Two books about St. Francis: one by the protean English critic and one by an equally protean Greek. How, though, to treat their differences, especially since the books are unalike in length and fervency?
St. Francis of Assisi by G. K. Chesterton
and
Saint Francis by Nikos Kazantzakis
So in this perilous grace of God
With all my sins go I….
—G. K. Chesterton, “A Second Childhood”
I. “Brother Moon and Sister Sun”:[i] A Personal Note
I remember from my undergraduate years time in Christ Chapel, a lovely place with wedding ceremonies, Sunday liturgical worship, chapel services, concerts, a funeral now and again.
It was either 1967 or 1968 when the college choir, all 400-plus souls, and what was called a “Festival of Remembrance,” gave a chant-like version of “Make Me A Channel Of Your Peace”:
For it’s in giving that we receive
And it’s in pardoning that we are pardoned
And it’s in dying that we are born . . .
To eternal life.
One might call it a “common prayer,” but that day in chapel in memory for a classmate dead in Vietnam, the chanting reverberated and those of us who needed to be consoled were consoled uncommonly.
It’s the “Prayer of St. Francis” but not unusual for a Lutheran College where St. Francis is venerated.[ii]
My interest in St. Francis began at that time and deepened when I learned there was an Order of Lutheran Franciscans devoted to living the spirit of St. Francis. It’s all about Franciscanism and there’s a smallish Franciscan Lutheran Monastery near where I live and I met a Lutheran Franciscan Friar on one of my Appalachian Trail hikes and a joyful beggar.
Nine centuries after his death in 1226 St. Francisco de asis’s inspiration continues.
II. The Biographers and Their Contesting….
I read once that when St. Francis died he was cuddled in St. Clare’s arms. Although I have a preference, the story is likely untrue; her life in the convent was cloistered for over four decades.
Who was this St. Francis whose love for God was unquenchable according to some or someone more true to the modern spirit which would make St. Francis a kindred veterinary spirit with James Herriot.
When I prowled my college library as an undergraduate, I recall a shelf of St. Francis biographies including a copy by Brother Thomas Celano, the first to write a biography three years after St. Francis’ death, that same Thomas Celano who wrote as a trustworthy witness since he was one of the saint’s early followers. It’s seraphically interesting; the point is largely hagiographic, Celano comparing St. Francis with earlier martyrs and saints of memory, suggesting St. Francis’ holiness is rooted in that tradition.
There are other biographers; St. Bonaventure records the meeting with the leper as the appearance of Christ which led to St. Francis’ love of poverty. What’s interesting in St. Bonaventure’s biography is that at the moment of his death, his Franciscan brethren saw his blessed soul “ascend” and carried into heaven on a cloud radiant with dazzling whiteness, appropriate for a saint often called “the mirror of Christ.”
By the fourteenth century anecdotes were gathered into The Little Flowers of St. Francis, which includes a chapter in which the Virgin Mary, St. John, and St. Francis appear in a vision to Friar Peter; St. Francis’ grief over the crucified Christ was greater than that of the Virgin Mary’s or St. John’s; St. Francis is clothed in more noble garments of beatific glory.
Written after his 1894 visit to Assisi, Johannes Jorgensen wrote in Danish and his biography of St. Francis was translated to reach a wider audience. Dry facts but it’s diligent, suggestive of an early version of Ghandi. One can skip forward to Father Omer Englebert’s 1979 biography, an English translation from the 1947 text; readable and not long with fewer vignettes. It compares with Paul Sabatier’s 1893 The Life of St. Francis, the first modern biography in which St. Francis is an enthusiastic pacifist and ecologist rather than a remote icon of devotion. The book raises the question as to how familiar the reader needs to be with the medieval times in which St. Francis lived.[iii]
I recall browsing my own college’s library shelves and scanned Donald Spoto’s 2002 Reluctant Saint: The Life of Francis of Assisi which proposed to remove the legends accrued over time resulting in an obscure pious iconography. Spoto suggests that if St. Francis could see his contemporary biography so misrepresented he likely would be saddened by the pomp and ceremony.[iv] Augustine Thompson’s 2012 Francis of Assisi: A New Biography is described as a tour de force; his St. Francis is psychologically conflicted; unlike the St. Francis of legend, Thompson’s St. Francis never had a moment of divine inspiration.[v]
III. St. Francis as the Mirror of Christ and a Savior of God
The issue is complicated as would any issue that presents such a figure as St. Francis as the “mirror of Christ.” If we read “blurbs,” G. K. Chesterton’s St. Francis of Assisi opines that after Mary of Nazareth the greatest saint in the Christian calendar, and one of the most influential men in human history, is St. Francis. The “blurb” also claims that Chesterton’s “life” is by acclaim the “best appreciation of St. Francis life—the one that gets to the heart of the matter.”
