The Evolution of Love

by Emil Lucka

Jacob of Vitry, a cultured French prelate, took a different view. He inveighed against the "foolish poems, the lies of the poets, the sing-song of the women, the coarse innuendoes of the jesters." "Such vermin flourishes on the stream of temporal abundance; it literally crawls over all food, for, as a rule, the meal is followed by a deluge of idle talk." A reconciliation of the two worlds was impossible.

While the Waldenses flourished in Provence, various heretical sects arose in the west of Germany and in the Netherlands; prominent among them were the Apostolics, who took the Gospels literally, and introduced communism and polygamy, and the communities of the Beghards and Beguines, which roused little public attention, and did not aim at reform, but advocated a life of contemplation. They found supporters in all ranks of the community, and were connected with the later German mystics. An indictment preserved for us proves the religious originality of one of those sects, "The Brethren of the Free Spirit," who upheld the heretical view that it were better that one man should attain to spiritual perfection than that a hundred monasteries should be founded. At the same time the inspired seer and hysterical nun, Hildegarde of Bingen, wrote wild letters to the popes, denouncing the vice existing in the Church and the degradation of religion. "But thou, oh Rome, who art well-nigh at the point of death, thou wilt be shaken so that the strength of thy feet shall forsake thee, because thou hast not loved the royal maiden righteousness with an ardent love, but with the torpor of sleep, and thou hast become a stranger to her. Therefore she will desert thee if thou do not call her back." Pope Adrian IV. replied, almost humbly: "We long to hear words of warning from you, because men say that you are endowed with the spirit of the divine miracles." St. Bernard craved Hildegarde's prayer, two emperors, popes, bishops and abbots corresponded with her, requesting her prayer and advice, and the interpretation of difficult passages of the Scriptures. Hildegarde replied in an obscure, apocalyptical language: "In the mysteries of the true wisdom have I seen and heard this."

Prophets predicting the revival of the Gospel of Christ and the regeneration of the world appeared in the north and south. The Italian monk and fanatic, Joachim of Floris (about a.d. 1200), preached that this regeneration was predestined to happen. A precursor of Hegel, he taught three eras: the dominion of the Father, or the first era, characterised by fear and the severity of the law; the dominion of the Son, or the era of faith and compassion; and the dominion of the Holy Ghost, or the era of love. This last era was beginning to dawn, and in many places Joachim's words were regarded as the prophecies of a seer. Thus the monk, Gerhard of Borgo San Domino, claimed for the dawning third era the preaching of a new gospel of the Holy Ghost, an unmistakable proof that the spirit of heresy was the outcome of religious enthusiasm.

The people despised the clergy, and were favourably disposed to every reformer; at the same time they were entirely under the sway of a superstitious awe of the administrators of mysterious magic which, by appropriate practices, or by means of presents, could be turned to advantage. The fetichism of relics flourished everywhere; a sufficient number of pieces of the Cross of Christ were sold and worshipped to furnish trees for a big forest—to say nothing of the bones of numerous saints with which many monasteries, more especially French monasteries, did a lucrative trade. Even at the time this traffic repelled the finer intellects; in a.d. 1200, Guibert, the abbot of Novigentum, preached against the cult of the saints and the worship of relics, adducing all the well-known arguments which to this day, however, have proved insufficient to overcome the evil. In Guibert's words, "It was an abominable nuisance that certain limbs should be detached from the body, thereby defying the law that all bodies must turn to dust. How can the bones of any man be worth framing in gold and silver," he asked, "when the body of the Son of God was laid beneath a miserable stone?" He exhorted the people to turn from the visible and obvious to the invisible. He maintained that the worship of relics was opposed to true religion because "not until the disciples were bereaved of the bodily presence of Christ could the Holy Ghost descend upon them." He even rejected the prevalent, entirely materialistic, view of a life after death, and dared to suggest that the torments of hell should be interpreted spiritually. "The eternal contemplation of the Lord is the supreme bliss of the righteous; who could dare to deny that the misery of the damned consists in the eternal bereavement of the face of the Lord?"

