 CHAPTER I. THE PROBLEM OF ST. FRANCESS OF A SISSY A sketch of St. Francis of Assisi in modern English may be written in one of three ways. Between these the writer must make his selection, and the third way, which is adopted here, is in some respects the most difficult of all. At least it would be the most difficult if the other two were not impossible. First, he may deal with this great and most amazing man as a figure in secular history and a model of social virtues. He may describe this divine demagogue as being, as he probably was, the world's one quite sincere Democrat. He may say, what means very little, that St. Francis was in advance of his age. He may say, what is quite true, that St. Francis anticipated all that is most liberal and sympathetic in the modern mood, the love of nature, the love of animals, the sense of social compassion, the sense of the spiritual dangers of prosperity, and even of property. All these things that nobody understood before Wordsworth were familiar to St. Francis. All these things that were first discovered by Tolstoy had been taken for granted by St. Francis. He could be presented not only as a human, but a humanitarian hero, indeed, as the first hero of humanism. He has been described as a sort of morning star of the Renaissance, and in comparison with all these things his ascetical theology can be ignored or dismissed as a contemporary accident, which was fortunately not a fatal accident. His religion can be regarded as a superstition, but an inevitable superstition from which not even genius could wholly free itself. In the consideration of which it would be unjust to condemn St. Francis for his self-denial or unduly chide him for his chastity. It is quite true that even from so detached a standpoint, his stature would still appear heroic. There would still be a great deal to be said about the man who tried to end the Crusades by talking to the Saracens, or who interceded with the emperor for the birds. The writer might describe in a purely historical spirit the whole of that great Franciscan inspiration that was felt in the painting of Giotto, in the poetry of Dante, in the miracle plays that made possible the modern drama, and in so many other things that are already appreciated by the modern culture. He may try to do it, as others have done, almost without raising any religious question at all. In short, he may try to tell the story of a saint without God, which is like being told to write the life of Nansen and forbidden to mention the North Pole. Second, he may go to the opposite extreme and decide, as it were, to be defiantly devotional. He may take the theological enthusiasm as thoroughly the theme as it was the theme of the First Franciscans. He may treat religion as the real thing that it was to the First Francis of Assisi. He can find an austere joy, so to speak, in parading the paradoxes of asceticism and all the holy topsy-turvydom of humility. He can stamp the whole history with the stigmata, record fasts like fights against a dragon, till in the vague modern mind Saint Francis is as dark a figure as Saint Dominic. In short, he can produce what many in our world will regard as a sort of photographic negative, the reversal of all lights and shades, what the foolish will find as impenetrable as darkness, and even many of the wise will find almost as invisible as if it were written in silver upon white. Such a study of Saint Francis would be unintelligible to anyone who does not share his religion, perhaps only partly intelligible to anyone who does not share his vocation. According to degrees of judgment, it will be regarded as something too bad or too good for the world. The only difficulty about doing the thing in this way is that it cannot be done. It would really require a saint to write the life of a saint. In the present case, the objections to such a course are insuperable. Third, he may try to do what I have tried to do here, and, as I have already suggested, the course has peculiar problems of its own. The writer may put himself in the position of the ordinary modern outsider and inquirer, as indeed the present writer is still largely and was once entirely in that position. He may start from the standpoint of a man who already admires Saint Francis, but only for those things which such a man finds admirable. In other words, he may assume that the reader is at least as enlightened as Renaud or Matthew Arnold, but in the light of that enlightenment he may try to illuminate what Renaud and Matthew Arnold left dark. He may try to use what is understood to explain what is not understood. He may say to the modern English reader, Here is an historical character which is admittedly attractive to many of us already by its gaiety, its romantic imagination, its spiritual courtesy, and camaraderie, but which also contains elements evidently equally sincere and emphatic, which seem to you quite remote and repulsive. But after all, this man was a man and not half a dozen men. What seems inconsistency to you did not seem inconsistency to him. Let us see whether we can understand, with the help of the existing understanding, these other things that seem now to be doubly dark by their intrinsic gloom and their ironic contrast. I do not mean, of course, that I can really reach such a psychological completeness in this crude and curt outline, but I mean that this is the only controversial condition that I shall here assume, that I am dealing with the sympathetic outsider. I shall not assume any more or any less agreement than this. A materialist may not care whether the inconsistencies are reconciled or not. A Catholic may not see any inconsistencies to reconcile. But I am here addressing the ordinary modern man, sympathetic but skeptical, and I can only rather hazily hope that by approaching the great saint's story through what is evidently picturesque and popular about it, I may at least leave the reader understanding a little more than before of the consistency of a complete character. That by approaching it in this way, we may at least get a glimmering of why the poet who praised his Lord the Son often hid himself in a dark cavern, of why the saint who was so gentle with his brother the wolf was so harsh to his brother the ass, as he nicknamed his own body, of why the troubadour who said that love set his heart on fire separated himself from women, or why the singer who rejoiced in the strength and gaiety of the fire deliberately rolled himself in the snow, of why the very song which cries with all the passion of a pagan, praised be God for our sister Mother Earth which brings forth varied fruits and grass and glowing flowers, ends almost with the words, praised be God for our sister the death of the body. Renaud and Matthew Ornel failed utterly at this test. They were content to follow Francis with their praises until they were stopped by their prejudices, the stubborn prejudices of the skeptic. The moment Francis begins to do something they did not understand or did not like, they did not try to understand it still less to like it. They simply turn their backs on the whole business and walked no more with him. No man will get any further along a path of historical inquiry in that fashion. The skeptics are really driven to drop the whole subject into despair, to leave the most simple and sincere of all historical characters as a mass of contradictions to be praised on the principle of the cure its egg. Arnold refers to the asceticism of Alverno almost hardly, as if it were an unlucky but undeniable blot on the beauty of the story, or rather as if it were a pitiable breakdown and bathos at the end of the story. Now, this is simply to be stone blind to the whole point of any story. To represent Mount Alverno as the mere collapse of Francis is exactly like representing Mount Calvary as the mere collapse of Christ. Those mountains are mountains whatever else they are, and it is nonsense to say, like the Red Queen, that they are comparative hollows or negative holes in the ground. They were quite manifestly met to be culminations and landmarks. To treat the stigmata as a sort of scandal, to be touched on tenderly, but with pain, is exactly like treating the original five wounds of Jesus Christ as five blots on his character. You may dislike the idea of asceticism. You may dislike equally the idea of martyrdom. For that matter, you may have an honest and natural dislike of the whole conception of sacrifice symbolized by the cross. But if it is an intelligent dislike, you will still retain the capacity for seeing the point of a story, of the story of a martyr or even the story of a monk. You will not be able rationally to read the gospel and regard the crucifixion as an afterthought or an anticlimax or an accident in the life of Christ. It is obviously the point of the story like the point of a sword, the sword that pierced the heart of the mother of God. And you will not be able rationally to read the story of a man presented as a mirror of Christ without understanding his final phase as a man of sorrows and at least artistically appreciating the appropriateness of his receiving in a cloud of mystery and isolation inflicted by no human hand, the unhealed, everlasting wounds that heal the world, the practical reconciliation of the gaiety and austerity I must leave the story itself to suggest. But since I have mentioned Matthew Ornall and Arinon and the rationalistic admirers of Saint Francis, I will here give the hint of what it seems to me most advisable for such readers to keep in mind. These distinguished writers found things like the Stigmata, a stumbling block, because to them a religion was a philosophy. It was an impersonal thing, and it is only the most personal passion that provides here an approximate earthly parallel. A man will not roll in the snow for a stream of tendency by which all things fulfill the law of their being. He will not go without food the name of something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness. He will do things like this, or pretty nearly like this, under quite a different impulse. He will do these things when he is in love. The first fact to realize about Saint Francis is involved in the first fact with which his story starts, that when he said from the first that he was a troubadour and said later that he was a troubadour of a newer and nobler romance, he was not using mere metaphor, but understood himself much better than the scholars understand him. He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a troubadour. He was a lover. He was a lover of God, and he was really and truly a lover of men. Possibly a much rarer mystical vocation. A lover of men is very nearly the opposite of a philanthropist. Indeed, the pedantry of the Greek word carries something like a satire on itself. A philanthropist may be said to love anthropoids, but as Saint Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity, but Christ. Say, if you think so, that he was a lunatic loving and imaginary person, but an imaginary person, not an imaginary idea. And for the modern reader, the clue to the asceticism and all the rest can best be found in the stories of lovers when they seem to be rather like lunatics. Tell it as the tale of one of the troubadours and the wild things he would do for his lady, and the whole of the modern puzzle disappears. In such