IT is a desperate task, at this time of day, to attempt to say anything about St. Francis of Assisi which is not familiar and even over-familiar to all of us. And yet, as the natural world holds to the very end something in reserve for us, and can show us new beauty and new meaning, again and again, with a freshness, a shock of delight, that keeps pace with our real growth; so it is, I think, with the contemplation of great souls. Here too, because their secret life must always immeasurably exceed our own, there are always fresh paths of approach awaiting us, and always fresh discoveries to be made. That which we know of them in general, is merely the sum total of that which their various lovers have so far seen in them: and that is always a limited vision, conditioned by the seeing mind, of a mystery which stretches away beyond our focus, to be lost to view in the great mystery of life. In this partial way we know something of the effect of great souls upon
(1) Walter Seton Memorial Lecture, delivered at University College, London, 17 January 1933.
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history, their relation to their environment, their special teaching, influence, and charm: and from these various pictures our minds construct a sort of composite photograph, which we only too easily mistake for the real man.
Thus St. Francis has again and again been shown to us, as—among many other things—the humble penitent, the bridegroom of Lady Poverty, the troubadour of God, the enemy of capitalism, the ecstatic of La Verna, the successful revivalist, the brother of the birds, and the poet of the Canticle of the Sun. And yet a rather blurred, even if attractive picture, seems to result from the attempt to combine all these in one figure, perhaps because we still lack the dominant image which shall harmonize them; the picture of the spiritual Francis, the intensely living creature possessed and devoured by a secret love, who finds a fragmentary yet real expression in all these symbolic attitudes and deeds.
For we know that in dealing with St. Francis we are dealing, not with a small neat mind of a particular sort, capable of analysis, but with a great soul who was a genuine source of more abundant life to all who came within his sphere of influence. St. Francis, however else we regard him, is shown by history to have been one of those creative personalities which break out from time to time with disconcerting suddenness within the human scene; to reveal new spiritual possibilities within life, and initiate a new spiritual growth, which flowers in a wide variety of souls.
These creative personalities, in their abrupt appearance, their entirely unconscious originality and free-
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dom, defy all our attempts to classify or to define them. For they are real, individual, intensely living men and women; who are made ardent by a supernatural glow, and become channels of a supernatural energy.
They stand in the gap between the hidden Perfect and the imperfect world, and love not one but both; revealing within history the absolute goodness, applying the absolute standard, and communicating the absolute life, because they are saturated by it, because they cannot conceive existence except in relation to it, not because they have new and interesting opinions about it. This is why we really cannot hope to make much sense of their activities, or relate their outward to their inward life, unless we accept, at least as an hypothesis, the passion and the conviction by which they always live; the passion for God, and the conviction of the absolute priority of the Eternal, the vivid presence and ceaseless pressure of God within the world. Take away this, which is the whole meaning of his life, and the saint looks insignificant, and often rather silly too. He is like one of those hats which are everything on the head, nothing in the hand. Father Wilfred Knox observes in his life of St. Paul, that from the point of view of contemporary Pagan culture, Paul would have appeared as a small and unimpressive Jew, creeping from ghetto to ghetto; yet he bore in his bosom the seed of the Catholic Church. So too St. Frands, if he reappeared amongst us, would certainly seem small and of no reputation—even perhaps intolerably tiresome —to those who could not recognize the supernatural flame of holiness within the homely lantern of his love.
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So it may be, that what is chiefly lacking in our composite portrait of St. Francis, with its invincible attraction, its disconcerting contrasts, and its refusal to fit into our gallery of types, is the subjection of all the elements of the picture to this one overruling fact of Holiness, which gave his life its supernatural intention and supernatural worth. And it may be worth while to look at him again, with this as our controlling thought. The most enthusiastic modern admirers of Francis generally seem to fall into two classes, and arrive at their view-point from two opposite directions; and were we not so dim and vague about fundamentals, so terribly willing to be satisfied with the easy and picturesque, we should perceive the completeness of the contrast between them. For one—the naturalistic school—finds all that really matters about him on the outside; in the give-and-take between Francis and his environment. The other—the supernatural school—finds all that really matters in the inside; in the give-and-take between Francis and the unseen realities of his faith. The naturalistic admirers often seem to think that he is all the more a saint, because he differs from their notion of the normal kind of saint; and they stress these differences all the time. But there is not, of course, any such thing as a normal kind of saint. A saint is just a human being released from the love of self, and enslaved by the love of God. Any kind of human being will do for that, and the less conventional he is the better for the purpose of his new career; for the spirit makes strange demands upon its instruments. The supernatural school, on the contrary, seeks and finds
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in Francis, in a high degree, what it regards as the essential marks of sanctity: a single-minded devotion to the purposes of God, a transforming influence on souls, a total oblation of personality. Absorbed in these great matters, it does not take particular notice of the things that give special delight to the Franciscan naturalist. But the supernaturalist too forgets something; and surely a very important something. He tends to ignore all those human aptitudes and tendencies, those fresh and unconventional judgements of and responses to the world of things, with its good and evil, joy and pain, which form the raw material of holiness: aptitudes and tendencies which become, when transmuted by the fire of love, part—and a very lovely part—of the saint’s living sacrifice to the purposes of the Infinite Life.
