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Exploring the Variety of Random
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of St. Francis of
Assisi
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Title: St. Francis of Assisi

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Release date: August 31, 2020 [eBook #63084]

Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ST. FRANCIS OF

ASSISI ***
 Transcriber's Note:
Obvious printer errors have
been corrected.
Hyphenation has been
rationalised.
A list of other books from
the same publisher, and a
preface to them, have been
moved to the end of the
book.

ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI

BY
G. K. CHESTERTON

HODDER AND STOUGHTON LTD.

LONDON
TORONTO
 Contents
PAGE

CHAPTER I
THE PROBLEM OF ST. FRANCIS 7

CHAPTER II
THE WORLD ST. FRANCIS FOUND 18

CHAPTER III
FRANCIS THE FIGHTER 40

CHAPTER IV
FRANCIS THE BUILDER 58

CHAPTER V
LE JONGLEUR DE DIEU 74

CHAPTER VI
THE LITTLE POOR MAN 94

CHAPTER VII
THE THREE ORDERS 113

CHAPTER VIII
THE MIRROR OF CHRIST 133

CHAPTER IX
MIRACLES AND DEATH 153

CHAPTER X
THE TESTAMENT OF ST. FRANCIS 172
 Chapter I
The Problem of St. Francis
A sketch of St. Francis of Assisi in modern English may be written
in one of three ways. Between these the writer must make his
selection; and the third way, which is adopted here, is in some
respects the most difficult of all. At least, it would be the most
difficult if the other two were not impossible.
First, he may deal with this great and most amazing man as a
figure in secular history and a model of social virtues. He may
describe this divine demagogue as being, as he probably was, the
world's one quite sincere democrat. He may say (what means very
little) that St. Francis was in advance of his age. He may say (what is
quite true) that St. Francis anticipated all that is most liberal and
sympathetic in the modern mood; the love of nature; the love of
animals; the sense of social compassion; the sense of the spiritual
dangers of prosperity and even of property. All those things that
nobody understood before Wordsworth were familiar to St. Francis.
All those things that were first discovered by Tolstoy had been taken
for granted by St. Francis. He could be presented, not only as a
human but a humanitarian hero; indeed as the first hero of
humanism. He has been described as a sort of morning star of the
Renaissance. And in comparison with all these things, his ascetical
theology can be ignored or dismissed as a contemporary accident,
which was fortunately not a fatal accident. His religion can be
regarded as a superstition, but an inevitable superstition, from which
not even genius could wholly free itself; in the consideration of
which it would be unjust to condemn St. Francis for his self-denial or
unduly chide him for his chastity. It is quite true that even from so
detached a standpoint his stature would still appear heroic. There
would still be a great deal to be said about the man who tried to end
the Crusades by talking to the Saracens or who interceded with the
Emperor for the birds. The writer might describe in a purely
historical spirit the whole of that great Franciscan inspiration that
was felt in the painting of Giotto, in the poetry of Dante, in the
miracle plays that made possible the modern drama, and in so many
other things that are already appreciated by the modern culture. He
may try to do it, as others have done, almost without raising any
religious question at all. In short, he may try to tell the story of a
saint without God; which is like being told to write the life of Nansen
and forbidden to mention the North Pole.
Second, he may go to the opposite extreme, and decide, as it
were, to be defiantly devotional. He may make the theological
enthusiasm as thoroughly the theme as it was the theme of the first
Franciscans. He may treat religion as the real thing that it was to the
real Francis of Assisi. He can find an austere joy, so to speak, in
parading the paradoxes of asceticism and all the holy topsy-
turvydom of humility. He can stamp the whole history with the
Stigmata, record fasts like fights against a dragon; till in the vague
modern mind St. Francis is as dark a figure as St. Dominic. In short
he can produce what many in our world will regard as a sort of
photographic negative, the reversal of all lights and shades; what
the foolish will find as impenetrable as darkness and even many of
the wise will find almost as invisible as if it were written in silver
upon white. Such a study of St. Francis would be unintelligible to
anyone who does not share his religion, perhaps only partly
intelligible to anyone who does not share his vocation. According to
degrees of judgment, it will be regarded as something too bad or
too good for the world. The only difficulty about doing the thing in
this way is that it cannot be done. It would really require a saint to
write the life of a saint. In the present case the objections to such a
course are insuperable.
Third, he may try to do what I have tried to do here; and, as I
have already suggested, the course has peculiar problems of its
own. The writer may put himself in the position of the ordinary
modern outsider and enquirer; as indeed the present writer is still
largely and was once entirely in that position. He may start from the
standpoint of a man who already admires St. Francis, but only for
those things which such a man finds admirable. In other words he
may assume that the reader is at least as enlightened as Renan or
Matthew Arnold; but in the light of that enlightenment he may try to
illuminate what Renan and Matthew Arnold left dark. He may try to
use what is understood to explain what is not understood. He may
say to the modern English reader: "Here is an historical character
which is admittedly attractive to many of us already, by its gaiety, its
romantic imagination, its spiritual courtesy and camaraderie, but
which also contains elements (evidently equally sincere and
emphatic) which seem to you quite remote and repulsive. But after
all, this man was a man and not half a dozen men. What seems
inconsistency to you did not seem inconsistency to him. Let us see
whether we can understand, with the help of the existing
understanding, these other things that seem now to be doubly dark,
by their intrinsic gloom and their ironic contrast." I do not mean, of
course, that I can really reach such a psychological completeness in
this crude and curt outline. But I mean that this is the only
controversial condition that I shall here assume; that I am dealing
