The Saint and the Sepulcher, Francis of Assisi and the Paradox of Relics

“ To all who revolt against the vulgar materialism which dominates so much of our present life, Francis of Assisi is as a prophet sent by God. Standing against the dark background of Avarice and Luxury which had already infested the growing commercial centres of the mediæval world, he throws the light of his own clear personality into the dark corners of our own life.
We yearn, many of us, for a deeper spiritual life; we sorrow because the joy of life seems flitting ever further and further away from this complex social organism of ours. ”

“ By meditating on the life, passion, and death of Jesus Christ St. Francis of Assisi was filled with such a burning zeal for God and his neighbor that he renounced his great wealth, and his right to an honorable inheritance, and spent his life in inflaming others with zeal for the salvation of souls. ”

“ Freely have you received, freely give. Carry neither gold nor silver nor money in your girdles, nor bag, nor two coats, nor sandals, nor staff, for the workman is worthy of his hire” (Matt. x. 7-10) . He at once felt that this was his vocation, and the next day, layman as he was, he went up to Assisi and began to preach to the poor (1209) . Disciples joined him, and when they were twelve in number Francis said: “Let us go to our Mother, the holy Roman Church, and tell the pope what the Lord has begun to do through us, and carry it out with his sanction.” ”

“ Unselfish and holy men in ecclesiastical places, both high and humble, preserved the spirit and sanctity of Christian faith, but were not able wholly to counteract the evils of pride, wealth, and luxury that invaded the Church from the worldly side, and infected its unworthy servants. Francis perceived that the only hope or relief possible to that age lay in a decisive spiritual revolution, to be effected without violence, which would recall people to the primitive simplicity, unselfishness, and absolute devotion of the time of Christ and the apostolic period. ”

“ Francis himself has told us how this joy of life came to him with the absolute renunciation of what the world at large holds most dear—wealth, place, and power. In renunciation he found spiritual freedom, and with it joy. No man is truly joyous whose joy does not spring from his own soul, or from that inalienable possession of the world which comes of spiritual communion with what is good and true in it, and therefore Eternal. ”

“ I do not mean by this the adventure of involuntary poverty, for I maintain that involuntary poverty, like involuntary riches, is a credit to no man. It is only as we dominate life that we really live. What I mean here, if I may so express it, is an adventure in achieved poverty. In the lives of such true men as Francis of Assisi and Tolstoi, that which draws the world to them in secret sympathy is not that they lived lives of poverty, but rather, having riches at their hands, or for the very asking, that they chose poverty as the better way of life. ”

“ Francis and Poverty—these lovers seem strange indeed to twentieth-century eyes. An age when philanthropy strives for the abolition of poverty and invites enlightened self-interest to its aid cannot readily understand one who welcomed poverty as a blessed condition. “No man,” said a [Pg 208] disciple of St. Francis, “was ever so covetous of wealth as he of poverty.”
We hear St. Francis discoursing with brother Leo concerning perfect bliss. It lies not in knowledge or power or even in the ability to convert the infidels to the Holy Faith. ”

“ In order to imitate His poverty, His humility, His sufferings, all His virtues, he did many things far above the ordinary rules of human wisdom; and, as to his language, it was formed on that of the Gospel.
St. Francis was simple, but he had great qualities of mind and heart; and his simplicity was a perfection in him—not a defect. If it induced him to do things of which human prudence disapproves, it was because he was guided by Divine light; it was because he sought to be despised by the world, to render himself more conformable to Jesus Christ. Men of his age were not deceived by it ”

“ ALL the world loves a lover,” but all the world does not love a saint. Our hearts do not leap up when we behold a halo on the title-page, and so the lives of the heroes of the Church are frequently neglected. When the saint has been duly canonized, that is generally the end of him in popular esteem. But sometimes the ecclesiastical and secular judgments coincide and the saint is invested with human interest.
So it has been with St. Francis of Assisi,—given the highest honors in his church, he has captivated the imagination of the world. ”