It is true in a sense to say that a Christian saint is a new creature. But he is a new creature for which all the old material has been used; and the character of this material will condition his type. For a saint is not an angel, but a solid human being of body, soul and spirit, physically and psychologically conditioned, and operating in space and time. And perhaps it will give us a fresh view at least of one aspect of St. Francis, if we ask what the raw material of personality was in his case. In other words, what sort of person would Francis have been, if he had grown up unconverted; had not been driven to capitulate to the unseen love? Where should we have looked in the world of his day, for the sort of man who is foreshadowed by his early, unconverted life? There is surely not much doubt about that. Francesco
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Bernadone was, from the world’s point of view, a most disconcerting and attractive creature. He had a very high index of aesthetic sensibility, a hunger for romance. He responded with joy to every wayside beauty, and shrank with a peculiar horror from hideous and repulsive things; a sensibility which was afterwards transmuted into an infinite compassion and sympathy for all life. The life of the senses—colour, music, taste, fragrance, texture—meant much to Francis. The living sacrifice he offered was rich with possibility of delight for he was capable of seeing and feeling far more than most men in that created world which is all that most men feel and see, and brought a child’s spontaneity and eagerness, a child’s completeness of response to every experience, simple or sublime, which it offered him.
Add to this the important fact that his response to these experiences always tended to have a dramatic character. He had an immense need of movement and expression. The temper of soul which gave us the Christmas crib at Greccio appears again and again in all the chief incidents of his career. With him, every interior movement and interior light tends to have its outward expression. We find examples of this on every page of the Franciscan story. Such symbolic gestures as the stripping off of his clothes in the streets of Assisi, or the literal mending · of the ruined church, the kissing of the leper, the preaching to the birds, or the exquisite scene at the close of his life, when he fed his brethren with blessed bread: these things are simply expressions of St. Francis’s general attitude to existence. He is equally at home
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in the visible and the invisible world, and lives in both at once. Both are full of friendly presences, from Brother Sun to Sister Death. His very practice of poverty has its dramatic, indeed its sacramental aspect. His life might be regarded as a continuous mystery play; and has proved richer in pictorial incidents than the legend of any other saint.
If beyond this we consider that total indifference to class and convention which makes short work of respectability, takes off its clothes without concern in the open street, and sees no difficulty about adopting the free life of a tramp, remove from all this the religious colour, and look at it with innocence of eye, it is easily recognized as part of the characteristic make-up of the artist-type; perhaps specially of the dramatic poet. The unconverted Francis delightful if somewhat bewildering in his versatility and quickly changing moods, is still a familiar figure in what used to be called Bohemian society. His parents are often solid business people, who cannot understand his irresponsibility and violent reaction from the family ideals. Surely too we get something of the social flexibility of the artist, his easy friendliness with all classes and all types, in Celano’s casual saying of Francis: ‘More sanctified than the saints amongst sinners he was as one of themselves.’ And when we add to all this the incurable troubadour temper, the intense love of rhythm and music which made him regard the First Companions as above all else the Lord’s minstrels and urge on them the duty of song, and the ‘French-like rejoicings’ which broke out as the natural expression of his own fervour for
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God, we can hardly doubt that one of the wedding gifts which Francesco Bernadone made to the Lady Poverty was a laurel crown he might have worn.
Nor is Francis the only natural artist in the Celestial Rose. Here, among others, he has as his companion one of the greatest—yet apparently one of the least Franciscan—of all Christian mystics, that mighty transcendentalist St. John of the Cross: a fact which it is worth while to recollect. The poet of the ‘Canticle of the Sun’, and the poet of ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’ are alike in this, that their intense artistic sensibility gave its special quality of realism to their contemplation of supernatural things. As the great artist shows us in this world a beauty we cannot see or hear without his help; so, by the transfiguration of that same quality, these in their different ways show us a spiritual richness, truth, and beauty which we cannot perceive alone.