with the sympathetic outsider. I shall not assume any more or any
less agreement than this. A materialist may not care whether the
inconsistencies are reconciled or not. A Catholic may not see any
inconsistencies to reconcile. But I am here addressing the ordinary
modern man, sympathetic but sceptical, and I can only rather hazily
hope that, by approaching the great saint's story through what is
evidently picturesque and popular about it, I may at least leave the
reader understanding a little more than he did before of the
consistency of a complete character; that by approaching it in this
way, we may at least get a glimmering of why the poet who praised
his lord the sun, often hid himself in a dark cavern, of why the saint
who was so gentle with his Brother the Wolf was so harsh to his
Brother the Ass (as he nicknamed his own body), of why the
troubadour who said that love set his heart on fire separated himself
from women, of why the singer who rejoiced in the strength and
gaiety of the fire deliberately rolled himself in the snow, of why the
very song which cries with all the passion of a pagan, "Praised be
God for our Sister, Mother Earth, which brings forth varied fruits and
grass and glowing flowers," ends almost with the words "Praised be
God for our Sister, the death of the body."
Renan and Matthew Arnold failed utterly at this test. They were
content to follow Francis with their praises until they were stopped
by their prejudices; the stubborn prejudices of the sceptic. The
moment Francis began to do something they did not understand or
did not like, they did not try to understand it, still less to like it; they
simply turned their backs on the whole business and "walked no
more with him." No man will get any further along a path of
historical enquiry in that fashion. These sceptics are really driven to
drop the whole subject in despair, to leave the most simple and
sincere of all historical characters as a mass of contradictions, to be
praised on the principle of the curate's egg. Arnold refers to the
asceticism of Alverno almost hurriedly, as if it were an unlucky but
undeniable blot on the beauty of the story; or rather as if it were a
pitiable break-down and bathos at the end of the story. Now this is
simply to be stone-blind to the whole point of any story. To
represent Mount Alverno as the mere collapse of Francis is exactly
like representing Mount Calvary as the mere collapse of Christ.
Those mountains are mountains, whatever else they are, and it is
nonsense to say (like the Red Queen) that they are comparative
hollows or negative holes in the ground. They were quite manifestly
meant to be culminations and landmarks. To treat the Stigmata as a
sort of scandal, to be touched on tenderly but with pain, is exactly
like treating the original five wounds of Jesus Christ as five blots on
His character. You may dislike the idea of asceticism; you may dislike
equally the idea of martyrdom; for that matter you may have an
honest and natural dislike of the whole conception of sacrifice
symbolised by the cross. But if it is an intelligent dislike, you will still
retain the capacity for seeing the point of a story; of the story of a
martyr or even the story of a monk. You will not be able rationally to
read the Gospel and regard the Crucifixion as an afterthought or an
anti-climax or an accident in the life of Christ; it is obviously the
point of the story like the point of a sword, the sword that pierced
the heart of the Mother of God.
And you will not be able rationally to read the story of a man
presented as a Mirror of Christ without understanding his final phase
as a Man of Sorrows, and at least artistically appreciating the
appropriateness of his receiving, in a cloud of mystery and isolation,
inflicted by no human hand, the unhealed everlasting wounds that
heal the world.
The practical reconciliation of the gaiety and austerity I must leave
the story itself to suggest. But since I have mentioned Matthew
Arnold and Renan and the rationalistic admirers of St. Francis, I will
here give the hint of what it seems to me most advisable for such
readers to keep in mind. These distinguished writers found things
like the Stigmata a stumbling-block because to them a religion was a
philosophy. It was an impersonal thing; and it is only the most
personal passion that provides here an approximate earthly parallel.
A man will not roll in the snow for a stream of tendency by which all
things fulfil the law of their being. He will not go without food in the
name of something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness. He
will do things like this, or pretty nearly like this, under quite a
different impulse. He will do these things when he is in love. The
first fact to realise about St. Francis is involved in the first fact with
which his story starts; that when he said from the first that he was a
Troubadour, and said later that he was a Troubadour of a newer and
nobler romance, he was not using a mere metaphor, but understood
himself much better than the scholars understand him. He was, to
the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubadour. He was a Lover. He was
a lover of God and he was really and truly a lover of men; possibly a
much rarer mystical vocation. A lover of men is very nearly the
opposite of a philanthropist; indeed the pedantry of the Greek word
carries something like a satire on itself. A philanthropist may be said
to love anthropoids. But as St. Francis did not love humanity but
men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ. Say, if you think so,
that he was a lunatic loving an imaginary person; but an imaginary
person, not an imaginary idea. And for the modern reader the clue
to the asceticism and all the rest can best be found in the stories of
lovers when they seemed to be rather like lunatics. Tell it as the tale
of one of the Troubadours, and the wild things he would do for his
lady, and the whole of the modern puzzle disappears. In such a
romance there would be no contradiction between the poet
gathering flowers in the sun and enduring a freezing vigil in the
snow, between his praising all earthly and bodily beauty and then
refusing to eat, between his glorifying gold and purple and
perversely going in rags, between his showing pathetically a hunger
for a happy life and a thirst for a heroic death. All these riddles
would easily be resolved in the simplicity of any noble love; only this
was so noble a love that nine men out of ten have hardly even heard
of it. We shall see later that this parallel of the earthly lover has a
very practical relation to the problems of his life, as to his relations
