A few years after the sermon at Cannara the Third Order was in existence, based upon this letter, but with more specific rules added to its broad outline of Christian living. It was open to all Christians, men and women, married or single, and its aim was to enable them to approximate their lives as closely as possible to that of the brothers and sisters of the First and Second Orders, while remaining in the world and carrying out there the secular duties to which they believed God had called them. Noblemen such as the Lord Orlando, who was one of the first whom Francis admitted to the order, did not renounce their hereditary duties, they continued to administer their estates as before, but they did their work looking to God, regarding even the smallest duties as having their place in God’s pattern, and when the needs of those dependent on them had been met they gave all their surplus money to the poor. It was the same with the merchants, who pledged themselves to carry on their businesses with strict integrity, renouncing all money which had been dishonestly earned in the past and keeping for themselves in the future nothing that was not needed for their sustenance. They dressed austerely and ate sparingly, holding themselves aloof from the luxury that was one of the evils of that as of any age. The men did not carry arms, they were pledged to peace, and they were absolved by the pope from taking the legal oaths which bound men to fight for their party whether the cause was just or unjust. They became a great power for peace in the quarrelsome Italian republics and, as their numbers grew, in Europe also. But there was nothing negative about them, or they could not have called themselves Franciscans. They lived their lives joyously, in no spirit of condemnation, and they did not think they had done their duty to the poor merely by almsgiving, they loved and served them, bringing them into their houses and caring for them when they were sick, and spending themselves for them in every way they knew.
The Third Order, called the Order of Penitence, increased as rapidly as the First and Second, working always for peace, justice, honesty, and love. It lived on through the generations, a spiritual power the strength of which it is not possible to estimate, and lives still, and has numbered among its penitents some of the greatest servants of God that the world has known, kings and queens, poets and artists, men and women whose names ring like music in our ears today, such names as Christopher Columbus, Saint Louis of France, Elizabeth of Hungary, Angela of Foligno, Petrarch, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotas. Another penitent was Giotto, who painted the frescoes in the church of San Francesco at Assisi. It is probable that he came to Assisi as a pupil of Cimabue, whose paintings also glorify San Francesco, and whose portrait of Francis in the lower church shows us the little man with the humorous suffering face that our own imagination has pictured for us. After the death of Francis the brothers of the order would often present dramatized scenes from the saint’s life in their convents and churches, and the famous frescoes suggest that Giotto had seen some of these dramatic performances at Assisi, for there is much about them that suggests the medieval stage. They are fresh, dramatic, and lovely, with a naturalness about them that was something new in the stylized art of Italy and was the direct outcome of the simplicity and naturalness of Francis himself.
Two great poets wore the habit of the Third Order, Jacopone da Todi and Dante Alighieri. Francis inspired not only a new school of painting but a new era in poetry. His Canticle of the Sun was the inspiration of Jacopone’s verse and of that of the Italian poets, including Dante, who followed him. Jacopone was born in the strange old town of Todi probably in 1230, four years after the death of Francis, a man of wealth and ambition who found no place for God in his life until in middle age he passed through a time of such suffering and stress that the proud structure of his life collapsed beneath him and he became for a short while almost insane. Then from the ruins of it all God took him to himself, leading him to find shelter with the Franciscan family, first in the Third Order and later in the First, and to become the greatest poet of his age, expressing the Franciscan spirit in his verse as perfectly as Giotto in his paintings. Like Francis himself he was aflame with the love of God. It has been said of his poem “Amor de Caritate” that it is the counterpart of Francis’s mystic crucifixion, an expression in words, as that in flesh, of the miracle of the union of the soul with God. Saint Bernadine of Siena believed that Francis himself, not Jacopone, had written it.
The influence of Francis upon Dante was lifelong. He was educated at the school of the Franciscan Friars at Santa Croce and buried in the habit of the Third Order by the monks of Ravenna. A story told of him says that at a time of suffering in his life he came one night to a lonely convent in the Apennines and knocked at the door. The brother who opened to him saw a stooped and gray-haired man standing in the shadows and asked him what he wanted, and Dante answered, “Peace!”
