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Title: Life of St. Francis of Assisi

Author: Paul Sabatier

Translator: Louise Seymour Houghton

Release date: July 8, 2006 [eBook #18787]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE OF ST.
FRANCIS OF ASSISI ***

LIFE OF
ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI
BY

PAUL SABATIER
Quivere monachus est nihil
reputat esse suum nisi citharam

Gioacchino di Fiore in Apoc. 182 a 2

TRANSLATED BY
LOUISE SEYMOUR HOUGHTON

LONDON

HODDER & STOUGHTON

1919

Copyright, 1894, by Charles Scribner's Sons, for the
United States of America.

Printed by the Scribner Press
New York, U.S.A.

TO THE STRASBURGHERS

Friends!
At last here is this book which I told you about so long ago. The result is
small indeed in relation to the endeavor, as I, alas! see better than anyone.
The widow of the Gospel put only one mite into the alms-box of the temple,
but this mite, they tell us, won her Paradise. Accept the mite that I offer you
to-day as God accepted that of the poor woman, looking not at her offering,
but at her love, Feci quod potui, omnia dedi.

Do not chide me too severely for this long delay, for you are somewhat its
cause. Many times a day at Florence, at Assisi, at Rome, I have forgotten
the document I had to study. Something in me seemed to have gone to flutter
at your windows, and sometimes they opened.... One evening at St. Damian
I forgot myself and remained long after sunset. An old monk came to warn
me that the sanctuary was closed. "Per Bacco!" he gently murmured as he
led me away, all ready to receive my confidence, "sognava d'amore o di
tristitia?" Well, yes. I was dreaming of love and of sadness, for I was
dreaming of Strasbourg.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
Introduction, xi

CHAPTER I.
Youth, 1

CHAPTER II.
Stages of Conversion, 15

CHAPTER III.
The Church about 1209, 28

CHAPTER IV.
Struggles and Triumphs, 53

CHAPTER V.
First Year of Apostolate, 71

CHAPTER VI.
St. Francis and Innocent III., 88

CHAPTER VII.
Rivo-Torto, 103

CHAPTER VIII.
Portiuncula, 120

CHAPTER IX.
Santa Clara, 147

CHAPTER X.
First Attempts to reach the Infidels, 168

CHAPTER XI.
The Inner Man and Wonder-working, 183

CHAPTER XII.
The Chapter-General of 1217, 198

CHAPTER XIII.
St. Dominic and St. Francis, 217

CHAPTER XIV.
The Crisis of the Order, 239

CHAPTER XV.
The Rule of 1221, 252

CHAPTER XVI.
The Brothers Minor and Learning, 271

CHAPTER XVII.
The Stigmata, 287

CHAPTER XVIII.
The Canticle of the Sun, 297

CHAPTER XIX.
The Last Year, 308

CHAPTER XX.
Francis's Will and Death, 333

Critical Study of the Sources, 347

APPENDIX.
Critical Study of the Stigmata and of the Indulgence of August
433
2,

INTRODUCTION
In the renascence of history which is in a manner the characteristic of our
time, the Middle Ages have been the object of peculiar fondness with both
criticism and erudition. We rummage all the dark corners of the libraries,
we bring old parchments to light, and in the zeal and ardor we put into our
search there is an indefinable touch of piety.
These efforts to make the past live again reveal not merely our curiosity,
or the lack of power to grapple with great philosophic problems, they are a
token of wisdom and modesty; we are beginning to feel that the present has
its roots in the past, and that in the fields of politics and religion, as in
others, slow, modest, persevering toil is that which has the best results.
There is also a token of love in this. We love our ancestors of five or six
centuries ago, and we mingle not a little emotion and gratitude with this
love. So, if one may hope everything of a son who loves his parents, we
must not despair of an age that loves history.
The Middle Ages form an organic period in the life of humanity. Like all
powerful organisms the period began with a long and mysterious gestation;
it had its youth, its manhood, its decrepitude. The end of the twelfth century
and the beginning of the thirteenth mark its full expansion; it is the
twentieth year of life, with its poetry, its dreams, its enthusiasm, its
generosity, its daring. Love overflowed with vigor; men everywhere had but
one desire—to devote themselves to some great and holy cause.
Curiously enough, though Europe was more parcelled out than ever, it
felt a new thrill run through its entire extent. There was what we might call
a state of European consciousness.
In ordinary periods each people has its own interests, its tendencies, its
tears, and its joys; but let a time of crisis come, and the true unity of the
human family will suddenly make itself felt with a strength never before
suspected. Each body of water has its own currents, but when the hurricane
is abroad they mysteriously intermingle, and from the ocean to the remotest
mountain lake the same tremor will upheave them all.

It was thus in '89, it was thus also in the thirteenth century.
Never was there less of frontier, never, either before or since, such a
mingling of nationalities; and at the present day, with all our highways and
railroads, the people live more apart.1
The great movement of thought of the thirteenth century is above all a
religious movement, presenting a double character—it is popular and it is
laic. It comes out from the heart of the people, and it looks athwart many
uncertainties at nothing less than wresting the sacred things from the hands
of the clergy.
The conservatives of our time who turn to the thirteenth century as to the
golden age of authoritative faith make a strange mistake. If it is especially
the century of saints, it is also that of heretics. We shall soon see that the
two words are not so contradictory as might appear; it is enough for the
moment to point out that the Church had never been more powerful nor
more threatened.
There was a genuine attempt at a religious revolution, which, if it had
succeeded, would have ended in a universal priesthood, in the proclamation
of the rights of the individual conscience.
The effort failed, and though later on the Revolution made us all kings,
neither the thirteenth century nor the Reformation was able to make us all
priests. Herein, no doubt, lies the essential contradiction of our lives and
that which periodically puts our national institutions in peril. Politically
emancipated, we are not morally or religiously free.2
The thirteenth century with juvenile ardor undertook this revolution,
which has not yet reached its end. In the north of Europe it became
incarnate in cathedrals, in the south, in saints.
The cathedrals were the lay churches of the thirteenth century. Built by
the people for the people, they were originally the true common house of
our old cities. Museums, granaries, chambers of commerce, halls of justice,
depositories of archives, and even labor exchanges, they were all these at
once.
That art of the Middle Ages which Victor Hugo and Viollet-le-Duc have
taught us to understand and love was the visible expression of the
enthusiasm of a people who were achieving communal liberty. Very far

from being the gift of the Church, it was in its beginning an unconscious
protest against the hieratic, impassive, esoteric art of the religious orders.
We find only laymen in the long list of master-workmen and painters who
have left us the innumerable Gothic monuments which stud the soil of
Europe. Those artists of genius who, like those of Greece, knew how to
speak to the populace without being common, were for the most part
humble workmen; they found their inspiration not in the formulas of the
masters of monastic art, but in constant communion with the very soul of
the nation. Therefore this renascence, in its most profound features,
concerns less the archæology or the architecture than the history of a
country.
While in the northern countries the people were building their own
churches, and finding in their enthusiasm an art which was new, original,
complete, in the south, above the official, clerical priesthood of divine right
they were greeting and consecrating a new priesthood, that of the saints.
The priest of the thirteenth century is the antithesis of the saint, he is
almost always his enemy. Separated by the holy unction from the rest of
mankind, inspiring awe as the representative of an all-powerful God, able
by a few signs to perform unheard-of mysteries, with a word to change
bread into flesh and wine into blood, he appeared as a sort of idol which can
do all things for or against you and before which you have only to adore
and tremble.
The saint, on the contrary, was one whose mission was proclaimed by
nothing in his apparel, but whose life and words made themselves felt in all
hearts and consciences; he was one who, with no cure of souls in the
Church, felt himself suddenly impelled to lift up his voice. The child of the
people, he knew all their material and moral woes, and their mysterious
echo sounded in his own heart. Like the ancient prophet of Israel, he heard
an imperious voice saying to him: "Go and speak to the children of my
people." "Ah, Lord God, I am but a child, I know not how to speak." "Say
not, I am but a child, for thou shalt go to all those to whom I shall send thee.
Behold I have set thee to-day as a strong city, a pillar of iron and a wall of
brass against the kings of Judah, against its princes and against its priests."
These thirteenth-century saints were in fact true prophets. Apostles like
St. Paul, not as the result of a canonical consecration, but by the interior

order of the Spirit, they were the witnesses of liberty against authority.
The Calabrian seer, Gioacchino di Fiore, hailed the new-born revolution;
he believed in its success and proclaimed to the wondering world the advent
of a new ministry. He was mistaken.
When the priest sees himself vanquished by the prophet he suddenly
changes his method. He takes him under his protection, he introduces his
harangues into the sacred canon, he throws over his shoulders the priestly
chasuble. The days pass on, the years roll by, and the moment comes when
the heedless crowd no longer distinguishes between them, and it ends by
believing the prophet to be an emanation of the clergy.
This is one of the bitterest ironies of history.
Francis of Assisi is pre-eminently the saint of the Middle Ages. Owing
nothing to church or school he was truly theodidact,3 and if he perhaps did
not perceive the revolutionary bearing of his preaching, he at least always
refused to be ordained priest. He divined the superiority of the spiritual
priesthood.
The charm of his life is that, thanks to reliable documents, we find the
man behind the wonder worker. We find in him not merely noble actions,
we find in him a life in the true meaning of the word; I mean, we feel in him
both development and struggle.
How mistaken are the annals of the Saints in representing him as from
the very cradle surrounded with aureole and nimbus! As if the finest and
most manly of spectacles were not that of the man who conquers his soul
hour after hour, fighting first against himself, against the suggestions of
egoism, idleness, discouragement, then at the moment when he might
believe himself victorious, finding in the champions attracted by his ideal
those who are destined if not to bring about its complete ruin, at least to
give it its most terrible blows. Poor Francis! The last years of his life were
indeed a via dolorosa as painful as that where his master sank down under
the weight of the cross; for it is still a joy to die for one's ideal, but what
bitter pain to look on in advance at the apotheosis of one's body, while
seeing one's soul—I would say his thought—misunderstood and frustrated.
If we ask for the origins of his idea we find them exclusively among the
common people of his time; he is the incarnation of the Italian soul at the

beginning of the thirteenth century, as Dante was to be its incarnation a
hundred years later.
He was of the people and the people recognized themselves in him. He
had their poetry and their aspirations, he espoused their claims, and the very
name of his institute had at first a political signification: in Assisi as in most
other Italian towns there were majores and minores, the popolo grasso and
the popolo minuto; he resolutely placed himself among the latter. This
political side of his apostolate needs to be clearly apprehended if we would
understand its amazing success and the wholly unique character of the
Franciscan movement in its beginning.
As to its attitude toward the Church, it was that of filial obedience. This
may perhaps appear strange at first as regards an unauthorized preacher
who comes speaking to the world in the name of his own immediate
personal inspiration. But did not most of the men of '89 believe themselves
good and loyal subjects of Louis XVI.?
The Church was to our ancestors what the fatherland is to us; we may
wish to remodel its government, overturn its administration, change its
constitution, but we do not think ourselves less good patriots for that.
In the same way, in an age of simple faith when religious beliefs seemed
to be in the very fibre and flesh of humanity, Dante, without ceasing to be a
good Catholic, could attack the clergy and the court of Rome with a
violence that has never been surpassed. St. Francis so surely believed that
the Church had become unfaithful to her mission that he could speak in his
symbolic language of the widowhood of his Lady Poverty, who from
Christ's time to his own had found no husband. How could he better have
declared his purposes or revealed his dreams?
What he purposed was far more than the foundation of an order, and it is
to do him great wrong thus to restrict his endeavor. He longed for a true
awakening of the Church in the name of the evangelical ideal which he had
regained. All Europe awoke with a start when it heard of these penitents
from a little Umbrian town. It was reported that they had craved a strange
privilege from the court of Rome: that of possessing nothing. Men saw
them pass by, earning their bread by the labor of their hands, accepting only
the bare necessities of bodily sustenance from them to whom they had
given with lavish hands the bread of life. The people lifted up their heads,

breathing in with deep inspirations the airs of a springtime upon which was
already floating the perfume of new flowers.
Here and there in the world there are many souls capable of all heroism,
if only they can see before them a true leader. St. Francis became for these
the guide they had longed for, and whatever was best in humanity at that
time leaped to follow in his footsteps.
This movement, which was destined to result in the constitution of a new
family of monks, was in the beginning anti-monastic. It is not rare for
history to have similar contradictions to record. The meek Galilean who
preached the religion of a personal revelation, without ceremonial or
dogmatic law, triumphed only on condition of being conquered, and of
permitting his words of spirit and life to be confiscated by a church
essentially dogmatic and sacerdotal.
In the same way the Franciscan movement was originally, if not the
protest of the Christian consciousness against monachism, at least the
recognition of an ideal singularly higher than that of the clergy of that time.
Let us picture to ourselves the Italy of the beginning of the thirteenth
century with its divisions, its perpetual warfare, its depopulated country
districts, the impossibility of tilling the fields except in the narrow circle
which the garrisons of the towns might protect; all these cities from the
greatest to the least occupied in watching for the most favorable moment
for falling upon and pillaging their neighbors; sieges terminated by
unspeakable atrocities, and after all this, famine, speedily followed by
pestilence to complete the devastation. Then let us picture to ourselves the
rich Benedictine abbeys, veritable fortresses set upon the hill-tops, whence
they seemed to command all the surrounding plains. There was nothing
surprising in their prosperity. Shielded by their inviolability, they were in
these disordered times the only refuge of peaceful souls and timid hearts.4
The monks were in great majority deserters from life, who for motives
entirely aside from religion had taken refuge behind the only walls which at
this period were secure.
Overlook this as we may, forget as we may the demoralization and
ignorance of the inferior clergy, the simony and the vices of the prelates, the
coarseness and avarice of the monks, judging the Church of the thirteenth
century only by those of her sons who do her the most honor; none the less

are these the anchorites who flee into the desert to escape from wars and
vices, pausing only when they are very sure that none of the world's noises
will interrupt their meditations. Sometimes they will draw away with them
hundreds of imitators, to the solitudes of Clairvaux, of the Chartreuse, of
Vallombrosa, of the Camaldoli; but even when they are a multitude they are
alone; for they are dead to the world and to their brethren. Each cell is a
desert, on whose threshold they cry
O beata solitudo.
O sola beatitudo.
The book of the Imitation is the picture of all that is purest in this
cloistered life.
But is this abstinence from action truly Christian?
No, replied St. Francis. He for his part would do like Jesus, and we may
say that his life is an imitation of Christ singularly more real than that of
Thomas à Kempis.
Jesus went indeed into the desert, but only that he might find in prayer
and communion with the heavenly Father the inspiration and strength
necessary for keeping up the struggle against evil. Far from avoiding the
multitude, he sought them out to enlighten, console, and convert them.
This is what St. Francis desired to imitate. More than once he felt the
seduction of the purely contemplative life, but each time his own spirit
warned him that this was only a disguised selfishness; that one saves
oneself only in saving others.
When he saw suffering, wretchedness, corruption, instead of fleeing he
stopped to bind up, to heal, feeling in his heart the surging of waves of
compassion. He not only preached love to others; he himself was ravished
with it; he sang it, and what was of greater value, he lived it.
There had indeed been preachers of love before his day, but most
generally they had appealed to the lowest selfishness. They had thought to
triumph by proving that in fact to give to others is to put one's money out at
a usurious interest. "Give to the poor," said St. Peter Chrysologus,5 "that
you may give to yourself; give him a crumb in order to receive a loaf; give
him a shelter to receive heaven."

There was nothing like this in Francis; his charity is not selfishness, it is
love. He went, not to the whole, who need no physician, but to the sick, the
forgotten, the disdained. He dispensed the treasures of his heart according
to the need and reserved the best of himself for the poorest and the most
lost, for lepers and thieves.
The gaps in his education were of marvellous service to him. More
learned, the formal logic of the schools would have robbed him of that
flower of simplicity which is the great charm of his life; he would have seen
the whole extent of the sore of the Church, and would no doubt have
despaired of healing it. If he had known the ecclesiastical discipline he
would have felt obliged to observe it; but thanks to his ignorance he could
often violate it without knowing it,6 and be a heretic quite unawares.
We can now determine to what religious family St. Francis belongs.
Looking at the question from a somewhat high standpoint we see that in
the last analysis minds, like religious systems, are to be found in two great
families, standing, so to say, at the two poles of thought. These two poles
are only mathematical points, they do not exist in concrete reality; but for
all that we can set them down on the chart of philosophic and moral ideas.
There are religions which look toward divinity and religions which look
toward man. Here again the line of demarcation between the two families is
purely ideal and artificial; they often so mingle and blend with one another
that we have much difficulty in distinguishing them, especially in the
intermediate zone in which our civilization finds its place; but if we go
toward the poles we shall find their characteristics growing gradually
distinct.
In the religions which look toward divinity all effort is concentrated on
worship, and especially on sacrifice. The end aimed at is a change in the
disposition of the gods. They are mighty kings whose support or favor one
must purchase by gifts.
Most pagan religions belong to this category and pharisaic Judaism as
well. This is also the tendency of certain Catholics of the old school for
whom the great thing is to appease God or to buy the protection of the
Virgin and the saints by means of prayers, candles, and masses.

The other religions look toward man; their effort is directed to the heart
and conscience with the purpose of transforming them. Sacrifice disappears,
or rather it changes from the exterior to the interior. God is conceived of as
a father, always ready to welcome him who comes to him. Conversion,
perfection, sanctification become the pre-eminent religious acts. Worship
and prayer cease to be incantations and become reflection, meditation, virile
effort; while in religions of the first class the clergy have an essential part,
as intermediaries between heaven and earth, in those of the second they
have none, each conscience entering into direct relations with God.
It was reserved to the prophets of Israel to formulate, with a precision
before unknown, the starting-point of spiritual worship.
Bring no more vain offerings;
I have a horror of incense,
Your new moons, your Sabbaths, and your assemblies;
When you multiply prayers I will not hearken.
Your hands are full of blood,
Wash you, make you clean,
Put away from before my eyes the evil of your ways,
Cease to do evil,
Learn to do well.7
With Isaiah these vehement apostrophes are but flashes of genius, but
with Jesus the interior change becomes at once the principle and the end of
the religious life. His promises were not for those who were right with the
ceremonial law, or who offered the greatest number of sacrifices, but for the
pure in heart, for men of good will.
These considerations are not perhaps without their use in showing the
spiritual ancestry of the Saint of Assisi.
For him, as for St. Paul and St. Augustine, conversion was a radical and
complete change, the act of will by which man wrests himself from the
slavery of sin and places himself under the yoke of divine authority.
Thenceforth prayer, become a necessary act of life, ceases to be a magic
formula; it is an impulse of the heart, it is reflection and meditation rising
above the commonplaces of this mortal life, to enter into the mystery of the
divine will and conform itself to it; it is the act of the atom which

understands its littleness, but which desires, though only by a single note, to
be in harmony with the divine symphony.
Ecce adsum Domine, ut faciam voluntatem tuam.
When we reach these heights we belong not to a sect, but to humanity;
we are like those wonders of nature which the accident of circumstances
has placed upon the territory of this or that people, but which belong to all
the world, because in fact they belong to no one, or rather they are the
common and inalienable property of the entire human race. Homer,
Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Michael Angelo, Rembrandt belong to us all
as much as the ruins of Athens or Rome, or, rather, they belong to those
who love them most and understand them best.
But that which is a truism, so far as men of genius in the domain of
imagination or thought are concerned, still appears like a paradox when we
speak of men of religious genius. The Church has laid such absolute claim
to them that she has created in her own favor a sort of right. It cannot be
that this arbitrary confiscation shall endure forever. To prevent it we have
not to perform an act of negation or demolition: let us leave to the chapels
their statues and their relics, and far from belittling the saints, let us make
their true grandeur shine forth.

It is time to say a few words concerning the difficulties of the work here
presented to the public. History always embraces but a very feeble part of
the reality: ignorant, she is like the stories children tell of the events that
have occurred before their eyes; learned, she reminds us of a museum
organized with all the modern improvements. Instead of making you see
nature with its external covering, its diffuse life, its mysterious echoes in
your own heart, they offer you a herbarium.
If it is difficult to narrate an ordinary event of our own time, it is far more
so to describe the great crises where restless humanity is seeking its true
path.
The first duty of the historian is to forget his own time and country and
become the sympathetic and interested contemporary of what he relates; but

if it is difficult to give oneself the heart of a Greek or a Roman, it is
infinitely more so to give oneself a heart of the thirteenth century. I have
said that at that period the Middle Age was twenty years old, and the
feelings of the twentieth year are, if not the most fugitive, at least the most
difficult to note down. Everyone knows that it is impossible to recall the
feelings of youth with the same clearness as those of childhood or mature
age. Doubtless we may have external facts in the memory, but we cannot
recall the sensations and the sentiments; the confused forces which seek to
move us are then all at work at once, and to speak the language of beyond
the Rhine, it is the essentially phenomenal hour of the phenomena that we
are; everything in us crosses, intermingles, collides, in desperate conflict: it
is a time of diabolic or divine excitement. Let a few years pass, and nothing
in the world can make us live those hours over again. Where was once a
volcano, we perceive only a heap of blackened ashes, and scarcely, at long
intervals, will a chance meeting, a sound, a word, awaken memory and
unseal the fountain of recollection; and even then it is only a flash; we have
had but a glimpse and all has sunk back into shadow and silence.
We find the same difficulty when we try to take note of the fiery
enthusiasms of the thirteenth century, its poetic inspirations, its amorous
and chaste visions—all this is thrown up against a background of
coarseness, wretchedness, corruption, and folly.
The men of that time had all the vices except triviality, all the virtues
except moderation; they were either ruffians or saints. Life was rude enough
to kill feeble organisms; and thus characters had an energy unknown to-day.
It was forever necessary to provide beforehand against a thousand dangers,
to take those sudden resolutions in which one risks his life. Open the
chronicle of Fra Salimbeni and you will be shocked to find that the largest
place is taken up with the account of the annual expeditions of Parma
against the neighboring cities, or of the neighboring cities against Parma.
What would it have been if this chronicle, instead of being written by a
monk of uncommonly open mind, a lover of music, at certain times an
ardent Joachimite, an indefatigable traveller, had been written by a warrior?
And this is not all; these wars between city and city were complicated with
civil dissensions, plots were hatched periodically, conspirators were
massacred if they were discovered, or massacred and exiled others in their
turn if they were triumphant.8 When we picture to ourselves this state of

things dominated by the grand struggles of the papacy against the empire,
heretics, and infidels, we may understand how difficult it is to describe such
a time.
The imagination being haunted by horrible or entrancing pictures like
those of the frescos in the Campo Santo of Pisa, men were always thinking
of heaven and hell; they informed themselves about them with the feverish
curiosity of emigrants, who pass their days on shipboard in trying to picture
that spot in America where in a few days they will pitch their tent.
Every monk of any notoriety must have gone through this. Dante's poem
is not an isolated work; it is the noblest result of a condition which had
given birth to hundreds of compositions, and Alighieri had little more to do
than to co-ordinate the works of his predecessors and vivify them with the
breath of his own genius.
The unsettled state of men's minds was unimaginable. That unhealthy
curiosity which lies at the bottom of the human heart, and which at the
present day impels men to seek for refined and even perverse enjoyments,
impelled men of that time to devotions which seem like a defiance to
common sense.
Never had hearts been shaken with such terrors, nor ever thrilled with
such radiant hopes. The noblest hymns of the liturgy, the Stabat and the
Dies Iræ, come to us from the thirteenth century, and we may well say that
never has the human plaint been more agonized.
When we look through history, not to find accounts of battles or of the
succession of dynasties, but to try to grasp the evolution of ideas and
feelings, when we seek above all to discover the heart of man and of
epochs, we perceive, on arriving at the thirteenth century, that a fresh wind
has blown over the world, the human lyre has a new string, the lowest, the
most profound; one which sings of woes and hopes to which the ancient
world had not vibrated.
In the breast of the men of that time we think sometimes we feel the
beating of a woman's heart; they have exquisite sentiments, delightful
inspirations, with absurd terrors, fantastic angers, infernal cruelties.
Weakness and fear often make them insincere; they have the idea of the
grand, the beautiful, the ugly, but that of order is wanting; they fast or feast;

the notion of the laws of nature, so deeply graven in our own minds, is to
them entirely a stranger; the words possible and impossible have for them
no meaning. Some give themselves to God, others sell themselves to the
devil, but not one feels himself strong enough to walk alone, strong enough
to have no need to hold on by some one's skirt.
Peopled with spirits and demons nature appeared to them singularly
animated; in her presence they have all the emotions which a child
experiences at night before the trees on the roadside and the vague forms of
the rocks.
Unfortunately, our language is a very imperfect instrument for rendering
all this; it is neither musical nor flexible; since the seventeenth century it
has been deemed seemly to keep one's emotions to oneself, and the old
words which served to note states of the soul have fallen into neglect; the
Imitation and the Fioretti have become untranslatable.
More than this, in a history like the present one, we must give a large
place to the Italian spirit; it is evident that in a country where they call a
chapel basilica and a tiny house palazzo, or in speaking to a seminarist say
"Your Reverence," words have not the same value as on this side of the
Alps.
The Italians have an imagination which enlarges and simplifies. They see
the forms and outlines of men and things more than they grasp their spirit.
What they most admire in Michael Angelo is gigantic forms, noble and
proud attitudes, while we better understand his secret thoughts, hidden
sorrows, groans, and sighs.
Place before their eyes a picture by Rembrandt, and more often than not
it will appear to them ugly; its charm cannot be caught at a glance as in
those of their artists; to see it you must examine it, make an effort, and with
them effort is the beginning of pain.
Do not ask them, then, to understand the pathos of things, to be touched
by the mysterious and almost fanciful emotion which northern hearts
discover and enjoy in the works of the Amsterdam master. No, instead of a
forest they want a few trees, standing out clearly against the horizon;
instead of a multitude swarming in the penumbra of reality, a few

personages, larger than nature, forming harmonious groups in an ideal
temple.
The genius of a people9 is all of a piece: they apply to history the same
processes that they apply to the arts. While the Germanic spirit considers
events rather in their evolution, in their complex becoming, the Italian spirit
takes them at a given moment, overlooks the shadows, the clouds, the mists,
everything that makes the line indistinct, brings out the contour sharply, and
thus constructs a very lucid story, which is a delight to the eyes, but which
is little more than a symbol of the reality.
At other times it takes a man, separates him from the unnamed crowd,
and by a labor often unconscious, makes him the ideal type of a whole
epoch.10
Certainly there is in every people a tendency to give themselves a circle
of divinities and heroes who are, so to say, the incarnation of its instincts;
but generally that requires the long labor of centuries. The Italian character
will not suffer this slow action; as soon as it recognizes a man it says so, it
even shouts it aloud if that is necessary, and makes him enter upon
immortality while still alive. Thus legend almost confounds itself with
history, and it becomes very difficult to reduce men to their true
proportions.
We must not, then, ask too much of history. The more beautiful is the
dawn, the less one can describe it. The most beautiful things in nature, the
flower and the butterfly, should be touched only by delicate hands.
The effort here made to indicate the variegated, wavering tints which
form the atmosphere in which St. Francis lived is therefore of very
uncertain success. It was perhaps presumptuous to undertake it.
Happily we are no longer in the time when historians thought they had
done the right thing when they had reduced everything to its proper size,
contenting themselves with denying or omitting everything in the life of the
heroes of humanity which rises above the level of our every-day
experience.
No doubt Francis did not meet on the road to Sienna three pure and
gentle virgins come from heaven to greet him; the devil did not overturn
rocks for the sake of terrifying him; but when we deny these visions and

apparitions, we are victims of an error graver, perhaps, than that of those
who affirm them.
The first time that I was at Assisi I arrived in the middle of the night.
When the sun rose, flooding everything with warmth and light, the old
basilica11 seemed suddenly to quiver; one might have said that it wished to
speak and sing. Giotto's frescos, but now invisible, awoke to a strange life,
you might have thought them painted the evening before so much alive they
were; everything was moving without awkwardness or jar.
I returned six months later. A scaffold had been put up in the middle of
the nave; upon it an art critic was examining the paintings, and as the day
was overcast he threw upon the walls the beams of a lamp with a reflector.
Then you saw arms thrown out, faces grimacing, without unity, without
harmony; the most exquisite figures took on something fantastic and
grotesque.
He came down triumphant, with a portfolio stuffed with sketches; here a
foot, there a muscle, farther on a bit of face, and I could not refrain from
musing on the frescos as I had seen them bathed in sunlight.
The sun and the lamp are both deceivers; they transform what they show;
but if the truth must be told I own to my preference for the falsehoods of the
sun.
History is a landscape, and like those of nature it is continually changing.
Two persons who look at it at the same time do not find in it the same
charm, and you yourself, if you had it continually before your eyes, would
never see it twice alike. The general lines are permanent, but it needs only a
cloud to hide the most important ones, as it needs only a jet of light to bring
out such or such a detail and give it a false value.
When I began this page the sun was disappearing behind the rains of the
Castle of Crussol and the splendors of the sunset gave it a shining aureola;
the light flooded everything, and you no longer saw anywhere the damage
which wars have inflicted upon the old feudal manor. I looked, almost
thinking I could perceive at the window the figure of the chatelaine ...
Twilight has come, and now there is nothing up there but crumbling walls, a
discrowned tower, nothing but ruins and rubbish, which seem to beg for
pity.

It is the same with the landscapes of history. Narrow minds cannot
accommodate themselves to these perpetual transformations: they want an
objective history in which the author will study the people as a chemist
studies a body. It is very possible that there may be laws for historic
evolution and social transformations as exact as those of chemical
combinations, and we must hope that in the end they will be discovered; but
for the present there is no purely objective truth of history.
To write history we must think it, and to think it is to transform it. Within
a few years, it is true, men have believed they had found the secret of
objectivity, in the publication of original documents. This is a true progress
which renders inestimable service, but here again we must not deceive
ourselves as to its significance. All the documents on an epoch or an event
cannot usually be published, a selection must be made, and in it will
necessarily appear the turn of mind of him who makes it. Let us admit that
all that can be found is published; but alas, the most unusual movements
have generally the fewest documents. Take, for instance, the religious
history of the Middle Ages: it is already a pretty delicate task to collect
official documents, such as bulls, briefs, conciliary canons, monastic
constitutions, etc., but do these documents contain all the life of the
Church? Much is still wanting, and to my mind the movements which
secretly agitated the masses are much more important, although to testify to
them we have only a few fragments.
Poor heretics, they were not only imprisoned and burned, but their books
were destroyed and everything that spoke of them; and more than one
historian, finding scarcely a trace of them in his heaps of documents, forgets
these prophets with their strange visions, these poet-monks who from the
depths of their cells made the world to thrill and the papacy to tremble.
Objective history is then a utopia. We create God in our own image, and
we impress the mark of our personality in places where we least expect to
find it again.
But by dint of talking about the tribunal of history we have made most
authors think that they owe to themselves and their readers definitive and
irrevocable judgments.
It is always easier to pronounce a sentence than to wait, to reserve one's
opinion, to re-examine. The crowd which has put itself out to be present at a

trial is almost always furious with the judges when they reserve the case for
further information; its mind is so made that it requires precision in things
which will bear it the least; it puts questions right and left, as children do; if
you appear to hesitate or to be embarrassed you are lost in its estimation,
you are evidently only an ignoramus.
But perhaps below the Areopagites, obliged by their functions to
pronounce sentence, there is place at the famous tribunal for a simple
spectator who has come in by accident. He has made out a brief and would
like very simply to tell his neighbors his opinion.
This, then, is not a history ad probandum, to use the ancient formula. Is
this to say that I have only desired to give the reader a moment of
diversion? That would be to understand my thought very ill. In the grand
spectacles of history as in those of nature there is something divine; from it
our minds and hearts gain a virtue at once pacifying and encouraging, we
experience the salutary sensation of littleness, and seeing the beauties and
the sadnesses of the past we learn better how to judge the present hour.
In one of the frescos of the Upper Church of Assisi, Giotto has
represented St. Clara and her companions coming out from St. Damian all
in tears, to kiss their spiritual father's corpse as it is being carried to its last
home. With an artist's liberty he has made the chapel a rich church built of
precious marbles.
Happily the real St. Damian is still there, nestled under some olive-trees
like a lark under the heather; it still has its ill-made walls of irregular stones,
like those which bound the neighboring fields. Which is the more beautiful,
the ideal temple of the artist's fancy, or the poor chapel of reality? No heart
will be in doubt.
Francis's official historians have done for his biography what Giotto did
for his little sanctuary. In general they have done him ill-service. Their
embellishments have hidden the real St. Francis, who was, in fact, infinitely
nobler than they have made him to be. Ecclesiastical writers appear to make
a great mistake in thus adorning the lives of their heroes, and only
mentioning their edifying features. They thus give occasion, even to the
most devout, to suspect their testimony. Besides, by thus surrounding their
saints with light they make them superhuman creatures, having nothing in
common with us; they are privileged characters, marked with the divine

seal; they are, as the litanies say, vials of election, into which God has
poured the sweetest perfumes; their sanctity is revealed almost in spite of
themselves; they are born saints as others are born kings or slaves, their life
is set out against the golden background of a tryptich, and not against the
sombre background of reality.
By such means the saints, perhaps, gain something in the respect of the
superstitious; but their lives lose something of virtue and of communicable
strength. Forgetting that they were men like ourselves, we no longer hear in
our conscience the command, "Go and do likewise."
It is, then, a work of piety to seek behind the legend for the history. Is it
presumptuous to ask our readers to try to understand the thirteenth century
and love St. Francis? They will be amply rewarded for the effort, and will
soon find an unexpected charm in these too meagre landscapes, these
incorporate souls, these sickly imaginations which will pass before their
eyes. Love is the true key of history.
A book has always a great number of authors, and the following pages
owe much to the researches of others; I have tried in the notes to show the
whole value of these debts.
I have also had colaborers to whom it will be more difficult for me to
express my gratitude. I refer to the librarians of the libraries of Italy and
their assistants; it is impossible to name them all, their faces are better
known to me than their names, but I would here say that during long
months passed in the various collections of the Peninsula, all, even to the
most humble employees, have shown a tireless helpfulness even at those
periods of the year when the number of attendants was the smallest.
Professor Alessandro Leto, who, barely recovered from a grave attack of
influenza, kindly served as my guide among the archives of Assisi, deserves
a very particular mention. To the Syndic and municipality of that city I
desire also to express my gratitude.
I cannot close without a warm remembrance to the spiritual sons of St.
Francis dispersed in the mountains of Umbria and Tuscany.
Dear dwellers in St. Damian, Portiuncula, the Carceri, the Verna, Monte
Colombo, you perhaps remember the strange pilgrim who, though he wore
neither the frock nor the cord, used to talk with you of the Seraphic Father

with as much love as the most pious Franciscan; you used to be surprised at
his eagerness to see everything, to look at everything, to thread all the
unexplored paths. You often tried to restrain him by telling him that there
was not the smallest relic, the most meagre indulgence in the far-away
grottos to which he was dragging you, but you always ended by going with
him, thinking that none but a Frenchman could be possessed by a devotion
so fervent and so imprudent.
Thank you, pious anchorites of Greccio, thank you for the bread that you
went out and begged when I arrived at your hermitage benumbed with cold
and hunger. If you read these lines, read here my gratitude and also a little
admiration. You are not all saints, but nearly all of you have hours of
saintliness, flights of pure love.
If some pages of this book give you pain, turn them over quickly; let me
think that others of them will give you pleasure, and will make the name
you bear, if possible, still more precious to you than it now is.

FOOTNOTES
1. The mendicant orders were in their origin a true International. When in the spring of 1216 St.
Dominic assembled his friars at Notre Dame de la Prouille, they were found to be sixteen in number,
and among them Castilians, Navarese, Normans, French, Languedocians, and even English and
Germans.
Heretics travelled all over Europe, and nowhere do we find them checked by the diversity of
languages. Arnold of Brescia, for example, the famous Tribune of Rome, appeared in France and
Switzerland and in the heart of Germany.
2. The Reformation only substituted the authority of the book for that of the priest; it is a change of
dynasty and nothing more. As to the majority of those who to-day call themselves free-thinkers, they
confuse religious freedom with irreligion; they choose not to see that in religion as in politics,
between a royalty based on divine right and anarchy there is room for a government which may be as
strong as the first and a better guarantee of freedom than the second. The spirit of the older time put
God outside of the world; the sovereignty outside of the people; authority outside of the conscience.
The spirit of the new times has the contrary tendency: it denies neither God nor sovereignty nor
authority, but it sees them where they really are.
3. Nemo ostendebat mihi quod deberem facere, sed ipse Altissimus revelavit mihi quod deberem
vivere secundem formam sancti Evangelii. Testamentum Fr.
4. The wealthiest monasteries of France are of the twelfth century or were enlarged at that time:
Arles, S. Gilles, S. Sernin, Cluny, Vézelay, Brioude, Issoire, Paray-le-Monial. The same was the case
in Italy.
Down to the year 1000, 1,108 monasteries had been founded in France. The eleventh century saw the
birth of 326 and the twelfth of 702. The convents of Mount Athos in their present state give us a very

accurate notion of the great monasteries of Europe at the close of the twelfth century.
5. St. Petrus Chrysologus, sermo viii., de jejunio et eleemosyna. Da pauperi ut des tibi: da micam ut
accipias totum panem; da tectum, accipe cœlum.
6. By what right did he begin to preach? By what right did he, a mere deacon, admit to profession
and cut off the hair of a young girl of eighteen? That is an episcopal function, one which can only
devolve even upon priests by an express commission.
7. Isaiah i. 10-17. Cf. Joel 2, Psalm 50.
8. The chronicles of Orvieto (Archivio, storico italiano, t. i., of 1889, pp. 7 and following) are
nothing more than a list, as melancholy as they are tedious of wars, which, during the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, all the places of that region carried on, from the greatest to the smallest.
9. Do not forget that in the thirteenth century Italy was not a mere geographical expression. It was of
all the countries of Europe the one which, notwithstanding its partitions, had the clearest
consciousness of its unity. The expression profectus et honor Italiæ often appeared from the pen of
Innocent III. See, for instance, the bull of April 16, 1198, Mirari cogimur, addressed particularly to
the Assisans.
10. Note what the Fioretti say of Brother Bernard: "Stava solo sulle cime dei monti altissimi
contemplando le cose celesti." Fior., 28. The learned historian of Assisi, Mr. Cristofani, has used
similar expressions; speaking of St. Francis, he says: "Nuovo Christo in somma e pero degno d'essere
riguardoto come la piu gigantesca, la piu splendida, la piu cara tra le grandi figure campeggianti
nell' aere del medio evo" (Storia d'Assisi, t. i., p. 70, ed. of 1885).
11. It remains open all night.

LIFE OF ST. FRANCIS

CHAPTER I
YOUTH

Assisi is to-day very much what it was six or seven hundred years ago.
The feudal castle is in ruins, but the aspect of the city is just the same. Its
long-deserted streets, bordered by ancient houses, lie in terraces half-way
up the steep hill-side. Above it Mount Subasio1 proudly towers, at its feet
lies outspread all the Umbrian plain from Perugia to Spoleto. The crowded
houses clamber up the rocks like children a-tiptoe to see all that is to be
seen; they succeed so well that every window gives the whole panorama set
in its frame of rounded hills, from whose summits castles and villages stand
sharply out against a sky of incomparable purity.
These simple dwellings contain no more than five or six little rooms,2 but
the rosy hues of the stone of which they are built give them a wonderfully
cheerful air. The one in which, according to the story, St. Francis was born
has almost entirely disappeared, to make room for a church; but the street is
so modest, and all that remains of the palazzo dei genitori di San Francesco
is so precisely like the neighboring houses that the tradition must be correct.
Francis entered into glory in his lifetime; it would be surprising if a sort of
worship had not from the first been centred around the house in which he
saw the light and where he passed the first twenty-five years of his life.
He was born about 1182.3 The biographies have preserved to us few
details about his parents.4 His father, Pietro Bernardone, was a wealthy
cloth-merchant. We know how different was the life of the merchants of
that period from what it is to-day. A great portion of their time was spent in
extensive journeys for the purchase of goods. Such tours were little short of
expeditions. The roads being insecure, a strong escort was needed for the
journey to those famous fairs where, for long weeks at a time, merchants
from the most remote parts of Europe were gathered together. In certain
cities, Montpellier for example, the fair was perpetual. Benjamin of Tudela
shows us that city frequented by all nations, Christian and Mohammedan.
"One meets there merchants from Africa, from Italy, Egypt, Palestine,

Greece, Gaul, Spain, and England, so that one sees men of all languages,
with the Genoese and the Pisans."
Among all these merchants the richest were those who dealt in textile
stuffs. They were literally the bankers of the time, and their heavy wagons
were often laden with the sums levied by the popes in England or France.
Their arrival at a castle was one of the great events. They were kept as
long as possible, everyone being eager for the news they brought. It is easy
to understand how close must have been their relations with the nobility; in
certain countries, Provence for example, the merchants were considered as
nobles of a second order.5
Bernardone often made these long journeys; he went even as far as
France, and by this we must surely understand Northern France, and
particularly Champagne, which was the seat of commercial exchange
between Northern and Southern Europe.
He was there at the very time of his son's birth. The mother, presenting
the child at the font of San Rufino,6 had him baptized by the name of John,
but the father on his return chose to call him Francis.7 Had he already
determined on the education he was to give the child; did he name him thus
because he even then intended to bring him up after the French fashion, to
make a little Frenchman of him? It is by no means improbable. Perhaps,
indeed, the name was only a sort of grateful homage tendered by the
Assisan burgher to his noble clients beyond the Alps. However this may be,
the child was taught to speak French, and always had a special fondness for
both the language and the country.8
These facts about Bernardone are of real importance; they reveal the
influences in the midst of which Francis grew up. Merchants, indeed, play a
considerable part in the religious movements of the thirteenth century. Their
calling in some sense forced them to become colporters of ideas. What else
could they do, on arriving in a country, but answer those who asked for
news? And the news most eagerly looked for was religious news, for men's
minds were turned upon very different subjects then from now. They
accommodated themselves to the popular wish, observing, hearkening
everywhere, keeping eyes and ears open, glad to find anything to tell; and
little by little many of them became active propagandists of ideas
concerning which at first they had been simply curious.

The importance of the part thus played by the merchants as they came
and went, everywhere sowing the new ideas which they had gathered up in
their travels, has not been put in a clear enough light; they were often,
unconsciously and quite involuntarily, the carriers of ideas of all kinds,
especially of heresy and rebellion. It was they who made the success of the
Waldenses, the Albigenses, the Humiliati, and many other sects.
Thus Bernardone, without dreaming of such a thing, became the artisan
of his son's religious vocation. The tales which he brought home from his
travels seemed at first, perhaps, not to have aroused the child's attention, but
they were like germs a long time buried, which suddenly, under a warm ray
of sunlight, bring forth unlooked-for fruit.
The boy's education was not carried very far;9 the school was in those
days overshadowed by the church. The priests of San Giorgio were his
teachers,10 and taught him a little Latin. This language was spoken in
Umbria until toward the middle of the thirteenth century; every one
understood it and spoke it a little; it was still the language of sermons and of
political deliberations.11
He learned also to write, but with less success; all through his life we see
him take up the pen only on rare occasions, and for but a few words.12 The
autograph of Sacro-Convento, which appears to be entirely authentic, shows
extreme awkwardness; in general he dictated, signing his letters by a simple
Τ, the symbol of the cross of Jesus.13
That part of his education which was destined to have most influence
upon his life was the French language,14 which he perhaps spoke in his own
family. It has been rightly said that to know two languages is to have two
souls; in learning that of France the boy felt his heart thrill to the melody of
its youthful poetry, and his imagination was mysteriously stirred with
dreams of imitating the exploits of the French cavaliers.
But let us not anticipate. His early life was that of other children of his
age. In the quarter of the town where his house is still shown no vehicles
are ever seen; from morning till night the narrow streets are given over to
the children. They play there in many groups, frolicking with an exquisite
charm, very different from the little Romans, who, from the time they are
six or seven years old, spend hours at a time squatting behind a pillar, or in

a corner of a wall or a ruin, to play dice or "morra," putting a passionate
ferocity even into their play.
In Umbria, as in Tuscany, children love above all things games in which
they can make a parade; to play at soldiers or procession is the supreme
delight of Assisan children. Through the day they keep to the narrow streets,
but toward evening they go, singing and dancing, to one of the open squares
of the city. These squares are one of the charms of Assisi. Every few paces
an interval occurs between the houses looking toward the plain, and you
find a delightful terrace, shaded by a few trees, the very place for enjoying
the sunset without losing one of its splendors. Hither no doubt came often
the son of Bernardone, leading one of those farandoles which you may see
there to this day: from his very babyhood he was a prince among the
children.
Thomas of Celano draws an appalling picture of the education of that
day. He describes parents inciting their children to vice, and driving them
by main force to wrong-doing. Francis responded only too quickly to these
unhappy lessons.15
His father's profession and the possibly noble origin of his mother raised
him almost to the level of the titled families of the country; money, which
he spent with both hands, made him welcome among them. Well pleased to
enjoy themselves at his expense, the young nobles paid him a sort of court.
As to Bernardone, he was too happy to see his son associating with them to
be niggardly as to the means. He was miserly, as the course of this history
will show, but his pride and self-conceit exceeded his avarice.
Pica, his wife, gentle and modest creature,16 concerning whom the
biographers have been only too laconic, saw all this, and mourned over it in
silence, but though weak as mothers are, she would not despair of her son,
and when the neighbors told her of Francis's escapades, she would calmly
reply, "What are you thinking about? I am very sure that, if it pleases God,
he will become a good Christian."17 The words were natural enough from a
mother's lips, but later on they were held to have been truly prophetic.
How far did the young man permit himself to be led on? It would be
difficult to say. The question which, as we are told, tormented Brother Leo,
could only have suggested itself to a diseased imagination.18 Thomas of
Celano and the Three Companions agree in picturing him as going to the

worst excesses. Later biographers speak with more circumspection of his
worldly career. A too widely credited story gathered from Celano's narrative
was modified by the chapter-general of 1260,19 and the frankness of the
early biographers was, no doubt, one of the causes which most effectively
contributed to their definitive condemnation three years later.20
Their statements are in no sense obscure; according to them the son of
Bernardone not only patterned himself after the young men of his age, he
made it a point of honor to exceed them. What with eccentricities,
buffooneries, pranks, prodigalities, he ended by achieving a sort of
celebrity. He was forever in the streets with his companions, compelling
attention by his extravagant or fantastic attire. Even at night the joyous
company kept up their merrymakings, causing the town to ring with their
noisy songs.21
At this very time the troubadours were roaming over the towns of
Northern Italy22 and bringing brilliant festivities and especially Courts of
Love into vogue. If they worked upon the passions, they also made appeal
to feelings of courtesy and delicacy; it was this that saved Francis. In the
midst of his excesses he was always refined and considerate, carefully
abstaining from every base or indecent utterance.23 Already his chief
aspiration was to rise above the commonplace. Tortured with the desire for
that which is far off and high,24 he had conceived a sort of passion for
chivalry, and fancying that dissipation was one of the distinguishing
features of nobility, he had thrown himself into it with all his soul.
But he who, at twenty, goes from pleasure to pleasure with the heart not
absolutely closed to good, must now and then, at some turning of the road,
become aware that there are hungry folk, who could live a month on what
he spends in a few hours on frivolity. Francis saw them, and with his
impressionable nature for the moment forgot everything else. In thought he
put himself in their place, and it sometimes happened that he gave them all
the money he had about him and even his clothes.
One day he was busy with some customers in his father's shop, when a
man came in, begging for charity in the name of God. Losing his patience
Francis sharply turned him away; but quickly reproaching himself for his
harshness he thought, "What would I not have done if this man had asked
something of me in the name of a count or a baron? What ought I not to

have done when he came in the name of God? I am no better than a clown!"
Leaving his customers he ran after the beggar.25
Bernardone had been well pleased with his son's commercial aptitude in
the early days when the young man was first in his father's employ. Francis
was only too proficient in spending money; he at least knew well how to
make it.26 But this satisfaction did not last long. Francis's bad companions
were exercising over him a most pernicious influence. The time came when
he could no longer endure to be separated from them; if he heard their call,
nothing could keep him, he would leave everything and go after them.27
All this time political events were hurrying on in Umbria and Italy; after
a formidable struggle the allied republics had forced the empire to
recognize them. By the immortal victory of Legnano (May 29, 1176) and
the Peace of Constance (June 25, 1183) the Lombard League had wrested
from Frederick Barbarossa almost all the prerogatives of power; little was
left to the emperor but insignia and outward show.
From one end of the Peninsula to the other visions of liberty were making
hearts beat high. For an instant it seemed as if all Italy was about to regain
consciousness of its unity, was about to rise up as one man and hurl the
foreigner from its borders; but the rivalries of the cities were too strong for
them to see that local liberty without a common independence is precarious
and illusory. Henry VI., the successor of Barbarossa (1183-1196), laid Italy
under a yoke of iron; he might perhaps in the end have assured the
domination of the empire, if his career had not been suddenly cut short by a
premature death.
Yet he had not been able to put fetters upon ideas. The communal
movement which was shaking the north of France reverberated beyond the
Alps.
Although a city of second rank, Assisi had not been behind in the great
struggles for independence.28 She had been severely chastised, had lost her
franchise, and was obliged to submit to Conrad of Suabia, Duke of Spoleto,
who from the heights of his fortress kept her in subjection.
But when Innocent III. ascended the pontifical throne (January 8, 1199)
the old duke knew himself to be lost. He made a tender to him of money,
men, his faith even, but the pontiff refused them all. He had no desire to

appear to favor the Tedeschi, who had so odiously oppressed the country.
Conrad of Suabia was forced to yield at mercy, and to go to Narni to put his
submission into the hands of two cardinals.
Like the practical folk that they were, the Assisans did not hesitate an
instant. No sooner was the count on the road to Narni than they rushed to
the assault of the castle. The arrival of envoys charged to take possession of
it as a pontifical domain by no means gave them pause. Not one stone of it
was left upon another.29 Then, with incredible rapidity they enclosed their
city with walls, parts of which are still standing, their formidable ruins a
witness to the zeal with which the whole population labored on them.
It is natural to think that Francis, then seventeen years old, was one of the
most gallant laborers of those glorious days, and it was perhaps there that
he gained the habit of carrying stones and wielding the trowel which was
destined to serve him so well a few years later.
Unhappily his fellow-citizens had not the sense to profit by their hard-
won liberty. The lower classes, who in this revolution had become aware of
their strength, determined to follow out the victory by taking possession of
the property of the nobles. The latter took refuge in their fortified houses in
the interior of the city, or in their castles in the suburbs. The townspeople
burned down several of the latter, whereupon counts and barons made
request of aid and succor from the neighboring cities.
Perugia was at this time at the apogee of its power,30 and had already
made many efforts to reduce Assisi to submission. It therefore received the
fugitives with alacrity, and making their cause its own, declared war upon
Assisi. This was in 1202. An encounter took place in the plain about half
way between the two cities, not far from Ponte San Giovanni. Assisi was
defeated, and Francis, who was in the ranks, was made prisoner.31
The treachery of the nobles had not been universal; a few had fought with
the people. It was with them and not with the popolani that Francis, in
consideration of the nobility of his manners,32 passed the time of his
captivity, which lasted an entire year. He greatly astonished his companions
by his lightness of heart. Very often they thought him almost crazy. Instead
of passing his time in wailing and cursing he made plans for the future,
about which he was glad to talk to any one who came along. To his fancy
life was what the songs of the troubadours had painted it; he dreamed of

glorious adventures, and always ended by saying: "You will see that one
day I shall be adored by the whole world."33
During these long months Francis must have been pretty rudely
undeceived with respect to those nobles whom from afar he had so heartily
admired. However that may be, he retained with them not only his
frankness of speech, but also his full freedom of action. One of them, a
knight, had always held aloof from the others, out of vanity and bad temper.
Francis, far from leaving him to himself, always showed him affection, and
finally had the joy of reconciling him with his fellow-captives.
A compromise was finally arrived at between the counts and the people
of Assisi. In November, 1203, the arbitrators designated by the two parties
announced their decision. The commons of Assisi were to repair in a certain
measure the damage done to the lords, and the latter agreed, on their part, to
make no further alliances without authorization of the commons.34 Rural
serfage was maintained, which proves that the revolution had been directed
by the burghers, and for their own profit. Ten years more were not,
however, to elapse before the common people also would succeed in
achieving liberty. In this cause we shall again see Francis fighting on the
side of the oppressed, earning the title of Patriarch of religious democracy
which has been accorded him by one of his compatriots.35
The agreement being made the prisoners detained at Perugia were
released, and Francis returned to Assisi. He was twenty-two years old.

FOOTNOTES
1. Eleven hundred and one metres above the level of the sea; the plain around Assisi has an average
of two hundred, and the town of two hundred and fifty, metres above.
2. As in the majority of Tuscan cities the dimensions of the houses were formerly fixed by law.
3. The biographies say that he died (October 3, 1226) in his forty-fifth year. But the terms are not
precise enough to make the date 1181 improbable. For that matter the question is of small
importance. A Franciscan of Erfurt, about the middle of the thirteenth century, fixes the date at 1182.
Pertz, vol. xxiv., p. 193.
4. A number of different genealogies have been fabricated for Francis; they prove only one thing, the
wreck of the Franciscan idea. How little they understood their hero, who thought to magnify and
glorify him by making him spring from a noble family! "Quæ rero," says Father Suysken, S. J., "de
ejus gentilitio insigni disserit Waddingus, non lubet mihi attingere. Factis et virtutibus eluxit S.
Franciscus non proavorum insignibus aut titulis, quos nec desideravit." (A. SS. p. 557a.) It could not
be better said.

