Life of St. Francis of Assisi

"Go in, go in!" he cried to his beast; "we shall be most comfortable here." It appeared that he was afraid that if the Brothers remained there much longer they would begin to think this deserted place was their own.1 Such rudeness was very displeasing to Francis, who immediately arose and departed, followed by his companions.

Now that they were so numerous the Brothers could no longer continue their wandering life in all respects as in the past; they had need of a permanent shelter and above all of a little chapel. They addressed themselves in vain first to the bishop and then to the canons of San Rufino for the loan of what they needed, but were more fortunate with the abbot of the Benedictines of Mount Subasio, who ceded to them in perpetuity the use of a chapel already very dear to their hearts, Santa Maria degli Angeli or the Portiuncula.2

Francis was enchanted; he saw a mysterious harmony, ordained by God himself, between the name of the humble sanctuary and that of his Order. The brethren quickly built for themselves a few huts; a quickset hedge served as enclosing wall, and thus in three or four days was organized the first Franciscan convent.

For ten years they were satisfied with this. These ten years are the heroic period of the Order. St. Francis, in full possession of his ideal, will seek to inculcate it upon his disciples and will succeed sometimes; but already the too rapid multiplication of the brotherhood will provoke some symptoms of relaxation.

The remembrance of the beginning of this period has drawn from the lips of Thomas of Celano a sort of canticle in honor of the monastic life. It is the burning and untranslatable commentary of the Psalmist's cry: "Behold how sweet and pleasant it is to be brethren and to dwell together."

Their cloister was the forest which then extended on all sides of Portiuncula, occupying a large part of the plain. There they gathered around their master to receive his spiritual counsels, and thither they retired to meditate and pray.3 It would be a gross mistake, however, to suppose that contemplation absorbed them completely during the days which were not consecrated to missionary tours: a part of their time was spent in manual labor.

The intentions of St. Francis have been more misapprehended on this point than on any other, but it may be said that nowhere is he more clear than when he ordains that his friars shall gain their livelihood by the work of their hands. He never dreamed of creating a mendicant order, he created a laboring order. It is true we shall often see him begging and urging his disciples to do as much, but these incidents ought not to mislead us; they are meant to teach that when a friar arrived in any locality and there spent his strength for long days in dispensing spiritual bread to famished souls, he ought not to blush to receive material bread in exchange. To work was the rule, to beg the exception; but this exception was in nowise dishonorable. Did not Jesus, the Virgin, the disciples live on bread bestowed? Was it not rendering a great service to those to whom they resorted to teach them charity?

Francis in his poetic language gave the name of mensa Domini, the table of the Lord, to this table of love around which gathered the little poor ones. The bread of charity is the bread of angels; and it is also that of the birds, which reap not nor gather into barns.

We are far enough, in this case, from that mendicity which is understood as a means of existence and the essential condition of a life of idleness. It is the opposite extreme, and we are true and just to St. Francis and to the origin of the mendicant orders only when we do not separate the obligation of labor from the praise of mendicity.4

No doubt this zeal did not last long, and Thomas of Celano already entitles his chapters, "Lament before God over the idleness and gluttony of the friars;" but we must not permit this speedy and inevitable decadence to veil from our sight the holy and manly beauty of the origin.

With all his gentleness Francis knew how to show an inflexible severity toward the idle; he even went so far as to dismiss a friar who refused to work.5 Nothing in this matter better shows the intentions of the Poverello than the life of Brother Egidio, one of his dearest companions, him of whom he said with a smile: "He is one of the paladins of my Round Table."

Brother Egidio had a taste for great adventures, and is a living example of a Franciscan of the earliest days; he survived his master twenty-five years, and never ceased to obey the letter and spirit of the Rule with freedom and simplicity.

We find him one day setting out on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Arrived at Brindisi, he borrowed a water-jug that he might carry water while he was awaiting the departure of the ship, and passed a part of every day in crying through the streets of the city: "Alla fresca! Alla fresca!" like other water-carriers. But he would change his trade according to the country and the circumstances; on his way back, at Ancona, he procured willow for making baskets, which he afterward sold, not for money but for his food. It even happened to him to be employed in burying the dead.