Of this sort, then, I think, was the natural Francis before the Divine Charity seized and transformed him; and perhaps the curious fact that this most impasssioned and realistic of Christians has become specially the saint of the unchurched, and is loved by thousands who would hardly accept one of his governing beliefs, is closely connected with his natural make up. For he is somehow felt, as other saints are not, to reveal a beauty and significance in the visible world, a perfection of adjustment to its life, that we had lost or failed to realize before. He brings to men and women that harmony with life for which they crave; and does this in a way that is peculiarly winning, at once poetic and homely, because he is, at one and the same
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time, a poet, an artist, and a saint. Out of our confusions, difficulties, and anxieties, and the unreal sufferings we manufacture for ourselves, he awakes us to the inexhaustible charm, the authentic beauty of a human life so loving and so single-minded, so humble and so courageous, that it cut clean through the web of convention, and came out into the free air of reality. A life, it is true, which contained much suffering and almost continual hardship; but found in these the material of Perfect Joy.
Certainly the wide popularity of Francis owes something to the persuasive charm of certain incidents in that life; as the wide popularity of any beautiful soul always owes something to the gracious actions in which that beauty is expressed. This must be so in our mixed world of sense and spirit, where the appeal of the soul is made through the veil of the flesh. But that is not enough. We must go deeper if we want to find the source of that creative power which history proves that Francis possessed; that transforming innfluence which he exercised and continued to exercise after his bodily death on a multitude of souls of different types. And here we must make the transition from the natural to the spiritual Francis, and try to see together the artist and the mystical saint.
All readers of the letters of Baron von Hügel will remember the penetrating and unconventional sayings of his director, the saintly Abbe Huvelin: and among them one which strikes us on first reading as a paradox. Huvelin said to the Baron on one occasion in answer to a question which is not reported to us, ‘Yes, there have been saints, and even great saints, of
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your type. St. Francis of Assisi—I don’t mean the Franciscans!—there is a saint wholly cast in the mould of life and movement, light and warmth!’ Those who knew the great scholar-saint, or know him from his profound and often difficult teaching, and those who think they know the spirit of St. Francis, will feel baffled by this judgement. For where are we to find the likeness between the vast and deep intellect, the awe-struck spirit of von Hügel, and the little shabby penitent with his inexhaustible vitality, his bursts of poetry, his child-like friendliness to every living creature, his transfiguration of squalor, his utter contempt for mere scholarship, his equal acceptance of joy and of suffering, his unlimited and incandescent love? Nevertheless this is a judgement from within. It is the opinion of a saint—a realist, for whom God was everything—about two other saints, also realists for whom God was everything; and neither of whom were able to exclude any aspect of His creation from the sphere of their interest and their love. Plainly it is not an opinion based on surface characters, but on some interior likeness which entirely escapes the casual glance. What was it ?
I think perhaps it was this. Both the medieval friar and the modern scholar were penetrated by a sense of the realness, more the sacredness, of the natural as well as the supernatural order; as something which was not to be fled from, but to be loved without possessiveness, with an unlimited and humble tenderness cleansed of all desire. This is not the outlook of the pious naturalist or the higher pantheist. It is the outlook of the genuine Christian super-
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naturalist, who replaces nature where it belongs—in the Heart of God—and is conscious of His supporting presence through and in the web of life. ‘God,’ said von Hügel, ‘is a stupendously rich Reality; He is the God of Nature, as well as the God of Supernature.’ St. Francis would have understood and welcomed that. Every movement of his life declares its truth. Hence come the Franciscan attitude of reverence and delight towards the finite world in which we live; and the humble and friendly love of all those creatures whom von Hügel, in terms St. Francis would surely have echoed, called ‘our little relations, the lesser children of God’.