It’s possible: Chesterton’s biographical purpose—combined with his commentary—is to illuminate what Ernst Renan and Matthew Arnold “left dark.”[vi] He’s concerned with previous biographies that make St. Francis defiantly devotional, even if the book’s cover is drawn from a Caravaggio painting of St. Francis in meditation and akin to Elijah in his cave, a man who owned a high-strung emotional nature while waiting in that cave to hear the small voice of God.
But there’s also Nikos Kazantzakis’ Saint Francis, a Loyola classic, and the story of a beloved saint who changed the way people think about following Christ. Like most studies of St. Francis, Kazantzakis draws on the stories of St. Francis and his “little flowers.” In vignette-after-vignette, Kazantzakis infuses those master narratives with a spiritual fervency all his own but also typical of Kazantzakis and similar to the testament one finds in The Saviors of God, his spiritual exercises written during a time of intense suffering which Kazanstzakis describes as the result of a mental and spiritual disturbance manifesting itself in the body much like the wounds of St. Francis.[vii]
Two books about St. Francis: one by the protean English critic and one by an equally protean Greek. How, though, to treat their differences, especially since the books are unalike in length and fervency?
IV. The World of St. Francis and Our Own
As for our own world, best to begin with Chesterton’s belief that the Franciscan spirit is missing in our age, replaced by science and a secular world which has led to the presumed death of Christianity caused by an enlightened age suffering no marvels. Chesterton comments that the pagan world which had begun to “melt” during the long Medieval period “was colored by dangerous and rapidly deteriorating unnatural passions… [and] something dangerous and disproportionate [had taken] its place in human nature” and that which is dangerous and disproportionate was becoming rooted in our own age (20, 21).
That sort of thing, “goeth out but by prayer and fasting.” To Chesterton, the “historical importance of St. Francis” is the larger moral movement he caused during the transition from the twelfth to the thirteenth century.
He comments and narrates the life of a young man from the nouveau riche, the son of a cloth merchant and a member of the rising mercantile class. His education was sufficient for a young man who needed only a few skills to become a cloth merchant. Depending on the testimony of his biographers, it’s clear that Francis spent nights with rowdies and became debauched. From a modern point of view, Francis was high-spirited, rebellious in a mid-1960s free-spirit way.
Rather than patronizing St. Francis as found in collections of pretty stories, Chesterton early uses the vignette of the war that had broken out between Assisi and Perugia which he notes is akin to recent European history, a war of modern industrial empires haunting the fancy of Chesterton’s own youth and which he infers “paralyzed civilization” and turned out any number of paralytics (31). Among the soldiers of Assisi was St. Francis, the son of that same cloth merchant who with a company of lancers went out, was captured and imprisoned. For Chesterton, this is a landmark appearing in the fellowship St. Francis offers to his fellow prisoners, acting out of a peace-making largesse “within himself,” even when sickness made him more serious.
After which Francis discovered that he had lost his desire for debauchery. Outside Assisi was an abandoned church where Francis began staying, praying for whole days. We are told that such living was preparation for his conversion. Chesterton remarks that in his testament St. Francis writes that such began his repentance with bitter experiences among the poor with whom he performed acts of charity (104 ).
There are other landmarks Chesterton discusses after his first chapter, “The Problem of St. Francis.” His commenting alludes to St. Francis anticipating all that is “most liberal and sympathetic in the modern mood; the love of nature, the love of animals, the sense of social compassion, the sense of the spiritual dangers of prosperity and even of property” (98). To argue such suggests that St. Francis is a grand sort of humanitarian, the first hero of humanism, the bright morning star of the Renaissance which misses the point when Chesterton asks his reader to consider the whole of the Franciscan inspiration one might “feel” best in the “painting of Giotto” (7,8).