In the fourteenth century a whole cycle of legends had gathered about his birth. It could not have
been otherwise. They all grow out of the story that tells of an old man who comes knocking at the
parents' door, begging them to let him take the infant in his arms, when he announces that it will do
great things. Under this form the episode certainly presents nothing impossible, but very soon
marvellous incidents begin to gather around this nucleus until it becomes unrecognizable.
Bartholomew of Pisa has preserved it in almost its primitive form. Conform., 28a 2. Francis certainly
had several brothers [3 Soc., 9. Mater ... quæ cum præ ceteris filiis diligebat], but they have left no
trace in history except the incident related farther on. Vide p. 44. Christofani publishes several
official pieces concerning Angelo, St. Francis's brother, and his descendants: Storie d'Assisi, vol. i., p.
78 ff. In these documents Angelo is called Angelus Pice, and his son Johannectus olim Angeli domine
Pice, appellations which might be cited in favor of the noble origin of Pica.
5. Documentary History of Languedoc, iii., p. 607.
6. The Cathedral of Assisi. To this day all the children of the town are baptized there; the other
churches are without fonts.
7. 3 Soc., 1; 2 Cel., 1, 1. Vide also 3 Soc., edition of Pesaro, 1831.
8. The langue d'oïl was at this epoch the international language of Europe; in Italy it was the
language of games and tourneys, and was spoken in the petty princely courts of Northern Italy. Vide
Dante, De vulgari eloquio, lib. I., cap. x. Brunetto Latini wrote in French because "the speech of
France is more delectable and more common to all people." At the other end of Europe the Abbot of
Stade, in Westphalia, spoke of the nobility of the Gallic dialect. Ann. 1224 apud Pertz, Script. xvi. We
shall find St. Francis often making allusions to the tales of the Round Table and the Chanson de
Roland.
9. We must not be led astray by certain remarks upon his ignorance, from which one might at first
conclude that he knew absolutely nothing; for example, 2 Cel., 3, 45: Quamvis homo iste beatus
nullis fuerit scientiæ studiis innutritus. This evidently refers to science such as the Franciscans soon
came to apprehend it, and to theology in particular.
The close of the passage in Celano is itself an evident proof of this.
10. Bon., 219; Cf. A. SS., p. 560a. 1 Cel., 23.
11. Ozanam, Documents inédits pour servir à l'histoire littéraire d'Italie du VIIIe au XIIIe siècle.
Paris, 1851, 8vo, pp. 65, 68, 71, 73. Fauriel, Dante et les origines de la littérature italienne. Paris,
1854, 2 vols., 8vo, ii., p. 332, 379, 429.
12. V. 3 Soc., 51 and 67; 2 Cel., 3, 110; Bon., 55; 2 Cel., 3, 99; Eccl., 6. Bernard de Besse, Turin MS.,
fo. 96a, calls Brother Leo the secretary of St. Francis.
13. See page 357, n. 8. Bon., 51 and 308.
14. 1 Cel., 16; 3 Soc., 10; 23; 24; 33; 2 Cel., 1, 8; 3, 67. See also the Testament of St. Clara and the
Speculum, 119a.
15. Primum namque cum fari vel balbutire incipiunt, turpia quædam et execrabilia valde signis et
vocibus edocentur pueri ii nondum nati: et cum tempus ablactationis advenerit quædam luxu et
lascivia plena non solum fari sed et operari coguntur.... Sed et cum paulo plusculum ætate
profecerint, se ipsis impellentibus, semper ad deteriora opera dilabuntur. 1 Cel., 1.
16. 2 Cel., 1. Cf. Conform., 14a, 1. There is nothing impossible in her having been of Provençal
origin, but there is nothing to indicate it in any document worthy of credence. She was no doubt of
noble stock, for official documents always give her the title Domina. Cristofani I., p. 78 ff. Cf.
Matrem honestissimam habuit. 3 Soc., Edition of Pesaro, 1831, p. 17.

17. The reading given by the Conform., 14a, 1, Meritorum gratia dei filium ipsum noveritis
affuturum, seems better than that of 2 Cel., 1, 1, Multorum gratia Dei filiorum patrem ipsum noveritis
affuturum. Cf. 3 Soc., 2.
18. Bernardo of Besse, Turin MS., 102 b.: An integer carne desiderans ... quod non extorsisset a
Sancto ... meruit obtinere a Deo quod virgo esset. Cf. Conform., 211a, 1, and A. SS., p. 560f.
19. "In illa antiphona quæ incipit: Hic vir in vanitatibus nutritus insolenter, fiat talis mutatis: Divinis
karismatibus preventus est clementer." Archiv., vi., p. 35.
20. Vide p. 395, the decision of the chapter of 1263 ordaining the destruction of legends earlier than
that of Bonaventura.
21. 1 Cel., 1 and 2; 89; 3 Soc., 2. Cf. A. SS., 560c. Vincent of Beauvais, Spec. hist. lib., 29, cap. 97.
22. Pierre Vidal was at the court of Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat, about 1195, and liked his
surroundings so well that he desired to establish himself there. K. Bartsch, Piere Vidal's Lieder,
Berlin, 1857, n. 41. Ern. Monaci, Testi antichi provenzali, Rome, 1889, col. 67. One should read this
piece to have an idea of the fervor with which this poet shared the hopes of Italy and desired its
independence. This political note is found again in a tenzon of Manfred II. Lancia, addressed to
Pierre Vidal. (V. Monaci, loc. cit., col. 68.)—Gaucelme Faidit was also at this court as well as
Raimbaud of Vacqueyras (1180-1207).—Folquet de Romans passed nearly all his life in Italy.
Bernard of Ventadour (1145-1195), Peirol of Auvergne (1180-1220), and many others abode there a
longer or shorter time. Very soon the Italians began to sing in Provençal, among others this Manfred
Lancia, and Albert Marquis of Malaspina (1162-1210), Pietro della Caravana, who in 1196 stirred up
the Lombard towns against Henry VI., Pietro della Mula, who about 1200 was at the court of
Cortemiglia. Fragments from these poets may be found in Monaci, op. cit., col. 69 ff.
23. Soc., 3; 2 Cel., 1, 1.
24. Cum esset gloriosus animo et nollet aliquem se præcellere, Giord. 20.
25. 1 Cel., 17; 3 Soc., 3; Bon., 7. Cf. A. SS., p. 562.
26. 1 Cel., 2; Bon., 6; Vit. sec. apud, A. SS., p. 560.
27. 3 Soc., 9.
28. In 1174 Assisi was taken by the chancellor of the empire, Christian, Archbishop of Mayence. A.
Cristofani, i., p. 69.
29. All these events are related in the Gesta Innocentii III. ab auctore coætaneo, edited by Baluze:
Migne, Inn. op., vol. i., col. xxiv. See especially the letter of Innocent, Rectoribus Tusciæ: Mirari
cogimur, of April 16, 1198. Migne, vol. i., col. 75-77. Potthast, No. 82.
30. See Luigi Bonazzi, Storia di Perugia, 2 vols., 8vo. Perugia, 1875-1879 vol. i., cap. v., pp. 257-
322.
31. 3 Soc., 4; 2 Cel., 1, 1. Cristofani, op. cit., i., p. 88 ff.; Bonazzi, op. cit., p. 257.
32. 3 Soc., 4.
33. 3 Soc., 4; 2 Cel., 1, 1.
34. See this arbitration in Cristofani, op. cit., p. 93
35. Cristofani, loc. cit., p. 70.

CHAPTER II
STAGES OF CONVERSION

Spring 1204—Spring 1206

On his return to Assisi Francis at once resumed his former mode of life;
perhaps he even tried in some degree to make up for lost time. Fêtes,
games, festivals, and dissipations began again. He did his part in them so
well that he soon fell gravely ill.1 For long weeks he looked death so closely
in the face that the physical crisis brought about a moral one. Thomas of
Celano has preserved for us an incident of Francis's convalescence. He was
regaining strength little by little and had begun to go about the house, when
one day he felt a desire to walk abroad, to contemplate nature quietly, and
so take hold again of life. Leaning on a stick he bent his steps toward the
city gate.
The nearest one, called Porta Nuova, is the very one which opens upon
the finest scenery. Immediately on passing through it one finds one's self in
the open country; a fold of the hill hides the city, and cuts off every sound
that might come from it. Before you lies the winding road to Foligno; at the
left the imposing mass of Mount Subasio; at the right the Umbrian plain
with its farms, its villages, its cloud-like hills, on whose slopes pines,
cedars, oaks, the vine, and the olive-tree shed abroad an incomparable
brightness and animation. The whole country sparkles with beauty, a beauty
harmonious and thoroughly human, that is, made to the measure of man.
Francis had hoped by this sight to recover the delicious sensations of his
youth. With the sharpened sensibility of the convalescent he breathed in the
odors of the spring-time, but spring-time did not come, as he had expected,
to his heart. This smiling nature had for him only a message of sadness. He
had believed that the breezes of this beloved country-side would carry away
the last shudders of the fever, and instead he felt in his heart a
discouragement a thousand-fold more painful than any physical ill. The

miserable emptiness of his life suddenly appeared before him; he was
terrified at his solitude, the solitude of a great soul in which there is no altar.
Memories of the past assailed him with intolerable bitterness; he was
seized with a disgust of himself, his former ambitions seemed to him
ridiculous or despicable. He went home overwhelmed with the weight of a
new suffering.
In such hours of moral anguish man seeks a refuge either in love or in
faith. Unhappily the family and friends of Francis were incapable of
understanding him. As to religion, it was for him, as for the greater number
of his contemporaries, that crass fetichism with Christian terminology
which is far from having entirely disappeared. With certain men, in fact,
piety consists in making one's self right with a king more powerful than any
other, but also more severe and capricious, who is called God. One proves
one's loyalty to him as to other sovereigns, by putting his image more or
less everywhere, and punctually paying the imposts levied by his ministers.
If you are stingy, if you cheat, you run the risk of being severely chastised,
but there are courtiers around the king who willingly render services. For a
reasonable recompense they will seize a favorable moment to adroitly make
away with the sentence of your condemnation or to slip before the prince a
form of plenary absolution which in a moment of good humor he will sign
without looking at it.2
Such was the religious basis upon which Francis had lived up to this
time. He did not so much as dream of seeking the spiritual balm which he
needed for the healing of his wounds. By a holy violence he was to arrive at
last at a pure and virile faith; but the road to this point is long, and sown
thick with obstacles, and at the moment at which we have arrived he had
not yet entered upon it, he did not even suspect its existence; all he knew
was that pleasure leads to nothingness, to satiety and self-contempt.
He knew this, and yet he was about to throw himself once more into a
life of pleasure. The body is so weak, so prone to return to the old paths,
that it seeks them of itself, the moment an energetic will does not stop it.
Though no longer under any illusion with respect to it, Francis returned to
his former life. Was he trying to divert his mind, to forget that day of bitter
thought? We might suppose so, seeing the ardor with which he threw
himself into his new projects.3

An opportunity offered itself for him to realize his dreams of glory. A
knight of Assisi, perhaps one of those who had been in captivity with him at
Perugia, was preparing to go to Apulia under orders from Count Gentile.4
The latter was to join Gaultier de Brienne, who was in the south of Italy
fighting on the side of Innocent III. Gaultier's renown was immense all
through the Peninsula; he was held to be one of the most gallant knights of
the time. Francis's heart bounded with joy; it seemed to him that at the side
of such a hero he should soon cover himself with glory. His departure was
decided upon, and he gave himself up, without reserve, to his joy.
He made his preparations with ostentatious prodigality. His equipment, of
a princely luxury, soon became the universal subject of conversation. It was
all the more talked about because the chief of the expedition, ruined perhaps
by the revolution of 1202 or by the expenses of a long captivity, was
constrained to order things much more modestly.5 But with Francis
kindliness was much stronger than love of display. He gave his sumptuous
clothing to a poor knight. The biographies do not say whether or not it was
to the very one whom he was to accompany.6 To see him running hither and
thither in all the bustle of preparation one would have thought him the son
of a great lord. His companions were doubtless not slow to feel chafed by
his ways and to promise themselves to make him cruelly expiate them. As
for him, he perceived nothing of the jealousies which he was exciting, and
night and day he thought only of his future glory. In his dreams he seemed
to see his parents' house completely transformed. Instead of bales of cloth
he saw there only gleaming bucklers hanging on the walls, and arms of all
kinds as in a seignorial castle. He saw himself there, beside a noble and
beautiful bride, and he never suspected that in this vision there was any
presage of the future which was reserved for him. Never had any one seen
him so communicative, so radiant; and when he was asked for the
hundredth time whence came all this joy, he would reply with surprising
assurance: "I know that I shall become a great prince."7
The day of departure arrived at last. Francis on horseback, the little
buckler of a page on his arm, bade adieu to his natal city with joy, and with
the little troop took the road to Spoleto which winds around the base of
Mount Subasio.
What happened next? The documents do not say. They confine
themselves to reporting that that very evening Francis had a vision which

decided him to return to Assisi.8 Perhaps it would not be far from the truth
to conjecture that once fairly on the way the young nobles took their
revenge on the son of Bernardone for his airs as of a future prince. At
twenty years one hardly pardons things like these. If, as we are often
assured, there is a pleasure unsuspected by the profane in getting even with
a stranger, it must be an almost divine delight to get even with a young
coxcomb upon whom one has to exercise so righteous a vengeance.
Arriving at Spoleto, Francis took to his bed. A fever was consuming him;
in a few hours he had seen all his dreams crumble away. The very next day
he took the road back to Assisi.9
So unexpected a return made a great stir in the little city, and was a cruel
blow to his parents. As for him, he doubled his charities to the poor, and
sought to keep aloof from society, but his old companions came flocking
about him from all quarters, hoping to find in him once more the tireless
purveyor of their idle wants. He let them have their way.
Nevertheless a great change had taken place in him. Neither pleasures
nor work could long hold him; he spent a portion of his days in long
country rambles, often accompanied by a friend most different from those
whom until now we have seen about him. The name of this friend is not
known, but from certain indications one is inclined to believe that he was
Bombarone da Beviglia, the future Brother Elias.10
Francis now went back to his reflections at the time of his recovery, but
with less of bitterness. His own heart and his friend agreed in saying to him
that it is possible no longer to trust either in pleasure or in glory and yet to
find worthy causes to which to consecrate one's life. It is at this moment
that religious thought seems to have awaked in him. From the moment that
he saw this new way of life his desire to run in it had all the fiery
impetuosity which he put into all his actions. He was continually calling
upon his friend and leading him apart into the most sequestered paths.
But intense conflicts are indescribable. We struggle, we suffer alone. It is
the nocturnal wrestling of Bethel, mysterious and solitary. The soul of
Francis was great enough to endure this tragic duel. His friend had
marvellously understood his part in this contest. He gave a few rare
counsels, but much of the time he contented himself with manifesting his

solicitude by following Francis everywhere and never asking to know more
than he could tell him.
Often Francis directed his steps to a grotto in the country near Assisi,
which he entered alone. This rocky cave concealed in the midst of the olive
trees became for faithful Franciscans that which Gethsemane is for
Christians. Here Francis relieved his overcharged heart by heavy groans.
Sometimes, seized with a real horror for the disorders of his youth, he
would implore mercy, but the greater part of the time his face was turned
toward the future; feverishly he sought for that higher truth to which he
longed to dedicate himself, that pearl of great price of which the gospel
speaks: "Whosoever seeks, finds; he who asks, receives; and to him who
knocks, it shall be opened."
When he came out after long hours of seclusion the pallor of his
countenance, the painful tension of his features told plainly enough of the
intensity of his asking and the violence of his knocks.11
The inward man, to borrow the language of the mystics, was not yet
formed in him, but it needed only the occasion to bring about the final break
with the past. The occasion soon presented itself.
His friends were making continual efforts to induce him to take up his
old habits again. One day he invited them all to a sumptuous banquet. They
thought they had conquered, and as in old times they proclaimed him king
of the revels. The feast was prolonged far into the night, and at its close the
guests rushed out into the streets, which they filled with song and uproar.
Suddenly they perceived that Francis was no longer with them. After long
searching they at last discovered him far behind them, still holding in his
hand his sceptre of king of misrule, but plunged in so profound a revery that
he seemed to be riveted to the ground and unconscious of all that was going
on.
"What is the matter with you?" they cried, bustling about him as if to
awaken him.
"Don't you see that he is thinking of taking a wife?" said one.
"Yes," answered Francis, arousing himself and looking at them with a
smile which they did not recognize. "I am thinking of taking a wife more
beautiful, more rich, more pure than you could ever imagine."12

This reply marks a decisive stage in his inner life. By it he cut the last
links which bound him to trivial pleasures. It remains for us to see through
what struggles he was to give himself to God, after having torn himself free
from the world. His friends probably understood nothing of all that had
taken place, but he had become aware of the abyss that was opening
between them and him. They soon accepted the situation.
As for himself, no longer having any reason for caution, he gave himself
up more than ever to his passion for solitude. If he often wept over his past
dissipations and wondered how he could have lived so long without tasting
the bitterness of the dregs of the enchanted cup, he never allowed himself to
be overwhelmed with vain regrets.
The poor had remained faithful to him. They gave him an admiration of
which he knew himself to be unworthy, yet which had for him an infinite
sweetness. The future grew bright to him in the light of their gratitude, of
the timid, trembling affection which they dared not utter but which his heart
revealed to him; this worship which he does not deserve to-day he will
deserve to-morrow, at least he promises himself to do all he can to deserve
it.
To understand these feelings one must understand the condition of the
poor of a place like Assisi. In an agricultural country poverty does not, as
elsewhere, almost inevitably involve moral destitution, that degeneration of
the entire human being which renders charity so difficult. Most of the poor
persons whom Francis knew were in straits because of war, of bad harvests,
or of illness. In such cases material succor is but a small part. Sympathy is
the thing needed above all. Francis had treasures of it to lavish upon them.
He was well requited. All sorrows are sisters; a secret intelligence
establishes itself between troubled hearts, however diverse their griefs. The
poor people felt that their friend also suffered; they did not precisely know
with what, but they forgot their own sorrows in pitying their benefactor.
Suffering is the true cement of love. For men to love each other truly, they
must have shed tears together.
As yet no influence strictly ecclesiastic had been felt by Francis.
Doubtless there was in his heart that leaven of Christian faith which enters
one's being without his being aware; but the interior transformation which
was going on in him was as yet the fruit of his own intuition. This period

was drawing to a close. His thought was soon to find expression, and by
that very act to receive the stamp of external circumstances. Christian
instruction will give a precise form to ideas of which as yet he has but
vague glimpses, but he will find in this form a frame in which his thought
will perhaps lose something of its originality and vigor; the new wine will
be put into old wine-skins.
By degrees he was becoming calm, was finding in the contemplation of
nature joys which up to this time he had sipped but hastily, almost
unconsciously, and of which he was now learning to relish the flavor. He
drew from them not simply soothing; in his heart he felt new compassions
springing into life, and with these the desire to act, to give himself, to cry
aloud to these cities perched upon the hill-tops, threatening as warriors who
eye one another before the fray, that they should be reconciled and love one
another.
Certainly, at this time Francis had no glimpse of what he was some time
to become; but these hours are perhaps the most important in the evolution
of his thought; it is to them that his life owes that air of liberty, that perfume
of the fields which make it as different from the piety of the sacristy as from
that of the drawing-room.
About this time he made a pilgrimage to Rome, whether to ask counsel of
his friends, whether as a penance imposed by his confessor, or from a mere
impulse, no one knows. Perhaps he thought that in a visit to the Holy
Apostles, as people said then, he should find the answers to all the questions
which he was asking himself.
At any rate he went. It is hardly probable that he received from the visit
any religious influence, for his biographers relate the pained surprise which
he experienced when he saw in Saint Peter's how meagre were the offerings
of pilgrims. He wanted to give everything to the prince of the apostles, and
emptying his purse he threw its entire contents upon the tomb.
This journey was marked by a more important incident. Many a time
when succoring the poor he had asked himself if he himself was able to
endure poverty; no one knows the weight of a burden until he has carried it,
at least for a moment, upon his own shoulders. He desired to know what it
is like to have nothing, and to depend for bread upon the charity or the
caprice of the passer by.13

There were swarms of beggars crowding the Piazza before the great
basilica. He borrowed the rags of one of them, lending him his garment in
exchange, and a whole day he stood there, fasting, with outstretched hand.
The act was a great victory, the triumph of compassion over natural pride.
Returning to Assisi, he doubled his kindnesses to those of whom he had
truly the right to call himself the brother. With such sentiments he could not
long escape the influence of the Church.
On all the roadsides in the environs of the city there were then, as now,
numerous chapels. Very often he must have heard mass in these rustic
sanctuaries, alone with the celebrant. Recognizing the tendency of simple
natures to bring home to themselves everything that they hear, it is easy to
understand his emotion and agitation when the priest, turning toward him,
would read the gospel for the day. The Christian ideal was revealed to him,
bringing an answer to his secret anxieties. And when, a few moments later,
he would plunge into the forest, all his thoughts would be with the poor
carpenter of Nazareth, who placed himself in his path, saying to him, even
to him, "Follow thou me."
Nearly two years had passed since the day when he felt the first shock; a
life of renunciation appeared to him as the goal of his efforts, but he felt that
his spiritual novitiate was not yet ended. He suddenly experienced a bitter
assurance of the fact.
He was riding on horseback one day, his mind more than ever possessed
with the desire to lead a life of absolute devotion, when at a turn of the road
he found himself face to face with a leper. The frightful malady had always
inspired in him an invincible repulsion. He could not control a movement of
horror, and by instinct he turned his horse in another direction.
If the shock had been severe, the defeat was complete. He reproached
himself bitterly. To cherish such fine projects and show himself so
cowardly! Was the knight of Christ then going to give up his arms? He
retraced his steps and springing from his horse he gave to the astounded
sufferer all the money that he had; then kissed his hand as he would have
done to a priest.14 This new victory, as he himself saw, marked an era in his
spiritual life.15
It is far indeed from hatred of evil to love of good. Those are more
numerous than we think who, after severe experience, have renounced what

the ancient liturgies call the world, with its pomps and lusts; but the greater
number of them have not at the bottom of their hearts the smallest grain of
pure love. In vulgar souls disillusion leaves only a frightful egoism.
This victory of Francis had been so sudden that he desired to complete it;
a few days later he went to the lazaretto.16 One can imagine the stupefaction
of these wretches at the entrance of the brilliant cavalier. If in our days a
visit to the sick in our hospitals is a real event awaited with feverish
impatience, what must not have been the appearance of Francis among
these poor recluses? One must have seen sufferers thus abandoned, to
understand what joy may be given by an affectionate word, sometimes even
a simple glance.
Moved and transported, Francis felt his whole being vibrate with
unfamiliar sensations. For the first time he heard the unspeakable accents of
a gratitude which cannot find words burning enough to express itself, which
admires and adores the benefactor almost like an angel from heaven.

FOOTNOTES
1. 1 Cel., 3; cf. Bon., 8, and A. SS., p. 563c.
2. It is enough to have lived in the country of Naples to know that there is nothing exaggerated in this
picture. I am much surprised that intelligent and good men fancy that to change the religious formula
of these people would suffice to transform them. What a mistake! To-day, as in the time of Jesus, the
important matter is not to adore on Mount Moriah or Mount Zion, but to adore in spirit and in truth.
3. 1 Cel., 3 and 4.
4. 3 Soc., 5. In the existing state of the documents it is impossible to know whom this name
designates, for at that time it was borne by a number of counts who are only to be distinguished by
the names of their castles. The three following are possible: 1. Gentile comes de Campilio, who in
1215 paid homage for his property to the commune of Orvieto: Le antiche cronache di Orvieto, Arch.
stor. ital., 5th series., 1889, iii., p. 47. 2. Gentilis comes filius Alberici, who with others had made
donation of a monastery to the Bishop of Foligno: Confirmatory Bull In eminenti of April 10, 1210:
Ughelli, Italia Sacra, 1, p. 697; Potthast, 3974. 3. Gentilis comes Manupelli; whom we find in July,
1200, assuring to Palermo the victory over the troops sent by Innocent III. against Marckwald;
Huillard-Bréholles, Hist. dipl., i. p., 46 ff. Cf. Potthast, 1126. Gesta Innocenti, Migne, vol. i., xxxii,
ff. Cf. Huillard-Bréholles, loc. cit., pages 60, 84, 89, 101. It is wrong to consider that Gentile could
here be a mere adjective; the 3 Soc. say Gentile nomine.
5. 1 Cel., 4; 3 Soc., 5.
6. 3 Soc., 6; 2 Cel., 1, 2; Bon., 8.
7. 1 Cel., 5; 3 Soc., 5; 2 Cel., 1, 2; Bon., 9.
8. 3 Soc., 6; Bon., 9; 2 Cel., 1, 2.

9. 3 Soc., 6; 2 Cel., 1, 2.
10. These days are recalled by Celano with a very particular precision. It is very improbable that
Francis, usually so reserved as to his personal experience, should have told him about them (2 Cel., 3,
68 and 42, cf. Bon., 144). On the other hand, nothing forbids his having been informed on this matter
by Brother Elias. (I strongly suspect the legend which tells of an old man appearing on the day
Francis was born and begging permission to take the child in his arms, saying, "To-day, two infants
were born—this one, who will be among the best of men, and another, who will be among the
worst"—of having been invented by the zelanti against Brother Elias. It is evident that such a story is
aimed at some one. Whom, if not him who was afterward to appear as the Anti-Francis?) We have
sufficient details about the eleven first disciples to know that none of them is here in question. There
is nothing surprising in the fact that Elias does not appear in the earliest years of the Order (1209-
1212), because after having practised at Assisi his double calling of schoolmaster and carriage-
trimmer (suebat cultras et docebat puerulos psalterium legere, Salimbene, p. 402) he was scriptor at
Bologna (Eccl., 13). And from the psychological point of view this hypothesis would admirably
explain the ascendency which Elias was destined always to exercise over his master. Still it remains
difficult to understand why Celano did not name Elias here, but the passage, 1 Cel., 6, differs in the
different manuscripts (cf. A. SS. and Amoni's edition, p. 14) and may have been retouched after the
latter's fall.
Beviglia is a simple farm three-quarters of an hour northwest of Assisi, almost half way to
Petrignano. Half an hour from Assisi in the direction of Beviglia is a grotto, which may very well be
that of which we are about to speak.
11. 1 Cel., 6; 2 Cel., 1, 5; 3 Soc., 8, 12; Bon., 10, 11, 12.
12. 3 Soc., 7; 1 Cel., 7; 2 Cel., 1, 3; 3 Soc., 13.
13. 3 Soc., 8-10; Bon., 13, 14; 2 Cel., 1, 4.
14. To this day in the centre and south of Italy they kiss the hand of priests and monks.
15. See the Will. Cf. 3 Soc., 11; 1 Cel., 17; Bon., 11; A. SS., p. 566.
16. 3 Soc., 11; Bon., 13.

CHAPTER III
THE CHURCH ABOUT 1209

St. Francis was inspired as much as any man may be, but it would be a
palpable error to study him apart from his age and from the conditions in
which he lived.
We know that he desired and believed his life to be an imitation of Jesus,
but what we know about the Christ is in fact so little, that St. Francis's life
loses none of its strangeness for that. His conviction that he was but an
imitator preserved him from all temptation to pride, and enabled him to
proclaim his views with incomparable vigor, without seeming in the least to
be preaching himself.
We must therefore neither isolate him from external influences nor show
him too dependent on them. During the period of his life at which we are
now arrived, 1205-1206, the religious situation of Italy must more than at
any other time have influenced his thought and urged him into the path
which he finally entered.
The morals of the clergy were as corrupt as ever, rendering any serious
reform impossible. If some among the heresies of the time were pure and
without reproach, many were trivial and impure. Here and there a few
voices were raised in protest, but the prophesyings of Gioacchino di Fiore
had no more power than those of St. Hildegarde to put a stop to wickedness.
Luke Wadding, the pious Franciscan annalist, begins his chronicle with this
appalling picture. The advance in historic research permits us to retouch it
somewhat more in detail, but the conclusion remains the same; without
Francis of Assisi the Church would perhaps have foundered and the Cathari
would have won the day. The little poor man, driven away, cast out of doors
by the creatures of Innocent III., saved Christianity.
We cannot here make a thorough study of the state of the Church at the
beginning of the thirteenth century; it will suffice to trace some of its most
prominent features.

The first glance at the secular clergy brings out into startling prominence
the ravages of simony; the traffic in ecclesiastical places was carried on
with boundless audacity; benefices were put up to the highest bidder, and
Innocent III. admitted that fire and sword alone could heal this plague.1
Prelates who declined to be bought by propinæ, fees, were held up as
astounding exceptions!2
"They are stones for understanding," it was said of the officers of the
Roman curia, "wood for justice, fire for wrath, iron for forgiveness;
deceitful as foxes, proud as bulls, greedy and insatiate as the minotaur."3
The praises showered upon Pope Eugenius III. for rebuffing a priest who, at
the beginning of a lawsuit, offered him a golden mark, speak only too
plainly as to the morals of Rome in this respect.4
The bishops, on their part, found a thousand methods, often most out of
keeping with their calling, for extorting money from the simple priests.5
Violent, quarrelsome, contentious, they were held up to ridicule in popular
ballads from one end of Europe to the other.6 As to the priests, they bent all
their powers to accumulate benefices, and secure inheritances from the
dying, stooping to the most despicable measures for providing for their
bastards.7
The monastic orders were hardly more reputable. A great number of these
had sprung up in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; their reputation for
sanctity soon stimulated the liberality of the faithful, and thus fatally
brought about their own decadence. Few communities had shown the
discretion of the first monks of the Order of Grammont in the diocese of
Limoges. When Stephen de Muret, its founder, began to manifest his
sanctity by giving sight to a blind man, his disciples took alarm at the
thought of the wealth and notoriety which was likely to come to them from
this cause. Pierre of Limoges, who had succeeded Stephen as prior, went at
once to his tomb, praying:
"O servant of God, thou hast shown us the way of poverty,
and behold, thou wouldst make us leave the strait and difficult
path of salvation, and wouldst set us in the broad road of eternal
death. Thou hast preached to us (the virtues of) solitude, and
thou art about to change this place into a fair and a market-
place. We know well that thou art a saint! Thou hast no need to

prove it to us by performing miracles which will destroy our
humility. Be not so zealous for thy reputation as to augment it to
the injury of our salvation. This is what we ask of thee,
expecting it of thy love. If not, we declare unto thee by the
obedience which we once owed to thee, we will unearth thy
bones and throw them into the river."
Stephen obeyed up to the time of his canonization (1189), but from that
time forward ambition, avarice, and luxury made such inroads upon the
solitude of Grammont that its monks became the byword and scoff of the
Christian world.8
Pierre of Limoges was not entirely without reason in fearing that his
monastery would be transformed into a fair-ground; members of the
chapters of most of the cathedrals kept wine-shops literally under their
shadows, and certain monasteries did not hesitate to attract custom by
jugglers of all kinds and even by courtesans.9
To form an idea of the degradation of the greater number of the monks it
is not enough to read the oratorical and often exaggerated reproofs of
preachers obliged to strike hard in order to produce an effect. We must run
through the collection of bulls, where appeals to the court of Rome against
assassinations, violations, incests, adulteries, recur on almost every page. It
is easy to see that even an Innocent III. might feel himself helpless and
tempted to yield to discouragement, in the face of so many ills.10
The best spirits were turning toward the Orient, asking themselves if
perchance the Greek Church might not suddenly come forward to purify all
these abuses, and receive for herself the inheritance of her sister.11
The clergy, though no longer respected, still overawed the people through
their superstitious terror of their power. Here and there might have been
perceived many a forewarning of direful revolts; the roads to Rome were
crowded with monks hastening to claim the protection of the Holy See
against the people among whom they lived. The Pope would promptly
declare an interdict, but it was not to be expected that such a resource would
avail forever.12
To maintain the privileges of the Church the papacy was often obliged to
spread the mantle of its protection over those who deserved it least. Its

clients were not always as interesting as the unfortunate Ingelburge. It
would be easier to give unreserved admiration to the conduct of Innocent
III. if in this matter one could feel certain that his only interest was to
maintain the cause of a poor abandoned woman. But it is only too evident
that he desired above all to keep up the ecclesiastical immunities. This is
very evident in his intervention in favor of Waldemar, Bishop of Schleswig.
Yet we must not assume that all was corrupt in the bosom of the Church;
then, as always, the evil made more noise than the good, and the voices of
those who desired a reformation aroused only passing interest.
Among the populace there was superstition unimaginable; the pulpit,
which ought to have shed abroad some little light, was as yet open only to
the bishops, and the few pastors who did not neglect their duty in this
regard accomplished very little, being too much absorbed in other duties. It
was the birth of the mendicant orders which obliged the entire body of
secular clergy to take up the practice of preaching.
Public worship, reduced to liturgical ceremonies, no longer preserved
anything which appealed to the intelligence; it was more and more
becoming a sort of self-acting magic formula. Once upon this road, the
absurd was not far distant. Those who deemed themselves pious told of
miracles performed by relics with no need of aid from the moral act of faith.
In one case a parrot, being carried away by a kite, uttered the invocation
dear to his mistress, "Sancte Thoma adjuva me," and was miraculously
rescued. In another, a merchant of Groningen, having purloined an arm of
St. John the Baptist, grew rich as if by enchantment so long as he kept it
concealed in his house, but was reduced to beggary so soon as, his secret
being discovered, the relic was taken away from him and placed in a
church.13
These stories, we must observe, do not come from ignorant enthusiasts,
hidden away in obscure country places; they are given us by one of the
most learned monks of his time, who relates them to a novice by way of
forming his mind!
Relics, then, were held to be neither more nor less than talismans. Not
alone did they perform miracles upon those who were in no special state of
faith or devotion, the more potent among them healed the sick in spite of

themselves. A chronicler relates that the body of Saint Martin of Tours had
in 887 been secretly transported to some remote hiding place for fear of the
Danish invasion. When the time came for bringing it home again, there
were in Touraine two impotent men who, thanks to their infirmity, gained
large sums by begging. They were thrown into great terror by the tidings
that the relics were being brought back: Saint Martin would certainly heal
them and take away their means of livelihood. Their fears were only too
well founded. They had taken to flight, but being too lame to walk fast they
had not yet crossed the frontier of Touraine when the saint arrived and
healed them!
Hundreds of similar stories might be collected, statistics might be made
up to show, at the accession of Innocent III., the greater number of
episcopal thrones occupied by unworthy bishops, the religious houses
peopled with idle and debauched monks; but would this give a truly
accurate picture of the Church at this epoch? I do not think so. In the first
place, we must reckon with the choice spirits, who were without doubt
more numerous than is generally supposed. Five righteous men would have
saved Sodom; the Almighty did not find them there, but he perhaps might
have found them had He Himself made search for them instead of trusting
to Lot. The Church of the thirteenth century had them, and it was for their
sakes that the whirlwind of heresy did not sweep it away.
But this is not all: the Church of that time offered a noble spectacle of
moral grandeur. We must learn to lift our eyes from the wretched state of
things which has just been pointed out and fix them on the pontifical throne
and recognize the beauty of the struggle there going on: a power wholly
spiritual undertaking to command the rulers of the world, as the soul
masters the body, and triumphing in the end. It is true that both soldiers and
generals of this army were often little better than ruffians, but here again, in
order to be just, we must understand the end they aimed at.
In that iron age, when brute force was the only force, the Church,
notwithstanding its wounds, offered to the world the spectacle of peasants
and laboring men receiving the humble homage of the highest potentates of
earth, simply because, seated on the throne of Saint Peter, they represented
the moral law. This is why Alighieri and many others before and after him,
though they might heap curses on wicked ministers, yet in the depths of

their heart were never without an immense compassion and an ardent love
for the Church which they never ceased to call their mother.
Still, everybody was not like them, and the vices of the clergy explain the
innumerable heresies of that day. All of them had a certain success, from
those which were simply the outcry of an outraged conscience, like that of
the Waldenses, to the most absurd of them all, like that of Eon de l'Étoile.
Some of these movements were for great and sacred causes; but we must
not let our sympathies be so moved by the persecutions suffered by heretics
as to cloud our judgment. It would have been better had Rome triumphed
by gentleness, by education and holiness, but unhappily a soldier may not
always choose his weapons, and when life is at stake he seizes the first he
finds within his reach. The papacy has not always been reactionary and
obscurantist; when it overthrew the Cathari, for example, its victory was
that of reason and good sense.
The list of the heresies of the thirteenth century is already long, but it is
increasing every day, to the great joy of those erudite ones who are making
strenuous efforts to classify everything in that tohu-bohu of mysticism and
folly. In that day heresy was very much alive; it was consequently very
complex and its powers of transformation infinite. One may indicate its
currents, mark its direction, but to go farther is to condemn oneself to utter
confusion in this medley of impulsive, passionate, fantastic movements
which were born, shot upward, and fell to earth again, at the caprice of a
thousand incomprehensible circumstances. In certain counties of England
there are at the present day villages having as many as eight and ten places
of worship for a few hundreds of inhabitants. Many of these people change
their denomination every three or four years, returning to that they first
quitted, leaving it again only to enter it anew, and so on as long as they live.
Their leaders set the example, throwing themselves enthusiastically into
each new movement only to leave it before long. They would all alike find
it difficult to give an intelligible reason for these changes. They say that the
Spirit guides them, and it would be unfair to disbelieve them, but the
historian who should investigate conditions like these would lose his head
in the labyrinth unless he made a separate study of each of these Protean
movements. They are surely not worth the trouble.
In a somewhat similar condition was a great part of Christendom under
Innocent III.; but while the sects of which I have just spoken move in a very

narrow circle of dogmas and ideas, in the thirteenth century every sort of
excess followed in rapid succession. Without the slightest pause of
transition men passed through the most contradictory systems of belief.
Still, a few general characteristics may be observed; in the first place,
heresies are no longer metaphysical subtleties as in earlier days; Arius and
Priscillian, Nestorius and Eutychus are dead indeed. In the second place,
they no longer arise in the upper and governing class, but proceed
especially from the inferior clergy and the common people. The blows
which actually threatened the Church of the Middle Ages were struck by
obscure laboring men, by the poor and the oppressed, who in their
wretchedness and degradation felt that she had failed in her mission.
No sooner was a voice uplifted, preaching austerity and simplicity, than it
drew together not the laity only, but members of the clergy as well. Toward
the close of the twelfth century we find a certain Pons rousing all Perigord,
preaching evangelical poverty before the coming of St. Francis.14
Two great currents are apparent: on one side the Cathari, on the other,
innumerable sects revolting from the Church by very fidelity to Christianity
and the desire to return to the primitive Church.
Among the sects of the second category the close of the twelfth century
saw in Italy the rise of the Poor Men, who without doubt were a part of the
movement of Arnold of Brescia; they denied the efficacy of sacraments
administered by unworthy hands.15
A true attempt at reform was made by the Waldenses. Their history,
although better known, still remains obscure on certain sides; their name,
Poor Men of Lyons, recalls the former movement, with which they were in
close agreement, as also with the Humiliants. All these names involuntarily
suggest that by which St. Francis afterward called his Order. The analogy
between the inspiration of Peter Waldo and that of St. Francis was so close
that one might be tempted to believe the latter a sort of imitation of the
former. It would be a mistake: the same causes produced in all quarters the
same effects; ideas of reform, of a return to gospel poverty, were in the air,
and this helps us to understand how it was that before many years the
Franciscan preaching reverberated through the entire world. If at the outset
the careers of these two men were alike, their later lives were very different.
Waldo, driven into heresy almost in spite of himself, was obliged to accept

the consequences of the premises which he himself had laid down;16 while
Francis, remaining the obedient son of the Church, bent all his efforts to
develop the inner life in himself and his disciples. It is indeed most likely
that through his father Francis had become acquainted with the movement
of the Poor Men of Lyons. Hence his oft-repeated counsels to his friars of
the duty of submission to the clergy. When he went to seek the approbation
of Innocent III., it is evident that the prelates with whom he had relations
warned him, by the very example of Waldo, of the dangers inherent in his
own movement.17
The latter had gone to Rome in 1179, accompanied by a few followers, to
ask at the same time the approbation of their translation of the Scriptures
into the vulgar tongue and the permission to preach. They were granted
both requests on condition of gaining for their preaching the authorization
of their local clergy. Walter Map ( 1210), who was charged with their
examination, was constrained, while ridiculing their simplicity, to admire
their poverty and zeal for the apostolic life.18 Two or three years later they
met a very different reception at Rome, and in 1184 they were
anathematized by the Council of Verona. From that day nothing could stop
them, even to the forming of a new Church. They multiplied with a rapidity
hardly exceeded afterward by the Franciscans. By the end of the twelfth
century we find them spread abroad from Hungary to Spain; the first
attempts to hunt them down were made in the latter country. Other countries
were at first satisfied with treating them as excommunicated persons.
Obliged to hide themselves, reduced to the impossibility of holding their
chapters, which ought to have come together once or twice a year, and
which, had they done so, might have maintained among them a certain
unity of doctrine, the Waldenses rapidly underwent a change according to
their environment; some obstinately insisting upon calling themselves good
Catholics, others going so far as to preach the overthrow of the hierarchy
and the uselessness of sacraments.19 Hence that multiplicity of differing and
even hostile branches which seemed to develop almost hourly.
A common persecution brought them nearer to the Cathari and favored
the fusion of their ideas. Their activity was inconceivable. Under pretext of
pilgrimages to Rome they were always on the road, simple and insinuating.
The methods of travel of that day were peculiarly favorable to the diffusion
of ideas. While retailing news to those whose hospitality they received, they

would speak of the unhappy state of the Church and the reforms that were
needed. Such conversations were a means of apostleship much more
efficacious than those of the present day, the book and the newspaper; there
is nothing like the viva vox20 for spreading thought.
Many vile stories have been told of the Waldenses; calumny is far too
facile a weapon not to tempt an adversary at bay. Thus they have been
charged with the same indecent promiscuities of which the early Christians
were accused. In reality their true strength was in their virtues, which
strongly contrasted with the vices of the clergy.
The most powerful and determined enemies of the Church were the
Cathari. Sincere, audacious, often learned and keen in argument, having
among them some choice spirits and men of great intellectual powers, they
were pre-eminently the heretics of the thirteenth century. Their revolt did
not bear upon points of detail and questions of discipline, like that of the
early Waldenses; it had a definite doctrinal basis, taking issue with the
whole body of Catholic dogma. But, although this heresy flourished in Italy
and under the very eyes of St. Francis, there is need only to indicate it
briefly. His work may have received many infiltrations from the Waldensian
movement, but Catharism was wholly foreign to it.
This is naturally explained by the fact that St. Francis never consented to
occupy himself with questions of doctrine. For him faith was not of the
intellectual but the moral domain; it is the consecration of the heart. Time
spent in dogmatizing appeared to him time lost.
An incident in the life of Brother Egidio well brings out the slight esteem
in which theology was held by the early Brothers Minor. One day, in the
presence of St. Bonaventura, he cried, perhaps not without a touch of irony,
"Alas! what shall we ignorant and simple ones do to merit the favor of
God?" "My brother," replied the famous divine, "you know very well that it
suffices to love the Lord." "Are you very sure of that?" replied Egidio; "do
you believe that a simple woman might please Him as well as a master in
theology?" Upon the affirmative response of his interlocutor, he ran out into
the street and calling to a beggar woman with all his might, "Poor old
creature," he exclaimed, "rejoice, for if you love God, you may have a
higher place in the kingdom of heaven than Brother Bonaventura!"21

The Cathari, then, had no direct influence upon St. Francis,22 but nothing
could better prove the disturbance of thought at this epoch than that
resurrection of Manicheism. To what a depth of lassitude and folly must
religious Italy have fallen for this mixture of Buddhism, Mazdeism, and
gnosticism to have taken such hold upon it! The Catharist doctrine rested
upon the antagonism of two principles, one bad, the other good. The first
had created matter; the second, the soul, which, for generation after
generation passes from one body to another until it achieves salvation.
Matter is the cause and the seat of evil; all contact with it constitutes a
blemish,23 consequently the Cathari renounced marriage and property and
advocated suicide. All this was mixed up with most complicated
cosmogonical myths.
Their adherents were divided into two classes—the pure or perfect, and
the believers, who were proselytes in the second degree, and whose
obligations were very simple. The adepts, properly so called, were initiated
by the ceremony of the consolamentum or imposition of hands, which
induced the descent upon them of the Consoling Spirit. Among them were
enthusiasts who after this ceremony placed themselves in endura—that is to
say, they starved themselves to death in order not to descend from this state
of grace.
In Languedoc, where this sect went by the name of Albigenses, they had
an organization which embraced all Central Europe, and everywhere
supported flourishing schools attended by the children of the nobles. In
Italy they were hardly less powerful; Concorrezo, near Monza in Lombardy,
and Bagnolo, gave their names to two congregations slightly different from
those in Languedoc.24
But it was especially from Milan25 that they spread abroad over all the
Peninsula, making proselytes even in the most remote districts of Calabria.
The state of anarchy prevailing in the country was very favorable to them.
The papacy was too much occupied in baffling the spasmodic efforts of the
Hohenstaufen, to put the necessary perseverance and system into its
struggles against heresy. Thus the new ideas were preached under the very
shadow of the Lateran; in 1209, Otho IV., coming to Rome to be crowned,
found there a school in which Manicheism was publicly taught.26

With all his energy Innocent III. had not been able to check this evil in
the States of the Church. The case of Viterbo tells much of the difficulty of
repressing it; in March, 1199, the pope wrote to the clergy and people of
this town to recall to their minds, and at the same time to increase, the
penalties pronounced against heresy. For all that, the Patarini had the
majority in 1205, and succeeded in naming one of themselves consul.27
The wrath of the pontiff at this event was unbounded; he fulminated a
bull menacing the city with fire and sword, and commanding the
neighboring towns to throw themselves upon her if within a fortnight she
had not given satisfaction.28 It was all in vain: the Patarini were dealt with
only as a matter of form; it needed the presence of the pope himself to
assure the execution of his orders and obtain the demolition of the houses of
the heretics and their abettors (autumn of 1207).29
But stifled at one point the revolt burst out at a hundred others; at this
moment it was triumphant on all sides; at Ferrara, Verona, Rimini, Florence,
Prato, Faenza, Treviso, Piacenza. The clergy were expelled from this last
town, which remained more than three years without a priest.30
Viterbo is twenty leagues from Assisi, Orvieto only ten, and disturbances
in this town were equally grave. A noble Roman, Pietro Parentio, the deputy
of the Holy See in this place, endeavored to exterminate the Patarini. He
was assassinated.31
But Francis needed not to go even so far as Orvieto to become acquainted
with heretics. In Assisi the same things were going on as in the neighboring
cities. In 1203 this town had elected for podestà a heretic named Giraldo di
Gilberto, and in spite of warnings from Rome had persisted in keeping him
at the head of affairs until the expiration of his term of office (1204).
Innocent III., who had not yet been obliged to use vigor with Viterbo,
resorted to persuasion and despatched to Umbria the Cardinal Leo di Santa
Croce, who will appear more than once in this history.32 The successor of
Giraldo and fifty of the principal citizens made the amende honorable and
swore fidelity to the Church.
It is easy to perceive in what a state of ferment Italy was during these
early years of the thirteenth century. The moral discredit of the clergy must
have been deep indeed for souls to have turned toward Manicheism with
such ardor.

Italy may well be grateful to St. Francis; it was as much infected with
Catharism as Languedoc, and it was he who wrought its purification. He did
not pause to demonstrate by syllogisms or theological theses the vanity of
the Catharist doctrines; but soaring as on wings to the religious life, he
suddenly made a new ideal to shine out before the eyes of his
contemporaries, an ideal before which all these fantastic sects vanished as
birds of the night take flight at the first rays of the sun.
A great part of St. Francis's power came to him thus through his
systematic avoidance of polemics. The latter is always more or less a form
of spiritual pride; it only deepens the chasm which it undertakes to fill up.
Truth needs not to be proved; it is its own witness.
The only weapon which he would use against the wicked was the
holiness of a life so full of love as to enlighten and revive those about him,
and compel them to love.33 The disappearance of Catharism in Italy, without
an upheaval, and above all without the Inquisition, is thus an indirect result
of the Franciscan movement, and not the least important among them.34
At the voice of the Umbrian reformer Italy roused herself, recovered her
good sense and fine temper; she cast out those doctrines of pessimism and
death, as a robust organism casts out morbid substances.
I have already endeavored to show the strong analogy between the initial
efforts of Francis and those of the Poor Men of Lyons. His thought ripened
in an atmosphere thoroughly saturated with their ideas; unconsciously to
himself they entered into his being.
The prophecies of the Calabrian abbot exerted upon him an influence
quite as difficult to appreciate, but no less profound.
Standing on the confines of Italy and as it were at the threshold of
Greece, Gioacchino di Fiore35 was the last link in a chain of monastic
prophets, who during nearly four hundred years succeeded one another in
the monasteries and hermitages of Southern Italy. The most famous among
them had been St. Nilo, a sort of untamed John the Baptist, living in desert
places, but suddenly emerging from them when his duties of maintaining
the right called him elsewhere. We see him on one occasion appearing in
Rome itself, to announce to pope and emperor the unloosing of the divine
wrath.36

Scattered in the Alpine solitudes of Basilicata these Calabrian hermits
were continually obliged to retreat higher and higher into the mountain
fastnesses to escape the populace, who, pursued by pirates, were taking
refuge in these mountains. They thus passed their lives between heaven and
earth, with two seas for their horizon. Disquieted by fear of the corsairs, and
by the war-cries whose echoes reached even to them, they turned their
thoughts toward the future. The ages of great terror are also the ages of
great hope; it is to the captivity of Babylon that we owe, with the second
part of Isaiah, those pictures of the future which have not yet ceased to
charm the soul of man; Nero's persecutions gave us the Apocalypse of St.
John, and the paroxysms of the twelfth century the eternal Gospel.
Converted after a life of dissipation, Gioacchino di Fiore travelled
extensively in the Holy Land, Greece, and Constantinople. Returning to
Italy he began, though a layman, to preach in the outskirts of Rende and
Cosenza. Later on he joined the Cistercians of Cortale, near Catanzaro, and
there took vows. Shortly after elected abbot of the monastery in spite of
refusal and even flight, he was seized after a few years with the nostalgia of
solitude, and sought from Pope Lucius III. a discharge from his functions
(1181), that he might consecrate all his time to the works which he had in
mind. The pope granted his request, and even permitted him to go wherever
he might deem best in the interest of his work. Then began for Gioacchino a
life of wandering from convent to convent, which carried him even as far as
Lombardy, to Verona, where we find him with Pope Urban III.
When he returned to the south, a group of disciples gathered around him
to hear his explanations of the most obscure passages of the Bible. Whether
he would or no he was obliged to receive them, to talk with them, to give
them a rule, and, finally, to instal them in the very heart of the Sila, the
Black Forest of Italy,37 over against the highest peak, in gorges where the
silence is interrupted only by the murmurs of the Arvo and the Neto, which
have their source not far from there. The new Athos received the name of
Fiore (flower), transparent symbol of the hopes of its founder.38 It was there
that he put the finishing touch to writings which, after fifty years of neglect,
were to become the starting-point of all heresies, and the aliment of all
souls burdened with the salvation of Christendom. The men of the first half
of the thirteenth century, too much occupied with other things, did not

perceive that the spiritual streams at which they were drinking descended
from the snowy mountain-tops of Calabria.
It is always thus with mystical influences. There is in them something
vague, tenuous, and penetrating which escapes an exact estimation. Let two
choice souls meet, and they will find it a difficult thing to analyze and name
the impressions which each has received from the other. It is so with an
epoch; it is not always those who speak to her the oftenest and loudest
whom she best understands; nor even those at whose feet she sits, a faithful
pupil, day after day. Sometimes, while on the way to her accustomed
masters, she suddenly meets a stranger; she barely catches a few words of
what he says; she knows not whence he comes nor whither he goes; she
never sees him again, but those few words of his go on surging in the depths
of her soul, agitating and disquieting her.
Thus it was for a long while with Gioacchino di Fiore. His teachings,
scattered here and there by enthusiastic disciples, were germinating silently
in many hearts.39 Giving back hope to men, they restored to them strength
also. To think is already to act; alone under the shadow of the hoary pines
which surrounded his cell, the cenobite of Fiore was laboring for the
renovation of the Church with as much vigor as the reformers who came
after him.
He was, however, far from attaining the height of the prophets of Israel;
instead of soaring like them to the very heavens, he always remained
riveted to the text, upon which he commented in the allegorical method, and
whence by this method he brought out the most fantastic improbabilities. A
few pages of his books would wear out the most patient reader, but in these
fields, burnt over by theological arguments more drying than the winds of
the desert, fields where one at first perceives only stones and thistles, one
comes at last to the charming oasis, with repose and dreams in its shade.
The exegesis of Gioacchino di Fiore in fact led up to a sort of philosophy
of history; its grand lines were calculated to make a striking appeal to the
imagination. The life of humanity is divided into three periods: in the first,
under the reign of the Father, men lived under the rigor of the law; in the
second, reigned over by the Son, men live under the rule of grace; in the
third, the Spirit shall reign and men shall live in the plenitude of love. The
first is the period of servile obedience; the second, that of filial obedience;

the third, that of liberty. In the first, men lived in fear; in the second, they
rest in faith; in the third, they shall burn with love. The first saw the shining
of the stars; the second sees the whitening of the dawn; the third will behold
the glory of the day. The first produced nettles, the second gives roses, the
third will be the age of lilies.
If now we consider that in the thought of Gioacchino the third period, the
Age of the Spirit, was about to open, we shall understand with what
enthusiasm men hailed the words which restored joy to hearts still disturbed
with millenarian fears.
It is evident that St. Francis knew these radiant hopes. Who knows even
that it was not the Calabrian Seer who awoke his heart to its transports of
love? If this be so, Gioacchino was not merely his precursor; he was his true
spiritual father. However this may be, St. Francis found in Gioacchino's
thought many of the elements which, unconsciously to himself, were to
become the foundation of his institute.
The noble disdain which he shows for all men of learning, and which he
sought to inculcate upon his Order, was for Gioacchino one of the
characteristics of the new era. "The truth which remains hidden to the
wise," he says, "is revealed to babes; dialectics closes that which is open,
obscures that which is clear; it is the mother of useless talk, of rivalries and
blasphemy. Learning does not edify, and it may destroy, as is proved by the
scribes of the Church, swollen with pride and arrogance, who by dint of
reasoning fall into heresy."40
We have seen that the return to evangelical simplicity had become a
necessity; all the heretical sects were on this point in accord with pious
Catholics, but no one spoke in a manner so Franciscan as Gioacchino di
Fiore. Not only did he make voluntary poverty one of the characteristics of
the age of lilies, but he speaks of it in his pages with so profound, so living
an emotion, that St. Francis could do little more than repeat his words. The
ideal monk whom he describes,41 whose only property is a lyre, is a true
Franciscan before the letter, him of whom the Poverello of Assisi always
dreamed.
The feeling for nature also bursts forth in him with incomparable vigor.
One day he was preaching in a chapel which was plunged in almost total
darkness, the sky being quite overcast with clouds. Suddenly the clouds

broke away, the sun shone, the church was flooded with light. Gioacchino
paused, saluted the sun, intoned the Veni Creator, and led his congregation
out to gaze upon the landscape.
It would be by no means surprising if toward 1205 Francis should have
heard of this prophet, toward whom so many hearts were turning, this
anchorite who, gazing up into heaven, spoke with Jesus as a friend talks
with his friend, yet knew also how to come down to console men and warm
the faces of the dying at his own breast.
At the other end of Europe, in the heart of Germany, the same causes had
produced the same effects. From the excess of the people's sufferings and
the despair of religious souls was being born a movement of apocalyptic
mysticism which seemed to have secret communication with that which
was rousing the Peninsula. They had the same views of the future, the same
anxious expectation of new cataclysms, joined with a prospect of a reviving
of the Church.
"Cry with a loud voice," said her guardian angel to St. Elizabeth of
Schonau ( 1164), "cry to all nations: Woe! for the whole world has
become darkness. The Lord's vine has withered, there is no one to tend it.
The Lord has sent laborers, but they have all been found idle. The head of
the Church is ill and her members are dead.... Shepherds of my Church, you
are sleeping, but I shall awaken you! Kings of the earth, the cry of your
iniquity has risen even to me."42
"Divine justice," said St. Hildegarde ( 1178), "shall have its hour; the
last of the seven epochs symbolized by the seven days of creation has
arrived, the judgments of God are about to be accomplished; the empire and
the papacy, sunk into impiety, shall crumble away together.... But upon their
ruins shall appear a new nation of God, a nation of prophets illuminated
from on high, living in poverty and solitude. Then the divine mysteries shall
be revealed, and the saying of Joel shall be fulfilled; the Holy Spirit shall
shed abroad upon the people the dew of his prophecies, of his wisdom and
holiness; the heathen, the Jews, the worldly and the unbelieving shall be
converted together, spring-time and peace shall reign over a regenerated
world, and the angels will return with confidence to dwell among men."
These hopes were not wholly confounded. In the evening of his days the
prophet of Fiore was able, like a new Simeon, to utter his Nunc dimittis, and

for a few years Christendom could turn in amazement to Assisi as to a new
Bethlehem.

