“Rightly renouncing all other affections, the Bride reposes on love alone, and returns a love reciprocal. And when she has poured her whole self out in love, what is that compared with the perennial flood of that fountain? Not equals in abundance are this loving one and Love, the soul and the Word, the Bride and Bridegroom, creature and Creator—no more than thirst equals the fount. What then? shall she therefore despair, and the vow of the would-be Bride be rendered empty? Shall the desire of this panting one, the ardour of this loving one, the trust of this confiding one be baffled because she cannot keep pace with the giant’s course, in sweetness contend with honey, in mildness with the Lamb, in whiteness with the Lily, in brightness with the Sun, in love with Him who is love? No. For although the creature loves less, because she is less, yet if she loves with her whole self, nothing lacks where there is all. Wherefore, as I have said, so to love is to have wedded; for no one can so love and yet be loved but little, and in mutual consent stands the entire and perfect marriage.”[505]
Who has not marvelled that the relationship of marriage should make so large a part of the symbolism through which monks and nuns expressed the soul’s love of God? Historically it might be traced to Paul’s precept, “Husbands love your wives, as Christ loved the Church”; still more potently it was derived from the Song of Songs. But beyond these almost adventitious influences, did not the holy priest, the monk, the nun, feel and know that marriage was the great human relationship? So they drew from it the most adequate allegory of the soul’s communion with its Maker: differently according to their sex, with much emotion, and even with unseemly imaginings, they thought and felt the love of God along the ways of wedded union or even bridal passion.[506]
CHAPTER XVIII
ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI[507]
Twenty-nine years after the death of St. Bernard, Francis was born in the Umbrian hill town of Assisi. The year was 1182. On the fourth of October 1226, in the forty-fifth year of his age, this most loving and best beloved of mediaeval saints breathed his last, in the little church of the Portiuncula, within the shadows of that same hill town.
Of all mediaeval saints, Bernard and Francis impressed themselves most strongly upon their times. Neither of them was pre-eminently an intellectual force—Francis especially would not have been what he was but for certain childlike qualities of mind which never fell away from him. The power of these men sprang from their personalities and the vivida vis (their contemporaries would have said, the grace of God) realizing itself in every word and act. Bernard’s power was more directly dependent upon the conditions of his epoch, and his influence was more limited in duration.
The reason is not far to seek. Both men were of the Middle Ages, even of those decades in which they lived. But Bernard’s strength was part of the medium wherein he worked and the evil against which he fought—the clerical corruptions, the heresies, the schisms and political controversies, the warfare of Christ with Mahomet,—all matters of vital import for his time, but which were to change and pass.
Francis, on the other hand, was occupied with none of these. He was no scourge of clerical corruptions, no scourge of anything; he knew nought of heresy or schism, nothing of politics or war; into the story of his life there comes not even a far-off echo of the Albigensian Crusade or the conflict between pope and emperor. His life appears detached from the special conditions of his time; it is neither held within them nor compelled by them, but only by its inner impulse. For it was not occupied with the exigencies of Italy and Germany, or Southern France, during that first quarter of the thirteenth century, when De Montfort was hurling the orthodox and brutal north upon the fair but heretical provinces of Languedoc, and when Innocent III. was excommunicating Otho IV., and Frederick II. was disclosing himself as the most dangerous foe the papacy had yet known. The passing turmoil and danger of the time did not touch this life; the man knew naught of all these things. He was not considering thirteenth-century Italians, Frenchmen, and Germans; he was fascinated with men as men, with the dumb brutes as fellow-creatures, and even with plants and stones as vessels of God’s loveliness or symbols of His Word; above all he was absorbed in Christ, who had taken on humanity for him, had suffered for him, died for him, and who now around, above, within him, inspired and directed his life.