Chesterton follows by suggesting that most studies of St. Francis seem unintelligible to anyone who does not share his religion since to be truthful to the saint requires a saint to write about the life of a saint. The problem has a peculiarity when the biography is charged with reconciling gaiety with austerity and that mystical “stigma” received in a cloud of mystery and isolation and inflicted by no human hand, the unheralded everlasting wound that heals the world which Chesterton describes as St. Francis’ “seraphic suffering, spread-out like a cross” piercing the soul with a sword of grief and pity.” Amid all of that, “relaxation and quiet” and “in which time can drift by with the sense of something ended and complete; and as [St. Francis] stared downwards, he saw the marks of nails in his own hands” (66).
So to go about commenting and narrating and tasking the modern world to read the story of a man”presented as the mirror of Christ” which by analogy means understanding something of a mystical creed and a different order of ideas apart from more modernized Christian morals. Chesterton makes the argument in Chapter I that for St. Francis after a long period of sterile experience came in time an emancipation from rationalistic routine. The theological short-hand, however, has been for many a mystical creed of nature worship. What had happened to St. Francis in his time has been happening in our times: a “whole world colored by dangerous ideologies and rapidly deteriorating passions let alone the presence of bad psychology with which the world has grown weary or should grow weary” (65 ).
It was no metaphor to say that the modern age needed a new heaven and a new earth. The transition from the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries might by analogy bring reform if only a twilit figure could appear silently and suddenly as on a little hill and stand with hands lifted as in so many statues and about him a burst of birds singing and behind him would be the break of day, this figure, this “mirror of Christ.”
Chesterton’s St. Francis is a model of traditional Christian morals for a world that has become defiled. But how could one learn anything from a saint who over time had become a “kind old person pottering under a yew hedge in sight of a village spire” (83). Chesterton notes that the simplicity of St. Francis’ undertaking was characteristic. St. Francis, like Christ, was alive with a religious revolution and although writing at a distance Chesterton notes the consequence in St. Francis’ own life was a spiritual earthquake which for our own time should not be decreased but increased.
The problem for St. Francis—which is likely our own problem in a similar guise—was the human horror of leprosy. But Chesterton notes that St. Francis had sworn that he would never refuse to help a poor man. Never was any man so little afraid of his own promises. His life was not one of rash vows [but] rash vows that turned out right (28). Chesterton comments that for dramatic effect the episode should not be decreased for effect in our own day but increased if we are to understand St. Francis bravery. Still dressed in his own gay garments, Francis scampers after the vanishing leper- beggar. Still “in his sins,” but quick to recognize his moral laziness—and to dramatize his conversion—the saint detached himself from his former life and embracing the leper embraced a life of spiritual consolation. It was not an isolated instance; when he remounted his horse and looked around he could not see the leper anywhere but it dawned on Francis “Whom” he had just kissed.
It’s prelude to a period of crisis for St. Francis which has led to that single event about which modern scholars voice skepticism. Chesterton draws from Celano’s record but also notes with little sensationalism for his contemporaries that such was not the banner and spears of Perugia but for once St. Francis’ soul must have stood still at what must have been a vulgar danger. When he rushed on the leper such began a long vocation of ministry among lepers for this “mirror or Christ.”
V. A Man For All Seasons
There’s a note by Chesterton written in his usual manner that modernism’s “romance” with Nietzsche’s Superman is like a “thief in the night . . . . [W]e cannot ask the Superman simply to add a higher set of virtues to current respectable morals; for he is undoubtedly going to empty a good deal of respectable morality out like so much dirty water, and replace it by new and strange customs, shedding old obligations and accepting new and heavier ones.”[viii] But philosophy “is not the concern of those who pass through Divinity and Greats, but of those who pass through birth and death. Nearly all the more awful and abstruse statements can be put inwards of one syllable, from ‘A child is born’ to ‘A soul is damned.’ If the ordinary man may not discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it?”[ix]
It’s from Chesterton’s book on George Bernard Shaw, which appeared in 1909, and a dramatist Chesterton believed owned a dull consistency in his faulty thinking, especially his mockery of marriage in Man and Superman and his embrace of Nietzsche. The suggestion is the likelihood that what Chesterton came to know of Nietzsche is from Shaw’s preface to Man and Superman where Shaw introduced his audience to writers with attitudes similar to his own including Goethe and his Faust and Nietzsche whose term “Ubermensch” from both Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Gay Science has been traditionally translated as Superman or more accurately “Beyond Man.” Shaw, a socialist, was also a bit vague on Nietzsche’s “usefulness” and the dark pessimism that animated his numerous aphorisms.