FOOTNOTES
1. Bull of June 8, 1198, Quamvis. Migne, i., col. 220; Potthast, 265.
2. For example, Pierre, Cardinal of St. Chryzogone and former Bishop of Meaux, who in a single
election refused the dazzling offer of five hundred silver marks. Alexander III., Migne's edition, epist.
395.
3. Fasciculus rerum expetend. et fugiend., t. ii., 7, pp. 254, 255 (Brown, 1690).
4. John of Salisbury, Policrat. Migne, v. 15.
5. Among their sources of revenue we find the right of collagium, by payment of which clerics
acquired the right to keep a concubine. Pierre le Chantre, Verb. abbrev., 24.
6. Vide Carmina Burana, Breslau, 8vo, 1883; Political Songs of England, published by Th. Wright,
London, 8vo, 1893; Poésies populaires latines du moyen âge, du Méril, Paris, 1847. See also
Raynouard, Lexique roman, i., 446, 451, 464, the fine poems of the troubadour Pierre Cardinal,
contemporary of St. Francis, upon the woes of the Church, and Dante, Inferno, xix. If one would gain
an idea of what the bishop of a small city in those days cost his flock, he has only to read the bull of
February 12, 1219, Justis petentium, addressed by Honorius III. to the Bishop of Terni, and including
the contract by which the inhabitants of that city settled the revenues of the episcopal see. Horoy, t.
iii., col. 114, or the Bullarium romanum, t. iii., p. 348, Turin.
7. Conosco sacerdoti che fanno gli usura per formare un patrimonio da lasciare ai loro spurii; altri
che tengono osteria coll' insegna del collare e vendono vino ... Salimbene, Cantarelli, Parma, 1882, 2
vols., 8vo, ii., p. 307.
8. Vide Brevis historia Prior. Grandimont.—Stephani Tornacensis. Epist. 115, 152, 153, 156, 162;
Honorius III., Horoy's edition, lib. i., 280, 284, 286-288; ii., 12, 130, 136, 383-387.
9. Guérard, Cartulaire de N. D. de Paris, t. i., p. cxi; t. ii., p. 406. Cf. Honorius III., Bull Inter statuta
of July 25, 1223, Horoy, t. iv., col. 401. See also canon 23 of the Council of Beziers, 1233; Guibert
de Gemblours, epist. 5 and 6 (Migne); Honorius III., lib. ix., 32, 81; ii., 193; iv., 10; iii., 253 and 258;
iv., 33, 27, 70, 144; v., 56, 291, 420, 430; vi., 214, 132, 139, 204; vii., 127; ix., 51.
10. Vide Bull Postquam vocante Domino of July 11, 1206. Potthast 2840.
11. V. Annales Stadenses [Monumenta Germaniæ historica, Scriptorum, t. 16], ad ann. 1237. Among
the comprehensive pictures of the situation of the Church in the thirteenth century, there is none more
interesting than that left us by the Cardinal Jacques de Vitry in his Historia occidentalis: Libri duo
quorum prior Orientalis, alter Occidentalis historiæ nomine inscribitur Duaci, 1597, 16mo. pp. 259-
480.
12. V. Honorius III., Horoy's edition, lib. i., ep. 109, 125, 135, 206, 273; ii., 128, 164; iv., 120, etc.
13. Dialogus miraculorum of Cesar of Heisterbach [Strange's edition, Cologne, 1851, 2 vols., 8vo], t.
ii., pp. 255 and 125. This book, with the Golden Legend of Giacomo di Varaggio, gives the best idea
of the state of religious thought in the thirteenth century.
14. Recueil des historiens de France. Bouquet, t. xii., pp. 550, 551.
15. Bonacorsi: Vitæ hæreticorum [d'Achery, Spicilegium, t. i., p. 215] Cf. Lucius III., epist. 171,
Migne.

16. Vide Bernard Gui, Practica inquisitionis, Douai edition, 4to, Paris, 1886 p. 244 ff., and especially
the Vatican MS., 2548, folio 71.
17. A chronicle of St. Francis's time makes this same comparison: Burchard, Abbot of Urspurg (
1226) [Burchardi et Cuonradi chronicon. Monum. Germ. hist. Script., t. 23], has left us an account of
the approbation of Francis by the Pope, all the more precious for being that of a contemporary. Loc.
cit., p. 376.
18. De nugis Curialium, Dist. 1, cap. 31, p. 64, Wright's edition. Cf. Chronique de Laon, Bouquet
xiii., p. 680.
19. See, for example, the letter of the Italian branch of the Poor Men of Lyons [Pauperos Lombardi]
to their brethren of Germany, there called Leonistes. In it they show the points in which they are not
in harmony with the French Waldenses. Published by Preger: Abhandlungen der K. bayer. Akademie
der Wiss. Hist. Cl., t. xiii., 1875, p. 19 ff.
20. These continual journeyings sometimes gained for them the name of Passagieni, as in the south
of France the preachers of certain sects are to-day called Courriers. The term, however, specially
designates a Judaizing sect who returned to the literal observation of the Mosaic law: Döllinger,
Beiträge, t. ii., pp. 327 and 375. They should therefore be identified with the Circonsisi of the
constitution of Frederic II. (Huillard-Bréholles, t. v., p. 280). See especially the fine monograph of M.
C. Molinier: Mémoires de l'Académie de Toulouse, 1888.
21. A. SS., Aprilis, t. iii., p. 238d.
22. I would say that between the inspiration of Francis and the Catharian doctrines there is an
irreconcilable opposition; but it would not be difficult to find acts and words of his which recall the
contempt for matter of the Cathari; for example, his way of treating his body. Some of his counsels to
the friars: Unusquisque habet in potestate sua inimicum suum videlicit corpus, per quod peccat.
Assisi MS. 338, folio 20b. Conform. 138, b. 2.—Cum majorem inimicum corpore non habeam. 2
Cel., 3, 63. These are momentary but inevitable obscurations, moments of forgetfulness, of
discouragement, when a man is not himself, and repeats mechanically what he hears said around him.
The real St. Francis is, on the contrary, the lover of nature, he who sees in the whole creation the
work of divine goodness, the radiance of the eternal beauty, he who, in the Canticle of the Creatures,
sees in the body not the Enemy but a brother: Cæpit hilariter loqui ad corpus; Gaude, frater corpus.
2 Cel., 3, 137.
23. Quodam die, dicta fabrissa dixit ipsi testi prægnanti, quod rogaret Deum, ut liberaret eam a
Dæmone, quem habebat in ventre ... Gulielmus dixit quod ita magnum peccatum erat jacere cum
uxore sua quam cum concubina. Döllinger, loc. cit., pp. 24, 35.
24. Those of the Concorrezenses and Bajolenses. In Italy Cathari becomes Gazzari; for that matter,
each country had its special appellatives; one of the most general in the north was that of the Bulgari,
which marks the oriental origin of the sect, whence the slang term Boulgres and its derivatives (vide
Matthew Paris, ann. 1238). Cf. Schmit, Histoire des Cathares, 8vo, 2 vols, Paris, 1849.
25. The most current name in Italy was that of the Patarini, given them no doubt from their
inhabiting the quarter of second-hand dealers in Milan: la contrada dei Patari, found in many cities.
Patari! is still the cry of the ragpickers in the small towns of Provence. In the thirteenth century
Patarino and Catharo were synonyms. But before that the term Patarini had an entirely different
sense. See the very remarkable study of M. Felice Tocco on this subject in his Eresia net medio evo,
12mo, Florence, 1884.
26. Cesar von Heisterbach, Dial. mirac., t. i., p. 309, Strange's edition.
27. Innocentii opera, Migne, t. i., col. 537; t. ii., 654.

28. Computruistis in peccatis sicut jumenta in stercore suo ut fumus ac fimus putrefactionis vestræ
jam fere circumadjacentes regionis infecerit, ac ipsum Dominum ut credimus ad nauseam
provocaverit. Loc. cit., col. 654. Cf. 673; Potthast, 2532, 2539.
29. Gesta Innocentii, Migne, t. i., col. clxii. Cf. epist. viii., 85 and 105.
30. Campi, Historia Ecclesiastica di Piacenza, parte ii., p. 92 ff. Cf. Innoc., epist. ix., 131, 166-169;
x., 54, 64, 222.
31. A. SS., Maii, t. v., p. 87.
32. Bull of June 6, 1205, Potthast, 2237; Migne, vii., 83. This Cardinal Leo (of the presbyterial title
of Holy Cross of Jerusalem) was one most valued by Innocent III. To him and Ugolini, the future
Gregory IX., he at this epoch confided the most delicate missions (for example, in 1209, they were
named legates to Otho IV.). This embassy shows in what importance the pope held the affairs of
Assisi, though it was a very small city.
33. Not once do we find him fighting heretics. The early Dominicans, on the contrary, are incessantly
occupied with arguing. See 2 Cel., 3, 46.
34. It need not be said that I do not assert that no trace of it is to be found after the ministry of St.
Francis, but it was no longer a force, and no longer endangered the very existence of the Church.
35. This strange personality will charm historians and philosophers for a long while to come. I know
nothing more learned or more luminous than M. Felice Tocco's fine study in his Eresia nel medio
evo, Florence, 1884, 1 vol., 12mo, pp. 261-409.
36. A. SS., Sept., t. vii., p. 283 ff.
37. A. SS., Maii, vii.; Vincent de Beauvais, Speculum historiale, lib. 29, cap. 40. La Sila is a wooded
mountain, situated eastward from Cosenza, which the peasants call Monte Nero. The summits are
nearly 2,000 metres above the sea.
38. Toward 1195. Gioacchino died there, March 30, 1202.
39. A whole apochryphal literature has blossomed out around Gioacchino; certain hypercritics have
tried to prove that he never wrote anything. These are exaggerations. Three large works are certainly
authentic: The Agreement of the Old and New Testaments, The Commentary on the Apocalypse, and
The Psaltery of Ten Strings, published in Venice, the first in 1517, the two others in 1527. His
prophecies were so well known, even in his lifetime, that an English Cistercian, Rudolph, Abbot of
Coggeshall ( 1228), coming to Rome in 1195, sought a conference with him and has left us an
interesting account of it. Martène, Amplissima Collectio, t. v., p. 839.
40. Comm. in apoc., folio 78, b. 2.
41. Qui vere monachus est nihil reputat esse suum nisi citharam: Apoc., ib., folio 183. a. 2.
42. E. Roth, Die Visionen der heiligen Elisabeth von Schönau: Brünn, 1884, pp. 115-117.

CHAPTER IV
STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPH

Spring of 1206—February 24, 1209

The biographies of St. Francis have preserved to us an incident which
shows how great was the religious ferment even in the little city of Assisi. A
stranger was seen to go up and down the streets saying to every one he met,
"Peace and welfare!" (Pax et bonum.)1 He thus expressed in his own way
the disquietude of those hearts which could neither resign themselves to
perpetual warfare nor to the disappearance of faith and love; artless echo,
vibrating in response to the hopes and fears that were shaking all Europe!
"Vox clamantis in deserto!" it will be said. No, for every heart-cry leaves
its trace even when it seems to be uttered in empty air, and that of the
Unknown of Assisi may have contributed in some measure to Francis's
definitive call.
Since his abrupt return from Spoleto, life in his father's house had
become daily more difficult. Bernardone's self-love had received from his
son's discomfiture such a wound as with commonplace men is never healed.
He might provide, without counting it, money to be swallowed up in
dissipation, that so his son might stand on an equal footing with the young
nobles; he could never resign himself to see him giving with lavish hands to
every beggar in the streets.
Francis, continually plunged in reverie and spending his days in lonely
wanderings in the fields, was no longer of the least use to his father. Months
passed, and the distance between the two men grew ever wider; and the
gentle and loving Pica could do nothing to prevent a rupture which from
this time appeared to be inevitable. Francis soon came to feel only one
desire, to flee from the abode where, in the place of love, he found only
reproaches, upbraidings, anguish.

The faithful confidant of his earlier struggles had been obliged to leave
him, and this absolute solitude weighed heavily upon his warm and loving
heart. He did what he could to escape from it, but no one understood him.
The ideas which he was beginning timidly to express evoked from those to
whom he spoke only mocking smiles or the head-shakings which men sure
that they are right bestow upon him who is marching straight to madness.
He even went to open his mind to the bishop, but the latter understood no
more than others his vague, incoherent plans, filled with ideas impossible to
realize and possibly subversive.2 It was thus that in spite of himself Francis
was led to ask nothing of men, but to raise himself by prayer to intuitive
knowledge of the divine will. The doors of houses and of hearts were alike
closing upon him, but the interior voice was about to speak out with
irresistible force and make itself forever obeyed.
Among the numerous chapels in the suburbs of Assisi there was one
which he particularly loved, that of St. Damian. It was reached by a few
minutes' walk over a stony path, almost trackless, under olive trees, amid
odors of lavender and rosemary. Standing on the top of a hillock, the entire
plain is visible from it, through a curtain of cypresses and pines which seem
to be trying to hide the humble hermitage and set up an ideal barrier
between it and the world.
Served by a poor priest who had scarcely the wherewithal for necessary
food, the sanctuary was falling into ruin. There was nothing in the interior
but a simple altar of masonry, and by way of reredos one of those byzantine
crucifixes still so numerous in Italy, where through the work of the artists of
the time has come down to us something of the terrors which agitated the
twelfth century. In general the Crucified One, frightfully lacerated, with
bleeding wounds, appears to seek to inspire only grief and compunction;
that of St. Damian, on the contrary, has an expression of inexpressible calm
and gentleness; instead of closing the eyelids in eternal surrender to the
weight of suffering, it looks down in self-forgetfulness, and its pure, clear
gaze says, not "I suffer," but, "Come unto me."3
One day Francis was praying before the poor altar: "Great and glorious
God, and thou, Lord Jesus, I pray ye, shed abroad your light in the darkness
of my mind.... Be found of me, Lord, so that in all things I may act only in
accordance with thy holy will."4

Thus he prayed in his heart, and behold, little by little it seemed to him
that his gaze could not detach itself from that of Jesus; he felt something
marvellous taking place in and around him. The sacred victim took on life,
and in the outward silence he was aware of a voice which softly stole into
the very depths of his heart, speaking to him an ineffable language. Jesus
accepted his oblation. Jesus desired his labor, his life, all his being, and the
heart of the poor solitary was already bathed in light and strength.5
This vision marks the final triumph of Francis. His union with Christ is
consummated; from this time he can exclaim with the mystics of every age,
"My beloved is mine, and I am his."
But instead of giving himself up to transports of contemplation he at once
asks himself how he may repay to Jesus love for love, in what action he
shall employ this life which he has just offered to him. He had not long to
seek. We have seen that the chapel where his spiritual espousals had just
been celebrated was threatened with ruin. He believed that to repair it was
the work assigned to him.
From that day the remembrance of the Crucified One, the thought of the
love which had triumphed in immolating itself, became the very centre of
his religious life and as it were the soul of his soul. For the first time, no
doubt, Francis had been brought into direct, personal, intimate contact with
Jesus Christ; from belief he had passed to faith, to that living faith which a
distinguished thinker has so well defined: "To believe is to look; it is a
serious, attentive, and prolonged look; a look more simple than that of
observation, a look which looks, and nothing more; artless, infantine, it has
all the soul in it, it is a look of the soul and not the mind, a look which does
not seek to analyze its object, but which receives it as a whole into the soul
through the eyes." In these words Vinet unconsciously has marvellously
characterized the religious temperament of St. Francis.
This look of love cast upon the crucifix, this mysterious colloquy with
the compassionate victim, was never more to cease. At St. Damian, St.
Francis's piety took on its outward appearance and its originality. From this
time his soul bears the stigmata, and as his biographers have said in words
untranslatable, Ab illa hora vulneratum et liquefactum est cor ejus ed
memoriam Dominicæ passionis. 6

From that time his way was plain before him. Coming out from the
sanctuary, he gave the priest all the money he had about him to keep a lamp
always burning, and with ravished heart he returned to Assisi. He had
decided to quit his father's house and undertake the restoration of the
chapel, after having broken the last ties that bound him to the past. A horse
and a few pieces of gayly colored stuffs were all that he possessed. Arrived
at home he made a packet of the stuffs, and mounting his horse he set out
for Foligno. This city was then as now the most important commercial town
of all the region. Its fairs attracted the whole population of Umbria and the
Sabines. Bernardone had often taken his son there,7 and Francis speedily
succeeded in selling all he had brought. He even parted with his horse, and
full of joy set out upon the road to Assisi.8
This act was to him most important; it marked his final rupture with the
past; from this day on his life was to be in all points the opposite of what it
had been; the Crucified had given himself to him; he on his side had given
himself to the Crucified without reserve or return. To uncertainty,
disquietude of soul, anguish, longing for an unknown good, bitter regrets,
had succeeded a delicious calm, the ecstasy of the lost child who finds his
mother, and forgets in a moment the torture of his heart.
From Foligno he returned direct to St. Damian; it was not necessary to
pass through the city, and he was in haste to put his projects into execution.
The poor priest was surprised enough when Francis handed over to him
the whole product of his sale. He doubtless thought that a passing quarrel
had occurred between Bernardone and his son, and for greater prudence
refused the gift; but Francis so insisted upon remaining with him that he
finally gave him leave to do so. As to the money, now become useless,
Francis cast it as a worthless object upon a window-seat in the chapel.9
Meanwhile Bernardone, disturbed by his son's failure to return, sought
for him in all quarters, and was not long in learning of his presence at St.
Damian. In a moment he perceived that Francis was lost to him. Resolved
to try every means, he collected a few neighbors, and furious with rage
hastened to the hermitage to snatch him away, if need were, by main force.
But Francis knew his father's violence. When he heard the shouts of those
who were in pursuit of him he felt his courage fail and hurried to a hiding-
place which he had prepared for himself for precisely such an emergency.

Bernardone, no doubt ill seconded in the search, ransacked every corner,
but was obliged at last to return to Assisi without his son. Francis remained
hidden for long days, weeping and groaning, imploring God to show him
the path he ought to follow. Notwithstanding his fears he had an infinite joy
at heart, and at no price would he have turned back.10
This seclusion could not last long. Francis perceived this, and told
himself that for a newly made knight of the Christ he was cutting a very
pitiful figure. Arming himself, therefore, with courage, he went one day to
the city to present himself before his father and make known to him his
resolution.
It is easy to imagine the changes wrought in his appearance by these few
weeks of seclusion, passed much of them in mental anguish. When he
appeared, pale, cadaverous, his clothes in tatters, upon what is now the
Piazza Nuova, where hundreds of children play all day long, he was greeted
with a great shout, "Pazzo, Pazzo!" (A madman! a madman!) "Un pazzo ne
fa cento" (One madman makes a hundred more), says the proverb, but one
must have seen the delirious excitement of the street children of Italy at the
sight of a madman to gain an idea how true it is. The moment the magic cry
resounds they rush into the street with frightful din, and while their parents
look on from the windows, they surround the unhappy sufferer with wild
dances mingled with songs, shouts, and savage howls. They throw stones at
him, fling mud upon him, blindfold him; if he flies into a rage, they double
their insults; if he weeps or begs for pity, they repeat his cries and mimic his
sobs and supplications without respite and without mercy.11
Bernardone soon heard the clamor which filled the narrow streets, and
went out to enjoy the show; suddenly he thought he heard his own name
and that of his son, and bursting with shame and rage he perceived Francis.
Throwing himself upon him, as if to throttle him, he dragged him into the
house and cast him, half dead, into a dark closet. Threats, bad usage,
everything was brought to bear to change the prisoner's resolves, but all in
vain. At last, wearied out and desperate, he left him in peace, though not
without having firmly bound him.12
A few days after he was obliged to be absent for a short time. Pica, his
wife, understood only too well his grievances against Francis, but feeling
that violence would be of no avail she resolved to try gentleness. It was all

in vain. Then, not being able longer to see him thus tortured, she set him at
liberty.
He returned straight to St. Damian.13
Bernardone, on his return, went so far as to strike Pica in punishment for
her weakness. Then, unable to tolerate the thought of seeing his son the jest
of the whole city, he tried to procure his expulsion from the territory of
Assisi. Going to St. Damian he summoned him to leave the country. This
time Francis did not try to hide. Boldly presenting himself before his father,
he declared to him that not only would nothing induce him to abandon his
resolutions, but that, moreover, having become the servant of Christ, he had
no longer to receive orders from him.14 As Bernardone launched out into
invective, reproaching him with the enormous sums which he had cost him,
Francis showed him by a gesture the money which he had brought back
from the sale at Foligno lying on the window-ledge. The father greedily
seized it and went away, resolving to appeal to the magistrates.
The consuls summoned Francis to appear before them, but he replied
simply that as servant of the Church he did not come under their
jurisdiction. Glad of this response, which relieved them of a delicate
dilemma, they referred the complainant to the diocesan authorities.15
The matter took on another aspect before the ecclesiastical tribunal; it
was idle to dream of asking the bishop to pronounce a sentence of
banishment, since it was his part to preserve the liberty of the clerics.
Bernardone could do no more than disinherit his son, or at least induce him
of his own accord to renounce all claim upon his inheritance. This was not
difficult.
When called upon to appear before the episcopal tribunal16 Francis
experienced a lively joy; his mystical espousals to the Crucified One were
now to receive a sort of official consecration. To this Jesus, whom he had so
often blasphemed and betrayed by word and conduct, he would now be able
with equal publicity to promise obedience and fidelity.
It is easy to imagine the sensation which all this caused in a small town
like Assisi, and the crowd that on the appointed day pressed toward the
Piazza of Santa Maria Maggiore, where the bishop pronounced sentence.17
Every one held Francis to be assuredly mad, but they anticipated with relish

the shame and rage of Bernardone, whom every one detested, and whose
pride was so well punished by all this.
The bishop first set forth the case, and advised Francis to simply give up
all his property. To the great surprise of the crowd the latter, instead of
replying, retired to a room in the bishop's palace, and immediately
reappeared absolutely naked, holding in his hand the packet into which he
had rolled his clothes; these he laid down before the bishop with the little
money that he still had kept, saying: "Listen, all of you, and understand it
well; until this time I have called Pietro Bernardone my father, but now I
desire to serve God. This is why I return to him this money, for which he
has given himself so much trouble, as well as my clothing, and all that I
have had from him, for from henceforth I desire to say nothing else than
'Our Father, who art in heaven.'"
A long murmur arose from the crowd when Bernardone was seen to
gather up and carry off the clothing without the least evidence of
compassion, while the bishop was fain to take under his mantle the poor
Francis, who was trembling with emotion and cold.18
The scene of the judgment hall made an immense impression; the ardor,
simplicity, and indignation of Francis had been so profound and sincere that
scoffers were disconcerted. On that day he won for himself a secret
sympathy in many souls. The populace loves such abrupt conversions, or
those which it considers such. Francis once again forced himself upon the
attention of his fellow-citizens with a power all the greater for the contrast
between his former and his new life.
There are pious folk whose modesty is shocked by the nudity of Francis;
but Italy is not Germany nor England, and the thirteenth century would
have been astonished indeed at the prudery of the Bollandists. The incident
is simply a new manifestation of Francis's character, with its ingenuousness,
its exaggerations, its longing to establish a complete harmony, a literal
correspondence, between words and actions.
After emotions such as he had just experienced he felt the need of being
alone, of realizing his joy, of singing the liberty he had finally achieved
along all the lines where once he had so deeply suffered, so ardently
struggled. He would not, therefore, return immediately to St. Damian.

Leaving the city by the nearest gate, he plunged into the deserted paths
which climb the sides of Mount Subasio.
It was the early spring. Here and there were still great drifts of snow, but
under the ardor of the March sun winter seemed to own itself vanquished.
In the midst of this mysterious and bewildering harmony the heart of
Francis felt a delicious thrill, all his being was calmed and uplifted, the soul
of things caressed him gently and shed upon him peace. An unwonted
happiness swept over him; he made the forest to resound with his hymns of
praise.
Men utter in song emotions too sweet or too deep to be expressed in
ordinary language, but unworded music is in this respect superior to song, it
is above all things the language of the ineffable. Song gains almost the same
value when the words are only there as a support for the voice. The great
beauty of the psalms and hymns of the Church lies in the fact that being
sung in an unknown tongue they make no appeal to the intelligence; they
say nothing, but they express everything with marvellous modulations like a
celestial accompaniment, which follows the believer's emotions from the
most agonizing struggles to the most unspeakable ecstasies.
So Francis went on his way, deeply inhaling the odors of spring, singing
at the top of his voice one of those songs of French chivalry which he had
learned in days gone by.
The forest in which he was walking was the usual retreat of such people
of Assisi and its environs as had any reason for hiding. Some ruffians,
aroused by his voice, suddenly fell upon him. "Who are you?" they asked.
"I am the herald of the great King," he answered "but what is that to you?"
His only garment was an old mantle which the bishop's gardener had lent
him at his master's request. They stripped it from him, and throwing him
into a ditch full of snow, "There is your place, poor herald of God," they
said.
The robbers gone, he shook off the snow which covered him, and after
may efforts succeeded in extricating himself from the ditch. Stiff with cold,
with no other covering than a worn-out shirt, he none the less resumed his
singing, happy to suffer and thus to accustom himself the better to
understand the words of the Crucified One.19

Not far away was a monastery. He entered and offered his services. In
those solitudes, peopled often by such undesirable neighbors, people were
suspicious. The monks permitted him to make himself useful in the kitchen,
but they gave him nothing to cover himself with and hardly anything to eat.
There was nothing for it but to go away; he directed his steps toward
Gubbio, where he knew that he should find a friend. Perhaps this was he
who had been his confidant on his return from Spoleto. However this may
be, he received from him a tunic, and a few days after set out to return to his
dear St. Damian.20
He did not, however, go directly thither; before beginning to restore the
little sanctuary, he desired to see again his friends, the lepers, to promise
them that he would love them even better than in the past.
Since his first visit to the leper-house the brilliant cavalier had become a
poor beggar; he came with empty hands but with heart overflowing with
tenderness and compassion. Taking up his abode in the midst of these
afflicted ones he lavished upon them the most touching care, washing and
wiping their sores, all the more gentle and radiant as their sores were more
repulsive.21 The neglected sufferer is as much blinded by love of him who
comes to visit him as the child by its love for its mother. He believes him to
be all powerful; at his approach the most painful sufferings are eased or
disappear.
This love inspired by the sympathy of an affectionate heart may become
so deep as to appear at times supernatural; the dying have been known to
recover consciousness in order to look for the last time into the face, not of
some member of the family, but of the friend who has tried to be the
sunshine of their last days. The ties of pure love are stronger than the bonds
of flesh and blood. Francis had many a time sweet experience of this; from
the time of his arrival at the leper-house he felt that if he had lost his life he
was about to find it again.
Encouraged by his sojourn among the lepers, he returned to St. Damian
and went to work, filled with joy and ardor, his heart as much in the
sunshine as the Umbrian plain in this beautiful month of May. After having
fashioned for himself a hermit's dress, he began to go into the squares and
open places of the city. There having sung a few hymns, he would announce
to those who gathered around him his project of restoring the chapel.

"Those who will give me one stone," he would add with a smile, "shall have
a reward; those who give me two shall have two rewards, and those who
give me three shall have three."
Many deemed him mad, but others were deeply moved by the
remembrance of the past. As for Francis, deaf to mockery, he spared himself
no labor, carrying upon his shoulders, so ill-fitted for severe toil, the stones
which were given him.22
During this time the poor priest of St. Damian felt his heart swelling with
love for this companion who had at first caused him such embarrassment,
and he strove to prepare for him his favorite dishes. Francis soon perceived
it. His delicacy took alarm at the expense which he caused his friend, and,
thanking him, he resolved to beg his food from door to door.
It was not an easy task. The first time, when at the end of his round he
glanced at the broken food in his wallet, he felt his courage fail him. But the
thought of being so soon unfaithful to the spouse to whom he had plighted
his faith made his blood run cold with shame and gave him strength to eat
ravenously.23
Each hour, so to speak, brought to him a new struggle. One day he was
going through the town begging for oil for the lamps of St. Damian, when
he arrived at a house where a banquet was going on; the greater number of
his former companions were there, singing and dancing. At the sound of
those well-known voices he felt as if he could not enter; he even turned
away, but very soon, filled with confusion by his own cowardice, he
returned quickly upon his steps, made his way into the banquet-hall, and
after confessing his shame, put so much earnestness and fire into his request
that every one desired to co-operate in this pious work.24
His bitterest trial however was his father's anger, which remained as
violent as ever. Although he had renounced Francis, Bernardone's pride
suffered none the less at seeing his mode of life, and whenever he met his
son he overwhelmed him with reproaches and maledictions. The tender
heart of Francis was so wrung with sorrow that he resorted to a sort of
stratagem for charming away the spell of the paternal imprecations. "Come
with me," he said to a beggar; "be to me as a father, and I will give you a
part of the alms which I receive. When you see Bernardone curse me, if I
say, 'Bless me, my father,' you must sign me with the cross and bless me in

his stead."25 His brother was prominent in the front rank of those who
harassed him with their mockeries. One winter morning they met in a
church; Angelo leaned over to a friend who was with him, saying: "Go, ask
Francis to sell you a farthing's worth of his sweat." "No," replied the latter,
who overheard. "I shall sell it much dearer to my God."
In the spring of 1208 he finished the restoration of St. Damian; he had
been aided by all people of good will, setting the example of work and
above all of joy, cheering everybody by his songs and his projects for the
future. He spoke with such enthusiasm and contagious warmth of the
transformation of his dear chapel, of the grace which God would accord to
those who should come there to pray, that later on it was believed that he
had spoken of Clara and her holy maidens who were to retire to this place
four years later.26
This success soon inspired him with the idea of repairing the other
sanctuaries in the suburbs of Assisi. Those which had struck him by their
state of decay were St. Peter and Santa Maria, of the Portiuncula, called
also Santa Maria degli Angeli. The former is not otherwise mentioned in his
biographies.27 As to the second, it was to become the true cradle of the
Franciscan movement.
This chapel, still standing at the present day after escaping revolutions
and earthquakes, is a true Bethel, one of those rare spots in the world on
which rests the mystic ladder which joins heaven to earth; there were
dreamed some of the noblest dreams which have soothed the pains of
humanity. It is not to Assisi in its marvellous basilica that one must go to
divine and comprehend St. Francis; he must turn his steps to Santa Maria
degli Angeli at the hours when the stated prayers cease, at the moment
when the evening shadows lengthen, when all the fripperies of worship
disappear in the obscurity, when all the nation seems to collect itself to
listen to the chime of the distant church bells. Doubtless it was Francis's
plan to settle there as a hermit. He dreamed of passing his life there in
meditation and silence, keeping up the little church and from time to time
inviting a priest there to say mass. Nothing as yet suggested to him that he
was in the end to become a religious founder. One of the most interesting
aspects of his life is in fact the continual development revealing itself in
him; he is of the small number to whom to live is to be active, and to be
active to make progress. There is hardly anyone, except St. Paul, in whom

is found to the same degree the devouring need of being always something
more, always something better, and it is so beautiful in both of them only
because it is absolutely instinctive.
When he began to restore the Portiuncula his projects hardly went
beyond a very narrow horizon; he was preparing himself for a life of
penitence rather than a life of activity. But these works once finished it was
impossible that this somewhat selfish and passive manner of achieving his
own salvation should satisfy him long. At the memory of the appearance of
the Crucified One his heart would swell with overpowering emotions, and
he would melt into tears without knowing whether they were of admiration,
pity, or desire.28
When the repairs were finished meditation occupied the greater part of
his days. A Benedictine of the Abbey of Mont Subasio29 came from time to
time to say mass at Santa Maria; these were the bright hours of St. Francis's
life. One can imagine with what pious care he prepared himself and with
what faith he listened to the divine teachings.
One day, it was probably February 24, 1209, the festival of St. Matthias,
mass was being celebrated at the Portiuncula.30 When the priest turned
toward him to read the words of Jesus, Francis felt himself overpowered
with a profound agitation. He no longer saw the priest; it was Jesus, the
Crucified One of St. Damian, who was speaking: "Wherever ye go, preach,
saying, 'The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers,
cast out devils. Freely ye have received, freely give. Provide neither silver
nor gold nor brass in your purses, neither scrip nor two coats, nor shoes nor
staff, for the laborer is worthy of his meat.'"
These words burst upon him like a revelation, like the answer of Heaven
to his sighs and anxieties.
"This is what I want," he cried, "this is what I was seeking; from this day
forth I shall set myself with all my strength to put it in practice."
Immediately throwing aside his stick, his scrip, his purse, his shoes, he
determined immediately to obey, observing to the letter the precepts of the
apostolic life.
It is quite possible that some allegorizing tendencies have had some
influence upon this narrative.31 The long struggle through which Francis

passed before becoming the apostle of the new times assuredly came to a
crisis in the scene at Portiuncula; but we have already seen how slow was
the interior travail which prepared for it.
The revelation of Francis was in his heart; the sacred fire which he was to
communicate to the souls of others came from within his own, but the best
causes need a standard. Before the shabby altar of the Portiuncula he had
perceived the banner of poverty, sacrifice, and love, he would carry it to the
assault of every fortress of sin; under its shadow, a true knight of Christ, he
would marshal all the valiant warriors of a spiritual strife.

FOOTNOTES
1. 3 Soc., 26.
2. 3 Soc., 10.
3. This crucifix is preserved in the sacristy of Santa Chiara, whither the sisters carried it when they
left St. Damian.
4. Opuscula B. Francisci, Oratio I.
5. 3 Soc., 13; 2 Cel., 1, 6; Bon., 12; 15; 16.
6. 3 Soc., 14.
7. This incident is found in the narrative of 1 Cel., 8: Ibi ex more venditis.
8. 1 Cel., 8; 3 Soc., 16; Bon. 16. Foligno is a three hours' walk from Assisi.
9. 1 Cel., 9; 3 Soc., 16; Bon., 6. Cf. A. SS., p. 567.
10. 1 Cel., 10; 3 Soc., 16; Bon., 17, A. SS.; p. 568.
11. 1 Cel., 11.
12. 1 Cel., 12; 3 Soc., 17; Bon., 18.
13. 1 Cel., 13; 3 Soc., 18.
14. 1 Cel., 13. It is possible that at this epoch he had received the lesser order, and that thus he might
be subject to the jurisdiction of the Church.
15. 3 Soc., 18 and 19; 1 Cel., 14; Bon., 19.
16. From 1204 until after the death of St. Francis the episcopal throne of Assisi was occupied by
Guido II. Vide Cristofano, 1, 169 ff.
17. Piazza di Santa Maria Maggiore o del vescovado. Everything has remained pretty nearly in the
same state as in the thirteenth century.
18. 1 Cel., 15; 3 Soc., 20; Bon., 20.
19. 3 Soc., 16; Bon., 21.
20. 1 Cel., 16; Bon., 21. The curious will read with interest an article by M. Mezzatinti upon the
journey to Gubbio entitled S. Francesco e Frederico Spadalunga da Gubbio. [Miscellanea, t. v., pp.

76-78.] This Spadalunga da Gubbio was well able to give a garment to Francis, but it is very possible
that the gift was made much later and that this solemn date in the saint's life has been fixed by an
optical illusion, almost inevitable because of the identity of the fact with the name of the locality.
21. 1 Cel., 17; Bon., 11; 13; 21; 22; 3 Soc., 11; A. SS., p. 575.
22. 1 Cel., 18; 3 Soc., 21; Bon., 23.
23. 3 Soc., 22; 2 Cel., 1, 9.
24. 3 Soc., 24; 2 Cel., 8; Spec., 24.
25. 3 Soc., 23; 2 Cel., 7.
26. 3 Soc., 24; Testament de Claire, Wadding, ann. 1253 v.
27. Cel., 21; Bon., 24.
28. 3 Soc., 14; 2 Cel., i., 6.
29. Portiuncula was a dependence of this abbey.
30. This is the date adopted by the Bollandists, because the ancient missals mark the pericope, Matt.
x., for the gospel of this day. This entails no difficulty and in any case it cannot be very far distant
from the truth. A. SS., p. 574.
31. See in particular Bon., 25 and 26. Cf. A. SS., p. 577d.

CHAPTER V
FIRST YEAR OF APOSTOLATE

Spring of 1209—Summer of 1210

The very next morning Francis went up to Assisi and began to preach.
His words were simple, but they came so straight from the heart that all
who heard him were touched.
It is not easy to hear and apply to one's self the exhortations of preachers
who, aloft in the pulpit, seem to be carrying out a mere formality; it is just
as difficult to escape from the appeals of a layman who walks at our side.
The amazing multitude of Protestant sects is due in a great degree to this
superiority of lay preaching over clerical. The most brilliant orators of the
Christian pulpit are bad converters; their eloquent appeals may captivate the
imagination and lead a few men of the world to the foot of the altar, but
these results are not more brilliant than ephemeral. But let a peasant or a
workingman speak to those whom he meets a few simple words going
directly to the conscience, and the man is always impressed, often won.
Thus the words of Francis seemed to his hearers like a flaming sword
penetrating to the very depths of their conscience. His first attempts were
the simplest possible; in general they were merely a few words addressed to
men whom he knew well enough to recognize their weak points and strike
at them with the holy boldness of love. His person, his example, were
themselves a sermon, and he spoke only of that which he had himself
experienced, proclaiming repentance, the shortness of life, a future
retribution, the necessity of arriving at gospel perfection.1 It is not easy to
realize how many waiting souls there are in this world. The greater number
of men pass through life with souls asleep. They are like virgins of the
sanctuary who sometimes feel a vague agitation; their hearts throb with an
infinitely sweet and subtile thrill, but their eyelids droop; again they feel the
damp cold of the cloister creeping over them; the delicious but baneful

dream vanishes; and this is all they ever know of that love which is stronger
than death.
It is thus with many men for all that belongs to the higher life.
Sometimes, alone in the wide plain at the hour of twilight, they fix their
eyes on the fading lights of the horizon, and on the evening breeze comes to
them another breath, more distant, fainter, and almost heavenly, awaking in
them a nostalgia for the world beyond and for holiness. But the darkness
falls, they must go back to their homes; they shake off their reverie; and it
often happens that to the very end of life this is their only glimpse of the
Divine; a few sighs, a few thrills, a few inarticulate murmurs—this sums up
all our efforts to attain to the sovereign good.
Yet the instinct for love and for the divine is only slumbering. At the sight
of beauty love always awakes; at the appeal of holiness the divine witness
within us at once responds; and so we see, streaming from all points of the
horizon to gather around those who preach in the name of the inward voice,
long processions of souls athirst for the ideal. The human heart so naturally
yearns to offer itself up, that we have only to meet along our pathway some
one who, doubting neither himself nor us, demands it without reserve, and
we yield it to him at once. Reason may understand a partial gift, a transient
devotion; the heart knows only the entire sacrifice, and like the lover to his
beloved, it says to its vanquisher, "Thine alone and forever."
That which has caused the miserable failure of all the efforts of natural
religion is that its founders have not had the courage to lay hold upon the
hearts of men, consenting to no partition. They have not understood the
imperious desire for immolation which lies in the depths of every soul, and
souls have taken their revenge in not heeding these too lukewarm lovers.
Francis had given himself up too completely not to claim from others an
absolute self-renunciation. In the two years and more since he had quitted
the world, the reality and depth of his conversion had shone out in the sight
of all; to the scoffings of the early days had gradually succeeded in the
minds of many a feeling closely akin to admiration.
This feeling inevitably provokes imitation. A man of Assisi, hardly
mentioned by the biographers, had attached himself to Francis. He was one
of those simple-hearted men who find life beautiful enough so long as they
can be with him who has kindled the divine spark2 in their hearts. His

arrival at Portiuncula gave Francis a suggestion; from that time he dreamed
of the possibility of bringing together a few companions with whom he
could carry on his apostolic mission in the neighborhood.
At Assisi he had often enjoyed the hospitality of a rich and prominent
man named Bernardo di Quintavalle,3 who took him to sleep in his own
chamber; it is easy to see how such an intimacy would favor confidential
outpourings. When in the silence of the early night an ardent and
enthusiastic soul pours out to you its disappointments, wounds, dreams,
hopes, faith, it is difficult indeed not to be carried along, especially when
the apostle has a secret ally in your soul, and unconsciously meets your
most secret aspirations.
One day Bernardo begged Francis to pass the following night with him,
at the same time giving him to understand that he was about to make a
grave resolution upon which he desired to consult him. The joy of Francis
was great indeed as he divined his intentions. They passed the night without
thinking of sleep; it was a long communion of souls. Bernardo had decided
to distribute his goods to the poor and cast in his lot with Francis. The latter
desired his friend to pass through a sort of initiation, pointing out to him
that what he himself practised, what he preached, was not his own
invention, but that Jesus himself had expressly ordained it in his word.
At early dawn they bent their steps to the St. Nicholas Church,
accompanied by another neophyte named Pietro, and there, after praying
and hearing mass, Francis opened the Gospels that lay on the altar and read
to his companions the portion which had decided his own vocation: the
words of Jesus sending forth his disciples on their mission.
"Brethren," he added, "this is our life and our Rule, and that of all who
may join us. Go then and do as you have heard."4
The persistence with which the Three Companions relate that Francis
consulted the book three times in honor of the Trinity, and that it opened of
its own accord at the verses describing the apostolic life, leads to the belief
that these passages became the Rule of the new association, if not that very
day at least very soon afterward.
If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell that thou hast, and give to the
poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come and

follow me.
Jesus having called to him the Twelve, gave them power and
authority over all devils and to cure diseases. And he sent them
to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick. And he said
unto them, Take nothing for your journey, neither staves, nor
scrip, neither bread, neither money; neither have two coats
apiece. And whatsoever house ye enter into, there abide, and
thence depart. And whosoever will not receive you, when ye go
out of that city shake off the very dust from your feet for a
testimony against them. And they departed and went through the
towns, preaching the gospel and healing everywhere.
Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after
me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.
For whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will
lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited
if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?5
At first these verses were hardly more than the official Rule of the Order;
the true Rule was Francis himself; but they had the great merit of being
short, absolute, of promising perfection, and of being taken from the
Gospel.
Bernardo immediately set to work to distribute his fortune among the
poor. Full of joy, his friend was looking on at this act, which had drawn
together a crowd, when a priest named Sylvester, who had formerly sold
him some stones for the repairs of St. Damian, seeing so much money given
away to everyone who applied for it, drew near and said:
"Brother, you did not pay me very well for the stones which you bought
of me."
Francis had too thoroughly killed every germ of avarice in himself not to
be moved to indignation by hearing a priest speak thus. "Here," he said,
holding out to him a double handful of coins which he took from Bernardo's
robe, "here; are you sufficiently paid now?"
"Quite so," replied Sylvester, somewhat abashed by the murmurs of the
bystanders.6

This picture, in which the characters stand out so strongly, must have
taken strong hold upon the memory of the bystanders: the Italians only
thoroughly understand things which they make a picture of. It taught them,
better than all Francis's preachings, what manner of men these new friars
would be.
The distribution finished, they went at once to Portiuncula, where
Bernardo and Pietro built for themselves cabins of boughs, and made
themselves tunics like that of Francis. They did not differ much from the
garment worn by the peasants, and were of that brown, with its infinite
variety of shades, which the Italians call beast color. One finds similar
garments to-day among the shepherds of the most remote parts of the
Apennines.
A week later, Thursday, April 23, 1209,7 a new disciple of the name of
Egidio presented himself before Francis. Of a gentle and submissive nature,
he was of those who need to lean on someone, but who, the needed support
having been found and tested, lift themselves sometimes even above it. The
pure soul of brother Egidio, supported by that of Francis, came to enjoy the
intoxicating delights of contemplation with an unheard-of ardor.8
Here we must be on our guard against forcing the authorities, and asking
of them more than they can give. Later, when the Order was definitely
constituted and its convents organized, men fancied that the past had been
like the present, and this error still weighs upon the picture of the origins of
the Franciscan movement. The first brothers lived as did the poor people
among whom they so willingly moved; Portiuncula was their favorite
church, but it would be a mistake to suppose that they sojourned there for
any long periods. It was their place of meeting, nothing more. When they
set forth they simply knew that they should meet again in the neighborhood
of the modest chapel. Their life was that of the Umbrian beggars of the
present day, going here and there as fancy dictated, sleeping in hay-lofts, in
leper hospitals, or under the porch of some church. So little had they any
fixed domicile that Egidio, having decided to join them, was at considerable
trouble to learn where to find Francis, and accidentally meeting him in the
neighborhood of Rivo-Torto9 he saw in the fact a providential leading.
They went up and down the country, joyfully sowing their seed. It was
the beginning of summer, the time when everybody in Umbria is out of

doors mowing or turning the grass. The customs of the country have
changed but little. Walking in the end of May in the fields about Florence,
Perugia, or Rieti, one still sees, at nightfall, the bagpipers entering the fields
as the mowers seat themselves upon the hay-cocks for their evening meal;
they play a few pieces, and when the train of haymakers returns to the
village, followed by the harvest-laden carts, it is they who lead the
procession, rending the air with their sharpest strains.
The joyous Penitents who loved to call themselves Joculatores Domini,
God's jongleurs, no doubt often did the same.10 They did even better, for not
willing to be a charge to anyone, they passed a part of the day in aiding the
peasants in their field work.11 The inhabitants of these districts are for the
most part kindly and sedate; the friars soon gained their confidence by
relating to them first their history and then their hopes. They worked and ate
together; field-hands and friars often slept in the same barn, and when with
the morrow's dawn the friars went on their way, the hearts of those they left
behind had been touched. They were not yet converted, but they knew that
not far away, over toward Assisi, were living men who had renounced all
worldly goods, and who, consumed with zeal, were going up and down
preaching penitence and peace.
Their reception was very different in the cities. If the peasant of Central
Italy is mild and kindly the townsfolk are on a first acquaintance scoffing
and ill disposed. We shall shortly see the friars who went to Florence the
butt of all sorts of persecutions.
Only a few weeks had passed since Francis began to preach, and already
his words and acts were sounding an irresistible appeal in the depths of
many a heart. We have arrived at the most unique and interesting period in
the history of the Franciscans. These first months are for their institution
what the first days of spring are for nature, days when the almond-tree
blossoms, bearing witness to the mysterious labor going on in the womb of
the earth, and heralding the flowers that will suddenly enamel the fields. At
the sight of these men—bare footed, scantily clothed, without money, and
yet so happy—men's minds were much divided. Some held them to be mad,
others admired them, finding them widely different from the vagrant
monks,12 that plague of Christendom.

Sometimes, however, the friars found success not responding to their
efforts, the conversion of souls not taking form with enough rapidity and
vigor. To encourage them, Francis would then confide to them his visions
and his hopes. "I saw a multitude of men coming toward us, asking that
they might receive the habit of our holy religion, and lo, the sound of their
footsteps still echoes in my ears. I saw them coming from every direction,
filling all the roads."
Whatever the biographies may say, Francis was far from foreseeing the
sorrows that were to follow this rapid increase of his Order. The maiden
leaning with trembling rapture on her lover's arm no more dreams of the
pangs of motherhood than he thought of the dregs he must drain after
quaffing joyfully the generous wine of the chalice.13
Every prosperous movement provokes opposition by the very fact of its
prosperity. The herbs of the field have their own language for cursing the
longer-lived plants that smother them out; one can hardly live without
arousing jealousy; in vain the new fraternity showed itself humble, it could
not escape this law.
When the brethren went up to Assisi to beg from door to door, many
refused to give to them, reproaching them with desiring to live on the goods
of others after having squandered their own. Many a time they had barely
enough not to starve to death. It would even seem that the clergy were not
entirely without part in this opposition. The Bishop of Assisi said to Francis
one day: "Your way of living without owning anything seems to me very
harsh and difficult." "My lord," replied he, "if we possessed property we
should have need of arms for its defence, for it is the source of quarrels and
lawsuits, and the love of God and of one's neighbor usually finds many
obstacles therein; this is why we do not desire temporal goods."14
The argument was unanswerable, but Guido began to rue the
encouragement which he had formerly offered the son of Bernardone. He
was very nearly in the situation and consequently in the state of mind of the
Anglican bishops when they saw the organizing of the Salvation Army. It
was not exactly hostility, but a distrust which was all the deeper for hardly
daring to show itself. The only counsel which the bishop could give Francis
was to come into the ranks of the clergy, or, if asceticism attracted him, to
join some already existing monastic order.15

If the bishop's perplexities were great, those of Francis were hardly less
so. He was too acute not to foresee the conflict that threatened to break out
between the friars and the clergy. He saw that the enemies of the priests
praised him and his companions beyond measure simply to set off their
poverty against the avarice and wealth of the ecclesiastics, yet he felt
himself urged on from within to continue his work, and could well have
exclaimed with the apostle, "Woe is me if I preach not the gospel!" On the
other hand, the families of the Penitents could not forgive them for having
distributed their goods among the poor, and attacks came from this direction
with all the bitter language and the deep hatred natural to disappointed
heirs. From this point of view the brotherhood appeared as a menace to
families, and many parents trembled lest their sons should join it. Whether
the friars would or no, they were an unending subject of interest to the
whole city. Evil rumors, plentifully spread abroad against them, simply
defeated themselves; flying from mouth to mouth they speedily found
contradictors who had no difficulty in showing their absurdity. All this
indirectly served their cause and gained to their side those hearts, more
numerous than is generally believed, who find the defence of the persecuted
a necessity.
As to the clergy, they could not but feel a profound distrust of these lay
converters, who, though they aroused the hatred of some interested persons,
awakened in more pious souls first astonishment and then admiration.
Suddenly to see men without title or diploma succeed brilliantly in the
mission which has been officially confided to ourselves, and in which we
have made pitiful shipwreck, is cruel torture. Have we not seen generals
who preferred to lose a battle rather than gain it with the aid of guerrillas?
This covert opposition has left no characteristic traces in the biographies
of St. Francis. It is not to be wondered at; Thomas of Celano, even if he had
had information of this matter, would have been wanting in tact to make use
of it. The clergy, for that matter, possess a thousand means of working upon
public opinion without ceasing to show a religious interest in those whom
they detest.
But the more St. Francis shall find himself in contradiction with the
clergy of his time, the more he will believe himself the obedient son of the
Church. Confounding the gospel with the teaching of the Church, he will

for a good while border upon heresy, but without ever falling into it. Happy
simplicity, thanks to which he had never to take the attitude of revolt!
It was five years since, a convalescent leaning upon his staff, he had felt
himself taken possession of by a loathing of material pleasures. From that
time every one of his days had been marked by a step in advance.
It was again the spring-time. Perfectly happy, he felt himself more and
more impelled to bring others to share his happiness and to proclaim in the
four corners of the world how he had attained it. He resolved, therefore, to
undertake a new mission. A few days were spent in preparing for it. The
Three Companions have preserved for us the directions which he gave to
his disciples:
"Let us consider that God in his goodness has not called us
merely for our own salvation, but also for that of many men, that
we may go through all the world exhorting men, more by our
example than by our words, to repent of their sins and bear the
commandments in mind. Be not fearful on the ground that we
appear little and ignorant, but simply and without disquietude
preach repentance. Have faith in God, who has overcome the
world, that his Spirit will speak in you and by you, exhorting
men to be converted and keep his commandments.
You will find men full of faith, gentleness, and goodness, who
will receive you and your words with joy; but you will find
others, and in greater numbers, faithless, proud, blasphemers,
who will speak evil of you, resisting you and your words. Be
resolute, then, to endure everything with patience and humility."
Hearing this, the brethren began to be agitated. St. Francis
said to them: "Have no fear, for very soon many nobles and
learned men will come to you; they will be with you preaching
to kings and princes and to a multitude of peoples. Many will be
converted to the Lord, all over the world, who will multiply and
increase his family."
After he had thus spoken he blessed them, saying to each one the word
which was in the future to be his supreme consolation:

"My brother, commit yourself to God with all your cares, and
he will care for you."
Then the men of God departed, faithfully observing his
instructions, and when they found a church or a cross they
bowed in adoration, saying with devotion, "We adore thee, O
Christ, and we bless thee here and in all churches in the whole
world, for by thy holy cross thou hast ransomed the world." In
fact they believed that they had found a holy place wherever
they found a church or a cross.
Some listened willingly, others scoffed, the greater number
overwhelmed them with questions. "Whence come you?" "Of
what order are you?" And they, though sometimes it was
wearisome to answer, said simply, "We are penitents, natives of
the city of Assisi."16
This freshness and poetry will not be found in the later missions. Here
the river is still itself, and if it knows toward what sea it is hastening, it
knows nothing of the streams, more or less turbid, which shall disturb its
limpidity, nor the dykes and the straightenings to which it will have to
submit.
A long account by the Three Companions gives us a picture from life of
these first essays at preaching:
Many men took the friars for knaves or madmen and refused
to receive them into their houses for fear of being robbed. So in
many places, after having undergone all sorts of bad usage, they
could find no other refuge for the night than the porticos of
churches or houses. There were at that time two brethren who
went to Florence. They begged all through the city but could
find no shelter. Coming to a house which had a portico and
under the portico a bench, they said to one another, "We shall be
very comfortable here for the night." As the mistress of the
house refused to let them enter, they humbly asked her
permission to sleep upon the bench.
She was about to grant them permission when her husband
appeared. "Why have you permitted these lewd fellows to stay

under our portico?" he asked. The woman replied that she had
refused to receive them into the house, but had given them
permission to sleep under the portico where there was nothing
for them to steal but the bench.
The cold was very sharp; but taking them for thieves no one
gave them any covering.
As for them, after having enjoyed on their bench no more
sleep than was necessary, warmed only by divine warmth, and
having for covering only their Lady Poverty, in the early dawn
they went to the church to hear mass.
The lady went also on her part, and seeing the friars devoutly
praying she said to herself: "If these men were rascals and
thieves as my husband said, they would not remain thus in
prayer." And while she was making these reflections behold a
man of the name of Guido was giving alms to the poor in the
church. Coming to the friars he would have given a piece of
money to them as to the others, but they refused his money and
would not receive it. "Why," he asked, "since you are poor, will
you not accept like the others?" "It is true that we are poor,"
replied Brother Bernardo, "but poverty does not weigh upon us
as upon other poor people; for by the grace of God, whose will
we are accomplishing, we have voluntarily become poor."
Much amazed, he asked them if they had ever had anything,
and learned that they had possessed much, but that for the love
of God they had given everything away.... The lady, seeing that
the friars had refused the alms, drew near to them and said that
she would gladly receive them into her house if they would be
pleased to lodge there. "May the Lord recompense to you your
good will," replied the friars, humbly.
But Guido, learning that they had not been able to find a
shelter, took them to his own house, saying, "Here is a refuge
prepared for you by the Lord; remain in it as long as you
desire."