Sent to Rome, every morning after finishing his religious duties, he would take a walk of several leagues, to a certain forest, whence he brought a load of wood. Coming back one day he met a lady who wanted to buy it; they agreed on a price, and Egidio carried it to her house. But when he arrived at the house she perceived him to be a friar, and would have given him more than the price agreed upon. "My good lady," he replied, "I will not permit myself to be overcome by avarice," and he departed without accepting anything at all.

In the olive season he helped in the gathering; in grape season he offered himself as vintager. One day on the Piazza di Roma, where men are hired for day's work, he saw a padrone who could not find a man to thrash his walnut tree; it was so high that no one dared risk himself in it. "If you will give me part of the nuts," said Egidio, "I will do it willingly." The bargain struck and the tree thrashed, there proved to be so many nuts that he did not know where to put his share. Gathering up his tunic he made a bag of it and full of joy returned to Rome, where he distributed them among all the poor whom he met.

Is not this a charming incident? Does it not by itself alone reveal the freshness, the youth, the kindness of heart of the first Franciscans? There is no end to the stories of the ingenuousness of Brother Egidio. All kinds of work seemed good to him provided he had time enough in the morning for his religious duties. Now he is in the service of the Cellarer of the Four Crowns at Rome, sifting flour and carrying water to the convent from the well of San Sisto. Now he is at Rieti, where he consents to remain with Cardinal Nicholas, bringing to every meal the bread which he had earned, notwithstanding the entreaties of the master of the house, who would gladly have provided for his wants. One day it rained so hard that Brother Egidio could not think of going out; the cardinal was already making merry over the thought that he would be forced to accept bread that he had not earned. But Egidio went to the kitchen, and finding that it needed cleaning he persuaded the cook to let him sweep it, and returned triumphant with the bread he had earned, which he ate at the cardinal's table.6

From the very beginning Egidio's life commanded respect; it was at once so original, so gay, so spiritual,7 and so mystical, that even in the least exact and most expanded accounts his legend has remained almost free from all addition. He is, after St. Francis, the finest incarnation of the Franciscan spirit.

The Brothers, after entering upon the Order, were to continue to exercise the calling which they had when in the world, and if they had none they were to learn one. For payment they were to accept only the food that was necessary for them, but in case that was insufficient they might beg. In addition they were naturally permitted to own the instruments of their calling.8 Brother Ginepro, whose acquaintance we shall make further on, had an awl, and gained his bread wherever he went by mending shoes, and we see St. Clara working even on her death-bed.

This obligation to work with the hands merits all the more to be brought into the light, because it was destined hardly to survive St. Francis, and because to it is due in part the original character of the first generation of the Order. Yet this was not the real reason for the being of the Brothers Minor. Their mission consisted above all in being the spouses of Poverty.

Terrified by the ecclesiastical disorders of the time, haunted by painful memories of his past life, Francis saw in money the special instrument of the devil; in moments of excitement he went so far as to execrate it, as if there had been in the metal itself a sort of magical power and secret curse. Money was truly for him the sacrament of evil.

This is not the place for asking if he was wrong; grave authors have demonstrated at length the economic troubles which would have been let loose upon the world if men had followed him. Alas! his madness, if madness it were, is a kind of which one need not fear the contagion.

He felt that in this respect the Rule could not be too absolute, and that if unfortunately the door was opened to various interpretations of it, there would be no stopping-point. The course of events and the periodical convulsions which shook his Order show clearly enough how rightly he judged.

I do not know nor desire to know if theologians have yet come to a scientific conclusion with regard to the poverty of Jesus, but it seems evident to me that poverty with the labor of the hands is the ideal held up by the Galilean to the efforts of his disciples.

Still it is easy to see that Franciscan poverty is neither to be confounded with the unfeeling pride of the stoic, nor with the stupid horror of all joy felt by certain devotees; St. Francis renounced everything only that he might the better possess everything. The lives of the immense majority of our contemporaries are ruled by the fatal error that the more one possesses the more one enjoys. Our exterior, civil liberties continually increase, but at the same time our inward freedom is taking flight; how many are there among us who are literally possessed by what they possess?9

Poverty not only permitted the Brothers to mingle with the poor and speak to them with authority, but, removing from them all material anxiety, it left them free to enjoy without hindrance those hidden treasures which nature reserves for pure idealists.