with his father and with his friends and their families. The modern
reader will almost always find that if he could only feel this kind of
love as a reality, he could feel this kind of extravagance as a
romance. But I only note it here as a preliminary point because,
though it is very far from being the final truth in the matter, it is the
best approach to it. The reader cannot even begin to see the sense
of a story that may well seem to him a very wild one, until he
understands that to this great mystic his religion was not a thing like
a theory but a thing like a love-affair. And the only purpose of this
prefatory chapter is to explain the limits of this present book; which
is only addressed to that part of the modern world which finds in
St. Francis a certain modern difficulty; which can admire him yet
hardly accept him, or which can appreciate the saint almost without
the sanctity. And my only claim even to attempt such a task is that I
myself have for so long been in various stages of such a condition.
Many thousand things that I now partly comprehend I should have
thought utterly incomprehensible, many things I now hold sacred I
should have scouted as utterly superstitious, many things that seem
to me lucid and enlightened now they are seen from the inside I
should honestly have called dark and barbarous seen from the
outside, when long ago in those days of boyhood my fancy first
caught fire with the glory of Francis of Assisi. I too have lived in
Arcady; but even in Arcady I met one walking in a brown habit who
loved the woods better than Pan. The figure in the brown habit
stands above the hearth in the room where I write, and alone
among many such images, at no stage of my pilgrimage has he ever
seemed to me a stranger. There is something of harmony between
the hearth and the firefight and my own first pleasure in his words
about his brother fire; for he stands far enough back in my memory
to mingle with all those more domestic dreams of the first days.
Even the fantastic shadows thrown by fire make a sort of shadow
pantomime that belongs to the nursery; yet the shadows were even
then the shadows of his favourite beasts and birds, as he saw them,
grotesque but haloed with the love of God. His Brother Wolf and
Brother Sheep seemed then almost like the Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit
of a more Christian Uncle Remus. I have come slowly to see many
and more marvellous aspects of such a man, but I have never lost
that one. His figure stands on a sort of bridge connecting my
boyhood with my conversion to many other things; for the romance
of his religion had penetrated even the rationalism of that vague
Victorian time. In so far as I have had this experience, I may be able
to lead others a little further along that road; but only a very little
further. Nobody knows better than I do now that it is a road upon
which angels might fear to tread; but though I am certain of failure I
am not altogether overcome by fear; for he suffered fools gladly.
 Chapter II
The World St. Francis Found
The modern innovation which has substituted journalism for
history, or for that tradition that is the gossip of history, has had at
least one definite effect. It has insured that everybody should only
hear the end of every story. Journalists are in the habit of printing
above the very last chapters of their serial stories (when the hero
and heroine are just about to embrace in the last chapter, as only an
unfathomable perversity prevented them from doing in the first) the
rather misleading words, "You can begin this story here." But even
this is not a complete parallel; for the journals do give some sort of
a summary of the story, while they never give anything remotely
resembling a summary of the history. Newspapers not only deal with
news, but they deal with everything as if it were entirely new.
Tutankamen, for instance, was entirely new. It is exactly in the same
fashion that we read that Admiral Bangs has been shot, which is the
first intimation we have that he has ever been born. There is
something singularly significant in the use which journalism makes
of its stores of biography. It never thinks of publishing the life until it
is publishing the death. As it deals with individuals it deals with
institutions and ideas. After the Great War our public began to be
told of all sorts of nations being emancipated. It had never been told
a word about their being enslaved. We were called upon to judge of
the justice of the settlements, when we had never been allowed to
hear of the very existence of the quarrels. People would think it
pedantic to talk about the Serbian epics and they prefer to speak in
plain every-day modern language about the Yugo-Slavonic
international new diplomacy; and they are quite excited about
something they call Czecho-Slovakia without apparently having ever
heard of Bohemia. Things that are as old as Europe are regarded as
more recent than the very latest claims pegged out on the prairies of
America. It is very exciting; like the last act of a play to people who
have only come into the theatre just before the curtain falls. But it
does not conduce exactly to knowing what it is all about. To those
content with the mere fact of a pistol-shot or a passionate embrace,
such a leisurely manner of patronising the drama may be
recommended. To those tormented by a merely intellectual curiosity
about who is kissing or killing whom, and why, it is unsatisfactory.
Most modern history, especially in England, suffers from the same
imperfection as journalism. At best it only tells half of the history of
Christendom; and that the second half without the first half. Men for
whom reason begins with the Revival of Learning, men for whom
religion begins with the Reformation, can never give a complete
account of anything, for they have to start with institutions whose
origin they cannot explain, or generally even imagine. Just as we
hear of the admiral being shot but have never heard of his being
born, so we all heard a great deal about the dissolution of the
monasteries, but we heard next to nothing about the creation of the
monasteries. Now this sort of history would be hopelessly
insufficient, even for an intelligent man who hated the monasteries.
It is hopelessly insufficient in connection with institutions that many
intelligent men do in a quite healthy spirit hate. For instance, it is
possible that some of us have occasionally seen some mention, by
our learned leader-writers, of an obscure institution called the
Spanish Inquisition. Well, it really is an obscure institution, according
