Life of St. Francis of Assisi | Page 2

the twentieth year of life, with its poetry, its dreams, its
enthusiasm, its generosity, its daring. Love overflowed with vigor; men
everywhere had but one desire--to devote themselves to some great and
holy cause.
Curiously enough, though Europe was more parcelled out than ever, it
felt a new thrill run through its entire extent. There was what we might
call a state of European consciousness.
In ordinary periods each people has its own interests, its tendencies, its
tears, and its joys; but let a time of crisis come, and the true unity of the
human family will suddenly make itself felt with a strength never
before suspected. Each body of water has its own currents, but when
the hurricane is abroad they mysteriously intermingle, and from the
ocean to the remotest mountain lake the same tremor will upheave
them all.
It was thus in '89, it was thus also in the thirteenth century.
Never was there less of frontier, never, either before or since, such a
mingling of nationalities; and at the present day, with all our highways
and railroads, the people live more apart.[1]

The great movement of thought of the thirteenth century is above all a
religious movement, presenting a double character--it is popular and it
is laic. It comes out from the heart of the people, and it looks athwart
many uncertainties at nothing less than wresting the sacred things from
the hands of the clergy.
The conservatives of our time who turn to the thirteenth century as to
the golden age of authoritative faith make a strange mistake. If it is
especially the century of saints, it is also that of heretics. We shall soon
see that the two words are not so contradictory as might appear; it is
enough for the moment to point out that the Church had never been
more powerful nor more threatened.
There was a genuine attempt at a religious revolution, which, if it had
succeeded, would have ended in a universal priesthood, in the
proclamation of the rights of the individual conscience.
The effort failed, and though later on the Revolution made us all kings,
neither the thirteenth century nor the Reformation was able to make us
all priests. Herein, no doubt, lies the essential contradiction of our lives
and that which periodically puts our national institutions in peril.
Politically emancipated, we are not morally or religiously free.[2]
The thirteenth century with juvenile ardor undertook this revolution,
which has not yet reached its end. In the north of Europe it became
incarnate in cathedrals, in the south, in saints.
The cathedrals were the lay churches of the thirteenth century. Built by
the people for the people, they were originally the true common house
of our old cities. Museums, granaries, chambers of commerce, halls of
justice, depositories of archives, and even labor exchanges, they were
all these at once.
That art of the Middle Ages which Victor Hugo and Viollet-le-Duc
have taught us to understand and love was the visible expression of the
enthusiasm of a people who were achieving communal liberty. Very far
from being the gift of the Church, it was in its beginning an
unconscious protest against the hieratic, impassive, esoteric art of the

religious orders. We find only laymen in the long list of
master-workmen and painters who have left us the innumerable Gothic
monuments which stud the soil of Europe. Those artists of genius who,
like those of Greece, knew how to speak to the populace without being
common, were for the most part humble workmen; they found their
inspiration not in the formulas of the masters of monastic art, but in
constant communion with the very soul of the nation. Therefore this
renascence, in its most profound features, concerns less the archæology
or the architecture than the history of a country.
While in the northern countries the people were building their own
churches, and finding in their enthusiasm an art which was new,
original, complete, in the south, above the official, clerical priesthood
of divine right they were greeting and consecrating a new priesthood,
that of the saints.
The priest of the thirteenth century is the antithesis of the saint, he is
almost always his enemy. Separated by the holy unction from the rest
of mankind, inspiring awe as the representative of an all-powerful God,
able by a few signs to perform unheard-of mysteries, with a word to
change bread into flesh and wine into blood, he appeared as a sort of
idol which can do all things for or against you and before which you
have only to adore and tremble.
The saint, on the contrary, was one whose mission was proclaimed by
nothing in his apparel, but whose life and words made themselves felt
in all hearts and consciences; he was one who, with no