The ever-thickening barriers which modern life, with its sickly search for useless comfort, has set up between us and nature did not exist for these men, so full of youth and life, eager for wide spaces and the outer air. This is what gave St. Francis and his companions that quick susceptibility to Nature which made them thrill in mysterious harmony with her. Their communion with Nature was so intimate, so ardent, that Umbria, with the harmonious poetry of its skies, the joyful outburst of its spring-time, is still the best document from which to study them. The tie between the two is so indissoluble, that after having lived a certain time in company with St. Francis, one can hardly, on reading certain passages of his biographers, help seeing the spot where the incident took place, hearing the vague sounds of creatures and things, precisely as, when reading certain pages of a beloved author, one hears the sound of his voice.

The worship of Poverty of the early Franciscans had in it, then, nothing ascetic or barbarous, nothing which recalls the Stylites or the Nazirs. She was their bride, and like true lovers they felt no fatigues which they might endure to find and remain near her.

To draw the portrait of an ideal knight at the beginning of the thirteenth century is to draw Francis's very portrait, with this difference, that what the knight did for his lady, he did for Poverty. This comparison is not a mere caprice; he himself profoundly felt it and expressed it with perfect clearness, and it is only by keeping it clearly present in the mind that we can see into the very depth of his heart.11

To find any other souls of the same nature one must come down to Giovanni di Parma and Jacoponi di Todi. The life of St. Francis as troubadour has been written; it would have been better to write it as knight, for this is the explanation of his whole life, and as it were the heart of his heart. From the day when, forgetting the songs of his friends and suddenly stopped in the public place of Assisi, he met Poverty, his bride, and swore to her faith and love, down to that evening when, naked upon the naked earth of Portiuncula, he breathed out his life, it may be said that all his thoughts went out to this lady of his chaste loves. For twenty years he served her without faltering, sometimes with an artlessness which would appear infantine, if something infinitely sincere and sublime did not arrest the smile upon the most sceptical lips.

Poverty agreed marvellously with that need which men had at that time, and which perhaps they have lost less than they suppose, the need of an ideal very high, very pure, mysterious, inaccessible, which yet they may picture to themselves in concrete form. Sometimes a few privileged disciples saw the lovely and pure Lady descend from heaven to salute her spouse, but, whether visible or not, she always kept close beside her Umbrian lover, as she kept close beside the Galilean; in the stable of the nativity, upon the cross at Golgotha, and even in the borrowed tomb where his body lay.

During several years this ideal was not alone that of St. Francis, but also of all the Brothers. In poverty the gente poverelle had found safety, love, liberty; and all the efforts of the new apostles are directed to the keeping of this precious treasure.

Their worship sometimes might seem excessive. They showed their spouse those delicate attentions, those refinements of courtesy so frequent in the morning light of a betrothal, but which one gradually forgets till they become incomprehensible.12

The number of disciples continually increased; almost every week brought new recruits; the year 1211 was without doubt devoted by Francis to a tour in Umbria and the neighboring provinces. His sermons were short appeals to conscience; his heart went out to his hearers in ineffable tones, so that when men tried to repeat what they had heard they found themselves incapable.13 The Rule of 1221 has preserved for us a summary of these appeals:

"Here is an exhortation which all the Brothers may make when they think best: Fear and honor God, praise and bless him. Give thanks unto him. Adore the Lord, Almighty God, in Trinity and unity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Repent and make fruits meet for repentance, for you know that we shall soon die. Give, and it shall be given unto you. Forgive, and you shall be forgiven; for if you forgive not, God will not forgive you. Blessed are they who die repenting, for they shall be in the kingdom of heaven.... Abstain carefully from all evil, and persevere in the good until the end."14

We see how simple and purely ethical was the early Franciscan preaching. The complications of dogma and scholasticism are entirely absent from it. To understand how new this was and how refreshing to the soul we must study the disciples that came after him.

I do not judge the disciple; he was of his time in not knowing how to say simply what he thought, in always desiring to subtilize it, to extract it from passages in the Bible turned from their natural meaning by efforts at once laborious and puerile; what the alchemists did in their continual making of strange mixtures from which they fancied that they should bring out gold, the preachers did to the texts, in order to bring out the truth.