a romance there would be no contradiction between the poet gathering flowers in the sun and enduring a freezing vigil in the snow, between his praising all earthly and bodily beauty and then refusing to eat, between his glorifying gold and purple and perversely going in rags, between his showing pathetically a hunger for a happy life and a thirst for a heroic death. All these riddles would easily be resolved in the simplicity of any noble love. Only this was so noble a love that nine men out of ten have hardly even heard of it. We shall see later that this parallel of the earthly lover has a very practical relation to the problems of his life, as to his relations with his father and with his friends and their families. The modern reader will almost always find that if he could only feel this kind of love as a reality, he would feel this kind of extravagance as a romance. But I only note it here as a preliminary point because, though it is very far from being the final truth in the matter, it is the best approach to it. The reader cannot even begin to see the sense of a story that may well seem to him a very wild one until he understands that to this great mystic his religion was not a thing like a theory, but a thing like a love affair. And the only purpose of this preparatory chapter is to explain the limits of this present book, which is only addressed to that part of the modern world which finds in St. Francis a certain modern difficulty, which can admire him, yet hardly accept him, or which can appreciate the saint almost without the saintity. And my only claim, even to attempt such a task, is that I myself have for so long been in various stages of such a condition. Many thousand things that I now partly comprehend I should have thought utterly incomprehensible. Many things I now hold sacred I should have scouted as utterly superstitious. Many things that seem to me lucid and enlightened now they are seen from the inside. I should honestly have called dark and barbarous seen from the outside. When long ago in those days of boyhood my fancy first caught fire with the glory of Francis of Assisi. I too have lived in Arkady, but even in Arkady I met one walking in a brown habit who loved the woods better than Pan. The figure in the brown habit stands above the hearth in the room where I write, and alone among many such images at no stage of my pilgrimage has he ever seemed to me a stranger. There is something of harmony between the hearth and the firelight and my own first pleasure in his words about his brother fire, for he stands far enough back in my memory to mingle with all those more domestic dreams of the first days. Even the fantastic shadows thrown by fire make a sort of shadow pantomime that belongs to the nursery. Yet the shadows were even then the shadows of his favorite beasts and birds, and he saw them grotesque but haloed with the love of God. His brother wolf and brother sheep seemed then almost like the brer fox and brer rabbit of a more Christian uncle Remus. I have come slowly to see many and more marvelous aspects of such a man, but I have never lost that one. His figure stands on a sort of bridge connecting my boyhood with my conversion to many other things for the romance of his religion has penetrated even the rationalism of that vague Victorian time. In so far as I have had this experience I may be able to lead others a little further along that road, but only a very little further. Nobody knows better than I now that it is a road upon which angels might fear to tread, but though I am certain of failure I am not altogether overcome by fear, for he suffered fools gladly. CHAPTER II. THE WORLD ST. FRANCIS FOUND The modern innovation which has substituted journalism for history, or for that tradition that is the gossip of history, has had at least one definite effect. It has ensured that everybody should only hear the end of every story. Journalists are in the habit of printing above the very last chapters of their serial stories when the hero and heroine are just about to embrace in the last chapter as only an unfathomable perversity prevented them from doing in the first, the rather misleading words, you can begin this story here. But even this is not a complete parallel, for the journals do give some sort of a summary of the story, while they never give anything remotely resembling a summary of the history. Newspapers not only deal with news, but they deal with everything as if it were entirely new. Tutankhamen for instance was entirely new. It is exactly in the same fashion that we read that Admiral Bangs has been shot, which is the first intimation we have that he has ever been born. There is something singularly significant in the use which journalism makes of its stories of biography. It never thinks of publishing the life until it is publishing the death. As it deals with individuals it deals with institutions and ideas. After the great war our public began to be told of all sorts of nations being emancipated. It had never been told a word about their being enslaved. We were called upon to judge of the justice of the settlements when we had never been allowed to hear of the very existence of the quarrels. People would think it pedantic to talk about the Serbian epics and they prefer to speak in plain everyday modern language about the Yugoslavonic international new diplomacy. And they are quite excited about something they call Czechoslovia without apparently having ever heard of Bohemia. Things that are as old as Europe are regarded as more recent than the very latest claims pegged out on the prairies of America. It is very exciting like the last act of a play to people who have only come into the theater just before the curtain falls. But it does not conduce exactly to knowing what it is all about. To those content with the mere fact of a pistol shot or a passionate embrace, such a leisurely manner of patronizing the drama may be recommended. To those tormented by a merely intellectual curiosity about who is kissing or killing whom and why, it is unsatisfactory. Most modern history, especially in England, suffers from the same imperfection as journalism. At best it only tells half of the history of Christendom and that second half without the first half. Men for whom reason begins with the revival of learning, men for whom religion begins with the Reformation, can never give a complete account of anything, for they have to start with institutions whose origin they cannot explain or generally even imagine. Just as we hear of the admiral being shot but have never heard of his being born, so we all heard a great deal about the dissolution of the monasteries, but we heard next to nothing about the creation of the monasteries. Now, this sort of history would be hopelessly insufficient even for an intelligent man who hated the monasteries. It is hopelessly insufficient in connection with institutions that many intelligent men do in a quite healthy spirit hate. For instance, it is possible that some of us have occasionally seen some mention by our learned leader writers of an obscure institution called the Spanish Inquisition. Well, it really is an obscure institution according to them and the histories they read. It is obscure because its origin is obscure. Protestant history simply begins with the horrible thing in possession as the pantomime begins with the demon king of the goblin kitchen. It is likely enough that it was, especially towards the end, a horrible thing that might be haunted by demons, but if we say this was so, we have no notion why it was so. To understand the Spanish Inquisition, it would be necessary to discover two things that we have never dreamed of bothering about, what Spain was and what an Inquisition was. The farmer would bring in the whole great question about the crusade against the Moors and by what heroic chivalry a European nation freed itself of an alien domination from Africa. The latter would begin in the whole business of the other crusade against the Alba Gencians and why men loved and hated that nihilistic vision from Asia. Unless we understand that there was in these things originally the rush and romance of a crusade, we cannot understand how they came to deceive men or dragged them on towards evil. The crusaders doubtless abused their victory, but there was a victory to abuse, and where there is victory there is valor in the field and popularity in the forum. There is some sort of enthusiasm that encourages excesses or covers faults. For instance, I for one have maintained from very early days the responsibility of the English for their atrocious treatment of the Irish, but it would be quite unfair to the English to describe even the devilry of 98 and leave out altogether all mention of the war with Napoleon. It would be unjust to suggest that the English mind was bent on nothing but the death of Emmett when it was more probably full of the glory of the death of Nelson. Unfortunately, 98 was very far from being the last state of such dirty work, and only a few years ago our politicians started trying to rule by random robbing and killing while gently remonstrating with the Irish for their memory of old unhappy foreign things and battles long ago. But however badly we may think of the Black and Tan business, it would be unjust to forget that most of us were not thinking of Black and Tan but of Khaki and that Khaki had just then a noble and national connotation covering many things. To write of the war in Ireland and leave out the war against Prussia and the English sincerity about it would be unjust to the English. So to talk about the torture engine as if it had been a hideous toy is unjust to the Spanish. It does not tell sensibly from the start the story of what the Spaniard did and why. We may concede to our contemporaries that in any case it is not a story that ends well. We do not insist that in their version it should begin well. What we complain of is that in their version it does not begin at all. They are only in at the death, or even like Lord Tom Naughty, too late for the hanging. It is quite true that it was sometimes more horrible than any hanging, but they only gather, so to speak, the very ashes of the ashes, the fag end of the faggot. The case of the Inquisition is here taken at random, for it is one among any number illustrating the same thing, and not because it is especially connected with Saint Francis in whatever sense it may have been connected with Saint Dominic. It may well be suggested later indeed that Saint Francis is unintelligible just as Saint Dominic is unintelligible unless we do understand something of what the 13th century meant by heresy and a crusade. But for the moment I use it as a lesser example of a much larger purpose. It is to point out that to begin the story of Saint Francis with the birth of Saint Francis would be to miss the whole point of the story, or rather not to tell the story at all. And it is to suggest that the modern tale foremost type of journalistic history perpetually fails us. We learn about reformers without knowing what they had to reform, against rebels without a notion of what they rebelled against, or memorials that are not connected with any memory and restorations of things that had apparently never existed before. Even at the expense of this chapter appearing disproportionate, it is necessary