Life of St. Francis of Assisi
clear than when he ordains that his friars shall gain their livelihood
by the work of their hands. He never dreamed of creating a _mendicant_
order, he created a _laboring_ order. It is true we shall often see him
begging and urging his disciples to do as much, but these incidents
ought not to mislead us; they are meant to teach that when a friar
arrived in any locality and there spent his strength for long days in
dispensing spiritual bread to famished souls, he ought not to blush to
receive material bread in exchange. To work was the rule, to beg the
exception; but this exception was in nowise dishonorable. Did not Jesus,
the Virgin, the disciples live on bread bestowed? Was it not rendering a
great service to those to whom they resorted to teach them charity?
Francis in his poetic language gave the name of _mensa Domini_, the
table of the Lord, to this table of love around which gathered the
_little poor ones_. The bread of charity is the bread of angels; and it
is also that of the birds, which reap not nor gather into barns.
We are far enough, in this case, from that mendicity which is understood
as a means of existence and the essential condition of a life of
idleness. It is the opposite extreme, and we are true and just to St.
Francis and to the origin of the mendicant orders only when we do not
separate the obligation of labor from the praise of mendicity.[4]
No doubt this zeal did not last long, and Thomas of Celano already
entitles his chapters, "_Lament before God over the idleness and
gluttony of the friars_;" but we must not permit this speedy and
inevitable decadence to veil from our sight the holy and manly beauty of
the origin.
With all his gentleness Francis knew how to show an inflexible severity
toward the idle; he even went so far as to dismiss a friar who refused
to work.[5] Nothing in this matter better shows the intentions of the
Poverello than the life of Brother Egidio, one of his dearest
companions, him of whom he said with a smile: "He is one of the paladins
of my Round Table."
Brother Egidio had a taste for great adventures, and is a living example
of a Franciscan of the earliest days; he survived his master twenty-five
years, and never ceased to obey the letter and spirit of the Rule with
freedom and simplicity.
We find him one day setting out on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
Arrived at Brindisi, he borrowed a water-jug that he might carry water
while he was awaiting the departure of the ship, and passed a part of
every day in crying through the streets of the city: "_Alla fresca! Alla
fresca!_" like other water-carriers. But he would change his trade
according to the country and the circumstances; on his way back, at
Ancona, he procured willow for making baskets, which he afterward sold,
not for money but for his food. It even happened to him to be employed
in burying the dead.
Sent to Rome, every morning after finishing his religious duties, he
would take a walk of several leagues, to a certain forest, whence he
brought a load of wood. Coming back one day he met a lady who wanted to
buy it; they agreed on a price, and Egidio carried it to her house. But
when he arrived at the house she perceived him to be a friar, and would
have given him more than the price agreed upon. "My good lady," he
replied, "I will not permit myself to be overcome by avarice," and he
departed without accepting anything at all.
In the olive season he helped in the gathering; in grape season he
offered himself as vintager. One day on the Piazza di Roma, where men
are hired for day's work, he saw a _padrone_ who could not find a man to
thrash his walnut tree; it was so high that no one dared risk himself
in it. "If you will give me part of the nuts," said Egidio, "I will do
it willingly." The bargain struck and the tree thrashed, there proved to
be so many nuts that he did not know where to put his share. Gathering
up his tunic he made a bag of it and full of joy returned to Rome, where
he distributed them among all the poor whom he met.
Is not this a charming incident? Does it not by itself alone reveal the
freshness, the youth, the kindness of heart of the first Franciscans?
There is no end to the stories of the ingenuousness of Brother Egidio.
All kinds of work seemed good to him provided he had time enough in the
morning for his religious duties. Now he is in the service of the
Cellarer of the Four Crowns at Rome, sifting flour and carrying water to
the convent from the well of San Sisto. Now he is at Rieti, where he
consents to remain with Cardinal Nicholas, bringing to every meal the
bread which he had earned, notwithstanding the entreaties of the master
of the house, who would gladly have provided for his wants. One day it
rained so hard that Brother Egidio could not think of going out; the
cardinal was already making merry over the thought that he would be
forced to accept bread that he had not earned. But Egidio went to the
kitchen, and finding that it needed cleaning he persuaded the cook to
let him sweep it, and returned triumphant with the bread he had earned,
which he ate at the cardinal's table.[6]
From the very beginning Egidio's life commanded respect; it was at once
so original, so gay, so spiritual,[7] and so mystical, that even in
the least exact and most expanded accounts his legend has remained
almost free from all addition. He is, after St. Francis, the finest
incarnation of the Franciscan spirit.
The incidents which are here cited are all, so to speak, illustrations
of the Rule; in fact there is nothing more explicit than its commands
with respect to work.
