Из книги: ITALIAN FANTASIES
His disciples, whose affinities with him were so imperfect that his most devoted biographer is the author of the “Dies Iræ,” attempt indeed to harmonise the two halves of his personality by the mediation of texts. If he loves even the humble worm, it is because “he had read that word concerning the Saviour: ‘I am a worm and no man,’” and if he treads reverently on the stone, it is not from some mystic sense of a stone-life or some sacramental sense of a divine immanence, but “for love of Him who is called the Rock.” That his delight in water should be traced to its baptismal uses, and his prohibition against cutting down the whole of a tree to a reverence for the material of the cross, was, of course, inevitable. Nor is it impossible that St. Francis occasionally glossed himself over to himself, and it is quite probable that his special tenderness for the hooded lark was due to its quasi-monkish cowl, and that his comparative coldness to the ant reposed upon its providing for the morrow. For it was his tragedy to be torn between a blithe personal revelation of the divine and a stereotyped tradition of sorrow, to constrict his spiritual genius to a cut-and-dried scheme of salvation, and to be crucified on a second-hand cross. The stigmata which are the best proof of his hyperæsthesia are likewise the best evidence of his spiritual plagiarism and his comparative failure. For to be crucified is not to be Christ. Jesus did not set out to be crucified, but to do his and his Father’s work. Crucifixion came in the day’s work, but was its interruption, not its fulfilment. The true imitation of Christ is to do one’s work though men crucify one. But deliberately to seek crucifixion—even crucifixion of one’s natural desires—is to imitate the accident, not the essence. A still greater perversion is it to brood upon the crude insignia of the Passion till auto-hypnotism works miracles in the flesh.
The followers of St. Francis pushed the plagiarism so far as to adumbrate a parallel legend, with a descent into Purgatory and a John of the Chapel who fell away and hanged himself, and by the latter end of the fourteenth century the parallel was made precise and perfect in the _Liber Conformitatum_ of Bartolommeo of Pisa. But the copy is only superficially true to the original. There is nothing in the story of the great Galilæan to justify the perpetual self-torture of St. Francis in his morbid quest of perfect humility and sinlessness. On the contrary, Jesus speaks with so god-like an assurance of righteousness that it has become one of the chief arguments for his divinity, as it is the chief stumbling-block to the efficacy of his example. For if God was made not man but superman, we can no more emulate this superman’s goodness than his power of creating loaves and fishes in a crisis. Only if Jesus were not God is his example valuable. But man or superman, he did not sap his energies by brooding on his own vileness. Buddhism, with all the apathy that its pessimism engenders, is healthier here, since (according to the Mahâviyûhassutta) the _Muni_, the Master of renunciation, never blames himself.
I sympathise cordially with the perplexities of Brother Masseo, who, according to the “Analecta Franciscana,” lost his naturally cheerful countenance under the difficulty of believing himself viler than the vicious loafer; and who, when this peak of humility was by grace attained, found himself in fresh despondency before the new Alp that rose on the horizon. “I am sad because I cannot get to the point of feeling that if any one cut off my hands or feet or plucked my eyes out, though I had served him to the best of my power, still I could love him as much as I did before, and be equally pleased to hear him well spoken of.” Poor Masseo! Why should this worthy brother, a man, according to the _Fioretti_, of great eloquence and belonging to the inner circle of St. Francis, waste his time and spoil his valuable cheerfulness over such hypothetic absurdities? The humour of the last clause is worthy of Gilbert.
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.
Endowments—there is the secret of stagnation. It is an unhappy truth that man tends to become a parasite on his own institutions. Humanity is a Frankenstein that is ridden by its own creations. Its Churches, with their cast-iron creeds and their golden treasure-heaps, are the prisons of the soul of the future. The legal decision in the great Free Church fight serves as what Bacon calls an “ostensive instance” of this elemental truth, bringing out as it does that the legal interpretation of a Church involves, not the elasticity so glibly vaunted by the _Church Quarterly_ reviewer, but absolute inelasticity. A tiny minority of ministers is able, for a time at least, to hold millions of money and hundreds of buildings, because the vast majority has elected, in a spirit of brotherly love, to join another body from which it is separated by a microscopic point. There can, at this rate, never be development in a Church. The faintest divergence from old tradition may justify the hard-shell orthodox in claiming all the funds and regarding the innovators as deserters of their posts and properties. All Church funds are indissolubly connected with the doctrines to which they were first tacked on, and changes in doctrine involve forfeiture of the belongings in favour of those who have had the fidelity or the shrewdness to cling to the original dogma. How much change is necessary to alter a creed is a delicate problem, known in logic as of the Soros order. For every day brings it subtle increments or decrements, and a dogma of imperishable adamant has not yet appeared in human history. Every dogma has its day. The life of a normally constituted truth is, according to Ibsen, twenty years at the outside, and aged truths are apt to be shockingly thin. Thus the danger which threatens all Churches—the danger of having to buy their ministers—is raised to infinity if the money is thus to be tied up by the dead hand of the past. A premium is placed upon infidelity and mustiness. There is no Church or religious body in the world which is not weighted with pecuniary substance, from Rome to the Order we have been considering, founded for the preachment of Absolute Poverty. The continuity of policy which the _Church Quarterly_ applauds becomes a mere continuity of property, if progress is to be thus penalised. Nor are the Dissenting bodies immune from this pecuniary peril. A Calvinist chapel in Doncaster that was gravitating to the New Theology has found itself closed _pro tem._ under its trust deed of 1802.
The remedy for this clogging of spiritual life is clear. It was always obvious, but when Property is in danger one begins to consider things seriously.
Every Church and sect must be wound up after three generations. The time-limit needs elucidation.