to them and the histories they read. It is obscure because its origin
is obscure. Protestant history simply begins with the horrible thing in
possession, as the pantomime begins with the demon king in the
goblin kitchen. It is likely enough that it was, especially towards the
end, a horrible thing that might be haunted by demons; but if we
say this was so, we have no notion why it was so. To understand the
Spanish Inquisition it would be necessary to discover two things that
we have never dreamed of bothering about; what Spain was and
what an Inquisition was. The former would bring in the whole great
question about the Crusade against the Moors; and by what heroic
chivalry a European nation freed itself of an alien domination from
Africa. The latter would bring in the whole business of the other
Crusade against the Albigensians, and why men loved and hated
that nihilistic vision from Asia. Unless we understand that there was
in these things originally the rush and romance of a Crusade, we
cannot understand how they came to deceive men or drag them on
towards evil. The Crusaders doubtless abused their victory, but there
was a victory to abuse. And where there is victory there is valour in
the field and popularity in the forum. There is some sort of
enthusiasm that encourages excesses or covers faults. For instance,
I for one have maintained from very early days the responsibility of
the English for their atrocious treatment of the Irish. But it would be
quite unfair to the English to describe even the devilry of '98 and
leave out altogether all mention of the war with Napoleon. It would
be unjust to suggest that the English mind was bent on nothing but
the death of Emmett, when it was more probably full of the glory of
the death of Nelson. Unfortunately '98 was very far from being the
last date of such dirty work; and only a few years ago our politicians
started trying to rule by random robbing and killing, while gently
remonstrating with the Irish for their memory of old unhappy far-off
things and battles long ago. But however badly we may think of the
Black-and-Tan business, it would be unjust to forget that most of us
were not thinking of Black-and-Tan but of khaki; and that khaki had
just then a noble and national connotation covering many things. To
write of the war in Ireland and leave out the war against Prussia,
and the English sincerity about it, would be unjust to the English. So
to talk about the torture-engine as if it had been a hideous toy is
unjust to the Spanish. It does not tell sensibly from the start the
story of what the Spaniard did, and why. We may concede to our
contemporaries that in any case it is not a story that ends well. We
do not insist that in their version it should begin well. What we
complain of is that in their version it does not begin at all. They are
only in at the death; or even, like Lord Tom Noddy, too late for the
hanging. It is quite true that it was sometimes more horrible than
any hanging; but they only gather, so to speak, the very ashes of the
ashes; the fag-end of the faggot.
 The case of the Inquisition is here taken at random, for it is one
among any number illustrating the same thing; and not because it is
especially connected with St. Francis, in whatever sense it may have
been connected with St. Dominic. It may well be suggested later
indeed that St. Francis is unintelligible, just as St. Dominic is
unintelligible, unless we do understand something of what the
thirteenth century meant by heresy and a crusade. But for the
moment I use it as a lesser example for a much larger purpose. It is
to point out that to begin the story of St. Francis with the birth of
St. Francis would be to miss the whole point of the story, or rather
not to tell the story at all. And it is to suggest that the modern tail-
foremost type of journalistic history perpetually fails us. We learn
about reformers without knowing what they had to reform, about
rebels without a notion of what they rebelled against, of memorials
that are not connected with any memory and restorations of things
that had apparently never existed before. Even at the expense of
this chapter appearing disproportionate, it is necessary to say
something about the great movements that led up to the entrance of
the founder of the Franciscans. It may seem to mean describing a
world, or even a universe, in order to describe a man. It will
inevitably mean that the world or the universe will be described with
a few desperate generalisations in a few abrupt sentences. But so
far from its meaning that we see a very small figure under so large a
sky, it will mean that we must measure the sky before we can begin
to measure the towering stature of the man.
And this phrase alone brings me to the preliminary suggestions
that seem necessary before even a slight sketch of the life of
St. Francis. It is necessary to realise, in however rude and
elementary a fashion, into what sort of a world St. Francis entered
and what has been the history of that world, at least in so far as it
affected him. It is necessary to have, if only in a few sentences, a
sort of preface in the form of an Outline of History, if we may borrow
the phrase of Mr. Wells. In the case of Mr. Wells himself, it is evident
that the distinguished novelist suffered the same disadvantage as if
he had been obliged to write a novel of which he hated the hero. To
write history and hate Rome, both pagan and papal, is practically to
hate nearly everything that has happened. It comes very near to
hating humanity on purely humanitarian grounds. To dislike both the
priest and the soldier, both the laurels of the warrior and the lilies of
the saint, is to suffer a division from the mass of mankind for which
not all the dexterities of the finest and most flexible of modern
intelligences can compensate. A much wider sympathy is needed for
the historical setting of St. Francis, himself both a soldier and a
saint. I will therefore conclude this chapter with a few
generalisations about the world that St. Francis found.
Men will not believe because they will not broaden their minds. As
a matter of individual belief, I should of course express it by saying
that they are not sufficiently catholic to be Catholic. But I am not
going to discuss here the doctrinal truths of Christianity, but simply
the broad historical fact of Christianity, as it might appear to a really
enlightened and imaginative person even if he were not a Christian.
What I mean at the moment is that the majority of doubts are made
out of details. In the course of random reading a man comes across
