we have now reached the great break in the life of francis of assisi; the point at which something happened to him that must remain greatly dark to most of us, who are ordinary and selfish men whom god has not broken to make anew.
in dealing with this difficult passage, especially for my own purpose of making things moderately easy for the more secular sympathiser, i have hesitated as to the proper course; and have eventually decided to state first of all what happened, with little more than a hint of what i imagine to have been the meaning of what happened. the fuller meaning may be debated more easily afterwards, when it was unfolded in the full franciscan life. anyhow what happened was this. the story very largely revolves round the ruins of the church of st. damian, an old shrine in assisi which was apparently neglected and falling to pieces. here francis was in the habit of praying before the crucifix during these dark and aimless days of {59}transition that followed the tragical collapse of all his military ambitions, probably made bitter by some loss of social prestige terrible to his sensitive spirit. as he did so he heard a voice saying to him, "francis, seest thou not that my house is in ruins? go and restore it for me."
francis sprang up and went. to go and do something was one of the driving demands of his nature; probably he had gone and done it before he had at all thoroughly thought out what he had done. in any case what he had done was something very decisive and immediately very disastrous for his singular social career. in the coarse conventional language of the uncomprehending world, he stole. from his own enthusiastic point of view, he extended to his venerable father peter bernardone the exquisite excitement and inestimable privilege of assisting, more or less unconsciously, in the rebuilding of st. damian's church. in point of fact what he did was first to sell his own horse and then to go off and sell several bales of his father's cloth, making the sign of the cross over them to indicate their pious and charitable destination. peter bernardone did not see things in this light. peter bernardone indeed had not very much light to see by, so far as understanding the genius and temperament of his extraordinary son was concerned. instead of understanding {60}in what sort of a wind and flame of abstract appetites the lad was living, instead of simply telling him (as the priest practically did later) that he had done an indefensible thing with the best intentions, old bernardone took up the matter in the hardest style; in a legal and literal fashion. he used absolute political powers like a heathen father, and himself put his son under lock and key as a vulgar thief. it would appear that the cry was caught up among many with whom the unlucky francis had once been popular; and altogether, in his efforts to build up the house of god he had only succeeded in bringing his own house about his ears and lying buried under the ruins. the quarrel dragged drearily through several stages; at one time the wretched young man seems to have disappeared underground, so to speak, into some cavern or cellar where he remained huddled hopelessly in the darkness. anyhow, it was his blackest moment; the whole world had turned over; the whole world was on top of him.
when he came out, it was only perhaps gradually that anybody grasped that something had happened. he and his father were summoned in the court of the bishop; for francis had refused the authority of all legal tribunals. the bishop addressed some remarks to him, full of that excellent common sense which the catholic church keeps permanently as the background {61}for all the fiery attitudes of her saints. he told francis that he must unquestionably restore the money to his father; that no blessing could follow a good work done by unjust methods; and in short (to put it crudely) if the young fanatic would give back his money to the old fool, the incident would then terminate. there was a new air about francis. he was no longer crushed, still less crawling, so far as his father was concerned; yet his words do not, i think, indicate either just indignation or wanton insult or anything in the nature of a mere continuation of the quarrel. they are rather remotely akin to mysterious utterances of his great model, "what have i to do with thee?" or even the terrible "touch me not."
he stood up before them all and said, "up to this time i have called pietro bernardone father, but now i am the servant of god. not only the money but everything that can be called his i will restore to my father, even the very clothes he has given me." and he rent off all his garments except one; and they saw that that was a hair-shirt.
he piled the garments in a heap on the floor and tossed the money on top of them. then he turned to the bishop, and received his blessing, like one who turns his back on society; and, according to the account, went out as he was into the cold world. apparently it was literally {62}a cold world at the moment, and snow was on the ground. a curious detail, very deep in its significance, i fancy, is given in the same account of this great crisis in his life. he went out half-naked in his hair-shirt into the winter woods, walking the frozen ground between the frosty trees; a man without a father. he was penniless, he was parentless, he was to all appearance without a trade or a plan or a hope in the world; and as he went under the frosty trees, he burst suddenly into song.