Religion had been lost; what should have been a vital force had become as far as the most learned were concerned a knowledge of historical events. Many saw in a return to evangelical simplicity and love the only remedy; but it was the life, not the preaching of a man, which once again was vouchsafed to the world as a great example. "Nobody has shown me what I should do; but the Most High Himself has commanded me to live according to the Gospels." Francis of Assisi accepted the accounts of the life of Christ with the utmost naïveté; he neither searched for an allegorical meaning (as the theologians did), nor did he subordinate the man Jesus to the divine principle of the logos (in the manner of the great mystics). To him the imitation of Christ meant a ministry of love; he did not conceive religion as dogma and the political power of a hierarchy, but as a state of the heart. This is a characteristic which he shares with Eckhart, the great recreator of European religion, although he was fundamentally alien to him. St. Francis never uttered a single hostile word against tradition or the clergy; he never inveighed against the corruption of morals and religious indifference, as other reformers did; he exerted a reformatory influence solely by his life, for he possessed the secret of the great love. During his whole life he was averse to laying down rules for his followers, although continually urged to do so by popes and bishops. His importance does not lie in the foundation of an order with certain regulations and a specific object, but in the fact that he was a vital force. He broke the norms of the Church whenever it seemed right to him to do so, for he was absolutely sure of himself; without being ordained he preached to the people in his own tongue, probably the first man (after the Provençal Peter Valdez) who did so; without possessing the slightest authority he consecrated his friend Clara as a nun. Innocent III., who made the suppression of heresy the task of his life, showed great intelligence and wisdom in sanctioning St. Francis' sermons to the people and acknowledging his unecclesiastical brotherhood. This probably transformed a dangerous revolutionary into a faithful servant of the Church. Maybe the Church was indebted to St. Francis for being saved from a great early reformation; signs of it were not wanting, and another Arnold of Brescia might have arisen and brought about her overthrow. It is doubtful whether the Church would have come out of a Franciscan crusade as victoriously as she came out of her struggle with Provence.

St. Francis regarded science with indifference. "Every demon," he said, "has more scientific knowledge than all men on earth put together. But there is something a demon is incapable of, and in it lies the glory of man. A man can be faithful to God." With those words he had inwardly overcome tradition and theology, and direct knowledge of the divine had dawned in his soul. He even forbade his brethren to own copies of the Scriptures. God in the heart—that was the core of his doctrine. With all his wonderful intuition he was absolutely innocent of the pride of ignorance; he really felt himself smaller than the smallest of men—unlike the bishops and popes who called themselves the servants of the servants of God, without attaching the least meaning to it. How characteristic of his simple mind was his passionate insistence on the respectful handling of the vessels used at holy Mass, because they were destined to receive the body of the Lord. And yet he hardly knew anything of the symbolic transmutation of bread and wine—he accepted the miracle without a thought, like a child.

In the year 1219, St. Francis took part in a Crusade. While the battle of Damietta was raging, he went into the camp of the Saracens and preached before the Sultan, who received him with respect and sent him back unharmed. According to the legend, he then went to Bethlehem and Jerusalem, where the Sultan, touched by his personality, gave him access to the sacred shrines. To Francis this pilgrimage to the Holy Land had a profound meaning, for to him Christianity meant the imitation of Christ.

Although he lived on bread himself, and poverty was his chosen lady, he regarded the asceticism of the early Middle Ages as futile and rejected it. The fire of life burned in him so ardently that he gave no thought to the morrow, and literally followed the admonition of the Gospels: "So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be My disciple." We read in the Fioretti (perhaps the oldest popular collection of poems in existence) that he expressly prohibited asceticism as a principle; an idea too foreign to the spirit of the age to have been an invention. He also disapproved of the secluded monastic life, then the universal ideal of the vita contemplativa, and insisted on his followers living in the world, radiating love and sustaining life by the charity of their fellow-men.

There is an anecdote contained in the Fioretti, reflecting the great superiority and lucidity of his mind. On a cold winter's day he and Brother Leo were tramping through the deep snow. "Brother Leo," said St. Francis, "if we could restore sight to all blind men, heal all cripples, expel evil spirits and recall the dead to life—it would not be perfect joy." And after a while: "And if we knew all the secrets of science, the course of the stars, the ways of the beasts—it would not be perfect joy—and if by our preaching we could convert all infidels to the true faith—even that would not be perfect joy." "Tell me then, Father," said Brother Leo, "what would be perfect joy?" "If we now knocked at the convent gates, cold and wet and faint with hunger, and the porter sent us away with harsh words, so that we should have to stand in the snow until the evening; if we thus waited, bearing all things patiently without murmuring—that would be perfect joy: the mercy of self-control."

"He met death singing," says his biographer, Thomas of Celano, the author of the magnificent Dies irae, dies illa. On his deathbed St. Francis composed and sang without interruption the Hymn to the Sun, that lofty song of praise in which the sum total of his noble life, love for all created things,—is comprised and transfigured. It expresses a new form of devotion, composed of the ecstasy of love and perfect humility. He embraced in his heart his brother Sun, his sister Moon, the dear Stars; his brother Wind, his sister and mother Earth; and on the day of his death this brother seraphicus added to it a powerful and touching song of praise of his "brother Death." The legend has it that a flock of singing-birds descended on the roof of the cottage in which he lay dying; the songs of his "little sisters" accompanied him to the world beyond the grave.