Life of St. Francis of Assisi
habere cupientibus profecto per necessarium. Speculum Minorum
... per Martinum Morin ... Rouen_, 1509. It is 8vo, with
numbered folios, printed with remarkable care. It contains
besides the bulls the principal dissertations upon the Rule,
elaborated in the thirteenth century, and a _Memoriale ordinis_
(first part, f^o 60-82), a kind of catalogue of the
ministers-general, which would have prevented many of the errors
of the historians, if it had been known.
[4] The Bollandists themselves have entirely overlooked those
sources of information, thinking, upon the authority of a single
badly interpreted passage, that the Order had not obtained a
single bull before the solemn approval of Honorius III.,
November 29, 1223.
[5] And not March 29, as Sbaralea has it. The original, which I
have had under my eyes in the archives of Assisi, bears in fact:
_Datum Anagnie XI. Kal. aprilis pontificatus nostri anno sexto_.
[6] The Abbe Horoy has indeed published in five volumes what he
entitles the _Opera omnia_ of Honorius III., but he omits,
without a word of explanation, a great number of letters,
certain of which are brought forward in the well-known
collection of Potthast. The Abbe Pietro Pressuti has undertaken
to publish a compendium of all the bulls of this pope according
to the original Registers of the Vatican. _I regesti del
Pontifice Onorio III._ Roma, t. i., 1884. Volume i. only has as
yet appeared.
* * * * *
IV
CHRONICLERS OF THE ORDER
I. CHRONICLE OF BROTHER GIORDANO DI GIANO[1]
Born at Giano, in Umbria, in the mountainous district which closes the
southern horizon of Assisi, Brother Giordano was in 1221 one of the
twenty-six friars who, under the conduct of Caesar of Speyer, set out for
Germany. He seems to have remained attached to this province until his
death, even when most of the friars, especially those who held cures,
had been transferred, often to a distance of several months' journey,
from one end of Europe to the other. It is not, then, surprising that he
was often prayed to commit his memories to writing. He dictated them to
Brother Baldwin of Brandenburg in the spring of 1262. He must have done
it with joy, having long before prepared himself for the task. He
relates with artless simplicity how in 1221, at the chapter-general of
Portiuncula, he went from group to group questioning as to their names
and country the Brothers who were going to set out on distant missions,
that he might be able to say later, especially if they came to suffer
martyrdom: "I knew them myself!"[2]
His chronicle bears the imprint of this tendency. What he desires to
describe is the introduction of the Order into Germany and its early
developments there, and he does it by enumerating, with a complacency
which has its own coquetry, the names of a multitude of friars[3] and
by carefully dating the events. These details, tedious for the ordinary
reader, are precious to the historian; he sees there the diverse
conditions from which the friars were recruited, and the rapidity with
which a handful of missionaries thrown into an unknown country were able
to branch out, found new stations, and in five years cover with a
network of monasteries, the Tyrol, Saxony, Bavaria, Alsace, and the
neighboring provinces.
It is needless to say that it is worth while to test Giordano's
chronology, for he begins by praying the reader to forgive the errors
which may have escaped him on this head; but a man who thus marks in his
memory what he desires later to tell or to write is not an ordinary
witness.
Reading his chronicle, it seems as if we were listening to the
recollections of an old soldier, who grasps certain worthless details
and presents them with an extraordinary power of relief, who knows not
how to resist the temptation to bring himself forward, at the risk
sometimes of slightly embellishing the dry reality.[4]
In fact this chronicle swarms with anecdotes somewhat personal, but very
artless and welcome, and which on the whole carry in themselves the
testimony to their authenticity. The perfume of the Fioretti already
exhales from these pages so full of candor and manliness; we can follow
the missionaries stage by stage, then when they are settled, open the
door of the monastery and read in the very hearts of these men, many of
whom are as brave as heroes and harmless as doves.
It is true that this chronicle deals especially with Germany, but the
first chapters have an importance for Francis's history that exceeds
even that of the biographers. Thanks to Giordano of Giano, we are from
this time forward informed upon the crises which the institute of
Francis passed through after 1219; he furnishes us the solidly
historical base which seems to be lacking in the documents emanating
from the Spirituals, and corroborates their testimony.
II. ECCLESTON: ARRIVAL OF THE FRIARS IN ENGLAND[5]
Our knowledge of Thomas of Eccleston is very slight, for he has left no
more trace of himself in the history of the Order than of Simon of
Esseby, to whom he dedicates his work. A native no doubt of Yorkshire,
he seems never to have quitted England. He was twenty-five years
gathering the materials of his work, which embraces the course of events
from 1224 almost to 1260. The last facts that he relates belong to years
very near to this date.
Of almost double the length of that of Giordano, Eccleston's work is far
from furnishing as interesting reading. The former had seen nearly
everything that he described, and thence resulted a vigor in his story
that we cannot find in an author who writes on the testimony of others.
