My God and My All: The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi

  Francis and his companion went south toward the beautiful valley of Rieti that he was to come to love only a little less than his own valley of Spoleto. Bernard and Giles went north toward Florence, for they hoped to get as far as Spain and visit the shrine of Saint James at Compostella, and the other four brothers went east and west to unknown destinations. Francis had given them careful instructions. When they came to a church or wayside crucifix they were to stop and pray, and say devoutly, “We adore thee, O Christ, and bless thee, in all thy churches that be in the whole world, for by thy holy cross thou had redeemed the world.” Wherever they went, in city or castle or house, they were to give the Franciscan greeting, “The Lord give thee peace,” and they were to comfort the sorrowful, and bid them fear and love God and keep his commandments.

  The treatment they received on this journey was not much better than that of the previous one. People thought them wild men from the hills, or thieves, and would not give them shelter in their houses or barns, so that they had to spend the winter nights in the porches of churches and houses. It was hard for them to give a satisfactory account of themselves. When they were asked to what order they belonged they could only reply that they were penitents, natives of Assisi, an answer which did not give satisfaction. They were mocked and ill-treated, were cold and footsore and hungry. But there were some who heard them gladly and were touched by their simplicity and patience. The hard earth was yielding a very little under the plow.

  The Legend of Saint Francis by the Three Companions, gives an account of the adventures of Bernard and Giles at Florence which we can take as typical of the experience of all the brothers in the early days, before fame came to them and the Franciscan habit was honored wherever they went.

  In the great city, where Giles had never been, and which was perhaps strange to Bernard also, they tried to find shelter for the night. They went from house to house but each time the door was shut in their faces. It was getting late, dark, and cold, and they were worn out after a day of traveling, so that when they found a house porch with an oven in it they said to each other that they would shelter there. But first they knocked at the door, prayed that the peace of God might rest upon the house, and asked the mistress of it if she would receive them within. She refused but she said they might sleep in the porch near the oven. Her husband protested at even this much kindness but she said there was nothing they could steal but the wood. So all that night these two great Franciscans, perhaps the greatest of all the early followers of Francis, supperless and with no cloak to cover them, lay huddled together in the porch. They slept very little and when morning came they got up and went to find a church, and when they had found one they went in and knelt down to pray. Presently the bell rang out for matins and a few worshipers came to the church, together with the ubiquitous beggars who always haunted the doors of churches. Among the worshipers was the woman who had not given Bernard and Giles either a scrap of bread or an old blanket to keep out the cold when they took shelter in her porch, and she was astonished to see them kneeling there in reverent prayer. She watched them and thought about them all through matins. When the service was over another member of the congregation, a man called Guido, began to give alms to the waiting beggars, and he tried to give money to Bernard and Giles. They refused it, and when he asked why they would not accept alms like the rest Bernard said, “True is it that we be poor, but poverty is not a hard thing unto us, as unto the other poor, for by the grace of God, whose counsel we have fulfilled, of our own accord have we made ourselves poor.” The astonished Guido asked if they had had possessions, and Bernard told him they had given all they had to the poor for the love of God. The woman was listening and she was ashamed, and begged them to come back to her house and be her guests, and they thanked her humbly, saying, “The Lord repay thee.” But something about them had made Guido feel ashamed too and he insisted that his house must be their lodging for as long as they liked. He took them there and looked after them, and they stayed with him for some days, and their example so touched him that after they had left him he gave much of his own wealth to the poor.

  Francis, in the valley of Rieti, where the snow lay white upon the enclosing mountains, was also winning the heart of a rich man. In the town of Rieti lived a young knight, Angelo Tancredi, gallant, courteous, and most charming. One night he dreamed of Francis, and Thomas of Celano, who enlivens the wordiness of his biography of Francis with occasional flashes of humor, says that after the dream “he began to purpose better things – at least, in the distant future.” The story goes that later Francis met Angelo in a street of Rieti, where he and the brother who was with him were preaching, and said to him, “It is a long time now that you have carried the belt and sword and spurs of the world. Come with me and I will dub you a knight of the army of Christ.” It seems a story likely to be true, for Francis had this gift of knowing at first sight one whose life was to be intimately bound up with his own, and Angelo was to be to him one of the nearest and dearest of his sons. His words seem to imply that he knew it already. Angelo must have known it also, for when Francis returned to the Portiuncula he followed him.

  Francis and the brother left Rieti and went north to Poggio-Bustone, a little city that clings to the fringe of the mountains looking out across the plain, and after he had preached to the people there came upon Francis the longing to be alone with God. Like his master he had to have these times of solitude that God might re-create him and give him the strength to go on, and like Christ he liked to climb up into the loneliness of the hills. Here, with the clamor of earth fallen away below him, there was nothing to distract his prayer. There was nothing but the great silence, for him not empty but filled with the quiet upholding of God.

