Thomas of Celano, very brief as to all that concerns Francis’s sojourn in the Eternal City, recounts at full length the lightheartedness of the little band on leaving it. Already it began to be transfigured in their memory—pains, fatigues, fears, disquietude, hesitations were all forgotten. They thought only of the fatherly assurances of the supreme pontiff and promised themselves to make ever new efforts to follow the Rule with fidelity.
Full of these thoughts they set out, without provisions, preaching in such places as they came upon along their route. People hastened from all parts to hear these preachers who were more severe upon themselves than on anyone else. Members of the secular clergy, monks, learned people, rich even, often mingled in the impromptu audiences gathered in the streets and public places. Not all were converted, but it would have been very difficult for any of them to forget this stranger whom they met one day upon their way, and who in a few words had moved them to the very bottom of their hearts with anxiety and fear.
“the bright morning star”: This phrase originated with Thomas of Celano and became popularly understood in the decades after Francis’s death. Dante wrote in his Paradiso that when speaking of Assisi, we might more properly name it “Orient,” where the morning star, the Sun, rises. Speaking metaphorically of Francis, Dante wrote: “He was not yet far distant from his rising / Before he had begun to make the earth / Some comfort from his mighty virtue feel” (canto xi).
Francis was in truth, as Celano says, the bright morning star. His simple preaching took hold on consciences. “The whole country trembled, the barren land was already covered with a rich harvest, the withered vine began again to blossom.”
The greatest crime of our industrial and commercial civilization is that it leaves us a taste only for that which may be bought with money, and makes us overlook the purest and truest joys that are all the time within our reach. “Why,” said the God of old Isaiah, “do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food” (Isa. 55:2). Joys bought with money—noisy, feverish pleasures—are nothing compared with those sweet, quiet, modest but profound, lasting, and peaceful joys, enlarging, not wearying the heart.
In the plain of Assisi, at an hour’s walk from the city and near the highway between Perugia and Rome, was a ruinous cottage called Rivo-Torto. A torrent, almost always dry, but capable of becoming terrible in a storm, descends from Mount Subasio and passes beside it. The ruin had no owner; it had served as a leper hospital. Now came Francis and his companions to seek shelter there.
Regarding the Carceri, one century-old guide to Assisi writes, “Even to call such shelters huts is giving them too grand a name, for they were but caverns excavated in the rock, scattered here and there in a deep mountain gorge. They can still be seen, unchanged since the days of St. Francis save for the tresses of ivy growing thick, like a curtain, across the entrance, for now there are none to pass in and out to pray there. . . . [L]ater Franciscan writers. . .no longer caring to live in caves, only saw Dantesque visions when they thought of these arid, sunburnt rocks, rushing torrents and wild wastes of mountains which even shepherds never reached” (GORDON, p. 84). Visitors to Assisi today may visit Carceri (“the Hermitage”), but it requires a fairly steep hike of about two miles, or a short taxi ride. Francis’s own grotto at Carceri is an important place of pilgrimage.
The principal motive for the choice of the place seems to have been the proximity of the Carceri, as the shallow natural grottos are called that are found in the forests, halfway up the side of Mount Subasio. These little hermitages, sufficiently isolated to secure them from disturbance, but near enough to the cities to permit their going there to preach, may be found wherever Francis went. They form, as it were, a series of documents about his life quite as important as the written witnesses. Something of his soul may still be found in these caverns in the Apennine forests. He never separated the contemplative from the active life.
The return of the Brothers to Rivo-Torto was marked by a vast increase in popularity.
The prejudiced attacks to which they had formerly been subjected were lost in a chorus of praises. But they suffered much; this part of the plain of Assisi is inundated by torrents nearly every autumn, and many times the poor friars, blockaded in the lazaretto, were forced to satisfy their hunger with a few roots from the neighboring fields. The barrack in which they lived was so narrow that, when they were all there at once, they had much difficulty not crowding one another.
When the people of Assisi learned that Francis’s Rule had been approved by the pope there was strong excitement. Everyone desired to hear him preach. The clergy were obliged to give way: they offered him the Church of San Giorgio, but this church was manifestly insufficient for the crowds of hearers. It was necessary to open the cathedral to him.
St. Francis rarely said anything especially new. To win hearts he had what is worth more than any arts of oratory—an ardent conviction. He spoke as compelled by the imperious need of kindling others with the flame that burned within himself. When they heard him recall the horrors of war, the crimes of the populace, the laxity of the great, the rapacity that dishonored the Church, the age-long widowhood of Poverty, each person felt taken to task in his or her own conscience.
An attentive or excited crowd is always very impressionable, but this peculiar sensitivity was perhaps stronger in the Middle Ages than at any other time. Nervous disturbances were in the air, and upon people thus prepared the will of the preacher impressed itself in an almost magnetic manner.
To understand what Francis’s preaching must have been like we must forget the manners of today and transport ourselves for a moment to the Cathedral of Assisi in the thirteenth century. It is still standing, but the centuries have given to its stones a fine rust of polished bronze that recalls Venice and Titian’s tones of ruddy gold. It was new then, and all sparkling with whiteness, with the fine rosy tinge of the stones of Mount Subasio. It had been built by the people of Assisi a few years before; so, when the people thronged into it on their high days, they not only had none of the vague respect for a holy place that, though it has passed into the customs of other countries, still continues to be unknown in Italy, but they felt themselves at home in a palace that they had built for themselves. More than in any other church there they felt themselves at liberty to criticize the preacher, and they had no hesitation in showing him, either by murmurs of dissatisfaction or by applause, just what they thought of his words. These are the conditions under which Francis first entered the pulpit of San Rufino.
