Part 14

It is in face of such a _heautontimorumenos_ as poor Brother Masseo that I revolt against all this strained ethics, this gymnast virtue demanding years of training to force the soul into some unnatural posture which it can only sustain at best for a few seconds. I could weep over all this wasted goodness when I think of the wrongs crying out for justice, the voice of lamentation that rises daily from the wan places of the world. How much there is for Hercules to labour at without standing on his head and balancing the seven deadly virtues on his toes! The beauty of holiness is often put on the same level as the holiness of beauty, as a self-sufficient ideal. But even as false ideals of beauty may impose themselves, so may false ideals of holiness. The static sanctity of a Stylites has long been relegated to those false ideals, and even a St. Francis cannot be accepted as a model for to-day, though a few satiated souls may yearn after abnegation as the last luxury of the spirit. There is much barren æsthetic admiration wasted upon religious maxims which it is admitted would overturn society if acted upon; and it is questionable, therefore, whether there is any real beauty in these, any more than in jewelled watches that will not go. Even when a rare saint acts upon them, they seem to produce spiritual sickliness rather than spiritual health. There is, perhaps, a finer beauty of holiness in the life of a wise and good man of the world with a sense of humour, than in the life of an ecstatic and underfed saint, whose very notion of the Fatherhood of God lacks the reality and fulness that come from paternity.

There are few things in literature more touchingly simple than those adventures in search of holiness, that picaresque novel of the spirit, known as “The Little Flowers of St. Francis.” These gentle souls, who wander without food or knapsack, under the tutelage of the seraphic saint, through the enchanting valleys and hills of unspoiled thirteenth-century Italy, and adventuring in even more glamorous regions hold strange parleyings with the Soldan of Babylon, have upon them a morning light of innocence and that perfume of holiness which can never fail to justify the Master’s exposition of Ezekiel. If anything could add to the sweetness of the idyll, it is the spiritual loves of St. Francis and St. Clara. And yet our adoration of St. Francis must not blind us to the questionable aspects of the chronicle. “I may yet have sons and daughters,” he replied deprecatingly to one who proclaimed him blessed and holy. What a caricature of true ethics! Even the poverty for which he was “so greedy” is impossible if everybody is greedy for it, and the abnegation he practised he could not have preached. Otherwise when he tossed his own tunic to a shivering beggar, he should have inspired the beggar to toss it back to his now shivering self, and so _ad infinitum_. That game of tunic-tennis with nothing ever scored but “love” would have been true Franciscanism, but also its _reductio ad absurdum_. I do not wonder that Goethe smiled at the “Heiliger” of Assisi, for neglecting to visit whose shrine he was nearly arrested as a smuggler.

Yes, the bland brother does well to babble of the cabbage planted with its leaves in the ground. For he has blundered into the very essence of the Master’s teaching: this topsy-turvydom, these roots in the air, are the secret of St. Francis’s success. There is a tendency to blame our paradoxists, to deride their inversions as mechanical. But St. Francis is an inversion incarnate, a paradox in flesh and blood. While with other men Property is a sacred concept, a fetish guarded by a mesh of laws, he refuses to own anything and even disposes with blasphemous levity of other people’s property. Theft he daringly defines as not to give something to anybody who has greater need of it than oneself. He hated Property, not as the Socialist hates it who covets its communalisation, but as something in itself evil. These practical inversions of his have the same excuse as those of the literary paradoxist. Nothing less than this violent antithesis will suffice to shake men’s notions from the _rigor mortis_ that overtakes even true ideas, or to offset the exaggeration which gradually falsifies them. One false extreme must be met by another, if the happy mean is to be struck.

Pray do not imagine I would endorse Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean, or the popular platitude that truth always lies midway between two extreme views. On the contrary, truth is often the most violent and extreme of all possible propositions and right action the most violent and extreme of all possible forms of conduct. But the system of St. Francis needed as much contradiction from the world of common sense as the world of common sense needed from it. In so far as it was Christian, it was an imitation of early Christianity, minus the time-limit which justified its model. But the right course of action when the world is about to come to an end will not necessarily be the right course if the world is indefinitely to be continued in our next. In such a world the system of St. Francis is an impossibility, if only because it would bring the world to an end by lack of population. And if it really succeeded, it would bring itself to an end even before the world, for in the absence of owners there would be none to receive alms from, none to bake that bread which St. Francis naïvely regarded as coming by grace as simply as water. This absolute avoidance of money resembles, indeed, nothing so much as banking, which is possible only if the bulk of the investors do not ask for their money at the same time. It is on the certainty of his failure that the success of a saint reposes. His disciples will never be more than a miserable minority and so he will seem recuperative and not destructive to society. The exaggeration of his holiness will mitigate the materialism of the average man. Dives will not give up his dinner but he will drop a crumb for Lazarus and another for the saint, and perhaps eat only salmon and trout on Fridays. It is this reflection that he incarnates for the race an ideal of perfection, imperfect though it be in its impossibility, that reconciles me to the saint, as the reflection that the Church Fathers were engaged in fashioning that ideal reconciles me to their meticulous morality, in a world so given over to slaughter, sensuality and every abomination of injustice that their fine shades and their notion of an impassable infinity between right and the smallest wrong appear ludicrously disproportionate and academic.

