return with confidence to dwell among men."
These hopes were not wholly confounded. In the evening of his days the
prophet of Fiore was able, like a new Simeon, to utter his _Nunc
dimittis_, and for a few years Christendom could turn in amazement to
Assisi as to a new Bethlehem.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Bull of June 8, 1198, _Quamvis_. Migne, i., col. 220;
Potthast, 265.
[2] For example, Pierre, Cardinal of St. Chryzogone and former
Bishop of Meaux, who in a single election refused the dazzling
offer of five hundred silver marks. Alexander III., Migne's
edition, _epist._ 395.
[3] _Fasciculus rerum expetend. et fugiend._, t. ii., 7, pp.
254, 255 (Brown, 1690).
[4] John of Salisbury, _Policrat._ Migne, v. 15.
[5] Among their sources of revenue we find the right of
_collagium_, by payment of which clerics acquired the right to
keep a concubine. Pierre le Chantre, _Verb. abbrev._, 24.
[6] Vide _Carmina Burana_, Breslau, 8vo, 1883; Political Songs