  He left the city and followed a steep path into the mountains behind, climbing up through the woods until he reached a place where the trees thinned out and there were only the bare crags, with the snow above them, and here he found a cave where he could hide himself. For he was in misery, crushed by the thought of the wasted years of his early life and of his sins; he thought he had sinned so greatly that God could not forgive him. His was a nature of contrasts, and alternations of joy and grief were habitual with him, but this overwhelming wretchedness was partly the misery of exhaustion. It is always a temptation to an exhausted Christian to hark back to the past and wonder if the sins of which he has repented, which he has confessed, and which have been forgiven, are not really after all past forgiveness. Attacking a man at his weakest it is a most subtle temptation of the devil to make him doubt the love of God without realizing what it is that he doubts.

  It is difficult, reading or thinking about Saint Francis, to remember how young he was. The old chroniclers speak of him always as the blessed father or the holy man, and that gives a misleading impression of age, but at this time he was only twenty-eight. Only five years had passed since the Voice had spoken to him at Spoleto and in that short time he had passed through experiences, both physical and spiritual, that must have severely overstrained a man as sensitive and highly strung as Francis. And lately he had had other men dependent on him, some of them older than himself, men who had flung aside their security because of what he had said to them. They were a heavy burden on his youth. How could such a sinner as he was guide other men? How could eight poor sinful men, who so far had met with little but failure and contempt in all that they had tried to do for God, convert the world? Crouched in the cave he was bowed down by the burden of his sin, weariness, and hopelessness, and wept out his misery within the upholding quietness until, like a child, he had spent himself.

  Gradually he became aware of what it was that held him. The passion of Christ was never far from his mind, for the image of the poor man crucified had been stamped on his soul in the church of San Damiano. Perhaps now his awareness of the load of his sin passed into remembrance of another burden and he saw a man staggering uphill, crushed almost to the ground with the weight of the burden on his back. “Behold the Lamb of God, which
taketh away the sin of the world.” Slowly, like the dawning of light, he was flooded with the knowledge of the love of God and knew himself forgiven. And then the mercy of God lifted for a moment the curtain of the future and showed him that “he that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bearing his sheaves with him.” Thomas of Celano says, “He was . . . wholly absorbed into a certain light; the capacity of his mind was enlarged, and he beheld clearly what was to come to pass.” As far as words can tell such things he tried to describe his vision to the brothers when he returned to the Portiuncula. “I have seen,” he said, “a great multitude of men coming to us, desiring to put on the habit of our holy vocation and to live under the rule of our blessed religion, and their sound is in my ears as they come and go under the orders of holy obedience. I have seen the roads from all the nations full of men coming into these parts: the French are coming, the Spaniards are hastening, the Germans and English run, and great is the crowd of them who hurry along speaking other tongues.”

  But there were no words to describe that sense of flooding love and power that was filling him and bearing him up. As strong now as he had before been weak, he praised and adored God, and then prayed that he would turn the brothers back from their journeys and bring them all home to the Portiuncula, so that he could share his joy with them. He knew how often they too were exhausted and discouraged and he wanted to tell them what he knew. His prayer was answered. To all the brothers on that day there came the conviction that they must turn back. When they had all met together at the Portiuncula and saw Francis again, he was so confident and so happy that “he seemed changed into another man.”

  Chapter 6

  The Rule

  And when the Lord gave me some brothers, no one showed me what I ought to do, but the Most High himself revealed to me that I should live according to the form of the holy gospel. And I caused it to be written in a few words and simply, and the pope confirmed it for me.

  WRITINGS OF SAINT FRANCIS

  THIS VISION OF AN increasing brotherhood confronted Francis with a problem. The independent life that he and the brothers had been living had been possible for a few men, but it was hardly possible for a large number to live in this way without becoming an embarrassment to the clergy, as they had already been to Bishop Guido. Francis was a devoted and loyal son of the Church and he wanted her blessing upon the life and work of the brotherhood. No doubt by this time he understood that the rebuilding of San Damiano had been a symbol of what Christ really wanted him to do. He had been like a child playing with toy bricks while his Lord, his Father God, looked on in tenderness, leading him gently on to see that the living church is built up of souls and that the stones that he really had to handle were the souls of men that needed to be reborn in love. But love cannot work from outside. To attack and criticize from outside is not love’s way, and it was never Francis’s way. He saw that he and his brothers must be living their life of gospel poverty deeply within the Church if they were to touch her heart that had become so corrupt and hardened by the power and ambition of the world. They must go to the pope and ask for his permission to be an order recognized by the Church, living under his protection and with his blessing. That the little barefoot family should go straight to the great Pope Innocent the Third, a man before whom kings trembled, was an idea so daring that the brothers must have had their breath taken away when Francis put it to them. All Francis’s ideas had this daring simplicity, but none of them was ever allowed to run away with him; he and the brothers prayed earnestly that they might know if this was the will of God.

  God’s answer came in the arrival of four new brothers, Angelo of Tancredi, the young knight who had followed Francis from Rieti, John of San Constanzo, Barbaro, and Bernard de Vigilanzio. Now they numbered twelve, the number of Christ’s apostles, and this seemed to Francis a sign that the time had come to take his twelve apostles to Christ in the person of the pope, his vicar upon earth. It remained only to find a name for themselves, and to write out a rule for their little order which could be submitted to the pope for his approval.

