Life of St. Francis of Assisi Part 51

In consequence of the decision of the chapter of 1244 search was begun in all quarters for memorials of the early times of the Order. In view of the ardor of this inquiry, in which zeal for the glory of the Franciscan inst.i.tute certainly cast the interests of history into the background, the minister-general, Crescentius, was obliged to take certain precautions.

Many of the pieces that he received were doing double duty; others might contradict one another; many of them, under color of telling the life of the Saint, had no other object than to oppose the present to the past.

It soon became imperative to const.i.tute a sort of commission charged to study and coordinate all this matter.[55] What more natural than to put Thomas of Celano at its head? Ever since the approbation of the first legend by Gregory IX. he had appeared to be in a sense the official historiographer of the Order.[56]

This view accords perfectly with the contents of the seventeen chapters which contain the first part of the second legend. It offers itself at the outset as a compilation. Celano is surrounded with companions who help him.[57] A more attentive examination shows that its princ.i.p.al source is the Legend of the Three Companions, which the compilers worked over, sometimes filling out certain details, more often making large excisions.

Everything that does not concern St. Francis is ruthlessly proscribed; we feel the well-defined purpose to leave in the background the disciples who so complacently placed themselves in the foreground.[58]

The work of the Three Companions had been finished August 11, 1246. On July 13, 1247, the chapter of Lyons put an end to the powers of Crescentius. It is, therefore, between these two dates that we must place the composition of the first part of Thomas of Celano's Second Life.[59]

VII. SECOND LIFE BY THOMAS OF CELANO[59]

_Second Part_

The election of Giovanni di Parma (1247-1257) as successor of Crescentius was a victory for the Zealots. This man, in whose work-table the birds came to make their nests,[61] was to astonish the world by his virtues. No one saw more deeply into St. Francis's heart, no one was more worthy to take up and continue his work.

He soon asked Celano to resume his work.[62] The latter was perhaps alone at first, but little by little a group of collaborators formed itself anew about him.[63] Thenceforth nothing prevented his doing with that portion of the work of the Three Companions which Crescentius had suppressed what he had already done with the part he had approved.

The Legend of Brother Leo has thus come down to us, entirely worked over by Thomas of Celano, abridged and with all its freshness gone, but still of capital importance in the absence of the major part of the original.

The events of which we possess two accounts permit us to measure the extent of our loss. We find, in fact, in Celano's compilation all that we expected to find in the Three Companions: the incidents belong especially to the last two years of Francis's life, and the scene of many of them is either Greccio or one of the hermitages of the vale of Rieti;[64] according to tradition, Brother Leo was the hero of a great number of the incidents here related[65] and all the citations that Ubertini di Casali makes from Brother Leo's book find their correspondents here.[66]

This second part of the Second Life perfectly reflects the new circ.u.mstances to which it owes its existence. The question of Poverty dominates everything;[67] the struggle between the two parties in the Order reveals itself on every page; the collaborators are determined that each event narrated shall be an indirect lesson to the Liberals, to whom they oppose the Spirituals; the popes had commented on the Rule in the large sense; they, on their side, undertook to comment on it in a sense at once literal and spiritual, by the actions and words of its author himself.

History has hardly any part here except as the vehicle of a thesis, a fact which diminishes nothing of the historic value of the information given in the course of these pages. But while in Celano's First Life and in the Legend of the Three Companions the facts succeed one another organically, here they are placed side by side. Therefore when we come to read this work we are sensible of a fall; even from the literary point of view the inferiority makes itself cruelly felt. Instead of a poem we have before us a catalogue, very cleverly made, it is true, but with no power to move us.

VIII. NOTES ON A FEW SECONDARY DOc.u.mENTS

a. _Celano's Life of St. Francis for Use in the Choir._

Thomas of Celano made also a short legend for use in the choir. It is divided into nine lessons and served for the Franciscan breviaries up to the time when St. Bonaventura made his _Legenda Minor_.

That of Celano may be found in part (the first three lessons) in the a.s.sisi MS. 338, fol. 52a-53b; it is preceded by a letter of envoy: "_Rogasti me frater Benedicte, ut de legenda B. P. N. F. quaedam exciperem et in novem lectionum seriem ordinarem_ ... etc. _B.

