The Franciscan Reform
THE history of the Franciscan Order has been, almost from the beginning, the history of a series of gradual falls and abrupt restorations. The heroic idealism of its founder was soon found to set up too severe a standard for the imitation of ordinary men ; and mitigations, interpretations, and accom- modations of the Primitive Rule began almost before his death. Yet the impression made by the personality of St. Francis, and the appeal of his vision to heroic souls, were imperishable. They haunted the Order ; and from time to time in the course of its history found the human material in and through which they could once more impose themselves on an unwilling world. It is the story of one of the greatest and most fruitful of these renewals that Father Cuthbert tells in this learned and most delightful book ; a renewal which, like the original creation of Francis, grew from the humblest beginnings to be a great spiritual force.
Fra Matteo, the simple-minded and dernted initiator of the Capuchin Reform, had behind him. not only the lives and examples of the great " Spiritual " friars of the post-Franciscan epoch, whose memory was still venerated in the convents of central Italy. The careers of Fra Giovanni Valle, the creator
of that reform of the Strict Observance, to which he himself belonged, of its greatest son St. Bernardino of Siena, and of St. Bernardino's friend the astonishing St. Colette of Corbie, were also there to assure hum that the Franciscan ideal might still be capable of realization on earth, even in the first quarter of the sixteenth century ; a period when few religious orders were at their best. A simple but significant incident turned his latent -dissatisfaction into- an emotionally coloured conviction ; Of the sort that is able to change the direction of a life. As the -vocation of St. Francis really dates from the moment when he recognized his duty to the leper ; so it was the sight of the community streaming heedlessly past a starving and frozen beggar at the wayside, in its hurry to get home to a- comfortable dinner, which brought home to Matteo -the terrible cleavage between the ancient Franciscan vision and the present Franciscan life. Since he was, in Father Cuthbert's excellent phrase, a " visionary realist," this contrast weighed• more and more on his mind. At last, making himself a rough. habit with a pointed hood or eapuee, like that worn by the primitive friars, he fled from his too-comfortable convent to Rome, where he obtained from the Pope verbal permission to practise in its rigours the Primitive Rule. After vicissitudes
which included imprisonment at the hands of his displeased superiors, and a period of devoted labour among the sufferers from the plague, he at last, with three companions, obtained ecclesiastical recognition. A Papal bull conferred canonical status on the tiny fraternity, and the Order of " Friars Minor of the Eremetic Life " came into existence at Camerino. It was a principle of Matteo's reform that, as in primitive days, the friars should live in small groups in hermitages. Here, in absolute poverty, they practised the " mixed life " of work and contemplation ; and thence went out to preach to the people and gather food for their daily needs. All great religious reforms have much in common ; a deliberate casting away of superfluities, an avoidance of publicity, a love of the plain and simple in the inward and outward life. Reading the constitution which Matteo ordained for the governance of his little family, and which was " the mirror of their sacred ambition," we find ourselves once more in the presence of the same ideals which St. Bruno gave to the Grande Chartreuse, and St. Stephen Harding to Citeaux. It is, says Father Cuthbert, " the spirit of prayer and the unworldliness of the mountain solitude which confronts one, shaming with the simplicity of a great faith the prudence of the world and of the flesh."
From this obscure beginning the Capuchin friars gradually spread through Italy and France, drawing into their ranks a multitude of devoted and heroic souls. In the century following their first establishment, we find them at the fountain-head of the great revival of mysticism which was a feature of the Counter-Reformation, especially in France and Spain. The large part played by the sons of St. Francis in this revival is not always realized. In Spain, even St. Teresa owed much to the support and teaching of St. Peter of Alcantara. In France, as M. Bremond has already made clear, the first impulse to a renewal of the contemplative life came from the English Capuchin, Benet Canfield ; and was continued by a long line of mystical writers, among them the saintly POre Honore de Champigny and the philosopher Yves de Paris. The doctrine of all these was coloured by the distinctive Franciscan spontaneity ; the child-like spirit of loving delight which inspires the Canticle of the Sun, here restated in terms appropriate to the mentality of a new age. All laid stress on that " mixed life " of action transfused by contemplation, which had been the secret of St. Francis, and now became that of the heroic friars of the Counter-Refcrm.
For these Capuchins were not mystics of the cloister. They lived out their religion in its fullness, in both spiritual and physical service ; and were equally at home in the pulpit and among the horrors of the plague-ridden city. Many were vigorous missionaries, as well as writers and directors of souls, and risked their lives with a gay courage on their excursions into Calvinist and Huguenot territory. As Father Cuthbert observes in a sentence which might perhaps have been phrased a little differently : " A few of them did die at the hands of the Huguenots and one was eaten by savages in the Caribbean isles."
EVELYN Urinnann.r,
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