a pagan custom that strikes him as picturesque or a Christian action
that strikes him as cruel; but he does not enlarge his mind
sufficiently to see the main truth about pagan custom or the
Christian reaction against it. Until we understand, not necessarily in
detail, but in their big bulk and proportion that pagan progress and
that Christian reaction, we cannot really understand the point of
history at which St. Francis appears or what his great popular
mission was all about.
Now everybody knows, I imagine, that the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries were an awakening of the world. They were a fresh
flowering of culture and the creative arts after a long spell of much
sterner and even more sterile experience which we call the Dark
Ages. They may be called an emancipation; they were certainly an
end; an end of what may at least seem a harsher and more inhuman
time. But what was it that was ended? From what was it that men
were emancipated? That is where there is a real collision and point
at issue between the different philosophies of history. On the merely
external and secular side, it has been truly said that men awoke
from a sleep; but there had been dreams in that sleep of a mystical
and sometimes of a monstrous kind. In that rationalistic routine into
which most modern historians have fallen, it is considered enough to
say that they were emancipated from mere savage superstition and
advanced towards mere civilised enlightenment. Now this is the big
blunder that stands as a stumbling-block at the very beginning of
our story. Anybody who supposes that the Dark Ages were plain
darkness and nothing else, and that the dawn of the thirteenth
century was plain daylight and nothing else, will not be able to make
head or tail of the human story of St. Francis of Assisi. The truth is
that the joy of St. Francis and his Jongleurs de Dieu was not merely
an awakening. It was something which cannot be understood
without understanding their own mystical creed. The end of the Dark
Ages was not merely the end of a sleep. It was certainly not merely
the end of a superstitious enslavement. It was the end of something
belonging to a quite definite but quite different order of ideas.
It was the end of a penance; or, if it be preferred, a purgation. It
marked the moment when a certain spiritual expiation had been
finally worked out and certain spiritual diseases had been finally
expelled from the system. They had been expelled by an era of
asceticism, which was the only thing that could have expelled them.
Christianity had entered the world to cure the world; and she had
cured it in the only way in which it could be cured.
Viewed merely in an external and experimental fashion, the whole
of the high civilisation of antiquity had ended in the learning of a
certain lesson; that is, in its conversion to Christianity. But that
lesson was a psychological fact as well as a theological faith. That
pagan civilisation had indeed been a very high civilisation. It would
not weaken our thesis, it might even strengthen it, to say that it was
the highest that humanity ever reached. It had discovered its still
unrivalled arts of poetry and plastic representation; it had discovered
its own permanent political ideals; it had discovered its own clear
system of logic and of language. But above all, it had discovered its
own mistake.
 That mistake was too deep to be ideally defined; the short-hand of
it is to call it the mistake of nature-worship. It might almost as truly
be called the mistake of being natural; and it was a very natural
mistake. The Greeks, the great guides and pioneers of pagan
antiquity, started out with the idea of something splendidly obvious
and direct; the idea that if man walked straight ahead on the high
road of reason and nature, he could come to no harm; especially if
he was, as the Greek was, eminently enlightened and intelligent. We
might be so flippant as to say that man was simply to follow his
nose, so long as it was a Greek nose. And the case of the Greeks
themselves is alone enough to illustrate the strange but certain
fatality that attends upon this fallacy. No sooner did the Greeks
themselves begin to follow their own noses and their own notion of
being natural, than the queerest thing in history seems to have
happened to them. It was much too queer to be an easy matter to
discuss. It may be remarked that our more repulsive realists never
give us the benefit of their realism. Their studies of unsavoury
subjects never take note of the testimony which they bear to the
truths of a traditional morality. But if we had the taste for such
things, we could cite thousands of such things as part of the case for
Christian morals. And an instance of this is found in the fact that
nobody has written, in this sense, a real moral history of the Greeks.
Nobody has seen the scale or the strangeness of the story. The
wisest men in the world set out to be natural; and the most
unnatural thing in the world was the very first thing they did. The
immediate effect of saluting the sun and the sunny sanity of nature
was a perversion spreading like a pestilence. The greatest and even
the purest philosophers could not apparently avoid this low sort of
lunacy. Why? It would seem simple enough for the people whose
poets had conceived Helen of Troy, whose sculptors had carved the
Venus of Milo, to remain healthy on the point. The truth is that
people who worship health cannot remain healthy. When Man goes
straight he goes crooked. When he follows his nose he manages
somehow to put his nose out of joint, or even to cut off his nose to
spite his face; and that in accordance with something much deeper
in human nature than nature-worshippers could ever understand. It
was the discovery of that deeper thing, humanly speaking, that
constituted the conversion to Christianity. There is a bias in man like
the bias in the bowl; and Christianity was the discovery of how to
correct the bias and therefore hit the mark. There are many who will
smile at the saying; but it is profoundly true to say that the glad
good news brought by the Gospel was the news of original sin.
Rome rose at the expense of her Greek teachers largely because
she did not entirely consent to be taught these tricks. She had a
much more decent domestic tradition; but she ultimately suffered
from the same fallacy in her religious tradition; which was
necessarily in no small degree the heathen tradition of nature-
worship. What was the matter with the whole heathen civilisation
was that there was nothing for the mass of men in the way of