it was apparently noted as remarkable that the language in which he sang was french, or that provençal which was called for convenience french. it was not his native language; and it was in his native language that he ultimately won fame as a poet; indeed st. francis is one of the very first of the national poets in the purely national dialects of europe. but it was the language with which all his most boyish ardours and ambitions had been identified; it was for him pre-eminently the language of romance. that it broke from him in this extraordinary extremity seems to me something at first sight very strange and in the last analysis very significant. what that significance was, or may well have been, i will try to suggest in the subsequent chapter; it is enough to indicate here that the whole philosophy of st. francis revolved round the idea of a new supernatural {63}light on natural things, which meant the ultimate recovery not the ultimate refusal of natural things. and for the purpose of this purely narrative part of the business, it is enough to record that while he wandered in the winter forest in his hair-shirt, like the very wildest of the hermits, he sang in the tongue of the troubadours.
meanwhile the narrative naturally reverts to the problem of the ruined or at least neglected church, which had been the starting point of the saint's innocent crime and beatific punishment. that problem still predominated in his mind and was soon engaging his insatiable activities; but they were activities of a new sort; and he made no more attempts to interfere with the commercial ethics of the town of assisi. there had dawned on him one of those great paradoxes that are also platitudes. he realised that the way to build a church is not to become entangled in bargains and, to him, rather bewildering questions of legal claim. the way to build a church is not to pay for it, certainly not with somebody else's money. the way to build a church is not even to pay for it with your own money. the way to build a church is to build it.
he went about by himself collecting stones. he begged all the people he met to give him stones. in fact he became a new sort of beggar, {64}reversing the parable; a beggar who asks not for bread but a stone. probably, as happened to him again and again throughout his extraordinary existence, the very queerness of the request gave it a sort of popularity; and all sorts of idle and luxurious people fell in with the benevolent project, as they would have done with a bet. he worked with his own hands at the rebuilding of the church, dragging the material like a beast of burden and learning the very last and lowest lessons of toil. a vast number of stories are told about francis at this as at every other period of his life; but for the purpose here, which is one of simplification, it is best to dwell on this definite re-entrance of the saint into the world by the low gate of manual labour. there does indeed run through the whole of his life a sort of double meaning, like his shadow thrown upon the wall. all his action had something of the character of an allegory; and it is likely enough that some leaden-witted scientific historian may some day try to prove that he himself was never anything but an allegory. it is true enough in this sense that he was labouring at a double task, and rebuilding something else as well as the church of st. damian. he was not only discovering the general lesson that his glory was not to be in overthrowing men in battle but in building up the positive and creative monuments of {65}peace. he was truly building up something else, or beginning to build it up; something that has often enough fallen into ruin but has never been past rebuilding; a church that could always be built anew though it had rotted away to its first foundation-stone, against which the gates of hell shall not prevail.
the next stage in his progress is probably marked by his transferring the same energies of architectural reconstruction to the little church of st. mary of the angels at the portiuncula. he had already done something of the same kind at a church dedicated to st. peter; and that quality in his life noted above, which made it seem like a symbolical drama, led many of his most devout biographers to note the numerical symbolism of the three churches. there was at any rate a more historical and practical symbolism about two of them. for the original church of st. damian afterwards became the seat of his striking experiment of a female order, and of the pure and spiritual romance of st. clare. and the church of the portiuncula will remain for ever as one of the great historic buildings of the world; for it was there that he gathered the little knot of friends and enthusiasts; it was the home of many homeless men. at this time, however, it is not clear that he had the definite idea of any such monastic developments. how early the plan appeared in his own mind {66}it is of course impossible to say; but on the face of events it first takes the form of a few friends who attached themselves to him one by one because they shared his own passion for simplicity. the account given of the form of their dedication is, however, very significant; for it was that of an invocation of the simplification of life as suggested in the new testament. the adoration of christ had been a part of the man's passionate nature for a long time past. but the imitation of christ, as a sort of plan or ordered scheme of life, may in that sense be said to begin here.