The cathedral of San Rufino dates from around 1000 C.E. It is named for the first bishop of Assisi, who was martyred during one of the Roman persecutions of Christians (238 C.E.). He was drowned in the Chiascio River and his faithful later buried his bones under the high altar. St. Clare was raised in the home directly to the left of the old cathedral, as you stand facing it.
His success was startling. The poor felt that they had found a friend, a brother, a champion, almost an avenger. The thoughts that they hardly dared murmur beneath their breath Francis proclaimed at the top of his voice, daring to bid all, without distinction, to repent and love one another. His words were a cry of the heart, an appeal to the consciences of all his fellow citizens, almost recalling the passionate utterances of the prophets of Israel. Like those witnesses for Yahweh the “little poor man” of Assisi had put on sackcloth and ashes to denounce the iniquities of his people, like theirs was his courage and heroism, like theirs the divine tenderness in his heart.
It was St. Francis who set the example of open-air sermons given in the vernacular, at street corners, in public squares, in the fields. To feel the change that he brought about we must read the sermons of his contemporaries; declamatory, scholastic, subtile, they delighted in the minutiae of exegesis or dogma, serving up refined dissertations on the most obscure texts of the Hebrew Bible, to hearers starving for a simple and wholesome diet.
With Francis, on the contrary, all is incisive, clear, practical. He pays no attention to the precepts of the rhetoricians, he forgets himself completely, thinking only of the end desired, the conversion of souls. And conversion was not in his view something vague and indistinct that must take place only between God and the hearer. No, we will have immediate and practical proofs of conversion. We must give up ill-gotten gains, renounce our enmities, be reconciled with our adversaries.
In Assisi, Francis threw himself into the thick of civil dissension. An agreement in 1202 between the parties who divided the city, following the battles with Perugia, had been wholly ephemeral. The common people were continually demanding new freedoms that
the nobles and burghers would yield to them only under the pressure of fear. Francis took up the cause of the weak, the minores, and succeeded in reconciling them with the rich, the majores.
“To understand what Francis’s preaching must have been like”: Father Cuthbert, in his Life of St. Francis of Assisi, adds: “His language was homely, as it was spoken by the people themselves; he borrowed none of the phrases of the schools: oftentimes the homeliness of the speech was elevated only by the sincerity of the speaker, at other times by the dramatic vividness of the thought or a poetic sensibility to nature” (CUTHBERT, p. 115).
In contrast to the vividness of Francis’s preaching, one scholar has summarized that of Pope Innocent III: “These sermons, to the modern reader, are dry. . .barren. . . . His preaching shows how scholastic influences had turned the Bible from a book of emotional and ethical truth into a book of scientific truth, and how a vast and minute ecclesiastical polity was hardening and drying the living tissue of the great religious organism” (SEDGWICK, VOL. 1, p. 27).
His spiritual family as yet, properly speaking, had no name. Unlike those too hasty spirits that baptize their productions before they have come to light, Francis was waiting for the occasion that would reveal the true name he ought to give it.
One day someone was reading the Rule in his presence. When he came to the passage, “Let the brothers, wherever they may find themselves called to labor or to serve, never take an office that will put them over others, but on the contrary, let them always be under (sint minores) all those who may be in the house.” These words, sint minores of the Rule, after the circumstances then existing in the city, suddenly appeared to him as a providential indication. His institution should be called the Order of the Brothers Minor.
We can imagine the effect of this determination. The saint—for already this magic word had burst forth where he appeared—the saint had spoken. It was he who was about to bring peace to the city, acting as arbiter between the two factions that rent it.
We still possess the document of this pace civile, exhumed, so to speak, from the communal archives of Assisi by the learned and pious Antonio Cristofani. The opening lines are as follows:
In the name of God!
May the supreme grace of the Holy Spirit assist us! To the honor of our Lord Jesus Christ, the blessed Virgin Mary, the Emperor Otho, and Duke Leopold.
This is the statute and perpetual agreement between the Majori and Minori of Assisi.
Without common consent there shall never be any sort of alliance either with the pope and his nuncios or legates, or with the emperor, or with the king, or with their nuncios or legates, or with any city or town, or with any important person, except with a common accord they shall do all that there may be to do for the honor, safety, and advantage of the commune of Assisi.
What follows is worthy of the beginning. The lords, in consideration of a small periodical payment, should renounce all feudal rights. The inhabitants of the villages subject to Assisi were put on a par with those of the city, foreigners were protected, and the assessment of taxes was fixed. On Wednesday, November 9, 1210, this agreement was signed and sworn to in the public place of Assisi. It was made in such good faith that exiles were able to return in peace, and from this day we find in the city registers the names of those émigrés who, in 1202, had betrayed their city and provoked the disastrous war with Perugia. Francis might well be happy. Love had triumphed, and for several years there were at Assisi neither victors nor vanquished.