mysticism, except that concerned with the mystery of the nameless
forces of nature, such as sex and growth and death. In the Roman
Empire also, long before the end, we find nature-worship inevitably
producing things that are against nature. Cases like that of Nero
have passed into a proverb, when Sadism sat on a throne brazen in
the broad daylight. But the truth I mean is something much more
subtle and universal than a conventional catalogue of atrocities.
What had happened to the human imagination, as a whole, was that
the whole world was coloured by dangerous and rapidly
deteriorating passions; by natural passions becoming unnatural
passions. Thus the effect of treating sex as only one innocent natural
thing was that every other innocent natural thing became soaked
and sodden with sex. For sex cannot be admitted to a mere equality
among elementary emotions or experiences like eating and sleeping.
The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant. There
is something dangerous and disproportionate in its place in human
nature, for whatever reason; and it does really need a special
purification and dedication. The modern talk about sex being free
like any other sense, about the body being beautiful like any tree or
flower, is either a description of the Garden of Eden or a piece of
thoroughly bad psychology, of which the world grew weary two
thousand years ago.
 This is not to be confused with mere self-righteous sensationalism
about the wickedness of the pagan world. It was not so much that
the pagan world was wicked as that it was good enough to realise
that its paganism was becoming wicked, or rather was on the logical
high road to wickedness. I mean that there was no future for
"natural magic"; to deepen it was only to darken it into black magic.
There was no future for it; because in the past it had only been
innocent because it was young. We might say it had only been
innocent because it was shallow. Pagans were wiser than paganism;
that is why the pagans became Christians. Thousands of them had
philosophy and family virtues and military honour to hold them up;
but by this time the purely popular thing called religion was certainly
dragging them down. When this reaction against the evil is allowed
for, it is true to repeat that it was an evil that was everywhere. In
another and more literal sense its name was Pan.
It was no metaphor to say that these people needed a new
heaven and a new earth; for they had really defiled their own earth
and even their own heaven. How could their case be met by looking
at the sky, when erotic legends were scrawled in stars across it; how
could they learn anything from the love of birds and flowers after
the sort of love stories that were told of them? It is impossible here
to multiply evidences, and one small example may stand for the rest.
We know what sort of sentimental associations are called up to us
by the phrase "a garden"; and how we think mostly of the memory
of melancholy and innocent romances, or quite as often of some
gracious maiden lady or kindly old parson pottering under a yew
hedge, perhaps in sight of a village spire. Then, let anyone who
knows a little Latin poetry recall suddenly what would once have
stood in place of the sun-dial or the fountain, obscene and
monstrous in the sun; and of what sort was the god of their
gardens.
Nothing could purge this obsession but a religion that was literally
unearthly. It was no good telling such people to have a natural
religion full of stars and flowers; there was not a flower or even a
star that had not been stained. They had to go into the desert where
they could find no flowers or even into the cavern where they could
see no stars. Into that desert and that cavern the highest human
intellect entered for some four centuries; and it was the very wisest
thing it could do. Nothing but the stark supernatural stood up for its
salvation; if God could not save it, certainly the gods could not. The
Early Church called the gods of paganism devils; and the Early
Church was perfectly right. Whatever natural religion may have had
to do with their beginnings, nothing but fiends now inhabited those
hollow shrines. Pan was nothing but panic. Venus was nothing but
venereal vice. I do not mean for a moment, of course, that all the
individual pagans were of this character even to the end; but it was
as individuals that they differed from it. Nothing distinguishes
paganism from Christianity so clearly as the fact that the individual
thing called philosophy had little or nothing to do with the social
thing called religion. Anyhow it was no good to preach natural
religion to people to whom nature had grown as unnatural as any
religion. They knew much better than we do what was the matter
with them and what sort of demons at once tempted and tormented
them; and they wrote across that great space of history the text:
"This sort goeth not out but by prayer and fasting."
Now the historic importance of St. Francis and the transition from
the twelfth to the thirteenth century, lies in the fact that they
marked the end of this expiation. Men at the close of the Dark Ages
may have been rude and unlettered and unlearned in everything but
wars with heathen tribes, more barbarous than themselves, but they
were clean. They were like children; the first beginnings of their rude
arts have all the clean pleasure of children. We have to conceive
them in Europe as a whole living under little local governments,
feudal in so far as they were a survival of fierce wars with the
barbarians, often monastic and carrying a more friendly and fatherly
character, still faintly imperial in so far as Rome still ruled as a great
legend. But in Italy something had survived more typical of the finer
spirit of antiquity: the republic. Italy was dotted with little states,
largely democratic in their ideals, and often filled with real citizens.
But the city no longer lay open as under the Roman peace, but was
pent in high walls for defence against feudal war and all the citizens
had to be soldiers. One of these stood in a steep and striking
position on the wooded hills of Umbria; and its name was Assisi. Out
of its deep gate under its high turrets was to come the message that
was the gospel of the hour, "Your warfare is accomplished, your
iniquity is pardoned." But it was out of all these fragmentary things
of feudalism and freedom and remains of Roman Law that there was
to rise, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, vast and almost
universal, the mighty civilisation of the Middle Ages.
It is an exaggeration to attribute it entirely to the inspiration of