These great names of kings and queens and poets lend luster to the Third Order, but there were thousands of humble men and women whose unseen and selfless lives were its bones and its strength. One of these was named Lucchesio. He was a native of Tuscany and lived at Poggibonsi, not far from Siena. He had been a rich merchant but when he joined the Third Order he gave all his superfluous wealth to the poor, keeping nothing for himself but his house, his garden, and his donkey. He had a beautiful wife whom he dearly loved, Bona Donna, who was with him heart and soul in all that he did for the love of God. Together they kept their house as a hospital for the poor, cultivating their garden that they might grow food for them. All who came to them were made welcome and tenderly nursed and cared for, and, not content with this, Lucchesio would ride out to the fever-stricken Maremma and seek out the sick there and take care of them. Sometimes he would bring them home with him, and Bona Donna would see him approaching the house with one sick man on his back and another on the donkey. For many years these two toiled together for Christ, and then Bona Donna fell sick, and when Lucchesio saw that she was dying his grief was too great to be borne. Perhaps like so many husbands and wives they had often said to each other, “We will go together,” and while he knelt by Bona Donna’s bedside, as she received the last sacraments, Lucchesio prayed that it might be so, and received the assurance that his prayer was answered, for he whispered to Bona Donna, “Wait for me,” and calling back the priest he asked that he too might receive the last sacraments. Then he held his wife’s hand and comforted her through her last agony, and when it was over he made the sign of the cross over her and lay down beside her, calling with love upon Jesus, Mary, and Francis, and so followed her.
It is fitting that among all the unknown stories of the knights of the Third Order this one should have been handed down to us, for in their love for God, for his poor, and for each other, these two were typical of the chivalry.
Part III
The Kingdom
Chapter 10
The Rich
O love, thou fire divine, of laughter spun;
Love that art smile and jest,
Thou giv’st us of thy best,
Thy wealth unmeasured that is never done.
Love, that art bountiful and courteous,
Great gifts thou dost divide,
Thy table’s long and wide:
How welcome is thy servant in thy house!
JACOPONE DA TODI
LAUDA LXXXI
FRANCIS WOULD HAVE TREMBLED in horror and dismay if anyone had suggested to him that he moved through his life on earth as a prince among men. Yet it is true. The values of the kingdom of heaven are a complete reversal of those of the world, yet the kingdom is a mighty one and it has its princes. The spiritual ascendancy over the souls of men that is possessed by a man who is both holy and humble is one of the most satisfying of historical facts. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux striding from one end of Europe to the other in his tattered habit, fierce and lean, pouring out the vials of his anger upon wicked kings and erring popes, launching a crusade by the sheer glory of his eloquence, could not have been unaware of the power he wielded, though he ascribed all things to God alone, but Francis dominated rich and poor alike
without having any idea of what he was doing. The little friar in company with the great men of his time is a fascinating spectacle. He moves amongst them quietly and humbly, a small lark among the peacocks, and most of us know about them only insofar as they were dominated by his loving humility.
In the year 1215, soon after Francis had been turned back by illness from his second attempt to reach the infidels, he traveled to Rome. Pope Innocent III had summoned a General Council and Francis as the founder of a religious order was commanded to be present. All the leaders of Christendom were there, representatives of kings and princes, heads of religious houses and universities, cardinals, bishops, and archbishops. In all their glory and magnificence they thronged into the church of Saint John Lateran upon Saint Martin’s day, to hear the pope’s inaugural sermon, and with them went the barefoot man in the gray habit whom Innocent in his dream had seen holding up this same church upon his frail shoulders. The pope’s dream had not shown him the tottering Saint John Lateran filled with this congregation of the princes of the world and of the Church, but they had been there all the same. Francis upheld them now as he sat unnoticed in the most obscure corner he could find and prayed for them all, and for the pope. There is no doubt that he knew, in the hushed moment when Innocent mounted the pulpit steps and stood and looked out over the congregation, that the great pope was a dying man. Francis always knew these things about people and he would have prayed with all his loving selflessness for Innocent the man, now while despite his illness he must preach this sermon, in the weeks of suffering to come, and in the agony of death.
The pope knew he was dying and it was because he knew it that he had brought this great congregation here before him. Time was short and he had much that he wanted to say to them while he could. He took as his text the words of the dying Christ to his disciples, “With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer,” and then with passion and power he spoke to them of his two great longings: that before he died he might see a great crusade rescue the Holy Places from the infidels, and that he might see a purified Church lead a Christendom that had sinned back to God in penitence and peace. He wished that he might see these things, but if it was not God’s will for him, “not my will, but God’s, be done.”
