The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

  Stephen Harding came presently to such admiration for Bernard’s piety and energy that he sent him forth (1115) as abbot, with twelve other monks, to found a new Cistercian house. Bernard chose a heavily wooded spot, ninety miles from Cîteaux, known as Clara vallis, Bright Valley, Clairvaux. There was no habitation there, and no human life. The initial task of the fraternal band was to build with their own hands their first “monastery”—a wooden building containing under one roof a chapel, a refectory, and a dormitory loft reached by a ladder; the beds were bins strewn with leaves; the windows were no larger than a man’s head; the floor was the earth. Diet was vegetarian except for an occasional fish; no white bread, no spices, little wine; these monks eager for heaven ate like philosophers courting longevity. The monks prepared their own meals, each serving as cook in turn. By the rule that Bernard drew up, the monastery could not buy property; it could own only what was given it; he hoped that it would never have more land than could be worked by the monks’ own hands and simple tools. In that quiet valley Bernard and his growing fellowship labored in silence and content, free from the “storm of the world,” clearing the forest, planting and reaping, making their own furniture, and coming together at the canonical hours to sing, without an organ, the psalms and hymns of the day. “The more attentively I watch them,” said William of St. Thierry, “the more I believe that they are perfect followers of Christ… a little less than angels, but much more than men.”23 The news of this Christian peace and self-containment spread, and before Bernard’s death there were 700 monks at Clairvaux. They must have been happy there, for nearly all who were sent from that communistic enclave to serve as abbots, bishops, and councilors longed to return; and Bernard himself, offered the highest dignities in the Church, and going to many lands at her bidding, always yearned to get back to his cell at Clairvaux, “that my eyes may be closed by the hands of my children, and that my body may be laid at Clairvaux side by side with the bodies of the poor.”24

  He was a man of moderate intellect, of strong conviction, of immense force and unity of character. He cared nothing for science or philosophy. The mind of man, he felt, was too infinitesimal a portion of the universe to sit in judgment upon it or pretend to understand it. He marveled at the silly pride of philosophers prating about the nature, origin, and destiny of the cosmos. He was shocked by Abélard’s proposal to submit faith to reason, and he fought that rationalism as a blasphemous impudence. Instead of trying to understand the universe he preferred to walk unquestioning and grateful in the miracle of revelation. He accepted the Bible as God’s word, for otherwise, it seemed to him, life would be a desert of dark uncertainty. The more he preached that childlike faith the more surely he felt it to be the Way. When one of his monks, in terror, confessed to him that he could not believe in the power of the priest to change the bread of the Eucharist into the body and blood of Christ, Bernard did not reprove him; he bade him receive the sacrament nevertheless; “go and communicate with my faith”; and we are assured that Bernard’s faith overflowed into the doubter and saved his soul.25 Bernard could hate and pursue, almost to the death, heretics like Abélard or Arnold of Brescia, who weakened a Church which, with all her faults, seemed to him the very vehicle of Christ; and he could love with almost the tenderness of the Virgin whom he worshiped so fervently. Seeing a thief on the way to the gallows, he begged the count of Champagne for him, promising that he would subject the man to a harder penance than a moment’s death.26 He preached to kings and popes, but more contentedly to the peasants and shepherds of his valley; he was lenient with their faults, converted them by his example, and earned their mute love for the faith and love he gave them. He carried his piety to an exhausting asceticism; he fasted so much that his superior at Cîteaux had to command him to eat; and for thirty-eight years he lived in one cramped cell at Clairvaux, with a bed of straw and no seat but a cut in the wall.27 All the comforts and goods of the world seemed to him as nothing compared with the thought and promise of Christ. He wrote in this mood several hymns of unassuming simplicity and touching tenderness:

  Iesu dulcis memoria,

  dans vera cordi gaudia,

  sed super mel et omnia

  eius dulcis praesentia.

  Nil canitur suavius,

  auditur nil iocundius,

  nil cogitatur dulcius

  quam Iesu Dei filius.

  Iesu spes poenitentibus,

  quam pius es petentibus,

  quam bonus es quaerentibus,

  sed quid invenientibus?28

  Jesus sweet in memory,

  Giving the heart true joy,

  Yea, beyond honey and all things,

  Sweet is His presence.

  Nothing sung is lovelier,

  Nothing heard is pleasanter,

  Nothing thought is sweeter

  Than Jesus the Son of God.

  Jesus hope of the penitent,

  How gentle Thou art to suppliants!

  How good to those seeking Thee!

  What must Thou be to those finding Thee?