The saint on this theory is a scapegoat, a victim on the altar of human selfishness; he does, suffers, or gives up, too much because most other persons do, suffer, or give up, too little. He is sacrificed to the balance of things, or as St. Paul put it, he is the leaven to the lump. Yet things would overbalance were he too successful, and too much leaven would spoil the lump.

If there is within St. Francis an unresolved discord between Hinduism and Christianity, still more jarring is the outer discord between Nature and Christianity which he tried so heroically to harmonise. Don Quixote tilting at windmills is a practical figure beside St. Francis trying to Christianise bird and beast. The consciously grotesque pathos of Cervantes is surpassed by the unconsciously grotesque pathos of the chronicles of St. Francis. The struggle for existence in Nature—the angler’s hook and the birdcatcher’s snare—can hardly be glossed over by sermons to the birds and the fishes. Doubtless St. Francis had—as some sinners have to-day—a strange power of fascination over the lower creatures, but the butcher was not eliminated because St. Francis occasionally bought off a lamb or a turtle-dove. We know too little of the psychology of wild beasts to deny that he tamed the Wolf of Agobio—though it is permissible to doubt the civil contract with Brother Wolf which in Sassetta’s fanciful picture is even drawn up by a notary; nor is the stone record of the miracle you may read to-day on the façade of that little church in Gubbio which was set up three centuries later, nor even the skull of Brother Wolf himself, found—according to a lady writer on Gubbio—“precisely on the spot pointed out by tradition as the burial-place of the beast,” and “now in the possession of a gentleman at Scheggia,” as convincing a testimony as she imagines “to the indubitable truth of the tradition, and to the superhuman power of love towards every living creature.” Love has no such power to turn lions and wolves into civil contractors or vegetarians. There is a battle of beneficent and sinister forces in the universe, which Persian speculation has always recognised frankly, but which Hebraic and Hindu systems, by their higher synthesis of Love or Good, unconsciously whittle away into a sham fight, or at best a tournament; a play of God with His own forces. ’Tis Docetism writ larger. But whether the fight be sham or real, the universe is not run on a Franciscan system, and it is this which makes the pathos and the grotesquerie of the saint’s attempts to equate the macrocosm with his autocosm. Yes, St. Francis is as nobly mad as Don Quixote. Nay, towards the end, where the cavalier of Christ, broken by disease in the prime of his years—disease of the spleen, disease of the liver, disease of the stomach, disease of the eyes—macerated by senseless privations, a mere substratum for poultices and fomentations and cauterisations, scarcely even washing himself for fear of ostentating the stigmata, still sings songs of praise so blithely as to scandalise his companions’ sense of death-bed decency, we touch a more Quixotic pathos than anything in Cervantes.

And these legends of his pious influence over the cicala and the swallow and the wolf, this tench that plays around his boat, this pheasant that haunts his cell, this falcon that wakes him for matins during his fast in the mountain, these birds that fly off in four companies like a cross after devoutly digesting his sermon, all make for the comity of creation, especially in Italy, where animals have no souls, only bodies that may be ill-used: indeed, St. Francis—with his disciple St. Antony of Padua—contributes to Christianity that missing note of respect for the animal creation which Hinduism expresses “in the great word _Tat-twam-asi_ (This is thyself!).” And here at least modern thought is with St. Francis and his Hindu universalism. The evolution theory is usually considered a depressing doctrine, yet it has its stimulating aspects. For though we may doubt if St. Francis converted the wolf, we cannot doubt that Nature Christianised it, or at least some creature as low and savage. For from some gibbering ferocious brute there did, in the process of the suns, emerge a seraphic, selfless being with love for all creation. The wolf, in fact, became St. Francis; a more notable conversion than any in the missionary books.

