Life of St. Francis of Assisi
asleep near Bethel, had already divined this: the God who passes by
tells his name only to those who stop him and do him violence to learn
it. He blesses only after long hours of conflict.
The gospel has found an untranslatable word to characterize the prayers
of Jesus, it compares the conflict which preceded the voluntary
immolation of Christ to the death-struggle: _Factus in agonia_.[6] We
might say of his life that it had been a long temptation, a struggle, a
prayer, since these words only express different moments of spiritual
activity.
Like their Master, the disciples and successors of Christ can conquer
their own souls only through perseverance. But these words, empty of
meaning for devout conventicles, have had a tragic sense for men of
religious genius.
Nothing is more false, historically, than the saints that adorn our
churches, with their mincing attitude, their piteous expression, that
indescribably anaemic and emaciated--one may almost say emasculated--air
which shows in their whole nature; they are pious seminarists brought up
under the direction of St. Alphonso di Liguori or of St. Louis di
Gonzagua; they are not saints, not the violent who take the kingdom of
heaven by force.
We have come to one of the most delicate features of the life of
Francis--his relations with diabolical powers. Customs and ideas have so
profoundly changed in all that concerns the existence of the devil and
his relations with men, that it is almost impossible to picture to
oneself the enormous place which the thought of demons occupied at that
time in the minds of men.
The best minds of the Middle Ages believed without a doubt in the
existence of the perverse spirit, in his perpetual transformations in
the endeavor to tempt men and cause them to fall into his snares. Even
in the sixteenth century, Luther, who undermined so many beliefs, had no
more doubt of the personal existence of Satan than of sorcery,
conjurations, or possessions.[7]
Finding in their souls a wide background of grandeur and wretchedness,
whence they sometimes heard a burst of distant harmonies calling them to
a higher life, soon to be overpowered by the clamors of the brute, our
ancestors could not refrain from seeking the explanation of this duel.
They found it in the conflict of the demons with God.
The devil is the prince of the demons, as God is the prince of the
angels; capable of all transformations, they carry on to the end of time
terrible battles which will end in the victory of God, but meantime each
man his whole life long is contended for by these two adversaries, and
the noblest souls are naturally the most disputed.
This is how St. Francis, with all men of his time, explained the
disquietudes, terrors, anguish, with which his heart was at times
assailed, as well as the hopes, consolations, joys in which in general
his soul was bathed. Wherever we follow his steps local tradition has
preserved the memory of rude assaults of the tempter which he had to
undergo.
It is no doubt useless to recall here the elementary fact that if
manners change with the times, man himself is quite as strangely
modified. If, according to education, and the manner of life, such or
such a sense may develop an acuteness which confounds common
experience--hearing in the musician, touch with the blind, etc.--we may
estimate by this how much sharper certain senses may have been then than
now. Several centuries ago visual delusion was with adults what it is
now with children in remotest country parts. A quivering leaf, a
nothing, a breath, an unexplained sound creates an image which they see
and in the reality of which they believe absolutely. Man is all of a
piece; the hyperaesthesia of the will presupposes that of the
sensibility, one is conditioned on the other, and it is this which makes
men of revolutionary epochs so much greater than nature. It would be
absurd under pretext of truth to try to bring them back to the common
measures of our contemporary society, for they were veritably demigods
for good as for evil.
Legends are not always absurd. The men of '93 are still near to us, but
it is nevertheless with good right that legend has taken possession of
them, and it is pitiable to see these men who, ten times a day, had to
take resolutions where everything was at stake--their destiny, that of
their ideas, and sometimes that of their country--judged as if they had
been mere worthy citizens, with leisure to discuss at length every
morning the garments they were to wear or the _menu_ of a dinner. Most
of the time historians have perceived only a part of the truth about
them; for not only were there two men in them, almost all of them are at
the same time poets, demagogues, prophets, heroes, martyrs. To write
history, then, is to translate and transpose almost continually. The men
of the thirteenth century could not bring themselves to not refer to an
exterior cause the inner motions of their souls. In what appears to us
as the result of our own reflections they saw inspiration; where we say
desires, instincts, passions, they said temptation, but we must not
permit these differences of language to make us overlook or tax with
trickery a part of their spiritual life, bringing us thus to the
conclusions of a narrow and ignorant rationalism.