  Despite his flair for graceful speech he cared little for any but spiritual beauty. He covered his eyes lest they take too sensual a delight from the lakes of Switzerland.29 His abbey was bare of all ornament except the crucified Christ. He berated Cluny for spending so much on the architecture and adornment of its abbeys. “The church,” he said, “is resplendent in its walls and wholly lacking in its poor. It gilds its stones and leaves its children naked. With the silver of the wretched it charms the eyes of the rich.”30 He complained that the great abbey of St. Denis was crowded with proud and armored knights instead of simple worshipers; he called it “a garrison, a school of Satan, a den of thieves.”31 Suger, humbly moved by these strictures, reformed the customs of his church and his monks, and lived to earn Bernard’s praise.

  The monastic reform that radiated from Clairvaux, and the improvement of the hierarchy through the elevation of Bernard’s monks to bishoprics and archbishoprics, were but a part of the influence which this astonishing man, who asked nothing but bread, wielded on all ranks in his half century. Henry of France, brother of the king, came to visit him; Bernard spoke to him; on that day Henry became a monk, and washed the dishes at Clairvaux.32 Through his sermons—themselves so eloquent and sensuous as to verge on poetry—he moved all who heard him; through his letters—masterpieces of passionate pleading—he influenced councils, bishops, popes, kings; through personal contacts he molded the policies of Church and state. He refused to be more than an abbot, but he made and unmade popes, and no pontiff was heard with greater respect or reverence. He left his cell on a dozen errands of high diplomacy, usually at the call of the Church. When contending groups chose Anacletus II and Innocent II as rival popes (1130), Bernard supported Innocent; when Anacletus captured Rome Bernard entered Italy, and by the pure power of his personality and his speech roused the Lombard cities for Innocent; the crowds, drunk with his oratory and his sanctity, kissed his feet and tore his garments to pieces as sacred relics for their posterity. The sick came to him at Milan, and epileptics, paralytics, and other ailing faithful announced that they had been cured by his touch. On his return to Clairvaux from his diplomatic triumphs the peasants would come in from the fields, and the shepherds down from the hills, to ask his blessing; and receiving it they would return to their toil uplifted and content.

  When Bernard died in 1153 the number of Cistercian houses had risen from 30 in 1134 (the year of Stephen Harding’s death) to 343. The fame of his sanctity and his power brought many converts to the new order; by 1300 it had 60,000 monks in 693 monasteries. Other monastic orders took form in the twelfth century. About 1100 Robert of Arbrissol founded the order of Fontevrault in Anjou; in 1120 St. Norbert gave up a rich inheritance to establish the Premonstratensian order of Canons Regular at Prémontré near Laon; in 1131 St. Gilbert constituted the English order of Sempringham—the Gilbertines—on the model of Fontevrault. About 1150 some Palestinian anchorites adopted the eremitical rule of
St. Basil, and spread throughout Palestine; when the Moslems captured the Holy Land these “Carmelites” migrated to Cyprus, Sicily, France, and England. In 1198 Innocent III approved the articles of the order of Trinitarians, and dedicated it to the ransoming of Christians captured by Saracens. These new orders were a saving and uplifting leaven in the Christian Church.

  The burst of monastic reform climaxed by Bernard died down as the twelfth century advanced. The younger orders kept their arduous rules with reasonable fidelity; but not many men could be found, in that dynamic period, to bear so strict a regimen. In time the Cistercians—even at Bernard’s Clairvaux—became rich through hopeful gifts; endowments for “pittances” enabled the monks to add meat to their diet, and plenty of wine;33 they delegated all manual labor to lay brothers; four years after Bernard’s death they bought a supply of Saracen slaves;34 they developed a large and profitable trade in the products of their socialistic industry, and aroused guild animosity through their exemption from transportation tolls.35 The decline of faith as the Crusades failed reduced the number of novices, and disturbed the morale of all the monastic orders. But the old ideal of living like the apostles in a propertyless communism did not die; the conviction that the true Christian must shun wealth and power, and be a man of unflinching peace, lingered in thousands of souls. At the opening of the thirteenth century a man appeared, in the Umbrian hills of Italy, who brought these old ideals to vigor again by such a life of simplicity, purity, piety, and love that men wondered had Christ been born again.