But what did St. Francis become? Here the record is not so stimulating; here begins degeneration, devolution. Before he died he was an idol and the nominal centre of vast organisations, lay as well as monastic, female as well as male, and in this success lay his defeat. _Lachrymæ rerum_ inhere even more in success than in failure. The portrait of St. Francis by Ribera which may be seen at Florence—a melancholy monk with his eyes turned up, holding a skull—was no sadder caricature of the blithe little man who swept out dirty churches with a broom than these gigantic and infinitely quarrelsome organisations were of his teaching.

A great man may either influence humanity by his solitary work or he may found an institution. The institution (if adequately financed) will live, but with himself squeezed out of it—for worship at a safe height. The squeezing out of St. Francis from Franciscanism began even before his death—the Papacy pressing from without and his own vicars from within. That very sensible fear of Brother William of Nottingham—evidently a practical Briton—that superfluities would grow up in the Order as insensibly as hairs in the beard, was more than verified. The dangerous rule of Absolute Poverty was relaxed, scholastic learning was reinstalled in its armchair, a network of rules replaced the rule of the spirit, and the little brotherhood that had lain on straw and tattered mattresses in the Portiuncula swelled and split into Conventualists and Observants, the majority established in magnificent monasteries. St. Francis lamented the degeneration of the brethren, though he characteristically refused to punish it. And when he was quite squeezed to death there began a fight for his body—holy body-snatching was a feature of the Middle Ages—and that vile enemy of the soul which he had battled against all his life took his place as the centre of the cult. Perugia, holding by force the body of St. Giles, removed from Assisi the only possible rival of his relics. His very poultice is still preserved as an object of edification.

II

Erasmus dreamed once—so he writes to Charles Utenhove—that St. Francis came to thank him for chastising the Franciscans. The Founder had not the scrupulous stage-costume of his degenerate followers: his brown frock was of undyed wool; the hood was not peaked, but merely hung behind to cover the head in bad weather; the cord was a piece of rope from a farmyard; the feet were bare. Of the five wounds of the stigmata there was as little trace in St. Francis as of the six virtues in the Franciscans. Obedience, poverty, chastity, humility, simplicity, charity—where had flown these “six wings of the seraph”?

_Eheu fugaces!_ ’Tis the story of all founders, of all orders. St. Francis at his supreme moment of renunciation had not even the brown frock of Erasmus’s dream. In the market-place of Assisi he stood in his shirt. And he desired to die even more naked, as Thomas of Celano and the “Legenda Trium Sociorum” testify. The first Franciscans were simple souls kindled by his love and ecstasy, “the minstrels of the dear Lord.” They bore revilement and scourging; dragged along by their hoods, they never ceased to proclaim Peace. They lay a-cold in caves, with hearts careless of the morrow; they served in lepers’ houses. And above all they worked; begging was only to be a last resort, and never was money to be asked for. “Beware of money,” says the “Regula.”

Brother Elias of Cortona, the immediate successor of St. Francis, is said to have lived like a prince, with valets and horses, and he readily got the Pope to sanction a device by which he obtained all the money he wanted _per interpositas personas_. Nor did the Master’s teaching fare better at the hands of the more faithful faction—the Observants whom the Conventualists persecuted—for the rule of Absolute Poverty was applied without the genial concessions and exceptions he knew how to make; and under the guidance of the caustic and canonical Antony of Padua the ancient _gaudentes in Domino_ hardened into slaves of the letter, while the more mystic degenerated into anchorites who retired to the mountains to save their own souls.

Nothing can point the tragedy of St. Francis’s success more vividly than his own homely words in his “Testamentum.” “And they who came to take up this life gave up whatever they might have to the poor and were content with a single tunic, patched inside and out (if they wished), together with a girdle and drawers: and we would have no more. We clerks said the office like other clerks; the lay-brothers said the Lord’s Prayer. We gladly abode in poor and forsaken churches, and were simple folk and subject to all. And I used to work with my hands, and I desire to work, and my earnest wish is that all the brethren should work at some decent employment.”

Only a century later Dante’s eulogy of the Founder (“Paradiso,” Canto XI) is qualified by the remark that so few of his followers cleave to his teachings that “a little stuff may furnish out their cloaks.” And three centuries later the spectacle which these _Fratri Minori_ represented to Erasmus was that of arrogant mendicants, often of loose morals, begging with forged testimonials, haunting the palaces of the rich, forcing themselves into families, selling the Franciscan habit to wealthy dying sinners as a funeral cloak to cover many sins. His little sisters, the swallows and the doves, fluttered over St. Francis’s tomb, but from it issued the hawks and the vultures. An old, old moral, though humanity will never learn it.

