The upper valley of the Arno forms in the very center of Italy a country apart—the Casentino—which through centuries had its own life, somewhat like an island in the midst of the ocean. The river flows out from it by a narrow defile at the south, and on all other sides the Apennines encircle it with a girdle of inaccessible mountains.
The people are charming and refined; the mountains have sheltered them from wars, and on every side we see the signs of labor, prosperity, a gentle gaiety. The vegetation on the borders of the Arno is thoroughly tropical; the olive and the mulberry marry with the vine. On the lower hill-slopes are wheat fields divided by meadows, and then come the chestnuts and the oaks, higher still the pine, fir, larch, and above all the bare rock.
La Verna is located in the Casentine Valley, south of Bologna and east of Florence. Sabatier notes that “The forest has been preserved as a relic. Alexander IV fulminated excommunication against whoever should cut down the firs of Verna” (SABATIER, p. 289). Another historian, echoing Sabatier, writes: “Its summit, covered with fir-trees, straight and close together, appears like a great whale that has rested there since the days of the flood. Below the forest lie huge boulders of rock and yawning chasms, upheaved, says the legend, during the earthquake at the time of the Crucifixion. To this solitary place came Francis in the year 1224 to celebrate by forty days of fasting and prayer the feast of St. Michael the Archangel” (GORDON, p. 72).
A monastery sits today at the top of La Verna, and in the chapel there are the famous terracotta panels (ceramics) of biblical scenes executed by members of the talented della Robbia family in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It is a popular place of pilgrimage today.
Among all the peaks there is one that especially attracts the attention. Instead of a rounded and somewhat flattened top, it rises slender, proud, and isolated. It is the Verna.
One might think it to be an immense rock fallen from the sky, a little like a petrified Noah’s ark on the summit of Mount Ararat. The basaltic mass, perpendicular on all sides, is crowned with a plateau planted with pines and gigantic beeches, and accessible only by a footpath. Such was the solitude that Orlando, Count of Chiusi, had given to Francis, and to which Francis had already many a time come for quiet and contemplation.
Seated upon the few stones of the Penna, the highest point on the plateau, he heard only the whispering of the wind among the trees, but in the splendor of the sunrise or the sunset he could see nearly all of the districts in which he had sown the seed of the gospel: the Romagna and the March of Ancona, losing themselves on the horizon in the waves of the Adriatic; Umbria; and farther away, Tuscany, vanishing in the waters of the Mediterranean.
Francis desired to return to La Verna after the chapter of 1224. This meeting was the last at which he was present. A new Rule was put into the hands of the ministers there, and a mission to England decided upon.
In the early days of August, Francis made his way toward La Verna. With him were only a few brothers: Masseo, Angelo, and Leo. The first had been charged to direct the little band and to spare Francis all duties except prayer.
“They came to this mountain in high spirits. Francesco had accepted Count Orlando’s offer without his usual reservations about the hospitality of the wealthy and powerful. The wise count had not offered them a seat at his table, soft beds, or polished floors; he did not seek, as so many did, to make house pets of the friars. Rather, he offered them a rugged wilderness in which to pray and fast, a place uninhabited because inhospitable. Francesco was convinced the invitation was from God” (MARTIN, pp. 66–67).
They were on the road two days when it became necessary to seek a donkey for Francis, who was too feeble to continue on foot. The brothers, in asking for this gift, failed to conceal the name of their master, and the peasant, to whom they had addressed themselves respectfully, asked permission to join them, guiding the beast himself.
After going on for a time, the peasant said, “Is it true, that you are Brother Francis of Assisi?”
“Very well,” he went on, after the answer was in the affirmative, “apply yourself to be as good as folk say you are, that they may not be deceived in their expectations—that is my advice.”
Francis immediately got down from the donkey and, prostrating himself before the peasant, thanked him warmly.
Meanwhile, the warmest hour of the day had come on. The peasant, exhausted with fatigue, little by little forgot his surprise and joy. One does not feel the burning of thirst any less when walking beside a saint. He had begun to regret his kindness, and at that moment Francis pointed with his finger to a spring, unknown until then, and which has never been seen since.
