His distinctively Christian sayings are indeed comparatively poor. One scans the record almost in vain for any flash of the irony or sublimity of Jesus. The profoundest remark of the Fioretti—“everything, good or bad, that a man does, he does to himself”—belongs to brother Giles who, one is not surprised to find, left a book of Verba Aurea. Occasionally a superb transcendence of ritual as in St. Francis’s remark that so far from not eating meat when Christ’s nativity fell on a Friday, “the very walls should eat flesh on such a day, or if they cannot should at any rate be greased outside,” recalls the flouter of Pharisaism, and we catch the voice of an authentic master in his exposition of a passage of Ezekiel to a peace-loving doctor of divinity perturbed about the text: “If thou proclaim not to the wicked man his wickedness, I will require his soul at thy hand.” It was by the brightness of his own life and the perfume of his fame, said St. Francis, that the servant of God proclaimed their wickedness to the wicked. That was not precisely the method of Jesus, and herein St. Francis is more Christian than Christ. Nevertheless, if one had not his Hindu utterances to supplement his Christian, there would be little to distinguish the skinny black-eyed little strolling preacher from the numberless narrow-browed ascetics of the Church except his childishly dramatic delivery, his success in founding an Order and his redeeming weakness for talking bad French. It is that strange animism of his which gives him his hold upon us, which, not content with reading a soul into the bird, the fish, the grasshopper and the wolf, extends with half-savage, half-childish personalisation to fire and water, and even to wood and stone, nay to the very letters of the alphabet, so that he will not erase a letter even when he has set it down in error. Behind this divination of life in all things must have lain an exquisite sensibility, and it was thus his unfortunate fate to be supremely alive to beauty—even in woman—yet to be driven by his creed to the worship of sorrow, abnegation and self-inflicted pain, though even from these his subtle nervous system could snatch a rare moment of ecstasy, for so delicately was he strung that the mere words “the love of God” set up a sweet vibration like a plectrum striking a lute. How indeed should the gay knight, whom his comrades elected “King of the fools,” change his sensitive skin, merely because he turned to be “God’s fool?” If he now found his joy in the ecstasy of mystic communion and absolute abnegation, the joy was still at his core, and however he might afflict his body, with a sub-conscious sense of setting a model to his weaker brethren, it was impossible for him to subdue his sun-worship, or not to delight in the ripple of water, and the grace of birds and flowers and women. And herein he differs from the Buddha with whose life-story and tenderness for all creation he has so much in common, but to whom this world is merely a mistake to be endured till the nullity of Nirvana is attained. Even the pseudo-Christian theory of this vale of tears is not so pessimistic as Buddhism, for the lachrymose vale is merely the prelude to a mountain of bliss, and Schopenhauer’s attempt to pair Christianity with Buddhism overlooked that the Buddhist saint lives to die and the Christian dies to live. Kuenen showed much deeper insight when he pointed out that Buddha does not value purity and renunciation as virtue—he is “beyond good and evil”—but as the best means of escape from life. But for St. Francis the world is not a vale of tears. Indeed the conception of a world of sorrow is contradicted by the sorrowful lives of the saints. For abnegation is pointless if there is no happiness to be surrendered. The pathos of the life of St. Francis lies precisely in his exquisite capacity for terrestrial happiness, and in his daily crucifixion of every natural desire at the bidding of a vicious theory of virtue, to which a natural want means something created by God in order to be thwarted, and which makes a vice of every necessity. Fortunately he had from his Hindu side the saving grace of joyousness, and could rebuke the saturnine visage of professional sanctity and even—towards the end—his own barbarity to that brotherly ass, his body.
His disciples, whose affinities with him were so imperfect that his most devoted biographer is the author of the “Dies Iræ,” attempt indeed to harmonise the two halves of his personality by the mediation of texts. If he loves even the humble worm, it is because “he had read that word concerning the Saviour: ‘I am a worm and no man,’ ” and if he treads reverently on the stone, it is not from some mystic sense of a stone-life or some sacramental sense of a divine immanence, but “for love of Him who is called the Rock.” That his delight in water should be traced to its baptismal uses, and his prohibition against cutting down the whole of a tree to a reverence for the material of the cross, was, of course, inevitable. Nor is it impossible that St. Francis occasionally glossed himself over to himself, and it is quite probable that his special tenderness for the hooded lark was due to its quasi-monkish cowl, and that his comparative coldness to the ant reposed upon its providing for the morrow. For it was his tragedy to be torn between a blithe personal revelation of the divine and a stereotyped tradition of sorrow, to constrict his spiritual genius to a cut-and-dried scheme of salvation, and to be crucified on a second-hand cross. The stigmata which are the best proof of his hyperæsthesia are likewise the best evidence of his spiritual plagiarism and his comparative failure. For to be crucified is not to be Christ. Jesus did not set out to be crucified, but to do his and his Father’s work. Crucifixion came in the day’s work, but was its interruption, not its fulfilment. The true imitation of Christ is to do one’s work though men crucify one. But deliberately to seek crucifixion—even crucifixion of one’s natural desires—is to imitate the accident, not the essence. A still greater perversion is it to brood upon the crude insignia of the Passion till auto-hypnotism works miracles in the flesh.