As for them, they gave thanks to God and spent several days
with him, preaching the fear of the Lord by word and example,
so that in the end he made large distributions to the poor.
Well treated by him, they were despised by others. Many
men, great and small, attacked and insulted them, sometimes
going so far as to tear off their clothing; but though despoiled of
their only tunic, they would not ask for its restitution. If, moved
to pity, men gave back to them what they had taken away, they
accepted it cheerfully.
There were those who threw mud upon them, others who put
dice into their hands and invited them to play, and others
clutching them by the cowl made them drag them along thus.
But seeing that the friars were always full of joy in the midst of
their tribulations, that they neither received nor carried money,
and that by their love for one another they made themselves
known as true disciples of the Lord, many of them felt
themselves reproved in their hearts and came asking pardon for
the offences which they had committed. They, pardoning them
with all their heart, said, "The Lord forgive you," and gave them
pious counsels for the salvation of their souls.
A translation can but imperfectly give all the repressed emotion, the
candid simplicity, the modest joy, the fervent love which breathe in the
faulty Latin of the Three Companions. Yet these scattered friars sighed after
the home-coming and the long conversations with their spiritual father in
the tranquil forests of the suburbs of Assisi. Friendship among men, when it
overpasses a certain limit, has something deep, high, ideal, infinitely sweet,
to which no other friendship attains. There was no woman in the Upper
Chamber when, on the last evening of his life, Jesus communed with his
disciples and invited the world to the eternal marriage supper.
Francis, above all, was impatient to see his young family once more.
They all arrived at Portiuncula almost at the same time, having already,
before reaching it, forgotten the torments they had endured, thinking only of
the joy of the meeting.17

FOOTNOTES

1. 1 Cel., 23; 3 Soc., 25 and 26; Bon., 27. Cf. Auct. Vit. Sec. ap., A. SS., p. 579.
2. 1 Cel., 24. We must correct the Bollandist text: Inter quos quidam de Assisio puer ac simplicem
animum gerens, by: quidam de Assisio pium ac simplicem, etc. The period at which we have arrived
is very clear as a whole: the picture which the Three Companions give us is true with a truth which
forces conviction at first sight; but neither they nor Celano are giving an official report. Later on men
desired to know precisely in what order the early disciples came, and they tortured the texts to find an
answer. The same course was followed with regard to the first missionary journeys. But on both sides
they came up against impossibilities and contradictions. What does it matter whether there were two,
three, or four missions before the papal approbation? Of what consequence are the names of those
early disciples who are entirely secondary in the history of the Franciscan movement? All these
things took place with much more simplicity and spontaneity than is generally supposed. There is a
wide difference between the plan of a house drawn up by an architect and a view of the same house
painted by an artist. The second, though abounding in inexactitudes, gives a more just notion of the
reality than the plan. The same is true of the Franciscan biographies.
3. 1 Cel., 24. Bernard de Besse is the first to call him B. di Quintavalle: De laudibus, fo. 95 h.; cf.
upon him Mark of Lisbon, t. i., second part, pp. 68-70; Conform., 47; Fior., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 28; 3 Soc.,
27, 30, 39; 2 Cel., 1, 10; 2, 19; Bon., 28; 1 Cel., 30; Salimbeni, ann. 1229, and Tribul. Arch., ii., p.
278, etc.
4. 1 Cel., 24; 3 Soc., 27, 28, 29; 2 Cel., 1, 10; 3, 52; Bon., 28; A. SS., p. 580. It is evident that the
tradition has been worked over here: it soon came to be desired to find a miracle in the manner in
which Francis found the passage for reading. The St. Nicholas Church is no longer in existence; it
stood upon the piece of ground now occupied by the barracks of the gendarmerie (carabinieri reali).
5. Matt., xix., 21; Luke, ix., 1-6; Matt., xvi., 24-26. The agreement of tradition upon these passages is
complete. 3 Soc., 29; 2 Cel., 1, 10; Bon., 28; Spec., 5b.; Conform., 37b. 2, 47a. 2; Fior., 2;
Glassberger and the Chronicle of the xxiv. generals reversing the order (Analecta, fr., t. ii., p. 5) as
well as the Conformities in another place, 87b, 2.
6. 3 Soc., 30. Cf. Anon. Perus., A. SS., p. 581a. This scene is reported neither by Celano nor by St.
Bonaventura.
7. This date is given in the life of Brother Egidio; A. SS., Oct., t. ii., p. 572; Aprilis, t. iii., p. 220. It
fits well with the accounts. Through it we obtain the approximate date of the definitive conversion of
Francis two full years earlier.
8. 1 Cel., 25; 3 Soc., 23; Bon. 29. Cf. Anon. Perus., A. SS., p. 582, and A. SS., Aprilis, t. iii., p. 220
ff.
9. Spec., 25a: Qualiter dixit fratri Egidio priusquam esset receptus ut daret mantellum ciudam
pauperi. In primordio religionis cum maneret apud Regum Tortum cum duobus fratribus quos tunc
tantum habehat. If we compare this passage with 3 Soc., 44, we shall doubtless arrive at the
conclusion that the account in the Speculum is more satisfactory. It is in fact very easy to understand
the optical illusion by which later on the Portiuncula was made the scene of the greater number of the
events of St. Francis's life, while it would be difficult to see why there should have been any attempt
to surround Rivo-Torto with an aureola. The Fioretti say: Ando inverso lo spedale dei lebbrosi, which
confirms the indication of Rivo-Torto. Vita d' Egidio, § 1.
10. An. Perus, A. SS., p. 582. Cf. Fior., Vita di Egidio, 1; Spec., 124, 136; 2 Cel., 3, 68; A. SS.,
Aprilis, t. iii., p. 227.
11. Spec., 34a; Conform., 219b, 1; Ant. fr., p. 96.
12. The Gyrovagi. Tr.

13. 3 Soc. 32-34; 1 Cel., 27 and 28; Bon., 31.
14. 3 Soc., 35. Cf. Anon. Perus.; A. SS., p. 584.
15. Later on, naturally, it was desired that Francis should have had no better supporter than Guido;
some have even made him out to be his spiritual director (St. François, Plon, p. 24)! We have an
indirect but unexceptionable proof of the reserve with which these pious traditions must be accepted;
Francis did not even tell his bishop (pater et dominus animarum, 3 Soc., 29) of his design of having
his Rule approved by the pope. This is the more striking because the bishop would have been his
natural advocate at the court of Rome, and because in the absence of any other reason the most
elementary politeness required that he should have been informed. Add to this that bishops in Italy
are not, as elsewhere, functionaries approached with difficulty by the common run of mortals.
Almost every village in Umbria has its bishop, so that their importance is hardly greater than that of
the curé of a French canton. Furthermore, several pontifical documents throw a sombre light on
Guido's character. In a chapter of the decretals of Honorius III. (Quinta compil., lib. ii., tit. iii., cap. i.)
is given a complaint against this bishop, brought before the curia by the Crucigeri of the hospital San
Salvatore delle Pareti (suburbs of Assisi), of having maltreated two of their number, and having
stolen a part of the wine belonging to the convent: pro eo quod Aegidium presbyterum, et fratrem
eorem conversum violentas manus injecerat ... adjiciens quod idem hospitale quadam vini quantitate
fuerat per eumdem episcopum spoliatum. Honorii opera, Horoy's edition, t. i., col. 200 ff. Cf.
Potthast, 7746. The mention of the hospital de Pariete proves beyond question that the Bishop of
Assisi is here concerned and not the Bishop of Osimo, as some critics have suggested.
Another document shows him at strife with the Benedictines of Mount Subasio (the very ones who
afterward gave Portiuncula to Francis), and Honorius III. found the bishop in the wrong: Bull
Conquerente œconomo monasterii ap. Richter, Corpus juris canonici. Leipzig, 1839, 4to, Horoy, loc.
cit., t. i., col. 163; Potthast, 7728.
16. 3 Soc., 36 and 37. Cf. Anon. Perus. ap., A. SS., p. 585; Test. B. Francisci.
17. 3 Soc., 38-41.

CHAPTER VI
ST. FRANCIS AND INNOCENT III

Summer 12101

Seeing the number of his friars daily increasing, Francis decided to write
the Rule of the Order and go to Rome to procure its approval by the Pope.
This resolution was not lightly taken. It would be a mistake in fact to take
Francis for one of those inspired ones who rush into action upon the
strength of unexpected revelations, and, thanks to their faith in their own
infallibility, overawe the multitude. On the contrary, he was filled with a
real humility, and if he believed that God reveals himself in prayer, he never
for that absolved himself from the duty of reflection nor even from
reconsidering his decisions. St. Bonaventura does him great wrong in
picturing the greater number of his important resolutions as taken in
consequence of dreams; this is to rob his life of its profound originality, his
sanctity of its choicest blossom. He was of those who struggle, and, to use
one of the noblest expressions of the Bible, of those who by their
perseverance conquer their souls. Thus we shall see him continually
retouching the Rule of his institute, unceasingly revising it down to the last
moment, according as the growth of the Order and experience of the human
heart suggested to him modifications of it.2
The first Rule which he submitted to Rome has not come down to us; we
only know that it was extremely simple, and composed especially of
passages from the Gospels. It was doubtless only the repetition of those
verses which Francis had read to his first companions, with a few precepts
about manual labor and the occupations of the new brethren.3
It will be well to pause here and consider the brethren who are about to
set out for Rome. The biographies are in agreement as to their number; they
were twelve, including Francis; but the moment they undertake to give a
name to each one of them difficulties begin to arise, and it is only by some
exegetical sleight of hand that they can claim to have reconciled the various

documents. The table given below4 briefly shows these difficulties. The
question took on some importance when in the fourteenth century men
undertook to show an exact conformity between the life of St. Francis and
that of Jesus. It is without interest to us. The profiles of two or three of these
brethren stand out very clearly in the picture of the origins of the Order;
others remind one of the pictures of primitive Umbrian masters, where the
figures of the background have a modest and tender grace, but no shadow
of personality. The first Franciscans had all the virtues, including the one
which is nearly always wanting, willingness to remain unknown.
In the Lower Church of Assisi there is an ancient fresco representing five
of the companions of St. Francis. Above them is a Madonna by Cimabue,
upon which they are gazing with all their soul. It would be more true if St.
Francis were there in the place of the Madonna; one is always changed into
the image of what one admires, and they resemble their master and one
another.5 To attempt to give them a name is to make a sort of psychological
error and become guilty of infidelity to their memory; the only name they
would have desired is that of their father. His love changed their hearts and
shed over their whole persons a radiance of light and joy. These are the true
personages of the Fioretti, the men who brought peace to cities, awakened
consciences, changed hearts, conversed with birds, tamed wolves. Of them
one may truly say: "Having nothing, yet possessing all things" (Nihil
habentes, omnia possidentes).
They quitted Portiuncula full of joy and confidence. Francis was too
much absorbed in thought not to desire to place in other hands the direction
of the little company.
"Let us choose," he said, "one from among ourselves to guide
us, and let him be to us as the vicar of Jesus Christ. Wherever it
may please him to go we will go, and when he may wish to stop
anywhere to sleep there we will stop." They chose Brother
Bernardo and did as Francis had said. They went on full of joy,
and all their conversations had for their object only the glory of
God and the salvation of their souls.
Their journey was happily accomplished. Everywhere they
found kindly souls who sheltered them, and they felt beyond a
doubt that God was taking care of them.6

Francis's thoughts were all fixed upon the purpose of their journey; he
thought of it day and night, and naturally interpreted his dreams with
reference to it. One time, in his dream, he saw himself walking along a road
beside which was a gigantic and wonderfully beautiful tree. And, behold,
while he looked upon it, filled with wonder, he felt himself become so tall
that he could touch the boughs, and at the same time the tree bent down its
branches to him.7 He awoke full of joy, sure of a gracious reception by the
sovereign pontiff.
His hopes were to be somewhat blighted. Innocent III. had now for
twelve years occupied the throne of St. Peter. Still young, energetic,
resolute, he enjoyed that superfluity of authority given by success. Coming
after the feeble Celestine III., he had been able in a few years to reconquer
the temporal domain of the Church, and so to improve the papal influence
as almost to realize the theocratic dreams of Gregory VII. He had seen King
Pedro of Aragon declaring himself his vassal and laying his crown upon the
tomb of the apostles, that he might take it back at his hands. At the other
end of Europe, John Lackland had been obliged to receive his crown from a
legate after having sworn homage, fealty, and an annual tribute to the Holy
See. Preaching union to the cities and republics of Italy, causing the cry
Italia! Italia! to resound like the shout of a trumpet, he was the natural
representative of the national awakening, and appeared to be in some sort
the suzerain of the emperor, as he was already that of other kings. Finally,
by his efforts to purify the Church, by his indomitable firmness in
defending morality and law in the affair of Ingelburge and in many others,
he was gaining a moral strength which in times so disquieted was all the
more powerful for being so rare.
But this incomparable power had its hidden dangers. Occupied with
defending the prerogatives of the Holy See, Innocent came to forget that the
Church does not exist for herself, that her supremacy is only a transitory
means; and one part of his pontificate may be likened to wars, legitimate in
the beginning, in which the conqueror keeps on with depredations and
massacres for no reason, except that he is intoxicated with blood and
success.
And so Rome, which canonized the petty Celestine V., refused this
supreme consecration to the glorious Innocent III. With exquisite tact she
perceived that he was rather king than priest, rather pope than saint.

When he suppressed ecclesiastical disorders it was less for love of good
than for hatred of evil; it was the judge who condemns or threatens, himself
always supported by the law, not the father who weeps his son's offence.
This priest did not comprehend the great movement of his age—the
awakening of love, of poetry, of liberty. I have already said that at the
opening of the thirteenth century the Middle Age was twenty years old.
Innocent III. undertook to treat it as if it were only fifteen. Possessed by his
civil and religious dogmas as others are by their educational doctrines, he
never suspected the unsatisfied longings, the dreams, unreasoning perhaps,
but beneficent and divine, that were dumbly stirring in the depths of men's
hearts. He was a believer, although certain sayings of the historians8 open
the door to some doubts on this point, but he drew his religion rather from
the Old Testament than from the New, and if he often thought of Moses, the
leader of his people, nothing reminded him of Jesus, the shepherd of souls.
One cannot be everything; a choice intelligence, an iron will9 are a
sufficient portion even for a priest-god; he lacked love. The death of this
pontiff, great among the great ones, was destined to be saluted with songs
of joy.10
His reception of Francis furnished to Giotto, the friend of Dante, one of
his most striking frescos; the pope, seated on his throne, turns abruptly
toward Francis. He frowns, for he does not understand, and yet he feels a
strange power in this mean and despised man, vilis et despectus; he makes a
real but futile effort to comprehend, and now I see in this pope, who lived
upon lemons,11 something that recalls another choice mind, theocratic like
his own, sacrificed like him to his work: Calvin. One might think that the
painter had touched his lips to the Calabrian Seer's cup, and that in the
attitude of these two men he sought to symbolize a meeting of
representatives of the two ages of humanity, that of Law and that of Love.12
A surprise awaited the pilgrims on their arrival in Rome: they met the
Bishop of Assisi,13 quite as much to his astonishment as to their own. This
detail is precious because it proves that Francis had not confided his plans
to Guido. Notwithstanding this the bishop, it is said, offered to make
interest for them with the princes of the Church. We may suspect that his
commendations were not very warm. At all events they did not avail to save
Francis and his company either from a searching inquiry or from the
extended fatherly counsels of Cardinal Giovanni di San Paolo14 upon the

difficulties of the Rule, counsels which strongly resemble those of Guido
himself.15
What Francis asked for was simple enough; he claimed no privilege of
any sort, but only that the pope would approve of his undertaking to lead a
life of absolute conformity to the precepts of the gospel. There is a delicate
point here which it is quite worth while to see clearly. The pope was not
called upon to approve the Rule, since that came from Jesus himself; at the
very worst all that he could do would be to lay an ecclesiastical censure
upon Francis and his companions for having acted without authority, and to
enjoin them to leave to the secular and regular clergy the task of reforming
the Church.
Cardinal Giovanni di San Paolo, to whom the Bishop of Assisi presented
them, had informed himself of the whole history of the Penitents. He
lavished upon them the most affectionate tokens of interest, even going so
far as to beg for a mention in their prayers. But such assurances, which
appear to have been always the small change of the court of Rome, did not
prevent his examining them for several successive days,16 and putting to
them an infinite number of questions, of which the conclusion was always
the advice to enter some Order already existing.
To this the unlucky Francis would reply as best he could, often not
without embarrassment, for he had no wish to appear to think lightly of the
cardinal's counsels, and yet he felt in his heart the imperious desire to obey
his vocation. The prelate would then return to the charge, insinuating that
they would find it very hard to persevere, that the enthusiasm of the early
days would pass away, and again pointing out a more easy course. He was
obliged in the end to own himself vanquished. The persistence of Francis,
who had never weakened for an instant nor doubted his mission, begat in
him a sort of awe, while the perfect humility of the Penitents and their
simple and striking fidelity to the Roman Church reassured him in the
matter of heresy.
He announced to them, therefore, that he would speak of them to the
pope, and would act as their advocate with him. According to the Three
Companions he said to the pope: "I have found a man of the highest
perfection, who desires to live in conformity with the Holy Gospel and
observe evangelical perfection in all things. I believe that by him the Lord

intends to reform the faith of the Holy Church throughout the whole
world."17
On the morrow he presented Francis and his companions to Innocent III.
Naturally, the pope was not sparing of expressions of sympathy, but he also
repeated to them the remarks and counsels which they had already heard so
often. "My dear children," he said, "your life appears to me too severe; I see
indeed that your fervor is too great for any doubt of you to be possible, but I
ought to consider those who shall come after you, lest your mode of life
should be beyond their strength."18
Adding a few kind words, he dismissed them without coming to any
definite conclusion, promising to consult the cardinals, and advising Francis
in particular to address himself to God, to the end that he might manifest his
will.
Francis's anxiety must have been great; he could not understand these
dilatory measures, these expressions of affection which never led to a
categorical approbation. It seemed to him that he had said all that he had to
say. For new arguments he had only one resource—prayer.
He felt his prayer answered when in his conversation with Jesus the
parable of poverty came to him; he returned to lay it before the pope.
There was in the desert a woman who was very poor, but
beautiful. A great king, seeing her beauty, desired to take her for
his wife, for he thought that by her he should have beautiful
children. The marriage contracted and consummated, many sons
were born to him. When they were grown up, their mother spoke
to them thus: "My sons, you have no cause to blush, for you are
the sons of the king; go, therefore, to his court, and he will give
you everything you need."
When they arrived at the court the king admired their beauty,
and finding in them his own likeness he asked, "Whose sons are
you?" And when they replied that they were the sons of a poor
woman who lived in the desert, the king clasped them to his
heart with joy saying, "Have no fear, for you are my sons; if
strangers eat at my table, much more shall you who are my
lawful sons." Then the king sent word to the woman to send to

his court all the sons which she had borne, that they might be
nourished there.
"Very holy father," added Francis, "I am this poor woman
whom God in his love has deigned to make beautiful, and of
whom he has been pleased to have lawful sons. The King of
Kings has told me that he will provide for all the sons which he
may have of me, for if he sustains bastards, how much more his
legitimate sons."19
So much simplicity, joined with such pious obstinacy, at last conquered
Innocent. In the humble mendicant he perceived an apostle and prophet
whose mouth no power could close. Successor of St. Peter and vicar of
Jesus Christ that he felt himself, he saw in the mean and despised man
before him one who with the authority of absolute faith proclaimed himself
the root of a new lineage of most legitimate Christians.
The biographers have held that by this parable Francis sought above all
things to tranquillize the pope as to the future of the brethren; they find in it
a reply to the anxieties of the pontiff, who feared to see them starve to
death. There can be no doubt that its original meaning was totally different.
It shows that with all his humility Francis knew how to speak out boldly,
and that all his respect for the Church could not hinder his seeing, and,
when necessary, saying, that he and his brethren were the lawful sons of the
gospel, of which the members of the clergy were only extranei. We shall
find in the course of his life more than one example of this indomitable
boldness, which disarmed Innocent III. as well as the future Gregory IX.
In a consistory which doubtless was held between the two audiences
some of the cardinals expressed the opinion that the initiative of the
Penitents of Assisi was an innovation, and that their mode of life was
entirely beyond human power. "But," replied Giovanni di San Paolo, "if we
hold that to observe gospel perfection and make profession of it is an
irrational and impossible innovation, are we not convicted of blasphemy
against Christ, the author of the gospel?"20
These words struck Innocent III. with great force; he knew better than
any one that the possessions of the ecclesiastics were the great obstacles to
the reform of the Church, and that the threatened success of the Albigensian

heresy was especially due to the fact that it preached the doctrine of
poverty.
Two years before he had accorded his approbation to a group of
Waldensians, who under the name Poor Catholics had desired to remain
faithful to the Church;21 he therefore gave his approval to the Penitents of
Assisi, but, as a contemporary chronicler has well observed, it was in the
hope that they would wrest the banner from heresy.22
Yet his doubts and hesitations were not entirely dissipated. He reserved
his definitive approbation, therefore, while lavishing upon the brothers the
most affectionate tokens of interest. He authorized them to continue their
missions everywhere, after having gained the consent of their ordinaries. He
required, however, that they should give themselves a responsible superior
to whom the ecclesiastical authorities could always address themselves.
Naturally, Francis was chosen.23 This fact, so humble in appearance,
definitively constituted the Franciscan family.
The mystics whom we saw going from village to village transported with
love and liberty accepted the yoke almost without thinking about it. This
yoke will preserve them from the disintegration of the heretics, but it will
make itself sharply felt by those pure souls; they will one day look back to
the early days of the Order as the only time when their life was truly
conformed to the gospel.
When Francis heard the words of the supreme pontiff he prostrated
himself at his feet, promising the most perfect obedience with all his heart.
The pope blessed them, saying: "Go, my brethren, and may God be with
you. Preach penitence to everyone according as the Lord may deign to
inspire you. Then when the All-powerful shall have made you multiply and
go forward, you will refer to us; we will concede what you ask, and we may
then with greater security accord to you even more than you ask."24
Francis and his companions were too little familiar with Roman
phraseology to perceive that after all the Holy See had simply consented to
suspend judgment in view of the uprightness of their intentions and the
purity of their faith.25
The flowers of clerical rhetoric hid from them the shackles which had
been laid upon them. The curia, in fact, was not satisfied with Francis's vow

of fidelity, it desired in addition to stamp the Penitents with the seal of the
Church: the Cardinal of San Paolo was deputed to confer upon them the
tonsure. From this time they were all under the spiritual authority of the
Roman Church.
The thoroughly lay creation of St. Francis had become, in spite of
himself, an ecclesiastical institution: it must soon degenerate into a clerical
institution. All unawares, the Franciscan movement had been unfaithful to
its origin. The prophet had abdicated in favor of the priest, not indeed
without possibility of return, for when a man has once reigned, I would say,
thought, in liberty—what other kingdom is there on this earth?—he makes
but an indifferent slave; in vain he tries to submit; in spite of himself it
happens at times that he lifts his head proudly, he rattles his chains, he
remembers the struggles, sadness, anguish of the days of liberty, and weeps
their loss. Among the sons of St. Francis many were destined to weep their
lost liberty, many to die to conquer it again.

FOOTNOTES
1. The date usually fixed for the approval of the Rule by Innocent III. is the month of August, 1209.
The Bollandists had thought themselves able to infer it from the account where Thomas of Celano (1
Cel., 43) refers to the passage through Umbria of the Emperor Otho IV., on his way to be crowned at
Rome (October 4, 1209). Upon this journey see Böhmer-Ficker, Regesta Imperii. Dei Regesten des
Kaiserreichs unter Philipp, Otto IV., etc., Insbruck, 1879, 4to, pp. 96 and 97. As this account follows
that of the approval, they conclude that the latter was earlier. But Thomas of Celano puts this account
there because the context led up to it, and not in order to fix its date. Everything leads to the belief
that the Brothers retired (recolligebat, 1 Cel., 42) to Rivo-Torto before and after their journey to
Rome. Besides, the time between April 23d and the middle of August, 1209, is much too short for all
that the biographers tell us about the life of the Brothers before their visit to Innocent III. The mission
to Florence took place in winter, or at least in a very cold month. But the decisive argument is that
Innocent III. quitted Rome toward the end of May, 1209, and went to Viterbo, returning only to
crown Otho, October 4th (Potthast, 3727-3803). It is therefore absolutely necessary to postpone to
the summer of 1210 the visit of the Penitents to the pope. This is also the date which Wadding arrives
at.
2. 3 Soc., 35.
3. 1 Cel., 32; 3 Soc., 51; Bon., 34. Cf. Test. B. Fr. M. K. Müller of Halle, in his Anfänge, has made a
very remarkable study of the Rule of 1221, whence he deduces an earlier Rule, which he believes to
be that of 1209 (1210). For once I find myself entirely in accord with him, except that the Rule thus
reconstructed (Vide Anfänge, pp. 14-25, 184-188) appears to me to be not that of 1210, which was
very short, but another, drawn up between 1210 and 1221. The plures regulas fecit of the 3 Soc., 35,
authorizes us to believe that he made perhaps as many as four—1st, 1210, very short, containing little
more than the three passages of the vocation; 2d, 1217 (?), substantially that proposed by M. Müller;
3d, 1221, that of which we shall speak at length farther on; 4th, 1226, the Will, which if not a Rule is

at least an appendix to the Rule. If from 1221-1226 he had time to make two Rules and the Will, as is
universally admitted, there is nothing surprising in his having made two from 1210-1221. Perhaps we
have a fragment of that of 1217 in the regulation of hermitages. Vide below, p. 109.
4. Thomas of Celano's list. 1, Quidam pium gerens animum; 2, Bernardus; 3, Vir alter; 4, Ægidius; 5,
Unus alius appositus; 6, Philippus; 7, Alius bonus vir; 8, 9, 10, 11, Quatuor boni et idonei viri. 1
Cel., 24, 25, 29, 31. The Rinaldi-Amoni text says nothing of the last four. Three Companions: 1,
Bernardus; 2, Petrus; 3, Ægidius; 4, Sabbatinus; 5, Moritus; Johannes Capella; 7, 8, 9, 10, 11,
Disciples received by the brethren in their missions. 3 Soc., 33, 35, 41, 46, 52. Bonaventura: 1,
Bernardus; 2, ... 3, Ægidius; 4, 5, ... 6, Silvestro; 7, Alius bonus viri; 8, 9, 10, 11, Quatuor viri
honesti. Bon., 28, 29, 30, 31, 33. The Fioretti, while insisting on the importance of the twelve
Franciscan apostles, cite only six in their list: Giovanni di Capella, Egidio, Philip, Silvestro,
Bernardo, and Rufino. Fior., 1. We must go to the Conformities to find the traditional list, fo 46b 1: 1,
Bernardus de Quintavalle; 2, Petrus Chatanii; 3, Egidius; 4, Sabatinus; 5, Moricus; 6, Johannes de
Capella; 7, Philippus Longus; 8, Johannes de Sancto Constantio; 9, Barbarus; 10, Bernardus de
Cleviridante (sic); 11, Angelus Tancredi; 12, Sylvester. As will be seen, in the last two documents
twelve disciples are in question, while in the preceding ones there are only eleven. This is enough to
show a dogmatic purpose. This list reappears exactly in the Speculum, with the sole difference that
Francis being there included Angelo di Tancrede is the twelfth brother and Silvestro disappears.
Spec., 87a.
5. According to tradition, the five compagni del Santo buried there beside their master are Bernardo,
Silvestro, William (an Englishman), Eletto, and Valentino(?)
6. 3 Soc., 46; 1 Cel., 32; Bon., 34.
7. 1 Cel., 33; 3 Soc., 53; Bon., 35.
8. St. Ludgarde (1182-1246) sees him condemned to Purgatory till the Last Judgment. Life of this
saint by Thomas of Catimpré in Surius: Vitæ SS. (1618), vi., 215-226.
9. Vir clari ingenii, magnæ probitatis et sapientiæ, cui nullus secundus tempore suo: Rigordus, de
gestis Philippi Augusti in Duchesne. Historiæ Francorum scriptores coætanei, t. v., p. 60.—Nec
similem sui scientia, facundia, decretorum et legum perititia, strenuitate, judiciorum nec adhuc visus
est habere sequentem. Cf. Mencken, Script. rer. Sax., Leipzig, 1728, t. iii., p. 252. Innocentius, qui
vere stupor mundi erat et immutator sæculi. Cotton, Hist. Anglicana, Luard, 1859, p. 107.
10. Cujus finis lætitiem potius quam tristitiam generavit subjectis. Alberic delle Tre Fontane.
Leibnitz, Accessiones historicæ, t. ii., p. 492.
11. Decidit in acutam (febrem) quam cum multis diebus fovisset nec a citris quibus in magna
quantitatæ et ex consuetudine vescebatur ... minime abstineret ... ad ultimum in lethargia prolapsus
vitam finivit. Alberic delle Tre Fontane, loc. cit.
12. Fresco in the great nave of the Upper Church of Assisi.
13. 1 Cel., 32; 3 Soc., 47.
14. Of the Colonna family; he died in 1216. Cf. 3 Soc., 61. Vide Cardella, Memorie storiche de'
Cardinali, 9 vols., 8vo, Rome, 1792 ff., t. i., p. 177. He was at Rome in the summer of 1210, for on
the 11th of August he countersigned the bull Religiosem vitam. Potthast, 4061. Angelo Clareno
relates the approbation with more precision in certain respects: Cum vero Summo Pontifici ea quæ
postulabat [Franciscus] ardua valde et quasi impossibilia viderentur infirmitate hominum sui
temporis, exhortabatur eum, quod aliquem ordinem vel regulam de approbatis assumeret, at ipse se a
Christo missum ad talem vitam et non aliam postulandam constanter affirmans, fixus in sua petitione
permansit. Tunc dominus Johannes de Sancto Paulo episcopus Sabinensis et dominus Hugo

episcopus Hostiensis Dei spiritu moti assisterunt Sancto Francisco et pro his quæ petebat coram
summo Pontifice et Cardinalibus plura proposuerunt rationabilia et efficacia valde. Tribul.
Laurentinian MS., fo 6a. This intervention of Ugolini is mentioned in no other document. It is,
however, by no means impossible. He also was in Rome in the summer of 1210. (Vide Potthast, p.
462.)
15. 1 Cel., 32 and 33; 3 Soc., 47 and 48. Cf. An. Per., A. SS., p. 590.
16. 1 Cel., 33.
17. 3 Soc., 48.
18. 3 Soc., 49; 1 Cel., 33; Bon., 35 and 36. All this has been much worked over by tradition and gives
us only an echo of the reality. It would certainly have needed very little for the Penitents to meet the
same fate before Innocent III. as the Waldenses before Lucius III. Traces of this interview are found
in two texts which appear to me to be too suspicious to warrant their insertion in the body of the
narrative. The first is a fragment of Matthew Paris: Papa itaque in fratre memorato habitum
deformem, vultum despicabilem, barbam prolixam, capillos incultos, supercilia pendentia et nigra
diligenter considerans; cum petitionem ejus tam arduam et executione impossibilem recitare fecisset,
despexit cum et dixit: Vade frater, et quære porcus, quibus potius debes quam hominibus comparari,
et involve te cum eis in volutabro, et regulam illis a te commentatam tradens, officium tuæ
prædicationis impende. Quod audiens Franciscus inclinato capite exixit et porcis tandem inventis, in
luto se cum eis tamdiu involvit quousque a planta pedis usque ad verticem, corpus suum totum cum
ipso habitu polluisset. Sicque ad consistorium revertens Papæ se conspectibus præsentavit dicens:
Domine feci sicut præcepisti exaudi nunc obsecro petitionem meam. Ed. Wats, p. 340. The incident
has a real Franciscan color, and should have some historic basis. Curiously, it in some sort meets a
passage in the legend of Bonaventura which is an interpolation of the end of the thirteenth century.
See A. SS., p. 591.
19. 3 Soc., 50 and 51; Bon., 37; 2 Cel., 1, 11; Bernard de Besse, Turin MS., fo 101b. Ubertini di
Casali (Arbor vitæ crucifixæ, Venice, 1485, lib. v., cap. iii.) tells a curious story in which he depicts
the indignation of the prelates against Francis. Quænam hæc est doctrina nova quam infers auribus
nostris? Quis potest vivere sine temporalium possessione? Numquid tu melior es quam patres nostri
qui dederunt nobis temporalia et in temporalibus abundantes ecclesias possiderunt? Then follows
the fine prayer inserted by Wadding in Francis's works. The central idea is the same as in the parable
of poverty. This story, though not referable to any source, has nevertheless its importance, since it
shows how in the year 1300 a man who had all the documents before his eyes, represented to himself
Francis's early steps.
20. Bon., 36.
21. The attempt of Durand of Huesca to create a mendicant order has not yet been studied with
sufficient minuteness. Chief of the Waldenses of Aragon, he was present in 1207 at the conference of
Pamiers, and decided to return to the Church. Received with kindness by the pope he at first had a
great success, and by 1209 had established communities in Aragon, at Carcassonne, Narbonne,
Béziers, Nimes, Uzès, Milan. We find in this movement all the lineaments of the institute of St.
Dominic; it was an order of priests to whom theological studies were recommended. They
disappeared almost completely in the storm of the Albigensian crusade. Innocent III., epistolæ, xi.,
196, 197, 198; xii., 17, 66; xiii., 63, 77, 78, 94; xv., 82, 83, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 137, 146. The first
of these bulls contains the very curious Rule of this ephemeral order. Upon its disappearance vide
Ripoli, Bullarium Prædicatorum, 8 vols., folio, Rome, 1729-1740, t. i., p. 96. Cf. Elie Berger,
Registres d'Innocent IV., 2752.
22. Burchard, of the order of the Premostrari, who died in 1226. See below, p. 234.

23. 3 Soc., 52; Bon., 38.
24. 3 Soc., 52 and 49.
25. St. Antonino, Archbishop of Florence, saw very clearly that it was quædam concessio simplex
habitus et modi illius vivendi et quasi permissio. A. SS., p. 839. The expression "approbation of the
Rule" by which the act of Innocent III. is usually designated is therefore erroneous.

CHAPTER VII
RIVO-TORTO

1210—1211

The Penitents of Assisi were overflowing with joy. After so many
mortally long days spent in that Rome, so different from the other cities that
they knew, exposed to the ill-disguised suspicions of the prelates and the
jeers of pontifical lackeys, the day of departure seemed to them like a
deliverance. At the thought of once more seeing their beloved mountains
they were seized by that homesickness of the child for its native village
which simple and kindly souls preserve till their latest breath.
Immediately after the ceremony they prayed at the tomb of St. Peter, and
then crossing the whole city they quitted Rome by the Porta Salara.
Thomas of Celano, very brief as to all that concerns Francis's sojourn in
the Eternal City, recounts at full length the light-heartedness of the little
band on quitting it. Already it began to be transfigured in their memory;
pains, fatigues, fears, disquietude, hesitations were all forgotten; they
thought only of the fatherly assurances of the supreme pontiff—the vicar of
Christ, the lord and father of the Christian universe—and promised
themselves to make ever new efforts to follow the Rule with fidelity.
Full of these thoughts they had set out, without provisions, to cross the
Campagna of Rome, whose few inhabitants never venture out in the heat of
the day. The road stretches away northward, keeping at some distance from
the Tiber; on the left the jagged crest of Soracte, bathed in mists formed by
the exhalations of the earth, looms up disproportionately as it fades in the
distance; on the right, the everlasting undulations of the hillocks with their
wide pastures separated by thickets so parched and ragged that they seemed
to cry for mercy and pardon. Between them the dusty road which goes
straight forward, implacable, showing, as far as the eye can reach, nothing
but the quivering of the fiery air. Not a house, not a tree, not a passing
breeze, nothing to sustain the traveller under the disquietude which creeps

over him. Here and there are a few abandoned huts, their ruins looking like
the corpses of departed civilizations, and on the edge of the horizon the hills
rising up like gigantic and unsurmountable walls.
There are no words to describe the physical and moral sufferings to
which he is exposed who undertakes without proper preparation to cross
this inhospitable district. To the weakness caused by lack of air soon
succeeds an insurmountable lassitude. The feet sink in a soft, tenuous dust
which every step sends up in clouds; it covers you, penetrates your skin,
and parches your mouth even more than thirst. Little by little all energy
ebbs away, a dumb dejection seizes you, sight and thought become alike
confused, fever ensues, and you cast yourself down by the roadside, unable
to take another step.
In their haste to leave Rome Francis and his companions had forgotten all
this, and had imprudently set forth. They would have succumbed if a chance
traveller had not brought them succor. He was obliged to leave them before
they had shaken off the last hallucinations of fever, leaving them amazed
with the unexpected succor which Providence had sent them.1
They were so severely shattered that on arriving at Orte they were
obliged to stop awhile. In a desert spot not far from this city they found a
shelter admirably adapted to serve them for refuge;2 it was one of those
Etruscan tombs so common in that country, whose chambers serve to this
day as a shelter for beggars and gypsies. While some of the brethren
hastened to the city to beg for food, the others remained in this solitude
enjoying the happiness of being together, forming a thousand plans, and
more than ever delighting in the charm of freedom from care and
renunciation of material goods.
This place had so strong an attraction for them that it required an effort of
will to quit it at the end of a fortnight. The seduction of a life purely
contemplative assailed Francis, and he asked himself if instead of preaching
to the multitudes he would not do better to live in retreat, solely mindful of
the inward dialogue between the soul and God.3
This aspiration for the selfish repose of the cloister came back to him
several times in his life; but love always won the victory. He was too much
the child of his time not to be at times tempted by that happiness which the
Middle Ages regarded as the supreme bliss of the elect in paradise—peace.

Beati mortui quia quiescunt! His distinguishing peculiarity is that he never
gave way to it.
The reflections of Francis and his companions during their stay at Orte
only made their apostolic mission more clear and imperative to them. He,
above all, seemed to be filled with a new ardor, and like a valiant knight he
burned to throw himself into the thick of the fray.
Their way now led through the valley of the Nera. The contrast between
these cool glens, awake with a thousand voices, and the desolation of the
Roman Campagna, must have struck them vividly; the stream is only a
swollen torrent, but it runs so noisily over pebbles and rocks that it seems to
be conversing with them and with the trees of the neighboring forest. In
proportion as they had felt themselves alone on the road from Rome to
Otricoli, they now felt themselves compassed about with the life, the
fecundity, the gayety of the country.
The account of Thomas of Celano becomes so animated as it describes
the life of Francis at this epoch that one cannot help thinking that at this
time he must have seen him, and that this first meeting remained always in
his memory as the radiant dawn of his spiritual life.4
The Brothers had taken to preaching in such places as they came upon
along their route. Their words were always pretty much the same, they
showed the blessedness of peace and exhorted to penitence. Emboldened by
the welcome they had received at Rome, which in all innocence they might
have taken to be more favorable than it really was, they told the story to
everyone they met, and thus set all scruples at rest.
These exhortations, in which Francis spared not his hearers, but in which
the sternest reproaches were mingled with so much of love, produced an
enormous effect. Man desires above all things to be loved, and when he
meets one who loves him sincerely he very seldom refuses him either his
love or his admiration.
It is only a low understanding that confounds love with weakness and
compliance. We sometimes see sick men feverishly kissing the hand of the
surgeon who performs an operation upon them; we sometimes do the same
for our spiritual surgeons, for we realize all that there is of vigor, pity,

compassion in the tortures which they inflict, and the cries which they force
from us are quite as much of gratitude as of pain.
Men hastened from all parts to hear these preachers who were more
severe upon themselves than on anyone else. Members of the secular clergy,
monks, learned men, rich men even, often mingled in the impromptu
audiences gathered in the streets and public places. All were not converted,
but it would have been very difficult for any of them to forget this stranger
whom they met one day upon their way, and who in a few words had
moved them to the very bottom of their hearts with anxiety and fear.
Francis was in truth, as Celano says, the bright morning star. His simple
preaching took hold on consciences, snatched his hearers from the mire and
blood in which they were painfully trudging, and in spite of themselves
carried them to the very heavens, to those serene regions where all is silent
save the voice of the heavenly Father. "The whole country trembled, the
barren land was already covered with a rich harvest, the withered vine
began again to blossom."5
Only a profoundly religious and poetic soul (is not the one the other?)
can understand the transports of joy which overflowed the souls of St.
Francis's spiritual sons.
The greatest crime of our industrial and commercial civilization is that it
leaves us a taste only for that which may be bought with money, and makes
us overlook the purest and truest joys which are all the time within our
reach. The evil has roots far in the past. "Wherefore," said the God of old
Isaiah, "do you weigh money for that which is not meat? why labor for that
which satisfieth not? Hearken unto me, and ye shall eat that which is good,
and your soul shall delight itself in fatness."6
Joys bought with money—noisy, feverish pleasures—are nothing
compared with those sweet, quiet, modest but profound, lasting, and
peaceful joys, enlarging, not wearying the heart, which we too often pass by
on one side, like those peasants whom we see going into ecstasies over the
fireworks of a fair, while they have not so much as a glance for the glorious
splendors of a summer night.
In the plain of Assisi, at an hour's walk from the city and near the
highway between Perugia and Rome, was a ruinous cottage called Rivo-

Torto. A torrent, almost always dry, but capable of becoming terrible in a
storm, descends from Mount Subasio and passes beside it. The ruin had no
owner; it had served as a leper hospital before the construction by the
Crucigeri7 of their hospital San Salvatore delle Pareti; but since that time it
had been abandoned. Now came Francis and his companions to seek shelter
there.8 It is one of the quietest spots in the suburbs of Assisi, and from
thence they could easily go out into the neighborhood in all directions; it
being about an equal distance from Portiuncula and St. Damian. But the
principal motive for the choice of the place seems to have been the
proximity of the Carceri, as those shallow natural grottos are called which
are found in the forests, half way up the side of Mount Subasio. Following
up the bed of the torrent of Rivo-Torto one reaches them in an hour by way
of rugged and slippery paths where the very goats do not willingly venture.
Once arrived, one might fancy oneself a thousand leagues from any human
being, so numerous are the birds of prey which live here quite undisturbed.9
Francis loved this solitude and often retired thither with a few
companions. The brethren in that case shared between them all care of their
material wants, after which, each one retiring into one of these caves, they
were able for a few days to listen only to the inner voice.
These little hermitages, sufficiently isolated to secure them from
disturbance, but near enough to the cities to permit their going thither to
preach, may be found wherever Francis went. They form, as it were, a
series of documents about his life quite as important as the written
witnesses. Something of his soul may still be found in these caverns in the
Apennine forests. He never separated the contemplative from the active life.
A precious witness to this fact is found in the regulations for the brethren
during their sojourn in hermitage.10
The return of the Brothers to Rivo-Torto was marked by a vast increase
of popularity. The prejudiced attacks to which they had formerly been
subjected were lost in a chorus of praises. Perhaps men suspected the ill-
will of the bishop and were happy to see him checked. However this may
be, a lively feeling of sympathy and admiration was awakened; the people
recalled to mind the indifference manifested by the son of Bernardone a few
months before with regard to Otho IV. going to be crowned at Rome. The
emperor had made a progress through Italy with a numerous suite and a
pomp designed to produce an effect on the minds of the populace; but not

only had Francis not interrupted his work to go and see him, he had
enjoined upon his friars also to abstain from going, and had merely selected
one of them to carry to the monarch a reminder of the ephemeral nature of
worldly glory. Later on it was held that he had predicted to the emperor his
approaching excommunication.
This spirited attitude made a vivid impression on the popular
imagination.11 Perhaps it was of more service in forming general opinion
than anything he had done thus far. The masses, who are not often alive to
delicate sentiments, respond quickly to those who, whether rightly or
wrongly, do not bow down before power. This time they perceived that
where other men would see the poor, the rich, the noble, the common, the
learned, Francis saw only souls, which were to him the more precious as
they were more neglected or despised.
No biographer informs us how long the Penitents remained at Rivo-
Torto. It seems probable, however, that they spent there the latter part of
1210 and the early months of 1211, evangelizing the towns and villages of
the neighborhood.
They suffered much; this part of the plain of Assisi is inundated by
torrents nearly every autumn, and many times the poor friars, blockaded in
the lazaretto, were forced to satisfy their hunger with a few roots from the
neighboring fields.
The barrack in which they lived was so narrow that, when they were all
there at once, they had much difficulty not to crowd one another. To secure
to each one his due quota of space, Francis wrote the name of each brother
upon the column which supports the building. But these minor discomforts
in no sense disturbed their happiness. No apprehension had as yet come to
cloud Francis's hopes; he was overflowing with joy and kindliness; all the
memories which Rivo-Torto has left with the Order are fresh and sweet
pictures of him.12
One night all the brethren seemed to be sleeping, when he heard a
moaning. It was one of his sheep, to speak after the manner of the
Franciscan biographer, who had denied himself too rigorously and was
dying of hunger. Francis immediately rose, called the brother to him,
brought forth the meagre reserve of food, and himself began to eat to

inspire the other with courage, explaining to him that if penitence is good it
is still necessary to temper it with discretion.13
Francis had that tact of the heart which divines the secrets of others and
anticipates their desires. At another time, still at Rivo-Torto, he took a sick
brother by the hand, led him to a grape-vine, and, presenting him with a fine
cluster, began himself to eat of it. It was nothing, but the simple act so
bound to him the sick man's heart that many years after the brother could
not speak of it without emotion.14
But Francis was far from neglecting his mission. Ever growing more
sure, not of himself but of his duty toward men, he took part in the political
and social affairs of his province with the confidence of an upright and pure
heart, never able to understand how stupidity, perverseness, pride, and
indolence, by leaguing themselves together, may check the finest and most
righteous impulses. He had the faith which removes mountains, and was
wholly free from that touch of scepticism, so common in our day, which
points out that it is of no more use to move mountains than to change the
place of difficulties.
When the people of Assisi learned that his Rule had been approved by the
pope there was strong excitement; every one desired to hear him preach.
The clergy were obliged to give way; they offered him the Church of St.
George, but this church was manifestly insufficient for the crowds of
hearers; it was necessary to open the cathedral to him.
St. Francis never said anything especially new; to win hearts he had that
which is worth more than any arts of oratory—an ardent conviction; he
spoke as compelled by the imperious need of kindling others with the flame
that burned within himself. When they heard him recall the horrors of war,
the crimes of the populace, the laxity of the great, the rapacity which
dishonored the Church, the age-long widowhood of Poverty, each one felt
himself taken to task in his own conscience.
An attentive or excited crowd is always very impressionable, but this
peculiar sensitiveness was perhaps stronger in the Middle Ages than at any
other time. Nervous disturbances were in the air, and upon men thus
prepared the will of the preacher impressed itself in a manner almost
magnetic.

To understand what Francis's preaching must have been like we must
forget the manners of to-day, and transport ourselves for a moment to the
Cathedral of Assisi in the thirteenth century; it is still standing, but the
centuries have given to its stones a fine rust of polished bronze, which
recalls Venice and Titian's tones of ruddy gold. It was new then, and all
sparkling with whiteness, with the fine rosy tinge of the stones of Mount
Subasio. It had been built by the people of Assisi a few years before in one
of those outbursts of faith and union which were almost everywhere the
prelude of the communal movement. So, when the people thronged into it
on their high days, they not merely had none of that vague respect for a
holy place which, though it has passed into the customs of other countries,
still continues to be unknown in Italy, but they felt themselves at home in a
palace which they had built for themselves. More than in any other church
they there felt themselves at liberty to criticise the preacher, and they had no
hesitation in proving to him, either by murmurs of dissatisfaction or by
applause, just what they thought of his words. We must remember also that
the churches of Italy have neither pews nor chairs, that one must listen
standing or kneeling, while the preacher walks about gesticulating on a
platform; add to this the general curiosity, the clamorous sympathies of
many, the disguised opposition of some, and we shall have a vague notion
of the conditions under which Francis first entered the pulpit of San Rufino.
His success was startling. The poor felt that they had found a friend, a
brother, a champion, almost an avenger. The thoughts which they hardly
dared murmur beneath their breath Francis proclaimed at the top of his
voice, daring to bid all, without distinction, to repent and love one another.
His words were a cry of the heart, an appeal to the consciences of all his
fellow-citizens, almost recalling the passionate utterances of the prophets of
Israel. Like those witnesses for Jehovah the "little poor man" of Assisi had
put on sackcloth and ashes to denounce the iniquities of his people, like
theirs was his courage and heroism, like theirs the divine tenderness in his
heart.
It seemed as if Assisi were about to recover again the feeling of Israel for
sin. The effect of these appeals was prodigious; the entire population was
thrilled, conquered, desiring in future to live only according to Francis's
counsels; his very companions, who had remained behind at Rivo-Torto,
hearing of these marvels, felt in themselves an answering thrill, and their

vocation took on a new strength; during the night they seemed to see their
master in a chariot of fire, soaring to heaven like a new Elijah.15
This almost delirious enthusiasm of a whole people was not perhaps so
difficult to arouse as might be supposed: the emotional power of the masses
was at that time as great all over Europe as it was in Paris during certain
days of the Revolution. We all know the tragic and touching story of those
companies of children from the north of Europe who appeared in 1212 in
troops of several thousands, boys and girls mingled together pell-mell.
Nothing could stop them, a mania had overtaken them, in all good faith they
believed that they were to deliver the Holy Land, that the sea would be
dried up to let them pass. They perished, we hardly know how, perhaps
being sold into slavery.16 They were accounted martyrs, and rightly; popular
devotion likened them to the Holy Innocents, dying for a God whom they
knew not. Those children of the crusade also perished for an unknown ideal,
false no doubt; but is it not better to die for an unknown and even a false
ideal than to live for the vain realities of an utterly unpoetic existence? In
the end of time we shall be judged neither by philosophers nor by
theologians, and if we were, it is to be hoped that even in this case love
would cover a multitude of sins and pass by many follies.
Certainly if ever there was a time when religious affections of the nerves
were to be dreaded, it was that which produced such movements as these.
All Europe seemed to be beside itself; women appeared stark naked in the
streets of towns and villages, slowly walking up and down, silent as
phantoms.17 We can understand now the accounts which have come down to
us, so fantastic at the first glance, of certain popular orators of this time; of
Berthold of Ratisbon, for example, who drew together crowds of sixteen
thousand persons, or of that Fra Giovanni Schio di Vicenza, who for a time
quieted all Northern Italy and brought Guelphs and Ghibellines into one
another's arms.18
That popular eloquence which was to accomplish so many marvels in
1233 comes down in a straight line from the Franciscan movement. It was
St. Francis who set the example of those open-air sermons given in the
vulgar tongue, at street corners, in public squares, in the fields.
To feel the change which he brought about we must read the sermons of
his contemporaries; declamatory, scholastic, subtile, they delighted in the

minutiæ of exegesis or dogma, serving up refined dissertations on the most
obscure texts of the Old Testament, to hearers starving for a simple and
wholesome diet.
With Francis, on the contrary, all is incisive, clear, practical. He pays no
attention to the precepts of the rhetoricians, he forgets himself completely,
thinking only of the end desired, the conversion of souls. And conversion
was not in his view something vague and indistinct, which must take place
only between God and the hearer. No, he will have immediate and practical
proofs of conversion. Men must give up ill-gotten gains, renounce their
enmities, be reconciled with their adversaries.
At Assisi he threw himself valiantly into the thick of civil dissensions.
The agreement of 1202 between the parties who divided the city had been
wholly ephemeral. The common people were continually demanding new
liberties, which the nobles and burghers would yield to them only under the
pressure of fear. Francis took up the cause of the weak, the minores, and
succeeded in reconciling them with the rich, the majores.
His spiritual family had not as yet, properly speaking, a name, for, unlike
those too hasty spirits who baptize their productions before they have come
to light, he was waiting for the occasion that should reveal the true name
which he ought to give it.19 One day someone was reading the Rule in his
presence. When he came to the passage, "Let the brethren, wherever they
may find themselves called to labor or to serve, never take an office which
shall put them over others, but on the contrary, let them be always under
(sint minores) all those who may be in that house,"20 these words sint
minores of the Rule, in the circumstances then existing in the city, suddenly
appeared to him as a providential indication. His institution should be called
the Order of the Brothers Minor.
We may imagine the effect of this determination. The Saint, for already
this magic word had burst forth where he appeared,21 the Saint had spoken.
It was he who was about to bring peace to the city, acting as arbiter between
the two factions which rent it.
We still possess the document of this pace civile, exhumed, so to speak,
from the communal archives of Assisi by the learned and pious Antonio
Cristofani.22 The opening lines are as follows:

"In the name of God!
"May the supreme grace of the Holy Spirit assist us! To the
honor of our Lord Jesus Christ, the blessed Virgin Mary, the
Emperor Otho, and Duke Leopold.
"This is the statute and perpetual agreement between the
Majori and Minori of Assisi.
"Without common consent there shall never be any sort of
alliance either with the pope and his nuncios or legates, or with
the emperor, or with the king, or with their nuncios or legates, or
with any city or town, or with any important person, except with
a common accord they shall do all which there may be to do for
the honor, safety, and advantage of the commune of Assisi."
What follows is worthy of the beginning. The lords, in consideration of a
small periodical payment, should renounce all the feudal rights; the
inhabitants of the villages subject to Assisi were put on a par with those of
the city, foreigners were protected, the assessment of taxes was fixed. On
Wednesday, November 9, 1210, this agreement was signed and sworn to in
the public place of Assisi; it was made in such good faith that exiles were
able to return in peace, and from this day we find in the city registers the
names of those émigrés who, in 1202, had betrayed their city and provoked
the disastrous war with Perugia. Francis might well be happy. Love had
triumphed, and for several years there were at Assisi neither victors nor
vanquished.
In the mystic marriages which here and there in history unite a man to a
people, something takes place of which the transports of sense, the delirium
of love, seem to be the only symbol; a moment comes in which saints, or
men of genius, feel unknown powers striving mightily within them; they
strive, they seek, they struggle until, triumphing over all obstacles, they
have forced trembling, swooning humanity to conceive by them.
This moment had come to St. Francis.

