He soon asked Celano to resume his work.[62] The latter was perhaps alone at first, but little by little a group of collaborators formed itself anew about him.[63] Thenceforth nothing prevented his doing with that portion of the work of the Three Companions which Crescentius had suppressed what he had already done with the part he had approved.
The Legend of Brother Leo has thus come down to us, entirely worked over by Thomas of Celano, abridged and with all its freshness gone, but still of capital importance in the absence of the major part of the original.
The events of which we possess two accounts permit us to measure the extent of our loss. We find, in fact, in Celano's compilation all that we expected to find in the Three Companions: the incidents belong especially to the last two years of Francis's life, and the scene of many of them is either Greccio or one of the hermitages of the vale of Rieti;[64] according to tradition, Brother Leo was the hero of a great number of the incidents here related[65] and all the citations that Ubertini di Casali makes from Brother Leo's book find their correspondents here.[66]
This second part of the Second Life perfectly reflects the new circumstances to which it owes its existence. The question of Poverty dominates everything;[67] the struggle between the two parties in the Order reveals itself on every page; the collaborators are determined that each event narrated shall be an indirect lesson to the Liberals, to whom they oppose the Spirituals; the popes had commented on the Rule in the large sense; they, on their side, undertook to comment on it in a sense at once literal and spiritual, by the actions and words of its author himself.
History has hardly any part here except as the vehicle of a thesis, a fact which diminishes nothing of the historic value of the information given in the course of these pages. But while in Celano's First Life and in the Legend of the Three Companions the facts succeed one another organically, here they are placed side by side. Therefore when we come to read this work we are sensible of a fall; even from the literary point of view the inferiority makes itself cruelly felt. Instead of a poem we have before us a catalogue, very cleverly made, it is true, but with no power to move us.
VIII. Notes on a Few Secondary Documents
a. Celano's Life of St. Francis for Use in the Choir.
Thomas of Celano made also a short legend for use in the choir. It is divided into nine lessons and served for the Franciscan breviaries up to the time when St. Bonaventura made his Legenda Minor.
That of Celano may be found in part (the first three lessons) in the Assisi MS. 338, fol. 52a-53b; it is preceded by a letter of envoy: "Rogasti me frater Benedicte, ut de legenda B. P. N. F. quædam exciperem et in novem lectionum seriem ordinarem ... etc. B. Franciscus de civitate Assisii ortus a puerilibus annis nutritus extitit insolenter."
This work has no historic importance.