It’s clear when reading Chesterton’s St. Francis of Assisi that his “man for all seasons” is the antidote for Shaw’s “Beyond Man” who has the modern disease not only of subversive blasphemy but an ideology which in Man and Superman presents a character, Tanner, lost in his own verbiage. What Shaw believed was intelligence borrowed from Nietzsche is an inversion of what Nietzsche intended. His paradigm shift can be best understood by noting that as an unforeseen consequence the Enlightenment created a worldly promise antithetical to the other-worldliness of Christianity. With the explanatory collapse brought on by the Enlightenment came the moral vacuum of nihilism and mankind was left with the notion that God could no longer prove valuable. For Nietzsche, what was needed was a “creator” of new values which would banish nihilism.[x]
More to the point would be the arrival of an evolutionary “Beyond Man” whose instinct would be to give birth to new tables of values which would, however, replace the Christian value system. The Ubermensch is not the “mirror of Christ.”
What was afoot was a new superstition: “The great difficulty of [Shaw’s] fine intelligence [was] a failure to grasp and enjoy the things commonly called convention and tradition; which are foods upon which all human creatures must feed frequently if they are to live.”
The issue is hardly moot.
This is Chesterton encouraging a revival of philosophy; unless a man has a philosophy, “bad things will happen to him. He will be practical; he will be progressive; he will cultivate efficiency; he will trust in evolution . . . . [and in time] will stagger on to a miserable death with no comfort but a series of catchwords.”
Philosophy “had become that which had [already] been thought. . . second if not third hand, exploded legends or unverified rumors” (21). In Chapter Two of his Saint Francis of Assisi, Chesterton offers something of an outline of history which is unlike that of Mr. Wells who understands the outline as a kind of picturesque Christianity albeit largely cruel. But the story of St. Francis which arrives in history near the close of the Medieval Period was not merely a Renaissance awakening as a larger movement of reform or what came, Chesterton comments, after a “long penitentiary period” (23).
This was done with the highest of motives and with the sweeping reforms of Pope Gregory the Seventh and a “reconciliation” a century or so later when a figure “appeared silently and suddenly on a little hill above the city, dark against the fading darkness. For it was the end of a long and stern night, a night of vigil” (25).
It’s again into such a context that Chesterton places his St. Francis of Assisi and the world St. Francis found which by analogy owns an “unfathomable perversity” if not a parallel with our own.
Such is the Franciscan spirit Chesterton believes is missing in our own modern age having been replaced by the development of science and the emergence of a secular world which has led to the presumed death of God.
If not the Superman, then what and from whom?
A philosophical person who with a certain amount of gruffness cleans up the impracticable muddle even such a conservative as Chesterton himself.
Or a saint.
With that in mind, it’s easier to explain Chesterton’s enthusiasm for Saint Francis and a proper way to discuss existence without becoming existential: “St. Francis is not a proper person to be patronized with merely ‘pretty’ stories. There are often any number of them; but they are too often used so as to be a sort of sentimental sediment of the medieval world, instead of being, as the saint emphatically is, a challenge to the modern world” (21).
So we have this figure in a brown habit. Ian Ker in his superb biography of Chesterton notes his early enthusiasm for the saint by “imagining a tea party consisting of about six people, including Jesus Christ, Walt Whitman—and St. Francis.” [xi]
Chesterton took the saint’s name as his confirmation name, but it was not his asceticism as it was his gratitude for his very existence. Chesterton explains the paradox (a favorite word) by applying the life of the saint against what he finds again in Nietzsche, a timid thinker: “So when he
describes his hero, he does not dare to say, ‘the pure man,’ or ‘the happier man,’ or ‘the sadder man,’ for all these are ideas and ideas are alarming”:[xii] [T]he whole philosophy of St. Francis revolved round the idea of a new supernatural light on natural things, which means the ultimate recovery not the ultimate refusal of natural things”(29).
Chesterton’s faith in the saint would be to effect a spiritual earthquake, one in which the very stones upon which we walk would cry out with joy. He was again in disagreement with Ernst Renan and Matthew Arnold who believed that religion had become mere philosophy. For Chesterton, his revival was to make such a “thing” personal, and for us to learn that to gaze into the mirror each morning is to see our own faces limned with the face of Christ which is not something foreign or temporary.
How else do we go about fulfilling the law of our “being”?