Saint Francis was Francis Saint. The Lady Poverty “who for eleven hundred years had remained without a single suitor” found in him a spouse faithful unto death. His soul went out in fraternity to all the wonderful creation, in joyous surrender to pain and tribulation: even Death was his sister. To found an Order of St. Francis is to count upon a succession of St. Francises. As well found an Order of Shakespeare, a phalanstery of Da Vincis.

In religion no less than in literature or art the Master is ever a new individual—“_Natura lo fece e ruppe il tipo_”—but followers ever think to fix the free-blowing spirit. Alas! saints may be summarised in a system, but the system will not produce saints. Academies, churches, orders can never replace men; they too often serve to asphyxiate or assassinate such as appear. St. Dominic, the sterner founder of the other mendicant order, was not more fortunate in creating an apostolic succession of Poverty than his friend and contemporary; and as for his precursor, St. Bruno, contrast his marble image in the Certosa, gazing agonisedly at a crucifix, with the mosaics of agate, lapis-lazuli, amethyst, and cornelian worked over the altars by eight generations of the Sacchi family, or with the Lucullian feasts which the Carthusians could furnish forth at the bidding of the Magnificent Lodovico. St. Bruno retreated to the desert to fast and pray, and the result was Chartreuse. If he now follows the copious litigation he may well apprehend that his order has modified its motto and that for “_Stat crux dum volvitur orbis_” you should read “_Stat spiritus_.”

Benedictine, too, is a curious by-product of the first of all the Western orders, and the one by which England was converted to Christianity. How pleased the founder of Monte Cassino must be to see a British bishop sipping Benedictine!

Religion has not, indeed, lacked saints aware of the tendency of followers to substitute the forms for the realities and the leader for the spirit. There was Antoinette Bourignon, with her love for the free flowing of the Holy Ghost and her hatred of the Atonement theory, but in the absence of forms her sect had not sufficient material framework to maintain itself by. If the Quakers still survive, it is because they have erected something into a system, if only colour-blindness. But the twaddle which is talked at Quaker meetings when an old bore is played upon by the spirit, turns one’s thoughts longingly to a stately liturgy, independent on the passing generation. Humanity is indeed between the devil and the deep sea. Institutions strangle the spirit, and their absence dissipates it.

“Nec tecum possum vivere, nec sine te.”

Even if by miracle a Church remains true to the spirit of its founder, this is a fresh source of unspirituality, for his spirit may be outgrown. An excellent definition of what a Church should be was given some years ago by a writer in the _Church Quarterly_: “A National Church, elastic enough to provide channels for fresh manifestations of spiritual life, yet anchored to the past.” But where is such a Church to be found? “Anchored to the past”—yes, that condition is more than fulfilled. But spiritual elasticity? The _Church Quarterly_ reviewer has the face to pass off his definition as that of the Church of England, and to say that such a National Church “might have saved the United States from many of those grotesque, and worse than grotesque, features which have at various times disfigured their spiritual life.” But the Church of England has notoriously failed in elasticity—even the Archbishop of Canterbury is unable to make it express his view of the Athanasian Creed. And, far from its anchoring the spiritual life of the English people, they have violently torn themselves away from it in secessions of Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, &c. &c. As to its preserving them from grotesque religious features, the aberrations of English sectarianism fully equal those of America, when the difference of geographic area is considered and the absence of supervision over great spaces. Sandemanians, Walworth Jumpers, Joanna Southcottians, Seventh Day Baptists, Plymouth Brethren, Christadelphians, Peculiar People—such are a few of the British aberrations, some of which have counted distinguished followers. The bequests to foster even the Southcott mania were treated as sacred by the Court of Chancery. Jump-to-Glory-Jane is an English type put into poetry by an English poet. The sect to which Silas Marner belonged, with its naïve belief in drawing lots—the practical equivalent of the sortilege of the Pagan soothsayer—was not made in America. It was England which Voltaire ridiculed for its one sauce and its endless sects. The great scale of America magnifies the aberrations. But even Mormonism, Dowieism, and Christian Science have solid achievements to their credit. Salt Lake City is a paradise built over a desert reclaimed by Mormon labourers, Zion City is a handsome town without drinking-palaces, and Christian Science has made more advances in the last generation than Christianity made in its first two centuries, numbering as it does its temples and its teachers by the thousand. There is at least life behind these grotesqueries, while in the Established Churches there is asphyxiation by endowments.