FOOTNOTES
1. 1 Cel., 34; 3 Soc., 53; Bon., 39.

2. Probably at Otricoli, which lies on the high-road between Rome and Spoleto. Orte is an hour and a
half further on. It is the ancient Otriculum, where many antiquities have been found.
3. 1 Cel., 35; Bon., 40 and 41.
4. The only road connecting Celano with Rome, as well as with all Central and Northern Italy, passes
by Aquila, Rieti, and Terni, where it joins the high-roads leading from the north toward Rome.
5. 1 Cel., 36 and 37; 3 Soc., 54; Bon., 45-48.
6. Isaiah, lv., 2.
7. This Order deserves to be better known; it was founded under Alexander III. and rapidly spread all
over Central Italy and the East. In Francis's lifetime it had in Italy and the Holy Land about forty
houses dedicated to the care of lepers. It is very probable that it was at San Salvatore delle Pareti that
Francis visited these unhappy sufferers. He there made the particular acquaintance of a Cruciger
named Morico. The latter afterward falling ill, Francis sent him a remedy which would cure him,
informing him at the same time that he was to become his disciple, which shortly afterward took
place. The hospital San Salvatore has disappeared; it stood in the place now called Ospedaletto,
where a small chapel now stands half way between Assisi and Santa Maria degli Angeli. It was from
there that the dying Francis blessed Assisi. For Morico vide 3 Soc., 35; Bon., 49; 2 Cel., 3, 128;
Conform., 63b.—For the hospital vide Bon., 49; Conform., 135a, 1; Honorii III. opera, Horoy, t. i.,
col. 206. Cf. Potthast, 7746; L. Auvray, Registres de Grégoire IX., Paris, 1890, 4to, no. 209. For the
Crucigeri in the time of St. Francis vide the interesting bull Cum tu fili prior, of July 8, 1203; Migne,
Inn. op., t. ii., col. 125 ff. Cf. Potthast, 1959, and Cum pastoris, April 5, 1204; Migne, loc. cit., 319.
Cf. Potthast, 2169 and 4474.
8. 3 Soc., 55.
9. All this yet remains in its primitive state. The road which went from Assisi to the now ruined
Abbey of Mount Subasio (almost on the summit of the mountain) passed the Carceri, where there
was a little chapel built by the Benedictines.
10. Illi qui religiose volunt stare in eremis sint tres aut quatuor ad plus. Duo ex ipsis sint matres, et
habeant duos filios, vel unum ad minus. Illi duo teneant vitam Marthæ et alii duo vitam Mariæ
Magdalenæ. Assisi MS., 338, 43a-b; text given also in Conf., 143a, 1, from which Wadding borrows
it for his edition of the Opuscules of St. Francis. Cf. 2 Cel., 3, 113. It is possible that we have here a
fragment of the Rule, which must have been composed toward 1217.
11. 1 Cel., 42 and 43; 3 Soc., 55; Bon., 41.
12. 1 Cel., 42-44.
13. 2 Cel., 1, 15; Bon., 65. These two authors do not say where the event took place; but there
appears to be no reason for suspecting the indication of Rivo-Torto given by the Speculum, fo. 21a.
14. 2 Cel., 3, 110. Cf. Spec., 22a.
15. 1 Cel., 47; Bon., 43.
16. There are few events of the thirteenth century that offer more documents or are more obscure
than this one. The chroniclers of the most different countries speak of it at length. Here is one of the
shortest but most exact of the notices, given by an eye-witness (Annals of Genoa of the years 1197-
1219, apud Mon. Germ. hist. Script., t. 18): 1212 in mense Augusti, die Sabbati, octava Kalendarum
Septembris, intravit civitatem Janue quidam puer Teutonicus nomine Nicholaus peregrinationis
causa, et cum eo multitudo maxima pelegrinorum defferentes cruces et bordonos atque scarsellas
ultra septem millia arbitratu boni viri inter homines et feminas et puellos et puellas. Et die dominica
sequenti de civitate exierunt.—Cf. Giacomo di Viraggio: Muratori, t. ix., col. 46: Dicebant quod

mare debebat apud Januam siccari et sic ipsi debebant in Hierusalem proficisci. Multi autem inter
eos erant filii Nobilium, quos ipsi etiam cum meretricibus destinarunt (!) The most tragic account is
that of Alberic, who relates the fate of the company that embarked at Marseilles. Mon. Ger. hist.
Script., t. 23, p. 894.
17. The Benedictine chronicler, Albert von Stade (Mon. Ger. hist. Script., t. 16, pp. 271-379), thus
closes his notice of the children's crusade: Adhuc quo devenerint ignorantur sed plurimi redierunt, a
quibus cum quæreretur causa cursus dixerunt se nescire. Nudæ etiam mulieres circa idem tempus
nihil loquentes per villas et civitates cucurrerunt. Loc. cit., p. 355.
18. Chron. Veronese, ann. 1238 (Muratori, Scriptores Rer. Ital., t. viii., p. 626). Cf. Barbarano de'
Mironi: Hist. Eccles. di Vicenza, t. ii., pp. 79-84.
19. The Brothers were at first called Viri pænitentiales de civitate Assisii (3 Soc., 37); it appears that
they had a momentary thought of calling themselves Pauperes de Assisio, but they were doubtless
dissuaded from this at Rome, as too closely resembling that of the Pauperes de Lugduno. Vide
Burchardi chronicon., p. 376; vide Introd., cap. 5.
20. Vide Rule of 1221, cap. 7. Cf. 1 Cel., 38, and Bon., 78.
21. 1 Cel., 36.
22. Storia d'Assisi, t. i., pp. 123-129.

CHAPTER VIII
PORTIUNCULA

1211

It was doubtless toward the spring of 1211 that the Brothers quitted Rivo-
Torto. They were engaged in prayer one day, when a peasant appeared with
an ass, which he noisily drove before him into the poor shelter.
"Go in, go in!" he cried to his beast; "we shall be most comfortable here."
It appeared that he was afraid that if the Brothers remained there much
longer they would begin to think this deserted place was their own.1 Such
rudeness was very displeasing to Francis, who immediately arose and
departed, followed by his companions.
Now that they were so numerous the Brothers could no longer continue
their wandering life in all respects as in the past; they had need of a
permanent shelter and above all of a little chapel. They addressed
themselves in vain first to the bishop and then to the canons of San Rufino
for the loan of what they needed, but were more fortunate with the abbot of
the Benedictines of Mount Subasio, who ceded to them in perpetuity the use
of a chapel already very dear to their hearts, Santa Maria degli Angeli or the
Portiuncula.2
Francis was enchanted; he saw a mysterious harmony, ordained by God
himself, between the name of the humble sanctuary and that of his Order.
The brethren quickly built for themselves a few huts; a quickset hedge
served as enclosing wall, and thus in three or four days was organized the
first Franciscan convent.
For ten years they were satisfied with this. These ten years are the heroic
period of the Order. St. Francis, in full possession of his ideal, will seek to
inculcate it upon his disciples and will succeed sometimes; but already the
too rapid multiplication of the brotherhood will provoke some symptoms of
relaxation.

The remembrance of the beginning of this period has drawn from the lips
of Thomas of Celano a sort of canticle in honor of the monastic life. It is the
burning and untranslatable commentary of the Psalmist's cry: "Behold how
sweet and pleasant it is to be brethren and to dwell together."
Their cloister was the forest which then extended on all sides of
Portiuncula, occupying a large part of the plain. There they gathered around
their master to receive his spiritual counsels, and thither they retired to
meditate and pray.3 It would be a gross mistake, however, to suppose that
contemplation absorbed them completely during the days which were not
consecrated to missionary tours: a part of their time was spent in manual
labor.
The intentions of St. Francis have been more misapprehended on this
point than on any other, but it may be said that nowhere is he more clear
than when he ordains that his friars shall gain their livelihood by the work
of their hands. He never dreamed of creating a mendicant order, he created
a laboring order. It is true we shall often see him begging and urging his
disciples to do as much, but these incidents ought not to mislead us; they
are meant to teach that when a friar arrived in any locality and there spent
his strength for long days in dispensing spiritual bread to famished souls, he
ought not to blush to receive material bread in exchange. To work was the
rule, to beg the exception; but this exception was in nowise dishonorable.
Did not Jesus, the Virgin, the disciples live on bread bestowed? Was it not
rendering a great service to those to whom they resorted to teach them
charity?
Francis in his poetic language gave the name of mensa Domini, the table
of the Lord, to this table of love around which gathered the little poor ones.
The bread of charity is the bread of angels; and it is also that of the birds,
which reap not nor gather into barns.
We are far enough, in this case, from that mendicity which is understood
as a means of existence and the essential condition of a life of idleness. It is
the opposite extreme, and we are true and just to St. Francis and to the
origin of the mendicant orders only when we do not separate the obligation
of labor from the praise of mendicity.4
No doubt this zeal did not last long, and Thomas of Celano already
entitles his chapters, "Lament before God over the idleness and gluttony of

the friars;" but we must not permit this speedy and inevitable decadence to
veil from our sight the holy and manly beauty of the origin.
With all his gentleness Francis knew how to show an inflexible severity
toward the idle; he even went so far as to dismiss a friar who refused to
work.5 Nothing in this matter better shows the intentions of the Poverello
than the life of Brother Egidio, one of his dearest companions, him of
whom he said with a smile: "He is one of the paladins of my Round Table."
Brother Egidio had a taste for great adventures, and is a living example
of a Franciscan of the earliest days; he survived his master twenty-five
years, and never ceased to obey the letter and spirit of the Rule with
freedom and simplicity.
We find him one day setting out on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
Arrived at Brindisi, he borrowed a water-jug that he might carry water
while he was awaiting the departure of the ship, and passed a part of every
day in crying through the streets of the city: "Alla fresca! Alla fresca!" like
other water-carriers. But he would change his trade according to the country
and the circumstances; on his way back, at Ancona, he procured willow for
making baskets, which he afterward sold, not for money but for his food. It
even happened to him to be employed in burying the dead.
Sent to Rome, every morning after finishing his religious duties, he
would take a walk of several leagues, to a certain forest, whence he brought
a load of wood. Coming back one day he met a lady who wanted to buy it;
they agreed on a price, and Egidio carried it to her house. But when he
arrived at the house she perceived him to be a friar, and would have given
him more than the price agreed upon. "My good lady," he replied, "I will
not permit myself to be overcome by avarice," and he departed without
accepting anything at all.
In the olive season he helped in the gathering; in grape season he offered
himself as vintager. One day on the Piazza di Roma, where men are hired
for day's work, he saw a padrone who could not find a man to thrash his
walnut tree; it was so high that no one dared risk himself in it. "If you will
give me part of the nuts," said Egidio, "I will do it willingly." The bargain
struck and the tree thrashed, there proved to be so many nuts that he did not
know where to put his share. Gathering up his tunic he made a bag of it and

full of joy returned to Rome, where he distributed them among all the poor
whom he met.
Is not this a charming incident? Does it not by itself alone reveal the
freshness, the youth, the kindness of heart of the first Franciscans? There is
no end to the stories of the ingenuousness of Brother Egidio. All kinds of
work seemed good to him provided he had time enough in the morning for
his religious duties. Now he is in the service of the Cellarer of the Four
Crowns at Rome, sifting flour and carrying water to the convent from the
well of San Sisto. Now he is at Rieti, where he consents to remain with
Cardinal Nicholas, bringing to every meal the bread which he had earned,
notwithstanding the entreaties of the master of the house, who would gladly
have provided for his wants. One day it rained so hard that Brother Egidio
could not think of going out; the cardinal was already making merry over
the thought that he would be forced to accept bread that he had not earned.
But Egidio went to the kitchen, and finding that it needed cleaning he
persuaded the cook to let him sweep it, and returned triumphant with the
bread he had earned, which he ate at the cardinal's table.6
From the very beginning Egidio's life commanded respect; it was at once
so original, so gay, so spiritual,7 and so mystical, that even in the least exact
and most expanded accounts his legend has remained almost free from all
addition. He is, after St. Francis, the finest incarnation of the Franciscan
spirit.
The incidents which are here cited are all, so to speak, illustrations of the
Rule; in fact there is nothing more explicit than its commands with respect
to work.
The Brothers, after entering upon the Order, were to continue to exercise
the calling which they had when in the world, and if they had none they
were to learn one. For payment they were to accept only the food that was
necessary for them, but in case that was insufficient they might beg. In
addition they were naturally permitted to own the instruments of their
calling.8 Brother Ginepro, whose acquaintance we shall make further on,
had an awl, and gained his bread wherever he went by mending shoes, and
we see St. Clara working even on her death-bed.
This obligation to work with the hands merits all the more to be brought
into the light, because it was destined hardly to survive St. Francis, and

because to it is due in part the original character of the first generation of
the Order. Yet this was not the real reason for the being of the Brothers
Minor. Their mission consisted above all in being the spouses of Poverty.
Terrified by the ecclesiastical disorders of the time, haunted by painful
memories of his past life, Francis saw in money the special instrument of
the devil; in moments of excitement he went so far as to execrate it, as if
there had been in the metal itself a sort of magical power and secret curse.
Money was truly for him the sacrament of evil.
This is not the place for asking if he was wrong; grave authors have
demonstrated at length the economic troubles which would have been let
loose upon the world if men had followed him. Alas! his madness, if
madness it were, is a kind of which one need not fear the contagion.
He felt that in this respect the Rule could not be too absolute, and that if
unfortunately the door was opened to various interpretations of it, there
would be no stopping-point. The course of events and the periodical
convulsions which shook his Order show clearly enough how rightly he
judged.
I do not know nor desire to know if theologians have yet come to a
scientific conclusion with regard to the poverty of Jesus, but it seems
evident to me that poverty with the labor of the hands is the ideal held up by
the Galilean to the efforts of his disciples.
Still it is easy to see that Franciscan poverty is neither to be confounded
with the unfeeling pride of the stoic, nor with the stupid horror of all joy felt
by certain devotees; St. Francis renounced everything only that he might the
better possess everything. The lives of the immense majority of our
contemporaries are ruled by the fatal error that the more one possesses the
more one enjoys. Our exterior, civil liberties continually increase, but at the
same time our inward freedom is taking flight; how many are there among
us who are literally possessed by what they possess?9
Poverty not only permitted the Brothers to mingle with the poor and
speak to them with authority, but, removing from them all material anxiety,
it left them free to enjoy without hindrance those hidden treasures which
nature reserves for pure idealists.

The ever-thickening barriers which modern life, with its sickly search for
useless comfort, has set up between us and nature did not exist for these
men, so full of youth and life, eager for wide spaces and the outer air. This
is what gave St. Francis and his companions that quick susceptibility to
Nature which made them thrill in mysterious harmony with her. Their
communion with Nature was so intimate, so ardent, that Umbria, with the
harmonious poetry of its skies, the joyful outburst of its spring-time, is still
the best document from which to study them. The tie between the two is so
indissoluble, that after having lived a certain time in company with St.
Francis, one can hardly, on reading certain passages of his biographers, help
seeing the spot where the incident took place, hearing the vague sounds of
creatures and things, precisely as, when reading certain pages of a beloved
author, one hears the sound of his voice.
The worship of Poverty of the early Franciscans had in it, then, nothing
ascetic or barbarous, nothing which recalls the Stylites or the Nazirs. She
was their bride, and like true lovers they felt no fatigues which they might
endure to find and remain near her.
La lor concordia e lor lieti sembianti,
Amor e maraviglia e dolce sguardo
Facean esser cagion de' pensier santi.10
To draw the portrait of an ideal knight at the beginning of the thirteenth
century is to draw Francis's very portrait, with this difference, that what the
knight did for his lady, he did for Poverty. This comparison is not a mere
caprice; he himself profoundly felt it and expressed it with perfect
clearness, and it is only by keeping it clearly present in the mind that we
can see into the very depth of his heart.11
To find any other souls of the same nature one must come down to
Giovanni di Parma and Jacoponi di Todi. The life of St. Francis as
troubadour has been written; it would have been better to write it as knight,
for this is the explanation of his whole life, and as it were the heart of his
heart. From the day when, forgetting the songs of his friends and suddenly
stopped in the public place of Assisi, he met Poverty, his bride, and swore to
her faith and love, down to that evening when, naked upon the naked earth
of Portiuncula, he breathed out his life, it may be said that all his thoughts
went out to this lady of his chaste loves. For twenty years he served her

without faltering, sometimes with an artlessness which would appear
infantine, if something infinitely sincere and sublime did not arrest the
smile upon the most sceptical lips.
Poverty agreed marvellously with that need which men had at that time,
and which perhaps they have lost less than they suppose, the need of an
ideal very high, very pure, mysterious, inaccessible, which yet they may
picture to themselves in concrete form. Sometimes a few privileged
disciples saw the lovely and pure Lady descend from heaven to salute her
spouse, but, whether visible or not, she always kept close beside her
Umbrian lover, as she kept close beside the Galilean; in the stable of the
nativity, upon the cross at Golgotha, and even in the borrowed tomb where
his body lay.
During several years this ideal was not alone that of St. Francis, but also
of all the Brothers. In poverty the gente poverelle had found safety, love,
liberty; and all the efforts of the new apostles are directed to the keeping of
this precious treasure.
Their worship sometimes might seem excessive. They showed their
spouse those delicate attentions, those refinements of courtesy so frequent
in the morning light of a betrothal, but which one gradually forgets till they
become incomprehensible.12
The number of disciples continually increased; almost every week
brought new recruits; the year 1211 was without doubt devoted by Francis
to a tour in Umbria and the neighboring provinces. His sermons were short
appeals to conscience; his heart went out to his hearers in ineffable tones, so
that when men tried to repeat what they had heard they found themselves
incapable.13 The Rule of 1221 has preserved for us a summary of these
appeals:
"Here is an exhortation which all the Brothers may make
when they think best: Fear and honor God, praise and bless him.
Give thanks unto him. Adore the Lord, Almighty God, in Trinity
and unity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Repent and
make fruits meet for repentance, for you know that we shall
soon die. Give, and it shall be given unto you. Forgive, and you
shall be forgiven; for if you forgive not, God will not forgive
you. Blessed are they who die repenting, for they shall be in the

kingdom of heaven.... Abstain carefully from all evil, and
persevere in the good until the end."14
We see how simple and purely ethical was the early Franciscan
preaching. The complications of dogma and scholasticism are entirely
absent from it. To understand how new this was and how refreshing to the
soul we must study the disciples that came after him.
With St. Anthony of Padua ( June 13, 1231; canonized in 123315), the
most illustrious of them all, the descent is immense. The distance between
these two men is as great as that which separates Jesus from St. Paul.
I do not judge the disciple; he was of his time in not knowing how to say
simply what he thought, in always desiring to subtilize it, to extract it from
passages in the Bible turned from their natural meaning by efforts at once
laborious and puerile; what the alchemists did in their continual making of
strange mixtures from which they fancied that they should bring out gold,
the preachers did to the texts, in order to bring out the truth.
The originality of St. Francis is only the more brilliant and meritorious;
with him gospel simplicity reappeared upon the earth.16 Like the lark with
which he so much loved to compare himself,17 he was at his ease only in the
open sky. He remained thus until his death. The epistle to all Christians
which he dictated in the last weeks of his life repeats the same ideas in the
same terms, perhaps with a little more feeling and a shade of sadness. The
evening breeze which breathed upon his face and bore away his words was
their symbolical accompaniment.
"I, Brother Francis, the least of your servants, pray and conjure you by
that Love which is God himself, willing to throw myself at your feet and
kiss them, to receive with humility and love these words and all others of
our Lord Jesus Christ, to put them to profit and carry them out."
This was not a more or less oratorical formula. Hence conversions
multiplied with an incredible rapidity. Often, as formerly with Jesus, a look,
a word sufficed Francis to attach to himself men who would follow him
until their death. It is impossible, alas! to analyze the best of this eloquence,
all made of love, intimate apprehension, and fire. The written word can no
more give an idea of it than it can give us an idea of a sonata of Beethoven
or a painting by Rembrandt. We are often amazed, on reading the memoirs

of those who have been great conquerors of souls, to find ourselves
remaining cold, finding in them all no trace of animation or originality. It is
because we have only a lifeless relic in the hand; the soul is gone. It is the
white wafer of the sacrament, but how shall that rouse in us the emotions of
the beloved disciple lying on the Lord's breast on the night of the Last
Supper?
The class from which Francis recruited his disciples was still about the
same; they were nearly all young men of Assisi and its environs, some the
sons of agriculturists, and others nobles; the School and the Church was
very little represented among them.18
Everything still went on with an unheard-of simplicity. In theory,
obedience to the superior was absolute; in practice, we can see Francis
continually giving his companions complete liberty of action.19 Men entered
the Order without a novitiate of any sort; it sufficed to say to Francis that
they wanted to lead with him a life of evangelical perfection, and to prove it
by giving all that they possessed to the poor. The more unpretending were
the neophytes, the more tenderness he had for them. Like his Master, he had
a partiality for those who were lost, for men whom regular society casts out
of its limits, but who with all their crimes and scandals are nearer to
sainthood than mediocrities and hypocrites.
One day St. Francis, passing by the desert of Borgo San
Sepolcro came to a place called Monte-Casale,20 and behold a
noble and refined young man came to him. "Father," he said, "I
would gladly be one of your disciples."
"My son," said St. Francis, "you are young, refined, and
noble; you will not be able to follow poverty and live wretched
like us."
"But, my father, are not you men like me? What you do I can
do with the grace of Jesus." This reply was well-pleasing to St.
Francis, who, giving him his blessing, incontinently received
him into the Order under the name of Brother Angelo.
He conducted himself so well that a little while after he was
made guardian21 of Monte-Casale. Now, in those times there
were three famous robbers who did much evil in the country.

They came to the hermitage one day to beg Brother Angelo to
give them something to eat; but he replied to them with severe
reproaches: "What! robbers, evil-doers, assassins, have you not
only no shame for stealing the goods of others, but you would
farther devour the alms of the servants of God, you who are not
worthy to live, and who have respect neither for men nor for
God your Creator. Depart, and let me never see you here again!"
They went away full of rage. But behold, the Saint returned,
bringing a wallet of bread and a bottle of wine which had been
given him, and the guardian told him how he had sent away the
robbers; then St. Francis reproved him severely for showing
himself so cruel.... "I command thee by thine obedience," said
he, "to take at once this loaf and this wine and go seek the
robbers by hill and dell until you have found them, to offer them
this as from me, and to kneel there before them and humbly ask
their pardon, and pray them in my name no longer to do wrong
but to fear God; and if they do it, I promise to provide for all
their wants, to see that they always have enough to eat and
drink. After that you may humbly return hither."
Brother Angelo did all that had been commanded him, while
St. Francis on his part prayed God to convert the robbers. They
returned with the brother, and when St. Francis gave them the
assurance of the pardon of God, they changed their lives and
entered the Order, in which they lived and died most holily.22
What has sometimes been said of the voice of the blood is still more true
of the voice of the soul. When a man truly wakens another to moral life, he
gains for himself an unspeakable gratitude. The word master is often
profaned, but it can express the noblest and purest of earthly ties.
Who are those among us, who in the hours of manly innocence when
they examine their own consciences, do not see rising up before them from
out of the past the ever beloved and loving face of one who, perhaps
without knowing it, initiated them into spiritual things? At such a time we
would throw ourselves at the feet of this father, would tell him in burning
words of our admiration and gratitude. We cannot do it, for the soul has its
own bashfulness; but who knows that our disquietude and embarrassment

do not betray us, and unveil, better than words could do, the depths of our
heart? The air they breathed at Portiuncula was all impregnated with joy
and gratitude like this.
To many of the Brothers, St. Francis was truly a saviour; he had delivered
them from chains heavier than those of prisons. And therefore their greatest
desire was in their turn to call others to this same liberty.
We have already seen Brother Bernardo on a mission to Florence a few
months after his entrance into the Order. Arrived at maturity when he put on
the habit, he appears in some degree the senior of this apostolic college. He
knew how to obey St. Francis and remain faithful to the very end to the
ideal of the early days; but he had no longer that privilege of the young—of
Brother Leo, for example—of being able to transform himself almost
entirely into the image of him whom he admired. His physiognomy has not
that touch of juvenile originality, of poetic fancy, which is so great a charm
of the others.
Toward this epoch two Brothers entered the Order, men such as the
successors of St. Francis never received, whose history throws a bright light
on the simplicity of the early days. It will be remembered with what zeal
Francis had repaired several churches; his solicitude went further; he saw a
sort of profanation in the negligence with which most of them were kept;
the want of cleanliness of the sacred objects, ill-concealed by tinsel, gave
him a sort of pain, and it often happened that when he was going to preach
somewhere he secretly called together the priests of the locality and
implored them to look after the decency of the service. But even in these
cases he was not content to preach only in words; binding together some
stalks of heather he would make them into brooms for sweeping out the
churches.
One day in the suburbs of Assisi he was performing this task when a
peasant appeared, who had left his oxen and cart out in the fields while he
came to gaze at him.
"Brother," said he on entering, "give me the broom. I will
help you," and he swept out the rest of the church.
When he had finished, "Brother," he said to Francis, "for a
long time I have decided to serve God, especially when I heard

men speak of you. But I never knew how to find you. Now it has
pleased God that we should meet, and henceforth I shall do
whatever you may please to command me."
Francis seeing his fervor felt a great joy; it seemed to him that
with his simplicity and honesty he would become a good friar.
It appears indeed that he had only too much simplicity, for after his
reception he felt himself bound to imitate every motion of the master, and
when the latter coughed, spat, or sighed, he did the same. At last Francis
noticed it and gently reproved him. Later he became so perfect that the
other friars admired him greatly, and after his death, which took place not
long after, St. Francis loved to relate his conversion, calling him not Brother
John, but Brother St. John.23
Ginepro is still more celebrated for his holy follies.
One day he went to see a sick Brother and offered him his services. The
patient confessed that he had a great longing to eat a pig's foot; the visitor
immediately rushed out, and armed with a knife ran to the neighboring
forest, where, espying a troop of pigs, he cut off a foot of one of them,
returning to the monastery full of pride over his trophy.
The owner of the pigs shortly followed, howling like mad, but Ginepro
went straight to him and pointed out with so much volubility that he had
done him a great service, that the man, after overwhelming him with
reproaches, suddenly begged pardon, killed the pig and invited all the
Brothers to feast upon it. Ginepro was probably less mad than the story
would lead us to suppose; Franciscan humility never had a more sincere
disciple; he could not endure the tokens of admiration which the populace
very early lavished on the growing Order, and which by their extravagance
contributed so much to its decadence.
One day, as he was entering Rome, the report of his arrival spread
abroad, and a great crowd came out to meet him. To escape was impossible,
but he suddenly had an inspiration; near the gate of the city some children
were playing at see-saw; to the great amazement of the Romans Ginepro
joined them, and, without heeding the salutations addressed to him,
remained so absorbed in his play that at last his indignant admirers
departed.24

It is clear that the life at Portiuncula must have been very different from
that of an ordinary convent. So much youth,25 simplicity, love, quickly drew
the eyes of men toward it. From all sides they were turned to those thatched
huts, where dwelt a spiritual family whose members loved one another
more than men love on earth, leading a life of labor, mirth, and devotion.
The humble chapel seemed a new Zion destined to enlighten the world, and
many in their dreams beheld blind humanity coming to kneel there and
recover sight.26
Among the first disciples who joined themselves to St. Francis we must
mention Brother Silvestro, the first priest who entered the Order, the very
same whom we have already seen the day that Bernardo di Quintevalle
distributed his goods among the poor. Since then he had not had a moment's
peace, bitterly reproaching himself for his avarice; night and day he thought
only of that, and in his dreams he saw Francis exorcising a horrid monster
which infested all the region.27
By his age and the nature of the memory he has left behind him Silvestro
resembles Brother Bernardo. He was what is usually understood by a holy
priest, but nothing denotes that he had the truly Franciscan love of great
enterprises, distant journeys, perilous missions. Withdrawn into one of the
grottos of the Carceri, absorbed in the contemplative life, he gave spiritual
counsels to his brethren as occasion served.28
The typical Franciscan priest is Brother Leo. The date of his entrance into
the Order is not exactly known, but we are probably not far from the truth
in placing it about 1214. Of a charming simplicity, tender, affectionate,
refined, he is, with Brother Elias, the one who plays the noblest part during
the obscure years in which the new reform was being elaborated. Becoming
Francis's confessor and secretary, treated by him as his favorite son, he
excited much opposition, and was to the end of his long life the head of the
strict observance.29
One winter's day, St. Francis was going with Brother Leo
from Perugia to Santa Maria degli Angeli, and the cold, being
intense, made them shiver; he called Brother Leo, who was
walking a little in advance, and said: "O Brother Leo, may it
please God that the Brothers Minor all over the world may give

a great example of holiness and edification; write, however, and
note with care, that not in this is the perfect joy."
St. Francis, going on a little farther, called him a second time:
"O Brother Leo, if the Brothers Minor gave sight to the blind,
healed the infirm, cast out demons, gave hearing to the deaf, or
even what is much more, if they raised the four days dead, write
that not in this is the perfect joy."
Going on a little farther he cried: "O Brother Leo, if the
Brother Minor knew all languages, all science, and all
scriptures, if he could prophesy and reveal not only future things
but even the secrets of consciences and of souls, write that not in
this consists the perfect joy."
Going a little farther St. Francis called to him again: "O
Brother Leo, little sheep of God, if the Brother Minor could
speak the language of angels, if he knew the courses of the stars
and the virtues of plants, if all the treasures of earth were
revealed to him, and he knew the qualities of birds, fishes, and
all animals, of men, trees, rocks, roots, and waters, write that not
in these is the perfect joy."
And advancing still a little farther St. Francis called loudly to
him: "O Brother Leo, if the Brother Minor could preach so well
as to convert all infidels to the faith of Christ, write that not in
this is the perfect joy."
While speaking thus they had already gone more than two
miles, and Brother Leo, full of surprise, said to him: "Father, I
pray you in God's name tell me in what consists the perfect joy."
And St. Francis replied: "When we arrive at Santa Maria degli
Angeli, soaked with rain, frozen with cold, covered with mud,
dying of hunger, and we knock and the porter comes in a rage,
saying, 'Who are you?' and we answer, 'We are two of your
brethren,' and he says, 'You lie, you are two lewd fellows who
go up and down corrupting the world and stealing the alms of
the poor. Go away from here!' and he does not open to us, but
leaves us outside shivering in the snow and rain, frozen, starved,

till night; then, if thus maltreated and turned away, we patiently
endure all without murmuring against him, if we think with
humility and charity that this porter really knows us truly and
that God makes him speak thus to us, then, O Brother Leo, write
that in this is the perfect joy.... Above all the graces and all the
gifts which the Holy Spirit gives to his friends is the grace to
conquer oneself, and willingly to suffer pain, outrages, disgrace,
and evil treatment, for the love of Christ!"30
Although by its slight and somewhat playful character this story recalls
the insipid statues of the fourteenth century, it has justly become celebrated,
its spirit is thoroughly Franciscan; that transcendent idealism, which sees in
perfection and joy two equivalent terms, and places perfect joy in the pure
and serene region of the perfecting of oneself; that sublime simplicity which
so easily puts in their true place the miracle-worker and the scholar, these
are perhaps not entirely new;31 but St. Francis must have had singular moral
strength to impose upon his contemporaries ideas in such absolute
contradiction to their habits and their hopes; for the intellectual aristocracy
of the thirteenth century with one accord found the perfect joy in
knowledge, while the people found it in miracles.
Doubtless we must not forget those great mystical families, which, all
through the Middle Ages, were the refuge of the noblest souls; but they
never had this fine simplicity. The School is always more or less the
gateway to mysticism; it is possible only to an elect of subtile minds; a
pious peasant seldom understands the Imitation.
It may be said that all St. Francis's philosophy is contained in this chapter
of the Fioretti.32 From it we foresee what will be his attitude toward
learning, and are helped to understand how it happens that this famous saint
was so poor a miracle-worker.
Twelve centuries before, Jesus had said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit.
Blessed are they who suffer." The words of St. Francis are only a
commentary, but this commentary is worthy of the text.
It remains to say a word concerning two disciples who were always
closely united with Brother Leo in the Franciscan memorials—Rufino and
Masseo.

Born of a noble family connected with that of St. Clara, the former was
soon distinguished in the Order for his visions and ecstasies, but his great
timidity checked him as soon as he tried to preach: for this reason he is
always to be found in the most isolated hermitages—Carceri, Verna,
Greccio.33
Masseo, of Marignano, a small village in the environs of Assisi, was his
very opposite; handsome, well made, witty, he attracted attention by his fine
presence and his great facility of speech; he occupies a special place in
popular Franciscan tradition. He deserves it. St. Francis, to test his humility,
made him the porter and cook of the hermitage,34 but in these functions
Masseo showed himself to be so perfectly a Minor that from that time the
master particularly loved to have him for companion in his missionary
journeys.
One day they were travelling together, when they arrived at the
intersection of the roads to Sienna, Arezzo, and Florence.
"Which one shall we take?" asked Masseo.
"Whichever one God wills."
"But how shall we know which one God wills?"
"You shall see. Go and stand at the crossing of the roads, turn round and
round as the children do, and do not stop until I bid you."
Brother Masseo began to turn; seized with a vertigo, he was nearly
falling, but caught himself up at once. Finally Francis called out, "Stop!
which way are you facing?"
"Toward Sienna."
"Very well; God wills that we go to Sienna."35
Such a method of making up one's mind is doubtless not for the daily
needs of life, but Francis employed still others, like it, if not in form at least
in fact.
Up to this time we have seen the brethren living together in their
hermitages or roving the highways, preaching repentance. It would,
however, be a mistake to think that their whole lives were passed thus. To
understand the first Franciscans we must absolutely forget what they may

have been since that time, and what monks are in general; if Portiuncula
was a monastery it was also a workshop, where each brother practised the
trade which had been his before entering the Order; but what is stranger still
to our ideas, the Brothers often went out as servants.36
Brother Egidio's case was not an exception, it was the rule. This did not
last long, for very soon the friars who entered a house as domestics came to
be treated as distinguished guests; but in the beginning they were literally
servants, and took upon themselves the most menial labors. Among the
works which they might undertake Francis recommended above all the care
of lepers. We have already seen the important part which these unfortunates
played in his conversion; he always retained for them a peculiar pity, which
he sought to make his disciples share.
For several years the Brothers Minor may be said to have gone from
lazaretto to lazaretto, preaching by day in the towns and villages, and
retiring at night to these refuges, where they rendered to these patients of
God the most repugnant services.
The Crucigeri, who took charge of the greater number of leper-houses,
always welcomed these kindly disposed aides, who, far from asking any
sort of recompense, were willing to eat whatever the patients might have
left.37 In fact, although created solely for the care of lepers, the Brothers of
this Order sometimes lost patience when the sufferers were too exacting,
and instead of being grateful had only murmurs or even reproaches for their
benefactors. In these desperate cases the intervention of Francis and his
disciples was especially precious. It often happened that a Brother was put
in special charge of a single leper, whose companion and servant he
continued to be, sometimes for a long period.38
The following narrative shows Francis's love for these unfortunates, and
his method with them.39
It happened one time that the Brothers were serving the lepers
and the sick in a hospital, near to the place where St. Francis
was. Among them was a leper who was so impatient, so cross-
grained, so unendurable, that everyone believed him to be
possessed by the devil, and rightly enough, for he heaped insults
and blows upon those who waited upon him, and what was
worse, he continually insulted and blasphemed the blessed

Christ and his most holy Mother the Virgin Mary, so that there
was no longer anyone who could or would wait upon him. The
Brothers would willingly have endured the insults and abuse
which he lavished upon them, in order to augment the merit of
their patience, but their souls could not consent to hear those
which he uttered against Christ and his Mother. They therefore
resolved to abandon this leper, but not without having told the
whole story exactly to St. Francis, who at that time was dwelling
not far away.
When they told him St. Francis betook himself to the wicked
leper; "May God give thee peace, my most dear brother," he said
to him as he drew near.
"And what peace," asked the leper, "can I receive from God,
who has taken away my peace and every good thing, and has
made my body a mass of stinking and corruption?"
St. Francis said to him: "My brother, be patient, for God gives
us diseases in this world for the salvation of our souls, and when
we endure them patiently they are the fountain of great merit to
us."
"How can I endure patiently continual pains which torture me
day and night? And it is not only my disease that I suffer from,
but the friars that you gave me to wait upon me are unendurable,
and do not take care of me as they ought."
Then St. Francis perceived that this leper was possessed by
the spirit of evil, and he betook himself to his knees in order to
pray for him. Then returning he said to him: "My son, since you
are not satisfied with the others, I will wait upon you."
"That is all very well, but what can you do for me more than
they?"
"I will do whatever you wish."
"Very well; I wish you to wash me from head to foot, for I
smell so badly that I disgust myself."

Then St. Francis made haste to heat some water with many
sweet-smelling herbs; next he took off the leper's clothes and
began to bathe him, while a Brother poured out the water. And
behold, by a divine miracle, wherever St. Francis touched him
with his holy hands the leprosy disappeared and the flesh
became perfectly sound. And in proportion as the flesh was
healed the soul of the wretched man was also healed, and he
began to feel a lively sorrow for his sins, and to weep bitterly....
And being completely healed both in body and soul, he cried
with all his might: "Woe unto me, for I have deserved hell for
the abuses and outrages which I have said and done to the
Brothers, for my impatience and my blasphemies."
One day, Brother John, whose simplicity we have already seen, and who
had been especially put in charge of a certain leper, took him for a walk to
Portiuncula, as if he had not been the victim of a contagious malady.
Reproaches were not spared him; the leper heard them and could not hide
his sadness and distress; it seemed to him like being a second time banished
from the world. Francis was quick to remark all this and to feel sharp
remorse for it; the thought of having saddened one of God's patients was
unendurable; he not only begged his pardon, but he caused food to be
served, and sitting down beside him he shared his repast, eating from the
same porringer.40 We see with what perseverance he pursued by every
means the realization of his ideal.
The details just given show the Umbrian movement, as it appears to me,
to be one of the most humble and at the same time the most sincere and
practical attempts to realize the kingdom of God on earth. How far removed
we are here from the superstitious vulgarity of the mechanical devotion, the
deceitful miracle-working of certain Catholics; how far also from the
commonplace, complacent, quibbling, theorizing Christianity of certain
Protestants!
Francis is of the race of mystics, for no intermediary comes between God
and his soul; but his mysticism is that of Jesus leading his disciples to the
Tabor of contemplation; but when, overflooded with joy, they long to build
tabernacles that they may remain on the heights and satiate themselves with
the raptures of ecstasy, "Fools," he says to them, "ye know not what ye
ask," and directing their gaze to the crowds wandering like sheep having no

shepherd, he leads them back to the plain, to the midst of those who moan,
who suffer, who blaspheme.
The higher the moral stature of Francis the more he was exposed to the
danger of being understood only by the very few, and disappointed by those
who were nearest to him. Reading the Franciscan authors, one feels every
moment how the radiant beauty of the model is marred by the awkwardness
of the disciple. It could not have been otherwise, and this difference
between this master and the companions is evident from the very
beginnings of the Order. The greater number of the biographers have drawn
the veil of oblivion over the difficulties created by certain Brothers as well
as those which came from the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but we must not
allow ourselves to be deceived by this almost universal silence.
Here and there we find indications all the more precious for being, so to
say, involuntary. Brother Rufino, for example, the same who was destined
to become one of the intimates of Francis's later days, assumed an attitude
of revolt shortly after his entrance into the Order. He thought it foolish in
Francis when, instead of leaving the friars to give themselves unceasingly
to prayer, he sent them out in all directions to wait upon lepers.41 His own
ideal was the life of the hermits of the Thebaïde, as it is related in the then
popular legends of St. Anthony, St. Paul, St. Paconius, and twenty others.
He once passed Lent in one of the grottos of the Carceri. Holy Thursday
having arrived, Francis, who was also there, summoned all the brethren
who were dispersed about the neighborhood, whether in grottos or huts, to
observe with him the memories to which this day was consecrated. Rufino
refused to come; "For that matter," he added, "I have decided to follow him
no longer; I mean to remain here and live solitary, for in this way I shall be
more surely saved than by submitting myself to this man and his nonsense."
Young and enthusiastic for the most part, it was not always without
difficulty that the Brothers formed the habit of keeping their work in the
background. Agreeing with their master as to fundamentals, they would
have liked to make more of a stir, attract public attention by more obvious
devotion; there were some among them whom it did not satisfy to be saints,
but who also wished to appear such.

FOOTNOTES

1. 1 Cel., 44; 3 Soc., 55.
2. 3 Soc., 56; Spec., 32b; Conform., 217b, 1; Fior. Bibl. Angel., Amoni, p. 378.
3. This forest has disappeared. Some of Francis's counsels have been collected in the Admonitions.
See 1 Cel., 37-41.
4. Vide Angelo Clareno, Tribul. cod. Laur., 3b.
5. 2 Cel., 3, 97 and 98. The Conformities, 142a, 1, cite textually 97 as coming from the Legenda
Antiqua. Cf. Spec., 64b.—2 Cel., 3, 21. Cf. Conform., 171a, 1; Spec., 19b. See especially Rule of
1221, cap. 7; Rule of 1223, cap. 5; the Will and 3 Soc. 41. The passage, liceat eis habere ferramenta
et instrumenta suis artibus necessaria, sufficiently proves that certain friars had real trades.
6. A. SS., Aprilis, t. iii., pp. 220-248; Fior. Vita d'Egidio; Spec., 158 ff; Conform., 53-60.
7. Other examples will be found below; it may suffice to recall here his sally: "The glorious Virgin
Mother of God had sinners for parents, she never entered any religious order, and yet she is what she
is!" A. SS., loc. cit., p. 234.
8. The passage of the Will, firmiter volo quod omnes laborent, ... has a capital importance because it
shows Francis renewing in the most solemn manner injunctions already made from the origin of the
Order. Cf. 1 Cel., 38 and 39; Conform., 219b. 1: Juvabant Fratres pauperes homines in agris eorum
et ipsi dabant postea eis de pane amore Dei. Spec., 34; 69. Vide also Archiv., t. ii., pp. 272 and 299;
Eccleston, 1 and 15; 2 Cel., 1, 12.
9. Nihil volebat proprietatis habere ut omnia plenius posset in Domino possidere. B. de Besse, 102a.
10.

Their concord and their joyous semblances
The love, the wonder and the sweet regard
They made to be the cause of holy thought.
Dante: Paradiso, canto xi., verses 76-78.
Longfellow's translation.

11. Amor factus ... castis eam, stringit amplexibus nec ad horam patitur non esse muritus. 2 Cel., 3,
1; cf. 1 Cel., 35; 51; 75; 2 Cel., 3, 128; 3 Soc., 15; 22; 33; 35; 50; Bon., 87; Fior. 13.
12. Bon., 93.—Prohibuit fratrem qui faciebat coquinam ne poneret legumina de sero in aqua calida
quæ debebat dare fratribus ad manducandum die sequenti ut observaverint illud verbum Evangelii:
Nolite solliciti esse de crastino. Spec., 15.
13. 2 Cel., 3, 50.
14. Cap., 21. Cf. Fior., I. consid., 18; 30; Conform., 103a, 2; 2 Cel., 3, 99; 100; 121. Vide Müller,
Anfänge, p. 187.
15. Vide his Opera omnia postillis illustrata, by Father de la Haye, 1739, fo. For his life, Surius and
Wadding arranged and mutilated the sources to which they had access; the Bollandists had only a
legend of the fifteenth century. The Latin manuscript 14,363 of the Bibliothèque Nationale gives one
which dates from the thirteenth. Very Rev. Father Hilary, of Paris: Saint Antoine de Padone, sa
légende primitive, Montreuil-sur-Mer, Imprimerie Notre-Dame-des-Prés, 1890, 1 vol., 8vo. Cf.
Legenda seu vita et miracula S. Antonii sæculo xiii concinnata ex cod. memb. antoniæ bibliothecæ a
P.M. Antonio Maria Josa min. comv. Bologna, 1883, 1 vol., 8vo.

16. This evangelical character of his mission is brought out in relief by all his biographers. 1 Cel., 56;
84; 89; 3 Soc. 25; 34; 40; 43; 45; 48; 51; 57; 2 Cel., 3, 8; 50; 93.
17. Spec., 134; 2 Cel., 3, 128.
18. The Order was at first essentially lay (at the present time it is, so far as I know, the only one in
which there is no difference of costume between laymen and priests). Vide Ehrle, Archiv., iii., p. 563.
It is the influence of the friars from northern countries which has especially changed it in this matter.
General Aymon, of Faversham (1240-1243), decided that laymen should be excluded from all
charges; laicos ad officia inhabilitavit, quæ usque tunc ut clerici exercebant. (Chron. xxiv. gen. cod.
Gadd. relig., 53, fo 110a). Among the early Brothers who refused ordination there were surely some
who did so from humility, but this sentiment is not enough to explain all the cases. There were also
with certain of them revolutionary desires and as it were a vague memory of the prophecies of
Gioacchino di Fiore upon the age succeeding that of the priests: Fior., 27. Frate Pellegrino non volle
mai andare come chierico, ma come laico, benche fassi molto litterato e grande decretalista. Cf.
Conform., 71a., 2. Fr. Thomas Hibernicus sibi pollecem amputavit ne ad sacerdotium cogeretur.
Conform., 124b, 2.
19. See, for example, the letter to Brother Leo. Cf. Conform., 53b, 2. Fratri Egidio dedit licentiam
liberam ut iret quocumque vellet et staret ubicumque sibi placeret.
20. The hermitage of Monte-Casale, at two hours walk northeast from Borgo San Sepolero, still
exists in its original state. It is one of the most significant and curious of the Franciscan deserts.
21. The office of guardian (superior of a monastery) naturally dates from the time when the Brothers
stationed themselves in small groups in the villages of Umbria—that is to say, most probably from
the year 1211. A few years later the monasteries were united to form a custodia. Finally, about 1215,
Central Italy was divided unto a certain number of provinces with provincial ministers at their head.
All this was done little by little, for Francis never permitted himself to regulate what did not yet exist.
22. Fior., 26; Conform., 119b, 1. Cf. Rule of 1221, cap. vii. Quicumque ad eos (fratres) venerint,
amicus vel adversarius, fur vel latro benigne recipiatur.
23. 2 Cel., 3, 120; Spec., 37; Conform., 53a, 1. See below, p. 385, n. 1.
24. Fior., Vita di fra Ginepro; Spec., 174-182; Conform., 62b.
25. A. SS., p. 600.
26. 3 Soc., 56; 2 Cel., 1, 13; Bon., 24.
27. Bon., 30; 3 Soc., 30, 31; 2 Cel., 3, 52. Cf. Fior., 2. The dragon of this dream perhaps symbolizes
heresy.
28. Bon., 83; 172; Fior., 1, 16; Conform., 49a, 1, and 110b, 1; 2 Cel., 3, 51.
29. Bernard de Besse, De laudibus, Turin MS., fo. 102b and 96a. He died November 15, 1271. A.
SS., Augusti, t. ii., p. 221.
30. Fior., 8; Spec., 89b ff.; Conform., 30b, 2, and 140a, 2.
31. I need not here point out the analogy in form between this chapter and St. Paul's celebrated song
of love, 1 Cor. xiii.
32. We find the same thoughts in nearly the same terms in cap. v. of the Verba sacræ admonitionis.
33. He is the second of the Three Companions. 3 Soc., 1; cf. 1 Cel., 95; Fior., 1; 29, 30, 31;
Eccleston, 12; Spec., 110a-114b; Conform., 51b ff.; cf. 2 Cel., 2, 4.

34. Very probably that of the Carceri, though the name is not indicated Vide 3 Soc., 1; Fior., 4; 10;
11; 12; 13; 16; 27; 32; Conform., 51b, 1 ff; Tribul. Archiv., t. ii., p. 263.
35. Fior., 11; Conform., 50b, 2; Spec., 104a.
36. Rule of 1221, chap. 7. Omnes fratres, in quibuscumque locis fuerint apud aliquos ad serviendum,
vel ad laborandum, non sint camerarii, nec cellarii, nec præsint in domibus corum quibus serviunt.
Cf. 1 Cel., 38 and 40; A. SS., p. 606.
37. 1 Cel., 103; 39; Spec., 28; Reg. 1221, ix.; Giord., 33 and 39.
38. Vide Spec., 34b.; Fior., 4.
39. All the details of this story lead me to think that it refers to Portiuncula and the hospital San
Salvatore delle Pareti. The story is given by the Conform., 174b, 2, as taken from the Legenda
Antiqua. Cf. Spec., 56b; Fior., 25.
40. In the Speculum, fo 41a, this story ends with the phrase: Qui vidit hæc scripsit et testimonium
perhibet de hiis. The brother is here called Frater Jacobus simplex. Cf. Conform., 174b.
41. Conform., 51b, 1. Cf. 2 Cel., 2, 4; Spec., 110b; Fior., 29.

CHAPTER IX
SANTA CLARA

Popular piety in Umbria never separates the memory of St. Francis from
that of Santa Clara. It is right.
Clara1 was born at Assisi in 1194, and was consequently about twelve
years younger than Francis. She belonged to the noble family of the Sciffi.
At the age when a little girl's imagination awakes and stirs, she heard the
follies of the son of Bernardone recounted at length. She was sixteen when
the Saint preached for the first time in the cathedral, suddenly appearing
like an angel of peace in a city torn by intestine dissensions. To her his
appeals were like a revelation. It seemed as if Francis was speaking for her,
that he divined her secret sorrows, her most personal anxieties, and all that
was ardent and enthusiastic in the heart of this young girl rushed like a
torrent that suddenly finds an outlet into the channel indicated by him. For
saints as for heroes the supreme stimulus is woman's admiration.
But here, more than ever, we must put away the vulgar judgment which
can understand no union between man and woman where the sexual instinct
has no part. That which makes the union of the sexes something almost
divine is that it is the prefiguration, the symbol, of the union of souls.
Physical love is an ephemeral spark, designed to kindle in human hearts the
flame of a more lasting love; it is the outer court of the temple, but not the
most holy place; its inestimable value is precisely that it leaves us abruptly
at the door of the holiest of all as if to invite us to step over the threshold.
The mysterious sigh of nature goes out for the union of souls. This is the
unknown God to whom debauchees, those pagans of love, offer their
sacrifices, and this sacred imprint, even though effaced, though soiled by all
pollutions, often saves the man of the world from inspiring as much disgust
as the drunkard and the criminal.
But sometimes—more often than we think—there are souls so pure, so
little earthly, that on their first meeting they enter the most holy place, and

once there the thought of any other union would be not merely a descent,
but an impossibility. Such was the love of St. Francis and St. Clara.
But these are exceptions. There is something mysterious in this supreme
purity; it is so high that in holding it up to men one risks speaking to them
in an unknown tongue, or even worse.
The biographers of St. Francis have clearly felt the danger of offering to
the multitude the sight of certain beauties which are far beyond them, and
this is for us the great fault of their works. They try to give us not so much
the true portrait of Francis as that of the perfect minister-general of the
Order such as they conceive it, such as it must needs be to serve as a model
for his disciples; thus they have made this model somewhat according to the
measure of those whom it is to serve, by omitting here and there features
which, stupidly interpreted, might have furnished material for the
malevolence of unscrupulous adversaries, or from which disciples little
versed in spiritual things could not have failed to draw support for
permitting themselves dangerous intimacies. Thus the relations of St.
Francis with women in general and St. Clara in particular, have been
completely travestied by Thomas of Celano. It could not have been
otherwise, and we must not bear him a grudge for it. The life of the founder
of an Order, when written by a monk, in the very nature of things becomes
always a sort of appendix to or illustration of the Rule. And the Rule,
especially if the Order has its thousands of members, is necessarily made
not for the elect, but for the average, for the majority of the flock.2
Hence this portrait, in which St. Francis is represented as a stern ascetic,
to whom woman appears to be a sort of incarnate devil! The biographers
even go so far as to assure us that he knew only two women by sight. These
are manifest exaggerations, or rather the opposite of the truth.3
We are not reduced to conjecture to discover the true attitude of the
Umbrian prophet in this matter. Without suspecting it, Celano himself gives
details enough for the correction of his own errors, and there are besides a
number of other documents whose scattered hints correspond and agree
with one another in a manner all the more marvellous that it is entirely
unintentional, giving, when they are brought together, almost all one could
desire to know of the intercourse of these two beautiful souls.