the two men who have the credit, apparently, of having first perceived something of what was happening in the world of the soul were a solid and wealthy citizen named bernard of quintavalle and a canon from a neighbouring church named peter. it is the more to their credit because francis, if one may put it so, was by this time wallowing in poverty and association with lepers and ragged mendicants; and these two were men with much to give up; the one of comforts in the world and the other of ambition in the church. bernard the rich burgher did quite literally and finally sell all he had and give to the poor. peter did even more; for he descended from a chair of spiritual authority, probably when he was already a man of mature years and therefore of fixed mental habits, to follow an extravagant young {67}eccentric whom most people probably regarded as a maniac. what it was of which they had caught a glimpse, of which francis had seen the glory, may be suggested later so far as it can be suggested at all. at this stage we need profess to see no more than all assisi saw, and that something not altogether unworthy of comment. the citizens of assisi only saw the camel go in triumph through the eye of the needle and god doing impossible things because to him all things were possible; only a priest who rent his robes like the publican and not like the pharisee and a rich man who went away joyful, for he had no possessions.
these three strange figures are said to have built themselves a sort of hut or den adjoining the leper hospital. there they talked to each other, in the intervals of drudgery and danger (for it needed ten times more courage to look after a leper than to fight for the crown of sicily), in the terms of their new life, almost like children talking a secret language. of these individual elements on their first friendship we can say little with certainty; but it is certain that they remained friends to the end. bernard of quintavalle occupies in the story something of the position of sir bedivere, "first made and latest left of arthur's knights," for he reappears again at the right hand of the saint on his death-bed and receives some sort of special blessing. {68}but all those things belong to another historical world and were quite remote from the ragged and fantastic trio in their tumble-down hut. they were not monks except perhaps in the most literal and archaic sense which was identical with hermits. they were, so to speak, three solitaries living together socially, but not as a society. the whole thing seems to have been intensely individual, as seen from the outside doubtless individual to the point of insanity. the stir of something that had in it the promise of a movement or a mission can first be felt as i have said in the affair of the appeal to the new testament.
it was a sort of sors virgiliana applied to the bible; a practice not unknown among protestants though open to their criticism, one would think, as being rather a superstition of pagans. anyhow it seems almost the opposite of searching the scriptures to open them at random; but st. francis certainly opened them at random. according to one story, he merely made the sign of the cross over the volume of the gospel and opened it at three places reading three texts. the first was the tale of the rich young man whose refusal to sell all his goods was the occasion of the great paradox about the camel and the needle. the second was the commandment to the disciples to take nothing with them on their journey, neither scrip nor staff nor any money. {69}the third was that saying, literally to be called crucial, that the follower of christ must also carry his cross. there is a somewhat similar story of francis finding one of these texts, almost as accidentally, merely in listening to what happened to be the gospel of the day. but from the former version at least it would seem that the incident occurred very early indeed in his new life, perhaps soon after his breach with his father; for it was after this oracle, apparently, that bernard the first disciple rushed forth and scattered all his goods among the poor. if this be so, it would seem that nothing followed it for the moment except the individual ascetical life with the hut for a hermitage. it must of course have been a rather public sort of hermitage, but it was none the less in a very real sense withdrawn from the world. st. simeon stylites on the top of his pillar was in one sense an exceedingly public character; but there was something a little singular in his situation for all that. it may be presumed that most people thought the situation of francis singular, that some even thought it too singular. there was inevitably indeed in any catholic society something ultimate and even subconscious that was at least capable of comprehending it better than a pagan or puritan society could comprehend it. but we must not at this stage, i think, exaggerate this potential public sympathy. as {70}has already been suggested, the church and all its institutions had already the air of being old and settled and sensible things, the monastic institutions among the rest. common sense was commoner in the middle ages, i think, than in our own rather jumpy journalistic age; but