to say something about the great movements that led up to the entrance of the founder of the Franciscans. It may seem to mean describing a world or even a universe in order to describe a man. It will inevitably mean that the world or the universe will be described with a few desperate generalizations and a few abrupt sentences. But so far from its meaning that we see a very small figure under so large a sky, it will mean that we must measure the sky before we can begin to measure the towering stature of the man. And this phrase alone brings me to the preliminary suggestions that seem necessary before even a slight sketch of the life of St. Francis. It is necessary to realize, in however rude and elementary a fashion, into what sort of a world St. Francis entered, and what had been the history of that world, at least in so far as it affected him. It is necessary to have, if only in a few sentences, a sort of preface in the form of an outline of history, if we may borrow the phrase of Mr. Wells, in the case of Mr. Wells himself, it is evident that the distinguished novelist suffered the same disadvantage as if he had been obliged to write a novel of which he hated the hero. To write history and hate Rome, both pagan and papal, is practically to hate nearly everything that has happened. It comes near to hating humanity on purely humanitarian grounds. To dislike both the priest and the soldier, both the laurels of the warrior and the lilies of the saint, is to suffer a division from the mass of mankind, for which not all the dexterities in the finest and most flexible of modern intelligence can compensate. A much wider sympathy is needed for the historical setting of St. Francis, himself both a soldier and a saint. I will therefore conclude this chapter with a few generalizations about the world the St. Francis found. Men will not believe because they will not broaden their minds. As a matter of individual belief, I should of course express it by saying that they are not sufficiently Catholic to be Catholic. But I am not going to discuss here the doctrinal truths of Christianity, but simply the broad historical fact of Christianity as it might appear to a really enlightened and imaginative person, even if he were not a Christian. What I mean at the moment is that the majority of doubts are made out of details. In the course of random reading, a man comes across a pagan custom that strikes him as picturesque or a Christian action that strikes him as cruel, but he does not enlarge his mind sufficiently to see the main truth about pagan custom or the Christian reaction against it. Until we understand, not necessarily in detail, but in their big bulk and proportion, that pagan progress and that Christian reaction, we cannot really understand the point of history at which St. Francis appears or what his great popular mission was all about. Now, everybody knows, I imagine, that the 12th and 13th centuries were an awakening of the world. They were a fresh flowering of culture and the creative arts after a long spell of much sterner and even more sterile experience, which we call the Dark Ages. They may be called an emancipation. They were certainly an end, an end of what may at least seem a harsher and more inhuman time. But what was it that was ended? From what was it that men were emancipated? That is where there is a great collision and point at issue between the different philosophies of history. On the merely external and secular side, it has been truly said that men awoke from asleep, but that there had been dreams in that sleep, of a mystical and sometimes of a monstrous kind. In that rationalistic routine into which most modern historians have fallen, it is considered enough to say that they were emancipated from mere savage superstition and advanced towards mere civilized enlightenment. Now this is the big blunder that stands as a stumbling block at the very beginning of our story. Anybody who supposes that the Dark Ages were plain darkness and nothing else, and that the dawn of the 13th century was plain daylight and nothing else, will not be able to make head or tail of the human story of Saint Francis of Assisi. The truth is that the joy of Saint Francis and his jogalers-de-deer was not merely an awakening. It was something which cannot be understood without understanding their own mystical creed. The end of the Dark Ages was not merely the end of a sleep. It was certainly not the end of a superstitious enslavement. It was the end of something belonging to a quite definite but quite different order of ideas. It was the end of a penance, or if it be preferred, a precation. It marked the moment when a certain spiritual expiation had been finally worked out, and certain spiritual diseases had been finally expelled from the system. They had been expelled by an era of asceticism which was the only thing that could have expelled them. Christianity had entered the world to cure the world, and she had cured it in the only way in which it could be cured. Viewed merely in an external and experimental fashion, the whole of the high civilization of antiquity had ended in the learning of a certain lesson, that is, in its conversion to Christianity. But that lesson was a psychological fact as well as a theological faith. That pagan civilization had indeed been a very high civilization. It would not weaken our thesis, it might even strengthen it to say that it was the highest that humanity ever reached. It had discovered its still unrivaled arts of poetry and plastic representation. It had discovered its own permanent political ideals. It had discovered its own clear system of logic and of language. But above all, it had discovered its own mistake. The mistake was too deep to be ideally defined. The shorthand of it is to call it the mistake of nature worship. It might almost as truly be called the mistake of being natural. And it was a very natural mistake. The Greeks, the great guides and pioneers of pagan antiquity, started out with the idea of something splendidly obvious and direct. The idea that if man walked straight ahead on the high road of reason and nature, he could come to no harm, especially if he was, as the Greek was, imminently enlightened and intelligent. We might be so flippant as to say that man was simply to follow his nose so long as it was a Greek nose. And the case of the Greeks themselves is alone enough to illustrate the strange but certain fatality that attends upon that fallacy. No sooner did the Greeks themselves begin to follow their own noses and their own notion of being natural than the queerest thing in history seems to have happened to them. It was much too queer to be an easy matter to discuss. It may be remarked that our mere repulsive realists never give us the benefit of their realism. Their studies of unsavory subjects never take note of the testimony which they bear to the truths of a traditional morality. But if we had the taste for such things, we could cite thousands of such things as part of the case for Christian morals. And an instance of this is found in the fact that nobody has written in this sense a real moral history of the Greeks. Nobody has seen the scale or the strangeness of the story. The wisest men in the world set out to be natural, and the most unnatural thing in the world was the very first thing they did. The immediate effect of saluting the sun and the sunny sanity of nature was a perversion spreading like a pestilence. The greatest and even the purest philosophers could not apparently avoid this low sort of lunacy. Why? It would seem simple enough for the people whose poets had conceived Helen of Troy, whose sculptures had carved the Venus of Milo, to remain healthy on the point. The truth is that people who worship health cannot remain healthy. When man goes straight, he goes crooked. When he follows his nose, he manages somehow to put his nose out of joint, or even to cut off his nose despite his face. And that, in accordance with something much deeper in human nature than nature worshippers could ever understand, it was the discovery of that deeper thing, humanly speaking, that constituted the conversion to Christianity. There is a bias in man, like the bias in the bowl, and Christianity was the discovery of how to correct the bias, and therefore hit the mark. There are many who will smile at the saying, but it is profoundly true to say that the glad good news brought by the Gospel was the news of original sin. Rome rose at the expense of her Greek teachers, largely because she did not entirely consent to be taught these tricks. She had a much more decent domestic tradition, but she ultimately suffered from the same fallacy in her religious tradition, which was necessarily in no small degree the heathen tradition of nature worship. What was the matter with the whole heathen civilization was that there was nothing for the mass of men in the way of mysticism, except that concern with the mystery of the nameless forces of nature, such as sex and growth and death. In the Roman Empire, also, long before the end, we find nature worship inevitably producing things that are against nature. Cases like that of Nero have passed into a proverb where sadism sat on a throne brazen in the broad daylight. But the truth, I mean, is something much more subtle and universal than a conventional catalog of atrocities. What had happened to the human imagination as a whole was that the whole world was colored by dangerous and rapidly deteriorating passions, by natural passions becoming unnatural passions. Thus the effect of treating sex as only one innocent natural thing was that every other innocent natural thing became soaked and sodden with sex. For sex cannot be admitted to a mere equality among elemental emotions or experiences like eating and sleeping. The moment sex ceases to be a servant, it becomes a tyrant. There is something dangerous and disproportionate in its place in human nature for whatever reason, and it does really need a special purification and dedication. The modern talk about sex being free like any other sense, about the body being beautiful like any tree or flower, is either a description of the Garden of Eden or a piece of thoroughly bad psychology of which the world grew weary two thousand years ago. This is not to be confused with mere self-righteous sensationalism about the wickedness of the pagan world. It was not so much that the pagan world was wicked as that it was good enough to realize that its paganism was becoming wicked or rather was on the logical high road to wickedness. I mean that there was no future for natural magic. To deepen it was only to darken it into black magic. There was no future for it because in the past it had only been innocent because it was young. We might say it had only been innocent because it was shallow. Pagans were wiser than paganism. That is why the pagans became Christians. Thousands of them had philosophy and family virtues and military honor to hold them up, but by this time the purely popular thing called religion was certainly dragging them down. When this reaction against the evil is allowed for, it is true to repeat that it was an evil that was everywhere. In another and more literal sense its name was Pan. It was no metaphor to say that these people needed a new heaven and a new earth for they had really defiled