Life of St. Francis of Assisi
Learn to do well.[7]
With Isaiah these vehement apostrophes are but flashes of genius, but
with Jesus the interior change becomes at once the principle and the end
of the religious life. His promises were not for those who were right
with the ceremonial law, or who offered the greatest number of
sacrifices, but for the pure in heart, for men of good will.
These considerations are not perhaps without their use in showing the
spiritual ancestry of the Saint of Assisi.
For him, as for St. Paul and St. Augustine, conversion was a radical and
complete change, the act of will by which man wrests himself from the
slavery of sin and places himself under the yoke of divine authority.
Thenceforth prayer, become a necessary act of life, ceases to be a magic
formula; it is an impulse of the heart, it is reflection and meditation
rising above the commonplaces of this mortal life, to enter into the
mystery of the divine will and conform itself to it; it is the act of
the atom which understands its littleness, but which desires, though
only by a single note, to be in harmony with the divine symphony.
_Ecce adsum Domine, ut faciam voluntatem tuam._
When we reach these heights we belong not to a sect, but to humanity; we
are like those wonders of nature which the accident of circumstances has
placed upon the territory of this or that people, but which belong to
all the world, because in fact they belong to no one, or rather they are
the common and inalienable property of the entire human race. Homer,
Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Michael Angelo, Rembrandt belong to us all
as much as the ruins of Athens or Rome, or, rather, they belong to
those who love them most and understand them best.
But that which is a truism, so far as men of genius in the domain of
imagination or thought are concerned, still appears like a paradox when
we speak of men of religious genius. The Church has laid such absolute
claim to them that she has created in her own favor a sort of right. It
cannot be that this arbitrary confiscation shall endure forever. To
prevent it we have not to perform an act of negation or demolition: let
us leave to the chapels their statues and their relics, and far from
belittling the saints, let us make their true grandeur shine forth.
* * * * *
It is time to say a few words concerning the difficulties of the work
here presented to the public. History always embraces but a very feeble
part of the reality: ignorant, she is like the stories children tell of
the events that have occurred before their eyes; learned, she reminds us
of a museum organized with all the modern improvements. Instead of
making you see nature with its external covering, its diffuse life, its
mysterious echoes in your own heart, they offer you a herbarium.
If it is difficult to narrate an ordinary event of our own time, it is
far more so to describe the great crises where restless humanity is
seeking its true path.
The first duty of the historian is to forget his own time and country
and become the sympathetic and interested contemporary of what he
relates; but if it is difficult to give oneself the heart of a Greek or
a Roman, it is infinitely more so to give oneself a heart of the
thirteenth century. I have said that at that period the Middle Age was
twenty years old, and the feelings of the twentieth year are, if not the
most fugitive, at least the most difficult to note down. Everyone knows
that it is impossible to recall the feelings of youth with the same
clearness as those of childhood or mature age. Doubtless we may have
external facts in the memory, but we cannot recall the sensations and
the sentiments; the confused forces which seek to move us are then all
at work at once, and to speak the language of beyond the Rhine, it is
_the essentially phenomenal hour of the phenomena that we are;_
everything in us crosses, intermingles, collides, in desperate conflict:
it is a time of diabolic or divine excitement. Let a few years pass, and
nothing in the world can make us live those hours over again. Where was
once a volcano, we perceive only a heap of blackened ashes, and
scarcely, at long intervals, will a chance meeting, a sound, a word,
awaken memory and unseal the fountain of recollection; and even then it
is only a flash; we have had but a glimpse and all has sunk back into
shadow and silence.
We find the same difficulty when we try to take note of the fiery
enthusiasms of the thirteenth century, its poetic inspirations, its
amorous and chaste visions--all this is thrown up against a background
of coarseness, wretchedness, corruption, and folly.
The men of that time had all the vices except triviality, all the
virtues except moderation; they were either ruffians or saints. Life was
rude enough to kill feeble organisms; and thus characters had an energy
unknown to-day. It was forever necessary to provide beforehand against a
thousand dangers, to take those sudden resolutions in which one risks
his life. Open the chronicle of Fra Salimbeni and you will be shocked to
find that the largest place is taken up with the account of the annual
expeditions of Parma against the neighboring cities, or of the
neighboring cities against Parma. What would it have been if this
chronicle, instead of being written by a monk of uncommonly open mind, a
lover of music, at certain times an ardent Joachimite, an indefatigable
traveller, had been written by a warrior? And this is not all; these
wars between city and city were complicated with civil dissensions,
plots were hatched periodically, conspirators were massacred if they
were discovered, or massacred and exiled others in their turn if they
were triumphant.[8] When we picture to ourselves this state of things
dominated by the grand struggles of the papacy against the empire,
heretics, and infidels, we may understand how difficult it is to
describe such a time.