By a sort of poetic intuition transfigured by heavenly love, St. Francis arrived at just that balanced sense of the sacramental value of the finite and temporal, the world of our daily experience on one hand, and the over-ruling mystery and attraction of the Infinite and Eternal world of Spirit over against us on the other hand, which lies at the very heart of von Hugel’s philosophy of religion. He can never be explained on a basis of shallow immanentism, nature mysticism, or any other reduction of religion’s full demand. No one will understand Franciscan spirituality, who does not bear in mind that awe-struck sense of the Transcendent, the Eternal, which emerges now and then to warn us that we have in St. Francis something more than a pure and delightful soul who found God in nature and nature in God. It is only when we refuse the temptation to simplify, to ignore the bits we do not understand, and put side by side some of the conntrasting strands in his experience, and that of his
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greatest followers, that we begin to realize how rich this experience was, how completely it was penetrated and controlled by the metaphysical craving for God; though we may be sure that St. Francis would never have given his ruling passion this name. I take it that one of the most deeply significant incidents for a real understanding of his mind, is that strange scene in the house of Bernardo Quintavalle; where a converted poet, still hardly more than a lad, is heard murmuring all night the single awful question, ‘My God and All! What art thou, and what am I?’: the problem which, once it lays hold upon the spirit, is the beginning alike of adoration and of humility. That Francis is a figure very unlike the Brother of the Birds of popular sentiment. Yet only one who has thus capitulated to Reality, and discovered his own creaturely status, can truly become a Brother to the Birds.
If we take that unique revelation of the secret life of Francis, that discovery of his own place, as seriously as we should, and remember it whilst we watch the drama of his outer life—the ceaseless self-spending, the joy and the hardship, the struggles with demons, the pleasant friendship with the falcon and the pheasant, the missionary ardour and the snatches of contemplation—I think that we shall give our portrait of him a certain unity it lacked before: and a background and atmosphere without which it can never be true to life. And if we are to understand Franciscan spirituality—so various and even contradictory in its expressions, sometimes so lofty and sometimes so child-like, but always inspired by an ardent and
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practical love—we should always keep this scene in mind. For when we are dealing with a saint, it is not the charming gesture, but the deep experience—not what he does for men, but what is done to him by the mysterious stirrings of the Spirit, and what his response—which matters most and helps us to understand him best.
A saint is a human creature devoured and transformed by love: a love that has dissolved and burnt out those instinctive passions—acquisitive and combative, proud and greedy—which commonly rule the lives of men. Therefore we must always consider him in relation with the two supreme objects of his love; God and the World, or that special bit of the world on which he is destined to pour out his charity. And the isolated facts about St. Francis which make up our mental image, are all found when we examine them, to be simply different expressions—conditioned by his special make up—of that love which made of him, perhaps, the most unspoilt channel of the Divine generosity known to us since New Testament times. That outpouring Charity, that Agape, in which the manward life of God consists; transformed him by ‘the kindling of his mind’, as he was told in the great experience on La Verna; so that his whole life, deeply considered, was swept up to become part of the Divine action, the self-expression of the Divine Love. The varied incidents of that external life fall into place, when we learn to see them as symptoms and sacraments of this interior state, in which he solved the problem of his relation to God, ‘What art thou and what am I?’ When that question is asked
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by a poet with his eyes fully opened on reality, he can hardly stop short of the total consecration which is holiness. Here then is the source of that intense sensitiveness to all the appeals of the life that surrrounded him, whether in its loveliness and movement, or in its piteous subjection to sin, evil, and disease. Birds and animals, lepers and sinners and simple loving souls, and the men of many different types who left all to follow him, are equal candidates for his interest and love. Thus we learn to understand that wide-open sympathy, in such vivid contrast to the exclusions and repressions of the monastic type.
We feel the more justified in adopting such a view of St. Francis, when we go back to the earliest records and see what the things were which struck his contemporaries as specially significant in his life. They are, I suppose, the things which would still stand out, for those whose spirits breathe the air on which he lived. For such a vision, I think the graph which records the real life of St. Francis—seen so to speak in supernatural regard—would mark two supreme points. The first point would be that in which it seemed to him that a voice spoke from the Crucifix of S. Damiano, and demanded his total dedication to its purposes. The second point would be that in which the seraph on La Verna, with its reminiscence of Isaiah’s mighty Vision of Reality baptized into Christianity, and mysteriously united with the sufferrings of the Cross, completed his initiation into the deep secrets of the redemptive order. That overwhelming illumination ruled the last two years of his life.
Whether it was a glimpse of eternal truths, or
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whether we regard it as a morbid illusion, this was the supreme thing which Francis saw, loved, and believed; and that with such intensity, that the love and belief took physical form. Here he found the clue to the meaning of his own life, as a servant and agent of the unseen. The mysterious power and worth of innocent suffering, and the enlightened spirit’s call to that suffering through which alone it can exercise a saving love: this is what that penetrating yet simple poetic genius of his, lifted to the supernatural order, found at the very heart of life.