their own earth and even their own heaven. How could their case be met by looking at the sky when erotic legends were scrawled in stars above them? How could they learn anything from the love of birds and flowers after the start of love stories that were told of them? It is impossible here to multiply evidences and one small example may stand for the rest. We know what sort of sentimental associations are called up to us by the phrase a garden and how we think mostly of the memory of melancholy and innocent romances are quite as often of some gracious maiden lady or kindly old parson pottering under a U hedge perhaps in sight of a village spire. Then let anyone who knows a little Latin poetry recalls suddenly what would once have stood in place of the sundial or the fountain, obscene and monstrous in the sun, and of what sort was the god of their gardens. Nothing could purge this obsession but a religion that was literally unearthly. It was no good telling such people to have a natural religion full of stars and flowers. There was not a flower or even a star that had not been stained. They had to go into the desert where they could find no flowers or even into the cavern where they could see no stars. Into that desert and that cavern the highest human intellect entered for some four centuries and it was the very wisest thing it could do. Nothing but the stark supernatural stood up for its salvation if God could not save it. Certainly the gods could not. The early church called the gods of paganism devils and the early church was perfectly right. Whatever natural religion may have had to do with their beginnings, nothing but fiends now inhabited those hollow shrines. Pan was nothing but panic. Venus was nothing but venereal vice. I do not mean for a moment of course that all the individual pagans were of this character even to the end but it was as individuals that they differed from it. Nothing distinguishes paganism from Christianity so clearly as the fact that the individual thing called philosophy had little or nothing to do with the social thing called religion. Anyhow it was no good to preach natural religion to people to whom nature had grown as unnatural as any religion. They knew much better than we do what was the matter with them and what sort of demons that once tempted and tormented them and they wrote across that great space of history the text. This sort goeth not out but by prayer and fasting. Now the historic importance of Saint Francis and the transition from the 12th to the 13th century lies in the fact that they marked the end of this expiation. Men at the close of the Dark Ages may have been rude and unlettered and unlearned in everything but wars with heathen tribes, more barbarous than themselves, but they were clean. They were like children. The first beginnings of their rude arts have all the clean pleasures of children. We have to conceive them in Europe as a whole living under local governments. Feudal insofar as they were a survival of fierce wars with the barbarians, often monastic and carrying a more friendly and fatherly character, still faintly imperial insofar as Rome still ruled as a great legend. But in Italy something had survived more typical of the finer spirit of antiquity, the Republic. Italy was dotted with little states, largely democratic in their ideals and often filled with real citizens. But the city no longer lay open as under the Roman peace, but was pent in high walls for defense against feudal war and all the citizens had to be soldiers. One of these stood in a steep and striking position on the wooded hills of Umbria, and its name was Assisi. Out of its deep gate under its high torrents was to come the message that was the gospel of the hour. Your warfare is accomplished. Your iniquity is pardoned. But it was out of all these fragmentary things of feudalism and freedom and remains of Roman law that there was to rise, at the beginning of the 13th century, vast and almost universal the mighty civilization of the Middle Ages. It is an exaggeration to attribute it entirely to the inspiration of any one man, even the most original genius of the 13th century. Its elementary ethics of fraternity and fair play had never been entirely extinct and Christendom had never been anything less than Christian. The great truisms about justice and pity can be found in the rudest monastic records of the barbaric transition or the stiffest maxims of the Byzantine decline. And early in the 11th and 12th centuries a larger moral movement had clearly begun. But what may fairly be said of it is this, that over all these first movements there was still something of that ancient austerity that came from the long penitential period. It was the twilight of mourning, but it was still a great twilight. This may be illustrated by the mere mention of two or three of these reforms before the Franciscan reform. The monastic institution itself, of course, was far older than all these things. Indeed, it was undoubtedly almost as old as Christianity. Its councils of perfection had always taken the form of vows of chastity and poverty and obedience. With these unworldly aims it had long ago civilized a great part of the world. The monks had taught people to plow and sow, as well as to read and write. Indeed, they had taught the people nearly everything that the people knew. But it may truly be said that the monks were severely practical in the sense that they were not only practical but also severe, although they were generally severe with themselves and practical for other people. All this early monastic movement had long ago settled down and doubtless often deteriorated, but when we come to the first medieval movements this sterner character is still apparent. Three examples may be taken to illustrate the point. First, the ancient social mold of slavery was already beginning to melt. Not only was the slave turning into the serf who was practically free as regards his own form and family life, but many lords were freeing slaves and serfs altogether. This was done under the pressure of the priests, but especially it was done in the spirit of a penance. In one sense, of course, any Catholic society must have an atmosphere of penance. But I am speaking of that rather sterner spirit of penance which had expiated the excesses of paganism. There was, about such restitutions, the atmosphere of the death bed. As many of them doubtless were examples of death bed repentance. A very honest atheist with whom I once debated made use of the expression, Men have only been kept in slavery by the fear of hell. As I pointed out to him, if he had said that men had only been freed from slavery by the fear of hell, he would at least have been referring to an unquestionable historical fact. Another example was the sweeping reform of church discipline by Pope Gregory VII. It really was a reform undertaken from the highest motives and having the healthiest results. It conducted a searching inquisition against seminary and the financial corruptions of the clergy. It insisted on a more serious and self-sacrificing ideal for the life of a parish priest. But the very fact that this largely took the form of making universal the obligation of celibacy will strike the note of something which, however noble, would seem too many to be vaguely negative. The third example is in one sense the strongest of all. For the third example was a war, a heroic war and for many of us a holy war, but still something having all the stark and terrible responsibilities of war. There was no space here to say all that should be said about the true nature of the Crusades. Everybody knows that in the very darkest hour of the Dark Ages a sort of heresy had sprung up in Arabia and became a new religion of a military but nomadic sort invoking the name of Mohammed. Intrinsically it had the character found in many heresies from the Muslim to the monist. It seemed to the heretic a sane simplification of religion, while it seemed to the Catholic an insane simplification of religion because it simplifies all to a single idea and so loses the breath and balance of Catholicism. Anyhow its objective character was that of a military dagger to Christendom and Christendom had struck at the very heart of it in seeking to reconquer the holy places. The great Duke Godfrey and the first Christians who stormed Jerusalem were heroes if there were ever any in the world, but they were the heroes of a tragedy. Now I have taken these two or three examples of the earlier medieval movements in order to note about them one general character which refers back to the penance that followed paganism. There is something in all these movements that is bracing even when it is still bleak like a wind blowing between the cliffs of the mountains. That wind, austere and pure of which the poet speaks, is really the spirit of the time for it is the wind of a world that has at last been purified. To anyone who can appreciate atmospheres there is something clear and clean about the atmosphere of this crude and often harsh society. Its very lusts are clean for they have no longer any smell of perversion. Its very cruelties are clean. They are not the luxurious cruelties of the empy theater. They come either of a very simple horror at blasphemy or a very simple fury at insult. Gradually against this gray background beauty begins to appear as something really fresh and delicate and above all surprising. Love returning is no longer what was once called platonic but what is still called chivalric love. The flowers and stars have recovered their first innocence. Fire and water are felt to be worthy to be the brother and sister of a saint. The purge of paganism is complete at last. For water itself has been washed. Fire itself has been purified as by fire. Water is no longer that water into which slaves were flung to feed the fishes. Fire is no longer that fire through which children are passed to mollock. Flowers smell no more of the forgotten garlands gathered in the garden of Priapus. Stars stand no more as signs of the far fragility of gods as cold as these cold fires. They are all like things newly made and awaiting new names from one who shall come to name them. Neither the universe nor the earth have now any longer the old sinister significance of the world. They await a new reconciliation with man. But they are already capable of being reconciled. Man has stripped from his soul the last rag of nature worship and can return to nature. While it was yet twilight a figure appeared silently and suddenly on a little hill above the city dark against the fading darkness. For it was the end of a long and stern night, a night of vigil not unvisited by stars. He stood with his hands lifted as in so many statues and pictures, and about him was a burst of birds singing, and behind him was the break of day. End of Chapter 2 Chapter 3 of Saint Francis of Assisi by G.K. Chesterton. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 3 Francis the Fighter According to one tale, which, if not true, would be none the less typical, the very name of Saint Francis was not so much a name as a nickname. There would be something akin to his familiar and popular instinct in the notion that he was nicknamed very much as an ordinary schoolboy might be called Frenchy at school. According to this version, his name was not Francis at all, but John, and his companions called him Francesco, or the Little Frenchman, because of his passion for the French poetry of the troubadours. The more probable story is that his mother had named him John when he was born in the absence of his father, who shortly returned from a visit to France, where his commercial success had filled him with such an enthusiasm for French taste and social usage that he gave his son the new name Signifying the Frank or Frenchman. In either case, his name has a certain significance, as connecting Francis from the first with what he himself regarded as the romantic fairyland of the troubadours. The name of the father was Pietro Bernadoni, and he was a substantial citizen of the guild of the cloth merchants in the town of Assisi. It is hard to describe the position of such a man without some appreciation of the position of such a guild and even of such a town. It did not exactly correspond to anything that is meant in modern times, either by a merchant or a man of business or a tradesman or anything that exists under the conditions of capitalism. Bernadon may have employed people, but he was not an employer, that is, he did not belong to an employing class as distinct from an employed class. The person we definitely hear of his employing is his son Francis, who, one is tempted to guess, was about the last person that any man of business would employ if it were convenient to employ anybody else. He was rich, as a peasant may be rich by the work of his own family, but he evidently expected his own family to work in a way almost as plain as a peasant's. He was a prominent citizen, but he belonged to a social order which existed to prevent him from being too prominent to be a citizen. He kept all such people on their own simple level, and no prosperity connoted that escape from drudgery by which in modern times the lad might have seemed to be a lord or a fine gentleman or something other than the cloth merchant's son. This is a rule that is proved even in the exception. Francis was one of those people who are popular with everybody in any case, and his guileless swagger as a troubadour and leader of French fashions made him a sort of romantic ringleader among the young men of the town. He threw money about both in extravagance and benevolence, in a way native to a man who never all of his life exactly understood what money was. This moved his mother to mingle exultation and exasperation, and she said as any tradesman's wife might say anywhere, he is more like a prince than our son. But one of the earliest glimpses we have of him shows him as simply selling bales of cloth from a booth in the market, which his mother may or may not have believed to be one of the habits of princes. This first glimpse of the young man in the market is symbolic in more ways than one. An incident occurred which is perhaps the shortest and sharpest summary that could be given of certain curious things which were a part of his character, long before it was transfigured by transcendental faith. While he was selling velvet and fine embroideries to some solid merchant of the town, a beggar came imploring alms evidently in a somewhat tackless manner. It was a rude and simple society that there were no laws to punish a starving man for expressing his need for food such as have been established in a more humanitarian age, and the lack of any organized police permitted such persons to pester the wealthy without any great danger. But there was, I believe, in many places a local custom of the guild forbidding outsiders to interrupt a fair bargain, and it is possible that some such thing put the merchant more than normally in the wrong. Francis had all his life a great liking for people who had been put hopelessly in the wrong. On this occasion he seemed to have dealt with the double interview with rather a divided mind, certainly with distraction, possibly with irritation. Perhaps he was all the more uneasy because of the almost fastidious standard of manners that came to him quite naturally. All are agreed that politeness flowed from him from the first, like one of the public fountains in such a sunny Italian marketplace. He might have written among his own poems as his own motto that verse of Mr. Bellock's poem, of courtesy it is much less than courage of heart or holiness, yet in my walks it seems to me that the grace of God is in courtesy. Nobody ever doubted that Francis Bernadon had courage of heart, even of the most ordinary manly and military sort, and a time was to come when there was quite as little doubt about the holiness and the grace of God. But I think that if there was one thing about which he was punctilious, it was punctiliousness. If there was one thing of which so humble a man could be said to be proud, he was proud of good manners. Only behind his perfectly natural urbanity were wider and even wilder possibilities of which we get the first flash in this trivial incident. Anyhow, Francis was evidently torn, two ways, with a botheration of two talkers, but finished his business with the merchant somehow, and when he had finished it found the beggar was gone. Francis leapt from his booth, left all the bails of velvet and embroidery behind him apparently unprotected, and went racing across the marketplace like an arrow from the bow. Still running, he threaded the labyrinth of the narrow and crooked streets of the little town, looking for his beggar whom he eventually discovered, and loaded that astonished mendicant with money. Then he straightened himself so to speak and swore before God that he would never all his life refuse help to a poor man. The sweeping simplicity of this undertaking is extremely characteristic. Never was any man so little afraid of his own promises. His life was one riot of rash vows that turned out right. The first biographers of Francis naturally alive with the great religious revolution that he wrought, equally naturally, looked back to his first years chiefly for omens and signs of such a spiritual earthquake. But, writing at a greater distance, we shall not decrease that dramatic effect, but rather increase it if we realize that there was not at this time any external sign of anything particularly mystical about the young man. He had not anything of that early sense of his vocation that has belonged to some of the saints. Over and above his main ambition to win fame as a French poet, he would seem to have most often thought of winning fame as a soldier. He was born kind, he was brave in the normal boyish fashion, but he drew the line both in kindness and bravery pretty well where most boys would have drawn it. For instance, he had the normal horror of leprosy of which few normal people felt any need to be ashamed. He had the love of gay and bright apparel which was inherent in the heraldic taste of medieval times, and seems altogether to have been rather a festive figure. If he did not paint the town red, he would probably have preferred to paint it all the colors of the rainbow as in a medieval picture. But in this story of the young man and gay garments scampering after the vanishing beggars and rags, there are certain notes of his natural individuality that must be assumed from first to last. For instance, there is the spirit of swiftness. In a sense he continued running for the rest of his life as he ran after the beggar, because nearly all the errands he ran on were errands of mercy. There appeared in his portraiture a mere element of mildness which was true in the truest sense, but is easily misunderstood. A certain precipitancy was the very poise of his soul. This saint should be represented among the other saints as angels were sometimes represented in pictures of angels with flying feet or even with feathers in the spirit of the text that makes angels winds and messengers a flaming fire. It is a curiosity of language that courage actually means running, and some of our skeptics will no doubt demonstrate that courage really means running away. But his courage was running in the sense of rushing. With all his gentleness there was originally something of impatience in his impetuosity. The psychological truth about it illustrates very well the modern muddle about the word practical. If we mean by what is practical what is most immediately practicable, we mean merely what is easiest. In that sense St. Francis was very unpractical, and his ultimate aims were very unworldly. But if we mean by practicality a preference for prompt effort and energy over-doubt and delay, he was very practical indeed. Some might call him a madman, but he was the very reverse of a dreamer. Nobody would be likely to call him a man of business, but he was very emphatically a man of action. In some of his early experiments he was rather too much of a man of action. He acted too soon and was too practical to be prudent. But at every turn of his extraordinary career we shall find him flinging himself round corners in the most unexpected fashion as when he flew through the crooked streets after the beggar. Another element implied in the story, which was already partially a natural instinct, before it became a supernatural ideal, was something that had never perhaps been wholly lost in those little republics of medieval Italy. It was something very puzzling to some people, something clearer as a rule to southerners than to northerners, and I think to Catholics than to Protestants, the quite natural assumption of the equality of men. It has nothing necessarily to do with the Franciscan love for men. On the contrary, one of its merely practical tests is the equality of the dugal. Perhaps a gentleman will never be fully an egalitarian until he can really quarrel with his servant. But it was an antecedent condition of the Franciscan brotherhood, and we feel it in this early and secular incident. Francis, I fancy, felt a real doubt about which he must attend to, the beggar or the merchant. And having attended to the merchant, he turned to attend to the beggar. He thought of them as two men. This is a thing much more difficult to describe in a society from which it is absent, but it was the original basis of the whole business. It was why the popular movement arose in that sort of place, and that sort of man. His imaginative magnanimity afterwards rose like a tower to starry heights that might well seem dizzy and even crazy, but it was founded on this high table-land of human equality. I have taken this the first among a hundred tales of the youth of St. Francis and dwelt on its significance a little, because until we have learned to look for the significance, there will often seem to be little but a sort of light sentiment in telling the story. St. Francis is not a proper person to be patronized with merely pretty stories. There are any number of them, but they are too often used so as to be a sort of sentimental sediment of the medieval world instead of being, as to say emphatically is, a challenge to the modern world. We must take his real human development somewhat more seriously, and the next story in which we get a real glimpse of it is in a very different setting, but in exactly the same way it opens as if by accident certain abysses of the mind and perhaps of the unconscious mind. Francis still looks more or less like an ordinary young man, and it is only when we look at him as an ordinary young man that