Three years after, in 1263, he brought his completed work to the chapter-general convoked under his presidence at Pisa. It was there solemnly approved.[78]
It is impossible to say whether they thought that the presence of the new legend would suffice to put the old ones out of mind, but it seems that at this time nothing was said about the latter.
It was not so at the following chapter. This one, held at Paris, came to a decision destined to have disastrous results for the primitive Franciscan documents. This decree, emanating from an assembly presided over by Bonaventura in person, is too important not to be quoted textually: "Item, the Chapter-general ordains on obedience that all the legends of the Blessed Francis formerly made shall be destroyed. The Brothers who shall find any without the Order must try to make away with them since the legend made by the General is compiled from accounts of three who almost always accompanied the Blessed Francis; all that they could certainly know and all that is proven has been carefully inserted therein."[79] It would have been difficult to be more precise. We see the perseverance with which Bonaventura carried on his struggle against the extreme parties. This decree explains the almost complete disappearance of the manuscripts of Celano and the Three Companions, since in certain collections even those of Bonaventura's legend are hardly to be found.
As we have seen, Bonaventura aimed to write a sort of official or canonical biography; he succeeded only too well. Most of the accounts that we already know have gone into his collection, but not without at times suffering profound mutilations. We are not surprised to find him passing over Francis's youth with more discretion than Celano in the First Life, but we regret to find him ornamenting and materializing some of the loveliest incidents of the earlier legends.
It is not enough for him that Francis hears the crucifix of St. Daraian speak; he pauses to lay stress on the assertion that he heard it corporeis auribus and that no one was in the chapel at that moment! Brother Monaldo at the chapter of Arles sees St. Francis appear corporeis oculis. He often abridges his predecessors, but this is not his invariable rule. When he reaches the account of the stigmata he devotes long pages to it,[80] relates a sort of consultation held by St. Francis as to whether he could conceal them, and adds several miracles due to these sacred wounds; further on he returns to the subject to show a certain Girolamo, Knight of Assisi, desiring to touch with his hands the miraculous nails.[81] On the other hand, he uses a significant discretion wherever the companions of the Saint are in question. He names only three of the first eleven disciples,[82] and no more mentions Brothers Leo, Angelo, Rufino, Masseo, than their adversary, Brother Elias.
As to the incidents which we find for the first time in this collection, they hardly make us regret the unknown sources which must have been at the service of the famous Doctor; it would appear that the healing of Morico, restored to health by a few pellets of bread soaked in the oil of the lamp which burned before the altar of the Virgin,[83] has little more importance for the life of St. Francis than the story of the sheep given to Giacomina di Settesoli which awakened its mistress to summon her to go to mass.[84] What shall we think of that other sheep, of Portiuncula, which hastened to the choir whenever it heard the psalmody of the friars, and kneeled devoutly for the elevation of the Holy Sacrament?[85]
All these incidents, the list of which might be enlarged,[86] betrays the working-over of the legend. St. Francis becomes a great thaumaturgist, but his physiognomy loses its originality.
The greatest fault of this work is, in fact, the vagueness of the figure of the Saint. While in Celano there are the large lines of a soul-history, a sketch of the affecting drama of a man who attains to the conquest of himself, with Bonaventura all this interior action disappears before divine interventions; his heart is, so to speak, the geometrical locality of a certain number of visitants; he is a passive instrument in the hands of God, and we really cannot see why he should have been chosen rather than another.
And yet Bonaventura was an Italian; he had seen Umbria; he must have knelt and celebrated the sacred mysteries in Portiuncula, that cradle of the noblest of religious reformations; he had conversed with Brother Egidio, and must have heard from his lips an echo of the first Franciscan fervor; but, alas! nothing of that rapture passed into his book, and if the truth must be told, I find it quite inferior to much later documents, to the Fioretti, for example; for they understood, at least in part, the soul of Francis; they felt the throbbing of that heart, with all its sensitiveness, admiration, indulgence, love, independence, and absence of carefulness.