Franciscus de civitate a.s.sisii ortus a puerilibus annis nutritus ext.i.tit insolenter._"

This work has no historic importance.

b. _Life of St. Francis in Verse._

In the list of biographers has sometimes been counted a poem in hexameter verse[68] the text of which was edited in 1882 by the lamented Cristofani.[69]

This work does not furnish a single new historic note. It is the Life by Celano in verse and nothing more; the author's desire was to figure as a poet. It is superfluous, therefore, to concern ourselves with it.[69]

c. _Biography of St. Francis by Giovanni di Ceperano._

One of the biographies which disappeared, no doubt in consequence of the decision of the chapter of 1266,[71] is that of Giovanni di Ceperano.

The resemblance of his name to that of Thomas of Celano has occasioned much confusion.[72] The most precious information which we have respecting him is given by Bernard of Besse in the opening of his _De laudibus St. Francisci_: "_Plenam virtutibus B. Francisci vitam scripsit in Italia exquisitae vir eloquentiae fr. Thomas jubente Domino Gregorio papa IX. et eam quae incipit: Quasi stella matutina vir venerabilis Dominus et fertur Joannes, Apostolicae sedis notarius._"[73]

In the face of so precise a text all doubt as to the existence of the work of Giovanni di Ceperano is impossible. The Reverend Father Denifle has been able to throw new light upon this question. In a ma.n.u.script containing the liturgy of the Brothers Minor and finished in 1256 he found the nine lessons for the festival of St. Francis preceded by the t.i.tle: _Ex gestis ejus abbreviatis quae sic incipiunt: Quasi stella_ (_Zeitschrift fur kath. Theol._, vii., p. 710. Cf. _Archiv._, i., p.

148). This summary of Ceperano's work gives, as we should expect, no new information; but perhaps we need not despair of finding the very work of this author.

d. _Life of St. Francis by Brother Julian._

It was doubtless about 1230 that Brother Julian, the Teuton, who had been chapel-master at the court of the King of France, was commissioned to put the finis.h.i.+ng touches to the Office of St. Francis.[74]

Evidently such a work would contain nothing original, and its loss is little felt.

IX. LEGEND OF ST. BONAVENTURA

Under the generalate of Giovanni di Parma (1247-1257) the Franciscan parties underwent modifications, in consequence of which their opposition became still more striking than before.

The Zelanti, with the minister-general at their head, enthusiastically adopted the views of Gioacchino di Fiore. The predictions of the Calabrian abbot corresponded too well with their inmost convictions for any other course to be possible: they seemed to see Francis, as a new Christ, inaugurating the third era of the world.

For a few years these dreams moved all Europe; the faith of the Joachimites was so ardent that it made its way by its own force; sceptics like Salimbeni told themselves that on the whole it was surely wiser not to be taken unawares by the great catastrophe of 1260, and hastened in crowds to the cell of Hyeres to be initiated by Hugues de Digne in the mysteries of the new times: as to the people, they waited, trembling, divided between hope and terror. Nevertheless their adversaries did not consider themselves beaten, and the Liberal party still remained the most numerous. Of an angelic purity, Giovanni di Parma believed in the omnipotence of example: events showed how mistaken he was; at the close of his term of office scandals were not less flagrant than ten years earlier.[75]

Between these two extreme parties, against which he was to proceed with equal rigor, stood that of the Moderates, to which belonged St.

Bonaventura.[76]

A mystic, but of a formal and orthodox mysticism, he saw the revolution toward which the Church was hastening if the party of the eternal Gospel was to triumph; its victory would not be that of this or that heresy in detail, it would be, with brief delay, the ruin of the entire ecclesiastical edifice; he was too perspicacious not to see that in the last a.n.a.lysis the struggle then going on was that of the individual conscience against authority. This explains, and up to a certain point gains him pardon for, his severities against his opponents; he was supported by the court of Rome and by all those who desired to make the Order a school at once of piety and of learning.

No sooner was he elected general than, with a purpose that never knew hesitation, and a will whose firmness made itself everywhere felt, he took his steps to forward this double aim. On the very morrow of his nomination he sketched the programme of reforms against the Liberal party, and at the same time secured the summons of the Joachimite Brothers before an ecclesiastical tribunal at Citta-della-Pieve. This tribunal condemned them to perpetual imprisonment, and it needed the personal intervention of Cardinal Ottobonus, the future Adrian V., for Giovanni di Parma to be left free to retire to the Convent of Greccio.