St. Francis believed himself to have many a time fought with the devil;
the horrible demons of the Etruscan Inferno still haunted the forests of
Umbria and Tuscany; but while for his contemporaries and some of his
disciples apparitions, prodigies, possessions, are daily phenomena, for
him they are exceptional, and remain entirely in the background. In the
iconography of St. Benedict, as in that of most of the popular saints,
the devil occupies a preponderant place; in that of St. Francis he
disappears so completely that in the long series of Giotto's frescos at
Assisi he is not seen a single time.[8]
In the same way all that is magic and miracle-working occupies in his
life an entirely secondary rank. Jesus in the Gospels gave his apostles
power to cast out evil spirits, and to heal all sickness and all
infirmity.[9] Francis surely took literally these words, which made a
part of his Rule. He believed that he could work miracles, and he willed
to do so; but his religious thought was too pure to permit him to
consider miracles otherwise than as an entirely exceptional means of
relieving the sufferings of men. Not once do we see him resorting to
miracle to prove his apostolate or to bolster up his ideas. His tact
taught him that souls are worthy of being won by better means. This
almost complete absence of the marvellous[10] is by so much the more
remarkable that it is in absolute contradiction with the tendencies of
his time.[11]
Open the life of his disciple, St. Anthony of Padua ([Cross] 1231); it is a
tiresome catalogue of prodigies, healings, resurrections. One would say
it was rather the prospectus of some druggist who had invented a new
drug than a call to men to conversion and a higher life. It may interest
invalids or devotees, but neither the heart nor the conscience is
touched by it. It must be said in justice to Anthony of Padua that his
relations with Francis appear to have been very slight. Among the
earliest disciples who had time to fathom their master's thought to the
very depths we find traces of this noble disdain of the marvellous; they
knew too well that the perfect joy is not to astound the world with
prodigies, to give sight to the blind, nor even to revive those who have
been four days dead, but that it lives in the love that goes even to
self-immolation. _Mihi absit gloriari nisi in cruce Domini._[12]
Thus Brother Egidio asked of God grace not to perform miracles; he saw
in them, as in the passion for learning, a snare in which the proud
would be taken, and which would distract the Order from its true
mission.[13]
St. Francis's miracles are all acts of love; the greater number of them
are found in the healing of nervous maladies, those apparently
inexplicable disquietudes which are the cruel afflictions of critical
times. His gentle glance, at once so compassionate and so strong, which
seemed like a messenger from his heart, often sufficed to make those who
met it forget all their suffering.
The evil eye is perhaps a less stupid superstition than is generally
fancied. Jesus was right in saying that a look sufficed to make one an
adulterer; but there is also a look--that of the contemplative Mary, for
example--which is worth all sacrifices, because it includes them all,
because it gives, consecrates, immolates him who looks.
Civilization dulls this power of the glance. A part of the education the
world gives us consists in teaching our eyes to deceive, in making them
expressionless, in extinguishing their flames; but simple and
straightforward natures never give up using this language of the heart,
"which brings life and health in its beams."
"A Brother was suffering unspeakable tortures; sometimes he would roll
upon the ground, striking against whatever lay in his way, frothing at
the mouth, horrible to see; at times he would become rigid, and again,
after remaining stark outstretched for a moment, would roll about in
horrible contortions; sometimes lying in a heap on the ground, his feet
touching his head, he would bound upward as high as a man's head."
Francis came to see him and healed him.[14]
But these are exceptions, and the greater part of the time the Saint
withdrew himself from the entreaties of his companions when they asked
miracles at his hands.
To sum up, if we take a survey of the whole field of Francis's piety, we
see that it proceeds from the secret union of his soul with the divine
by prayer; this intuitive power of seeing the ideal classes him with the
mystics. He knew, indeed, both the ecstasy and the liberty of mysticism,
but we must not forget those features of character which separate him
from it, particularly his apostolic fervor. Besides this his piety had
certain peculiar qualities which it is necessary to point out.
And first, liberty with respect of observances: Francis felt all the
emptiness and pride of most religious observance. He saw the snare that
lies hidden there, for the man who carefully observes all the minutiae of
a religious code risks forgetting the supreme law of love. More than
this, the friar who lays upon himself a certain number of supererogatory
facts gains the admiration of the ignorant, but the pleasure which he
finds in this admiration actually transforms his pious act into sin.
Thus, strangely enough, contrary to other founders of orders, he was
continually easing the strictness of the various rules which he laid
down.[15] We may not take this to be a mere accident, for it was only
after a struggle with his disciples that he made his will prevail; and
it was precisely those who were most disposed to relax their vow of
poverty who were the most anxious to display certain bigoted observances
before the public eye.
"The sinner can fast," Francis would say at such times; "he can pray,
weep, macerate himself, but one thing he cannot do, he cannot be
faithful to God." Noble words, not unworthy to fall from the lips of him
who came to preach a worship in spirit and in truth, without temple or
priest; or rather that every fireside shall be a temple and every
believer a priest.
Religious formalism, in whatever form of worship, always takes on a
forced and morose manner. Pharisees of every age disfigure their faces
that no one may be unaware of their godliness. Francis not merely could
not endure these grimaces of false piety, he actually counted mirth and
joy in the number of religious duties.
How shall one be melancholy who has in the heart an inexhaustible