ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI AND SPIRITUAL HEROISM.
IHE publication of a little book on St. Francis by the Rev. James A.dderley (London : Edward Arnold, 3s. 6d.), with some wise words from M. Sabatier (whose biography of St. Francis is one of the most fascinating books of our time), suggests to us an aspect of the wonderful life of St. Francis which is too often obscured and neglected. Because St. Francis was a monk and the founder of one of the greatest Orders in the Roman Catholic Church we are too much accustomed to take an ecclesiastical view of him. Now an ecclesiastic, in the proper sense of the word, St. Francis never was. The whole monkish institution in Western Europe was originally secular, its objects were largely secular, its fundamental aim being to found a new social order when the old Roman society had fallen in pieces. It was only after a long interval had elapsed that the Papacy incorporated the monastic system into the Church, and in the meanwhile the monks had found the ecclesiastics among their most bitter foes. What monkery has ultimately become we know : but in its incipient stage it
was one of the noblest and most heroic movements that ever took possession of the human soul.
Now St. Francis, who, it will be remembered, was of wealthy origin and had been exercised in a splendid, brilliant social life of gaiety and luxury, was in essence a man of heroic type. We are too apt to contract our conception of the heroic nature to a small space. Time out of mind it has been ass°. ciated with the military type, with the founders of great dynasties, with imposing political figures. Ask almost any person about his heroes, and he will spontaneously call up Charlemagne, or Cosar, or, if he is versed in ancient history, Miltiades or Ajax ; if he is interested in things of the mind, perhaps Luther or some other representative of the public strenuous life. But a monk, an ascetic who had retired from the world, who meditated in silence in the forest, kept com- pany with the birds, had no money, no visible emblems of power, no food save what his fellows provided, can such a type be counted heroic ? To flee the world, is it not to abandon its tasks, to ignore its problems, to refuse to share its burdens? And is that conduct heroic ?
In a nobly inspired passage St. John declares that the victory over that merely secular order of custom and routine called in the New Testament "the world" is "our faith,"— the faith of a few, and mostly poor, men and women scattered over the Roman Empire, with no learning, no influence, no wealth, no arms, with nothing whatever that imposes on the "average sensual man." It was this same all-powerful faith which made a hero of Francis of Assisi. To go out into the world from a life of luxury, deliberately to strip yourself of every earthly possession save the coarse brown garb you wear, to rely on God's goodness for your daily bread, to take a share in the world's menial work after a career of delicate ease, to keep weighty vows in the midst of temptation, to suppress all inordinate longings, and yet to do all this, not as though it were a heavy burden to be borne by reason of sin, but to do it with a high grace, a beautiful cheerfulness as of the sun coming forth from his chamber and rejoicing as a strong man to run his course—if this is not the character of a hero, then assuredly there has been no heroism on this planet. Now this was the true character of Francis of Assisi. So close was he to the very heart of Christ, so overpowered by the mystery of His death, that the story goes that, in the neighbourhood of Arezzo, he received the stigmata of the Passion in a moment of spiritual ecstasy. He might, of all men since the early Christian age, have exclaimed with Paul, "I am crucified with Christ."
Now we all profess to look with veneration on this type of man. We praise him, we read books about him, we visit his earthly haunts, we do everything save imitate his heroism, and this because we do not clearly recognise it. We think too much of the monk and those strange and miraculous stories contained in the "Little Flowers of St. Francis." We think too much of the ascetic, and wonder, perchance, whether we could stand such privations. We do not realise that to St. Francis there were no privations, that there was never any question of privations. He "embraced Poverty as a bride," he not only never felt that he had lost anything, he was so full of life, of the life that lives after the body has decayed, that a world of material possessions seemed to him ridiculous and impertinent. The objects for which men strive really appeared to St. Francis BA absurd. He did not need them ; his spiritual personality, filled with the love of Christ and dominated by the thought of God, was so great, so infinite, that the king- doms of this world and all their glory were to him as much glittering delusions as the bits of coloured glass which amuse a child in an idle hour. The burden which the outer world saw laid on him was no burden at all, the life of poverty had not a single care for him or for his comrades. The "Little Flowers of St. Francis" is steeped in sunny happiness. We gaze in the noble church of Santa Croce at those lovely frescoes in which Italy's purest artist has depicted scenes from the life of St. Francis, and the same blessed happiness pervades them all. Even at the funeral (to our thinking, the most perfect of all) there is, of course, sadness, but serenity is the pervading note as the beautiful sainted figure is about to be laid in the tomb. That group of friends round the dead form is never lost to the memory in after years.
We find, then, in St. Francis the great type of simple spiritual heroism of a nature so united. so completely at peace with itself that, along with the Christian tenderness and that ineffable quality which the New Testament calls "the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ," goes something that we might almost name Greek, the sense of "temperance" which was the most characteristic of all Greek virtues. If we could conceive of one of Plutarch's men armed, not with any carnal weapon, but with the sword of the spirit, over- flowing with the love which was manifested in the fields of Galilee, and entranced by that vision of divine things which the Greek mind at its best saw but as through a glass darkly,—we should perhaps gain some conception of the true personality of St. Francis. We must, while remembering all the wonderful work of the Fran- ciscans in their best days, think of their founder, not primarily as a monk, but as a man, a veritable medimval embodiment of the purest love, but strong with a human strength, no weak- ling, no mourner, fresh and lithe as a young sapling, rejoicing in his freedom from entanglements of those worldly lusts which war against the soul. Say what we will, the world, sunk in materialism and at the best conscious of but a low average of aspiration, will never rise to any further height of attainment till the spirit of St. Francis is once more incarnate amongst us. It is not by mere machinery that our cities are to be purged, our waste places made glad, and our social life redeemed. One spiritual hero is worth all the social machinery ever created or all the committees of worthy busybodies ever devised. The world needs above all else the man who will conceive of Christianity as a heroic adventure, who will be untrammelled, free, and yet joyous as a young Apollo. That was St. Francis, and so he was the true agent of redemption of a mediasval world, stained with wrong and doomed to corruption.
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