The missionary journey, undertaken under the encouragement of St. Clare and so poetically inaugurated by the sermon to the birds of Bevagna, appears to have been a continual triumph for Francis. Legend definitely takes possession of him. Whether he will or not, miracles burst forth under his footsteps. Quite unexpectedly the objects of which he had made use produced marvelous effects; folk came out from the villages in procession to meet him.
Masseo was the handsome brother mentioned above (chap. 9, p. 78). Despite his physical beauty and personal grace and charm, Masseo’s humility was a delight to Francis. The Little Flowers* tells many stories of Masseo and Francis together. One story depicts the two brothers begging their daily bread while on a journey to France. Masseo went through one street, Francis another. And while Masseo received choice food—fresh bread cut from the loaf—Francis received only meager scraps. The discrepancy only added to Francis’s joy, we are told, and the two men blessed the gifts received by Divine Providence.
*The Little Flowers is a collection of short tales from the life and legend of Francis compiled by one Brother Ugolino (not to be confused with Cardinal Ugolino, Francis’s contemporary, who became Pope Gregory IX) after the saint’s death. First written in Latin, the book was titled Actus Beati Francisci et Sociorum Ejus (“The Deeds of St. Francis and His Companions”), and later abridged and translated into Italian as I Fioretti di San Francesco (“The Little Flowers of St. Francis”).
One day Brother Masseo desired to put his modesty to the test:
“Everybody follows you, everyone desires to see you, hear you, and obey you, and yet for all that you are neither beautiful, nor learned, nor of noble family. Where does it come from, then, that it should be you whom the world desires to follow?”
On hearing these words the blessed Francis, full of joy, raised his eyes to heaven, and after remaining a long time absorbed in contemplation he knelt, praising and blessing God with great fervor. Then turning toward Masseo, he said, “You wish to know why it is me whom people follow? You wish to know? It is because the eyes of the Most High have willed it. He continually watches the good and the wicked, and as his most holy eyes have not found among sinners any smaller person, not any more insufficient and more sinful, therefore he has chosen me to accomplish the marvelous work that God has undertaken. He chose me because he could find no one more worthless, and he wished here to confound the nobility and grandeur, the strength, beauty, and the learning of this world.”
This reply throws a ray of light upon St. Francis’s heart. The message that he brought to the world is once again the glad tidings announced to the poor; its purpose is the taking up again of that messianic work that the Virgin of Nazareth caught a glimpse of in her Magnificat, that song of love and liberty, the sighs of which breathe the vision of a new social state. He comes to remind the world that the welfare of humanity, the peace of our hearts, the joy of our lives, are neither in money, nor in learning, nor in strength, but in an upright and sincere will.
The Magnificat, or “Song of Mary,” is one of the loveliest prayers in scripture. It is recorded in Luke’s Gospel (1:46–55) and used in public prayer in most Protestant and Catholic liturgical churches:
My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever.
It was in prayer that Francis found the spiritual strength that he needed; he therefore sought for silence and solitude. If he knew how to do battle in the midst of people in order to win them to the faith, he loved, as Celano says, to fly away like a bird going to make its nest upon a mountain.
With people like Francis, the prayer of the lips, the formulated prayer, is hardly more than an inferior form of true prayer. Even when it is sincere and attentive, and not a mechanical repetition, it is only a prelude for souls not dead of religious materialism. Formulas of prayer are as incapable of speaking the emotions of the soul as model love-letters of speaking the transports of an impassioned heart. To pray is to talk with God, to lift ourselves up to God, to converse with God that God may come down to us. It is an act of meditation, of reflection, that presupposes the effort of all that is most personal in us. Looked at in this sense, prayer is the mother of all freedom. Whether or not it be a soliloquy of the soul with itself, the soliloquy would be none less than the very foundation of a strong individuality.
Now we have come to one of the most delicate features of the life of Francis—his relations with diabolical powers. Customs and ideas have so profoundly changed in all that concerns the existence of the devil and his relations with people, that it is almost impossible to picture to oneself the enormous place that the thought of demons occupied at that time in the minds of people.
The best minds of the Middle Ages believed without a doubt in the existence of the perverse spirit, in his perpetual transformations in an endeavor to tempt people and cause them to fall into his snares. Even in the sixteenth century, Luther, who undermined so many beliefs, had no more doubt of the personal existence of Satan than of sorcery, conjurations, or possessions.
Finding in their souls a wide background of grandeur and wretchedness, from where they sometimes heard a burst of distant harmonies calling them to a higher life, soon to be overpowered by the clamors of the brute, our ancestors could not refrain from seeking the explanation of this duel. They found it in the conflict of the demons with God.
This is how St. Francis, with all people of his time, explained the disquietudes, terrors, and anguish with which his heart was at times assailed, as well as the hopes, consolations, and joys in which his soul was most often bathed. Wherever we follow his steps local tradition has preserved the memory of rude assaults of the tempter that he had to undergo.
