St Francis | Page 2

as Renan or Matthew Arnold; but in the light of
that enlightenment he may try to illimunate what Renan and Matthew
Arnold left dark. He may try to use what is understood to explain what
is not understood. He may try to say to the modern English reader:
"Here is an historical character which is admittedly attractive to many
of us already, by its gaiety, its romantic imagination, its spiritual
courtesy and cameraderie, but which also contains elements (evidently
equally sincere and emphatic) which seem to you quite remote and
repulsive. But after all, this man was a man and not half a dozen men.
What seems inconsistency to you did not seem inconsistency to him.
Let us see whether we can understand, with the help of the existing
understanding, these other things that now seem to be doubly dark, by
their intrinsic gloom and their ironic contrast." I do not mean, of course,
that I can really reach a psychological completeness in this crude and
curt outline. But I mean that this is the only controversial condition that
I shall here assume; that I am dealing with the sympathetic outsider. I
shall not assume any more or any less agreement than this. A
materialist may not care whether the inconsistencies are reconciled or
not. A Catholic may not see any inconsistencies to reconcile. But I am
here addressing the ordinary common man, sympathetic but sceptical,
and I can only rather hazily hope that, by approaching the great saint's
story through what is evidently picturesque and popular about it, I may
at least leave the reader understanding a little more than he did before
of the consistency of a complete character; that by approaching it in
this way, we may at least get a glimmering of why the poet who praised
his lord the sun, often hid himself in a dark cavern, of why the saint
who was so gentle with his Brother the Wolf was so harsh to his
Brother the Ass (as he nicknamed his own body), of why the
troubadour who said that love set his heart on fire separated himself
from women, of why the singer who rejoiced in the strength and gaiety
of the fire deliberately rolled himself in the snow, of why the very song
which cries with all the passion of a pagan, "Praised be God for our
Sister, Mother Earth, which brings forth varied fruits and grass and
glowing flowers," ends almost with the words "Praised be God for our

Sister, the death of the body."
Renan and Matthew Arnold failed utterly at this test. They were content
to follow Francis with their praises until they were stopped by their
prejudices; the stubborn prejudices of the sceptic. The moment Francis
began to do something they did not understand or did not like, they did
not try to understand, still less to like it; they simply turned their backs
on the whole business and "walked no more with him." No man will
get any further along a path of historical enquiry in that fashion. These
skeptics are really driven to drop the whole subject in despair, to leave
the most simple and sincere of all historical characters as a mass of
contradiction, to be praised on the principle of the curate's egg. Arnold
refers to the asceticism of Alverno almost hurriedly, as if it were an
unlucky but undeniable blot on the beauty of the story; or rather as if it
were a pitiable break-down and bathos at the end of story. Now this is
simply to be stone-blind to the whole point of any story. To represent
Mount Alverno as the mere collapse of Francis is exactly like
representing Mount Calvary as the mere collapse of Christ. Those
mountains are mountains, whatever else they are, and it is nonsense to
say (like the Red Queen) that they are comparitive hollows or negative
holes in the ground. They were quite manifestly meant to be
culminations and landmarks. To treat the Stigmata as a sort of scandal,
to be touched on tenderly but with pain, is exactly like treating the
original five wounds of Jesus Christ as five blots on his character. You
may dislike the idea of asceticism; you may dislike equally the idea of
martyrdom; for that matter you may have an honest and natural dislike
of the whole conception of sacrifice symbolised by the cross. But if it is
an intelligent dislike, you will retain the capacity for seeing the point of
the story; the story of a martyr or even the story of a monk. You will
not be able rationally to read the Gospel and regard the Crucifixion as
an afterthought or an anti-climax or an accident in the life of Christ; it
is obviously the point of the story