His whole career, as I see it, is poised on these two strange events. The first drew him out towards the visible world, to help, mend, and serve it. The second made him the mysterious partner of an invisible rescuing love. Wherever we get him really speaking his mind, he is never far from the Cross: the underlying tension of life. ‘Yes, there it is; no need to go further’, said Huvelin. ‘Sanctity and suffering are the same thing. You will do no good to others save in suffering and through suffering.’ We draw very near the real Francis, though not very near the popular notion of Francis, when we meditate on these words. The extreme sensibility of the transfigured poet feels the world’s anguish; and is always trying to make an alliance, first in one way and then in another, with the saving and self-giving forces of the Spiritual Order. It is this temper of soul which makes the most abject humiliation the material of Perfect Joy. The entire growth of Francis was towards the point at which, as that strange phrase in his legend says, he was ‘ transformed by the kindling of his mind into
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the image of the Crucified’, embracing and harmonizing in one movement of self-abandoned love, the splendour of God and the deep suffering of man. That is Charity, the outpouring passion of generous love at its full height, depth, breadth, and width; a passion which is the earnest of eternal life, and reflects back to a metaphysical source. St. Francis, says the Fioretti in a famous passage, offered his followers ‘the chalice of life’; and those who had courage to drink it, ‘saw in profound contemplation the abyss of the infinite divine light’: a strange phrase for the sort of gift which the St. Francis of popular sentiment, the little poor man, the troubadour, the animal’s friend, is supposed to have made to the world.
But if we ponder it, it does lead us back to the central truth of his life: the intense spiritual realism of the poet-saint, bringing fresh life and movement, light and warmth, into all his relations with things visible, just because of the completeness of his hold on things invisible. Living with simplicity in the embrace of the immensity because of his disinterested love, he shows us that union of mystery and homeliness which is the Christian solution of the paradox of life. We think, when we look at St. Francis kneeling before the first Christmas crib at Greccio, or read Jacopone da Todi’s Christmas hymns, that they are showing us the child- like simplicity of their faith. But not so. They are awe-struck before the Christian paradox revealed on every altar: the greatness and littleness of love.
Those people who desire to take a naturalistic view of Francis, and of our human situation, and explain
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away the strangeness and the suffering and keep the love and poetry, the gaiety and charm, may produce a picture which is very flattering to our corporate pride in human nature; but nothing which remotely resembles the portrait of St. Francis or indeed of any other saint. For in the saint, the response—the complete capitulation—to unseen realities comes first; and all that he shows the world of Holiness is the result of this. That is not a particularly popular doctrine now—our shallow naturalism revolts from it—but the whole trend of the life of Francis proves his implicit understanding of it; and we shall never get that life in proportion unless we try to understand it too.
When we take away the trappings, the charm and quaintness and pretty anecdotes, and all the holy Zoo business, and get down to the deep root of the matter, what we find is surely this. The real greatness of St. Francis is the same as the greatness of the Christian religion, when fully understood. For it is one thing to be a believer in Christianity, or even a courageous practitioner of its hard demands, another thing to be sensitized to all its mysterious implications: and it is just these mysterious implications which the poetic intuition and intrepid love of Francis seized and expressed in terms of human life. He reflects the very spirit of his Master in the completeness, ease, and simplicity with which he entered into our two-fold human heritage of spirit and of sense. On the one hand life and movement, light and warmth, all the activities of a homely love; serving the sick, living with the poor, considering the birds and the flowers,
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and seeking to raise the hearts of men to God. On the other hand, all the tension, suffering, interior solitude which is the price of a saving love: the Cross.
When we come to examine the experience of the immediate followers of Francis—the First Companions, and those who had learned to know him through the First Companions—we find much support for this view. It is true that here the evidence might be regarded as biased, since all the most living and attractive reminiscences come to us through works which were composed in the interest of the Spiritual party, and often for controversial use. Still, there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of the general impresssion which they give us. For nothing less than this impression can account for the stream of spiritual life which arose from Francis: a stream which flows still, though often its course is underground for a while. To these close friends and clients of his—some of whom struggled to imitate, while others were content only to admire him—Francis was not simply a mystic who had re-discovered the evangelical poverty, freedom, and joy. What they saw in him was something far more fundamental: a re-incarnation as it were of the whole evangelical life in its completeness,· its riches and poverty, suffering and beauty, the Crib and the Cross. He was one in whom, as Jacopone da Todi said plainly, ‘Christ was felt to live again’ and show in its perfection the right relation of man to God.