any one man, even the most original genius of the thirteenth
century. Its elementary ethics of fraternity and fair play had never
been entirely extinct and Christendom had never been anything less
than Christian. The great truisms about justice and pity can be found
in the rudest monastic records of the barbaric transition or the
stiffest maxims of the Byzantine decline. And early in the eleventh
and twelfth centuries a larger moral movement had clearly begun.
But what may fairly be said of it is this, that over all those first
movements there was still something of that ancient austerity that
came from the long penitential period. It was the twilight of
morning; but it was still a grey twilight. This may be illustrated by
the mere mention of two or three of these reforms before the
Franciscan reform. The monastic institution itself, of course, was far
older than all these things; indeed it was undoubtedly almost as old
as Christianity. Its counsels of perfection had always taken the form
of vows of chastity and poverty and obedience. With these unworldly
aims it had long ago civilised a great part of the world. The monks
had taught people to plough and sow as well as to read and write;
indeed they had taught the people nearly everything that the people
knew. But it may truly be said that the monks were severely
practical, in the sense that they were not only practical but also
severe; though they were generally severe with themselves and
practical for other people. All this early monastic movement had long
ago settled down and doubtless often deteriorated; but when we
come to the first medieval movements this sterner character is still
apparent. Three examples may be taken to illustrate the point.
First, the ancient social mould of slavery was already beginning to
melt. Not only was the slave turning into the serf, who was
practically free as regards his own farm and family life, but many
lords were freeing slaves and serfs altogether. This was done under
the pressure of the priests; but especially it was done in the spirit of
a penance. In one sense, of course, any Catholic society must have
an atmosphere of penance; but I am speaking of that rather sterner
spirit of penance which had expiated the excesses of paganism.
There was about such restitutions the atmosphere of the death-bed;
as many of them doubtless were examples of death-bed repentance.
A very honest atheist with whom I once debated made use of the
expression, "Men have only been kept in slavery by the fear of hell."
As I pointed out to him, if he had said that men had only been freed
from slavery by the fear of hell, he would at least have been
referring to an unquestionable historical fact.
Another example was the sweeping reform of Church discipline by
Pope Gregory the Seventh. It really was a reform, undertaken from
the highest motives and having the healthiest results; it conducted a
searching inquisition against simony or the financial corruptions of
the clergy; it insisted on a more serious and self-sacrificing ideal for
the life of a parish priest. But the very fact that this largely took the
form of making universal the obligation of celibacy will strike the
note of something which, however noble, would seem to many to be
vaguely negative. The third example is in one sense the strongest of
all. For the third example was a war; a heroic war and for many of
us a holy war; but still something having all the stark and terrible
responsibilities of war. There is no space here to say all that should
be said about the true nature of the Crusades. Everybody knows
that in the very darkest hour of the Dark Ages a sort of heresy had
sprung up in Arabia and become a new religion of a military but
nomadic sort, invoking the name of Mahomet. Intrinsically it had a
character found in many heresies from the Moslem to the Monist. It
seemed to the heretic a sane simplification of religion; while it seems
to the Catholic an insane simplification of religion, because it
simplifies all to a single idea and so loses the breadth and balance of
Catholicism. Anyhow its objective character was that of a military
danger to Christendom and Christendom had struck at the very
heart of it, in seeking to reconquer the Holy Places. The great Duke
Godfrey and the first Christians who stormed Jerusalem were heroes
if there were ever any in the world; but they were the heroes of a
tragedy.
Now I have taken these two or three examples of the earlier
medieval movements in order to note about them one general
character, which refers back to the penance that followed paganism.
There is something in all these movements that is bracing even
while it is still bleak, like a wind blowing between the clefts of the
mountains. That wind, austere and pure, of which the poet speaks,
is really the spirit of the time, for it is the wind of a world that has at
last been purified. To anyone who can appreciate atmospheres there
is something clear and clean about the atmosphere of this crude and
often harsh society. Its very lusts are clean; for they have no longer
any smell of perversion. Its very cruelties are clean; they are not the
luxurious cruelties of the amphitheatre. They come either of a very
simple horror at blasphemy or a very simple fury at insult. Gradually
against this grey background beauty begins to appear, as something
really fresh and delicate and above all surprising. Love returning is
no longer what was once called platonic but what is still called
chivalric love. The flowers and stars have recovered their first
innocence. Fire and water are felt to be worthy to be the brother
and sister of a saint. The purge of paganism is complete at last.
For water itself has been washed. Fire itself has been purified as
by fire. Water is no longer that water into which slaves were flung to
feed the fishes. Fire is no longer that fire through which children
were passed to Moloch. Flowers smell no more of the forgotten
garlands gathered in the garden of Priapus; stars stand no more as
signs of the far frigidity of gods as cold as those cold fires. They are
all like things newly made and awaiting new names, from one who
shall come to name them. Neither the universe nor the earth have
now any longer the old sinister significance of the world. They await
a new reconciliation with man, but they are already capable of being
reconciled. Man has stripped from his soul the last rag of nature-
worship, and can return to nature.
While it was yet twilight a figure appeared silently and suddenly
on a little hill above the city, dark against the fading darkness. For it
