Life of St. Francis of Assisi
form the atmosphere in which St. Francis lived is therefore of very
uncertain success. It was perhaps presumptuous to undertake it.
Happily we are no longer in the time when historians thought they had
done the right thing when they had reduced everything to its proper
size, contenting themselves with denying or omitting everything in the
life of the heroes of humanity which rises above the level of our
every-day experience.
No doubt Francis did not meet on the road to Sienna three pure and
gentle virgins come from heaven to greet him; the devil did not overturn
rocks for the sake of terrifying him; but when we deny these visions and
apparitions, we are victims of an error graver, perhaps, than that of
those who affirm them.
The first time that I was at Assisi I arrived in the middle of the
night. When the sun rose, flooding everything with warmth and light, the
old basilica[11] seemed suddenly to quiver; one might have said that it
wished to speak and sing. Giotto's frescos, but now invisible, awoke to
a strange life, you might have thought them painted the evening before
so much alive they were; everything was moving without awkwardness or
jar.
I returned six months later. A scaffold had been put up in the middle of
the nave; upon it an art critic was examining the paintings, and as the
day was overcast he threw upon the walls the beams of a lamp with a
reflector. Then you saw arms thrown out, faces grimacing, without unity,
without harmony; the most exquisite figures took on something fantastic
and grotesque.
He came down triumphant, with a portfolio stuffed with sketches; here a
foot, there a muscle, farther on a bit of face, and I could not refrain
from musing on the frescos as I had seen them bathed in sunlight.
The sun and the lamp are both deceivers; they transform what they show;
but if the truth must be told I own to my preference for the falsehoods
of the sun.
History is a landscape, and like those of nature it is continually
changing. Two persons who look at it at the same time do not find in it
the same charm, and you yourself, if you had it continually before your
eyes, would never see it twice alike. The general lines are permanent,
but it needs only a cloud to hide the most important ones, as it needs
only a jet of light to bring out such or such a detail and give it a
false value.
When I began this page the sun was disappearing behind the rains of the
Castle of Crussol and the splendors of the sunset gave it a shining
aureola; the light flooded everything, and you no longer saw anywhere
the damage which wars have inflicted upon the old feudal manor. I
looked, almost thinking I could perceive at the window the figure of the
chatelaine ... Twilight has come, and now there is nothing up there but
crumbling walls, a discrowned tower, nothing but ruins and rubbish,
which seem to beg for pity.
It is the same with the landscapes of history. Narrow minds cannot
accommodate themselves to these perpetual transformations: they want an
objective history in which the author will study the people as a chemist
studies a body. It is very possible that there may be laws for historic
evolution and social transformations as exact as those of chemical
combinations, and we must hope that in the end they will be discovered;
but for the present there is no purely objective truth of history.
To write history we must think it, and to think it is to transform it.
Within a few years, it is true, men have believed they had found the
secret of objectivity, in the publication of original documents. This is
a true progress which renders inestimable service, but here again we
must not deceive ourselves as to its significance. All the documents on
an epoch or an event cannot usually be published, a selection must be
made, and in it will necessarily appear the turn of mind of him who
makes it. Let us admit that all that can be found is published; but
alas, the most unusual movements have generally the fewest documents.
Take, for instance, the religious history of the Middle Ages: it is
already a pretty delicate task to collect official documents, such as
bulls, briefs, conciliary canons, monastic constitutions, etc., but do
these documents contain all the life of the Church? Much is still
wanting, and to my mind the movements which secretly agitated the masses
are much more important, although to testify to them we have only a few
fragments.
Poor heretics, they were not only imprisoned and burned, but their books
were destroyed and everything that spoke of them; and more than one
historian, finding scarcely a trace of them in his heaps of documents,
forgets these prophets with their strange visions, these poet-monks who
from the depths of their cells made the world to thrill and the papacy
to tremble.
Objective history is then a utopia. We create God in our own image, and
we impress the mark of our personality in places where we least expect
to find it again.
But by dint of talking about the tribunal of history we have made most
authors think that they owe to themselves and their readers definitive
and irrevocable judgments.
It is always easier to pronounce a sentence than to wait, to reserve
one's opinion, to re-examine. The crowd which has put itself out to be
present at a trial is almost always furious with the judges when they
reserve the case for further information; its mind is so made that it
requires precision in things which will bear it the least; it puts
questions right and left, as children do; if you appear to hesitate or
to be embarrassed you are lost in its estimation, you are evidently only
an ignoramus.
But perhaps below the Areopagites, obliged by their functions to
pronounce sentence, there is place at the famous tribunal for a simple
spectator who has come in by accident. He has made out a brief and would
like very simply to tell his neighbors his opinion.
