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

perfect and supreme obedience."
Then, comparing him who obeys to a corpse, he replied: "Take a
dead body, and put it where you will, it will make no resistance;
when it is in one place it will not murmur, when you take it away
from there it will not object; put it in a pulpit, it will not
look up but down; wrap it in purple, it will only be doubly
pale."[7]

This longing for corpse-like obedience witnesses to the ravages with which his soul had been laid waste; it corresponds in the moral domain to the cry for annihilation of great physical anguish.

The worst was that he was absolutely alone. Everywhere else the Franciscan obedience is living, active, joyful.[8]

He drank this cup to the very dregs, holding sacred the revolts dictated by conscience. One day in the later years of his life a German friar came to see him, and after having long discussed with him pure obedience:

"I ask you one favor," he said to him, "it is that if the
Brothers ever come to live no longer according to the Rule you
will permit me to separate myself from them, alone or with a few
others, to observe it in its completeness." At these words
Francis felt a great joy. "Know," said he, "that Christ as well
as I authorize what you have just been asking;" and laying hands
upon him, "Thou art a priest forever," he added, "after the
order of Melchisedec."[9]

We have a yet more touching proof of his solicitude to safeguard the spiritual independence of his disciples: it is a note to Brother Leo.[10] The latter, much alarmed by the new spirit which was gaining power in the Order, opened his mind thereupon to his master, and doubtless asked of him pretty much the same permission as the friar from Germany. After an interview in which he replied viva voce , Francis, not to leave any sort of doubt or hesitation in the mind of him whom he surnamed his little sheep of God, pecorella di Dio , wrote to him again:

Brother Leo, thy brother Francis wishes thee peace and health.

I reply yes , my son, as a mother to her child. This word sums
up all we said while walking, as well as all my counsels. If
thou hast need to come to me for counsel, it is my wish that
thou shouldst do it. Whatever may be the manner in which thou
thinkest thou canst please the Lord God, follow it, and live in
poverty. Do this (faites le[11]), God will bless thee and I
authorize it. And if it were necessary for thy soul, or for thy
consolation that thou shouldst come to see me, or if thou
desirest it, my Leo, come.

Thine in Christ.

Surely we are far enough here from the corpse of a few pages back.

It would be superfluous to pause over the other admonitions. For the most part they are reflections inspired by circumstances. Counsels as to humility recur with a frequency which explains both the personal anxieties of the author, and the necessity of reminding the brothers of the very essence of their profession.

The sojourn of St. Francis at Rome, whither he went in the early months of 1221, to lay his plan before Ugolini, was marked by a new effort of the latter to bring him and St. Dominic together.[12]

The cardinal was at this time at the apogee of his success. Everything had gone well with him. His voice was all powerful not only in affairs of the Church, but also in those of the Empire. Frederic II., who seemed to be groping his way, and in whose mind were germinating dreams of religious reformation, and the desire of placing his power at the service of the truth, treated him as a friend, and spoke of him with unbounded admiration.[13]

In his reflections upon the remedies to be applied to the woes of Christianity, the cardinal came at last to think that one of the most efficacious would be the substitution of bishops taken from the two new Orders, for the feudal episcopate almost always recruited from local families in which ecclesiastical dignities were, so to speak, hereditary. In the eyes of Ugolini such bishops were usually wanting in two essential qualities of a good prelate: religious zeal and zeal for the Church.

He believed that the Preaching and the Minor Friars would not only possess those virtues which were lacking in the others, but that in the hands of the papacy they might become a highly centralized hierarchy, truly catholic, wholly devoted to the interests of the Church at large. The difficulties which might occur on the part of the chapters which should elect the bishops, as well as on the side of the high secular clergy, would be put to flight by the enthusiasm which the people would feel for pastors whose poverty would recall the days of the primitive Church.

At the close of his interviews with Francis and Dominic, he communicated to them some of these thoughts, asking their advice as to the elevation of their friars to prelatures. There was a pious contest between the two saints as to which should answer first. Finally, Dominic said simply that he should prefer to see his companions remain as they were. In his turn, Francis showed that the very name of his institute made the thing impossible. "If my friars have been called Minores ," he said, "it is not that they may become Majores . If you desire that they become fruitful in the Church of God, leave them alone, and keep them in the estate into which God has called them. I pray you, father, do not so act that their poverty shall become a motive for pride, nor elevate them to prelatures which would move them to insolence toward others."[14]

The ecclesiastical policy followed by the popes was destined to render this counsel of the two founders wholly useless.[15]

Francis and Dominic parted, never again to meet. The Master of the Preaching Friars shortly after set out for Bologna, where he died on August 6th following, and Francis returned to Portiuncula, where Pietro di Catana had just died (March 10, 1221). He was replaced at the head of the Order by Brother Elias. Ugolini was doubtless not without influence in this choice.

Detained by his functions of legate, he could not be present at the Whitsunday chapter (May 30, 1221).[16] He was represented there by Cardinal Reynerio,[17] who came accompanied by several bishops and by monks of various orders.[18] About three thousand friars were there assembled, but so great was the eagerness of the people of the neighborhood to bring provisions, that after a session of seven days they were obliged to remain two days longer to eat up all that had been brought. The sessions were presided over by Brother Elias, Francis sitting at his feet and pulling at his robe when there was anything that he wished to have put before the Brothers.

Brother Giordani di Giano, who was present, has preserved for us all these details and that of the setting out of a group of friars for Germany. They were placed under the direction of Cæsar of Speyer, whose mission succeeded beyond all expectation. Eighteen months after, when he returned to Italy, consumed with the desire to see St. Francis again, the cities of Wurzburg, Mayence, Worms, Speyer, Strasburg, Cologne, Salzburg, and Ratisbon had become Franciscan centres, from whence the new ideas were radiating into all Southern Germany.

The foundation of the Tertiaries, or Third Order, generally in the oldest documents called Brotherhood of Penitence, is usually fixed as occurring in the year 1221; but we have already seen that this date is much too recent, or rather that it is impossible to fix any date, for what was later called, quite arbitrarily, the Third Order is evidently contemporary with the First.[19]

Francis and his companions desired to be the apostles of their time; but they, no more than the apostles of Jesus, desired to have all men enter their association, which was necessarily somewhat restricted, and which, according to the gospel saying, was meant to be the leaven of the rest of humanity. In consequence, their life was literally the apostolic life , but the ideal which they preached was the evangelical life , such as Jesus had preached it.

St. Francis no more condemned the family or property than Jesus did; he simply saw in them ties from which the apostle , and the apostle alone, needs to be free.

If before long sickly minds fancied that they interpreted his thought in making the union of the sexes an evil, and all that concerns the physical activity of man a fall; if unbalanced spirits borrowed the authority of his name to escape from all duty; if married persons condemned themselves to the senseless martyrdom of virginity, he should certainly not be made responsible. These traces of an unnatural asceticism come from the dualist ideas of the Catharists, and not from the inspired poet who sang nature and her fecundity, who made nests for doves, inviting them to multiply under the watch of God, and who imposed manual labor on his friars as a sacred duty.

The bases of the corporation of the Brothers and Sisters of Penitence were very simple. Francis gave no new doctrine to the world; what was new in his message was wholly in his love, in his direct call to the evangelical life, to an ideal of moral vigor, of labor, and of love.

Naturally, there were soon found men who did not understand this true and simple beauty; they fell into observances and devotions, imitated, while living in the world, the life of the cloister to which for one reason or another they were not able to retire; but it would be unjust to picture to ourselves the Brothers of Penitence as modelled after them.

Did they receive a Rule from St. Francis? It is impossible to say. The one which was given[20] them in 1289 by Pope Nicholas IV. is simply the recasting and amalgamation of all the rules of lay fraternities which existed at the end of the thirteenth century. To attribute this document to Francis is nothing less than the placing in a new building of certain venerated stones from an ancient edifice. It is a matter of façade and ornamentation, nothing more.

Notwithstanding this absence of any Rule emanating from Francis himself, it is clear enough what, in his estimation, this association ought to be. The Gospel, with its counsels and examples, was to be its true Rule. The great innovation designed by the Third Order was concord; this fraternity was a union of peace, and it brought to astonished Europe a new truce of God. Whether the absolute refusal to carry arms[21] was an idea wholly chimerical and ephemeral, the documents are there to prove, but it is a fine thing to have had the power to bring it about for a few years.

The second essential obligation of