we realize what an extraordinary young man he must be. War had broken out between Assisi and Perugia. It is now fashionable to say, in a satirical spirit, that such wars did not so much break out as go on indefinitely between the city-states of medieval Italy. It will be enough to say here that if one of these medieval wars had really gone on without stopping for a century, it might possibly have come within a remote distance of killing as many people as we kill in a year in one of our great modern scientific wars between our great modern industrial empires. But the citizens of the medieval republic were certainly under the limitation of only being asked to die for the things which which they had always lived, the houses they inhabited, the shrines they venerated, and the rulers and representatives they knew, and had not the larger vision calling them to die for the latest rumors about remote colonies as reported in anonymous newspapers. And if we infer from our own experience that war paralyzed civilization, we must at least admit that these warring towns turned out a number of paralytics who go by the names of Dante and Michelangelo, Aristo and Titian, Leonardo and Columbus, not to mention Catherine of Siena and the subject of this story. While we lament all this local patriotism as a hub above the Dark Ages, it must seem a rather curious fact that about three quarters of the greatest men who ever lived came out of these little towns and were often engaged in these little wars. It remains to be seen what will ultimately come out of our large towns, but there has been no sign of anything of this sort since they became large. And I have sometimes been haunted by a fancy of my youth that these things will not come till there is a city wall round Clapham and the Tuscan is wrung at night to arm the citizens of Wimbledon. Anyhow, the Tuscan was wrung in a sissy and the citizens armed and among them Francis the son of the cloth merchant. He went out to fight with some company of Lancers, and in some fight or foray or other he and his little band were taken prisoners. To me it seems most probable that there had been some tale of treason or cowardice about the disaster, for we are told that there was one of the captives with whom his fellow prisoners flatly refused to associate even in prison. And when this happens in such circumstances, it is generally because the military blame for the surrender is thrown on some individual. Anyhow, somebody noted a small but curious thing, though it might have seemed rather negative than positive. Francis we are told moved among his captive companions with all his characteristic courtesy and even conviviality. Liberal and hilarious, as somebody said of him, resolved to keep up their spirits and his own. And when he came across the mysterious outcast, traitor or coward or whatever he was called, he simply treated him exactly like all the rest, neither with coldness nor compassion, but with the same unaffected gaiety and good fellowship. But if there had been present in that prison, someone with a sort of second sight about the truth and trend of spiritual things, he might have known he was in the presence of something new and seemingly almost anarchic, a deep tide driving out to uncharted seas of charity. For in this sense, there was something really wanting in Francis of Assisi, something to which he was blind that he might see better and more beautiful things. All those limits in good fellowship and good form, all those landmarks of social life that divide the tolerable and intolerable, all those social scruples and conventional conditions that are normal and even noble in ordinary men, all those things that hold many decent societies together could never hold this man at all. He liked as he liked. He seems to have liked everybody, but especially those whom everybody disliked him for liking. Something very vast and universal was already present in that narrow dungeon, and such a seer might have seen in its darkness that red halo of Caritas Caritatum, which marks one saint among saints as well as among men. He might have heard the first whisper of that wild blessing that afterwards took the form of a blasphemy. He listens to those to whom God himself will not listen. But though such a seer might have seen such a truth, it is exceedingly doubtful if Francis himself saw it. He had acted out of an unconscious largeness, or even in the fine medieval phrase largesse within himself, something that might almost have been lawless if it had not been reaching out to a more divine law. But it is doubtful whether he yet knew that the law was divine. It is evident that he had not at this time any notion of abandoning the military still less adopting the monastic life. It is true that there is not, as pacifists and prigs imagine, the least inconsistency between loving men and fighting them if we fight them fairly and for a good cause. But it seems to me that there was more than this involved. That the mind of the young man was really running towards a military morality in any case. About this time the first calamity crossed his path in the form of a melody, which was to revisit him many times and hamper his headlong career. Sickness made him more serious. But one fancies it would only have made him a more serious soldier or even more serious about soldiering. And while he was recovering something rather larger than the little feuds and raids of the Italian towns opened an avenue of adventure and ambition. The crown of Sicily, a considerable center of controversy at the time, was apparently claimed by a certain Gocié de Bruyenne. And the papal cause to aid which Gocié was called in aroused enthusiasm among a number of young assassins including Francis, who proposed to march into Apulia on the count's behalf. Perhaps his French name had something to do with it. For it must never be forgotten that though this world was in one sense a world of little things, it was a world of little things concerned about great things. There was more internationalism in the lands adopted with tiny republics than in the huge, homogeneous, impenetrable national divisions of today. The legal authority of the Assessian magistrates might hardly reach farther than a bow shot from their high embattled city walls. But their sympathies might be with the ride of the Normans through Sicily or the palace of the troubadours at Toulouse, with the emperor enthroned in the German forests or the great pope dying in the exile of Salerno. Above all, it must be remembered that when the interests of an age are mainly religious, they must be universal. Nothing can be more universal than the universe. And there are several things about the religious position at that particular moment which modern people not unnaturally fail to realize. For one thing, modern people naturally think of people so remote as ancient people and even early people. We feel vaguely that these things happened in the first ages of the church. The church was already a good deal more than a thousand years old. That is, the church was then rather older than France is now. A great deal older than England is now. And she looked old then, almost as old as she does now. Possibly older than she does now. The church looked like great Charlemagne with a long white beard who had already fought a hundred wars with the heathen, and the legend was bitten by an angel to go forth and fight once more though he was two hundred years old. The church had topped her thousand years and turned the corner of the second thousand. She had come through the dark ages in which nothing could be done except desperate fighting against the barbarians and the stubborn repetition of the creed. The creed was still being repeated after the victory or escape, but it is not unnatural to suppose that there was something a little monotonous about the repetition. The church looked old then as now, and there were some who thought her dying then as now. In truth, orthodoxy was not dead, but it may have been dull. It is certain that some people began to think it dull. The troubadours of the Provençal movement had already begun to take that turn or twist toward Oriental fancies, and the paradox of pessimism which always comes to Europeans as something fresh when their own sanity seems to be something stale. It is likely enough that after all those centuries of hopeless war without and ruthless asceticism within, the official orthodoxy seemed to be something stale. The freshness and freedom of the first Christian seemed then as much as now a lost and almost prehistoric age of gold. Rome was still more rational than anything else. The church was really wiser, but it may well have seemed wearier than the world. There was something more adventurous and alluring perhaps about the mad metaphysics that had been blown across out of Asia. Dreams were gathering like dark clouds over the midi to break in the thunder of anathema and civil war. Only the light lay on the great plain round Rome, but the light was blank and the plain was flat, and there was no stir in the still air and the immemorial silence about the sacred town. High in the dark house of Assisi Francesco Berdedone slept and dreamed of arms. There came to him in the darkness a vision splendid with swords, patterned after the cross in the crusading fashion of spears and shields and helmets hung in a high armory, all bearing the sacred sign. When he awoke he accepted the dream as a trumpet bidding him to the battlefield and rushed out to take horse and arms. He delighted in all the exercises of chivalry, and was evidently an accomplished cavalier and fighting man by the tests of the tournament and the camp. He would doubtless at any time have preferred a Christian sort of chivalry, but it seems clear that he was also in a mood which thirsted for glory, though in him that glory would always have been identical with honor. He was not without some vision of that wreath of laurel which Caesar had left for all the Latins. As he rode out to war the great gate in the deep wall of Assisi resounded with his last boast, I shall come back a great prince. A little way along his road his sickness rose again and threw him. It seemed highly probable in the light of his impetuous temper that he had ridden away long before he was fit to move. And in the darkness of this second and far more desolating interruption he seems to have had another dream in which a voice said to him, You have mistaken the meaning of the vision. Return to your own town. And Francis trailed back in his sickness to Assisi, a very dismal and disappointed and perhaps even derided figure with nothing to do but to wait for what should happen next. It was his first descent into a dark ravine that is called the Valley of Humiliation which seemed to him very rocky and desolate but in which he was afterwards to find many flowers. But he was not only disappointed and humiliated. He was also very much puzzled and bewildered. He still firmly believed that his two dreams must have missed something and he could not imagine what they could possibly mean. It was while he was drifting one may even say mooning about the streets of Assisi and the fields outside the city wall that an incident occurred to him which has not always been immediately connected with the business of the dreams but which seems to meet the obvious culmination