da Parma Giovanni

“ Wherefore the Blessed Francis, as a true Follower and Disciple of the Saviour, gave himself up from the beginning of his Conversion with all his Heart, with all his Strength, and with all his Mind, to seek and to find, to have and to hold the Lady Poverty, dreading no Adversity, fearing no Evil, sparing no labour, shunning no suffering of the body, so only that he might come unto her to whom the Lord had given the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The embrace of the leper marked the final abandonment in Francis’ soul of the sense of separation between himself, the son of the wealthy Bernardone, and the outcasts of society. Henceforth to Francis, the poor and the outcast were human brethren, worthy of a brother’s intimate love and care. In the same moment he cast aside, once for all, his youthful dream of entering the ranks of chivalry, and seeking renown in battle and tournament. Henceforth he would be the servant of his brothers the poor, and “serve the Lord in Poverty and Humility.” ”

“ The poverty of our city slums where hearts break in discontent, and souls are starved for lack of spiritual intelligence—such was not the poverty of Francis’ dream. To use again his own manner of speech, this is poverty in slavery, degraded and dishonoured by the vice and selfishness of man. With a full heart would he have set himself to rescue his Ideal from her modern degradation and restore her to her place of honour upon the earth. Knight-errant as he was, he would not have rested until poverty was made honourable amongst men. ”

“ Whatever was good and beautiful was to him an indication of the Divine Goodness and Beauty, a portal of the Eternal Kingdom; and with keen spiritual intuition he discovered the good and the beautiful, where men of lesser sensibility would only find the commonplace and the material. “To them that love God, all things work together unto Good;” [29] the truly spiritual man discovers the imprint of the Divine Life along all the highways and byways of Creation: just as the poet’s eye discovers beauty in the woodland through which the ordinary wayfarer passes unheeding. ”

“ Thus the whole creation poured into the Soul of Francis an unceasing stream of spiritual life, and with the inflowing life came joy—joy unutterable; and sorrow too. For life as it is, has no joy altogether separate from pain. There is tragedy in the purest romance, death even where there is life. ”

“ But will it ever be that poverty shall again regain amongst the hungry multitude the honourable estate with which the Saint of Assisi had endowed it? Will it ever be rescued from its present inhuman conditions? The future only can tell; and they who strive that it shall be so can only work in the strength of their faith; but faith verily can accomplish the apparently impossible, if faith itself be strong. Meanwhile the ideal of Francis has assuredly a prophetic message for the multitude which is not hungry. ”

“ The meaning of Christ, however, is made clear, by His own earthly life and by the lives of His early disciples. “Poverty of Spirit” means nothing less than detachment of heart from the possession or achievement of material gain, and from its attendant pleasures. No man can be a disciple of Christ who is not free from the moral slavery which wealth and temporal possessions so easily set upon the soul. To no man is given the spiritual insight and vision which alone can bring rest eternal to man’s spirit, unless he have first put from him the lust of the earth. ”

“ In money-making and luxury lie the elemental dangers to our spiritual life. “Money,” says Cardinal Newman, “is a sort of creation, and gives the acquirer, even more than the possessor, an imagination of his own power, and tends to make him idolise himself. Again, what we have hardly won we are unwilling to part with; so that a man who has himself made his wealth will commonly be penurious, or, at least, will not part with it except in exchange for what will reflect credit on himself or increase his importance. ”

“ No man has an absolute ownership before God, so that he may satisfy his own whim or pleasure without consideration for what is due by Divine Law to his fellow-men. Possession in the sphere of conscience is stewardship. The rich are God’s stewards, appointed to “give to every man his just measure in due season.” Such briefly is the precept of Evangelical Poverty—a precept which has no direct connection with any theory of social economics, but is based upon the fundamental law of religion, that only the poor in spirit are spiritually free and capable of citizenship in the realm of eternal life. ”

“ And lest any be amazed that the Religious life should ever have fallen even half as low as is here portrayed, let them remember that the higher the ideal, the further the fall when it comes, and that the Lady Poverty has ever punished her betrayers by the completest degradation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In what could it hurt you to have the necessaries of Life, so long as you lack all Superfluities? For in Peace and Quietness could you work out your Salvation and the Salvation of Mankind, if you were supplied with all Things Needful to you. Therefore, while you have Time, provide for yourselves and those who shall come after you, for Men may not always be so generous to you, nor give you the customary Gifts. It would be good for you to be always as you are, but that is impossible, for God causes you daily to increase and multiply. ”

“ I am not new, [21] as many think, but old and full of years, knowing the nature of Things, the Varieties of Creatures, the mutability of Time. I know the vacillations of the Heart of Man, in part by the experience of Ages, in part by subtlety of Nature, in part by the Merit of Grace. In the beginning I dwelt in the Paradise of God, where Man was naked. ”

“ It strikes strangely upon modern ears to hear a Divine petition that certain men may ever be known as men who lived upon others. But it is logical, as Francis always was. There can be no evangelical poverty with possessions, and yet man must keep body and soul together; hence mendicancy is the only resource of the real lovers of my Lady Poverty. This sentiment recalls the famous saying of St Francis in the Fifth of his “Collationes Monasticæ”: “There is a compact between the World and my Brothers. They owe it a good example, and the World in return must provide them with all necessities. ”

“ I pray and most earnestly beseech you, as most dear Sons, to persevere in those Things which you have begun by the Inspiration of the Holy Ghost, not abandoning your Perfection as is the Custom with some, but avoiding all the Snares of Darkness, strive ever after Things more Perfect. Most high is your Perfection, above Man and the Strength of Man, and it excels in its Brightness the Perfection of your Forefathers. ”