“ Francis were here--in every olive garden--in each hill town--on the roads and the by-ways--on the mountains--in the plains--his heart would greet the swelling of a new tide drawing inward to this land--the breath of a new spring kindling the buds of life. He would hear preached again, in the language of a new day, his own religion of love, humility, and poverty. The new faith springs from the very heart of Catholicism, banned and persecuted as new faiths have always been; but every day it lives, it spreads! Knowledge and science walk hand in hand with it; the future is before it. ”

“ The true Nature-Mysticism is prominent in St. Francis of Assisi. He loves to see in all around him the pulsations of one life, which sleeps in the stones, dreams in the plants, and wakens in man. "He would remain in contemplation before a flower, an insect, or a bird, and regarded them with no dilettante or egoistic pleasure; he was interested that the plant should have its sun, the bird its nest; that the humblest manifestations of creative force should have the happiness to which they are entitled. ”

“ Pain, languor, and burning eyelids deprived him of sleep. Enormous rats came to attack him at night. Then he composed a joyous canticle in praise of our splendid brother the Sun, and our sister the Water, chaste, useful, and pure. My most beautiful verses have less charm and splendor. And it is just that it should be thus, for Saint Francis’s soul was more beautiful than his mind. I am better than all my contemporaries whom I have known, yet I am worth nothing. When Saint Francis had composed his Song of the Sun he rejoiced. ”

“ To do right, to imitate Christ and obey and love Him, is a privilege. Can it be other than a joy? Indeed, this following of Christ is so blessed, that not to rejoice continually in it, betokens some failure in obedience and love. Many have approved this Christian logic; but to realize it in one's heart and manifest it in one's life, was the more singular grace of Francis of Assisi. His heart sang always unto the Lord; his love flowed out in gladness to his fellows; his enchanted spirit rejoiced in every creature. The gospel of this new evangelist awoke the hearts of men to love and joy. ”

“ Assisi MS. 338, folio 20b. Conform. 138, b. 2.—Cum majorem inimicum corpore non habeam. 2 Cel., 3, 63. These are momentary but inevitable obscurations, moments of forgetfulness, of discouragement, when a man is not himself, and repeats mechanically what he hears said around him. The real St. Francis is, on the contrary, the lover of nature, he who sees in the whole creation the work of divine goodness, the radiance of the eternal beauty, he who, in the Canticle of the Creatures, sees in the body not the Enemy but a brother: Cæpit hilariter loqui ad corpus ”

“ He will do these things when he is in love. The first fact to realise about St. Francis is involved in the first fact with which his story starts; that when he said from the first that he was a Troubadour, and said later that he was a Troubadour of a newer and nobler romance, he was not using a mere metaphor, but understood himself much better than the scholars understand him. He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubadour. He was a Lover. He was a lover of God and he was really and truly a lover of men ”

“ The great and instantaneous movement which he produced in his own time was no short-lived blaze of fanaticism, for its results have lasted from the twelfth century to our own; and although we may well believe that the day is past for serving Christ by going barefoot and living on alms, the spirit of Saint Francis's doctrine, charity, purity, self-abnegation, might do as much for modern men as for those of six hundred years ago. ”

“ I do not know nor desire to know if theologians have yet come to a scientific conclusion with regard to the poverty of Jesus, but it seems evident to me that poverty with the labor of the hands is the ideal held up by the Galilean to the efforts of his disciples.
Still it is easy to see that Franciscan poverty is neither to be confounded with the unfeeling pride of the stoic, nor with the stupid horror of all joy felt by certain devotees; St. Francis renounced everything only that he might the better possess everything. ”

“ Our belief in the resurrection of the body; our assurance that Christians will, on a future judgment day, either rise in glory or stand to hear their eternal condemnation, renders it impossible for us to look on the mortal remains of Christians as do materialists and the professors of unbelief. What to the latter is nothing but a dead body, a fit object for study, is to us a sacred deposit whence immortality will germinate. ”

