“Ludibria rerum humanarum cunctis in negotiis.”
Tacitus.
I
So eccomi back in Assisi, after heaven knows how many years, and here is the same bland Franciscan—or his brother—to show me the same tiny monastery garden with the same rusty rose-bushes and tell me the same story of how its native thorns and briars turned into thornless roses with blood-specked leaves after St. Francis had rolled in them to subdue the flesh, and the same anecdote of the neophyte who refused to plant cabbages with their roots upward and was rejected by the saint as insufficiently simple and obedient, and I ask the same question as to the botanic results of planting cabbages topsy-turvy and receive the same beaming reassurance that they waxed to prize dimensions, while a blight fell on those whose roots had, with worldly-wise presumption, been planted in earth. And I am shown the same little hut which the saint occupied, with the same unnatural ecclesiastic vaulting and the same unnatural oratory above it, and I go again into the same Lilliputian church (twenty-two feet by thirteen) beloved of St. Francis, with its rude plaster and its wooden benches and its plain brass lamps, and receive the same shock at the thought of its asphyxiation beneath the giant grandeur of S. Maria of the Angels, that spreads over it like a golden eagle brooding a street sparrow. And from the door of this dear little Portiuncula I glean the same glad tidings that Pope Gregory XIII at the instance of the most illustrious Cardinal Sforza has conceded to every faithful Christian who will say (or pay for) a mass at its altar, the grace of liberating a soul from Purgatory. And I am given the same illuminated leaflet about St. Francis, with the same specimen of ensanguined rose-leaf—precisely like that which grows in my own garden—and I pay the same lira on the same spot where St. Francis, who called coins “flies,” had some of these pests, innocently offered by a worshipper, thrown out upon asses’ dung. The only change since my last visit is that a fig-tree has been planted “by request” in remembrance of the old tree in which Sister Grasshopper sang with the saint for eighty days.
And this “by request” is a vivid reminder that the Franciscan legend is flourishing more and more, like the topsy-turvy cabbage, and that shoals of pleasure-pilgrims, richly clad, come by carriage or motor to maunder over “the little poor man of Assisi,” to gloat upon the cord of his tunic, stored up in a cupboard, and to gain an appetite for lunch by rhapsodising over the cell in which he fasted. Yes, the lover of poverty and of the brute creation has brought a good deal of money to the little hill-town, and no small sum of labour and lashings to its horses, and it is not surprising that the region round the poor little abandoned church of S. Maria in Portiuncula has grown up in the last quarter of a century into a big suburb, with eating- and lodging-houses, or that the successors of the saint who in his horror of property tried to tear down the chapter-house built for him, and who left even his cell because somebody referred to it as St. Francis’s, have within the last ten years been able to enrich their vast basilica with three elaborate carven doors and an iron railing, not to mention the horrible modern fresco with six angels like ballet-girls hovering without the chapel where St. Francis died.
As I leave this musty S. Maria of the Angels and mount on this divine spring day towards the sunny hill-top where Assisi proper sits rock-hewn, with its towers, domes, and castles, and see beneath me the wonderful rolling Apennines, and the windings of white roads and silver streams, and around me the grey-green of olives and the bridal white of cherry-trees, and above me the cloud-galleons sailing in the great spaces of sky, a remark of the bland brother comes back to me with added significance. “We do not know where St. Francis’s heart is,” he said, grudgingly conceding that the rival church on high possessed his body. The fancy takes me, as I toil up to this tomb, that St. Francis’s heart refused to be buried in a church, is here out of doors, at one with the spring and the sunshine.
And even more symbolic sounds to me the bland brother’s boast that the colossal church built over the poor little Portiuncula is on the model of St. Peter’s. Canonisation is a process that normally lasts centuries; our King Alfred’s is not yet complete. But twenty months after his death Francesco Bernardone was hustled into formal saintship. The Pope crushed him by a loving embrace, and over his beloved doll’s house of a church was erected a copy of St. Peter’s! And far above, on the rival ridge of Assisi, as if to give a culminating irony to the symbolism, and as if one great church built over his body did not suffice to keep him down, a second church of S. Francesco has been built on the top of the first, and beneath these two churches, each supplied with its frescoed falsifications by the school of Giotto, the little brother of the poor who demanded only to lie among the criminals on the “Infernal Hill” was safely buried.
