The Lady Poverty: A XIII. Century Allegory

by da Parma Giovanni

THE SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE OF EVANGELICAL POVERTY

“This is the sublimity of most high Poverty which has made you, beloved brethren, heirs and kings of the Kingdom of Heaven.”[27] Thus wrote St Francis of Assisi when he gave his disciples the Rule which obliged them to “serve the Lord in poverty and humility.” It is easy to recognise in these words the note of exultation and achievement which made St Francis the most inspiring personality in Mediæval Christendom, and which gives to his name, even to-day, a singular power over the imagination of the Christian World. Clad in his peasant’s dress, and with no possessions of his own in the world save his soul and body,[28] he is nevertheless the man rich in all things that are of vital interest, the clear spiritual vision, the perfect joy, the encompassing sympathy, which gathers all palpitating life into its own. Francis lived, if ever a man lived. His was the liberty of soul which finds the joy of life in all Creation.

Artificial stimulus and transient excitement could add nought to the Joy that was his. To him the sky and the earth, the sun and the flowers, the fields and all living things, spoke with articulate speech of the life that is in them. As for his fellow-men, their life was his life. He had come to pass beyond the bounds of his own personality, and to enter into that spiritual communion with all living things, whereby man escapes from his own limitations, and the world lives in him as he in the world. And above all, and yet in all, he beheld the ever blessed God, the Author of all life that is. To Francis, God was ever present in the Creation, the Life behind all life. “The Heavens show forth the Glory of God, and the Firmament declareth the Work of His Hands.” The intimate relationship binding creation to its Creator was to him an abiding perception; he could not think of Earth apart from Heaven, nor of finite man apart from the Infinite God. Whatever was good and beautiful was to him an indication of the Divine Goodness and Beauty, a portal of the Eternal Kingdom; and with keen spiritual intuition he discovered the good and the beautiful, where men of lesser sensibility would only find the commonplace and the material. “To them that love God, all things work together unto Good;”[29] the truly spiritual man discovers the imprint of the Divine Life along all the highways and byways of Creation: just as the poet’s eye discovers beauty in the woodland through which the ordinary wayfarer passes unheeding.

Thus the whole creation poured into the Soul of Francis an unceasing stream of spiritual life, and with the inflowing life came joy—joy unutterable; and sorrow too. For life as it is, has no joy altogether separate from pain. There is tragedy in the purest romance, death even where there is life. And so the “joyous troubadour of God” sorrowed much because of the shadow that lay across the sunshine. To him personally life was joy, such was his liberty of spirit; but it was not so to all men. Many are they to whom life is sorrow; they walk as in a dark valley with but the twilight around them; nay, at times with no light at all, but only darkness, and their souls are starved for lack of light and warmth; even when in their ignorance or despair they seek pleasure in the immediate objects of sense around them. For these he sorrowed with the sorrow of Christ weeping over Jerusalem. It was a sorrow which kept him at long vigils when the world lay asleep, praying for mercy for the souls of men. Yet this sorrow could not destroy the essential joy of life which was his in a super-eminent degree. He sorrowed as many a man and woman sorrows over a friend who is deprived of the happiness which is their own.

Truly was Francis a “King and heir of the Kingdom,” if Kingship means sovereign possession; for he found what is best in life and had it as his own, nought else than the very joy of life. Francis himself has told us how this joy of life came to him with the absolute renunciation of what the world at large holds most dear—wealth, place, and power. In renunciation he found spiritual freedom, and with it joy. No man is truly joyous whose joy does not spring from his own soul, or from that inalienable possession of the world which comes of spiritual communion with what is good and true in it, and therefore Eternal.

The joy which is dependent upon the possession of the merely visible and material can never reach the inmost spirit of man, even were such possession not, at best, uncertain and of its nature transitory. Nay, the joy of life, which springs from man’s own spirit, is impossible to him whose heart is set upon the merely external world. For the spiritual and the material are in the immediate aspect a simple antithesis; so that where the one is, the other cannot be. “You cannot serve God and mammon.” You cannot satisfy your nature with the transitory, and yet retain an appetite for the Eternal. Consequently, he who would be free and retain a relish for the life of the Spirit, must beware of the lust of the earth, and keep a detached heart towards what is of its nature unspiritual.

To St Francis, a man amongst men, the lust of the earth was radically allied with pride of class, an inordinate ambitiousness of glory, and a love of luxury. Poverty, as Francis understood it, meant the antithesis of all this. The Lady Poverty (to borrow the Saint’s own imagery) was an outcast; she was the despised of men; and she walked amid the rough ways of the earth with threadbare garments and bruised feet.

The story how Francis found his ideal bride and came to love her with chivalric devotion, is too well known to need repetition. The final act in the drama came when one day, riding in the plain before Assisi, he was met by a leper who besought an alms, and, filled with disgust, he at first thought to pass on, but, moved by a nobler impulse, cast himself from his horse, and not only gave the alms, but folded the leper to his breast and embraced him. From that moment he himself has told us that “what had seemed bitter was changed into sweetness of soul and body, and not long afterwards I left the world.”[30]

The embrace of the leper marked the final abandonment in Francis’ soul of the sense of separation between himself, the son of the wealthy Bernardone, and the outcasts of society. Henceforth to Francis, the poor and the outcast were human brethren, worthy of a brother’s intimate love and care. In the same moment he cast aside, once for all, his youthful dream of entering the ranks of chivalry, and seeking renown in battle and tournament. Henceforth he would be the servant of his brothers the poor, and “serve the Lord in Poverty and Humility.”

The path of renunciation was further determined for him when his new ideal of life clashed with the commercial interests of his family. In the newly-awakened consciousness of his kinship with the poor, he considered his share in the family business as their share, and freely parted with what he had a right to consider his own. Pietro Bernardone, his father, foresaw commercial ruin from such a course, and when he found that Francis was indissolubly wedded to his ideal, promptly disinherited him. Henceforth Francis was without house or property of his own. With the keenness of a soul set free, he at once recognised in his father’s act of disinheritance the charter of his spiritual freedom. “Now in truth can I say: Our Father Who art in Heaven!” Heaven and earth became his when in the moment of abandonment he called God his Father. Thus he cast from himself forever the three dominant tyrannies which in his own age and since, have oppressed the souls of men—wealth, place, and power. He had become in very truth the Poor Man of Assisi, and yet who was richer than he?