men like francis are not common in any age, nor are they to be fully understood merely by the exercise of common sense. the thirteenth century was certainly a progressive period; perhaps the only really progressive period in human history. but it can truly be called progressive precisely because its progress was very orderly. it is really and truly an example of an epoch of reforms without revolutions. but the reforms were not only progressive but very practical; and they were very much to the advantage of highly practical institutions; the towns and the trading guilds and the manual crafts. now the solid men of town and guild in the time of francis of assisi were probably very solid indeed. they were much more economically equal, they were much more justly governed in their own economic environment, than the moderns who struggle madly between starvation and the monopolist prizes of capitalism; but it is likely enough that the majority of such citizens were as hard-headed as peasants. certainly the behaviour of the venerable peter bernardone does not indicate a delicate sympathy {71}with the fine and almost fanciful subtleties of the franciscan spirit. and we cannot measure the beauty and originality of this strange spiritual adventure, unless we have the humour and human sympathy to put into plain words how it would have looked to such an unsympathetic person at the time when it happened. in the next chapter i shall make an attempt, inevitably inadequate, to indicate the inside of this story of the building of the three churches and the little hut. in this chapter i have but outlined it from the outside. and in concluding that chapter i ask the reader to remember and realise what that story really looked like, when thus seen from the outside. given a critic of rather coarse common sense, with no feeling about the incident except annoyance, and how would the story seem to stand?
a young fool or rascal is caught robbing his father and selling goods which he ought to guard; and the only explanation he will offer is that a loud voice from nowhere spoke in his ear and told him to mend the cracks and holes in a particular wall. he then declares himself naturally independent of all powers corresponding to the police or the magistrates, and takes refuge with an amiable bishop who is forced to remonstrate with him and tell him he is wrong. he then proceeds to take off his clothes in public and practically throw them at his father; {72}announcing at the same time that his father is not his father at all. he then runs about the town asking everybody he meets to give him fragments of buildings or building materials, apparently with reference to his old monomania about mending the wall. it may be an excellent thing that cracks should be filled up, but preferably not by somebody who is himself cracked; and architectural restoration like other things is not best performed by builders who, as we should say, have a tile loose. finally the wretched youth relapses into rags and squalor and practically crawls away into the gutter. that is the spectacle that francis must have presented to a very large number of his neighbours and friends.
how he lived at all must have seemed to them dubious; but presumably he already begged for bread as he had begged for building materials. but he was always very careful to beg for the blackest or worst bread he could get, for the stalest crusts or something rather less luxurious than the crumbs which the dogs eat, and which fall from the rich man's table. thus he probably fared worse than an ordinary beggar; for the beggar would eat the best he could get and the saint ate the worst he could get. in plain fact he was ready to live on refuse; and it was probably something much uglier as an experience than the refined simplicity which vegetarians and water-drinkers would call the simple life. as he dealt {73}with the question of food, so he apparently dealt with the question of clothing. he dealt with it, that is, upon the same principle of taking what he could get, and not even the best of what he could get. according to one story he changed clothes with a beggar; and he would doubtless have been content to change them with a scarecrow. in another version he got hold of the rough brown tunic of a peasant, but presumably only because the peasant gave him his very oldest brown tunic, which was probably very old indeed. most peasants have few changes of clothing to give away; and some peasants are not specially inclined to give them away until it is absolutely necessary. it is said that in place of the girdle which he had flung off (perhaps with the more symbolic scorn because it probably carried the purse or wallet by the fashion of the period) he picked up a rope more or less at random, because it was lying near, and tied it round his waist. he undoubtedly meant it as a shabby expedient; rather as the very destitute tramp will sometimes tie his clothes together with a piece of string. he meant to strike the note of collecting his clothes anyhow, like rags from a succession of dust-bins. ten years later that make-shift costume was the uniform of five thousand men; and a hundred years later, in that, for a pontifical panoply, they laid great dante in the grave.