VI. God’s Struggler: This Is The Way The Soul Awakens….
About that same time the college choir was chanting “The Prayer of St. Francis,” I was switching majors from pre-med to literature. The oddity concerned a class I was taking in The Contemporary Continental Novel among which was one with the title Zorba the Greek and the story of an English writer traveling to Greece who meets an exuberant Greek, Zorba. My professor, Dame Sarah Keith, referred to Zorba as one of the great literary creations of all time and in a class with Falstaff and Sancho Panza which I thought was going some but then what did I know.
She was kind, that professor from Great Britain and a very proper woman who suffered my office visits. And brilliant, quietly aristocratic but harboring a soft kind of sadness. She used a term one day in class when we were reading that novel: metaphysics. The context was her reference to the novel as one of the greatest life-affirming novels of our time which left me a bit fuddled.
In her office, then, which she called her “rooms,” when I was explaining my fuddlement, she asked me a question which she said was “metaphysical”: Is it possible to convert matter into spirit? Well, I knew that matter in one form could be converted into another form, water into steam, for example. She suggested I think about it and return tomorrow.
I did and she thought my biblical example a good one, Jesus’ converting water into wine. We had tea. We then began talking about what this might mean, metaphysically. She asked if I recalled which book the narrator was reading at the novel’s beginning. I said it was the Divine Comedy. She said I might wish to think of our novel as similar to Dante’s poem, the narrator as Dante and Zorba as Virgil his guide. And the subject similar inasmuch as Zorba’s longish soliloquies set the tone for the book: how to convert the matter of our lives into spirit.
And through both joy and tragedy, and life a purgatorial struggling ordeal judged in the end, the soul hallowed by suffering and to dance which is like speaking without words and doing so to liberate one’s spontaneity and emotional passions.
And if turned into myth, by arguing, carefully, that Zorba, daring and refusing convention, is a reflection of Nietzsche’s ideas but an “Above Man” who does not kill God—as Nietzsche would seem to argue according to many— but rather wishes to save Him by converting matter into spirit which suggests the whole story is a fable about releasing the ecstatic, spontaneous will to live or hobble along with a time-bound smidgeon of life and never once dancing in tune with a bubbling laugh from the deep, very deep, wellsprings of one’s spirit.
VII. This Fool For Christ, This Francis of Assisi
We know that Kazantzakis and his wife Eleni spent the summer months of 1953 in Italy and meandered the streets of Assisi which ignited his desire to write a book about St. Francis, and what would be his last novel eventually. One problem was the ecclesiastical opposition already in place by the Greek Orthodox Church owing to the content especially in The Last Temptation of Christ.But the idea grew steadily richer and according to Kazantzakis came more and more like an unmerited gift of divine grace and perhaps for Kazantzakis and for his narrator Brother Leo an extraordinary exertion to get to the bottom of things, the story of this poor man of God and his essence. Even Brother Leo remarks that “Francis runs in my mind like water. He changes faces; I am unable to pin him down. . . . How can I ever know what he was like, who he was? Is it possible that he himself did not know?”[xiii]
Biography, then, and fiction which embellishes history embellished in turn by Kazantzakis’ personal philosophy, this Kazantzaksi educated early by Franciscans and then in Paris, this protean Greek, where he studied philosophy with Henri Bergson.
Problematic, then, when approaching Kazantzakis for whom Nietzsche sang like a caged bird at least for his modern mind. And for whom his St. Francis is much more visceral if not more Albert Camus-like existential, blazing with passion and to read the whole requires an investment of time and a desire for a scholarly synthesis of many different ideas not only from Nietzsche but Bergson especially to whom Kazantzakis owned an immense debt. Ideas that permeate his Saint Francis can be found in Bergson’s Creative Evolution and his philosophical notion of the élan vital, the creative force that drives men toward their own evolution and perhaps unlike Chesterton a strong emphasis on intuition over reason. And from Nietzsche, that Greek notion of the confrontation between the Dionysian and Apollonian versions of life found in the Birth of Tragedy, i.e., Dionysus the god of revelry, joy, song, dance and Apollo, the god of peace, repose intellectual contemplation, logic, but not the boisterous lover of life.