More than this, while Giordano follows a chronological order, Eccleston
has divided his incidents under fifteen rubrics, in which the same
people continually reappear in a confusion which at length becomes very
wearisome. Finally, his document is amazingly partial: the author is not
content with merely proving that the English friars are saints; he
desires to show that the province of England surpasses all others[6]
by its fidelity to the Rule and its courage against the upholders of new
ways, Brother Elias in particular.
But these few faults ought not to make us lose sight of the true value
of this document. It embraces what we may call the heroic period of the
Franciscan movement in England, and describes it with extreme
simplicity.
Aside from all question of history, we have here enough to interest all
those who are charmed by the spectacle of moral conquest. On Monday,
September 10th, the Brothers Minor landed at Dover. They were nine in
number: a priest, a deacon, two who had only the lesser Orders, and five
laymen. They visited Canterbury, London, Oxford, Cambridge, Lincoln, and
less than ten months later all who have made their mark in the history
of science or of sanctity had joined them; it may suffice to name Adam
of Marisco, Richard of Cornwall, Bishop Robert Grossetete, one of the
proudest and purest figures of the Middle Ages, and Roger Bacon, that
persecuted monk who several centuries before his time grappled with and
answered in his lonely cell the problems of authority and method, with a
firmness and power which the sixteenth century would find it hard to
surpass.
It is impossible that in such a movement human weaknesses and passions
should not here and there reveal themselves, but we owe our chronicler
thanks for not hiding them. Thanks to him, we can for a moment forget
the present hour, call to life again that first Cambridge chapel--so
slight that it took a carpenter only one day to build it--listen to
three Brothers chanting matins that same night, and that with so much
ardor that one of them--so rickety that his two companions were obliged
to carry him--wept for joy: in England as in Italy the Franciscan gospel
was a gospel of peace and joy. Moral ugliness inspired them with a pity
which we no longer know. There are few historic incidents finer than
that of Brother Geoffrey of Salisbury confessing Alexander of
Bissingburn; the noble penitent was performing this duty without
attention, as if he were telling some sort of a story; suddenly his
confessor melted into tears, making him blush with shame and forcing
tears also from him, working in him so complete a revolution that he
begged to be taken into the Order.
The most interesting parts are those where Thomas gives us an intimate
view of the friars: here drinking their beer, there hastening, in spite
of the Rule, to buy some on credit for two comrades who have been
maltreated, or again clustering about Brother Solomon, who had just come
in nearly frozen with cold, and whom they could not succeed in
warming--_sicut porcis mos est cum comprimendo foverunt_, says the pious
narrator.[7] All this is mingled with dreams, visions, numberless
apparitions,[8] which once more show us how different were the ideas
most familiar to the religious minds of the thirteenth century from
those which haunt the brains and hearts of to-day.
The information given by Eccleston bears only indirectly on this book,
but if he speaks little of Francis he speaks much at length of some of
the men who have been most closely mingled with his life.
III. CHRONICLE OF FRA SALIMBENI[9]
As celebrated as it is little known, this chronicle is of quite
secondary value in all that concerns the life of St. Francis. Its
author, born October 9, 1221, entered the Order in 1238, and wrote his
memoirs in 1282-1287; it is therefore especially for the middle years of
the thirteenth century that his importance is capital. Notwithstanding
this, it is surprising how small a place the radiant figure of the
master holds in these long pages, and this very fact shows, better than
long arguments could do, how profound was the fall of the Franciscan
idea.
IV. THE CHRONICLE OF THE TRIBULATIONS BY ANGELO CARENO[10]
This chronicle was written about 1330; we might therefore be surprised
to see it appear among the sources to be consulted for the life of St.
Francis, dead more than a century before; but the picture which Clareno
gives us of the early days of the Order gains its importance from the
fact that in sketching it he made constant appeal to eye-witnesses, and
precisely to those whose works have disappeared.
Angelo Clareno, earlier called Pietro da Fossombrone[11] from the name
of his native town, and sometimes da Cingoli, doubtless from the little
convent where he made profession, belonged to the Zelanti of the March
of Ancona as early as 1265. Hunted and persecuted by his adversaries
during his whole life, he died in the odor of sanctity June 15, 1339, in
the little hermitage of Santa Maria d' Aspro in the diocese of Marsico
in Basilicata.
Thanks to published documents, we may now, so to speak, follow day by
day not only the external circumstances of his life, but the inner
workings of his soul. With him we see the true Franciscan live again,
one of those men who, while desiring to remain the obedient son of the
Church, cannot reconcile themselves to permit the domain of the dream to
slip away from them, the ideal which they have hailed. Often they are on
the borders of heresy; in these utterances against bad priests and
unworthy pontiffs there is a bitterness which the sectaries of the
sixteenth century will not exceed.[12] Often, too, they seem to
renounce all authority and make final appeal to the inward witness of
the Holy Spirit;[13] and yet Protestantism would be mistaken in seeking
its ancestors among them. No, they desired to die as they had lived, in
the communion of that Church which was as a stepmother to them and which