  III. ST. FRANCIS*

  Giovanni de Bernadone was born in 1182 in Assisi, son of Ser Pietro de Bernadone, a wealthy merchant who did much business with Provence. There Pietro had fallen in love with a French girl, Pica, and he had brought her back to Assisi as his wife. When he returned from another trip to Provence, and found that a son had been born to him, he changed the child’s name to Francesco, Francis, apparently as a tribute to Pica. The boy grew up in one of the loveliest regions of Italy, and never lost his affection for the Umbrian landscape and sky. He learned Italian and French from his parents, and Latin from the parish priest; he had no further formal schooling, but soon entered his father’s business. He disappointed Ser Pietro by showing more facility in spending money than in making it. He was the richest youth in town, and the most generous; friends flocked about him, ate and drank with him, and sang with him the songs of the troubadours; Francis wore, now and then, a parti-colored minstrel’s suit.36 He was a good-looking boy, with black eyes and hair and kindly face, and a melodious voice. His early biographers protest that he had no relations with the other sex, and, indeed, knew only two women by sight;37 but this surely does Francis some injustice. Possibly, in those formative years, he heard from his father about the Albigensian and Waldensian heretics of southern France, and their new-old gospel of evangelical poverty.

  In 1202 he fought in the Assisian army against Perugia, was made prisoner, and spent a year in meditative captivity. In 1204 he joined as a volunteer the army of Pope Innocent III. At Spoleto, lying in bed with a fever, he thought he heard a voice asking him: “Why do you desert the Lord for the servant, the Prince for his vassal?” “Lord,” he asked, “what do you wish me to do?” The voice answered, “Go back to your home; there it shall be told you what you are to do.”38 He left the army and returned to Assisi. Now he showed ever less interest in his father’s business, ever more in religion. Near Assisi was a poor chapel of St. Damian. Praying there in February, 1207, Francis thought he heard Christ speak to him from the altar, accepting his life and soul as an oblation. From that moment he felt himself dedicated to a new life. He gave the chapel priest all the money he had with him, and went home. One day he met a leper, and turned away in revulsion. Rebuking himself for unfaithfulness to Christ, he went back, emptied his purse into the leper’s hand, and kissed the hand; this act, he tells us, marked an era in his spiritual life.39 Thereafter he frequently visited the dwellings of the lepers, and brought them alms.

  Shortly after this experience he spent several days in or near the chapel, apparently eating little; when he appeared again in Assisi he was so thin, haggard, and pale, and his clothes so tattered, his mind so bewildered, that the urchins in the public square cried out, Pazzo! Pazzo!—“A madman! A madman!” There his father found him, called him a half-wit, dragged him home, and locked him in a closet. Freed by his mother, Francis hurried back to the chapel. The angry father overtook him, upbraided him for making his family a public jest, reproached him for making so little return on the money spent in his rearing, and bade him leave the town. Francis had sold his personal belongings to support the chapel; he handed the proceeds to his father, who accepted them; but he would not recognize the authority of his father to command one who now belonged to Christ. Summoned before the tribunal of the bishop in the Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore, he presented himself humbly, while a crowd looked on in a scene made memorable by Giotto’s brush. The bishop took him at his word, and bade him give up all his property. Francis retired to a room in the episcopal palace, and soon reappeared stark naked; he laid his bundled clothing and a few remaining coins before the bishop, and said: “Until this time I have called Pietro Bernadone my father, but now I desire to serve God. That is why I return to him this money … as well as my clothing, and all that I have had from him; for henceforth I desire to say nothing else than ‘Our Father, Who art in heaven.’”40 Bernadone carried off the clothing, while the bishop covered the shivering Francis with his mantle. Francis returned to St. Damian’s, made himself a hermit’s robe, begged his food from door to door, and with his hands began to rebuild the crumbling chapel. Several of the townspeople came to aid him, and they sang together as they worked.

  In February, 1209, as he was hearing Mass, he was struck by the words which the priest read from the instructions of Jesus to the apostles:

  And as ye go, preach, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils. Freely ye have received, freely give. Provide neither gold nor silver nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor a staff. (Matt. x, 7–10.)

  It seemed to Francis that Christ Himself was speaking, and directly to him. He resolved to obey those words literally—to preach the kingdom of heaven, and possess nothing. He would go back across the 1200 years that had obscured the figure of Christ, and would rebuild his life on that divine exemplar.