  They called themselves the Fratres Minores, the Brothers Minor. In Assisi the important men of the city were called majores, while those who served them were the minores, and they remembered Christ’s words, “I am among you as he that serveth.” And they remembered too how Christ had called his disciples his little ones. Francis wrote out a rule suited to the humblest and the poorest of the humble and the poor. It was expressed largely in Christ’s own words, an expansion of the verses from the Gospels that Francis, Bernard, and Peter had taken as their rule in the church of San Nicholas. It was the charter of men who had pledged themselves to obey to the letter all the hard commandments of Christ that most Christians busy themselves in explaining away, the blueprint of one of the greatest adventures that men have ever undertaken. First, Francis promised obedience and reverence to both Innocent and his successors after him. All the brothers were to take the three evangelical vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and they were to live without any property whatever. Any brother joining the order was to sell all his goods and give everything to the poor. They were to wear shabby clothes patched with rags or sackcloth, eat anything that was set before them, and when going barefoot about the world they were to carry nothing with them. None of them was ever to have any power of any sort. No one was to be called prior, but all alike brothers minor, and in token of humility they were to wash one another’s feet. The brothers were to follow whatever trade they knew, and be paid for their work with the necessities of food and shelter, but not with money, and when working as servants they were to bear no rule in the households of those they served. They were not a mendicant order but when necessary they were to beg for alms and not be ashamed. They were to love one another and never wrangle or speak evil of each other, and they were to remember that they had given themselves and surrendered their bodies to Jesus Christ, for love of whom they ought to expose themselves to their enemies both visible and invisible. They were to follow the humility and poverty of Christ and to rejoice to be with despised persons, with the poor and weak, the sick, the beggars and the lepers. The brothers were to be Catholics and if any brother was to err from the Catholic faith, and refuse to mend his ways, he should be expelled. They were to respect all priests and religious as their superiors and respect their order, office, and work. Wherever they went they were to praise God and exhort men to reverence. Incorporated in this rule there was a great burst of praise, pouring out in a cataract of words, breathless, exhilarating, and infinitely happy. “Let us therefore desire nothing else, wish for nothing else, and let nothing please and delight us except our Creator and Redeemer and Savior, the only true God, who is full of good, all good, entire good, the true and supreme good, who alone is good, merciful and kind, gentle and sweet, who alone is holy, just, true, and upright, who alone is benign, pure, and clean, from whom, and through whom, and in whom is all mercy, all grace, all glory of all penitents and of the just, and of all the blessed rejoicing in heaven. Let nothing therefore hinder us, let nothing separate us, let nothing come between us. Let us all, everywhere, in every place, at every hour, and at all times, daily and continually believe, truly and humbly, and let us hold in our hearts, and love, honor, adore, serve, praise and bless, glorify and exalt, magnify and give thanks to the most high and supreme, eternal God, in trinity and unity, to the Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost, to the creator of all, to the savior of all who believe and hope in him, and love him, who, without beginning or end, is immutable, invisible, unerring, ineffable, incomprehensible, unfathomable, blessed, praiseworthy, glorious, exalted, sublime, most high, sweet, amiable, lovable, and always wholly desirable above all for ever and ever.”

  Carrying with them this rule, and nothing else, the barefoot brothers set out on their pilgrimage to Rome. It was the spring of 1210.

  2

  INNOCENT III WAS A GREAT MAN and a great pope. He was now forty-nine years
old and had been pope for twelve years, and the achievements of those years were impressive. In his struggle with the German barons he had been on the whole successful. The papal armies were exterminating heresy with fire and sword and every king in Europe was afraid of him, for he had made the papacy immensely powerful. He was a great statesman, a clever politician and a fine theologian who had studied at Bologna and Paris. He had a handsome presence and elegant though imperious manners. But he was not guilty of seeking dominance for its own sake. It was his honest belief that the papacy needed increasing worldly power if it was to redeem the world. He seems to have felt about power as Francis had once felt about money; that you could save men with it. But he was ascetic and deeply religious and knew with bitterness and sadness that the Church was corrupted by the luxury and greed that had eaten into her clergy and laity alike. He knew that the purification of the world must begin with the Church herself but he did not know by what means she could be saved.

  Arrived in Rome, there can be little doubt that the weary footsore brothers went straight to Saint Peter’s tomb. Francis led his little company up the marble steps, through the silver door into the cool shadows within. Their bare feet trod the marble floor silently, between the long columns of the pillars that were like their forest trees, and then they knelt together to pray at the tomb of the great apostle who had left all to follow Christ, who had lived for him and been martyred for him. The twelve later apostles, the little ones who had also left everything for Christ, gave themselves afresh to live and die for him. It was only four years since Francis had knelt here alone, and now he had his brothers around him. God had been good to him and he poured himself out in love and gratitude for the guidance and safekeeping that had brought him to this great hour of his life.