‘First’, says the opening chapter of the Fioretti, ‘we must needs consider how the glorious St. Francis in all the acts of his life was conformed to Christ the
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Blessed One.’ All Franciscan students know that this startling sentence represents a view of Francis which was developed within a very short time of his death; and which was worked out in minute detail, reaching before the end of the thirteenth century the point marked by ]acopone da Todi’s hymns to his Patriarch, where Francis is invoked as virtually a re-incarnation of Christ, so near his Pattern that even Satan was deceived. Such a claim as that points right past all the merely picturesque accidents of his life and spirituality—the troubadour spirit, the passion for poverty, the widespread love of living things—to something tremendous, something fundamental, in the impression which that small and humble figure made upon his world. He is, I believe, the only saint of whom such a thing as this has ever been suggested or said: and it was said by orthodox Catholics of another orthodox Catholic, and no one appears to have regarded it as blasphemous or extreme. Do we begin to understand St. Francis until we have given this astonishing fact full weight? I hardly think so. Other men and groups of men have set to work to re-live that Gospel life which gave human form to the Eternal Charity. No one but St. Francis left behind him the reputation of a success so genuine, that it could be said and sung of him in all sincerity, ‘It seemed as if Christ had come again; that very Christ who died upon the Rood’.
Now this, the rounded whole of sanctity, this mysterious and unlimited self-giving to the eternal purpose, in which charity and suffering become one thing, is what St. Francis seems to show us with a
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crystalline simplicity. And this is surely the key to the creative quality of his life. Without this clue, all the dramatic actions, all the gratuitous sufferings and voluntary humiliations, the deeds that enchant us and those that make us feel uncomfortable and ashamed, fall apart. They become separate and often inconsistent episodes, lacking significance.
With it, they are seen as incidents in the dramatic poem which expressed in action the secret movements of his inner life. When St. Bonaventura came to systematize Franciscan spirituality, it is significant that he found in Platonic philosophy, with its contrasting worlds of eternity and time, the system which harmonized with his Patriarch’s spirit best; and that, in opposition to the doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas, he declared will and love to be the highest powers of man’s soul, and the instruments of his union with God.
On this basis, we are able to understand the true nature of that spiritual heritage which St. Francis left behind him: the widely varying types of fervour and spirituality which have been claimed as representative of Franciscan mysticism. This principle illuminates and governs Franciscan poverty, Franciscan penitence, and Franciscan joy. It harmonizes the lonely contemplative life of the hermitage, and the busy active life of the tramping revivalist; trying to persuade men to cast off their entanglements, and see in God the reality of their own lives. For the peculiar note of Franciscan spirituality is neither its simplicity and charm on the one hand, nor its total contrite self-oblation on the other hand: not, to resort again to its two most characteristic devotions, either the
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Crib or the Cross, but both. It is the awe-struck sense of the Eternal which gives light and warmth to its humble, creaturely, and very loving acceptance of the human scene: a profound sense of the solemn privilege of sacrifice which deepens and steadies its exultant love. And Franciscan poverty means, I think, such a quiet rejection of all superfluities, such a horror of mere possession and mere clutch, as leaves the soul of man free to apprehend that only reality of our existence, that deep and mysterious relationship with God which underlies St. Francis’s question, ‘What art thou, and what am I?’
Franciscan history is full of examples of this alert and adoring sense of reality: this hold upon the double truth of our sublime yet lowly situation.
Brother Giles has it; proclaiming the immensity of God, and all man’s knowledge of Him as no more than a grain snatched by a sparrow from a mountain of corn. ]acopone da Todi has it, and gives it to us in poems which stretch from the extreme of homeliness to the stammering reports of ecstacy. So has the author of the Capuchin reform, so well-named by Father Cuthbert a ‘visionary realist’. But nowhere perhaps do we feel it so strongly as in the scene which closed the life of that great spiritual genius, Angela of Foligno. There I think, more than anywhere else, we recognize the very essence of true Franciscan mysticism—its creaturely simplicity, and its awe-struck sense of God. When she knew that she was dying, Angela called all her spiritual children to her, and blessed them and said to them, ‘Make yourselves small! Make yourselves small!’ And after that she lay very still,
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and they heard her murmuring, ‘No creature is suffiicient! No intelligence, even of angels or of archangels, is sufficient!’ Those who were round her asked, ‘What is it, Mother, for which the intelligence even of angels and archangels is not sufficient?’ And she said, ‘To understand.’