The followers of St. Francis pushed the plagiarism so far as to adumbrate a parallel legend, with a descent into Purgatory and a John of the Chapel who fell away and hanged himself, and by the latter end of the fourteenth century the parallel was made precise and perfect in the Liber Conformitatum of Bartolommeo of Pisa. But the copy is only superficially true to the original. There is nothing in the story of the great Galilæan to justify the perpetual self-torture of St. Francis in his morbid quest of perfect humility and sinlessness. On the contrary, Jesus speaks with so god-like an assurance of righteousness that it has become one of the chief arguments for his divinity, as it is the chief stumbling-block to the efficacy of his example. For if God was made not man but superman, we can no more emulate this superman’s goodness than his power of creating loaves and fishes in a crisis. Only if Jesus were not God is his example valuable. But man or superman, he did not sap his energies by brooding on his own vileness. Buddhism, with all the apathy that its pessimism engenders, is healthier here, since (according to the Mahâviyûhassutta) the Muni, the Master of renunciation, never blames himself.
I sympathise cordially with the perplexities of Brother Masseo, who, according to the “Analecta Franciscana,” lost his naturally cheerful countenance under the difficulty of believing himself viler than the vicious loafer; and who, when this peak of humility was by grace attained, found himself in fresh despondency before the new Alp that rose on the horizon. “I am sad because I cannot get to the point of feeling that if any one cut off my hands or feet or plucked my eyes out, though I had served him to the best of my power, still I could love him as much as I did before, and be equally pleased to hear him well spoken of.” Poor Masseo! Why should this worthy brother, a man, according to the Fioretti, of great eloquence and belonging to the inner circle of St. Francis, waste his time and spoil his valuable cheerfulness over such hypothetic absurdities? The humour of the last clause is worthy of Gilbert.
It is in face of such a heautontimorumenos as poor Brother Masseo that I revolt against all this strained ethics, this gymnast virtue demanding years of training to force the soul into some unnatural posture which it can only sustain at best for a few seconds. I could weep over all this wasted goodness when I think of the wrongs crying out for justice, the voice of lamentation that rises daily from the wan places of the world. How much there is for Hercules to labour at without standing on his head and balancing the seven deadly virtues on his toes! The beauty of holiness is often put on the same level as the holiness of beauty, as a self-sufficient ideal. But even as false ideals of beauty may impose themselves, so may false ideals of holiness. The static sanctity of a Stylites has long been relegated to those false ideals, and even a St. Francis cannot be accepted as a model for to-day, though a few satiated souls may yearn after abnegation as the last luxury of the spirit. There is much barren æsthetic admiration wasted upon religious maxims which it is admitted would overturn society if acted upon; and it is questionable, therefore, whether there is any real beauty in these, any more than in jewelled watches that will not go. Even when a rare saint acts upon them, they seem to produce spiritual sickliness rather than spiritual health. There is, perhaps, a finer beauty of holiness in the life of a wise and good man of the world with a sense of humour, than in the life of an ecstatic and underfed saint, whose very notion of the Fatherhood of God lacks the reality and fulness that come from paternity.
There are few things in literature more touchingly simple than those adventures in search of holiness, that picaresque novel of the spirit, known as “The Little Flowers of St. Francis.” These gentle souls, who wander without food or knapsack, under the tutelage of the seraphic saint, through the enchanting valleys and hills of unspoiled thirteenth-century Italy, and adventuring in even more glamorous regions hold strange parleyings with the Soldan of Babylon, have upon them a morning light of innocence and that perfume of holiness which can never fail to justify the Master’s exposition of Ezekiel. If anything could add to the sweetness of the idyll, it is the spiritual loves of St. Francis and St. Clara. And yet our adoration of St. Francis must not blind us to the questionable aspects of the chronicle. “I may yet have sons and daughters,” he replied deprecatingly to one who proclaimed him blessed and holy. What a caricature of true ethics! Even the poverty for which he was “so greedy” is impossible if everybody is greedy for it, and the abnegation he practised he could not have preached. Otherwise when he tossed his own tunic to a shivering beggar, he should have inspired the beggar to toss it back to his now shivering self, and so ad infinitum. That game of tunic-tennis with nothing ever scored but “love” would have been true Franciscanism, but also its reductio ad absurdum. I do not wonder that Goethe smiled at the “Heiliger” of Assisi, for neglecting to visit whose shrine he was nearly arrested as a smuggler.