The first chapter held under the presidence of Bonaventura, in the extended decisions of which we find everywhere tokens of his influence, a.s.sembled at Narbonne in 1260. He was then commissioned to compose a new life of St. Francis.[77]

We easily understand the anxieties to which this decision of the Brothers was an answer. The number of legends had greatly increased, for besides those which we have first studied or noted there were others in existence which have completely disappeared, and it had become equally difficult for the Brothers who went forth on missions either to make a choice between them or to carry them all.

The course of the new historian was therefore clearly marked out: he must do the work of compiler and peacemaker. He failed in neither. His book is a true sheaf, or rather it is a millstone under which the indefatigable author has pressed, somewhat at hazard, the sheaves of his predecessors. Most of the time he inserts them just as they are, confining himself to the work of harvesting them and weeding out the tares.

Therefore, when we reach the end of this voluminous work we have a very vague impression of St. Francis. We see that he was a saint, a very great saint, since he performed an innumerable quant.i.ty of miracles, great and small; but we feel very much as if we had been going through a shop of objects of piety. All these statues, whether they are called St.

Anthony the Abbot, St. Dominic, St. Theresa, or St. Vincent de Paul, have the same expression of mincing humility, of a somewhat shallow ecstasy. These are saints, if you please, miracle-workers; they are not men; he who made them made them by rule, by process; he has put nothing of his heart in these ever-bowed foreheads, these lips with their wan smile.

G.o.d forbid that I should say or think that St. Bonaventura was not worthy to write a life of St. Francis, but the circ.u.mstances controlled his work, and it is no injustice to him to say that it is fortunate for Francis, and especially for us, that we have another biography of the Poverello than that of the Seraphic Doctor.

Three years after, in 1263, he brought his completed work to the chapter-general convoked under his presidence at Pisa. It was there solemnly approved.[78]

It is impossible to say whether they thought that the presence of the new legend would suffice to put the old ones out of mind, but it seems that at this time nothing was said about the latter.

It was not so at the following chapter. This one, held at Paris, came to a decision destined to have disastrous results for the primitive Franciscan doc.u.ments. This decree, emanating from an a.s.sembly presided over by Bonaventura in person, is too important not to be quoted textually: "Item, the Chapter-general ordains on obedience that all the legends of the Blessed Francis formerly made shall be destroyed. The Brothers who shall find any without the Order must try to make away with them since the legend made by the General is compiled from accounts of three who almost always accompanied the Blessed Francis; all that they could certainly know and all that is proven has been carefully inserted therein."[79] It would have been difficult to be more precise. We see the perseverance with which Bonaventura carried on his struggle against the extreme parties. This decree explains the almost complete disappearance of the ma.n.u.scripts of Celano and the Three Companions, since in certain collections even those of Bonaventura's legend are hardly to be found.

As we have seen, Bonaventura aimed to write a sort of official or canonical biography; he succeeded only too well. Most of the accounts that we already know have gone into his collection, but not without at times suffering profound mutilations. We are not surprised to find him pa.s.sing over Francis's youth with more discretion than Celano in the First Life, but we regret to find him ornamenting and materializing some of the loveliest incidents of the earlier legends.

It is not enough for him that Francis hears the crucifix of St. Daraian speak; he pauses to lay stress on the a.s.sertion that he heard it _corporeis auribus_ and that no one was in the chapel at that moment!

Brother Monaldo at the chapter of Arles sees St. Francis appear _corporeis oculis_. He often abridges his predecessors, but this is not his invariable rule. When he reaches the account of the stigmata he devotes long pages to it,[79] relates a sort of consultation held by St. Francis as to whether he could conceal them, and adds several miracles due to these sacred wounds; further on he returns to the subject to show a certain Girolamo, Knight of a.s.sisi, desiring to touch with his hands the miraculous nails.[81] On the other hand, he uses a significant discretion wherever the companions of the Saint are in question. He names only three of the first eleven disciples,[82] and no more mentions Brothers Leo, Angelo, Rufino, Ma.s.seo, than their adversary, Brother Elias.

As to the incidents which we find for the first time in this collection, they hardly make us regret the unknown sources which must have been at the service of the famous Doctor; it would appear that the healing of Morico, restored to health by a few pellets of bread soaked in the oil of the lamp which burned before the altar of the Virgin,[83] has little more importance for the life of St. Francis than the story of the sheep given to Giacomina di Settesoli which awakened its mistress to summon her to go to ma.s.s.[84] What shall we think of that other sheep, of Portiuncula, which hastened to the choir whenever it heard the psalmody of the friars, and kneeled devoutly for the elevation of the Holy Sacrament?[85]