THE PROBLEM OF ST. FRANCIS
First, he may deal with this great and most amazing man as a figure in secular history and a model of social virtues. He may describe this divine demagogue as being, as he probably was, the world's one quite sincere democrat. He may say (what means very little) that St. Francis was in advance of his age. He may say (what is quite true) that St. Francis anticipated all that is most liberal and sympathetic in the modern mood; the love of nature; the love of animals; the sense of social compassion; the sense of the spiritual dangers of prosperity and even of property. All those things nobody understood before Wordsworth were familiar to St. Francis. All those things that were first discovered by Tolstoy had been taken for granted by St. Francis. He could be presented, not only as a human but a humanitarian hero; indeed as the first hero of humanism. He has been described as a sort of morning star of the Renaissance. And in comparison with all these things, his ascetical theology can be ignored or dismissed as a contemporary accident, which was fortunately not a fatal accident. His religion can be regarded as a superstition, but an inevitable superstition, from which not even genius could wholly free itself; in the consideration of which it would be unjust to condemn St. Francis for his self-denial or unduly chide him for his chastity. It is quite true that even from so detached a standpoint his stature would still appear heroic. There would still be a great deal to be said about the man who tried to end the Crusades by talking to the Saracens or who interceded with the Emperor for the birds. The writer might describe in a purely historical spirit the whole of that great Franciscan inspiration that was felt in the painting of Giotto, in the poetry of Dante, in the miracle plays that made possible the modern drama, and in so many other things that are already appreciated by the modern culture. He may try to do it, as others have done, almost without raising any religious question at all. In short, he may try to tell the story of a saint without God; which is like being told to write the life of Nansen and forbidden to mention the North Pole. Second, he may go to the opposite extreme, and decide, as it were, to be defiantly devotional. He may make the theological enthusiasm as thoroughly the theme as it was the theme of the first Franciscans. He may treat religion as the real thing that it was to the real Francis of Assisi. He can find an austere joy, so to speak, in parading the paradoxes of asceticism and all the holy topsy-turvydom of humility. He can stamp the whole history with the Stigmata, record fasts like fights against a dragon; till in the vague modern mind St. Francis is as dark a figure as St. Dominic. In short he can produce what many in our world will regard as a sort of photographic negative, the reversal of all lights and shades; what the foolish will find almost invisible as if it were written in silver upon white. Such a study of St. Francis would be unintelligible to anyone who does not share his religion, perhaps only partly intelligible to anyone who does not share his vocation. According to degrees of judgment, it will be regarded as something too bad or too good for the world. The only difficulty about doing the thing in this way is that it cannot be done. It would really require a saint to write the life of a saint. In the present case the objections to such a course are insuperable. Third, he may try to do what I have tried to do here; and, as I have already suggested, the course has peculiar problems of its own. The writer may put himself in the position of the ordinary modern outsider and enquirer; as indeed the present writer is still largely and was once entirely in that position. He may start from the standpoint of a man who already admires St. Francis, but only for those things which such a man finds admirable. In other words he may assume that the reader is at least as enlightened as Renan or Matthew Arnold; but in light of that enlightenment he may try to illuminate what Renan and Matthew Arnold left dark. He may try to use what is understood to explain what is not understood. He may say to the modern English reader: "Here is an historical character which is admittedly attractive to many of us already, by its gaiety, its romantic imagination, its spiritual courtesy and camaraderie, but which also contains elements (evidently equally sincere and emphatic) which seem to you quite remote and repulsive. But after all, this man was a man and not half a dozen men. What seems inconsistency to you did not seem inconsistency to him. Let us see whether we can understand, with the help of the existing understanding, these other things that seem now to be doubly dark, by their intrinsic gloom and their ironic contrast." I do not mean, of course, that I can really reach such a psychological completeness in this crude and curt outline. But I mean that this is the only controversial condition that I shall here assume; that I am dealing with the sympathetic outsider. I shall not assume any more or any less agreement than this. A materialist may not care whether the inconsistencies are reconciled or not. A Catholic may not see any inconsistencies to reconcile. But I am here addressing the ordinary modern man, sympathetic but sceptical, and I can only rather hazily hope that, by approaching the great saint's story through what is evidently picturesque and popular about it, I may at least leave the reader understanding a little more than he did before of the consistency of a complete character; that by approaching it in this way, we may at least get a glimmering of why the poet who praised his lord the sun, often hid himself in a dark cavern, of why the saint who was so gentle with his Brother the Wolf was so harsh to his Brother the Ass (as he nicknamed his own body), of why the troubadour who said that love set his heart on fire separated himself from women, of why the singer who rejoiced in the strength and gaiety of the fire deliberately rolled himself in the snow, of why the very song which cries with all the passion of a pagan, "Praised be God for our Sister, Mother Earth, which brings forth varied fruits and grass and glowing flowers," ends almost with the words, "Praised be God for our Sister, the death of the body." Renan and Matthew Arnold failed utterly at this test. They were content to follow Francis with their praises until they were stopped by their prejudices; the stubborn prejudices of the sceptic. The moment Francis began to do something they did not understand or did not like, they did not try to understand it, still less to like it; they simply turned their backs on the whole business and "walked no more with him." No man will get any further along a path of historical enquiry in that fashion. These sceptics are really driven to drop the whole subject in despair, to leave the most simple and sincere of all historical characters as a mass of contradictions, to be praised on the principle of the curate's egg. Arnold refers to the asceticism of Alverno almost hurriedly, as if it were an unlucky but undeniable blot on the beauty of the story; or rather as if it were a pitiable