of them. He was riding listlessly in some wayside place, apparently in the open country, when he saw a figure coming along the road towards him and halted. For he saw it was a leper. And he knew instantly that his courage was challenged. Not as the world challenges, but as one would challenge you knew the secrets of the heart of a man. What he saw advancing was not the banner and spears of Perugia from which it never occurred to him to shrink, nor the armies that fought for the crown of Sicily of which he had always thought as a courageous man thinks of mere vulgar danger. Francis Bernadone saw his fear coming up the road towards him, the fear that comes from within and not without, though it stood white and horrible in the sunlight. For once in the long rush of his life his soul must have stood still. Then he sprang from his horse, knowing nothing between stillness and swiftness, and rushed on the leper and threw his arms round him. It was the beginning of a long vocation of ministry among many lepers, for whom he did many services. To this man he gave what money he could and mounted and rode on. We do not know how far he rode, or with what sense of the things around him, but it is said that when he looked back he could see no figure on the road. CHAPTER IV Francis the Builder We have now reached the great break in the life of St. Francis of Assisi, the point at which something happened to him that must remain greatly dark to most of us, who are ordinary and selfish men, whom God has not broken to make anew. In dealing with this difficult passage, especially for my own purpose of making things moderately easy for the more secular sympathizer, I have hesitated as to the proper course, and have eventually decided to state, first of all, what happened, with little more than a hint of what I imagined to have been the meaning of what happened. The fuller meaning may be debated more easily afterwards, when it was unfolded in the full Franciscan life. Anyhow, what happened was this. The story very largely revolves around the ruins of the Church of St. Damien, an old shrine in Assisi, which was apparently neglected and falling to pieces. Here, Francis was in the habit of praying before the crucifix during these dark and aimless days of transition that followed the tragical collapse of all his military ambitions, probably made bitter by some loss of social prestige terrible to his sensitive spirit. As he did so, he heard a voice saying to him, Francis, seeest thou not that my house is in ruins? Go and restore it for me. Francis sprang up and went. To go and do something was one of the driving demands of his nature. Probably he had gone and done it before he had it all thoroughly thought out what he had done. In any case, what he had done was something very decisive and immediately very disastrous for his singular social career. In the coarse, conventional language of the uncomprehending world, he stole, from his own enthusiastic point of view, he extended to his venerable father, Peter Bernadone, the exquisite excitement and inestimal privilege of assisting more or less unconsciously in the rebuilding of Saint Damien's Church. End point of fact, what he did was first to sell his own horse and then to go off and sell several bails of his father's cloth, making the sign of the cross over them to indicate their pious and charitable destination. Peter Bernadone did not see things in this light. Peter Bernadone indeed had not very much light to see by so far as understanding the genius and temperament of his extraordinary son was concerned. Instead of understanding in what sort of a wind and flame of abstract appetites the lad was living, instead of simply telling him, as the priest practically did later, that he had done an indefensible thing with the best intentions, old Bernadone took up the matter in the hardest style, in a legal and literal fashion. He used absolute political powers like a heathen father and himself put his son under lock and key as a vulgar thief. It would appear that the cry was caught up among many with whom the unlucky Francis had once been popular, and altogether, in his efforts to build up the house of God, he had only succeeded in bringing his own house about his ears and lying buried under the ruins. The quarrel dragged drearily through several stages. At one time the wretched young man seemed to have disappeared underground, so to speak, into some cavern or cellar where he remained huddled, hopeless in the darkness. Anyhow it was his blackest moment. The whole world had turned over. The whole world was on top of him. When he came out it was only perhaps gradually that anybody grasped that something had happened. He and his father were summoned in the court of the bishop, for Francis had refused the authority of all legal tribunals. The bishop addressed some remarks to him full of that excellent common sense which the Catholic Church keeps permanently as the background for all the fiery attitudes of her saints. He told Francis that he must unquestionably restore the money to his father, that no blessing could follow a good work done by unjust methods, and in short, to put it crudely, if the young fanatic would give back his money to the old fool the incident would then terminate. There was a new air about Francis. He was no longer crushed, still less crawling so far as his father was concerned. Yet his words do not I think indicate either just indignation or wanton insult or anything in the nature of a mere continuation of the quarrel. They are rather remotely akin to the mysterious utterances of his great model. What have I to do with thee, or even the terrible touch me not? He stood up before them all and said, Up to this time I have called Pietro Bernadone a father, but now I am the servant of God. Not only the money but everything that can be called his I will restore to my father, even the very clothes he has given me. And he rent off all his garments except one, and they saw that that was a hair-shirt. He piled the garments in a heap on the floor and tossed the money on top of them. Then he turned to the bishop and received his blessing, like one who turns his back on society and, according to the account, went out as he was into the cold world. Apparently it was literally a cold world at the moment and snow was on the ground. A curious detail, very deep in its significance, I fancy, is given in the same account of this great crisis in his life. He went out half naked in his hair-shirt into the winter woods, walking the frozen ground between the frosty trees, a man without a father. He was penniless. He was parentless. He was, to all appearance, without a trade or a plan or a hope in the world. And, as he went under the frosty trees, he burst suddenly into song. It was apparently noted as remarkable that the language in which he sang was French, or that Provençal which was called for convenience French. It was not his native language. And it was in his native language that he ultimately won fame as a poet. Indeed, Saint Francis is one of the very first of the national poets in the purely national dialects of Europe. But it was the language with which all his most boyish orders and ambitions had been identified. It was for him preeminently the language of romance. That it broke from him in this extraordinary extremity seems to me something at first sight very strange, and in the last analysis, very significant. What that significant was, or may well have been, I will try to suggest in the subsequent chapter. It is enough to indicate here that the whole philosophy of Saint Francis revolved around the idea of a new supernatural light on natural things which met the ultimate recovery, not the ultimate refusal of natural things. And for the purpose of this purely narrative part of the business, it is enough to record that while he wandered in the winter forest in his hair-shirt, like the very wildest of the hermits, he sang in the tongue of the troubadours. Meanwhile the narrative naturally reverts to the problem of the ruined or at least neglected church, which had been the starting point of the Saint's innocent crime and beatific punishment. That problem still predominated in his mind and was soon engaging his insatiable activities. But they were activities of a new sort, and he made no more attempts to interfere with the commercial ethics of the town of Assisi. There had dawned on him one of those great paradoxes that are also platitudes. He realized that the way to build the church is not to become entangled in bargains and to him rather bewildering questions of legal claim. The way to build a church is not to pay for it, certainly not with someone else's money. The way to build a church is not even to pay for it with your own money. The way to build a church is to build it. He went about by himself collecting stones. He begged all the people he met to give him stones. In fact, he became a new sort of beggar, reversing the parable. A beggar who asks not for bread, but for a stone. Probably as happened to him again and again throughout his extraordinary existence, the very queerness of the request gave it a sort of popularity, and all sorts of idle and luxurious people fell in with the benevolent project as they would have done with a bet. He worked with his own hands at the rebuilding of the church, dragging the material like a beast of burden and learning the very last and lowest lessons of toil. A vast number of stories are told about Francis at this and at every other period of his life, but for the purpose here, which is one of simplification, it is best to dwell on this definite re-entrance of the saint into the world by the low gate of manual labour. There does indeed run through the whole of his life a sort of double meaning, like his shadow thrown upon the wall. All his action had something of the character of an allegory, and it is likely enough that some leaden-witted scientific historian may someday try to prove that he himself was never anything but an allegory. It is true enough in this sense that he was labouring at a double task and rebuilding something else as well as the church of Saint Damien. He was not only discovering the general lesson that his glory was not to be an overthrowing men in battle, but in building up the positive and creative monuments of peace. He was truly building up something else or beginning to build it up, something that has often enough fallen into ruin, but has never been past rebuilding. A church that could always be built anew, though it had rotted away to its first foundation stone, against which the gates of hell shall not prevail. The next stage in his progress is probably marked by his transferring the same energies of architectural reconstruction to the little church of Saint Mary of the Angels at the Porte-uncle. He had already done something of the same kind at a church dedicated to Saint Peter, and that quality in his life noted above, which made it seem like a symbolic drama, led many of his most devout biographers to note the numerical symbolism of the three churches. There was, at any rate, a more historical and practical symbolism about two of them, for the original church of Saint Damien afterwards became the seat of his striking experiment of a female order and of the pure and spiritual romance of Saint Clair. And the church of the Porte-uncle will remain forever as one of the great historic buildings of the world, for it was there that he gathered the little knot of friends and enthusiasts. It was the home of many homeless men. At this time, however, it is not clear that he had the definite idea of any such monastic developments. How early the plan appeared in his own mind it is, of course, impossible to say. But on the face of events it first takes the form of a few friends who attach themselves to him one by one because they shared his own passion for simplicity. The account given of the form of their dedication is, however, very significant, for it was that of an invocation of the simplification of life, as suggested in the New Testament. The adoration of Christ had been a part of man's passionate nature for a long time past. But the invitation of Christ as a sort of plan or ordered scheme of life may, in that sense, be said to begin here. The two men who have the credit, apparently, of having first perceived something of what was happening in the world of the soul were a solid and wealthy citizen named Bernard of Guindavalle, and a canon from the neighboring church named Peter. It is the more to their credit, because Francis, if one may put it so, was by this time wallowing in poverty and association with lepers and ragged mendicants. And these two were men with much to give up, the one of comforts in the world and the other of ambitions in the church. Bernard the rich burger did quite literally and, finally, sell all he had and give to the poor. Peter did even more, for he descended from a chair of spiritual authority, probably when he was already a man of mature years, and therefore of fixed mental habits, to follow an extravagant young eccentric who most people probably regarded as a maniac. What it was of which they had caught a glimpse of which Francis had seen the glory may be suggested later so far as it can be suggested at all. At this stage we need profess to see no more than all a sissy saw, and that's something not altogether unworthy of comment. The citizens of a sissy only saw the camel go in triumph through the eye of the needle and God doing impossible things, because to him all things were possible. Only a priest who rent his robes like the publican, and not like the Pharisee, and a rich man who went away joyful for he had no possessions. These three strange figures are said to have built themselves a sort of hut or den adjoining the Lepper Hospital. There they talk to each other in the intervals of drudgery and danger, for it needed ten times more courage to look after a lepper than to fight for the crown of Sicily, in the terms of their new life, almost like children talking a secret language. Of these individual elements on their first friendship we can say little with certainty, but it is certain that they remain friends to the end. Bernard of Quintivalet occupies in the story something of the position of Serbediver, first maid and latest left of Arthur's knights, for he reappears again at the right hand of the sight on his deathbed and receives some sort of special blessing. But all these things belong to another historical world and were quite remote from the ragged and fantastic trio in their tumble-down hut. They were not monks, except perhaps in the most literal and archaic sense, which was identical with Hermits. They were, so to speak, three solitaries living together socially, but not as a society. The whole thing seems to have been intensely individual, as seen from the outside, doubtless individual to the point of insanity. The stir of something that had in it the promise of a movement or a mission can first be felt, as I have said, in the affair of the appeal to the New Testament. It was a sort of Soros Virgiliana applied to the Bible. A practice not unknown among Protestants, though open to their criticism, one would think as being rather a superstition of pagans. Anyhow, it seems almost the opposite of searching the scriptures to open them at random, but St. Francis certainly opened them at random. According to one story, he merely made the sign of the cross over the volume of the Gospel, and opened it at three places, reading three texts. The first was the tale of the rich young man whose refusal to sell all his goods was the occasion of the great paradox about the camel and the needle. The second was the commandment to the disciples to take nothing with them on their journey, neither script, nor staff, nor any money. The third was that saying, literally to be called crucial, that the follower of Christ must also carry his cross. There is a somewhat similar story of Francis finding one of these texts almost as accidentally merely in listening to what happened to be the Gospel of the day, but from the former version at least it would seem that the incident occurred very early indeed in his new life, perhaps soon after the breach with his father. For it was after this oracle, apparently, that Bernard the First Disciple rushed forth and scattered all his goods among the poor. If this be so, it would seem that nothing followed it for the moment except the individual ascetical life with a hut for a hermitage. It must, of course, have been a rather public sort of hermitage, but it was, nonetheless, in a very real sense withdrawn from the world. St. Simeon Stilites, on the top of his pillar, was in one sense an exceedingly public character, but there was something a little singular in his situation for all that. It may be presumed that most people thought the situation in Francis singular, that some even thought it too singular. There was inevitably indeed in any Catholic society something ultimate and even subconscious that was at least capable of comprehending it better than a pagan or Puritan society could comprehend it. But we must not at this stage, I think, exaggerate this potential public sympathy. As has already been suggested, the Church and all its institutions had already the error of being old and settled and sensible things, the monastic institutions among the rest. Common sense was commoner in the Middle Ages, I think, than in our own rather jumpy journalistic age. But men like Francis are not common in any age, nor are they to be fully understood merely by the exercise of common sense. The thirteenth century was certainly a progressive period, perhaps the only really progressive period in human history, but it can truly be called progressive precisely because its progress was very orderly. It is really and truly an example of an epoch of reforms without revolutions. But the reforms were not only progressive, but very practical, and they were very much to the advantage of highly practical institutions, the towns and the trading guilds and the manual crafts. Now the solid men of town and guild in the time of Francis of Assisi were probably very solid indeed. They were much more economically equal. They were much more justly governed in their own economic environment than the moderns who struggle madly between starvation and the monopolistic prizes of capitalism. But it is likely enough that the majority of such citizens were as hard-headed as peasants. Certainly the behavior of the venerable Peter Bernadone does not indicate a delicate sympathy with the fine and almost fanciful subtleties of the Franciscan spirit. And we cannot measure the beauty and originality of this strange spiritual adventure unless we have the humor and human sympathy to put into plain words how it would have looked to such an unsympathetic person at the time when it happened. In the next chapter I shall make an attempt, inevitably inadequate, to indicate the inside of this story of the building of the Three Churches and the Little Hut. In this chapter I have but outlined it from the outside. And in concluding that chapter I asked the reader to remember and realize what that story really looked like when thus seen from the outside. Given a critic of rather coarse common sense, with no feeling about the incident except annoyance, and how would the story seem to stand? A young fool or rascal is caught robbing his father in selling goods which he ought to guard, and the only explanation he will offer is that a loud voice from nowhere spoke in his ear and told him to mend the cracks and holes in a particular wall. He then declares himself naturally independent of all powers corresponding to the police or the magistrates, and takes refuge with an amiable who is forced to remonstrate with him and tell him he is wrong. He then proceeds to take off his clothes in public and practically throw them at his father, announcing at the same time that his father is not his father at all. He then runs about the town asking everybody he meets to give him fragments of buildings or building materials, apparently with reference to his old monomania about mending the wall. It may be an excellent thing that cracks should be filled up, but preferably not by somebody who is himself cracked. An architectural restoration, like other things, is not best performed by builders who, as we should say, have a tile loose. Finally the wretched youth relapses into rags and squalor and practically crawls away into the gutter. That is the spectacle that Francis must have presented to a very large number of his neighbors and friends. How he lived at all must have seemed to them dubious, but presumably he already begged for bread as he had begged for building materials. But he was always very careful to beg for the blackest or worst crust he could get, for the stillest crusts are something rather less luxurious than the crumbs which the dogs eat, and which fall from the rich man's table. Thus he probably fared worse than an ordinary beggar, for the beggar would eat the best he could get and the saint ate the worst he could get. In plain fact he was ready to live on refuse, and it was probably something much uglier as an experience than the refined simplicity which vegetarians and water-drinkers would call the simple life. As he dealt with the question of food, so he apparently dealt with a question of clothing. He dealt with it, that is, upon the same principle of taking what he could get, and not even the best of what he could get. According to one story he changed clothes with a beggar, and he would doubtless have been content to change them with a scarecrow. In another version he got hold of the rough brown tunic of a peasant, but presumably only because the peasant gave him his very oldest brown tunic, which was probably very old indeed. Many peasants have few changes of clothing to give away, and some peasants are not specially inclined to give them away until it is absolutely necessary. It is said that in place of the girdle which he had flung off, perhaps with the more symbolic scorn because it probably carried the purse or wallet by the fashion of the period, he picked up a rope more or less at random because it was lying near and tied it round his waist. He undoubtedly meant it as a shabby expedient, rather as the very destitute tramp will sometimes tie his clothes together with a piece of string. He meant to strike the note of collecting his clothes anyhow, like rags from a succession of dustpins. Ten years later that makeshift costume was the uniform of five thousand men, and a hundred years later, in that for a pontifical panoply, they laid great Dante in the grave.