was the end of a long and stern night, a night of vigil, not unvisited
by stars. He stood with his hands lifted, as in so many statues and
pictures, and about him was a burst of birds singing; and behind him
was the break of day.
 Chapter III
Francis the Fighter
According to one tale, which if not true would be none the less
typical, the very name of St. Francis was not so much a name as a
nickname. There would be something akin to his familiar and
popular instinct in the notion that he was nicknamed very much as
an ordinary schoolboy might be called "Frenchy" at school. According
to this version, his name was not Francis at all but John; and his
companions called him "Francesco" or "The little Frenchman"
because of his passion for the French poetry of the Troubadours.
The more probable story is that his mother had named him John
when he was born in the absence of his father, who shortly returned
from a visit to France, where his commercial success had filled him
with so much enthusiasm for French taste and social usage that he
gave his son the new name signifying the Frank or Frenchman. In
either case the name has a certain significance, as connecting
Francis from the first with what he himself regarded as the romantic
fairyland of the Troubadours.
The name of the father was Pietro Bernardone and he was a
substantial citizen of the guild of the cloth merchants in the town of
Assisi. It is hard to describe the position of such a man without some
appreciation of the position of such a guild and even of such a town.
It did not exactly correspond to anything that is meant in modern
times either by a merchant or a man of business or a tradesman, or
anything that exists under the conditions of capitalism. Bernardone
may have employed people but he was not an employer; that is, he
did not belong to an employing class as distinct from an employed
class. The person we definitely hear of his employing is his son
Francis; who, one is tempted to guess, was about the last person
that any man of business would employ if it were convenient to
employ anybody else. He was rich, as a peasant may be rich by the
work of his own family; but he evidently expected his own family to
work in a way almost as plain as a peasant's. He was a prominent
citizen, but he belonged to a social order which existed to prevent
him being too prominent to be a citizen. It kept all such people on
their own simple level, and no prosperity connoted that escape from
drudgery by which in modern times the lad might have seemed to
be a lord or a fine gentleman or something other than the cloth
merchant's son. This is a rule that is proved even in the exception.
Francis was one of those people who are popular with everybody in
any case; and his guileless swagger as a Troubadour and leader of
French fashions made him a sort of romantic ringleader among the
young men of the town. He threw money about both in
extravagance and benevolence, in a way native to a man who never,
all his life, exactly understood what money was. This moved his
mother to mingled exultation and exasperation and she said, as any
tradesman's wife might say anywhere: "He is more like a prince than
our son." But one of the earliest glimpses we have of him shows him
as simply selling bales of cloth from a booth in the market; which his
mother may or may not have believed to be one of the habits of
princes. This first glimpse of the young man in the market is
symbolic in more ways than one. An incident occurred which is
perhaps the shortest and sharpest summary that could be given of
certain curious things which were a part of his character, long before
it was transfigured by transcendental faith. While he was selling
velvet and fine embroideries to some solid merchant of the town, a
beggar came imploring alms; evidently in a somewhat tactless
manner. It was a rude and simple society and there were no laws to
punish a starving man for expressing his need for food, such as have
been established in a more humanitarian age; and the lack of any
organised police permitted such persons to pester the wealthy
without any great danger. But there was, I believe, in many places a
local custom of the guild forbidding outsiders to interrupt a fair
bargain; and it is possible that some such thing put the mendicant
more than normally in the wrong. Francis had all his life a great
liking for people who had been put hopelessly in the wrong. On this
occasion he seems to have dealt with the double interview with
rather a divided mind; certainly with distraction, possibly with
irritation. Perhaps he was all the more uneasy because of the almost
fastidious standard of manners that came to him quite naturally. All
are agreed that politeness flowed from him from the first, like one of
the public fountains in such a sunny Italian market place. He might
have written among his own poems as his own motto that verse of
Mr. Belloc's poem—
'Of Courtesy, it is much less
Than courage of heart or holiness,
Yet in my walks it seems to me
That the grace of God is in Courtesy.'

Nobody ever doubted that Francis Bernardone had courage of heart,

even of the most ordinary manly and military sort; and a time was to
come when there was quite as little doubt about the holiness and
the grace of God. But I think that if there was one thing about which
he was punctilious, it was punctiliousness. If there was one thing of
which so humble a man could be said to be proud, he was proud of
good manners. Only behind his perfectly natural urbanity were wider
and even wilder possibilities, of which we get the first flash in this
trivial incident. Anyhow Francis was evidently torn two ways with the
botheration of two talkers, but finished his business with the
merchant somehow; and when he had finished it, found the beggar
was gone. Francis leapt from his booth, left all the bales of velvet
and embroidery behind him apparently unprotected, and went racing
across the market place like an arrow from the bow. Still running, he
threaded the labyrinth of the narrow and crooked streets of the little
town, looking for his beggar, whom he eventually discovered; and
loaded that astonished mendicant with money. Then he straightened
himself, so to speak, and swore before God that he would never all
his life refuse help to a poor man. The sweeping simplicity of this
undertaking is extremely characteristic. Never was any man so little
afraid of his own promises. His life was one riot of rash vows; of rash
vows that turned out right.
The first biographers of Francis, naturally alive with the great
religious revolution that he wrought, equally naturally looked back to