Life of St. Francis of Assisi by Paul Sabatier (best historical biographies txt) 📕

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 Gargano[31] 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