This, then, is not a history _ad probandum_, to use the ancient formula.
Is this to say that I have only desired to give the reader a moment of
diversion? That would be to understand my thought very ill. In the grand
spectacles of history as in those of nature there is something divine;
from it our minds and hearts gain a virtue at once pacifying and
encouraging, we experience the salutary sensation of littleness, and
seeing the beauties and the sadnesses of the past we learn better how to
judge the present hour.
In one of the frescos of the Upper Church of Assisi, Giotto has
represented St. Clara and her companions coming out from St. Damian all
in tears, to kiss their spiritual father's corpse as it is being carried
to its last home. With an artist's liberty he has made the chapel a rich
church built of precious marbles.
Happily the real St. Damian is still there, nestled under some
olive-trees like a lark under the heather; it still has its ill-made
walls of irregular stones, like those which bound the neighboring
fields. Which is the more beautiful, the ideal temple of the artist's
fancy, or the poor chapel of reality? No heart will be in doubt.
Francis's official historians have done for his biography what Giotto
did for his little sanctuary. In general they have done him ill-service.
Their embellishments have hidden the real St. Francis, who was, in fact,
infinitely nobler than they have made him to be. Ecclesiastical writers
appear to make a great mistake in thus adorning the lives of their
heroes, and only mentioning their edifying features. They thus give
occasion, even to the most devout, to suspect their testimony. Besides,
by thus surrounding their saints with light they make them superhuman
creatures, having nothing in common with us; they are privileged
characters, marked with the divine seal; they are, as the litanies say,
vials of election, into which God has poured the sweetest perfumes;
their sanctity is revealed almost in spite of themselves; they are born
saints as others are born kings or slaves, their life is set out against
the golden background of a tryptich, and not against the sombre
background of reality.
By such means the saints, perhaps, gain something in the respect of the
superstitious; but their lives lose something of virtue and of
communicable strength. Forgetting that they were men like ourselves, we
no longer hear in our conscience the command, "Go and do likewise."
It is, then, a work of piety to seek behind the legend for the history.
Is it presumptuous to ask our readers to try to understand the
thirteenth century and love St. Francis? They will be amply rewarded for
the effort, and will soon find an unexpected charm in these too meagre
landscapes, these incorporate souls, these sickly imaginations which
will pass before their eyes. Love is the true key of history.
A book has always a great number of authors, and the following pages owe
much to the researches of others; I have tried in the notes to show the
whole value of these debts.
I have also had colaborers to whom it will be more difficult for me to
express my gratitude. I refer to the librarians of the libraries of
Italy and their assistants; it is impossible to name them all, their
faces are better known to me than their names, but I would here say that
during long months passed in the various collections of the Peninsula,
all, even to the most humble employees, have shown a tireless
helpfulness even at those periods of the year when the number of
attendants was the smallest.
Professor Alessandro Leto, who, barely recovered from a grave attack of
influenza, kindly served as my guide among the archives of Assisi,
deserves a very particular mention. To the Syndic and municipality of
that city I desire also to express my gratitude.
I cannot close without a warm remembrance to the spiritual sons of St.
Francis dispersed in the mountains of Umbria and Tuscany.
Dear dwellers in St. Damian, Portiuncula, the Carceri, the Verna, Monte
Colombo, you perhaps remember the strange pilgrim who, though he wore
neither the frock nor the cord, used to talk with you of the Seraphic
Father with as much love as the most pious Franciscan; you used to be
surprised at his eagerness to see everything, to look at everything, to
thread all the unexplored paths. You often tried to restrain him by
telling him that there was not the smallest relic, the most meagre
indulgence in the far-away grottos to which he was dragging you, but you
always ended by going with him, thinking that none but a Frenchman could
be possessed by a devotion so fervent and so imprudent.
Thank you, pious anchorites of Greccio, thank you for the bread that you
went out and begged when I arrived at your hermitage benumbed with cold
and hunger. If you read these lines, read here my gratitude and also a
little admiration. You are not all saints, but nearly all of you have
hours of saintliness, flights of pure love.
If some pages of this book give you pain, turn them over quickly; let me
think that others of them will give you pleasure, and will make the name
you bear, if possible, still more precious to you than it now is.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The mendicant orders were in their origin a true
_International_. When in the spring of 1216 St. Dominic
assembled his friars at Notre Dame de la Prouille, they were
found to be sixteen in number, and among them Castilians,
Navarese, Normans, French, Languedocians, and even English and
Germans.
Heretics travelled all over Europe, and nowhere do we find them
checked by the diversity of languages. Arnold of Brescia, for
example, the famous Tribune of Rome, appeared in France and
Switzerland and in the heart of Germany.
[2] The Reformation only substituted the authority of the book