Yes, the bland brother does well to babble of the cabbage planted with its leaves in the ground. For he has blundered into the very essence of the Master’s teaching: this topsy-turvydom, these roots in the air, are the secret of St. Francis’s success. There is a tendency to blame our paradoxists, to deride their inversions as mechanical. But St. Francis is an inversion incarnate, a paradox in flesh and blood. While with other men Property is a sacred concept, a fetish guarded by a mesh of laws, he refuses to own anything and even disposes with blasphemous levity of other people’s property. Theft he daringly defines as not to give something to anybody who has greater need of it than oneself. He hated Property, not as the Socialist hates it who covets its communalisation, but as something in itself evil. These practical inversions of his have the same excuse as those of the literary paradoxist. Nothing less than this violent antithesis will suffice to shake men’s notions from the rigor mortis that overtakes even true ideas, or to offset the exaggeration which gradually falsifies them. One false extreme must be met by another, if the happy mean is to be struck.
Pray do not imagine I would endorse Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean, or the popular platitude that truth always lies midway between two extreme views. On the contrary, truth is often the most violent and extreme of all possible propositions and right action the most violent and extreme of all possible forms of conduct. But the system of St. Francis needed as much contradiction from the world of common sense as the world of common sense needed from it. In so far as it was Christian, it was an imitation of early Christianity, minus the time-limit which justified its model. But the right course of action when the world is about to come to an end will not necessarily be the right course if the world is indefinitely to be continued in our next. In such a world the system of St. Francis is an impossibility, if only because it would bring the world to an end by lack of population. And if it really succeeded, it would bring itself to an end even before the world, for in the absence of owners there would be none to receive alms from, none to bake that bread which St. Francis naïvely regarded as coming by grace as simply as water. This absolute avoidance of money resembles, indeed, nothing so much as banking, which is possible only if the bulk of the investors do not ask for their money at the same time. It is on the certainty of his failure that the success of a saint reposes. His disciples will never be more than a miserable minority and so he will seem recuperative and not destructive to society. The exaggeration of his holiness will mitigate the materialism of the average man. Dives will not give up his dinner but he will drop a crumb for Lazarus and another for the saint, and perhaps eat only salmon and trout on Fridays. It is this reflection that he incarnates for the race an ideal of perfection, imperfect though it be in its impossibility, that reconciles me to the saint, as the reflection that the Church Fathers were engaged in fashioning that ideal reconciles me to their meticulous morality, in a world so given over to slaughter, sensuality and every abomination of injustice that their fine shades and their notion of an impassable infinity between right and the smallest wrong appear ludicrously disproportionate and academic.
The saint on this theory is a scapegoat, a victim on the altar of human selfishness; he does, suffers, or gives up, too much because most other persons do, suffer, or give up, too little. He is sacrificed to the balance of things, or as St. Paul put it, he is the leaven to the lump. Yet things would overbalance were he too successful, and too much leaven would spoil the lump.
If there is within St. Francis an unresolved discord between Hinduism and Christianity, still more jarring is the outer discord between Nature and Christianity which he tried so heroically to harmonise. Don Quixote tilting at windmills is a practical figure beside St. Francis trying to Christianise bird and beast. The consciously grotesque pathos of Cervantes is surpassed by the unconsciously grotesque pathos of the chronicles of St. Francis. The struggle for existence in Nature—the angler’s hook and the birdcatcher’s snare—can hardly be glossed over by sermons to the birds and the fishes. Doubtless St. Francis had—as some sinners have to-day—a strange power of fascination over the lower creatures, but the butcher was not eliminated because St. Francis occasionally bought off a lamb or a turtle-dove. We know too little of the psychology of wild beasts to deny that he tamed the Wolf of Agobio—though it is permissible to doubt the civil contract with Brother Wolf which in Sassetta’s fanciful picture is even drawn up by a notary; nor is the stone record of the miracle you may read to-day on the façade of that little church in Gubbio which was set up three centuries later, nor even the skull of Brother Wolf himself, found—according to a lady writer on Gubbio—“precisely on the spot pointed out by tradition as the burial-place of the beast,” and “now in the possession of a gentleman at Scheggia,” as convincing a testimony as she imagines “to the indubitable truth of the tradition, and to the superhuman power of love towards every living creature.” Love has no such power to turn lions and wolves into civil contractors or vegetarians. There is a battle of beneficent and sinister forces in the universe, which Persian speculation has always recognised frankly, but which Hebraic and Hindu systems, by their higher synthesis of Love or Good, unconsciously whittle away into a sham fight, or at best a tournament; a play of God with His own forces. ’Tis Docetism writ larger. But whether the fight be sham or real, the universe is not run on a Franciscan system, and it is this which makes the pathos and the grotesquerie of the saint’s attempts to equate the macrocosm with his autocosm. Yes, St. Francis is as nobly mad as Don Quixote. Nay, towards the end, where the cavalier of Christ, broken by disease in the prime of his years—disease of the spleen, disease of the liver, disease of the stomach, disease of the eyes—macerated by senseless privations, a mere substratum for poultices and fomentations and cauterisations, scarcely even washing himself for fear of ostentating the stigmata, still sings songs of praise so blithely as to scandalise his companions’ sense of death-bed decency, we touch a more Quixotic pathos than anything in Cervantes.