And yet not so safely but that his spirit has begun to penetrate through all the layers of stone and legend. Perhaps it has escaped through that portal of the upper church which, incautiously thrown open to illumine the painted miracles, tempers the austere gloom and the drone of ceaseless psalm-saying from below with a revealed greensward and a piping of birds. But one cannot imagine that his spirit has gone to occupy that large red throne between two yellow armchairs which the fresco depicts as the vision of his appointed seat in heaven, or that fiery chariot with which to bedazzle the brethren left behind. These twenty-eight wall frescoes, like the four triangular allegories on the ceiling below, hold little of the true St. Francis (notwithstanding that they are all drawn from Franciscan literature), and the least spiritual and the most mythical portions of the legend, the demons flying over Arezzo, or St. Francis hovering in the air while praying, figure on equal terms with his real activities, while the picture of his offering the Soldan the ordeal of fire is an imaginative amplification even of the literature. Setting aside all the fatuous monastic miracles, and the more tedious anecdotes of the Franciscan legend—and it must be remembered that the earliest dated manuscript of the Fioretti comes a hundred and sixty-four years after the death of St. Francis—we are yet able to extricate from it a kernel of personality sufficient to account for its genesis and growth, and it is this St. Francis who has at length burst through the three churches devoted to keeping him down and made his appeal to the modern mind. Yet the modern mind might easily misread itself into the mediæval mystic.
Despite his marriage to Lady Poverty, St. Francis was far from a conscious rebel against the glories of the Vatican. He was too humble-minded to be anything but a meek acceptant of the established Church and the ruling ritual. But there was in his literal translation into life of the Sermon on the Mount, the germ of a dangerous schism—a germ which duly developed into a sect of “Spirituals” for whom the Gospel of Assisi was the Eternal Evangel destined to supersede the Christianity of the Vatican—and it is not an accident that his followers, despite their popularisation of the idea of Papal infallibility, gravitated more to the Ghibelline cause than to the Guelph, and were, later on, formally condemned as heretics by John XXII. This unstatesmanlike Pope was not only ignorant that persecution is the seed of the sect, but he undermined the doctrine of his own Papal infallibility by thus reversing the bull of Nicholas III confirming their order. He alleged that Nicholas had framed it without his Cardinals, but the more logical Minorite Brothers contended that the contradiction of his predecessors proved him no true Pope, but a usurper. John and his successors retorted with the Holy Inquisition, and the Franciscans were burnt in stacks or tortured to death in dungeons; “martyrs,” says Döllinger, “to the doctrine of Papal infallibility and the rule of poverty.” And such is the comedy of Catholicism.
One wonders sometimes what St. Francis would have made of himself, had Christianity never come his way. His own genius would never have created the melancholy dogmas of the mediæval Church. There is neither Christ nor Atonement in his Canticle to the Sun—his most characteristic utterance. The Christianity he absorbed from his environment makes but a hybrid composite with his essential personality. There is thus no real unity in his spiritual being, no real reconciliation between his theory of utter abnegation and unworthiness, and his cheerful mystic oneness with the material universe and all its creatures. That everything God has created is laudable except one’s self, and that all matter is sacramental except one’s own body, is scarcely a congruous creed. And he followed his Christianity for the most part with a prosaic literality that showed that here he was but a passive receiver, as in his pharisaic prohibition against the brethren’s practice of soaking pulse the evening before it was eaten, on the ground that this meant taking thought for the morrow. Not to soak it, is precisely taking thought, since it is concentrating attention on a triviality. But in his tender mystic universalism on the other hand he was a master, a creator. “Our Brother the Sun,” “Our Sister the Moon,” “Our Sister, Water,” “Our little Brothers and Sisters, the Birds,” “Our Sister, the Death of the Body”—these are the mintings of an original genius, not that tame subservience to texts which limited his wardrobe because of certain words in St. Matthew. And the originality of this genius consists, curiously enough, in the spontaneous reproduction of Hindu optimism and universality in a Western. How Hindu this thought is appears vividly from the story in the “Speculum Perfections,” that when St. Francis’s drawers caught fire about the knee, he would not put it out nor harm his brother Fire. From this point of view Hell would only be brother Fire enjoying himself. Yet we find St. Francis engaged all his life in thwarting the fraternal appetite. St. Francis would have been a greater man, had he been less of a Christian.