“ Remember, O Lord Jesus, that Poverty is so much the Queen of the Virtues, that Thou, forsaking the dwelling-place of the Angels, didst descend upon Earth in order to espouse her in Love Everlasting, and so as to bring forth in her, and by her, and through her, all the Children of Perfection. ”

“ The Lady Poverty (to borrow the Saint’s own imagery) was an outcast; she was the despised of men; and she walked amid the rough ways of the earth with threadbare garments and bruised feet.
The story how Francis found his ideal bride and came to love her with chivalric devotion, is too well known to need repetition. ”

“ The joy which is dependent upon the possession of the merely visible and material can never reach the inmost spirit of man, even were such possession not, at best, uncertain and of its nature transitory. Nay, the joy of life, which springs from man’s own spirit, is impossible to him whose heart is set upon the merely external world. For the spiritual and the material are in the immediate aspect a simple antithesis ”

“ But whilst my Disciples were thus walking in so great Fervour of the Love of Christ, Avarice, taking to herself the Name of Discretion, spake and said unto them: Do not show yourselves so severe to Mankind, nor thus contemn their Honours, but have a kindly Countenance for them, and do not outwardly reject the Honours offered to you: be content to do so inwardly. ”

“ One day, some years after his disinheritance, the Saint and one of his disciples, Brother Masseo, were eating a scanty meal of broken bread, begged by the way; they ate near a fountain, and a large stone was their table. “O Brother Masseo,” said Francis, his soul bubbling with joy, “we are not worthy of so great a treasure;” and he repeated these words several times. Brother Masseo answered: “Father, how canst thou talk of a treasure where there is so much poverty and indeed a lack of all things? for we have neither cloth, nor knife nor dish, nor table, nor house ”

“ The enduring strength of a nation, as of an individual, depends upon moral fibre and spiritual vision. If these be destroyed no nation can long remain save as a warning to the nations that shall come. Undoubtedly there are strong tendencies amongst us towards the worship of wealth and its attendant luxuries and towards a selfish accumulation of wealth beyond all possible needs, tendencies which acquire strength with the growth of empire and trade. Well for us is it that at this time Francis of Assisi is becoming widely known. ”

“ Poverty, as Francis preached it, is an integral element in the Christian life. Christianity imperatively demands of all its followers an acceptance of the truth which Francis embodied so wonderfully in himself. No one can enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless he be as Francis was, a lover of Poverty. ”

“ Clad in his peasant’s dress, and with no possessions of his own in the world save his soul and body, [28] he is nevertheless the man rich in all things that are of vital interest, the clear spiritual vision, the perfect joy, the encompassing sympathy, which gathers all palpitating life into its own. Francis lived, if ever a man lived. His was the liberty of soul which finds the joy of life in all Creation. ”

“ Your Heart will turn after other Things, but Reason will call you to return to the Former Things. Lapsed into Sloth and Idleness, Words of Excuse will rise easily to your Lips: We cannot be strong as we were in the Beginning, and now the Times are changed ”

“ You cannot satisfy your nature with the transitory, and yet retain an appetite for the Eternal. Consequently, he who would be free and retain a relish for the life of the Spirit, must beware of the lust of the earth, and keep a detached heart towards what is of its nature unspiritual.
To St Francis, a man amongst men, the lust of the earth was radically allied with pride of class, an inordinate ambitiousness of glory, and a love of luxury. Poverty, as Francis understood it, meant the antithesis of all this. ”

“ These were men of virtue, peaceful men, without Rebuke before the Lord, constant in brotherly Love, so long as they remained in the Flesh, poor in Spirit, poor in this World’s Goods, rich in Holiness, abounding in the Gifts of Heavenly Grace, fervent in Spirit, rejoicing in Hope, patient in Tribulation, meek and humble of Heart, and keeping Peace in their Souls, Harmony in their Ways, Steadfastness in their Hearts, and a joyful Unity in their Walk through Life. ”

“ In my translation I have been no bondsman, but have rendered freely, while seeking to convey accurately the spirit and meaning of the work, and to preserve, as far as that might be, the elemental simplicity of its language.
The “Sacrum Commercium” is a tissue of the words and phrases of St Jerome’s beautiful Latin version of Holy Scripture. Where so much is Biblical, I have had to a certain extent to adopt Biblical language, but I have striven earnestly to avoid those excesses of Archaism which irritate even the most equable nerves. ”

“ But the Blessed Giovanni was not made of such poor stuff! He who endured hatred, persecution and imprisonment, to some extent by reason of his zeal for the Lady Poverty, was not the man to resort to so trivial a ruse. His deeds were far more unpopular (with some) than ever this little allegory could have made him.
Père Edouard d’Alençon, with much ingenuity, seeks to credit Giovanni Parenti, St Francis’ immediate successor as Minister General (1227-1233) , with the authorship. ”

“ Who is there that does not reverence and honour thee, when He Whom all the Heavenly Host adore hath clothed thee with such Honour? Who would not readily adore thy Footsteps, to whom the Lord of Majesty so humbly inclined, whom He so intimately embraced, to whom he was joined in so great a Love? ”

“ But was ever Italian peasant so utterly degraded as are many of the victims of modern industrialism? Poverty with Francis was the mother of spiritual freedom; poverty in the London slum is synonymous with hard materialism and irreligion. ”

“ Why, therefore, do you not receive the Goods which are offered you, and not defraud the Givers of their Eternal Reward? You need fear no harm from the possession of Riches, so long as you account them as Nought. There is no Evil in Things themselves, but only in the Soul of Man, for God ♦Gen. i. 31.♦ saw All Things and they were good. To the Good, all Things are good, all Things serviceable, for them All Things were made. O how many having possessions use them evilly, which had they been yours, would have been put to a good use, for holy is your Purpose, holy your Desire. ”