After the sermons of Francis at St. Rufino, Clara's decision was speedily
taken; she would break away from the trivialities of an idle and luxurious
life and make herself the servant of the poor; all her efforts should be bent
to make each day a new advance in the royal way of love and poverty; and
for this she would have only to obey him who had suddenly revealed it to
her.
She sought him out and opened to him her heart. With that exaltation, a
union of candor and delicacy, which is woman's fine endowment, and to
which she would more readily give free course if she did not too often
divine the pitfalls of base passion and incredulity, Clara offered herself to
Francis.
It is one of the privileges of saints to suffer more than other men, for they
feel in their more loving hearts the echo of all the sorrows of the world; but
they also know joys and delights of which common men never taste. What
an inexpressible song of joy must have burst forth in Francis's heart when
he saw Clara on her knees before him, awaiting, with his blessing, the word
which would consecrate her life to the gospel ideal.
Who knows if this interview did not inspire another saint, Fra Angelico,
to introduce into his masterpiece those two elect souls who, already radiant
with the light of the heavenly Jerusalem, stop to exchange a kiss before
crossing its threshold?
Souls, like flowers, have a perfume of their own which never deceives.
One look had sufficed for Francis to go down into the depths of this heart;
he was too kind to submit Clara to useless tests, too much an idealist to
prudently confine himself to custom or arbitrary decorum; as when he
founded the Order of Friars, he took counsel only of himself and God. In
this was his strength; if he had hesitated, or even if he had simply submitted
himself to ecclesiastical rules, he would have been stopped twenty times
before he had done anything. Success is so powerful an argument that the
biographers appear not to have perceived how determined Francis was to
ignore the canonical laws. He, a simple deacon, arrogated to himself the
right to receive Clara's vows and admit her to the Order without the briefest
novitiate. Such an act ought to have drawn down upon its author all the
censures of the Church, but Francis was already one of those powers to

whom much is forgiven, even by those who speak in the name of the holy
Roman Church.
Francis had decided that on the night between Palm Sunday and Holy
Monday (March 18-19, 1212) Clara should secretly quit the paternal castle
and come with two companions to Portiuncula, where he would await her,
and would give her the veil. She arrived just as the friars were singing
matins. They went out, the story goes, carrying candles in their hands, to
meet the bride, while from the woods around Portiuncula resounded songs
of joy over this new bridal. Then Mass was begun at that same altar where,
three years before, Francis had heard the decisive call of Jesus; he was
kneeling in the same place, but surrounded now with a whole spiritual
family.
It is easy to imagine Clara's emotion. The step which she had just taken
was simply heroic, for she knew to what persecutions from her family she
was exposing herself, and what she had seen of the life of the Brothers
Minor was a sufficient warning of the distresses to which she was exposing
herself in espousing poverty. No doubt she interpreted the words of the
service in harmony with her own thoughts:
"Surely they are my people," said Jehovah.
"Children who will not be faithless!"
In none of their afflictions were they without succor.
And the angel that is before his face saved them. 4
Then Francis read again the words of Jesus to his disciples; she vowed to
conform her life to them; her hair was cut off; all was finished. A few
moments after, Francis conducted her to a house of Benedictine nuns5 at an
hour's distance, where she was to remain provisionally and await the
progress of events.
The very next morning Favorino, her father, arrived with a few friends,
inveighing, supplicating, abusing everybody. She was unmovable, showing
so much courage that at last they gave up the thought of carrying her off by
main force.
She was not, however, at the end of her tribulations. Had this scene
frightened the Benedictines? We cannot tell, but less than a fortnight after
we find her in another convent, that of Sant-Angelo in Panso, at Assisi.6 A

week after Easter, Agnes, her younger sister, joined her there, decided in her
turn to serve poverty. Francis received her into the Order. This time the
father's fury was horrible. With a band of relatives he invaded the convent,
but neither abuse nor blows could subdue this child of fourteen. In spite of
her cries they dragged her away. She fainted, and the little inanimate body
suddenly seemed to them so heavy that they abandoned it in the midst of
the fields, some laborers looking with pity on the painful scene, until Clara,
whose cry God had heard, hastened to succor her sister.
Their sojourn in this convent was of very short duration. It appears that
they did not carry away a very pleasant impression of it.7 Francis knew that
several others were burning to join his two women friends; he therefore set
himself to seek out a retreat where they could live under his direction and in
all liberty practise the gospel rule.
He had not long to seek; the Benedictine monks of Mount Subasio
always seized every possible opportunity to make themselves popular. They
belonged to that congregation of Camaldoli, whom the common people
appear to have particularly detested, and several of whose convents had
lately been pillaged.8 The abbey no longer counted more than eight monks,
who were trying to save the wreck of their riches and privileges by partial
sacrifices; on the 22d of April, 1212, they had given to the commune of
Assisi for a communal house a monument which is standing this day, the
temple of Minerva.9
Francis, who already was their debtor for Portiuncula, once more
addressed himself to them. Happy in this new opportunity to render service
to one who was the incarnation of popular claims, they gave him the chapel
of St. Damian; perhaps they were well pleased, by favoring the new Order,
to annoy Bishop Guido, of whom they had reason to complain.10 However
this may be, in this hermitage, so well adapted for prayer and meditation,
Francis installed his spiritual daughters.11 In this sanctuary, repaired by his
own hands, at the feet of this crucifix which had spoken to him, Clara was
henceforward to pray. It was the house of God; it was also in good measure
that of Francis. Crossing its threshold, Clara doubtless experienced that
feeling, at once so sweet and so poignant, of the wife who for the first time
enters her husband's house, trembling with emotion at the radiant and
confused vision of the future.

If we are not entirely to misapprehend these beginnings, we must
remember with what rapidity external influences transformed the first
conception of St. Francis. At this moment he no more expected to found a
second order than he had desired to found the first one. In snatching Clara
from her family he had simply acted like a true knight who rescues an
oppressed woman, and takes her under his protection. In installing her at St.
Damian he was preparing a refuge for those who desired to imitate her and
apart from the world practise the gospel Rule. But he never thought that the
perfection of which he and his disciples were the apostles and missionaries,
and which Clara and her companions were to realize in celibacy, was not
practicable in social positions also; thence comes what is wrongly called the
Tertiari, or Third Order, and which in its primitive thought was not
separated from the first. This Third Order had no need to be instituted in
1221, for it existed from the moment when a single conscience resolved to
practise his teachings, without being able to follow him to Portiuncula.12
The enemy of the soul for him as for Jesus was avarice, understood in its
largest sense—that is to say, that blindness which constrains men to
consecrate their hearts to material preoccupations, makes them the slave of
a few pieces of gold or a few acres of land, renders them insensible to the
beauties of nature, and deprives them of infinite joys which they alone can
know who are the disciples of poverty and love.
Whoever was free at heart from all material servitude, whoever was
decided to live without hoarding, every rich man who was willing to labor
with his hands and loyally distribute all that he did not consume in order to
constitute the common fund which St. Francis called the Lord's table, every
poor man who was willing to work, free to resort, in the strict measure of
his wants, to this table of the Lord, these were at that time true Franciscans.
It was a social revolution.
There was then at that time neither one Order nor several.13 The gospel of
the Beatitudes had been found again, and, as twelve centuries before, it
could accommodate itself to all situations.
Alas! the Church, personified by Cardinal Ugolini, was about, if not to
cause the Franciscan movement to miscarry, at least so well to hedge about
it that a few years later it would have lost nearly its whole original
character.

As has been seen, the word poverty expresses only very imperfectly St.
Francis's point of view, since it contains an idea of renunciation, of
abstinence, while in thought the vow of poverty is a vow of liberty.
Property is the cage with gilded wires, to which the poor larks are
sometimes so thoroughly accustomed that they no longer even think of
getting away in order to soar up into the blue.14
From the beginning St. Damian was the extreme opposite to what a
convent of Clarisses of the strict observance is now; it is still to-day very
much as Francis saw it. We owe thanks to the Brothers Minor for having
preserved intact this venerable and charming hermitage, and not spoiling it
with stupid embellishments. This little corner of Umbrian earth will be for
our descendants like Jacob's well whereon Christ sat himself down for an
instant, one of the favorite courts of the worship in spirit and in truth.
In installing Clara there Francis put into her hands the Rule which he had
prepared for her,15 which no doubt resembled that of the Brothers save for
the precepts with regard to the missionary life. He accompanied it with the
engagement16 taken by himself and his brothers to supply by labor or alms
all the needs of Clara and her future companions. In return they also were to
work and render to the Brothers all the services of which they might be
capable. We have seen the zeal which Francis had brought to the task of
making the churches worthy of the worship celebrated in them; he could not
endure that the linen put to sacred uses should be less than clean. Clara set
herself to spinning thread for the altar-cloths and corporals which the
Brothers undertook to distribute among the poor churches of the district.17
In addition, during the earlier years, she also nursed the sick whom Francis
sent to her, and St. Damian was for some time a sort of hospital.18
One or two friars, who were called Zealots of the Poor Ladies, were
especially charged with the care of the Sisters, making themselves huts
beside the chapel, after the model of those of Portiuncula. Francis was also
near at hand; a sort of terrace four paces long overlooks the hermitage;
Clara made there a tiny garden, and when, at twilight, she went thither to
water her flowers, she could see, hardly half a league distant, Portiuncula
standing out against the aureola of the western sky.
For several years the relations between the two houses were continual,
full of charm and freedom. The companions of Francis who received

Brothers received Sisters also, at times returning from their preaching tours
with a neophyte for St. Damian.19
But such a situation could not last long. The intimacy of Francis and
Clara, the familiarity of the earlier friars and Sisters would not do as a
model for the relations of the two Orders when each had some hundreds of
members. Francis himself very soon perceived this, though not so clearly as
his sister-friend. Clara survived him nearly twenty-seven years, and thus
had time to see the shipwreck of the Franciscan ideal among the Brothers,
as well as in almost every one of the houses which had at first followed the
Rule of St. Damian. She herself was led by the pressure of events to lay
down rules for her own convent, but to her very death-bed she contended
for the defence of the true Franciscan ideas, with a heroism, a boldness, at
once intense and holy, by which she took a place in the first rank of
witnesses for conscience.
Is it not one of the loveliest pictures in religious history, that of this
woman who for more than half a century sustains moment by moment a
struggle with all the popes who succeed one another in the pontifical throne,
remaining always equally respectful and immovable, not consenting to die
until she has gained her victory?20
To relate her life is to relate this struggle; the greater number of its
vicissitudes may be found in the documents of the Roman curia. Francis
had warded off many a danger from his institution, but he had given himself
guardians who were little disposed to yield any of their rights; Cardinal
Ugolini in particular, the future Gregory IX., took a part in these matters
which is very difficult to understand. We see him continually lavishing
upon Francis and Clara expressions of affection and admiration which
appear to be absolutely sincere; and yet the Franciscan ideal—regarded as
the life of love at which one arrives by freeing himself from all servitude to
material things—has hardly had a worse adversary than he.
In the month of May, 1228, Gregory IX. went to Assisi for the
preliminaries of the canonization of St. Francis. Before entering the city he
turned out of his way to visit St. Damian and to see Clara, whom he had
known for a long time, and to whom he had addressed letters burning with
admiration and paternal affection.21

How can we understand that at this time, the eve of the canonization
(July 16, 1228), the pontiff could have had the idea of urging her to be
faithless to her vows?
He represented to her that the state of the times made life impossible to
women who possess nothing, and offered her certain properties. As Clara
gazed at him in astonishment at this strange proposition, he said, "If it is
your vows which prevent you, we will release you from them."
"Holy Father," replied the Franciscan sister, "absolve me from my sins,
but I have no desire for a dispensation from following Christ."22
Noble and pious utterance, artless cry of independence, in which the
conscience proudly proclaims its autonomy! In these words is mirrored at
full length the spiritual daughter of the Poverello.
By one of those intuitions which often come to very enthusiastic and very
pure women, she had penetrated to the inmost depths of Francis's heart, and
felt herself inflamed with the same passion which burned in him. She
remained faithful to him to the end, but we perceive that it was not without
difficulty.
This is not the place in which to ask whether Gregory IX. was right in
desiring that religious communities should hold estates; he had a right to his
own views on the subject; but there is something shocking, to say no more,
in seeing him placing Francis among the saints at the very moment when he
was betraying his dearest ideals, and seeking to induce those who had
remained faithful to betray them.
Had Clara and Francis foreseen the difficulties which they would meet?
We may suppose so, for already under the pontificate of Innocent III. she
had obtained a grant of the privilege of poverty. The pope was so much
surprised at such a request that he desired to write with his own hands the
opening lines of this patent, the like of which had never been asked for at
the court of Rome.23
Under his successor, Honorius III., the most important personage of the
curia was this very Cardinal Ugolini. Almost a septuagenarian in 1216 he
inspired awe at first sight by the aspect of his person. He had that singular
beauty which distinguishes the old who have escaped the usury of life;
pious, enlightened, energetic, he felt himself made for great undertakings.

There is something in him which recalls Cardinal Lavigerie and all the
prelates whose red robes cover a soldier or a despot rather than a priest.24
The Franciscan movement was attacked with violence25 in various
quarters; he undertook to defend it, and a very long time before the charge
of protector of the Order was officially confided to him, he exercised it with
devouring zeal.26 He felt an unbounded admiration for Francis and Clara,
and often manifested it in a touching manner. If he had been a simple man
he might have loved them and followed them. Perhaps he even had thought
of doing so.27 Alas! he was a prince of the Church; he could not help
thinking of what he would do in case he should be called to guide the ship
of St. Peter.
He acted accordingly; was it calculation on his part or simply one of
those states of conscience in which a man absorbed in the end to be attained
hardly discusses the ways and means? I do not know, but we see him
immediately on the death of Innocent III., under pretext of protecting the
Clarisses, take their direction in hand, give them a Rule, and substitute his
own ideas for those of St. Francis.28
In the privilege which as legate he gave in favor of Monticelli, July 27,
1219, neither Clara nor Francis is named, and the Damianites become as a
congregation of Benedictines.29
We shall see farther on the wrath of Francis against Brother Philip, a
Zealot of the Poor Ladies, who had accepted this privilege in his absence.
His attitude was so firm that other documents of the same nature granted by
Ugolini at the same epoch were not indorsed by the pope until three years
later.
The cardinal's ardor to profit by the enthusiasm which the Franciscan
ideas everywhere excited was so great that we find, in the register of his
legation of 1221, a sort of formula all prepared for those who would found
convents like those of the Sisters of St. Damian; but even there we search in
vain for the name of Francis or Clara.30
This old man had, however, a truly mystical passion for the young
abbess; he wrote to her, lamenting the necessity of being far from her, in
words which are the language of love, respect, and admiration.31 There were
at least two men in Ugolini: the Christian, who felt himself subdued before

Clara and Francis; the prelate, that is, a man whom the glory of the Church
sometimes caused to forget the glory of God.
Francis, though almost always resisting him, appears to have kept a
feeling of ingenuous gratitude toward him to the very end. Clara, on the
contrary, had too long a struggle to be able to keep any illusions as to the
attitude of her protector. After 1230 there is no trace of any relations
between them.
All the efforts of the pope to mitigate the rigor of Clara's vow of poverty
had remained vain. Many other nuns desired to practise strictly the Rule of
St. Francis. Among them was the daughter of the King of Bohemia, Ottokar
I., who was in continual relations with Clara. But Gregory IX., to whom she
addressed herself, was inflexible. While pouring eulogies upon her he
enjoined upon her to follow the Rule which he sent to her—that is, the one
which he had composed while he was yet cardinal. The Rule of the
Poverello was put among the utopias, not to say heresies.32 He never,
however, could induce St. Clara to completely submit herself. One day,
indeed, she rebelled against his orders, and it was the pope who was obliged
to yield: he had desired to bring about a wider separation between the friars
and the Sisters than had formerly prevailed; for a long time after the death
of Francis a certain familiarity had continued between St. Damian and
Portiuncula; Clara especially loved these neighborly relations, and often
begged one or another Brother to come and preach. The pope thought ill of
this, and forbade, under the severest penalty, that any friar of Portiuncula
should go to St. Damian without express permission of the Holy See.
This time Clara became indignant. She went to the few friars attached to
her monastery, and thanking them for their services, "Go," she said; "since
they deprive us of those who dispense to us spiritual bread, we will not have
those who procure for us our material bread." He who wrote that "the necks
of kings and princes are bowed at the feet of the priests" was obliged to
bow before this woman and raise his prohibition.33
St. Damian had too often echoed with St. Francis's hymns of love and
liberty to forget him so soon and become an ordinary convent. Clara
remained surrounded with the master's early companions; Egidio, Leo,
Angelo, Ginepro never ceased to be assiduous visitors. These true lovers of
poverty felt themselves at home there, and took liberties which would

elsewhere have given surprise. One day an English friar, a celebrated
theologian, came according to the minister's orders to preach at St. Damian.
Suddenly Egidio, though a simple layman, interrupted him: "Stop, brother,
let me speak," he said to him. And the master in theology, bowing his head,
covered himself with his cowl as a sign of obedience, and sat down to listen
to Egidio.
Clara felt a great joy in this; it seemed to her that she was once again
living in St. Francis's days.34 The little coterie was kept up until her death;
she expired in the arms of Brothers Leo, Angelo, and Ginepro. In her last
sufferings and her dying visions she had the supreme happiness of being
surrounded by those who had devoted their lives to the same ideal as she.35
In her will her life shows itself that which we have seen it—a daily
struggle for the defence of the Franciscan idea. We see how courageous and
brave was this woman who has always been represented as frail, emaciated,
blanched like a flower of the cloister.36
She defended Francis not only against others, but also against himself. In
those hours of dark discouragement which so often and so profoundly
disturb the noblest souls and sterilize the grandest efforts, she was beside
him to show him his way. When he doubted his mission and thought of
fleeing to the heights of repose and solitary prayer, it was she who showed
him the ripening harvest with no reapers to gather it in, men going astray
with no shepherd to lead them, and drew him once again into the train of
the Galilean, into the number of those who give their lives a ransom for
many.37
Yet this love with which at St. Damian Francis felt himself surrounded
frightened him at times. He feared that his death, making too great a void,
would imperil the institution itself, and he took pains to remind the sisters
that he would not be always with them. One day when he was to preach to
them, instead of entering the pulpit he caused some ashes to be brought, and
after having spread them around him and scattered some on his head, he
intoned the Miserere, thus reminding them that he was but dust and would
soon return to dust.38
But in general it is at St. Damian that St. Francis is the most himself; it is
under the shade of its olive-trees, with Clara caring for him, that he

composes his finest work, that which Ernest Renan called the most perfect
utterance of modern religious sentiment, the "Canticle of the Sun."

FOOTNOTES
1. Easy as it is to seize the large outlines of her life, it is with difficulty that one makes a detailed and
documentary study of it. There is nothing surprising in this, for the Clarisses felt the rebound of the
struggles which divided and rapidly transformed the Order of the Brothers Minor. The greater
number of the documents have disappeared; we give summary indication of those which will most
often be cited: 1. Life of St. Clara by an anonymous author. A. SS., Aug., t. ii., pp. 739-768. 2. Her
Will, given by Wadding (Annales, 1253, No. 5), but which does not appear to be free from alteration.
(Compare, for example, the opening of this will with Chapter VI. of the Rule of the Damianites
approved by Innocent IV., August 8, 1253.) 3. The bull of canonization, given September 26, 1255—
that is to say, two years after Clara's death; it is much longer than these documents ordinarily are, and
relates the principal incidents of her life. A. SS., loc. cit., p. 749; Potthast, 16,025. 4. Her
correspondence. Unhappily we have only fragments of it; the Bollandists, without saying whence
they drew them, have inserted four of her letters in the Acta of St. Agnes of Bohemia, to whom they
were addressed. (A. SS., Martii, t. i., pp. 506-508.)
2. Reading the Chronicle of Fra Salimbeni, which represents the average Franciscan character about
1250, one sees with what reason the Rule had multiplied minute precautions for keeping the Brothers
from all relations with women.
The desire of Celano to present the facts in the life of Francis as the norm of the acts of the friars
appears still more in the chapters concerning St. Clara than in all the others. Vide 2 Cel., 3, 132: Non
credatis, charissimi (dixit Franciscus), quodeas perfecte non diligam.... Sed exemplum do vobis, ut
quemadmodum ego facio, ita et vos faciatis. Cf. ibid., 134.
3. 2 Cel., 3, 55. Fateor veritatem ... nullam me si aspicerem recogniturum in facie nisi duas. This
chapter and the two following give us a sort of caricature, in which Francis is represented as so little
sure of himself that he casts down his eyes for fear of yielding to desire. The stories of Francis and
Jacqueline of Settesoli give a very different picture of the relations between the Brothers and the
women in the origin of the Order from that which was given later. Bernard de Besse (Turin MS., fo.
113) relates at length the coming of Jacqueline to Portiuncula to be present at St. Francis's death. Cf.
Spec., 107; 133; Bon., 112. Also Clara's repast at Portiuncula. Fior., 15; Spec., 139b.; A. SS. Aug. Vita
Clar., No. 39 ff.
4. Isaiah, lxiii., 8 and 9 (Ségond's [French] translation). At the Mass on Holy Monday Isaiah lxiii. is
read for the Epistle and Mark xiv. for the Gospel.
5. San Paolo on the Chiasco, near Bastia.
6. At the present day diocesan seminary of Assisi, "Seminarium seraphicum." In the thirteenth
century the north gate of the city was there. The houses which lie between there and the Basilica
form the new town, which is rapidly growing and will unite the city with Sacro Convento.
7. Nam steteramus in alio loco, licet parum. Test. Clar. It is truly strange that there is not a word here
for the house where the first days of her religious life were passed. Cf. Vit., no. 10: S. Angelus de
Panse ... ubi cum non plene mens ejus quiesceret.
8. Mittarelli, Annales Camaldulenses (Venice, 1755-1773, 9 vols., fo.), t. iv., app. 431 and 435. Cf.
156.

9. The act of donation is still in the archives of Assisi. An analysis of it will be found in Cristofani,
t. i., p. 133. Their munificence remained without result; the bull Ab Ecclesia of July 27, 1232, shows
that they were suppressed less than twenty years after. Sbaralea, t. 1, p. 81. Potthast, 8984. Cf., ib., p.
195, note c, and 340, note a, and the bulls which are there indicated.
10. See p. 81, note ii.
11. 1 Cel., 18; 21; 3 Soc., 24; 2 Cel., 1, 8.
12. An. Perus., A. SS., p. 600. Cf. 3 Soc., 60. The three Orders are contemporary, one might even say,
the four, including among them the one that miscarried among the secular priests (see below).
In a letter St. Clara speaks of her Order as making only a part with that of the Brothers: Sequaris
consilia Reverendi Patris nostri fratris Eliæ Ministri generalis totius ordinis. A. SS., Martii, t. i., p.
507.
13. This point of view is brought into relief by an anecdote in the De laudibus of Bernard of Besse
(Turin MS., 113a). This is how he ends chap. vii. on the three Orders: Nec Santus his contentus
ordinibus satagebat omnium generi salutis et penitentiæ viam dare. Unde parochiali cuidam
sacerdoti dicenti sibi quod vellet suus, retenta tamen ecclesia. Frater esse, dato vivendi et induendi
modo, dicitur indixisse ut annuatim, collectis Eclesiæ fructibus daret pro Deo, quod de præteritis
superesset.
14. See the lovely story in the Fior., 13. Cf. Spec., 65a; Conform., 168b. 1.
15. The text of it was doubtless formerly inserted in chapter vi. of the Rule granted to the Clarisses of
St. Damian, August 9, 1253, by the bull Solet annuere. Potthast, 15,086. But this chapter has been
completely changed in many editions. The text of the Speculum, Morin, Rouen 1509, should be read.
Tract iii., 226b. The critical study to be made upon this text by comparing the indications given by
the bull Angelis guadium of May 11, 1238, Sbaralea, i., p. 242, is too long to find a place here.
16. 2 Cel., 3, 132. Cf. Test. B. Clar.
17. In illa gravi infirmitate ... faciebat se erigi ... et sedens filabat. A. SS., 760e. Sic vult eas [sorores]
operare manibus suis. Ib. 762a.
18. Fior. 33.
19. Rule of 1221, chap xii. Et nulla penitus mulier ab aliquo frater recipiatur ad obedientiam, sed
dato sibi consilio spirituali, ubi voluerit agat penitentiam. Cf. below, p. 252, note 1, the remainder of
this chapter and the indication of the sources. This proves, 1, that the friars had received women into
the Order; 2, that at the beginning they said The Order in the singular, and under this appellation
included Sisters as well as Brothers. We see how far the situation was, even at the end of 1221, from
being what it became a few years later. It is to be noted that in all the reforming sects of the
commencement of the thirteenth century the two sexes were closely united. (Vide Burchardi
chronicon, Pertz, 1, 23, p. 376. Cf. Potthast, 2611, bull Cum otim of Nov. 25, 1205.)
On the 7th of June, 1201 (bull Incunubit nobis), Innocent III. had approved the Rule of the
Humiliants. This was a religious association whose members continued to live in their own homes,
and who offer surprising points of contact with the Franciscan Order, though they took no vow of
poverty. From them issued a more restricted association which founded convents where they worked
in wool; these convents received both men and women. Vide Jacques de Vitry, Hist. Occidentalis,
cap. 28. De religione et regula Humiliatorum (Douai, 1597, pp. 334-337). The time came when from
these two Orders issued a third, composed solely of priests. These Humiliati are too little known,
though they have had a historian whose book is one of the noble works of the eighteenth century:
Tiraboschi, Vetera Humiliatorum monumenta (Milan, 3 vols., 4to, 1766-1768). Toward 1200 they had

monopolized l'arte della lana in all upper Italy as far as to Florence; it is evident, therefore, that
Francis's father must have had relations with them.
20. The bull approving the Rule of St. Damian is of August 9, 1253. Clara died two days later.
21. 1 Cel., 122. Cf. Potthast, 8194 ff.; cf. ib., 709.
22. A. SS., Vita Cl., p. 758. Cf. bull of canonization.
23. Vit. S. Clar., A. SS., p. 758. This petition was surely made by the medium of Francis; and there
are several indications of his presence in Perugia in the latter part of the life of Innocent III. In obitu
suo [Alexandri papæ] omnes familiares sui deseruerunt eum præter fratres Minores. Et similiter
Papam Gregorium et Honorium et Innocentium in cujus obitu fuit præsentialiter S. Franciscus. Eccl.
xv. Mon. Germ. hist. Script., t. 28 p. 568. Sbaralea puts forth doubts as to the authenticity of this
privilege, the text of which he gives; wrongly, I think, for Clara alludes to it in her will, A. SS., p.
747.
24. He was born about 1147, created cardinal in 1198. Vide Raynald, ann., 1217, § 88, the eulogy
made upon him by Honorius III. Forma decorus et venustus aspectu ... zelator fidei, disciplina
virtutis, ... castitatis amator et totius sanctitatis exemplar: Muratori, Scriptores rer. Ital., iii., 1, 575.
25. 1 Cel., 74.
26. The bull Litteræ tuæ of August 27, 1218, shows him already favoring the Clarisses. Sbaralea, i.,
p. 1. Vide 3 Soc., 61. Offero me ipsum, dixit Hugolinus, vobis, auxilium et consilium, atque
protectionem paratus impendere.
27. In the Conformities, 107a, 2, there is a curious story which shows Ugolini going to the Carceri to
find Francis, and asking him if he ought to enter his Order. Cf. Spec., 217.
28. He succeeded so well that Thomas of Celano himself seems to forget that, at least at St. Damian,
the Clarisses followed the Rule given by St. Francis himself: Ipsorum vita mirifica et institutio
gloriosa a domino Papa Gregorio, tunc Hostiensi episcopo. 1 Cel. 20. Cf. Honorii Opera Horoy, t.
iii., col. 363; t. iv., col. 218; Potthast, 6179 and 6879 ff.
29. This privilege is inserted in the bull Sacrosancta of December 9, 1219. Honorii opera, Horoy, t.
iii., col. 363 ff.
30. G. Levi, Registri dei Cardinali, no. 125. Vide below, p. 400. Cf. Campi, Hist. eccl. di Piacenza,
ii., 390.
31. See, for example, the letter given by Wadding: Annals, ii., p. 16 (Rome, 1732). Tanta me
amaritudo cordis, abundantia lacrymarum et immanitas doloris invasit, quod nisi ad pedes Jesu,
consolationem solitæ pietatis invenirem, spiritus meus forte deficeret et penitus anima liquefieret.
Wadding's text should be corrected by that of the Riccardi MS., 279. fo 80a and b. Cf. Mark of
Lisbon, t. i., p. 185; Sbaralea, i., p. 37.
32. Bull Angelis gaudium of May 11, 1238; it may be found in Sbaralea, i., p. 242. Cf. Palacky,
Literarische Reise nach Italien, Prague, 1838, 4to, no. 147. Potthast, 10,596; cf. 11,175.
33. A. SS., Vit. Clar., p. 762. Cf. Conform., 84b, 2.
34. A. SS., Aprilis, t. iii., p. 239a; Conform., 54a, 1; 177a, 2.
35. A. SS., Vit. Clar., p. 764d.
36. The bull of canonization says nothing of the Saracens whom she put to flight. Her life in the A.
SS. relates the fact, but shows her simply in prayer before the Holy Sacrament. Cf. Conform., 84b, 1.
Mark of Lisbon t. i., part 2, pp. 179-181. None of these accounts represents Clara as going to meet
them with a monstrance.

37. Bon., 173; Fior. 16; Spec., 62b; Conform., 84b, 2; 110b 1; 49a, 1. With these should be compared
Spec., 220b: Frater Leo narravit quod Sanctus Franciscus surgens orare (sic) venit ad fratres suos
dicens: "Ite ad sæculum et dimittatis habitum, licentio vos."
38. 2 Cel., 3, 134.

CHAPTER X
FIRST ATTEMPTS TO REACH THE INFIDELS

Autumn, 1212—Summer, 1215

The early Brothers Minor had too much need of the encouragement and
example of Francis not to have very early agreed with him upon certain
fixed periods when they would be sure to find him at Portiuncula. Still it
appears probable that these meetings did not become true Chapters-General
until toward 1216. There were at first two a year, one at Whitsunday, the
other at Michaelmas (September 29th). Those of Whitsunday were the most
important; all the Brothers came together to gain new strength in the society
of Francis, to draw generous ardor and grand hopes from him with his
counsels and directions.
The members of the young association had everything in common, their
joys as well as their sorrows; their uncertainties as well as the results of
their experiences. At these meetings they were particularly occupied with
the Rule, the changes that needed to be made in it, and above all, how they
might better and better observe it;1 then, in perfect harmony, they settled the
allotment of the friars to the various provinces.
One of Francis's most frequent counsels bore upon the respect due to the
clergy; he begged his disciples to show a very particular deference to the
priests, and never to meet them without kissing their hands. He saw only
too well that the Brothers, having renounced everything, were in danger of
being unjust or severe toward the rich and powerful of the earth; he,
therefore, sought to arm them against this tendency, often concluding his
counsels with these noble words: "There are men who to-day appear to us
to be members of the devil who one day shall be members of Christ."
"Our life in the midst of the world," said he again, "ought to be such that,
on hearing or seeing us, every one shall feel constrained to praise our
heavenly Father. You proclaim peace; have it in your hearts. Be not an

occasion of wrath or scandal to anyone, but by your gentleness may all be
led to peace, concord, and good works."
It was especially when he undertook to cheer his disciples, to fortify them
against temptations and deliver them from their power, that Francis was
most successful. However anxious a soul might be, his words brought it
back to serenity. The earnestness which he showed in calming sadness
became fiery and terrible in reproving those who fell away, but in these
days of early fervor he seldom had occasion to show severity; more often he
needed gently to reprove the Brothers whose piety led them to exaggerate
penances and macerations.
When all was finished and each one had had his part in this banquet of
love, Francis would bless them, and they would disperse in all directions
like strangers and travellers. They had nothing, but already they thought
they saw the signs of the grand and final regeneration. Like the exile on
Patmos they saw "the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God
out of heaven, like a bride adorned for her husband ... and the throne upon
which is seated the Desired of all nations, the Messiah of the new times, he
who is to make all things new."2
Yet all eyes were turned toward Syria, where a French knight, Jean de
Brienne, had just been declared King of Jerusalem (1210), and toward
which were hastening the bands of the children's crusade.
The conversion of Francis, radical as it was, giving a new direction to his
thoughts and will, had not had power to change the foundation of his
character. "In a great heart everything is great." In vain is one changed at
conversion—he remains the same. That which changes is not he who is
converted, but his surroundings; he is suddenly introduced into a new path,
but he runs in it with the same ardor. Francis still remained a knight, and it
is perhaps this which won for him in so high a degree the worship of the
finest souls of the Middle Ages. There was in him that longing for the
unknown, that thirst for adventures and sacrifices, which makes the history
of his century so grand and so attractive, in spite of many dark features.
Those who have a genius for religion have generally the privilege of
illusion. They never quite see how large the world is. When their faith has
moved a mountain they thrill with rapture, like the old Hebrew prophets,
and it seems to them that they see the dawning of the day "when the glory

of the Lord will appear, when the wolf and the lamb will feed together."
Blessed illusion, that fires the blood like a generous wine, so that the
soldiers of righteousness hurl themselves against the most terrific fortresses,
believing that these once taken the war will be ended.
Francis had found such joys in his union with poverty that he held it for
proven that one needed only to be a man to aspire after the same happiness,
and that the Saracens would be converted in crowds to the gospel of Jesus,
if only it were announced to them in all its simplicity. He therefore quitted
Portiuncula for this new kind of crusade. It is not known from what port he
embarked. It was probably in the autumn of 1212. A tempest having cast the
ship upon the coast of Slavonia, he was obliged to resign himself either to
remain several months in those parts or to return to Italy; he decided to
return, but found much difficulty in securing a passage on a ship which was
about to sail for Ancona. He had no ill-will against the sailors, however, and
the stock of food falling short he shared with them the provisions with
which his friends had overloaded him.
No sooner had he landed than he set out on a preaching tour, in which
souls responded to his appeals3 with even more eagerness than in times past.
We may suppose that he returned from Slavonia in the winter of 1212-1213,
and that he employed the following spring in evangelizing Central Italy. It
was perhaps during this Lent that he retired to an island in Lake Trasimeno,
making a sojourn there which afterward became famous in his legend.4
However that may be, a perfectly reliable document shows him to have
been in the Romagna in the month of May, 1213.5 One day Francis and his
companion, perhaps Brother Leo, arrived at the chateau of Montefeltro,6
between Macerata and San Marino. A grand fête was being given for the
reception of a new knight, but the noise and singing did not affright them,
and without hesitation they entered the court, where all the nobility of the
country was assembled. Francis then taking for his text the two lines,
Tanto è il bene ch' aspetto
Ch'ogni pena m'è diletto,7
preached so touching a sermon that several of those present forgot for a
moment the tourney for which they had come. One of them, Orlando dei
Cattani, Count of Chiusi in Casentino, was so much moved that, drawing
Francis aside, "Father," he said to him, "I desire much to converse with you

about the salvation of my soul." "Very willingly," replied Francis; "but go
for this morning, do honor to those friends who have invited you, eat with
them, and after that we will converse as much as you please."
So it was done. The count came back and concluded the interview by
saying, "I have in Tuscany a mountain especially favorable to
contemplation; it is entirely isolated and would well suit anyone who
desired to do penance far from the noises of the world; if it pleased you I
would willingly give it to you and your brethren for the salvation of my
soul."
Francis accepted it joyfully, but as he was obliged to be at Portiuncula for
the Whitsunday chapter he postponed the visit to the Verna8 to a more
favorable time.
It was perhaps in this circuit that he went to Imola; at least nothing
forbids the supposition. Always courteous, he had gone immediately on his
arrival to present himself to the bishop, and ask of him authority to preach.
"I am not in need of anyone to aid me in my task," replied the bishop dryly.
Francis bowed and retired, more polite and even more gentle than usual.
But in less than hour he had returned. "What is it, brother, what do you want
of me again?" "Monsignor," replied Francis, "when a father drives his son
out at the door he returns by the window."
The bishop, disarmed by such pious persistence, gave the desired
authorization.9
The aim of Francis at that time, however, was not to evangelize Italy; his
friars were already scattered over it in great numbers; and he desired rather
to gain them access to new countries.
Not having been able to reach the infidels in Syria, he resolved to seek
them in Morocco. Some little time before (July, 1212), the troops of the
Almohades had met an irreparable defeat in the plains of Tolosa; beaten by
the coalition of the Kings of Aragon, Navarre, and Castile, Mohammed-el-
Naser had returned to Morocco to die. Francis felt that this victory of arms
would be nothing if it were not followed by a peaceful victory of the gospel
spirit.
He was so full of his project, so much in haste to arrive at the end of his
journey, that very often he would forget his companion, and hastening

forward would leave him far behind. The biographers are unfortunately
most laconic with regard to this expedition; they merely say that on arriving
in Spain he was so seriously ill that a return home was imperative. Beyond
a few local legends, not very well attested, we possess no other information
upon the labors of the Saint in this country, nor upon the route which he
followed either in going or returning.10
This silence is not at all surprising, and ought not to make us undervalue
the importance of this mission. The one to Egypt, which took place six
years later, with a whole train of friars, and at a time when the Order was
much more developed, is mentioned only in a few lines by Thomas of
Celano; but for the recent discovery of the Chronicle of Brother Giordano
di Giano and the copious details given by Jacques de Vitry, we should be
reduced to conjectures upon that journey also. The Spanish legends, to
which allusion has just been made, cannot be altogether without foundation,
any more than those which concern the journey of St. Francis through
Languedoc and Piedmont; but in the actual condition of the sources it is
impossible to make a choice, with any sort of authority, between the historic
basis and additions to it wholly without value.
The mission in Spain doubtless took place between the Whitsunday of
1214 and that of 1215.11 Francis, I think, had passed the previous year12 in
Italy. Perhaps he was then going to see the Verna. The March of Ancona and
the Valley of Rieti would naturally have attracted him equally about this
epoch, and finally the growth of the two branches of the Order must have
made necessary his presence at Portiuncula and St. Damian. The rapidity
and importance of these missions ought in no sense to give surprise, nor
awaken exaggerated critical doubts. It took only a few hours to become a
member of the fraternity, and we may not doubt the sincerity of these
vocations, since their condition was the immediate giving up of all property
of whatever kind, for the benefit of the poor. The new friars were barely
received when they in their turn began to receive others, often becoming the
heads of the movement in whatever place they happened to be. The way in
which we see things going on in Germany in 1221, and in England in 1224,
gives a very living picture of this spiritual germination.
To found a monastery it was enough that two or three Brothers should
have at their disposition some sort of a shelter, whence they radiated out
into the city and the neighboring country. It would, therefore, be as much an

exaggeration to describe St. Francis as a man who passed his life in
founding convents, as to deny altogether the local traditions which attribute
to him the erection of a hundred monasteries. In many cases a glance is
enough to show whether these claims of antiquity are justified; before 1220
the Order had only hermitages after the pattern of the Verna or the Carceri,
solely intended for the Brothers who desired to pass some time in retreat.
Returned to Assisi, Francis admitted to the Order a certain number of
learned men, among whom was perhaps Thomas of Celano. The latter, in
fact, says that God at that time mercifully remembered him, and he adds
further on: "The blessed Francis was of an exquisite nobility of heart and
full of discernment; with the greatest care he rendered to each one what was
due him, with wisdom considering in each case the degree of their
dignities."
This does not harmonize very well with the character of Francis as we
have sketched it; one can hardly imagine him preserving in his Order such
profound distinctions as were at that time made between the different social
ranks, but he had that true and eternal politeness which has its roots in the
heart, and which is only an expression of tact and love. It could not be
otherwise with a man who saw in courtesy one of the qualities of God.
We are approaching one of the most obscure periods of his life. After the
chapter of 1215 he seems to have passed through one of those crises of
discouragement so frequent with those who long to realize the ideal in this
world. Had he discovered the warning signs of the misfortunes which were
to come upon his family? Had he come to see that the necessities of life
were to sully and blight his dream? Had he seen in the check of his missions
in Syria and Morocco a providential indication that he had to change his
method? We do not know. But about this time he felt the need of turning to
St. Clara and Brother Silvestro for counsel on the subject of the doubts and
hesitations which assailed him; their reply restored to him peace and joy.
God by their mouth commanded him to continue his apostolate.13
Immediately he rose and set forth in the direction of Bevagna,14 with an
ardor which he had never yet shown. In encouraging him to persevere Clara
had in some sort inoculated him with a new enthusiasm. One word from her
had sufficed to give him back all his courage, and from this point in his life
we find in him more poetry, more love, than ever before.

Full of joy, he was going on his way when, perceiving some flocks of
birds, he turned aside a little from the road to go to them. Far from taking
flight, they flocked around him as if to bid him welcome. "Brother birds,"
he said to them then, "you ought to praise and love your Creator very much.
He has given you feathers for clothing, wings for flying, and all that is
needful for you. He has made you the noblest of his creatures; he permits
you to live in the pure air; you have neither to sow nor to reap, and yet he
takes care of you, watches over you and guides you." Then the birds began
to arch their necks, to spread out their wings, to open their beaks, to look at
him, as if to thank him, while he went up and down in their midst stroking
them with the border of his tunic, sending them away at last with his
blessing.15
In this same evangelizing tour, passing through Alviano,16 he spoke a few
exhortations to the people, but the swallows so filled the air with their
chirping that he could not make himself heard. "It is my turn to speak," he
said to them; "little sister swallows, hearken to the word of God; keep silent
and be very quiet until I have finished."17
We see how Francis's love extended to all creation, how the diffused life
shed abroad upon all things inspired and moved him. From the sun to the
earthworm which we trample under foot, everything breathed in his ear the
ineffable sigh of beings that live and suffer and die, and in their life as in
their death have a part in the divine work.
"Praised be thou, Lord, with all thy creatures, especially for my brother
Sun which gives us the day and by him thou showest thy light. He is
beautiful and radiant with great splendor; of thee, Most High, he is the
symbol."
Here again, Francis revives the Hebrew inspiration, the simple and
grandiose view of the prophets of Israel. "Praise the Lord!" the royal
Psalmist had sung, "praise the Lord, fire and frost, snow and mists, stormy
winds that do his will, mountains and all hills, fruit-trees and all cedars,
beasts and all cattle, creeping things and fowls with wings, kings of the
earth and all peoples, princes and all judges of the earth, young men and
maidens, old men and children, praise the Lord, praise ye the Lord!"
The day of the birds of Bevagna remained in his memory as one of the
most beautiful of his whole life, and though usually so reserved he always

loved to tell of it;18 it was because he owed to Clara these pure ardors which
brought him into a secret and delicious communion with all beings; it was
she who had revived him from sadness and hesitation; in his heart he bore
an immense gratitude to her who, just when he needed it, had known how to
return to him love for love, inspiration for inspiration.
Francis's sympathy for animals, as we see it shining forth here, has none
of that sentimentalism, so often artificial and exclusive of all other love,
which certain associations of his time noisily displayed; in him it is only a
manifestation of his feeling for nature, a deeply mystical, one might say
pantheistic, sentiment, if the word had not a too definitely philosophical
sense, quite opposite to the Franciscan thought.
This sentiment, which in the poets of the thirteenth century is so often
false and affected, was in him not only true, but had in it something alive,
healthy, robust.19 It is this vein of poetry which awoke Italy to self-
consciousness, made her in a few years forget the nightmare of Catharist
ideas, and rescued her from pessimism. By it Francis became the forerunner
of the artistic movement which preceded the Renaissance, the inspirer of
that group of Pre-Raphaelites, awkward, grotesque in drawing though at
times they were, to whom we turn to-day with a sort of piety, finding in
their ungraceful saints an inner life, a moral feeling which we seek for
elsewhere in vain.
If the voice of the Poverello of Assisi was so well understood it was
because in this matter, as in all others, it was entirely unconventional. How
far we are, with him, from the fierce or Pharisaic piety of those monks
which forbids even the females of animals to enter their convent! His notion
of chastity in no sense resembles this excessive prudery. One day at Sienna
he asked for some turtle-doves, and holding them in the skirt of his tunic, he
said: "Little sisters turtle-doves, you are simple, innocent, and chaste; why
did you let yourselves be caught? I shall save you from death, and have
nests made for you, so that you may bring forth young and multiply
according to the commandment of our Creator."
And he went and made nests for them all, and the turtle-doves began to
lay eggs and bring up their broods under the eyes of the Brothers.20
At Rieti a family of red-breasts were the guests of the monastery, and the
young birds made marauding expeditions on the very table where the

Brothers were eating.21 Not far from there, at Greccio,22 they brought to
Francis a leveret that had been taken alive in a trap. "Come to me, brother
leveret," he said to it. And as the poor creature, being set free, ran to him for
refuge, he took it up, caressed it, and finally put it on the ground that it
might run away; but it returned to him again and again, so that he was
obliged to send it to the neighboring forest before it would consent to return
to freedom.23
One day he was crossing the Lake of Rieti. The boatman in whose bark
he was making the passage offered him a tench of uncommon size. Francis
accepted it with joy, but to the great amazement of the fisherman put it back
into the water, bidding it bless God.24
We should never have done if we were to relate all the incidents of this
kind,25 for the sentiment of nature was innate with him; it was a perpetual
communion which made him love the whole creation.26 He is ravished with
the witchery of great forests; he has the terrors of a child when he is alone
at prayer in a deserted chapel, but he tastes ineffable joy merely in inhaling
the perfume of a flower, or gazing into the limpid water of a brook.27
This perfect lover of poverty permitted one luxury—he even commanded
it at Portiuncula—that of flowers; the Brother was bidden not to sow
vegetables and useful plants only; he must reserve one corner of good
ground for our sisters, the flowers of the fields. Francis talked with them
also, or rather he replied to them, for their mysterious and gentle language
crept into the very depth of his heart.28
The thirteenth century was prepared to understand the voice of the
Umbrian poet; the sermon to the birds29 closed the reign of Byzantine art
and of the thought of which it was the image. It is the end of dogmatism and
authority; it is the coming in of individualism and inspiration; very
uncertain, no doubt, and to be followed by obstinate reactions, but none the
less marking a date in the history of the human conscience.30 Many among
the companions of Francis were too much the children of their century, too
thoroughly imbued with its theological and metaphysical methods, to quite
understand a sentiment so simple and profound.31 But each in his degree felt
its charm. Here Thomas of Celano's language rises to an elevation which we
find in no other part of his works, closing with a picture of Francis which
makes one think of the Song of Songs.32

Of more than middle height, Francis had a delicate and kindly face, black
eyes, a soft and sonorous voice. There was in his whole person a delicacy
and grace which made him infinitely lovely. All these characteristics are
found in the most ancient portraits.33

FOOTNOTES
1. 3 Soc., 57; cf. An. Perus., A. SS., p. 599.
2. Rev. xxi.; 1 Cel., 46; 3 Soc., 57-59; An. Perus., A. SS., p. 600.
3. 1 Cel., 55 and 56; Bon., 129-132.
4. Fior., 7; Spec., 96; Conform., 223a, 2. The fact of Francis's sojourn on an island in this lake is
made certain by 1 Cel., 60.
5. Vide below, p. 400. Cf. A. SS., pp. 823 f.
6. At present Sasso-Feltrio, between Conca and Marecchio, south of and about two hours' walk from
San Marino.
7. The happiness that I expect is so great that all pain is joyful to me. All the documents give
Francis's text in Italian, which is enough to prove that it was the language not only of his poems but
also of his sermons. Spec. 92a ff. Conform. 113a, 2; 231a, 1; Fior., Prima consid.
8. See p. 400.
9. 2 Cel., 3, 85; Bon., 82.
10. 1 Cel., 56; Bon., 132.
11. Vide Wadding, ann. 1213-1215. Cf. A. SS., pp. 602, 603, 825-831. Mark of Lisbon, lib. i., cap.
45, pp. 78-80; Papini, Storia di S. Francesco, i., p. 79 ff. (Foligno, 1825, 2 vols., 4to). It is surprising
to see Father Suysken giving so much weight to the argumentum a silentio.
12. From Pentecost, 1213, to that of 1214.—Post non multum vero temporis versus Marochium iter
arripuit, says Thomas of Celano (1 Cel., 56), after having mentioned the return from Slavonia.
Taking into account the author's usus loquendi the phrase appears to establish a certain interval
between the two missions.
13. Conform., 110b, 1; Spec., 62b; Fior., 16; Bon., 170-174.
14. Village about two leagues S. W. from Assisi. The time is indirectly fixed by Bon., 173, and 1 Cel.,
58.
15. 1 Cel. 58; Bon., 109 and 174; Fior., 16; Spec., 62b; Conform., 114b, 2.
16. About halfway between Orvieto and Narni.
17. 1 Cel., 59; Bon., 175.
18. Ad hæc, ut ipse dicebat ... 1 Cel., 58.
19. Francis has been compared in this regard to certain of his contemporaries, but the similarity of the
words only makes more evident the diversity of inspiration. Honorius III. may say: Forma rosæ est
inferius angusta, superius ampla et significat quod Christus pauper fuit in mundo, sed est Dominus
super omnia et implet universa. Nam sicut forma rosæ, etc. (Horoy, t. i., col. xxiv. and 804), and
make a whole sermon on the symbolism of the rose; these overstrained dissertations have nothing to
do with the feeling for nature. It is the arsenal of mediæval rhetoric used to dissect a word. It is an
intellectual effort, not a song of love. The Imitation would say: If thy heart were right all creatures
would be for thee a mirror of life and a volume of holy doctrine, lib. ii., cap. 2. The simple sentiment
of the beauty of creation is absent here also; the passage is a pedagogue in disguise.
20. Spec., 157. Fior.; 22.

21. 2 Cel., 2, 16; Conform., 148a, 1, 183b, 2. Cf. the story of the sheep of Portiuncula: Bon., 111.
22. Village in the valley of Rieti, two hours' walk from that town, on the road to Terni.
23. 1 Cel., 60; Bon., 113.
24. 1 Cel., 61; Bon., 114.
25. 2 Cel., 3, 54; Bon., 109; 2 Cel., 3; 103 ff.; Bon., 116 ff.; Bon., 110; 1 Cel., 61; Bon., 114, 113,
115; 1 Cel., 79; Fior., 13, etc.
26. 2 Cel., 3, 101 ff.; Bon., 123.
27. 2 Cel., 3, 59; 1 Cel., 80 and 81.
28. 2 Cel., 3, 101; Spec., 136a; 1 Cel., 81.
29. This is the scene in his life most often reproduced by the predecessors of Giotto. The unknown
artist who (before 1236) decorated the nave of the Lower Church of Assisi gives five frescos to the
history of Jesus and five to the life of St. Francis. Upon the latter he represents: 1, the renunciation of
the paternal inheritance; 2, Francis upholding the Lateran church; 3, the sermon to the birds; 4, the
stigmata; 5, the funeral. This work, unhappily very badly lighted, and about half of it destroyed at the
time of the construction of the chapels of the nave, ought to be engraved before it completely
disappears. The history of art in the time of Giunta Pisano is still too much enveloped in obscurity for
us to neglect such a source of information. M. Thode (Franz von Assisi und die Anfänge der Kunst,
Berlin, 1885, 8vo. illust.) and the Rev. Father Fratini (Storia della Basilica d'Assisi, Prato, 1882, 8vo)
are much too brief so far as these frescos are concerned.
30. It is needless to say that I do not claim that Francis was the only initiator of this movement, still
less that he was its creator; he was its most inspired singer, and that may suffice for his glory. If Italy
was awakened it was because her sleep was not so sound as in the tenth century; the mosaics of the
façade of the Cathedral of Spoleto (the Christ between the Virgin and St. John) already belong to the
new art. Still, the victory was so little final that the mural paintings of St. Lawrence without the walls
and of the Quattro Coronate, which are subsequent to it by half a score of years, relapse into a coarse
Byzantinism. See also those of the Baptistery of Florence.
31. Hence the more or less subtile explanations with which they adorn these incidents.—As to the
part of animals in thirteenth century legends consult Cæsar von Heisterbach, Strange's edition, t. ii.,
pp. 257 ff.
32. 1 Cel., 80-83.
33. 1 Cel., 83; Conform., 111a. M. Thode (Anfänge, pp. 76-94) makes a study of some thirty portraits.
The most important are reproduced in Saint François (1 vol., 4to, Paris, 1885); 1, contemporary
portrait, by Brother Eudes, now at Subiaco (loc. cit., p. 30); 2, portrait dating about 1230, by Giunta
Pisano (?); preserved at Portiuncula (loc. cit., p. 384); 3, finally, portrait dated 1235, by Bon.
Berlinghieri, and preserved at Pescia, in Tuscany (loc. cit., p. 277). In 1886 Prof. Carattoli studied
with great care a portrait which dates from about those years and of which he gives a picture (also
preserved of late years at Portiuncula). Miscellanea francescana t. i., pp. 44-48; cf. pp. 160, 190, and
1887, p. 32. M. Bonghi has written some interesting papers on the iconography of St. Francis
(Francesco di Assisi, 1 vol., 12mo, Citta di Castello, Lapi, 1884. Vide pp. 103-113).

CHAPTER XI
THE INNER MAN AND WONDER-WORKING

The missionary journey, undertaken under the encouragement of St.
Clara and so poetically inaugurated by the sermon to the birds of Bevagna,
appears to have been a continual triumph for Francis.1 Legend definitively
takes possession of him; whether he will or no, miracles burst forth under
his footsteps; quite unawares to himself the objects of which he has made
use produce marvellous effects; folk come out from the villages in
procession to meet him, and the biographer gives us to hear the echo of
those religious festivals of Italy—merry, popular, noisy, bathed in sunshine
—which so little resemble the fastidiously arranged festivals of northern
peoples.
From Alviano Francis doubtless went to Narni, one of the most charming
little towns in Umbria, busy with building a cathedral after the conquest of
their communal liberties. He seems to have had a sort of predilection for
this city as well as for its surrounding villages.2 From thence he seems to
have plunged into the valley of Rieti, where Greccio, Fonte-Colombo, San
Fabiano, Sant-Eleuthero, Poggio-Buscone retain even stronger traces of him
than the environs of Assisi.
Thomas of Celano gives us no particulars of the route followed, but, on
the other hand, he goes at length into the success of the apostle in the March
of Ancona, and especially at Ascoli. Did the people of these districts still
remember the appeals which Francis and Egidio had made to them six years
before (1209), or must we believe that they were peculiarly prepared to
understand the new gospel? However this may be, nowhere else was a like
enthusiasm shown; the effect of the sermons was so great that some thirty
neophytes at once received the habit of the Order.
The March of Ancona ought to be held to be the Franciscan province par
excellence. There are Offida, San-Severino, Macerata, Fornaro, Cingoli,
Fermo, Massa, and twenty other hermitages where, during more than a
century, poverty was to find its heralds and its martyrs; from thence came

Giovanni della Verna, Jacopo di Massa, Conrad di Offida, Angelo Clareno,
and those legions of nameless revolutionists, dreamers, and prophets, who
since the extirpés in 1244 by the general of the Order, Crescentius of Jesi,
never ceased to make new recruits, and by their proud resistance to all
powers filled one of the finest pages of religious history in the Middle Ages.
This success, which bathed the soul of Francis with joy, did not arouse in
him the smallest movement of pride. Never has man had a greater power
over hearts, because never preacher preached himself less. One day Brother
Masseo desired to put his modesty to the test.
"Why thee? Why thee? Why thee?" he repeated again and
again, as if to make a mock of Francis. "What are you saying?"
cried Francis at last. "I am saying that everybody follows thee,
everyone desires to see thee, hear thee, and obey thee, and yet
for all that thou art neither beautiful, nor learned, nor of noble
family. Whence comes it, then, that it should be thee whom the
world desires to follow?"
On hearing these words the blessed Francis, full of joy, raised
his eyes to heaven, and after remaining a long time absorbed in
contemplation he knelt, praising and blessing God with
extraordinary fervor. Then turning toward Masseo, "Thou
wishest to know why it is I whom men follow? Thou wishest to
know? It is because the eyes of the Most High have willed it
thus; he continually watches the good and the wicked, and as his
most holy eyes have not found among sinners any smaller man,
nor any more insufficient and more sinful, therefore he has
chosen me to accomplish the marvellous work which God has
undertaken; he chose me because he could find no one more
worthless, and he wished here to confound the nobility and
grandeur, the strength, the beauty, and the learning of this
world."
This reply throws a ray of light upon St. Francis's heart; the message
which he brought to the world is once again the glad tidings announced to
the poor; its purpose is the taking up again of that Messianic work which
the Virgin of Nazareth caught a glimpse of in her Magnificat, that song of
love and liberty, the sighs of which breathe the vision of a new social state.

He comes to remind the world that the welfare of man, the peace of his
heart, the joy of his life, are neither in money, nor in learning, nor in
strength, but in an upright and sincere will. Peace to men of good will.
The part which he had taken at Assisi in the controversies of his fellow-
citizens he would willingly have taken in all the rest of Italy, for no man has
ever dreamed of a more complete renovation; but if the end he sought was
the same as that of many revolutionaries who came after him, their methods
were completely different; his only weapon was love.
The event has decided against him. Apart from the illuminati of the
March of Ancona and the Fraticelli of our own Provence his disciples have
vied with one another to misunderstand his thought.3
Who knows if some one will not arise to take up his work? Has not the
passion for worm-eaten speculations yet made victims enough? Are there
not many among us who perceive that luxury is a delusion, that if life is a
battle, it is not a slaughter-house where ferocious beasts wrangle over their
prey, but a wrestling with the divine, under whatever form it may present
itself—truth, beauty, or love? Who knows whether this expiring nineteenth
century will not arise from its winding-sheet to make amende honorable
and bequeath to its successor one manly word of faith?
Yes, the Messiah will come. He who was announced by Gioacchino di
Fiore and who is to inaugurate a new epoch in the history of humanity will
appear. Hope maketh not ashamed. In our modern Babylons and in the huts
on our mountains are too many souls who mysteriously sigh the hymn of
the great vigil, Rorate cœli desuper et nubes pluant Justum,4 for us not to be
on the eve of a divine birth.
All origins are mysterious. This is true of matter, but yet more true of that
life, superior to all others, which we call holiness; it was in prayer that
Francis found the spiritual strength which he needed; he therefore sought
for silence and solitude. If he knew how to do battle in the midst of men in
order to win them to the faith, he loved, as Celano says, to fly away like a
bird going to make its nest upon the mountain.5
With men truly pious the prayer of the lips, the formulated prayer, is
hardly other than an inferior form of true prayer. Even when it is sincere

and attentive, and not a mechanical repetition, it is only a prelude for souls
not dead of religious materialism.
Nothing resembles piety so much as love. Formularies of prayer are as
incapable of speaking the emotions of the soul as model love-letters of
speaking the transports of an impassioned heart. To true piety as well as to
profound love, the formula is a sort of profanation.
To pray is to talk with God, to lift ourselves up to him, to converse with
him that he may come down to us. It is an act of meditation, of reflection,
which presupposes the effort of all that is most personal in us.
Looked at in this sense, prayer is the mother of all liberty and all
freedom.
Whether or no it be a soliloquy of the soul with itself, the soliloquy
would be none the less the very foundation of a strong individuality.
With St. Francis as with Jesus, prayer has this character of effort which
makes of it the greatest moral act. In order to truly know such men one
must have been able to go with them, to follow Jesus up to the mountain
where he passed his nights. Three favored ones, Peter, James, John,
followed him thither one day; but to describe what they saw, all that a
manly sursum corda added to the radiance and the mysterious grandeur of
him whom they adored, they were obliged to resort to the language of
symbols.
It was so with St. Francis. For him as for his Master the end of prayer is
communion with the heavenly Father, the accord of the divine with the
human; or rather it is man who puts forth his strength to do the work of
God, not saying to him a mere passive, resigned, powerless Fiat, but
courageously raising his head: "Behold me, Lord, I delight to do thy will."
"There are unfathomable depths in the human soul, because at the bottom
is God himself." Whether this God be transcendent or immanent, whether
he be One, the Creator, the eternal and immutable Principle, or whether he
be, as say the doctors beyond the Rhine, the ideal objectivation of our Me,
is not the question for the heroes of humanity. The soldier in the thick of
battle does not philosophize as to how much truth or falsehood there is in
the patriotic sentiment; he takes his arms and fights at the peril of his life.
So the soldiers of spiritual conflicts seek for strength in prayer, in reflection,

contemplation, inspiration; all, poets, artists, teachers, saints, legislators,
prophets, leaders of the people, learned men, philosophers, all draw from
this same source.
But it is not without difficulty that the soul unites itself to God, or if one
prefers, that it finds itself. A prayer ends at last in divine communion only
when it began by a struggle. The patriarch of Israel, asleep near Bethel, had
already divined this: the God who passes by tells his name only to those
who stop him and do him violence to learn it. He blesses only after long
hours of conflict.
The gospel has found an untranslatable word to characterize the prayers
of Jesus, it compares the conflict which preceded the voluntary immolation
of Christ to the death-struggle: Factus in agonia.6 We might say of his life
that it had been a long temptation, a struggle, a prayer, since these words
only express different moments of spiritual activity.
Like their Master, the disciples and successors of Christ can conquer their
own souls only through perseverance. But these words, empty of meaning
for devout conventicles, have had a tragic sense for men of religious genius.
Nothing is more false, historically, than the saints that adorn our
churches, with their mincing attitude, their piteous expression, that
indescribably anæmic and emaciated—one may almost say emasculated—
air which shows in their whole nature; they are pious seminarists brought
up under the direction of St. Alphonso di Liguori or of St. Louis di
Gonzagua; they are not saints, not the violent who take the kingdom of
heaven by force.
We have come to one of the most delicate features of the life of Francis—
his relations with diabolical powers. Customs and ideas have so profoundly
changed in all that concerns the existence of the devil and his relations with
men, that it is almost impossible to picture to oneself the enormous place
which the thought of demons occupied at that time in the minds of men.
The best minds of the Middle Ages believed without a doubt in the
existence of the perverse spirit, in his perpetual transformations in the
endeavor to tempt men and cause them to fall into his snares. Even in the
sixteenth century, Luther, who undermined so many beliefs, had no more

doubt of the personal existence of Satan than of sorcery, conjurations, or
possessions.7
Finding in their souls a wide background of grandeur and wretchedness,
whence they sometimes heard a burst of distant harmonies calling them to a
higher life, soon to be overpowered by the clamors of the brute, our
ancestors could not refrain from seeking the explanation of this duel. They
found it in the conflict of the demons with God.
The devil is the prince of the demons, as God is the prince of the angels;
capable of all transformations, they carry on to the end of time terrible
battles which will end in the victory of God, but meantime each man his
whole life long is contended for by these two adversaries, and the noblest
souls are naturally the most disputed.
This is how St. Francis, with all men of his time, explained the
disquietudes, terrors, anguish, with which his heart was at times assailed, as
well as the hopes, consolations, joys in which in general his soul was
bathed. Wherever we follow his steps local tradition has preserved the
memory of rude assaults of the tempter which he had to undergo.
It is no doubt useless to recall here the elementary fact that if manners
change with the times, man himself is quite as strangely modified. If,
according to education, and the manner of life, such or such a sense may
develop an acuteness which confounds common experience—hearing in the
musician, touch with the blind, etc.—we may estimate by this how much
sharper certain senses may have been then than now. Several centuries ago
visual delusion was with adults what it is now with children in remotest
country parts. A quivering leaf, a nothing, a breath, an unexplained sound
creates an image which they see and in the reality of which they believe
absolutely. Man is all of a piece; the hyperæsthesia of the will presupposes
that of the sensibility, one is conditioned on the other, and it is this which
makes men of revolutionary epochs so much greater than nature. It would
be absurd under pretext of truth to try to bring them back to the common
measures of our contemporary society, for they were veritably demigods for
good as for evil.
Legends are not always absurd. The men of '93 are still near to us, but it
is nevertheless with good right that legend has taken possession of them,
and it is pitiable to see these men who, ten times a day, had to take

resolutions where everything was at stake—their destiny, that of their ideas,
and sometimes that of their country—judged as if they had been mere
worthy citizens, with leisure to discuss at length every morning the
garments they were to wear or the menu of a dinner. Most of the time
historians have perceived only a part of the truth about them; for not only
were there two men in them, almost all of them are at the same time poets,
demagogues, prophets, heroes, martyrs. To write history, then, is to translate
and transpose almost continually. The men of the thirteenth century could
not bring themselves to not refer to an exterior cause the inner motions of
their souls. In what appears to us as the result of our own reflections they
saw inspiration; where we say desires, instincts, passions, they said
temptation, but we must not permit these differences of language to make
us overlook or tax with trickery a part of their spiritual life, bringing us thus
to the conclusions of a narrow and ignorant rationalism.
St. Francis believed himself to have many a time fought with the devil;
the horrible demons of the Etruscan Inferno still haunted the forests of
Umbria and Tuscany; but while for his contemporaries and some of his
disciples apparitions, prodigies, possessions, are daily phenomena, for him
they are exceptional, and remain entirely in the background. In the
iconography of St. Benedict, as in that of most of the popular saints, the
devil occupies a preponderant place; in that of St. Francis he disappears so
completely that in the long series of Giotto's frescos at Assisi he is not seen
a single time.8
In the same way all that is magic and miracle-working occupies in his life
an entirely secondary rank. Jesus in the Gospels gave his apostles power to
cast out evil spirits, and to heal all sickness and all infirmity.9 Francis surely
took literally these words, which made a part of his Rule. He believed that
he could work miracles, and he willed to do so; but his religious thought
was too pure to permit him to consider miracles otherwise than as an
entirely exceptional means of relieving the sufferings of men. Not once do
we see him resorting to miracle to prove his apostolate or to bolster up his
ideas. His tact taught him that souls are worthy of being won by better
means. This almost complete absence of the marvellous10 is by so much the
more remarkable that it is in absolute contradiction with the tendencies of
his time.11

Open the life of his disciple, St. Anthony of Padua ( 1231); it is a
tiresome catalogue of prodigies, healings, resurrections. One would say it
was rather the prospectus of some druggist who had invented a new drug
than a call to men to conversion and a higher life. It may interest invalids or
devotees, but neither the heart nor the conscience is touched by it. It must
be said in justice to Anthony of Padua that his relations with Francis appear
to have been very slight. Among the earliest disciples who had time to
fathom their master's thought to the very depths we find traces of this noble
disdain of the marvellous; they knew too well that the perfect joy is not to
astound the world with prodigies, to give sight to the blind, nor even to
revive those who have been four days dead, but that it lives in the love that
goes even to self-immolation. Mihi absit gloriari nisi in cruce Domini.12
Thus Brother Egidio asked of God grace not to perform miracles; he saw
in them, as in the passion for learning, a snare in which the proud would be
taken, and which would distract the Order from its true mission.13
St. Francis's miracles are all acts of love; the greater number of them are
found in the healing of nervous maladies, those apparently inexplicable
disquietudes which are the cruel afflictions of critical times. His gentle
glance, at once so compassionate and so strong, which seemed like a
messenger from his heart, often sufficed to make those who met it forget all
their suffering.
The evil eye is perhaps a less stupid superstition than is generally
fancied. Jesus was right in saying that a look sufficed to make one an
adulterer; but there is also a look—that of the contemplative Mary, for
example—which is worth all sacrifices, because it includes them all,
because it gives, consecrates, immolates him who looks.
Civilization dulls this power of the glance. A part of the education the
world gives us consists in teaching our eyes to deceive, in making them
expressionless, in extinguishing their flames; but simple and
straightforward natures never give up using this language of the heart,
"which brings life and health in its beams."
"A Brother was suffering unspeakable tortures; sometimes he would roll
upon the ground, striking against whatever lay in his way, frothing at the
mouth, horrible to see; at times he would become rigid, and again, after
remaining stark outstretched for a moment, would roll about in horrible

contortions; sometimes lying in a heap on the ground, his feet touching his
head, he would bound upward as high as a man's head." Francis came to see
him and healed him.14
But these are exceptions, and the greater part of the time the Saint
withdrew himself from the entreaties of his companions when they asked
miracles at his hands.
To sum up, if we take a survey of the whole field of Francis's piety, we
see that it proceeds from the secret union of his soul with the divine by
prayer; this intuitive power of seeing the ideal classes him with the mystics.
He knew, indeed, both the ecstasy and the liberty of mysticism, but we must
not forget those features of character which separate him from it,
particularly his apostolic fervor. Besides this his piety had certain peculiar
qualities which it is necessary to point out.
And first, liberty with respect of observances: Francis felt all the
emptiness and pride of most religious observance. He saw the snare that lies
hidden there, for the man who carefully observes all the minutiæ of a
religious code risks forgetting the supreme law of love. More than this, the
friar who lays upon himself a certain number of supererogatory facts gains
the admiration of the ignorant, but the pleasure which he finds in this
admiration actually transforms his pious act into sin. Thus, strangely
enough, contrary to other founders of orders, he was continually easing the
strictness of the various rules which he laid down.15 We may not take this to
be a mere accident, for it was only after a struggle with his disciples that he
made his will prevail; and it was precisely those who were most disposed to
relax their vow of poverty who were the most anxious to display certain
bigoted observances before the public eye.
"The sinner can fast," Francis would say at such times; "he can pray,
weep, macerate himself, but one thing he cannot do, he cannot be faithful to
God." Noble words, not unworthy to fall from the lips of him who came to
preach a worship in spirit and in truth, without temple or priest; or rather
that every fireside shall be a temple and every believer a priest.
Religious formalism, in whatever form of worship, always takes on a
forced and morose manner. Pharisees of every age disfigure their faces that
no one may be unaware of their godliness. Francis not merely could not

endure these grimaces of false piety, he actually counted mirth and joy in
the number of religious duties.
How shall one be melancholy who has in the heart an inexhaustible
treasure of life and truth which only increases as one draws upon it? How
be sad when in spite of falls one never ceases to make progress? The pious
soul which grows and develops has a joy like that of the child, happy in
feeling its weak little limbs growing strong and permitting it every day a
further exertion.
The word joy is perhaps that which comes most often to the pen of the
Franciscan authors;16 the master went so far as to make it one of the
precepts of the Rule.17 He was too good a general not to know that a joyous
army is always a victorious army. In the history of the early Franciscan
missions there are bursts of laughter which ring out high and clear.18
For that matter, we are apt to imagine the Middle Ages as much more
melancholy than they really were. Men suffered much in those days, but the
idea of grief being never separated from that of penalty, suffering was either
an expiation or a test, and sorrow thus regarded loses its sting; light and
hope shine through it.
Francis drew a part of his joy from the communion. He gave to the
sacrament of the eucharist that worship imbued with unutterable emotion,
with joyful tears, which has aided some of the noblest of human souls to
endure the burden and heat of the day.19 The letter of the dogma was not
fixed in the thirteenth century as it is to-day, but all that is beautiful, true,
potent, eternal in the mystical feast instituted by Jesus was then alive in
every heart.
The eucharist was truly the viaticum of the soul. Like the pilgrims of
Emmaus long ago, in the hour when the shades of evening fall and a vague
sadness invades the soul, when the phantoms of the night awake and seem
to loom up behind all our thoughts, our fathers saw the divine and
mysterious Companion coming toward them; they drank in his words, they
felt his strength descending upon their hearts, all their inward being warmed
again, and again they whispered, "Abide with us, Lord, for the day is far
spent and the night approacheth."
And often their prayer was heard.

FOOTNOTES
1. 1 Cel., 62.
2. 1 Cel., 66; cf. Bon., 180; 1 Cel., 67; cf. Bon., 182; 1 Cel., 69; Bon., 183. After St. Francis's death
the Narniates were the first to come to pray at his tomb. 1 Cel., 128, 135, 136, 138, 141; Bon., 275.
3. As concerning: 1, fidelity to Poverty; 2, prohibition of modifying the Rule; 3, the equal authority
of the Will and the Rule; 4, the request for privileges at the court of Rome; 5, the elevation of the
friars to high ecclesiastical charges; 6, the absolute prohibition of putting themselves in opposition to
the secular clergy; 7, the interdiction of great churches and rich convents. On all these points and
many others infidelity to Francis's will was complete in the Order less than twenty-five years after his
death. We might expatiate on all this; the Holy See in interpreting the Rule had canonical right on its
side, but Ubertino di Casali in saying that it was perfectly clear and had no need of interpretation had
good sense on his side; let that suffice! Et est stupor quare queritur expositio super litteram sic
apertam quia nulla est difficultas in regulæ intelligentia. Arbor vitæ crucifixæ, Venice, 1485. lib. v.,
cap. 3. Sanctus vir Egidius tanto ejulatu clamabat super regulæ destructionem quam videbat quod
ignorantibus viam spiritus quasi videbatur insanus. Id. ibid.
4. Heavens drop down your dew, and let the clouds rain down the Just One. Anthem for Advent.
5. In foramibus petræ nidificabat. 1 Cel., 71. Upon the prayers of Francis vide ibid., 71 and 72; 2
Cel., 3, 38-43; Ben., 139-148. Cf. 1 Cel., 6; 91; 103; 3 Soc., 8; 12; etc.
6. Luke, xxii. 44.
7. Felix Kuhn: Luther, sa vie et son œuvre, Paris, 1883, 3 vols., 8vo. t. i., p. 128; t. ii., p. 9; t. iii., p.
257. Benvenuto Cellini does not hesitate to describe a visit which he made one day to the Coliseum
in company with a magician whose words evoked clouds of devils who filled the whole place. B.
Cellini, La vita scritta da lui medesimo, Bianchi's edition, Florence, 1890, 12mo, p. 33.
8. On the devil and Francis vide 1 Cel., 68, 72; 3 Soc., 12; 2 Cel., 1, 6; 3, 10; 53; 58-65; Bon., 59-62.
Cf. Eccl., 3; 5; 13; Fior., 29; Spec., 110b. To form an idea of the part taken by the devil in the life of a
monk at the beginning of the thirteenth century, one must read the Dialogus miraculorium of Cæsar
von Heisterbach.
9. Matthew, x. 1.
10. Miracles occupy only ten paragraphs (61-70) in 1 Cel., and of this number there are several which
can hardly be counted as Francis's miracles, since they were performed by objects which had
belonged to him.
11. Heretics often took advantage of this thirst for the marvellous to dupe the catholics. The Cathari
of Moncoul made a portrait of the Virgin representing her as one eyed and toothless, saying that in
his humility Christ had chosen a very ugly woman for mother. They had no difficulty in healing
several cases of disease by its means; the image became famous, was venerated almost everywhere,
and accomplished many miracles until the day when the heretics divulged the deception, to the great
scandal of the faithful. Egbert von Schönau, Contra Catharos. Serm. I. cap. 2. (Patrol. lat. Migne t.
195.) Cf. Heisterbach, loc. cit., v. 18. Luc de Tuy, De altera Vita, lib. ii. 9; iii. 9, 18 (Patrol. Migne.,
208).
12. "But God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ." Gal. vi. 14. This is
to this day the motto of the Brothers Minor.
13. Spec., 182a; 200a; 232a. Cf. 199a.
14. 1 Cel., 67.

15. Secundum primam regulam fratres feria quarta et sexta et per licentiam beati Francisci feria
secunda et sabbato jejunabant. Giord. 11. cf. Reg. 1221, cap. 3 and Reg. 1223, cap. 3, where Friday
is the only fast day retained.
16. 1 Cel., 10; 22; 27; 31; 42; 80; 2 Cel., 1, 1; 3, 65-68; Eccl., 5; 6; Giord., 21; Spec., 119a; Conform.,
143a, 2.
17. Caveant fratres quod non ostendant se tristes extrinsecus nubilosos et hypocritas; sed ostendant
se gaudentis in Domine, hilares et convenientes gratiosos.
18. Eccl., loc. cit.; Giord., loc. cit.
19. Vide Test.; 1 Cel., 46; 62; 75; 2 Cel., 3, 129; Spec., 44a.

CHAPTER XII
THE CHAPTER-GENERAL OF 12171

After Whitsunday of 1217 chronological notes of Francis's life are
numerous enough to make error almost impossible. Unhappily, this is not
the case for the eighteen months which precede it (autumn of 1215-
Whitsunday, 1217). For this period we are reduced to conjecture, or little
better.
As Francis at that time undertook no foreign mission, he doubtless
employed his time in evangelizing Central Italy and in consolidating the
foundations of his institution. His presence at Rome during the Lateran
Council (November 11-30, 1215) is possible, but it has left no trace in the
earliest biographies. The Council certainly took the new Order into
consideration,2 but it was to renew the invitation made to it five years
before by the supreme pontiff, to choose one of the Rules already approved
by the Church.3 St. Dominic, who was then at Rome to beg for the
confirmation of his institute, received the same counsel and immediately
conformed to it. The Holy See would willingly have conceded special
constitutions to the Brothers Minor, if they had adopted for a base the Rule
of St. Benedict; thus the Clarisses, except those of St. Damian, while
preserving their name and a certain number of their customs, were obliged
to profess the Benedictine rule.
In spite of all solicitations, Francis insisted upon retaining his own Rule.
One is led to believe that it was to confer upon these questions that we find
him at Perugia in July, 1216, when Innocent III. died.4
However this may be, about this epoch the chapters took on a great
importance. The Church, which had looked on at the foundation of the
Order with somewhat mixed feelings, could no longer rest content with
being the mere spectator of so profound a movement; it saw the need of
utilizing it.

Ugolini was marvellously well prepared for such a task. Giovanni di San
Paolo, Bishop of the Sabine, charged by Innocent III. to look after the
Brothers, died in 1216, and Ugolini was not slow to offer his protection to
Francis, who accepted it with gratitude. This extraordinary offer is
recounted at length by the Three Companions.5 It must certainly be fixed in
the summer of 12166 immediately after the death of Giovanni di San Paolo.
It is very possible that the first chapter held in the presence of this
cardinal took place on May 29, 1216. By an error very common in history,
most of the Franciscan writers have referred to a single date all the scattered
incidents concerning the first solemn assizes of the Order, and have called
this typical assembly the Chapter of the Mats. In reality for long years all
the gatherings of the Brothers Minor deserved this name.7
Coming together at the season of the greatest heat, they slept in the open
air or sheltered themselves under booths of reeds. We need not pity them.
There is nothing like the glorious transparency of the summer night in
Umbria; sometimes in Provence one may enjoy a foretaste of it, but if at
Baux, upon the rock of Doms, or at St. Baume, the sight is equally solemn
and grandiose, it still wants the caressing sweetness, the effluence of life
which in Umbria give the night a bewitching charm.
The inhabitants of the neighboring towns and villages flocked to these
meetings in crowds, at once to see the ceremonies, to be present when their
relatives or friends assumed the habit, to listen to the appeals of the Saint
and to furnish to the friars the provisions of which they might have need.
All this is not without some analogy with the camp-meeting so dear to
Americans. As to the figures of several thousands of attendants given in the
legends, and furnishing even to a Franciscan, Father Papini, the occasion
for pleasantries of doubtful taste, it is perhaps not so surprising as might be
supposed.8
These first meetings, to which all the Brothers eagerly hastened, held in
the open air in the presence of crowds come together from distant places,
have then nothing in common with the subsequent chapters-general, which
were veritable conclaves attended by a small number of delegates, and the
majority of the work of which, done in secret, was concerned only with the
affairs of the Order.

During Francis's lifetime the purpose of these assemblies was essentially
religious. Men attended them not to talk business, or proceed to the
nomination of the minister-general, but in mutual communion to gain new
strength from the joys, the example, and the sufferings of the other
brethren.9
The four years which followed the Whitsunday of 1216 form a stage in
the evolution of the Umbrian movement; that during which Francis was
battling for autonomy. We find here pretty delicate shades of distinction,
which have been misunderstood by Church writers as much as by their
adversaries, for if Francis was particular not to put himself in the attitude of
revolt, he would not compromise his independence, and he felt with an
exquisite divination that all the privileges which the court of Rome could
heap upon him were worth nothing in comparison with liberty. Alas, he was
soon forced to resign himself to these gilded bonds, against which he never
ceased to protest, even to his last sigh;10 but to shut one's eyes to the moral
violence which the papacy did him in this matter is to condemn oneself to
an entire misapprehension of his work.
A glance over the collection of bulls addressed to the Franciscans suffices
to show with what ardor he struggled against favors so eagerly sought by
the monastic orders.11
A great number of legendary anecdotes put Francis's disdain of privileges
in the clearest light. Even his dearest friends did not always understand his
scruples.
"Do you not see," they said to him one day, "that often the
bishops do not permit us to preach, and make us remain several
days without doing anything before we are permitted to
proclaim the word of God? It would be better worth while to
obtain for this end a privilege from the pope, and it would be for
the good of souls."
"I would first convert the prelates by humility and respect," he
replied quickly; "for when they have seen us humble and
respectful toward them, they themselves will beg us to preach
and convert the people. As for me, I ask of God no privilege
unless it be that I may have none, to be full of respect for all

men, and to convert them, as our Rule ordains, more by our
example than by our speech."12
The question whether Francis was right or wrong in his antipathy to the
privileges of the curia does not come within the domain of history; it is
evident that this attitude could not long continue; the Church knows only
the faithful and rebels. But the noblest hearts often make a stand at
compromises of this kind; they desire that the future should grow out of the
past without convulsion and without a crisis.
The chapter of 1217 was notable for the definitive organization of the
Franciscan missions. Italy and the other countries were divided off into a
certain number of provinces, having each its provincial minister.
Immediately upon his accession Honorius III. had sought to revive the
popular zeal for the crusades. He had not stopped at preaching it, but
appealed to prophecies which had proclaimed that under his pontificate the
Holy Land would be reconquered.13 The renewal of fervor which ensued,
and of which the rebound was felt as far as Germany, had a profound
influence on the Brothers Minor. This time Francis, perhaps from humility,
did not put himself at the head of the friars charged with a mission to Syria;
for leader he gave them the famous Elias, formerly at Florence, where he
had had opportunity to show his high qualities.14
This Brother, who from this time appears in the foreground of this
history, came from the most humble ranks of society; the date and the
circumstances of his entrance into the Order are unknown, and hence
conjecture has come to see in him that friend of the grotto who had been
Francis's confidant shortly before his decisive conversion. However this
may be, in his youth he had earned his living in Assisi, making mattresses
and teaching a few children to read; then he had spent some time in
Bologna as scriptor; then suddenly we find him among the Brothers Minor,
charged with the most difficult missions.
His adversaries vie with one another in asserting that he was the finest
mind of his century, but unhappily it is very difficult, in the existing state of
the documents, to pronounce as to his actions; learned and energetic, eager
to play the leading part in the work of the reformation of religion, and
having made his plan beforehand as to the proper mode of realizing it, he
made straight for his goal, half political, half religious. Full of admiration

for Francis and gratitude toward him, he desired to regulate and consolidate
the movement for renovation. In the inner Franciscan circle, where Leo,
Ginepro, Egidio, and many others represent the spirit of liberty, the religion
of the humble and the simple, Elias represents the scientific and
ecclesiastical spirit, prudence and reason.
He had great success in Syria and received into the Order one of the
disciples most dear to Francis, Cæsar of Speyer, who later on was to make
the conquest of all Southern Germany in less than two years (1221-1223),
and who in the end sealed with his blood his fidelity to the strict
observance, which he defended against the attacks of Brother Elias
himself.15
Cæsar of Speyer offers a brilliant example of those suffering souls athirst
for the ideal, so numerous in the thirteenth century, who everywhere went
up and down, seeking first in learning, then in the religious life, that which
should assuage the mysterious thirst which tortured them. Disciple of the
scholastic Conrad, he had felt himself overpowered with the desire to
reform the Church; while still a layman he had preached his ideas, not
without some success, since a certain number of ladies of Speyer had begun
to lead a new life; but their husbands disapproving, he was obliged to
escape their vengeance by taking refuge at Paris, and thence he went to the
East, where in the preaching of the Brothers Minor he found again his
hopes and his dreams. This instance shows how general was the waiting
condition of souls when the Franciscan gospel blazed forth, and how its
way had been everywhere prepared.
But it is time to return to the chapter of 1217: the friars who went to
Germany under conduct of Giovanni di Penna were far from having the
success of Elias and his companions; they were completely ignorant of the
language of the country which they had undertaken to evangelize. Perhaps
Francis had not taken into account the fact that though Italian might, in case
of need, suffice in all the countries bathed by the Mediterranean, this could
not be the case in Central Europe.16
The lot of the party going to Hungary was not more happy. Very often it
came to pass that the missionaries were fain to give up their very garments
in the effort to appease the peasants and shepherds who maltreated them.
But no less incapable of understanding what was said to them than of

making themselves understood, they were soon obliged to think of returning
to Italy. We may thank the Franciscan authors for preserving for us the
memory of these checks, and not attempting to picture the friars as suddenly
knowing all languages by a divine inspiration, as later on was so often
related.17
Those who had been sent to Spain had also to undergo persecutions. This
country, like the south of France, was ravaged by heresy; but already at that
time it was vigorously repressed. The Franciscans, suspected of being false
Catholics and therefore eagerly hunted out, found a refuge with Queen
Urraca of Portugal, who permitted them to establish themselves at Coimbra,
Guimarraens, Alenquero, and Lisbon.18
Francis himself made preparations for going to France.19 This country
had a peculiar charm for him because of his fervent love of the Holy
Sacrament. Perhaps also he was unwittingly drawn toward this country to
which he owed his name, the chivalrous dreams of his youth, all of poetry,
song, music, delicious dream that had come into his life.
Something of the emotion that thrilled through him on undertaking this
new mission has passed into the story of his biographers; one feels there the
thrill at once sweet and agonizing, the heart-throb of the brave knight who
goes forth all harnessed in the early dawn to scan the horizon, dreading the
unknown and yet overflowing with joy, for he knows that the day will be
consecrated to love and to the right.
The Italian poet has given the one name of "pilgrimages of love" to the
farings forth of chivalry and the journeys undertaken by dreamers, artists, or
saints to those parts of the earth which forever mirror themselves before
their imagination and remain their chosen fatherland.20 Such a pilgrimage as
this was Francis undertaking.
"Set forth," said he to the Brothers who accompanied him,
"and walk two and two, humble and gentle, keeping silence until
after tierce, praying to God in your hearts, carefully avoiding
every vain or useless word. Meditate as much while on this
journey as if you were shut up in a hermitage or in your cell, for
wherever we are, wherever we go, we carry our cell with us;
Brother body is our cell, and the soul is the hermit who dwells in
it, there to pray to the Lord and to meditate."

Arrived at Florence he found there Cardinal Ugolini, sent by the pope as
legate to Tuscany to preach the crusade and take all needful measures for
assuring its success.21 Francis was surely far from expecting the reception
which the prelate gave him. Instead of encouraging him, the cardinal urged
him to give up his project.
"I am not willing, my brother, that you should cross the
mountains; there are many prelates who ask nothing better than
to stir up difficulties for you with the court of Rome. But I and
the other cardinals who love your Order desire to protect and aid
you, on the condition, however, that you do not quit this
province."
"But, monsignor, it would be a great disgrace for me to send
my brethren far away while I remained idly here, sharing none
of the tribulations which they must undergo."
"Wherefore, then, have you sent your brethren so far away,
exposing them thus to starvation and all sorts of perils?"
"Do you think," replied Francis warmly, and as if moved by
prophetic inspiration, "that God raised up the Brothers for the
sake of this country alone? Verily, I say unto you, God has
raised them up for the awakening and the salvation of all men,
and they shall win souls not only in the countries of those who
believe, but also in the very midst of the infidels." 22
The surprise and admiration which these words awoke in Ugolini were
not enough to make him change his mind. He insisted so strongly that
Francis turned back to Portiuncula, the inspiration of his work not even
shaken. Who knows whether the joy which he would have felt in seeing
France did not confirm him in the idea that he ought to renounce this plan?
Souls athirst with the longing for sacrifice often have scruples such as
these; they refuse the most lawful joys that they may offer them to God. We
cannot tell whether it was immediately after this interview or not till the
following year that Francis put Brother Pacifico at the head of the
missionaries sent into France.23
Pacifico, who was a poet of talent, had before his conversion been
surnamed Prince of Poesy and crowned at the capital by the emperor. One

day while visiting a relative who was a nun at San Severino in the March of
Ancona, Francis also arrived at the monastery, and preached with such a
holy impetuosity that the poet felt himself pierced with the sword of which
the Bible speaks, which penetrates between the very joints and marrow, and
discerns the thoughts and intents of the heart.24 On the morrow he assumed
the habit and received his symbolical surname.25
He was accompanied to France by Brother Agnello di Pisa, who was
destined to be put at the head of the first mission to England in 1224.26
Francis, on sending them forth, was far from dreaming that from this
country, which exerted such a fascination over him, was to come forth the
influence which was to compromise his dream—that Paris would be the
destruction of Assisi; and yet the time was not very far distant; a few years
more and the Poverello would see a part of his spiritual family forgetting
the humility of their name, their origin, and their aspirations, to run after the
ephemeral laurels of learning.
We have already seen that the habit of the Franciscans of this time was to
make their abode within easy reach of great cities; Pacifico and his
companions established themselves at St. Denis.27 We have no particulars of
their work; it was singularly fruitful, since it permitted them a few years
later to attack England with full success.
Francis passed the following year (1218) in evangelizing tours in Italy. It
is naturally impossible to follow him in these travels, the itinerary of which
was fixed by his daily inspirations, or by indications as fanciful as the one
which had formerly determined his going to Sienna. Bologna,28 the Verna,
the valley of Rieti, the Sacro-Speco of St. Benedict at Subiaco,29 Gaeta;30
San Michele on Mount Gargano31 perhaps received him at this time, but the
notes of his presence in these places are too sparse and vague to permit their
being included in any scheme of history.
It is very possible that he also paid a visit to Rome during this time; his
communications with Ugolini were much more frequent than is generally
supposed. We must not permit the stories of biographers to deceive us in
this matter; it is a natural tendency to refer all that we know of a man to
three or four especially striking dates. We forget entire years of the life of
those whom we have known the best and loved the most and group our
memories of them around a few salient events which shine all the more

brilliantly the deeper we make the surrounding obscurity. The words of
Jesus spoken on a hundred different occasions came at last to be formed
into a single discourse, the Sermon on the Mount. It is in such cases that
criticism needs to be delicate, to mingle a little divination with the heavy
artillery of scientific argument.
The texts are sacred, but we must not make fetiches of them;
notwithstanding St. Matthew, no one to-day dreams of representing Jesus as
uttering the Sermon on the Mount all at one time. In the same way, in the
narratives concerning the relations between St. Francis and Ugolini, we find
ourselves every moment shut up in no-thoroughfares, coming up against
contradictory indications, just so long as we try to refer everything to two or
three meetings, as we are at first led to do.
With a simple act of analysis these difficulties disappear and we find
each of the different narratives bringing us fragments which, being pieced
together, furnish an organic story, living, psychologically true.
From the moment at which we have now arrived, we must make a much
larger place for Ugolini than in the past; the struggle has definitively opened
between the Franciscan ideal—chimerical, perhaps, but sublime—and the
ecclesiastical policy, to go on until the day when, half in humility, half in
discouragement, Francis, heartsick, abdicates the direction of his spiritual
family.
Ugolini returned to Rome at the end of 1217. During the following winter
his countersign is found at the bottom of the most important bulls;32 he
devoted this time to the special study of the question of the new orders, and
summoned Francis before him. We have seen with what frankness he had
declared to him at Florence that many of the prelates would do anything to
discredit him with the pope.33 It is evident the success of the Order, its
methods, which in spite of all protestations to the contrary seemed to savor
of heresy, the independence of Francis, who had scattered his friars in all
the four corners of the globe without trying to gain a confirmation of the
verbal and entirely provisional authorization accorded him by Innocent III.
—all these things were calculated to startle the clergy.
Ugolini, who better than any one else knew Umbria, Tuscany, Emilia, the
March of Ancona, all those regions where the Franciscan preaching had
been most successful, was able by himself to judge of the power of the new

movement and the imperious necessity of directing it; he felt that the best
way to allay the prejudices which the pope and the sacred college might
have against Francis was to present him before the curia.
Francis was at first much abashed at the thought of preaching before the
Vicar of Jesus Christ, but upon the entreaties of his protector he consented,
and for greater security he learned by heart what he had to say.
Ugolini himself was not entirely at ease as to the result of this step;
Thomas of Celano pictures him as devoured with anxiety; he was troubled
about Francis, whose artless eloquence ran many a risk in the halls of the
Lateran Palace; he was also not without some more personal anxieties, for
the failure of his protégé might be most damaging to himself. He was in all
the greater anxiety when, on arriving at the feet of the pontiff, Francis
forgot all he had intended to say; but he frankly avowed it, and seeking a
new discourse from the inspiration of the moment, spoke with so much
warmth and simplicity that the assembly was won.34
The biographers are mute as to the practical result of this audience. We
are not to be surprised at this, for they write with the sole purpose of
edification. They wrote after the apotheosis of their master, and would with
very bad grace have dwelt upon the difficulties which he met during the
early years.35
The Holy See must have been greatly perplexed by this strange man,
whose faith and humility were evident, but whom it was impossible to teach
ecclesiastical obedience.
St. Dominic happened to be in Rome at the same time,36 and was
overwhelmed with favors by the pope. It is a matter of history that Innocent
III. having asked him to choose one of the Rules already approved by the
Church, he had returned to his friars at Notre Dame de Prouille, and after
conferring with them had adopted that of St. Augustine; Honorius therefore
was not sparing of privileges for him. It is hardly possible that Ugolini did
not try to use the influence of his example with St. Francis.
The curia saw clearly that Dominic, whose Order barely comprised a few
dozen members, was not one of the moral powers of the time, but its
sentiments toward him were by no means so mixed as those it experienced
with regard to Francis.

To unite the two Orders, to throw over the shoulders of the Dominicans
the brown cassock of the Poor Men of Assisi, and thus make a little of the
popularity of the Brothers Minor to be reflected upon them, to leave to the
latter their name, their habit, and even a semblance of their Rule, only
completing it with that of St. Augustine, such a project would have been
singularly pleasing to Ugolini, and with Francis's humility would seem to
have some chance of success.
One day Dominic by dint of pious insistance induced Francis to give him
his cord, and immediately girded himself with it. "Brother," said he, "I
earnestly long that your Order and mine might unite to form one sole and
same institute37 in the Church." But the Brother Minor wished to remain as
he was, and declined the proposition. So truly was he inspired with the
needs of his time and of the Church that less than three years after this
Dominic was drawn by an irresistible influence to transform his Order of
Canons of St. Augustine into an order of mendicant monks, whose
constitutions were outlined upon those of the Franciscans.38
A few years later the Dominicans took, so to speak, their revenge, and
obliged the Brothers Minor to give learning a large place in their work.
Thus, while hardly come to youth's estate, the two religious families
rivalled one another, impressed, influenced one another, yet never so much
so as to lose all traces of their origin—summed up for the one in poverty
and lay preaching, for the other in learning and the preaching of the clergy.

FOOTNOTES
1. The commencement of the great missions and the institution of provincial ministers is usually
fixed either at 1217 or 1219, but both these dates present great difficulties. I confess that I do not
understand the vehemence with which partisans of either side defend their opinions. The most
important text is a passage in the 3 Soc., 62: Expletis itaque undecim annis ab inceptione religionis,
et multiplicatis numero et merito fratribus, electi fuerant ministri, et missi cum aliquot fratribus quasi
per universas mundi provincias in quibus fides catholica colitur et servatur. What does this
expression, inceptio religionis, mean? At a first reading one unhesitatingly takes it to refer to the
foundation of the Order, which occurred in April, 1209, by the reception of the first Brothers; but on
adding eleven full years to this date we reach the summer of 1220. This is manifestly too late, for the
3 Soc. say that the brethren who went out were persecuted in most of the countries beyond the
mountains, as being accredited by no pontifical letter; but the bull Cum dilecti, bears the date of June
11, 1219. We are thus led to think that the eleven years are not to be counted from the reception of the
first Brothers, but from Francis's conversion, which the authors might well speak of as inceptio
religionis, and 1206 + 11 = 1217. The use of this expression to designate conversion is not entirely
without example. Glassberger says (An. fr., p. 9): Ordinem minorum incepit anno 1206. Those who

admit 1219 are obliged (like the Bollandists, for example), to attribute an inaccuracy to the text of the
3 Soc., that of having counted eleven years as having passed when there had been only ten. We
should notice that in the two other chronological indications given by the 3 Soc. (27 and 62) they
count from the conversion, that is from 1206, as also Thomas of Celano, 88, 105, 119, 97, 88, 57, 55,
21. Curiously, the Conformities reproduce the passage of the 3 Soc. (118b, 1), but with the alteration:
Nono anno ab inceptione religionis. Giordano di Giano opens the door to many scruples: Anno vero
Domini 1219 et anno conversionis ejus decimo frater Franciscus ... misit fratres in Franciam, in
Theutoniam, in Hungariam, in Hespaniam, Giord., 3. As a little later the same author properly
harmonizes 1219 with the thirteenth year from Francis's conversion, everyone is in agreement in
admitting that the passage cited needs correction; we have unfortunately only one manuscript of this
chronicle. Glassberger, who doubtless had another before him, substitutes 1217, but he may have
drawn this date from another document. It is noteworthy that Brother Giordano gives as simultaneous
the departure of the friars for Germany, Hungary, and France; but, as to the latter country, it certainly
took place in 1217. So the Speculum, 44a.
The chronicle of the xxiv. generals and Mark of Lisbon (Diola's ed., t. i., p. 82) holds also to 1217, so
that, though not definitely established, it would appear that this date should be accepted until further
information. Starting from slightly different premises, the learned editors of the Analecta arrive at the
same conclusion (t. ii., pp. 25-36). Cf. Evers, Analecta ad Fr. Minorum historiam, Leipsic, 1882, 4to,
pp. 7 and 11. That which appears to me decidedly to tip the balance in favor of 1217, is the fact that
the missionary friars were persecuted because they had no document of legitimation; and in 1219
they would have had the bull Cum dilecti, from June 11th of that year. The Bollandists, who hold for
1219, have so clearly seen this argument that they have been obliged to deny the authenticity of the
bull (or at least to suppose it wrongly dated). A. SS., p. 839.
2. Vide A. SS., p. 604. Cf. Angelo Clareno, Tribul. Archiv., i., p. 559. A papa Innocentis fuit omnibus
annuntiatum in concilio generali ... sicut sanctus vir fr. Leo scribit et fr. Johannes de Celano. These
lines have not perhaps the significance which one would be led to give them at the first glance, their
author having perhaps confounded consilium and consistorium. The Speculum, 20b says: Eam
(Regulam Innocentius) approvabit et concessit et postea in consistorio omnibus annuntiavit.
3. Ne nimia Religionem diversitas gravem in Ecclesia Dei confusionem inducat, firmiter prohibemus,
ne quis de cœtero novam Religionem inveniat; sed quicumque voluerit ad Religionem converti, unam
de approbatis assumat. Labbé and Cossart: Sacrosancta concilia, Paris, 1672, t. xi., col. 165.
4. Eccl., 15 (An. franc., t. 1, p. 253): Innocentium in cujus obitu fuit presentialiter S. Franciscus.
5. 3 Soc., 61; cf. An. Perus., A. SS., p. 606f.
6. Thomas of Celano must be in error when he declares that Francis was not acquainted with Cardinal
Ugolini before the visit which he made him at Florence (summer of 1217): Nondum alter alteri erat
præcipua familiaritate conjunctus (1 Cel., 74 and 75). The Franciscan biographer's purpose was not
historic; chronological indications are given in profusion; what he seeks is the apta junctura.
Tradition has preserved the memory of a chapter held at Portiuncula in presence of Ugolini during a
stay of the curia at Perugia (Spec., 137b.; Fior., 18; Conform., 207a; 3 Soc., 61). But the curia did not
come back to Perugia between 1216 and Francis's death. It is also to be noted that according to
Angelo Clareno, Ugolini was with Francis in 1210, supporting him in the presence of Innocent III.
Vide below, p. 413. Finally the bull Sacrosancta of December 9, 1219, witnesses that already during
his legation in Florence (1217) Ugolini was actually interesting himself for the Clarisses.
7. See, for example, the description of the chapter of 1221 by Brother Giordano. Giord., 16.
8. With regard to the figure of five thousand attendants given by Bonaventura (Bon., 59) Father
Papini writes: Io non credo stato capace alcuno di dare ad intendere al S. Dottore simil fanfaluca, ne
capace lui di crederla.

... In somma il numero quinque millia et ultra non è del Santo, incapace di scrivere una cosa tanto
improbabile e relativamente impossibile. Storia di S. Fr., i., pp. 181 and 183. This figure, five
thousand, is also indicated by Eccl., 6. All this may be explained and become possible by admitting
the presence of the Brothers of Penitence, and it seems very difficult to contest it, since in the Order
of the Humiliants, which much resembles that of the Brothers Minor (equally composed of three
branches approved by three bulls given June, 1201), the chapters-general annually held were
frequented by the brothers of the three Orders. Tiraboschi t. ii., p. 144. Cf. above, p. 158.
9. Vide 2 Cel., 3, 121; Spec., 42b; 127b.
10. Præcipio firmiter per obedientiam fratribus universis quod ubicunque sunt, non audeant petere
aliquam litteram in Curia Romana. Test. B. Fr.
11. A comparison with the Bullary of the Preaching Friars is especially instructive: from their first
chapter at Notre Dame de Prouille, in 1216, they are about fifteen; we find there at this time
absolutely nothing that can be compared to the Franciscan movement, which was already stirring up
all Italy. But while the first bull in favor of the Franciscans bears the date of June 11, 1219, and the
approbation properly so called that of November 29, 1223, we find Honorius already in the end of
1216 lavishing marks of affection upon the Dominicans; December 22, 1216, Religiosam vitam. Cf.
Pressuti, I regesti, del Pontefice Onorio III., Roma, 1884, t. i., no. 175; same date; Nos attendentes,
ibid., no. 176; January 21, 1217, gratiarum omnium, ib., no. 243. Vide 284, 1039, 1156, 1208. It is
needless to continue this enumeration. Very much the same could be done for the other Orders;
whence the conclusion that if the Brothers Minor alone are forgotten in this shower of favors, it is
because they decidedly wished to be. It must be admitted that immediately upon Francis's death they
made up for lost time.
12. The authenticity of this passage is put beyond doubt by Ubertino di Casal's citation. Archiv., iii.,
p. 53. Cf. Spec., 30a; Conform., 111b, 1; 118b, 1; Ubertino, Arbor vitæ cruc., iii., 3.
13. Burchardi chronicon ann. 1217, loc. cit., p. 377. See also the bulls indicated by Potthast, 5575,
5585-92.
14. Before 1217 the office of minister virtually existed, though its definitive institution dates only
from 1217. Brother Bernardo in his mission to Bologna, for example (1212?), certainly held in some
sort the office of minister.
15. Imprisoned by order of Elias, he died in consequence of blows given him one day when he was
taking the air outside of his prison. Tribul., 24a.
16. Giord., 5 and 6; 3 Soc., 62.
17. Of Giovanni di Parma, Clareno, Anthony of Padua, etc.
18. Mark of Lisbon, t. i., p. 82. Cf. p. 79, t. ii., p. 86, Glassberger ann., 1217. An. fr., ii., pp. 9 ff.;
Chron xxiv. gen., MS. of Assisi, no. 328, fo 2b.
19. Spec., 44a.; Conform., 119a, 2; 135a; 181b, 1; 1 Cel., 74 and 75.
20. Cel., 3, 129. Diligebat Franciam ... volebat in ea mori.
21. V. bull of January 23, 1217, Tempus acceptabile, Potthast, no. 5430, given in Horoy, t. ii., col.
205 ff.; cf. Pressuti, i., p. 71. This bull and those following fix without question the time of the
journey to Florence. Potthast, 5488, 5487, and page 495.
22. It is superfluous to point out the error of the Bollandist text in the phrase Monuit (Cardinalis
Franciscum) cœptum non perficere iter, where the non is omitted, A. SS., p. 704. Cf., p. 607 and 835,
which has led Suysken into several other errors.
23. Bon., 51. Cf. Glassberger, ann. 1217; Spec., 45b.

24. Heb., iv., 12; 2 Cel., 3, 49; Bon., 50 and 51.
25. Brother Pacifico interests us [the French people] particularly as the first minister of the Order in
France; information about him is abundant: Bon., 79; 2 Cel., 3, 63; Spec., 41b.: Conform., 38a, 1;
43a, 1; 71b; 173b, 1, and 176; 2 Cel., 8, 27; Spec., 38b; Conform., 181b; 2 Cel., 3, 76; Fior., 46;
Conform., 70a. I do not indicate the general references found in Chevalier's Bibliography. The
Miscellanea, t. ii. (1887), p. 158, contains a most precise and interesting column about him. Gregory
IX. speaks of him in the bull Magna sicut dicitur of August 12, 1227. Sbaralea, Bull, fr., i., p. 33
(Potthast, 8007). Thomas of Tuscany, socius of St. Bonaventura, knew him and speaks of him in his
Gesta Imperatorum (Mon. germ. hist. script., t. 22, p. 492).
26. Eccl., 1; Conform., 113b, 1.
27. Toward 1224 the Brothers Minor desired to draw nearer and build a vast convent near the walls of
Paris in the grounds called Vauvert, or Valvert (now the Luxembourg Garden), (Eccl., 10; cf. Top.
hist. du vieux Paris, by Berty and Tisserand, t. iv., p. 70). In 1230 they received at Paris from the
Benedictines of Saint-Germain-des-Prés a certain number of houses in parocchia SS. Cosmæ et
Damiani infra muros domini regis prope portam de Gibardo (Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis,
no. 76. Cf. Topographie historique du vieux Paris; Région occid. de l'univ., p. 95; Félibien, Histoire
de la ville de Paris, i., p. 115). Finally, St. Louis installed them in the celebrated Convent of the
Cordeliers, the refectory of which still exists, transformed into the Dupuytren Museum. The
Dominicans, who arrived in Paris September 12, 1217, went straight to the centre of the city, near the
bishop's palace on the Ile de la Cité, and on August 6, 1218, were installed in the Convent of St.
Jacques.
28. Fior., 27; Spec., 148b; Conform., 71a and 113a, 2; Bon., 182.
29. The traces of Francis's visit here are numerous. A Brother Eudes painted his portrait here.
30. Bon., 177.
31. Vide A. SS., pp. 855 and 856. Cf. 2 Cel., 3, 136.
32. Among others those of December 5, 1217, Potthast, 5629; February 8, March 30, April 7, 1218,
Potthast, 5695, 5739, 5747.
33. 1 Cel., 74. O quanti maxime in principio cum hæc agerentur novellæ plantationi ordinis
insidiabantur ut perderent. Cf. 2 Cel., 1, 16. Videbat Franciscus luporum more sevire quamplures.
34. 1 Cel., 73 (cf. 2 Cel., 1, 17; Spec., 102a); 3 Soc., 64; Bon., 78. The fixing of this scene in the
winter of 1217-1218 seems hardly to be debatable; Giordano's account (14) in fact determines the
date at which Ugolini became officially protector of the Order; it supposes earlier relations between
Honorius, Francis, and Ugolini. We are therefore led to seek a date at which these three personages
may have met in Rome, and we arrive thus at the period between December, 1217, and April, 1218.
35. A word of Brother Giordano's opens the door to certain conjectures. "My lord," said Francis to
Honorius III., in 1220, "you have given me many fathers (popes) give me a single one to whom I
may turn with the affairs of my Order." (Giord., 14, Multos mihi papas dedisti da unum, ... etc.)
Does not this suggest the idea that the pontiff had perhaps named a commission of cardinals to
oversee the Brothers Minor? Its deliberations and the events to be related in the following chapter
might have impelled him to issue the bull Cum dilecti of June 11, 1219, which was not an
approbation properly so called, but a safe-conduct in favor of the Franciscans.
36. He took possession of St. Sabine on February 28, 1218.
37. 2 Cel., 3, 87. The literal meaning of the phrase is somewhat ambiguous. The text is: Vellem, frater
Francisce, unam fieri religionem tuam et meam et in Ecclesia pari forma nos vivere. Spec. 27b. The

echo of this attempt is found in Thierry d'Apolda, Vie de S. Dominique (A. SS., Augusti, t. i., p. 572
d): S. Dominicus in oscula sancta ruens et sinceros amplexus, dixit: Tu es socius meus, tu curres
pariter mecum, stemus simul, nullus adversarius prævalebit. Bernard of Besse says: B. Dominicus
tanta B. Francisco devotione cohesit ut optatam ab eo cordam sub inferiori tunica devotissimi
cingeret, cujus et suam Religionem unam velle fieri diceret, ipsumque pro sanctitate cæteris
sequendem religiosis assereret. Turin MS., 102b.
38. At the chapter held at Bologna at Whitsunday, 1220. The bull Religiosam vitam (Privilege of
Notre Dame de Prouille) of March 30, 1218, enumerates the possessions of the Dominicans. Ripolli,
Bull. Præd., t. i., p. 6. Horoy, Honorii opera, t. ii., col. 684.