  So, that spring, braving all ridicule, he stood in the squares of Assisi and nearby towns and preached the gospel of poverty and Christ. Revolted by the unscrupulous pursuit of wealth that marked the age, and shocked by the splendor and luxury of some clergymen, he denounced money itself as a devil and a curse, bade his followers despise it as dung,41 and called upon men and women to sell all that they had, and give to the poor. Small audiences listened to him in wonder and admiration, but most men passed him by as a fool in Christ. The good bishop of Assisi protested, “Your way of living without owning anything seems to me very harsh and difficult”; to which Francis replied, “My lord, if we possessed property we should need arms to defend it.”42 Some hearts were moved; twelve men offered to follow his doctrine and his way; he welcomed them, and gave them the above-quoted words of Christ as their commission and their rule. They made themselves brown robes, and built themselves cabins of branches and boughs. Daily they and Francis, rejecting the old monastic isolation, went forth, barefoot and penniless, to preach. Sometimes they would be absent for several days, and sleep in haylofts, or leper hospitals, or under the porch of a church. When they returned, Francis would wash their feet and give them food.

  They greeted one another, and all whom they met on the road, with the ancient Oriental salutation: “The Lord give thee peace.” They were not yet named Franciscans. They called themselves Fratres minores, Friars Minor, or Minorites; friars as meaning brothers rather than priests, minor as being the least of Christ’s servants, and never wielding, but always un
der, superior authority; they were to hold themselves subordinate to even the lowliest priest, and to kiss the hand of any priest they met. Very few of them, in this first generation of the order, were ordained; Francis himself was never more than deacon. In their own little community they served one another, and did manual work; and no idler was long tolerated in the group. Intellectual study was discouraged; Francis saw no advantage in secular knowledge except for the accumulation of wealth or the pursuit of power; “my brethren who are led by desire of learning will find their hands empty in the day of tribulation.”43 He scorned historians, who perform no great deed themselves, but receive honors for recording the great deeds of others.44 Anticipating Goethe’s dictum that knowledge that does not lead to action is vain and poisonous, Francis said, Tantum homo habet de scientia, quantum operatur —“A man has only so much knowledge as he puts to work.”45 No friar was to own a book, not even a psalter. In preaching they were to use song as well as speech; they might even, said Francis, imitate the jongleurs, and become ioculatores Dei, gleemen of God.46

  Sometimes the friars were derided, beaten, or robbed of almost their last garment. Francis bade them offer no resistance. In many cases the miscreants, astonished at what seemed a superhuman indifference to pride and property, begged forgiveness and restored their thefts.47 We do not know if the following specimen of the Little Flowers of St. Francis is history or legend, but it portrays the ecstatic piety that runs through all that we hear of the saint:

  One winter’s day as Francis was going from Perugia, suffering sorely from the bitter cold, he said: “Friar Leo, although the Friars Minor give good examples of holiness and edification, nevertheless write and note down diligently that perfect joy is not to be found therein.” And Francis went his way a little farther, and said: “O Friar Leo, even though the Friars Minor gave sight to the blind, made the crooked straight, cast out devils, made the deaf to hear and the lame to walk … and raised to life those who had lain four days in the grave —write: perfect joy is never found there.” And he journeyed on a little while, and cried aloud: “O Friar Leo, if the Friar Minor knew all tongues and sciences and all the Scriptures, so that he could foretell and reveal not only future things but even the secrets of the conscience and the soul—write: perfect joy is not there.” … Yet a little farther he went, and cried again aloud: “O Friar Leo, although the Friar Minor were skilled to preach so well that he should convert all infidels to Christ—write: not there is perfect joy.” And when this fashion of talk had continued for two miles, Friar Leo asked: … “Father, prithee in God’s name tell me where is perfect joy to be found?” And Francis answered him: “When we are come to St. Mary of the Angels” [then the Franciscan chapel in Assisi], “wet through with rain, frozen with cold, foul with mire, and tormented with hunger, and when we knock at the door, and the doorkeeper comes in a rage and says, ‘Who are you?’ and we say, ‘We are two of your friars,’ and he answers, ‘You lie, you are rather two knaves who go about deceiving the world and stealing the alms of the poor. Begone!’ and he opens not to us, and makes us stay outside hungry and cold all night in the rain and snow; then, if we endure patiently such cruelty … without complaint or mourning, and believe humbly and charitably that it is God who made the doorkeeper rail against us—O Friar Leo, write: there is perfect joy! And if we persevere in our knocking; and he issues forth, and angrily drives us away, abusing us and smiting us on the cheek, saying, ‘Go hence, you vile thieves!’—if this we suffer patiently with love and gladness, write, O Friar Leo: this is perfect joy! And if, constrained by hunger and by cold, we knock once more and pray with many tears that he open to us for the love of God, and he … issues forth with a ‘big knotted stick and seizes us by our cowls and flings us on the ground, and rolls us in the snow, bruising every bone in our bodies with that heavy club; if we, thinking on the agony of the blessed Christ, endure all these things patiently and joyously for love of Him—write, O Friar Leo, that here and in this is found perfect joy.”48