break-down and bathos at the end of the story. To represent Mount Alverno as the mere collapse of Francis is exactly like representing Mount Calvary as the mere collapse of Christ. Those mountains are mountains, whatever else they are, and it is nonsense to say (like the Red Queen) that they are comparative hollows or negative holes in the ground. They were quite manifestly meant to be culminations and landmarks. To treat the Stigmata as a sort of scandal, to be touched on tenderly but with pain, is exactly like treating the original five wounds of Jesus Christ as five blots on His character. You may dislike the idea of asceticism, you may dislike equally the idea of martyrdom; for that matter you may have an honest and natural dislike of the whole conception of sacrifice symbolised by the cross. But if it is an intelligent dislike, you will still retain the capacity for seeing the point of a story; or a story of a martyr or even the story of a monk. You will not be able rationally to read the Gospel and regard the Crucifixion as an afterthought or an anti-climax or an accident in the life of Christ; it is obviously the point of the story like the point of a sword, the sword that pierced the heart of the Mother of God. And you will not be able rationally to read the story of a man presented as a Mirror of Christ without understanding his final phase as a Man of Sorrows, at least artistically appreciating the appropriateness of his receiving, in a cloud of mystery and isolation, inflicted by no human hand, the unhealed everlasting wounds that heal the world. The practical reconciliation of the gaiety
and austerity I must leave the story itself to suggest. But since
I
have mentioned Matthew Arnold and Renan and the rationalistic admirers
of
St. Francis, I will here give the hint of what it seems to me most
advisable for such readers to keep in mind. These distinguished
writers found things like the Stigmata a stumbling block because to
them a religion was a philosophy. It was an impersonal thing; and
it is only the most personal passion that provides here an approximate
earthly parallel. A man will not roll in the snow for a stream of
tendency by which all things fulfill the law of their being. He
will not go without food in the name of something,
not ourselves, that makes for righteousness. He will do things
like
this, or pretty nearly like this, under quite a different impulse.
He
will do these things when he is in love. The first fact to
realise
about St. Francis is involved in the first act with which his story
starts;
that when he said from the first that he was a Troubadour, and said
later
that he was a Troubadour of a newer and nobler romance, he was not
using
a mere metaphor, but understood himself much better than the scholars
understand
him. He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubadour.
He
was a Lover. He was a lover of God and he was really and truly a
lover
of men; possibly a much rarer mystical vocation. A lover of men
is
very nearly the opposite of a philanthropist; indeed the pedantry of
the
Greek word carries something like a satire on itself. A
philanthropist may be said to love anthropoids. But as St.
Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity
but Christ. Say, if you think so, that he was a lunatic loving an
imaginary person; but an imaginary person, not an imaginary idea.
And for the modern reader the clue to the asceticism and all the
rest can best be found in the stories of lovers when they seemed to be
rather like lunatics. Tell it as the tale of one of the
Troubadours, and the wild things he would do for his lady, and the
whole of the modern puzzle disappears. In such a romance there
would be no contradiction between the poet gathering flowers in the sun
and enduring a freezing vigil in the snow, between his glorifying gold
and purple and perversely going in
rags, between his showing pathetically a hunger for a happy life and a
thirst
for a heroic death. All these riddles would easily be resolved in
the
simplicity of any noble love; only this was so noble a love that nine
men
out of ten have hardly heard of it. We shall see later that this
parallel
of the earthly lover has a very practical relation to the problems of
his
life, as to his relations with his father and with his friends and
their
families. The modern reader will almost always find that if he could
only
feel this kind of love as a reality, he could feel this kind of
extravagance as a romance. But I only note it here as a
preliminary point because, though it is very far from being the final
truth in the matter, it is the best approach to it. The reader
cannot even begin to see the sense of
a story that may well seem to him a very wild one, until he understands
that
to this great mystic his religion was not a thing like a theory but a
thing
like a love-affair. And the only purpose of this prefatory
chapter is
to explain the limits of this present book; which is only addressed to
that
part of the modern world which finds in St. Francis a certain modern
difficulty;
which can admire him yet hardly accept him, or which can appreciate the
saint
almost without the sanctity. And my only claim even to attempt
such
a task is that I myself have for so long been in various stages of such
a
condition. Many thousand things that I now partly comprehend I
should have thought utterly incomprehensible, many things I now hold
sacred I should have scouted as utterly superstitious, many things that
seem to me lucid and
enlightened now they are seen from the inside I should honestly have
called
dark and barbarous seen from the outside, when long ago in those days
of
boyhood my fancy first caught fire with the glory of St. Francis of
Assisi. I too have lived in Arcady; but even in Arcady I met one
walking in a brown habit who loved the woods better than Pan. The
figure in the brown habit stands above the hearth in the room where I
write, and alone among
many such images, at no stage of my pilgrimage has he ever seemed to me
a
stranger. There is something of harmony between the hearth and
the
firelight and my own first pleasure in his words about his brother
fire; for
he stands far enough back in my memory to mingle with all those more
domestic
dreams of the first days. Even the fantastic shadows thrown by
fire
make a sort of shadow pantomime that belongs to the nursery; yet the
shadows
were even then the shadows of his favourite beasts and birds, as he saw
them,
grotesque but haloed with the love of God. His Brother Wolf and
Brother
Sheep seemed then almost like the Brer Fox and the Brer Rabbit of a
more
Christian Uncle Remus. I have come slowly to see many and more
marvelous
aspects of such a man, but I have never lost that one. His figure
stands
on a sort of bridge connecting my boyhood with my conversion to many
other
things; for the romance of his religion had penetrated even the
rationalism
of that vague Victorian time. In so far as I have had this
experience,
I may be able to lead others a little further along that road; but only
a
little further. Nobody knows better than I do now that it is a
road
upon which angels might fear to tread; but though I am certain of
failure
I am not altogether overcome by fear; for he suffered fools gladly. |