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

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 coelum.

[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 Subasio[1] 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