At last they arrived at the foot of the last precipice. Before scaling it they paused to rest a little under a great oak, and immediately flocks of birds gathered around them, testifying their joy by songs and flutterings of their wings. Hovering around Francis, they alighted on his head, his shoulders, or his arms. “I see,” he said joyfully to his companions, “that it is pleasing to our Lord Jesus that we live in this solitary mount, since our brothers and sisters the birds have shown such great delight at our coming.”
Two of the finest paintings in the Assisi cycle of Giotto are inspired by this time on La Verna. “The Stigmata” is one of the most imitated images in the history of art, and the “Miracle of the Spring” portrays Francis in prayer to God for water on behalf of the poor peasant, and as a result, water gushing forth from dry rock. Thus was Francis shown to be a new Moses, to whom Jesus too was often compared in early Christian literature.
This mountain was at once his Tabor and his Calvary. We must not wonder, then, that legends have flourished here even more numerously than at any other period of his life. Many of them have the exquisite charm of the little flowers, rosy and perfumed, that hide themselves modestly at the feet of the fir trees of La Verna.
The summer nights up there are of unparalleled beauty. Nature, stifled by the heat of the sun, seems then to breathe anew. In the trees, behind the rocks, on the turf, a thousand voices rise up, sweetly harmonizing with the murmur of the great woods. But among all these voices there is not one that forces itself upon the attention; it is a melody that you enjoy without listening. You let your eyes wander over the landscape, still for long hours illumined with hieratic tints by the departed star of the day, and the peaks of the Apennines, flooded with rainbow hues, drop down into your soul what the Franciscan poet Thomas of Celano called the nostalgia of the everlasting hills.
More than anyone else, Francis felt it. The very evening of their arrival, seated upon a mound in the midst of his brothers, he gave them his directions for their dwelling-place. He spoke with them of his approaching death with the regret of the laborer overtaken by the shades of evening before the completion of his task, with the sighs of the father who trembles for the future of his children.
In his brief “Rule for Hermitages,” about five years earlier, Francis had written: “Let those who wish to stay in hermitages in a religious way be three brothers or, at the most, four; let two of these be ‘the mother’ and have two ‘sons’ or at least one. Let the two who are ‘mothers’ keep the life of Martha and the two ‘sons’ the life of Mary and let one have one enclosure in which each one may have his cell in which he may pray and sleep” (ARMSTRONG, p. 61).
For himself during this time he desired to prepare for death by prayer and contemplation, and he begged them to protect him from all intrusion. Orlando, who had already come to bid them welcome and offer his services, had at Francis’s request hastily caused a hut of boughs to be made at the foot of a great beech. It was there that Francis desired to dwell, at a stone’s throw from the cells inhabited by his companions. Brother Leo was charged to bring him that which he would need each day.
He retired to his hut immediately after this memorable conversation, but several days later, embarrassed no doubt by the pious curiosity of the friars who watched all his movements, he went farther into the woods, and on Assumption Day he began there the Lent that he desired to observe.
Genius has its modesty as well as love. The poet, the artist, the saint, need to be alone when the Spirit comes to move them. Every effort of thought, of imagination, or of will is a prayer, and one does not pray in public. Jesus felt it deeply: The raptures of Tabor are brief; they may not be told.
Before these soul mysteries materialists and devotees often demand precision in the things that can the least endure it. The believer asks in what spot on the Verna Francis received the stigmata; whether the seraph that appeared to him was Jesus of a celestial spirit; what words were spoken as he imprinted them upon him; and the believer no more understands that hour when Francis fainted with woe and love than the materialist who asks to see with his eyes and touch with his hands the gaping wound.
Francis was distressed for the future of the Order, and with an infinite desire for new spiritual progress. He was consumed with the fever of saints—that need of immolation that wrung from St. Teresa the passionate cry, “Either to suffer or to die!” He was bitterly reproaching himself for not having been found worthy of martyrdom, not having been able to give himself for him who gave himself for us.
