For thus we rise,
And gain our freedom by the things
We most despise!
O gracious Poverty, supplied
With joy and rest,
Thine is the plenty of the heart,
And that is best!”
It is strangely incongruous with this almost idyllic gentleness for us to find such a man hanging a coveted bit of meat in his cell until the odor of its putrefaction disgusted the rest of the monks, as well as put an end to his own craving for the forbidden dainty. Then, too, we have several other anecdotes of his grim humor and bold denunciation of sin. Take, for example, the story told of his peculiar half-satirical conduct in an instance which Wadding, the historian of the Franciscan Order, relates with great gusto. A citizen of Todi, a relative of the poet, had bought a pair of chickens, and not wishing to be inconvenienced by them, he said to Jacoponus, “Take them and carry them for me, if you please; I don’t care to burden myself with them.” To which Jacoponus answered, “Trust me! I’ll carry your chickens home.” He then went direct to the church of Fortunatus, in which his own monument was afterward placed, and pulling up a gravestone he thrust the chickens in and replaced the slab. The worthy citizen on his return of course found no chickens, and therefore at once hunted out Jacoponus in the public square and reproached him. “I took them to your house,” retorted the Franciscan. “But I have just come from it and my wife says she has not seen you,” the Tudescan asserted. Thereupon Jacoponus took him to the church and having removed the stone, said to him: “Friend, isn’t that your home?” The citizen, says Wadding, took his chickens, being a man evidently of frugal mind, and, “not without fear, went his way absorbed in thought.”
This mad Solomon is at times so keen in his denunciations of the corruption of the Church, and so evidently sincere in his own religion, that more than one hymnologist has thought that his folly was largely assumed as a guise under which he had greater freedom. The court fool was a “chartered libertine” as to his language, and when we read the epitaph of Jacoponus it seems as if he had reversed the saying of Shakespeare and had stolen Satan’s livery to serve Heaven in. There is no question but that this satirical freedom actually cost the poor jester some considerable share of imprisonment, and this heightens the likelihood that he was playing Brutus in order to abolish Caesar. Boniface VIII., whom he had very plainly rebuked, was the one who imprisoned him, and he was not released before the case—as he had indeed predicted—was precisely reversed. Let me record my own conviction, based upon the poem of which I append a translation, and upon the other facts of his life, that this view of his career has much in its favor. Those days and these are not to be compared in respect to liberty. Where Bernard of Cluny swung his sling about his head and let the pebbles fly to right and left with no very tangible result, Jacoponus took bow and arrows and drove his shaft into the target. No one meddled with Bernard; but Jacoponus, a century later, was a Tell for the ecclesiastical Gessler.
Of the Stabat Mater Dolorosa, carried by the Flagellants into every corner of Europe as they flogged themselves in public to its anthem, it can be said that it is one of the very greatest hymns—if not actually the greatest—of the Roman Catholic Church. The Dies Irae, the Veni, Sancte Spiritus, and the Hymn of Bernard of Cluny, are catholic rather than Roman. This is Roman rather than catholic. It is full of Mariolatry. Take a stanza from a prose translation by way of example: