Life of St. Francis of Assisi, Paul Sabatier [sci fi books to read .txt] 📗

Yet that which gives these stories an inestimable worth is what for want of a better term we may call their atmosphere. They are legendary, worked over, exaggerated, false even, if you please, but they give us with a vivacity and intensity of coloring something that we shall search for in vain elsewhere—the surroundings in which St. Francis lived. More than any other biography the Fioretti transport us to Umbria, to the mountains of the March of Ancona; they make us visit the hermitages, and mingle with the life, half childish, half angelic, which was that of their inhabitants.

It is difficult to pronounce upon the name of the author. His work was only that of gathering the flowers of his bouquet from written and oral tradition. The question whether he wrote in Latin or Italian has been much discussed and appears to be not yet settled; what is certain is that though this work may be anterior to the Conformities,27 it is a little later than the Chronicle of the Tribulations, for it would be strange that it made no mention of Angelo Clareno, if it was written after his death.

This book is in fact an essentially local28 chronicle; the author has in mind to erect a monument to the glory of the Brothers Minor of the March of Ancona. This province, which is evidently his own, "does it not resemble the sky blazing with stars? The holy Brothers who dwelt in it, like the stars in the sky, have illuminated and adorned the Order of St. Francis, filling the world with their examples and teaching." He is acquainted with the smallest villages,29 each having at a short distance its monastery, well apart, usually near a torrent, in the edge of a wood, and above, near the hilltop, a few almost inaccessible cells, the asylums of Brothers even more than the others in love with contemplation and retirement.30

The chapters that concern St. Francis and the Umbrian Brothers are only a sort of introduction; Egidio, Masseo, Leo on one side, St. Clara on the other, are witnesses that the ideal at Portiuncula and St. Damian was indeed the same to which in later days Giachimo di Massa, Pietro di Monticulo, Conrad di Offida, Giovanni di Penna, and Giovanni della Verna endeavored to attain.

While most of the other legends give us the Franciscan tradition of the great convents, the Fioretti are almost the only document which shows it as it was perpetuated in the hermitages and among the people. In default of accuracy of detail, the incidents which are related here contain a higher truth—their tone is true. Here are words that were never uttered, acts that never took place, but the soul and the heart of the early Franciscans were surely what they are depicted here.

The Fioretti have the living truth that the pencil gives. Something is wanting in the physiognomy of the Poverello when we forget his conversation with Brother Leo on the perfect joy, his journey to Sienna with Masseo, or even the conversion of the wolf of Gubbio.

We must not, however, exaggerate the legendary side of the Fioretti: there are not more that two or three of these stories of which the kernel is not historic and easy to find. The famous episode of the wolf of Gubbio, which is unquestionably the most marvellous of all the series, is only, to speak the engraver's language, the third state of the story of the robbers of Monte Casale31 mingled with a legend of the Verna.

The stories crowd one another in this book like flocks of memories that come upon us pell-mell, and in which insignificant details occupy a larger place than the most important events; our memory is, in fact, an overgrown child, and what it retains of a man is generally a feature, a word, a gesture. Scientific history is trying to react, to mark the relative value of facts, to bring forward the important ones, to cast into shade that which is secondary. Is it not a mistake? Is there such a thing as the important and the secondary? How is it going to be marked?

The popular imagination is right: what we need to retain of a man is the expression of countenance in which lives his whole being, a heart-cry, a gesture that expresses his personality. Do we not find all of Jesus in the words of the Last Supper? And all of St. Francis in his address to brother wolf and his sermon to the birds?

Let us beware of despising these documents in which the first Franciscans are described as they saw themselves to be. Unfolding under the Umbrian sky at the foot of the olives of St. Damian, or the firs of the March of Ancona, these wild flowers have a perfume and an originality which we look for in vain in the carefully cultivated flowers of a learned gardener.