CHAPTER XIII
ST. DOMINIC AND ST. FRANCIS

The Egyptian Mission. Summer 1218—Autumn 1220

Art and poetry have done well in inseparably associating St. Dominic and
St. Francis; the glory of the first is only a reflection of that of the second,
and it is in placing them side by side that we succeed best in understanding
the genius of the Poverello. If Francis is the man of inspiration, Dominic is
that of obedience to orders; one may say that his life was passed on the road
to Rome, whither he continually went to ask for instructions. His legend
was therefore very slow to be formed, although nothing forbade it to
blossom freely; but neither the zeal of Gregory IX. for his memory nor the
learning of his disciples were able to do for the Hammer of heretics that
which the love of the people did for the Father of the poor. His legend has
the two defects which so soon weary the readers of hagiographical writings,
when the question is of the saints whose worship the Church has
commanded.1 It is encumbered with a spurious supernaturalism, and with
incidents borrowed right and left from earlier legends. The Italian people,
who hailed in Francis the angel of all their hopes, and who showed
themselves so greedy for his relics, did not so much as dream of taking up
the corpse of the founder of the Order of Preaching Friars, and allowed him
to wait twelve years for the glories of canonization.2
We have already seen the efforts of Cardinal Ugolini to unite the two
Orders, and the reasons he had for this course. He went to the Whitsunday
chapter-general which met at Portiuncula (June 3, 1218), to which came
also St. Dominic with several of his disciples. The ceremonial of these
solemnities appears to have been always about the same since 1216; the
Brothers Minor went in procession to meet the cardinal, who immediately
dismounted from his horse and lavished expressions of affection upon them.
An altar was set up in the open air, at which he said mass, Francis
performing the functions of deacon.3

It is easy to imagine the emotion which overcame those present when in
its beautiful setting of the Umbrian landscape burst forth that part of the
Pentecostal service, that most exciting, the most apocalyptic of the whole
Catholic liturgy, the anthem Alleluia, Alleluia, Emitte Spiritum tuum et
creabuntur, et renovabis faciem terræ. Alleluia,4 does not this include the
whole Franciscan dream?
But what especially amazed Dominic was the absence of material cares.
Francis had advised his brethren not to disquiet themselves in any respect
about food and drink; he knew by experience that they might fearlessly trust
all that to the love of the neighboring population. This want of carefulness
had greatly surprised Dominic, who thought it exaggerated; he was able to
reassure himself, when meal-time arrived, by seeing the inhabitants of the
district hastening in crowds to bring far larger supplies of provisions than
were needed for the several thousands of friars, and holding it an honor to
wait upon them.
The joy of the Franciscans, the sympathy of the populace with them, the
poverty of the huts of Portiuncula, all this impressed him deeply; so much
was he moved by it that in a burst of enthusiasm he announced his
resolution to embrace gospel poverty.5
Ugolini, though also moved, even to tears,6 did not forget his former
anxieties; the Order was too numerous not to include a group of
malcontents; a few friars who before their conversion had studied in the
universities began to condemn the extreme simplicity laid upon them as a
duty. To men no longer sustained by enthusiasm the short precepts of the
Rule appeared a charter all too insufficient for a vast association; they
turned with envy toward the monumental abbeys of the Benedictines, the
regular Canons, the Cistercians, and toward the ancient monastic
legislations. They had no difficulty in perceiving in Ugolini a powerful ally,
nor in confiding their observations to him.
The latter deemed the propitious moment arrived, and in a private
conversation with Francis made a few suggestions: Ought he not give to his
disciples, especially to the educated among them, a greater share of the
burdens? consult them, gain inspiration from their views? was there not
room to profit by the experience of the older orders? Though all this was
said casually and with the greatest possible tact, Francis felt himself

wounded to the quick, and without answering he drew the cardinal to the
very midst of the chapter.
"My brothers," said he with fire, "the Lord has called me into the ways of
simplicity and humility. In them he has shown me the truth for myself and
for those who desire to believe and follow me; do not, then, come speaking
to me of the Rule of St. Benedict, of St. Augustine, of St. Bernard, or of any
other, but solely of that which God in his mercy has seen fit to show to me,
and of which he has told me that he would, by its means, make a new
covenant with the world, and he does not will that we should have any
other. But by your learning and your wisdom God will bring you to
confusion. For I am persuaded that God will chastise you; whether you will
or no you will be forced to come to repentance, and nothing will remain for
you but confusion."7
This warmth in defending and affirming his ideas profoundly astonished
Ugolini, who added not a word. As to Dominic, what he had just seen at
Portiuncula was to him a revelation. He felt, indeed, that his zeal for the
Church could not be greater, but he also perceived that he could serve her
with more success by certain changes in his weapons.
Ugolini no doubt only encouraged him in this view, and Dominic, beset
with new anxieties, set out a few months later for Spain. The intensity of the
crisis through which he passed has not been sufficiently noticed; the
religious writers recount at length his sojourn in the grotto of Segovia, but
they see only the ascetic practices, the prayers, the genuflexions, and do not
think of looking for the cause of all this. From this epoch it might be said
that he was unceasingly occupied in copying Francis, if the word had not a
somewhat displeasing sense. Arrived at Segovia he follows the example of
the Brothers Minor, founds a hermitage in the outskirts of the city, hidden
among the rocks which overlook the town, and thence he descends from
time to time to preach to the people. The transformation in his mode of life
was so evident that several of his companions rebelled and refused to
follow him in the new way.
Popular sentiment has at times its intuitions; a legend grew up around
this grotto of Segovia, and it was said that St. Dominic there received the
stigmata. Is there not here an unconscious effort to translate into an image

within the comprehension of all, that which actually took place in this cave
of the Sierra da Guaderrama?8
Thus St. Dominic also arrived at the poverty of the gospel, but the road
by which he reached it was different indeed from that which St. Francis had
followed; while the latter had soared to it as on wings, had seen in it the
final emancipation from all the anxieties which debase this life, St. Dominic
considered it only as a means; it was for him one more weapon in the
arsenal of the host charged with the defence of the Church. We must not see
in this a mere vulgar calculation; his admiration for him whom he thus
imitated and followed afar off was sincere and profound, but genius is not
to be copied. This sacred malady was not his; he has transmitted to his sons
a sound and robust blood, thanks to which they have known nothing of
those paroxysms of hot fever, those lofty flights, those sudden returns
which make the story of the Franciscans the story of the most tempest-
tossed society which the world has ever known, in which glorious chapters
are mingled with pages trivial and grotesque, sometimes even coarse.
At the chapter of 1218 Francis had other causes for sadness than the
murmurs of a group of malcontents; the missionaries sent out the year
before to Germany and Hungary had returned completely discouraged. The
account of the sufferings they had endured produced so great an effect that
from that time many of the friars added to their prayers the formula: "Lord
preserve us from the heresy of the Lombards and the ferocity of the
Germans."9
This explains how Ugolini at last succeeded in convincing Francis of his
duty to take the necessary measures no longer to expose the friars to be
hunted down as heretics. It was decided that at the end of the next chapter
the missionaries should be armed with a papal brief, which should serve
them as ecclesiastical passport. Here is the translation of this document:
Honorius, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to the
archbishops, bishops, abbots, deacons, archdeacons, and other
ecclesiastical superiors, salutation and the apostolic blessing.
Our dear son, brother Francis, and his companions of the life
and the Order of the Brothers Minor, having renounced the
vanities of this world to choose a mode of life which has merited
the approval of the Roman Church, and to go out after the

example of the Apostles to cast in various regions the seed of the
word of God, we pray and exhort you by these apostolic letters
to receive as good catholics the friars of the above mentioned
society, bearers of these presents, warning you to be favorable to
them and treat them with kindness for the honor of God and out
of consideration for us.
Given (at Rieti) this third day of the ides of June (June 11,
1219), in the third year of our pontificate.10
It is evident that this bull was calculated to avoid awakening Francis's
susceptibilities. To understand precisely in what it differs from the first
letters usually accredited to new Orders it is necessary to compare it with
them; that which had instituted the Dominicans had been, like the others, a
veritable privilege;11 here there is nothing of the kind.
The assembly which was opened at Whitsunday of 1219 (May 26) was of
extreme importance.12 It closed the series of those primitive chapters in
which the inspiration and fancy of Francis were given free course. Those
which followed, presided over by the vicars, have neither the same
cheerfulness nor the same charm; the crude glare of full day has driven
away the hues of dawn and the indescribable ardors of nature at its
awakening.
The summer of 1219 was the epoch fixed by Honorius III. for making a
new effort in the East, and directing upon Egypt all the forces of the
Crusaders.13 Francis thought the moment arrived for realizing the project
which he had not been able to execute in 1212. Strangely enough, Ugolini
who, two years before had hindered his going to France, now left him in
entire liberty to carry out this new expedition.14 Several authors have
deemed that Francis, having found in him a true protector, felt himself
reassured as to the future of the Order; he might indeed have thought thus,
but the history of the troubles which burst out immediately after his
departure, the astounding story of the kind reception given by the court of
Rome to some meddlers who took the opportunity of his absence to imperil
his Order, would suffice to show how much the Church was embarrassed by
him, and with what ardor she longed for the transformation of his work. We
shall find later on the detailed account of these facts.

It appears that a Romagnol brother Christopher was at this same chapter
nominated provincial of Gascony; he lived there after the customs of the
early Franciscans, working with his hands, living in a narrow cell made of
the boughs of trees and potter's earth.15
Egidio set out for Tunis with a few friars, but a great disappointment
awaited them there; the Christians of this country, in the fear of being
compromised by their missionary zeal, hurried them into a boat and
constrained them to recross the sea.16
If the date of 1219 for these two missions has little other basis than
conjecture, the same is not the case as to the departure of the friars who
went to Spain and Morocco. The discovery has recently been made of the
account of their last preachings and of their tragic death, made by an eye-
witness.17 This document is all the more precious because it confirms the
general lines of the much longer account given by Mark of Lisbon. It would
be out of place to give a summary of it here, because it but very indirectly
concerns the life of St. Francis, but we must note that these acta have
beyond their historic value a truly remarkable psychological—one must
almost say pathological—significance; never was the mania for martyrdom
better characterized than in these long pages, where we see the friars
forcing the Mahometans to pursue them and make them win the heavenly
palm. The forbearance which Miramolin as well as his fellow religionists at
first show gives an idea of the civilization and the good qualities of these
infidels, all the higher that very different sentiments would be natural in the
vanquished ones of the plains of Tolosa.
It is impossible to call by the name of sermons the collections of rude
apostrophes which the missionaries addressed to those whom they wished
to convert; at this paroxysm the thirst for martyrdom becomes the madness
of suicide. Is this to say that friars Bernard, Pietro, Adjutus, Accurso, and
Otho have no right to the admiration and worship with which they have
been surrounded? Who would dare say so? Is not devotion always blind?
That a furrow should be fecund it must have blood, it must have tears, such
tears as St. Augustine has called the blood of the soul. Ah, it is a great
mistake to immolate oneself, for the blood of a single man will not save the
world nor even a nation; but it is a still greater mistake not to immolate
oneself, for then one lets others be lost, and is oneself lost first of all.

I greet you, therefore, Martyrs of Morocco; you do not regret your
madness, I am sure, and if ever some righteous pedant gone astray in the
groves of paradise undertakes to demonstrate to you that it would have been
better worth while to remain in your own country, and found a worthy
family of virtuous laborers, I fancy that Miramolin, there become your best
friend, will take the trouble to refute him.
You were mad, but I envy such madness, for you felt that the essential
thing in this world is not to serve this ideal or that one, but with all one's
soul to serve the ideal which one has chosen.
When, a few months after, the story of their glorious end arrived at
Assisi, Francis discerned a feeling of pride among his companions and
reproached them in lively terms; he who would so have envied the lot of the
martyrs felt himself humbled because God had not judged him worthy to
share it. As the story was mingled with some words of eulogy of the
founder of the Order, he forbade the further reading of it.18
Immediately after the chapter he had himself undertaken a mission of the
same kind as he had confided to the Brothers of Morocco, but he had
proceeded in it in an entirely different manner: his was not the blind zeal
which courts death in a sort of frenzy and forgets all the rest; perhaps he
already felt that the persistent effort after the better, the continual
immolation of self for truth, is the martyrdom of the strong.
This expedition, which lasted more than a year, is mentioned by the
biographers in a few lines.19 Happily we have a number of other papers
regarding it; but their silence suffices to prove the sincerity of the primitive
Franciscan authors; if they had wanted to amplify the deeds of their subject,
where could they have found an easier opportunity or a more marvellous
theme? Francis quitted Portiuncula in the middle of June and went to
Ancona, whence the Crusaders were to set sail for Egypt on St. John's Day
(June 24th).
Many friars joined him—a fact which was not without its inconveniences
for a journey by sea, where they were obliged to depend upon the charity of
the owners of the boats, or of their fellow-travellers.
We can understand Francis's embarrassment on arriving at Ancona and
finding himself obliged to leave behind a number of those who so earnestly

longed to go with him. The Conformities relate here an incident for which
we might desire an earlier authority, but which is certainly very like
Francis; he led all his friends to the port and explained to them his
perplexities. "The people of the boat," he told them, "refuse to take us all,
and I have not the courage to make choice among you; you might think that
I do not love you all alike; let us then try to learn the will of God." And he
called a child who was playing close by, and the little one, charmed to take
the part of Providence put upon him, pointed out with his finger the eleven
friars who were to set sail.20
We do not know what itinerary they followed. A single incident of the
journey has come down to us: that of the chastisement inflicted in the isle of
Cyprus on Brother Barbaro, who had been guilty of the fault which the
master detested above all others—evil-speaking. He was implacable with
regard to the looseness of language so customary among pious folk, and
which often made a hell of religious houses apparently the most peaceful.
The offence this time appeared to him the more grave for having been
uttered in the presence of a stranger, a knight of that district. The latter was
stupefied on hearing Francis command the guilty one to eat a lump of ass's
dung which lay there, adding: "The mouth which has distilled the venom of
hatred against my brother must eat this excrement." Such indignation, no
less than the obedience of the unhappy offender, filled him with
admiration.21
It is very probable, as Wadding has supposed, that the missionaries
debarked at St. Jean d'Acre. They arrived there about the middle of July.22
In the environs of this city, doubtless, Brother Elias had been established for
one or two years. Francis there told off a few of his companions, whom he
sent to preach in divers directions, and a few days afterward he himself set
out for Egypt, where all the efforts of the Crusaders were concentrated upon
Damietta.
From the first he was heart-broken with the moral condition of the
Christian army. Notwithstanding the presence of numerous prelates and of
the apostolic legate, it was disorganized for want of discipline. He was so
affected by this that when there was talk of battle he felt it his duty to advise
against it, predicting that the Christians would infallibly be beaten. No one
heeded him, and on August 29th the Crusaders, having attacked the
Saracens, were terribly routed.23

His predictions won him a marvellous success. It must be owned that the
ground was better prepared than any other to receive the new seed; not
surely that piety was alive there, but in this mass of men come together
from every corner of Europe, the troubled, the seers, the enlightened ones,
those who thirsted for righteousness and truth, were elbowed by rascals,
adventurers, those who were greedy for gold and plunder, capable of much
good or much evil, the sport of fleeting impulses, loosed from the bonds of
the family, of property, of the habits which usually twine themselves about
man's will, and only by exception permit a complete change in his manner
of life; those among them who were sincere and had come there with
generous purposes were, so to speak, predestined to enter the peaceful army
of the Brothers Minor. Francis was to win in this mission fellow-laborers
who would assure the success of his work in the countries of northern
Europe.
Jacques de Vitry, in a letter to friends written a few days later, thus
describes the impression produced on him by Francis:
"I announce to you that Master Reynier, Prior of St. Michael,
has entered the Order of the Brothers Minor, an Order which is
multiplying rapidly on all sides, because it imitates the primitive
Church and follows the life of the Apostles in everything. The
master of these Brothers is named Brother Francis; he is so
lovable that he is venerated by everyone. Having come into our
army, he has not been afraid, in his zeal for the faith, to go to
that of our enemies. For days together he announced the word of
God to the Saracens, but with little success; then the sultan,
King of Egypt, asked him in secret to entreat God to reveal to
him, by some miracle, which is the best religion. Colin, the
Englishman, our clerk, has entered the same Order, as also two
others of our companions, Michael and Dom Matthew, to whom
I had given the rectorship of the Sainte Chapelle. Cantor and
Henry have done the same, and still others whose names I have
forgotten." 24
The long and enthusiastic chapter which the same author gives to the
Brothers Minor in his great work on the Occident is too diffuse to find a
place here. It is a living and accurate picture of the early times of the Order;
in it Francis's sermon before the sultan is again related. It was written at a

period when the friars had still neither monasteries nor churches, and when
the chapters were held once or twice a year; this gives us a date anterior to
1223, and probably even before 1221. We have here, therefore, a
verification of the narratives of Thomas of Celano and the Three
Companions, and they find in it their perfect confirmation.
As to the interviews between Francis and the sultan, it is prudent to keep
to the narratives of Jacques de Vitry and William of Tyre.25 Although the
latter wrote at a comparatively late date (between 1275 and 1295), he
followed a truly historic method, and founded his work on authentic
documents; we see that he knows no more than Jacques de Vitry of the
proposal said to have been made by Francis to pass through a fire if the
priests of Mahomet would do as much, intending so to establish the
superiority of Christianity.
We know how little such an appeal to signs is characteristic of St.
Francis. Perhaps the story, which comes from Bonaventura, is born of a
misconception. The sultan, like a new Pharaoh, may have laid it upon the
strange preacher to prove his mission by miracles. However this may be,
Francis and his companions were treated with great consideration, a fact the
more meritorious that hostilities were then at their height.
Returned to the Crusading camp, they remained there until after the
taking of Damietta (November 5, 1219). This time the Christians were
victorious, but perhaps the heart of the gospel man bled more for this
victory than for the defeat of August 29th. The shocking condition of the
city, which the victors found piled with heaps of dead bodies, the quarrels
over the sharing of booty, the sale of the wretched creatures who had not
succumbed to the pestilence,26 all these scenes of terror, cruelty, greed,
caused him profound horror. The "human beast" was let loose, the apostle's
voice could no more make itself heard in the midst of the savage clamor
than that of a life-saver over a raging ocean.
He set out for Syria27 and the Holy Places. How gladly would we follow
him in this pilgrimage, accompany him in thought through Judea and
Galilee, to Bethlehem, to Nazareth, to Gethsemane! What was said to him
by the stable where the Son of Mary was born, the workshop where he
toiled, the olive-tree where he accepted the bitter cup? Alas! the documents
here suddenly fail us. Setting out from Damietta very shortly after the siege

(November 5, 1219) he may easily have been at Bethlehem by Christmas.
But we know nothing, absolutely nothing, except that his sojourn was more
prolonged than had been expected.
Some of the Brothers who were present at Portiuncula at the chapter-
general of 1220 (Whitsunday, May 17th) had time enough to go to Syria
and still find Francis there;28 they could hardly have arrived much earlier
than the end of June. What had he been doing those eight months? Why had
he not gone home to preside at the chapter? Had he been ill?29 Had he been
belated by some mission? Our information is too slight to permit us even to
venture upon conjecture.
Angelo Clareno relates that the Sultan of Egypt, touched by his
preaching, gave command that he and all his friars should have free access
to the Holy Sepulchre without the payment of any tribute.30
Bartholomew of Pisa on his part says incidentally that Francis, having
gone to preach in Antioch and its environs, the Benedictines of the Abbey
of the Black Mountain,31 eight miles from that city, joined the Order in a
body, and gave up all their property to the Patriarch.
These indications are meagre and isolated indeed, and the second is to be
accepted only with reserve. On the other hand, we have detailed
information of what went on in Italy during Francis's absence. Brother
Giordano's chronicle, recently discovered and published, throws all the light
that could be desired upon a plot laid against Francis by the very persons
whom he had commissioned to take his place at Portiuncula, and this, if not
with the connivance of Rome and the cardinal protector, at least without
their opposition. These events had indeed been narrated by Angelo Clareno,
but the undisguised feeling which breathes through all his writings and their
lack of accuracy had sufficed with careful critics to leave them in doubt.
How could it be supposed that in the very lifetime of St. Francis the vicars
whom he had instituted could take advantage of his absence to overthrow
his work? How could it be that the pope, who during this period was
sojourning at Rieti, how that Ugolini, who was still nearer, did not impose
silence on these agitators?32
Now that all the facts come anew to light, not in an oratorical and
impassioned account, but brief, precise, cutting, dated, with every
appearance of notes taken day by day, we must perforce yield to evidence.

Does this give us reason clamorously to condemn Ugolino and the pope?
I do not think so. They played a part which is not to their honor, but their
intentions were evidently excellent. If the famous aphorism that the end
justifies the means is criminal where one examines his own conduct, it
becomes the first duty in judging that of others. Here are the facts:
On July 25th, about one month after Francis's departure for Syria,
Ugolini, who was at Perugia, laid upon the Clarisses of Monticelli
(Florence), Sienna, Perugia, and Lucca that which his friend had so
obstinately refused for the friars, the Benedictine Rule.33
At the same time, St. Dominic, returning from Spain full of new ardor
after his retreat in the grotto of Segovia, and fully decided to adopt for his
Order the rule of poverty, was strongly encouraged in this purpose and
overwhelmed with favors.34 Honorius III. saw in him the providential man
of the time, the reformer of the monastic Orders; he showed him unusual
attentions, going so far, for example, as to transfer to him a group of monks
belonging to other Orders, whom he appointed to act as Dominic's
lieutenants on the preaching tours which he believed it to be his duty to
undertake, and to serve, under his direction, an apprenticeship in popular
preaching.35
That Ugolini was the inspiration of all this, the bulls are here to witness.
His ruling purpose at that time was so clearly to direct the two new Orders
that he chose a domicile with this end in view, and we find him continually
either at Perugia—that is to say, within three leagues of Portiuncula—or at
Bologna, the stronghold of the Dominicans.
It now becomes manifest that just as the fraternity instituted by Francis
was truly the fruit of his body, flesh of his flesh, so does the Order of the
Preaching Friars emanate from the papacy, and St. Dominic is only its
putative father. This character is expressed in one word by one of the most
authoritative of contemporary annalists, Burchard of Ursperg ( 1226).
"The pope," he says, "instituted and confirmed the Order of the
Preachers."36
Francis on his journey in the Orient had taken for special companion a
friar whom we have not yet met, Pietro di Catana or dei Cattani. Was he a
native of the town of Catana? There is no precise indication of it. It appears
more probable that he belonged to the noble family dei Cattani, already

known to Francis, and of which Orlando, Count of Chiusi in Casentino,
who gave him the Verna, was a member. However that may be, we must not
confound him with the Brother Pietro who assumed the habit in 1209, at the
same time with Bernardo of Quintavallo, and died shortly afterward.
Tradition, in reducing these two men to a single personage, was influenced
not merely by the similarity of the names, but also by the very natural desire
to increase the prestige of one who in 1220-1221 was to play an important
part in the direction of the Order.37
At the time of his departure for the East Francis had left two vicars in his
place, the Brothers Matteo of Narni and Gregorio of Naples. The former
was especially charged to remain at Portiuncula to admit postulants;38
Gregorio of Naples, on the other hand, was to pass through Italy to console
the Brothers.39
The two vicars began at once to overturn everything. It is inexplicable
how men still under the influence of their first fervor for a Rule which in
the plenitude of their liberty they had promised to obey could have dreamed
of such innovations if they had not been urged on and upheld by those in
high places. To alleviate the vow of poverty and to multiply observances
were the two points toward which their efforts were bent.
In appearance it was a trifling matter, in reality it was much, for it was
the first movement of the old spirit against the new. It was the effort of men
who unconsciously, I am willing to think, made religion an affair of rite and
observance, instead of seeing in it, like St. Francis, the conquest of the
liberty which makes us free in all things, and leads each soul to obey that
divine and mysterious power which the flowers of the fields adore, which
the birds of the air bless, which the symphony of the stars praises, and
which Jesus of Nazareth called Abba, that is to say, Father.
The first Rule was excessively simple in the matter of fasts. The friars
were to abstain from meat on Wednesdays and Fridays; they might add
Mondays and Saturdays, but only on Francis's special authorization. The
vicars and their adherents complicated this rule in a surprising manner. At
the chapter-general held in Francis's absence (May 17, 1220), they decided,
first, that in times of feasting the friars were not to provide meat, but if it
were offered to them spontaneously they were to eat it; second, that all
should fast on Mondays as well as Wednesdays and Fridays; third, that on

Mondays and Saturdays they should abstain from milk products unless by
chance the adherents of the Order brought some to them.40
These beginnings bear witness also to an effort to imitate the ancient
Orders, not without the vague hope that they would be substituted for them.
Brother Giordano has preserved to us only this decision of the chapter of
1220, but the expressions of which he makes use sufficiently prove that it
was far from being the only one, and that the malcontents had desired, as in
the chapters of Citeaux and Monte Cassino, to put forth veritable
constitutions.
These modifications of the Rule did not pass, however, without arousing
the indignation of a part of the chapter; a lay brother made himself their
eager messenger, and set out for the East to entreat Francis to return without
delay, to take the measures called for by the circumstances.
There were also other causes of disquiet. Brother Philip, a Zealot of the
Clarisses, had made haste to secure for them from Ugolini the privileges
which had already been under consideration.41
A certain Brother Giovanni di Conpello42 had gathered together a great
number of lepers of both sexes, and written a Rule, intending to form with
them a new Order. He had afterward presented himself before the supreme
pontiff with a train of these unfortunates to obtain his approbation.
Many other distressing symptoms, upon which Brother Giordano does
not dwell, had manifested themselves. The report of Francis's death had
even been spread abroad, so that the whole Order was disturbed, divided,
and in the greatest peril. The dark presentiments which Francis seems to
have had were exceeded by the reality.43 The messenger who brought him
the sad news found him in Syria, probably at St. Jean d'Acre. He at once
embarked with Elias, Pietro di Catana, Cæsar of Speyer, and a few others,
and returned to Italy in a vessel bound for Venice, where he might easily
arrive toward the end of July.

FOOTNOTES
1. One proof of the obscurity in which Dominic remained so long as Rome did not apotheosize him,
is that Jacques de Vitry, who consecrates a whole chapter of his Historia Occidentalis to the
Preaching Friars (27, p. 333) does not even name the founder. This is the more significant since a few
pages farther on, the chapter given to the Brothers Minor is almost entirely filled with the person of

St. Francis. This silence about St. Dominic has been remarked and taken up by Moschus, who finds
no way to explain it. Vide Vitam J. de Vitriaco, at the head of the Douai edition of 1597.
2. Francis, who died in 1226, is canonized in 1228; Anthony of Padua, 1231 and 1233; Elisabeth of
Thuringia, 1231 and 1235; Dominic, 1221 and 1234.
3. 3 Soc., 61.
4. Shed abroad, Lord, thy Spirit, and all shall be created, and thou shalt renew the face of the earth.
5. 2 Cel., 3. 87; Spec., 132b; Conform., 207a, 112a; Fior., 18. The historians of St. Dominic have not
received these details kindly, but an incontestable point gained from diplomatic documents is that in
1218 Dominic, at Rome, procured privileges in which the properties of his Order were indicated, and
that in 1220 he led his friars to profess poverty.
6. 2 Cel., 3, 9; Spec., 17a.
7. Spec., 49a; Tribul., Laur. MS., 11a-12b; Spec., 183a; Conform., 135b 1.
8. The principal sources are indicated in A. SS., Augusti, t. i., pp. 470 ff.
9. Giord., 18; 3 Soc., 62.
10. Sbaralea, Bull. fr., t. i, p. 2; Potthast, 6081: Wadding, ann. 1219, No. 28, indicates the works
where the text may be found. Cf. A. SS., p. 839.
11. The title sufficiently indicated the contents: Domenico priori S. Romani tolosani ejusque
fratribus, eos in protectionem recipit eorumque Ordinem cum bonis et privilegiis confirmat.
Religiosam vitam: December 22, 1216; Pressuti, t. i., 175, text in Horoy t. ii., col. 141-144.
12. Vide A. SS., pp. 608 ff. and 838 ff.
13. Vide Bull Multi divinæ of August 13, 1218. Horoy, t. iii., col. 12; Potthast, 5891.
14. The contradiction is so striking that the Bollandists have made of it the principal argument for
defending the error in their manuscript (1 Cel., 75), and insisting in the face of, and against
everything that Francis had taken that journey. A. SS., 607.
15. He died at Cahors, October 31, 1272. His legend is found in MS. Riccardi, 279, fo. 69a. Incipit
vita f. Christophori quam compilavit fr. Bernardus de Bessa custodiæ Caturcensis: Quasi vas auri
solidum. Cf. Mark of Lisbon, t. ii., pp. 106-113, t. iii., p. 212, and Glassberger, An. fr., t. ii., p. 14.
16. A. SS., Aprilis, t. iii., p. 224; Conform., 118b, 1; 54a; Mark of Lisbon, t. ii., p. 1—Brother Luke
had been sent to Constantinople, in 1219, at latest. Vide Constitutus of December 9, 1220. Sbaralea,
Bull. fr., t. i., p. 6; Potthast, 6431.
17. We owe to M. Müller (Anfänge, p. 207) the honor of this publication, copied from a manuscript
of the Cottoniana.
18. Giord., 8.
19. 1 Cel., 57; Bon., 133-138; 154 and 155; 2 Cel., 2, 2; Conform., 113b, 2; 114a, 2; Spec., 55b; Fior.,
24.
20. Conform., 113b, 2; cf. A. SS., p. 611.
21. 2 Cel., 3, 92; Spec., 30b. Cf. 2 Cel., 3, 115. Conform., 142b, 1. This incident may possibly have
taken place on the return.
22. With the facilities of that period the voyage required from twenty to thirty days. The diarium of a
similar passage may be found in Huillard-Bréholles, Hist. Dipl., t. i., 898-901. Cf. Ibid., Introd., p.
cccxxxi.

23. 2 Cel., 22; Bon 154, 155; cf. A. SS., p. 612.
24. Jacques de Vitry speaks only incidentally of Francis here in the midst of salutations; from the
critical point of view this only enhances the value of his words. See the Study of the Sources, p. 428.
25. Vide below, the Study of the Sources, p. 430.
26. All this is related at length by Jacques de Vitry.
27. "Cil hom qui comença l'ordre des Frères Mineurs, si ot nom frère François ... vint en l'ost de
Damiate, e i fist moult de bien, et demora tant que la ville fut prise. Il vit le mal et le péché qui
comença à croistre entre les gens de l'ost, si li desplot, par quoi il s'en parti, e fu une pièce en Surie, et
puis s'en rala en son pais." Historiens des Croisades, ii. L'Est de Eracles Empereur, liv. xxxii., chap.
xv. Cf. Sanuto; Secreta fid. cruc., lib. iii., p. xi., cap. 8, in Bongars.
28. Giord., Chron., 11-14.
29. The episode of Brother Leonard's complaints, related below, gives some probability to this
hypothesis.
30. Tribul., Laur. MS., 9b. Cf. 10b: Sepulcro Domini visitato festinat ad Christianorum terram.
31. Upon this monastery see a letter ad familiares of Jacques de Vitry, written in 1216 and published
in 1847 by Baron Jules de St. Genois in t. xiii. of the Mémoires de l'Académie royale des sciences et
des beaux arts de Bruxelles (1849). Conform., 106b, 2; 114a, 2; Spec.,184.
32. A. SS., pp. 619-620, 848, 851, 638.
33. Vide Bull Sacrosancta of December 9, 1219. Cf. those of September 19, 1222; Sbaralea, i., p. 3,
11 ff.; Potthast, 6179, 6879a, b, c.
34. Vide Potthast, 6155, 6177, 6184, 6199, 6214, 6217, 6218, 6220, 6246. See also Chartularium
Universitatis Par., t. i., 487.
35. Bull Quia qui seminant of May 12, 1220. Ripalli, Bul. Præd., t. i., p. 10 (Potthast, 6249).
36. Mon. Germ. hist. Script., t. 23, p. 376. This passage is of extreme importance because it sums up
in a few lines the ecclesiastical policy of Honorius III. After speaking of the perils with which the
Humiliati threatened the Church, Burchard adds: Quæ volens corrigere dominus papa ordinem
Predicatorum instituit et confirmavit. Now these Humiliati were an approved Order. But Burchard,
while classing them with heretics beside the Poor Men of Lyons, expresses in a word the sentiments
of the papacy toward them; it had for them an invincible repugnance, and not wishing to strike them
directly it sought a side issue. Similar tactics were followed with regard to the Brothers Minor, with
that overplus of caution which the prodigious success of the Order inspired. It all became useless
when in 1221 Brother Elias became Francis's vicar, and especially when, after the latter's death, he
had all the liberty necessary for directing the Order according to the views of Ugolini, now become
Gregory IX.
37. 1 Cel., 25; cf. A. SS., p. 581. Pietro di Catana had the title of doctor of laws, Giord., 11, which
entirely disagrees with what is related of Brother Pietro, 3 Soc., 28 and 29. Cf. Bon., 28 and 29;
Spec., 5b; Fior., 2; Conform., 47; 52b, 2; Petrus vir litteratus erat et nobilis, Giord., 12.
38. We know nothing more of him except that after his death he had the gift of miracles. Giord., 11;
Conform., 62a, 1.
39. He was not an ordinary man; a remarkable administrator and orator (Eccl., 6), he was minister in
France before 1224 and again in 1240, thanks to the zeal with which he had adopted the ideas of
Brother Elias. He was nephew of Gregory IX., which throws some light upon the practices which
have just been described. After having been swept away in Elias's disgrace and condemned to prison

for life, he became in the end Bishop of Bayeux. I note for those who take an interest in those things
that manuscripts of two of his sermons may be found in the National Library of Paris. The author of
them being indicated simply as fr. Gr. min., it has only lately become known whose they were. These
sermons were preached in Paris on Holy Thursday and Saturday. MS. new. acq., Lat., 338 fo 148,
159.
40. Giord., 11. Cf. Spec., 34b. Fior., 4; Conform., 184a, 1.
41. Giord., 12. Cf. Bull Sacrosancta of December 9, 1219.
42. Giord., 12. Ought we, perhaps, to read di Campello? Half way between Foligno and Spoleto there
is a place of this name. On the other hand, the 3 Soc., 35, indicate the entrance into the Order of a
Giovanni di Capella who in the legend became the Franciscan Judas. Invenit abusum capelle et ab
ipsa denominatus est: ab ordine recedens factus leprosus laqueo ut Judas se suspendit. Conform.,
104a, 1. Cf. Bernard de Besse, 96a; Spec., 2; Fior., 1. All this is much mixed up. Perhaps we should
believe that Giovanni di Campello died shortly afterward, and that later on, when the stories of this
troubled time were forgotten, some ingenious Brother explained the note of infamy attached to his
memory by a hypothesis built upon his name itself.
43. Giord., 12, 13, and 14.

CHAPTER XIV
THE CRISIS OF THE ORDER1

Autumn, 1220

On his arrival in Venice Francis informed himself yet more exactly
concerning all that had happened, and convoked the chapter-general at
Portiuncula for Michaelmas (September 29, 1220).2 His first care was
doubtless to reassure his sister-friend at St. Damian; a short fragment of a
letter which has been preserved to us gives indication of the sad anxieties
which filled his mind:

"I, little Brother Francis, desire to follow the life and the
poverty of Jesus Christ, our most high Lord, and of his most
holy Mother, persevering therein until the end; and I beg you all
and exhort you to persevere always in this most holy life and
poverty, and take good care never to depart from it upon the
advice or teachings of any one whomsoever."3
A long shout of joy sounded up and down all Italy when the news of his
return was heard. Many zealous brethren were already despairing, for
persecutions had begun in many provinces; so when they learned that their
spiritual father was alive and coming again to visit them their joy was
unbounded. From Venice Francis went to Bologna. The journey was marked
by an incident which once more shows his acute and wise goodness. Worn
out as much by emotion as by fatigue, he one day found himself obliged to
give up finishing the journey on foot. Mounted upon an ass, he was going
on his way, followed by Brother Leonard of Assisi, when a passing glance
showed him what was passing in his companion's mind. "My relatives," the
friar was thinking, "would have been far enough from associating with
Bernardone, and yet here am I, obliged to follow his son on foot."
We may judge of his astonishment when he heard Francis saying, as he
hastily dismounted from his beast: "Here, take my place; it is most
unseemly that thou shouldst follow me on foot, who art of a noble and
powerful lineage." The unhappy Leonard, much confused, threw himself at
Francis's feet, begging for pardon.4
Scarcely arrived at Bologna, Francis was obliged to proceed against those
who had become backsliders. It will be remembered that the Order was
intended to possess nothing, either directly or indirectly. The monasteries
given to the friars did not become their property; so soon as the proprietor
should desire to take them back or anyone else should wish to take
possession of them, they were to be given up without the least resistance;
but on drawing near to Bologna he learned that a house was being built,
which was already called The house of the Brothers. He commanded its
immediate evacuation, not even excepting the sick who happened to be
there. The Brothers then resorted to Ugolini, who was then in that very city
for the consecration of Santa Maria di Rheno.5 He explained to Francis at

length that this house did not belong to the Order; he had declared himself
its proprietor by public acts; and he succeeded in convincing him.6
Bolognese piety prepared for Francis an enthusiastic reception, the echo
of which has come down even to our times:
"I was studying at Bologna, I, Thomas of Spalato, archdeacon
in the cathedral church of that city, when in the year 1220, the
day of the Assumption, I saw St. Francis preaching on the piazza
of the Lesser Palace, before almost every man in the city. The
theme of his discourse was the following: Angels, men, the
demons. He spoke on all these subjects with so much wisdom
and eloquence that many learned men who were there were
filled with admiration at the words of so plain a man. Yet he had
not the manner of a preacher, his ways were rather those of
conversation; the substance of his discourse bore especially
upon the abolition of enmities and the necessity of making
peaceful alliances. His apparel was poor, his person in no
respect imposing, his face not at all handsome; but God gave
such great efficacy to his words that he brought back to peace
and harmony many nobles whose savage fury had not even
stopped short before the shedding of blood. So great a devotion
was felt for him that men and women flocked after him, and he
esteemed himself happy who succeeded in touching the hem of
his garment."
Was it at this time that the celebrated Accurso the Glossarist,7 chief of
that famous dynasty of jurisconsults who during the whole thirteenth
century shed lustre upon the University of Bologna, welcomed the Brothers
Minor to his villa at Ricardina, near the city?8 We do not know.
It appears that another professor, Nicolas dei Pepoli, also entered the
Order.9 Naturally the pupils did not lag behind, and a certain number asked
to receive the habit. Yet all this constituted a danger; this city, which in Italy
was as an altar consecrated to the science of law, was destined to exercise
upon the evolution of the Order the same influence as Paris; the Brothers
Minor could no more hold aloof from it than they could keep aloof from the
ambient air.

This time Francis remained here but a very short time. An ancient
tradition, of which his biographers have not preserved any trace, but which
nevertheless appears to be entirely probable, says that Ugolini took him to
pass a month in the Camaldoli, in the retreat formerly inhabited by St.
Romuald in the midst of the Casentino forest, one of the noblest in Europe,
within a few hours' walk of the Verna, whose summit rises up gigantic,
overlooking the whole country.
We know how much Francis needed repose. There is no doubt that he
also longed for a period of meditation in order to decide carefully in
advance upon his line of conduct, in the midst of the dark conjectures which
had called him home. The desire to give him the much-needed rest was only
a subordinate purpose with Ugolini. The moment for vigorous action
appeared to him to have come. We can easily picture his responses to
Francis's complaints. Had he not been seriously advised to profit by the
counsels of the past, by the experience of those founders of Orders who
have been not only saints but skilful leaders of men? Was not Ugolini
himself his best friend, his born defender, and yet had not Francis forced
him to lay aside the influence to which his love for the friars, his position in
the Church, and his great age gave him such just title? Yes, he had been
forced to leave Francis to needlessly expose his disciples to all sorts of
danger, to send them on missions as perilous as they had proved to be
ineffectual, and all for what? For the most trivial point of honor, because the
Brothers Minor were determined not to enjoy the smallest privileges. They
were not heretics, but they disturbed the Church as much as the heretics did.
How many times had he not been reminded that a great association, in order
to exist, must have precise and detailed regulations? It had all been labor
lost! Of course Francis's humility was doubted by no one, but why not
manifest it, not only in costume and manner of living, but in all his acts? He
thought himself obeying God in defending his own inspiration, but does not
the Church speak in the name of God? Are not the words of her
representatives the words of Jesus forever perpetuated on earth? He desired
to be a man of the Gospel, an apostolic man, but was not the best way of
becoming such to obey the Roman pontiff, the successor of Peter? With an
excess of condescension they had let him go on in his own way, and the
result was the saddest of lessons. But the situation was not desperate, there
was still time to find a remedy; to do that he had only to throw himself at
the feet of the pope, imploring his blessing, his light, and his counsel.

Reproaches such as these, mingled with professions of love and
admiration on the part of the prelate, could not but profoundly disturb a
sensitive heart like that of Francis. His conscience bore him good witness,
but with the modesty of noble minds he was ready enough to think that he
might have made many mistakes.
Perhaps this is the place to ask what was the secret of the friendship of
these two men, so little known to one another on certain sides. How could it
last without a shadow down to the very death of Francis, when we always
find Ugolini the very soul of the group who are compromising the
Franciscan ideal? No answer to this question is possible. The same problem
presents itself with regard to Brother Elias, and we are no better able to find
a satisfactory answer. Men of loving hearts seldom have a perfectly clear
intelligence. They often become fascinated by men the most different from
themselves, in whose breasts they feel none of those feminine weaknesses,
those strange dreams, that almost sickly pity for creatures and things, that
mysterious thirst for pain which is at once their own happiness and their
torment.
The sojourn at Camaldoli was prolonged until the middle of September,
and it ended to the cardinal's satisfaction. Francis had decided to go directly
to the pope, then at Orvieto, with the request that Ugolini should be given
him as official protector intrusted with the direction of the Order.
A dream which he had once had recurred to his memory; he had seen a
little black hen which, in spite of her efforts, was not able to spread her
wings over her whole brood. The poor hen was himself, the chickens were
the friars. This dream was a providential indication commanding him to
seek for them a mother under whose wings they could all find a place, and
who could defend them against the birds of prey. At least so he thought.10
He repaired to Orvieto without taking Assisi in his way, since if he went
there he would be obliged to take some measures against the fomentors of
disturbance; he now proposed to refer everything directly to the pope.
Does his profound humility, with the feeling of culpability which Ugolini
had awakened in him, suffice to explain his attitude with regard to the pope,
or must we suppose that he had a vague thought of abdicating? Who knows
whether conscience was not already murmuring a reproach, and showing
him how trivial were all the sophisms which had been woven around him?

"Not daring to present himself in the apartments of so great a
prince, he remained outside before the door, patiently waiting
till the pope should come out. When he appeared St. Francis
made a reverence and said:
'Father Pope, may God give you peace.' 'May God bless you,
my son,' replied he. 'My lord,' then said St. Francis to him, 'you
are great and often absorbed by great affairs; poor friars cannot
come and talk with you as often as they need to do; you have
given me many popes; give me a single one to whom I may
address myself when need occurs, and who will listen in your
stead, and discuss my affairs and those of the Order.' 'Whom do
you wish I should give you, my son?' 'The Bishop of Ostia.' And
he gave him to him."11
Conferences with Ugolini now began again; he immediately accorded
Francis some amends; the privilege granted the Clarisses was revoked;
Giovanni di Conpello was informed that he had nothing to hope from the
curia, and last of all leave was given to Francis himself to compose the
Rule of his Order. Naturally he was not spared counsel on the subject, but
there was one point upon which the curia could not brook delay, and of
which it exacted the immediate application—the obligation of a year's
novitiate for the postulants.
At the same time a bull was issued not merely for the sake of publishing
this ordinance, but especially to mark in a solemn manner the
commencement of a new era in the relations of the Church and the
Franciscans. The fraternity of the Umbrian Penitents became an Order in
the strictest sense of the word.
Honorius, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Brother
Francis and the other priors or custodes of the Brothers Minor,
greeting and the apostolic benediction.
In nearly all religious Orders it has been wisely ordained that
those who present themselves with the purpose of observing the
regular life shall make trial of it for a certain time, during which
they also shall be tested, in order to leave neither place nor
pretext for inconsiderate steps. For these reasons we command
you by these presents to admit no one to make profession until

after one year of novitiate; we forbid that after profession any
brother shall leave the Order, and that any one shall take back
again him who has gone out from it. We also forbid that those
wearing your habit shall circulate here and there without
obedience, lest the purity of your poverty be corrupted. If any
friars have had this audacity, you will inflict upon them
ecclesiastical censures until repentance.12
It is surely only by a very decided euphemism that such a bull can be
considered in the light of a privilege. It was in reality the laying of the
strong hand of the papacy upon the Brothers Minor.
From this time, in the very nature of things it became impossible for
Francis to remain minister-general. He felt it himself. Heart-broken, soul-
sick, he would fain, in spite of all, have found in the energy of his love
those words, those glances which up to this time had taken the place of rule
or constitution, giving to his earliest companions the intuition of what they
ought to do and the strength to accomplish it; but an administrator was
needed at the head of this family which he suddenly found to be so different
from what it had been a few years before, and he sadly acknowledged that
he himself was not in the slightest degree such a person.13
Ah, in his own conscience he well knew that the old ideal was the true,
the right one; but he drove away such thoughts as the temptations of pride.
The recent events had not taken place without in some degree weakening
his moral personality; from being continually talked to about obedience,
submission, humility, a certain obscurity had come over this luminous soul;
inspiration no longer came to it with the certainty of other days; the prophet
had begun to waver, almost to doubt of himself and of his mission.
Anxiously he searched himself to see if in the beginning of his work there
had not been some vain self-complacency. He pictured to himself
beforehand the chapter which he was about to open, the attack, the
criticisms of which it would be the object, and labored to convince himself
that if he did not endure them with joy he was not a true Brother Minor.14
The noblest virtues are subject to scruples, that of perfect humility more
than any other, and thus it is that excellent men religiously betray their own
convictions to avoid asserting themselves. He resolved then to put the
direction of the Order into the hands of Pietro di Catana. It is evident that
there was nothing spontaneous in this decision, and the fact that this brother

was a doctor of laws and belonged to the nobility squarely argues the
transformation of the Franciscan institute.
It is not known whether or not Ugolini was present at the chapter of
September 29, 1220, but if he was not there in person he was assuredly
represented by some prelate, charged to watch over the debates.15 The bull
which had been issued a week before was communicated to the friars, to
whom Francis also announced that he was about to elaborate a new Rule.
With reference to this matter there were conferences in which the ministers
alone appear to have had a deliberative voice. At these conferences the
essential points of the new Rule were settled as to principle, leaving to
Francis the care of giving them proper form at his leisure. Nothing better
reveals the demoralized state into which he had fallen than the decision
which was taken to drop out one of the essential passages of the old Rule,
one of his three fundamental precepts, that which began with these words,
"Carry nothing with you."16
How did they go to work to obtain from Francis this concession which, a
little while before, he would have looked upon as a denial of his call, a
refusal to accept in its integrity the message which Jesus had addressed to
him? It is the secret of history, but we may suppose there was in his life at
this time one of those moral tempests which overbear the faculties of the
strongest, leaving in their wounded hearts only an unutterable pain.
Something of this pain has passed into the touching narrative of his
abdication which the biographers have given us.
"From henceforth," he said to the friars, "I am dead for you,
but here is Brother Pietro di Catana, whom you and I will all
obey." And prostrating himself before him he promised him
obedience and submission. The friars could not restrain their
tears and lamentations when they saw themselves thus becoming
in some sort orphans, but Francis arose, and, clasping his hands,
with eyes upraised to heaven: "Lord," he said, "I return to thee
this family which thou hast confided to me. Now, as thou
knowest, most sweet Jesus, I have no longer strength nor ability
to keep on caring for them; I confide them, therefore, to the
ministers. May they be responsible before thee at the day of

judgment if any brother, by their negligence or bad example, or
by a too severe discipline, should ever wander away."17
The functions of Pietro di Catana were destined to continue but a very
short time; he died on March 10, 1221.18
Information abounds as to this period of a few months; nothing is more
natural, since Francis remained at Portiuncula to complete the task confided
to him, living there surrounded with brethren who later on would recall to
mind all the incidents of which they were witnesses. Some of them reveal
the conflict of which his soul was the arena. Desirous of showing himself
submissive, he nevertheless found himself tormented by the desire to shake
off his chains and fly away as in former days, to live and breathe in God
alone. The following artless record deserves, it seems to me, to be better
known.19
One day a novice who could read the psalter, though not without
difficulty, obtained from the minister general—that is to say, from the vicar
of St. Francis—permission to have one. But as he had learned that St.
Francis desired the brethren to be covetous neither for learning nor for
books, he would not take his psalter without his consent. So, St. Francis
having come to the monastery where the novice was, "Father," said he, "it
would be a great consolation to have a psalter; but though the minister-
general has authorized me to get it, I would not have it unknown to you."
"Look at the Emperor Charles," replied St. Francis with fire, "Roland, and
Oliver and all the paladins, valorous heroes and gallant knights, who gained
their famous victories in fighting infidels, in toiling and laboring even unto
death! The holy martyrs, they also have chosen to die in the midst of battle
for the faith of Christ! But now there are many of those who aspire to merit
honor and glory simply by relating their feats. Yes, among us also there are
many who expect to receive glory and honor by reciting and preaching the
works of the saints, as if they had done them themselves!"
... A few days after, St. Francis was sitting before the fire, and the novice
drew near to speak to him anew about his psalter.
"When you have your psalter," said Francis to him, "you will want a
breviary, and when you have a breviary you will seat yourself in a pulpit
like a great prelate and will beckon to your companion, 'Bring me my
breviary!'"

St. Francis said this with great vivacity, then taking up some ashes he
scattered them over the head of the novice, repeating, "There is the breviary,
there is the breviary!"
Several days after, St. Francis being at Portiuncula and walking up and
down on the roadside not far from his cell, the same Brother came again to
speak to him about his psalter. "Very well, go on," said Francis to him, "you
have only to do what your minister tells you." At these words the novice
went away, but Francis began to reflect on what he had said, and suddenly
calling to the friar, he cried, "Wait for me! wait for me!" When he had
caught up to him, "Retrace your steps a little way. I beg you," he said.
"Where was I when I told you to do whatever your minister told you as to
the psalter?" Then falling upon his knees on the spot pointed out by the
friar, he prostrated himself at his feet: "Pardon, my brother, pardon!" he
cried, "for he who would be Brother Minor ought to have nothing but his
clothing."
This long story is not merely precious because it shows us, even to the
smallest particular, the conflict between the Francis of the early years,
looking only to God and his conscience, and the Francis of 1220, become a
submissive monk in an Order approved by the Roman Church, but also
because it is one of those infrequent narratives where his method shows
itself with its artless realism. These allusions to the tales of chivalry, and
this freedom of manner which made a part of his success with the masses,
were eliminated from the legend with an incredible rapidity. His spiritual
sons were perhaps not ashamed of their father in this matter, but they were
so bent upon bringing out his other qualities that they forgot a little too
much the poet, the troubadour, the joculator Domini.
Certain fragments, later than Thomas of Celano by more than a century,
which relate some incidents of this kind, bear for that very reason the stamp
of authenticity.
It is difficult enough to ascertain precisely what part Francis still took in
the direction of the Order. Pietro di Catana and later Brother Elias are
sometimes called ministers-general, sometimes vicars; the two terms often
occur successively, as in the preceding narrative. It is very probable that this
confusion of terms corresponds to a like confusion of facts. Perhaps it was
even intentional. After the chapter of September, 1220, the affairs of the

Order pass into the hands of him whom Francis had called minister-general,
though the friars as well as the papacy gave him only the title of vicar. It
was essential for the popularity of the Brothers Minor that Francis should
preserve an appearance of authority, but the reality of government had
slipped from his hands.
The ideal which he had borne in his body until 1209 and had then given
birth to in anguish, was now taking its flight, like those sons of our loins
whom we see suddenly leaving us without our being able to help it, since
that is life, yet not without a rending of our vitals. Mater dolorosa! Ah, no
doubt they will come back again, and seat themselves piously beside us at
the paternal hearth; perhaps even, in some hour of moral distress, they will
feel the need of taking refuge in their mother's arms as in the old days; but
these fleeting returns, with their feverish haste, only reopen the wounds of
the poor parents, when they see how the children hasten to depart again—
they who bear their name but belong to them no longer.

FOOTNOTES
1. Giord., 14; Tribul., fo 10.
2. Any other date is impossible, since Francis in open chapter relinquished the direction of the Order
in favor of Pietro di Catana, who died March 10, 1221.
3. This too short fragment is found in § vi. of the Rule of the Damianites (August 9, 1253):
Speculum, Morin, Tract. iii., 226b.
4. 2 Cel., 2, 3; Bon., 162; cf. Conform., 184b, 2, and 62b, 1.
5. Sigonius, Opera, t. iii. col. 220; cf. Potthast, 5516, and 6086.
6. 2 Cel., 3, 4; Spec., 11a; Tribul., 13a; Conform., 169b, 2.
7. Died in 1229. Cf. Mazzetti, Repertorio di tutti i professori di Bologna, Bologna, 1847, p. 11.
8. See Mon. Germ. hist. Script., t. 28, p. 635, and the notes.
9. Wadding, ann. 1220, no. 9. Cf. A. SS., p. 823.
10. 2 Cel., 1, 16; Spec., 100a-101b.
11. Giord., 14; cf. 2 Cel., 1, 17; Spec., 102; 3 Soc., 56 and 63.
12. Cum secundum. The original is at Assisi with Datum apud Urbem Veterem X. Kal. Oct. pont.
nostri anno quinto (September 22, 1220). It is therefore by an error that Sbaralea and Wadding make
it date from Viterbo, which is the less explicable that all the bulls of this epoch are dated from
Orvieto. Wadding, ann. 1220, 57; Sbaralea, vol. i., p. 6; Potthast, 6561.
13. 2 Cel., 3, 118; Ubertin, Arbor. V., 2; Spec., 26; 50; 130b; Conform., 136a, 2; 143a, 2.