The imagination being haunted by horrible or entrancing pictures like
those of the frescos in the _Campo Santo_ of Pisa, men were always
thinking of heaven and hell; they informed themselves about them with
the feverish curiosity of emigrants, who pass their days on shipboard in
trying to picture that spot in America where in a few days they will
pitch their tent.
Every monk of any notoriety must have gone through this. Dante's poem is
not an isolated work; it is the noblest result of a condition which had
given birth to hundreds of compositions, and Alighieri had little more
to do than to co-ordinate the works of his predecessors and vivify them
with the breath of his own genius.
The unsettled state of men's minds was unimaginable. That unhealthy
curiosity which lies at the bottom of the human heart, and which at the
present day impels men to seek for refined and even perverse enjoyments,
impelled men of that time to devotions which seem like a defiance to
common sense.
Never had hearts been shaken with such terrors, nor ever thrilled with
such radiant hopes. The noblest hymns of the liturgy, the _Stabat_ and
the _Dies Irae_, come to us from the thirteenth century, and we may well
say that never has the human plaint been more agonized.
When we look through history, not to find accounts of battles or of the
succession of dynasties, but to try to grasp the evolution of ideas and
feelings, when we seek above all to discover the heart of man and of
epochs, we perceive, on arriving at the thirteenth century, that a fresh
wind has blown over the world, the human lyre has a new string, the
lowest, the most profound; one which sings of woes and hopes to which
the ancient world had not vibrated.
In the breast of the men of that time we think sometimes we feel the
beating of a woman's heart; they have exquisite sentiments, delightful
inspirations, with absurd terrors, fantastic angers, infernal cruelties.
Weakness and fear often make them insincere; they have the idea of the
grand, the beautiful, the ugly, but that of order is wanting; they fast
or feast; the notion of the laws of nature, so deeply graven in our own
minds, is to them entirely a stranger; the words possible and impossible
have for them no meaning. Some give themselves to God, others sell
themselves to the devil, but not one feels himself strong enough to walk
alone, strong enough to have no need to hold on by some one's skirt.
Peopled with spirits and demons nature appeared to them singularly
animated; in her presence they have all the emotions which a child
experiences at night before the trees on the roadside and the vague
forms of the rocks.
Unfortunately, our language is a very imperfect instrument for rendering
all this; it is neither musical nor flexible; since the seventeenth
century it has been deemed seemly to keep one's emotions to oneself, and
the old words which served to note states of the soul have fallen into
neglect; the Imitation and the Fioretti have become untranslatable.
More than this, in a history like the present one, we must give a large
place to the Italian spirit; it is evident that in a country where they
call a chapel _basilica_ and a tiny house _palazzo_, or in speaking to a
seminarist say "Your Reverence," words have not the same value as on
this side of the Alps.
The Italians have an imagination which enlarges and simplifies. They see
the forms and outlines of men and things more than they grasp their
spirit. What they most admire in Michael Angelo is gigantic forms, noble
and proud attitudes, while we better understand his secret thoughts,
hidden sorrows, groans, and sighs.
Place before their eyes a picture by Rembrandt, and more often than not
it will appear to them ugly; its charm cannot be caught at a glance as
in those of their artists; to see it you must examine it, make an
effort, and with them effort is the beginning of pain.
Do not ask them, then, to understand the pathos of things, to be touched
by the mysterious and almost fanciful emotion which northern hearts
discover and enjoy in the works of the Amsterdam master. No, instead of
a forest they want a few trees, standing out clearly against the
horizon; instead of a multitude swarming in the penumbra of reality, a
few personages, larger than nature, forming harmonious groups in an
ideal temple.
The genius of a people[9] is all of a piece: they apply to history the
same processes that they apply to the arts. While the Germanic spirit
considers events rather in their evolution, in their complex becoming,
the Italian spirit takes them at a given moment, overlooks the shadows,
the clouds, the mists, everything that makes the line indistinct, brings
out the contour sharply, and thus constructs a very lucid story, which
is a delight to the eyes, but which is little more than a symbol of the
reality.
At other times it takes a man, separates him from the unnamed crowd, and
by a labor often unconscious, makes him the ideal type of a whole
epoch.[10]
Certainly there is in every people a tendency to give themselves a
circle of divinities and heroes who are, so to say, the incarnation of
its instincts; but generally that requires the long labor of centuries.
The Italian character will not suffer this slow action; as soon as it
recognizes a man it says so, it even shouts it aloud if that is
necessary, and makes him enter upon immortality while still alive. Thus
legend almost confounds itself with history, and it becomes very
difficult to reduce men to their true proportions.
We must not, then, ask too much of history. The more beautiful is the
dawn, the less one can describe it. The most beautiful things in nature,
the flower and the butterfly, should be touched only by delicate hands.
The effort here made to indicate the variegated, wavering tints which