Francis believed himself to have many a time fought with the devil, but while for his contemporaries and some of his disciples apparitions, prodigies, and possessions were daily phenomena, for Francis they were exceptional, and remained entirely in the background. In the iconography of St. Benedict, as in that of most of the popular saints, the devil occupies a preponderant place. In that of St. Francis he disappears so completely that in the long series of Giotto’s frescos at Assisi the devil is not seen a single time.
In the same way all that is magic and miracle-working occupies in Francis’s life an entirely secondary rank. Jesus in the Gospels gave his apostles power to cast out evil spirits, and to heal all sickness and all infirmity. Francis surely took literally these words, which made a part of his Rule. He believed that he could work miracles, and he willed to do so, but his religious thought was too pure to permit him to consider miracles otherwise than as an entirely exceptional means of relieving the sufferings of people. Not once do we see him resorting to miracle to prove his apostolate or to bolster up his ideas. His tact taught him that souls are worthy of being won by better means. This almost complete absence of the marvelous (miracles occupy only ten paragraphs in Celano’s first biography of the saint) is all the more remarkable in that it is in absolute contradiction with the tendencies of his time.
In the early biographies of Francis, we find no mention of some of the popular tales from the Francis legend that are recorded in The Little Flowers, compiled from oral tradition a century after Francis’s death. Modern biographers have debated the accuracy of these stories because many of them go unmentioned in the early lives of Francis. Raphael Brown explains: “How then can we explain the puzzling fact that many of its most interesting stories were not recorded in the first official biographies of the Saint, which were based on the testimony of a number of his companions, including Leo, Angelo, and Rufino? The answer is quite simple. It is really a matter of psychology. The Poverello’s best friends would naturally hesitate to mention—and an official biographer would hesitate to describe—a recently canonized Saint of the Church shaking hands with a wolf or eating nothing for forty days or telling his companion to twirl around in a public crossroad or go into a church and preach a sermon while wearing only his breeches” (BROWN, pp. 27–28).
Many heretical groups, by contrast, often took advantage of this thirst for the marvelous to dupe the faithful. The Cathars of Moncoul, for example, made a portrait of the Virgin representing her as one-eyed and toothless, saying that in his humility Christ had chosen a very ugly woman for mother. They had no difficulty in healing several cases of disease by its means; the image became famous, was venerated almost everywhere, and accomplished many miracles until the day when the heretics divulged the deception to the great scandal of the faithful.
Open the life of Francis’s disciple, St. Anthony of Padua (d. 1231) and it is a tiresome catalog of prodigies, healings, resurrections. One would say it was rather the prospectus of some scientist who had invented a new drug than a call to people to conversion and a higher life. It may interest invalids or devotees, but neither the heart nor the conscience is touched by it. It must be said in fairness to Anthony of Padua that his relations with Francis appear to have been very slight.
Among the earliest disciples who had time to fathom their master’s thought to the very depths we find traces of this noble disdain of the marvelous. They knew too well that the perfect joy is not to astound the world with miracles, but that it lives in the love that goes even to self-immolation. Mihi absit gloriari nisi in cruce Domini. “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ . . .” (Gal. 6:14). This is, to this day, the motto of the Brothers Minor.
Thus Brother Egidio asked of God the grace not to perform miracles. He saw in them, as in the passion for learning, a snare in which the proud would be taken, and that would distract the Order from its true mission.
St. Francis’s miracles are all acts of love. The greater number of them are found in the healing of nervous maladies, those apparently inexplicable disquietudes that are the cruel afflictions of critical times. His gentle glance, at once so compassionate and so strong, that seemed like a messenger from his heart, often sufficed to make those who met it forget their suffering.
Jesus was right in saying that a look sufficed to make one an adulterer. But there is also a look—that of the contemplative Mary, for example—that is worth all sacrifices because it includes them all, because it gives, consecrates, immolates the one who looks. Civilization dulls this power of the glance. A part of the education the world gives us consists in teaching our eyes to deceive, in making them expressionless, in extinguishing their flames.
Thomas of Celano recounts: “A Brother was suffering unspeakable tortures. Sometimes he would roll on the ground, striking against whatever lay in his way, frothing at the mouth, horrible to see. At other times he would become rigid, and again, after remaining stark outstretched for a moment, would roll about in horrible contortions.” Francis came to see him and healed him.
“In one of the frescos of the Upper Church of Assisi, Giotto has represented St. Clare and her companions coming out from San Damiano all in tears, to kiss their spiritual father’s corpse as it is being carried to its last home. With an artist’s liberty he has made the chapel a rich church built of precious marbles.
“Happily the real San Damiano is still there, nestled under some olive-trees like a lark under the heather. It still has its ill-made walls of irregular stones, like those that bound the neighboring fields. Which is the more beautiful, the ideal temple of the artist’s fancy, or the poor chapel of reality? No heart will be in doubt.
“Francis’s official historians have done for his biography what Giotto did for his little sanctuary. In general, they have done him ill-service. Their embellishments have hidden the real St. Francis, who was, in fact, infinitely nobler than they have made him to be” (SABATIER, p. XXXIII).
But these are exceptions, and the greater part of the time the saint withdrew himself from the entreaties of his companions when they asked miracles at his hands.