We touch here upon one of the most powerful and mysterious elements of the Christian life. We may very easily not understand it, but we may not deny it. It is the root of true mysticism. The really new thing that Jesus brought into the world was that, feeling himself in perfect union with the heavenly Father, he called all people to unite themselves to him and through him to God: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (Jn. 15:5).
The Christ not only preached this union, he made it felt. On the evening of his last day he instituted its sacrament, and there is probably no sect that denies that communion is at once the symbol, the principle, and the aim and goal of the religious life.
The night before he died he took the bread and broke it and distributed it to them, saying, “Take and eat, for this is my body.”
Jesus, while presenting union with himself as the very foundation of the new life, took care to point out to his brethren that this union was before all things a sharing in his work, in his struggles, and his sufferings: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Lk. 9:23).
St. Paul entered so perfectly into the Master’s thought in this respect that he uttered a few years later this cry of a mysticism that has never been equalled: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:19–20). This utterance is not an isolated exclamation with him; it is the very center of his religious consciousness. Paul goes so far as to say—at the risk of scandalizing many Christians—“In my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Col. 1:24).
Perhaps it has been useful to enter into these thoughts in order to show to what point Francis is allied to the apostolic tradition during these last years of his life, as he renews in his body the passion of Christ. In the solitudes of the Verna, as formerly at San Damiano, Jesus presented himself to him as the Crucified One, the man of sorrows.
On the Verna, Francis was even more absorbed than usual in his ardent desire to suffer for Jesus and with him. His days were divided between exercises of piety in the humble sanctuary on the mountain top and meditation in the depths of the forest. He even forgot the services, and remained several days alone in a cave of the rock going over in his heart the memories of Golgotha. At other times he would remain for long hours at the foot of the altar, reading and re-reading the Gospel and entreating God to show him the way in which he ought to walk. The book almost always opened of itself to the story of the Passion, and this simple coincidence—though easy enough to explain—was enough to excite him.
The vision of the Crucified One took fuller possession of his faculties as the day of the Elevation of the Holy Cross drew near (September 14), a festival now relegated to the background, but in the thirteenth century celebrated with a fervor and zeal very natural for a solemnity that might be considered the patronal festival of the Crusades.
The story of the stigmata is told in the tales of The Little Flowers. One historian writes that, in contrast to it, Thomas of Celano’s telling of the events are “suspiciously elaborate.” Sabatier follows The Little Flowers version more closely than the even more fantastical language of Thomas of Celano and the other early biographers. “By contrast Leo and Angelo were only a few hundred yards away and later the same morning heard from Francis’s own lips what he had seen and felt. . . . Long after Francis died, [Brother Leo] told the full story. . .to a spiritual lay brother in the next generation, James of Massa. He in turn passed it on to the friars in the Marches from whom The Little Flowers emanated in the fourteenth century” (HOUSE, pp. 257–58).
Francis doubled his fastings and prayers, “quite transformed into Jesus by love and compassion,” says one of the legends. He passed the night before the festival alone in prayer, not far from the hermitage. In the morning he had a vision. In the rays of the rising sun, which after the chill of night came to revive his body, he suddenly perceived a strange form. A seraph, with outspread wings, flew toward him from the edge of the horizon and bathed his soul in raptures unutterable. In the center of the vision appeared a cross, and the seraph was nailed upon it.
When the vision disappeared, he felt sharp sufferings mingling with the ecstasy of the first moments. Stirred to the very depths of his being, he was anxiously seeking the meaning of it all when he perceived on his body the stigmata of the Crucified One.
Francis fascinates us, in part, because he seems to contain opposites. For example, as we read from the chapter just concluded to the one that follows, we see how he is both a sublime mystic and a man whose faith is grounded in the creation itself. It is interesting to imagine these two qualities exhibited in his two hands. At the end of his life, in his personal “Testament,” Francis spoke of his hands in a way that encompassed his entire ministry: “God gave me brothers. . . . We were simple and subject to each other. . . . I worked with my hands, then, and I still desire to do so.” (FRANCIS, pp. 97-98).