I. Jacques de Vitry
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Sabatier, Paul and Houghton, Louise Seymour
The following documents, which we can only briefly indicate, are of inestimable value; they emanate from men particularly well situated to give us the impression which the Umbrian prophet produced on his generation.
Jacques de Vitry1 has left extended writings on St. Francis. Like a prudent man who has already seen many religious madmen, he is at first reserved; but soon this sentiment disappears, and we find in him only a humble and active admiration for the Apostolic Man.
He speaks of him in a letter which he wrote immediately after the taking of Damietta (November, 1219), to his friends in Lorraine, to describe it to them.2 A few lines suffice to describe St. Francis and point out his irresistible influence. There is not a single passage in the Franciscan biographers which gives a more living idea of the apostolate of the Poverello.
He returns to him more at length in his Historia Occidentalis, devoting to him the thirty-second chapter of this curious work.3 These pages, vibrating with enthusiasm, were written during Francis's lifetime,4 at the time when the most enlightened members of the Church, who had believed themselves to be living in the evening of the world, in vespere mundi tendentis ad occasum, suddenly saw in the direction of Umbria the light of a new day.