“ The question of the authenticity of relics is one of fact and proved by the ordinary rules of evidence. When there seems to be moral certainty of the genuineness of a relic, the Church permits relative honour to be paid to it on account of the spiritual excellence of the person with whom it was connected. ”

“ Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his worship; for he can never go behind this sentiment. In the sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is never surmounted, love is never outgrown.
This sentiment lies at the foundation of society, and successively creates all forms of worship. The principle of veneration never dies out. Man fallen into superstition, into sensuality, is never wholly without the visions of the moral sentiment. In like manner, all the expressions of this sentiment are sacred and permanent in proportion to their purity. ”

“ Nay, the bones of the dead, and all other sorts of relies, have been placed over the principal altars in the high and lofty place to be adored with greater reverence. See how what was at first a foolish curiosity for preserving and treasuring up relics, has at length degenerated into such abomination, that men have not only turned away from God, in order to cleave to things vain and perishing, but even with execrable sacrilege to adore things void of sense, instead of Him who liveth, and is blessed for evermore. ”

“ Intelligent people now know that the bone of a saint has in it no greater virtue than the bone of any animal. That a rag from a wandering beggar is just as good as one from a saint, and that the hair of a horse will cure disease just as quickly and surely as the hair of a martyr. We now know that all the sacred relics are religious rubbish; that those who use them are for the most part dishonest, and that those who rely on them are almost idiotic.
This belief in amulets and charms, in ghosts and devils, is superstition, pure and simple. ”

“ Whatever ethical purity may have adorned the lives of the first converts, Christianity as an established religion was not less of a grovelling superstition than Paganism in its worst forms. The worship of martyrs, of saints, the factitious miracles wrought at their graves, the veneration of their relics and images, were but a travesty of polytheism under another name without the saving graces of the old belief. ”

“ It is not my intention now to discuss the abominable abuse of the relics of our Lord, as well as of the saints, at this present time, in the most part of Christendom. This subject alone would require a separate volume; for it is a well-known fact that the most part of the relics which are displayed every where are false, and have been put forward by impostors who have most impudently deceived the poor world. ”

“ Christianity does not condemn any natural human feeling, but it will not let these interfere with present duty and destroy future usefulness. It does not send men to search for the purpose of living in the graves of their dead hopes and pleasures. Its disciples must not attempt to live on the relics of even great incidents, among crucifixes and tombs. ”

“ But if you do not worship graven images, it is only because you are mentally and morally quite incapable of graving them. True religion, perhaps, is above idolatry. But you are below idolatry. You are not holy enough yet to worship a lump of stone. ”

“ It is not to Assisi in its marvellous basilica that one must go to divine and comprehend St. Francis; he must turn his steps to Santa Maria degli Angeli at the hours when the stated prayers cease, at the moment when the evening shadows lengthen, when all the fripperies of worship disappear in the obscurity,- 68 - when all the nation seems to collect itself to listen to the chime of the distant church bells. ”

“ Francis died very joyfully. At the fall of the night he died, and while still the brethren were gazing upon his face there dropped down on the thatch of the cell in which he lay larks innumerable, and most sweetly they sang, as though they rejoiced at the release of their holy kinsman.
He was buried at the great church at Assisi; but though it is thought he lies beneath the high altar, the spot is unknown to any man, and the hill-folk say that St. Francis is not dead at all, but that he lives hidden in a secret crypt far down below the roots of wall and pillar. ”

“ But, finally, we remark, that whereas human nature has ever been prone to the superstition of local consecrations and personal idolatries, by means of memorial relics, apparently it is the usage of God to hallow such remembrances by removing, abolishing, and confounding all traces of their punctual identities. ”

“ How can the bones of any man be worth framing in gold and silver," he asked, "when the body of the Son of God was laid beneath a miserable stone?" He exhorted the people to turn from the visible and obvious to the invisible. He maintained that the worship of relics was opposed to true religion because "not until the disciples were bereaved of the bodily presence of Christ could the Holy Ghost descend upon them." He even rejected the prevalent, entirely materialistic, view of a life after death, and dared to suggest that the torments of hell should be interpreted spiritually. ”