The Brothers, after entering upon the Order, were to continue to
exercise the calling which they had when in the world, and if they had
none they were to learn one. For payment they were to accept only the
food that was necessary for them, but in case that was insufficient they
might beg. In addition they were naturally permitted to own the
instruments of their calling.[8] Brother Ginepro, whose acquaintance
we shall make further on, had an awl, and gained his bread wherever he
went by mending shoes, and we see St. Clara working even on her
death-bed.
This obligation to work with the hands merits all the more to be brought
into the light, because it was destined hardly to survive St. Francis,
and because to it is due in part the original character of the first
generation of the Order. Yet this was not the real reason for the being
of the Brothers Minor. Their mission consisted above all in being the
spouses of Poverty.
Terrified by the ecclesiastical disorders of the time, haunted by
painful memories of his past life, Francis saw in money the special
instrument of the devil; in moments of excitement he went so far as to
execrate it, as if there had been in the metal itself a sort of magical
power and secret curse. Money was truly for him the sacrament of evil.
This is not the place for asking if he was wrong; grave authors have
demonstrated at length the economic troubles which would have been let
loose upon the world if men had followed him. Alas! his madness, if
madness it were, is a kind of which one need not fear the contagion.
He felt that in this respect the Rule could not be too absolute, and
that if unfortunately the door was opened to various interpretations of
it, there would be no stopping-point. The course of events and the
periodical convulsions which shook his Order show clearly enough how
rightly he judged.
I do not know nor desire to know if theologians have yet come to a
scientific conclusion with regard to the poverty of Jesus, but it seems
evident to me that poverty with the labor of the hands is the ideal held
up by the Galilean to the efforts of his disciples.
Still it is easy to see that Franciscan poverty is neither to be
confounded with the unfeeling pride of the stoic, nor with the stupid
horror of all joy felt by certain devotees; St. Francis renounced
everything only that he might the better possess everything. The lives
of the immense majority of our contemporaries are ruled by the fatal
error that the more one possesses the more one enjoys. Our exterior,
civil liberties continually increase, but at the same time our inward
freedom is taking flight; how many are there among us who are literally
possessed by what they possess?[9]
Poverty not only permitted the Brothers to mingle with the poor and
speak to them with authority, but, removing from them all material
anxiety, it left them free to enjoy without hindrance those hidden
treasures which nature reserves for pure idealists.
The ever-thickening barriers which modern life, with its sickly search
for useless comfort, has set up between us and nature did not exist for
these men, so full of youth and life, eager for wide spaces and the
outer air. This is what gave St. Francis and his companions that quick
susceptibility to Nature which made them thrill in mysterious harmony
with her. Their communion with Nature was so intimate, so ardent, that
Umbria, with the harmonious poetry of its skies, the joyful outburst of
its spring-time, is still the best document from which to study them.
The tie between the two is so indissoluble, that after having lived a
certain time in company with St. Francis, one can hardly, on reading
certain passages of his biographers, help _seeing_ the spot where the
incident took place, hearing the vague sounds of creatures and things,
precisely as, when reading certain pages of a beloved author, one hears
the sound of his voice.
The worship of Poverty of the early Franciscans had in it, then, nothing
ascetic or barbarous, nothing which recalls the Stylites or the Nazirs.
She was their bride, and like true lovers they felt no fatigues which
they might endure to find and remain near her.
La lor concordia e lor lieti sembianti,
Amor e maraviglia e dolce sguardo
Facean esser cagion de' pensier santi.[10]
To draw the portrait of an ideal knight at the beginning of the
thirteenth century is to draw Francis's very portrait, with this
difference, that what the knight did for his lady, he did for Poverty.
This comparison is not a mere caprice; he himself profoundly felt it and
expressed it with perfect clearness, and it is only by keeping it
clearly present in the mind that we can see into the very depth of his
heart.[11]
To find any other souls of the same nature one must come down to
Giovanni di Parma and Jacoponi di Todi. The life of St. Francis as
troubadour has been written; it would have been better to write it as
knight, for this is the explanation of his whole life, and as it were
the heart of his heart. From the day when, forgetting the songs of his
friends and suddenly stopped in the public place of Assisi, he met
Poverty, his bride, and swore to her faith and love, down to that
evening when, naked upon the naked earth of Portiuncula, he breathed out
his life, it may be said that all his thoughts went out to this lady of
his chaste loves. For twenty years he served her without faltering,
sometimes with an artlessness which would appear infantine, if something
infinitely sincere and sublime did not arrest the smile upon the most
sceptical lips.
Poverty agreed marvellously with that need which men had at that time,
and which perhaps they have lost less than they suppose, the need of an
ideal very high, very pure, mysterious, inaccessible, which yet they may
picture to themselves in concrete form. Sometimes a few privileged
disciples saw the lovely and pure Lady descend from heaven to salute her
spouse, but, whether visible or not, she always kept close beside her
Umbrian lover, as she kept close beside the Galilean; in the stable of
the nativity, upon the cross at Golgotha, and even in the borrowed tomb
where his body lay.