In the first of these appendices the compiler has divided into five chapters all the information on the stigmata which he was able to gather. It is easy to understand the success of the Fioretti. The people fell in love with these stories, in which St. Francis and his companions appear both more human and more divine than in the other legends; and they began very soon to feel the need of so completing them as to form a veritable biography.32

The second, entitled Life of Brother Ginepro, is only indirectly connected with St. Francis; yet it deserves to be studied, for it offers the same kind of interest as the principal collection, to which it is doubtless posterior. In these fourteen chapters we find the principal features of the life of this Brother, whose mad and saintly freaks still furnish material for conversation in Umbrian monasteries. These unpretending pages discover to us one aspect of the Franciscan heart. The official historians have thought it their duty to keep silence upon this Brother, who to them appeared to be a supremely indiscreet personage, very much in the way of the good name of the Order in the eyes of the laics. They were right from their point of view, but we owe a debt of gratitude to the Fioretti for having preserved for us this personality, so blithe, so modest, and with so arch a good nature. Certainly St. Francis was more like Ginepro than like Brother Elias or St. Bonaventura.33

The third, Life of Brother Egidio, appears to be on the whole the most ancient document on the life of the famous Ecstatic that we possess. It is very possible that these stories might be traced to Brother Giovanni, to whom the Three Companions appeal in their prologue.

In the defective texts given us in the existing editions we perceive the hand of an annotator whose notes have slipped into the text,34 but in spite of that this life is one of the most important of the secondary texts. This always itinerant brother, one of whose principal preoccupations is to live by his labor, is one of the most original and agreeable figures in Francis's surroundings, and it is in lives of this sort that we must seek the true meaning of some of the passages of the Rule, and precisely in those that have had the most to suffer from the enterprise of exegetes.

The fourth includes the favorite maxims of Brother Egidio; they have no other importance than to show the tendencies of the primitive Franciscan teaching. They are short, precise, practical counsels, saturated with mysticism, and yet in them good sense never loses its rights. The collection, just as it is in the Fioretti, is no doubt posterior to Egidio, for in 1385 Bartolommeo of Pisa furnished a much longer one.35

We find here at the end of the life of Francis that of most of his companions, and the events that occurred under the first twenty-four generals.

It is a very ordinary work of compilation. The authors have sought to include in it all the pieces which they had succeeded in collecting, and the result presents a very disproportioned whole. A thorough study of it might be interesting and useful, but it would be possible only after its publication. This cannot be long delayed: twice (at intervals of fifteen months) when I have desired to study the Assisi manuscript it was found to be with the Franciscans of Quaracchi, who were preparing to print it.

It is difficult not to bring the epoch in which this collection was closed near to that when Bartolommeo of Pisa wrote his famous work. Perhaps the two are quite closely related.

This chronicle was one of Glassberger's favorite sources.

The Book of the Conformities, to which Brother Bartolommeo of Pisa devoted more than fifteen years of his life,38 appears to have been read very inattentively by most of the authors who have spoken of it.39 In justice to them we must add that it would be hard to find a work more difficult to read; the same facts reappear from ten to fifteen times, and end by wearying the least delicate nerves.

It is to this no doubt that we must attribute the neglect to which it has been left. I do not hesitate, however, to see in it the most important work which has been made on the life of St. Francis. Of course the author does not undertake historical criticism as we understand it to-day, but if we must not expect to find him a historian, we can boldly place him in the front rank of compilers.40

If the Bollandists had more thoroughly studied him they would have seen more clearly into the difficult question of the sources, and the authors who have come after them would have been spared numberless errors and interminable researches.

Starting with the thought that Francis's life had been a perfect imitation of that of Jesus, Bartolommeo attempted to collect, without losing a single one, all the instances of the life of the Poverello scattered through the diverse legends still known at that time.

He regretted that Bonaventura, while borrowing the narratives of his predecessors, had often abridged them,41 and himself desired to preserve them in their original bloom. Better situated than any one for such a work, since he had at his disposal the archives of the Sacro Convento of Assisi, it may be said that he has omitted nothing of importance and that he has brought into his work considerable pieces from nearly all the legends which appeared in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; they are there only in fragments, it is true, but with perfect accuracy.42

When his researches were unsuccessful he avows it simply, without attempting to fill out the written testimonies with his own conjectures.43 He goes farther, and submits the documents he has before him to a real testing, laying aside those he considers uncertain.44 Finally he takes pains to point out the passages in which his only authority is oral testimony.45

As he is almost continually citing the legends of Celano, the Three Companions, and