He spoke powerfully to every man in the great congregation but perhaps to none more directly than to Francis, whose soul he set on fire with one of those moments of illumination that with him were always the precursor of heroic action. He felt about the crusades very much, but not quite, as did all Christian men of the Middle Ages. Theirs was an age of faith, and the Church was supremely important to them. Within her they found salvation for their souls, and by her were the ignorant taught, the poor fed, and the sick cared for. She alone could control the greed of princes and beyond her walls was only darkness and confusion. She was the spiritual fortress of Christendom and the shrine of the fortress was the land where Christ had lived, above all the city that had seen his death and resurrection. Jerusalem, the holy of holies, was held in the heart of every Christian man and woman, and the thought of its desecration by the infidels was something that could hardly be borne, especially just at this time, when they were still grieving over the loss of the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem, brought to an end by Saladin only twenty-eight years ago. For eighty-eight years the Christians had controlled the Holy Places of Jerusalem and now they had been taken from them. Richard Coeur de Lion had fought to get them back again but his crusade had failed. All Christian men felt that it must be a personal grief to Christ that the infidels held his earthly home. But Francis felt something more than this, something peculiar to himself, love for the infidels themselves. Where other Christian men longed to rescue the Holy Places from the infidels, Francis wanted to rescue the infidels for the Holy Places. Twice already he had tried to reach them and had failed. Listening to the pope’s sermon he was on fire to try again. When it was God’s will he would be a crusader. He had to wait five years before he had his wish but he was always a man who knew how to wait.
He was no less stirred by the pope’s second appeal, the cleansing of Christendom through the power of a penitent Church, for “Repent ye!” was his own cry and the mission of his life. The pope based this part of his discourse upon the ninth chapter of Ezekiel, where chosen men are called of God to go through the city and cleanse it, and to their leader God says, “Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof.” The sign that was to be put upon the foreheads of the penitents was the sign Tau, the headless cross of the Old Testament that the Hebrew people put on their doors to save their first-born in Egypt, the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the old form of which was a cross. According to tradition it was upon a Tau cross that Saint Matthew was crucified in Ethiopia. The sign Tau was thus the symbol of penitence, salvation, and suffering, and to Francis with his love of symbolism it became very precious upon this Saint Martin’s day and ever afterward. From the hour of the pope’s sermon he took to himself the sign Tau as the symbol of the vocation of the Brothers Minor. With it he signed his dwelling places, as the Hebrew people had done, and his letters too. Pacifico the visionary, in a dream that he had soon after this, saw it emblazoned in light upon Francis’s forehead.
The crusade, when it came, failed, and the attempt to root out avarice from the Roman court also failed, but the subsequent adoption of the penitential brotherhoods into the organized system of the Church saved Christendom, and the two men who were to be the spearhead of the work of purgation for which the pope pleaded were among his congregation: Francis of Assisi and Dominic Guzman, afterward known to all the world as Saint Dominic.
This great man had come to the General Council to petition the pope for permission to found a new order of preachers. He too, obscure and unknown, had sat quietly in the church of Saint John Lateran and heard the sermon that had so stirred Francis. As Innocent made his great appeal for the cleansing of the Church he would have been equally stirred, for to this end had God called him. These two men in their shabby clothes, scarcely noticeable in the brilliant congregation, were destined to go down to posterity with their names linked together. They were utterly unlike and in the work that they were called to do they were complementary to each other. Francis and his order were everywhere calling men to repent of their sins, and to follow in the footsteps of Christ in love and humility. Dominic wanted to found an order of preachers who by defending the faith of Christ against the attacks of the heretics should cleanse the Church of heresy. The appeal of Francis was to the hearts of men, Dominic desired to cleanse their minds. He was at this time forty-five years old and had from his boyhood been stern and ascetic, a scholar and a preacher of sermons utterly different from those of Francis; reasoned, intellectual, hard-hitting expositions of the truth. Yet he had some Franciscan qualities. He was a man of peace and believed that the best way to stamp out heresy was to convince men’s minds. And like Francis he was equally sure that men can be convinced of nothing unless the words of the man who reasons with them are the fruit of a dedicated life. The order he desired to found would make war upon heresy not with fire and sword but with learning and holiness. And he loved the poor. Once during a famine he had sold his precious books to feed them.
And so it is not surprising that when a few days later these two met in the streets of Rome Dominic fell instantly under the spell of Francis, who embodied in his simple humble being the holiness, peace, and love that Dominic adored. And he had had a dream the previous night. He had seen himself and a man he did not know presented by the Blessed Virgin to Christ, as God’s messengers to the world. The man was Francis. Men were less inhibited in those days. They were not afraid to love each other at sight or to express their love. Dominic embraced Francis and said, “Let us stand together and no enemy shall overcome us.”
In the following July Innocent III died at Perugia, and among the
men who knelt by his bed was Francis. In his last agony most of those about him fled in terror, but Francis knelt on until the end. Did the great pope see him there? If he did the last words that framed themselves in his conscious mind would have been the prayer of Francis, “The Lord give thee peace.”
My God and My All: The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi Page 17