Understood and also very mis-understood, Kazantsakis’ writings display a dialogue between divinity and humanity, even in his translation of Homer’s Odyssey which owns interesting parallels with the Letter to the Romans and Paul of Tarsus.[xiv] Rejecting codified dogmas, the majority of his writing and philosophy concerns his struggle with religious faith which led to some difficulty with Greek Orthodox clergy and some conservative literary critics.[xv] His novel Saint Francis is a case in point revealing his mystical tendencies and asceticism. Since the novel is a spiritual exercise others perceived the story as valuing the tenets of early Christianity: love, brotherhood, humility and most important, self-renunciation which in the novel details the processes by which ego is annihilated, that “mundane thing” Iris Murdoch (a favorite philosopher of mine) references and which Chesterton believed continuous with the self but more distant than any star.[xvi]
But Francis had already darted forward. The leper had emerged from a clump of trees. In his hand he held a staff covered with bells that, as he shook the staff, warned passersby to flee. As soon as he saw Francis running toward him with outspread arms, he uttered a shrill cry…. Half of his putrescent nose had fallen away; his hands were without fingers—just stumps; and his lips were an oozing wound.
Throwing himself upon the leper, Francis embraced him, then lowered his head and kissed him upon the lips (135).
The scene is again one of the seven key moments in the life of St. Francis narrated here by Brother Leo who remarks that these moments had about them the odor of sainthood (13), and and likely one to be wondered at by modern readers. As Francis remounts and begins to ride away, he looks back and the leper has disappeared. But in the whole of his life we know that because he was “still in his sin,” he began doing penance, taking what seems bitter and transmuting it into sweetness which is the way the soul awakens and the process by which matter is converted into spirit.
Chesterton, as previously mentioned, also narrates the scene by noting that Francis “saw his fear coming up the road… white and horrible in the sunlight. For once in the long rush of his life his soul must have stood still” (35). Imaginatively we are not looking at clouds and sparrows, leaves and flowers. It’s sublimity, a virtuous act, and a high spiritual experience. It begs the question to argue that such is “a sacramental experience” but those may be the exact words.
The issues in Chesterton’s biography and Kazantzakis’ novel are thus treated with synonymity and moments about which moral philosopher Iris Murdoch (again a favorite of mine) might offer such comment as “Faced with difficult problems or terrible decisions, we may feel the need, not so much of a sudden straining of unpracticed will power, but of a calm vision, a relaxed understanding, something that comes from a deep level” [xvii]
The great break in St. Francis life, Chesterton comments, is when “something happened to him that must remain greatly dark to most of us . . . who are ordinary and selfish men whom God has not broken to make anew” (36). It’s the talking crucifix moment and the ruins of the Church of St. Damien and where St. Francis had formed the habit of praying. As he did so, he heard a voice saying to him, “Francis, sees thou that my house is in ruins? Go and restore it for me” (36). St. Francis set about collecting stones even begging people to give him stones.
With Kazantzakis, however, as Brother Leo narrates these early episodes, St. Francis is swept up by a mysterious and invisible urge if not an agony. The action is not an appeal to our experience but also an abhorrence to our experience. Instinct tells us to avoid contact with something so filled with dread. For St. Francis it begins as a dark point of anguish after which his mind and heart glow and he hurls himself forward with an almost erotic phantasm and for the moment of that kiss the human in St. Francis is annihilated by the divine, matter into spirit. If we allowed wide latitude in our interpretation, well, perhaps this scene discloses what Kazantzakis believed was our “duty to transmute matter into spirit.”[xviii]
What Chesterton refers to in the fourth chapter, “Francis the Builder,”as “something” that “must remain greatly dark” is narrated in considerable emotional if not spiritual fervency by Brother Leo. St. Francis, suffering an extraordinary dark night of the soul believes himself doomed, “plummeting downward” (65) unless he could find a way to grow wings. The tiny church of San Damiano, the beloved saint of Assisi, is now tottering, the walls filled with gaping holes. Inside, though, still intact, “was the crucifix, a large Byzantine cross with a bloody, pale-green Christ hanging on it.” Brother Leo adds more sublime detail: “There was something strangely sweet about this Christ, a sadness that was not divine but human. You sensed he was weeping, dying like a human being.” Brother Leo and St. Francis on the same day as the feast of San Damiano, rush to the church in ruins, the glass lamp unlit. The difference, however, between Chesterton and Kazantzakis is that Christ speaks to St. Francis in a dream suggesting that the whole church, like the world, is falling into broken ruins. The little chapel is the case in point and not only does Christ in the dream grasp St. Francis’ shoulder he gives him a strong push with the command, “Build it up!” It was Sunday, the twenty-fourth day of September in the year 1206 after the birth of our Lord when St. Francis himself was reborn and when he and Brother Leo begin to gather stones and to buy oil for the lamp to illuminate “Him.”
As they worked, St. Francis sang a troubadour song about the virtue of the beloved lady and talked passionately about stones and that to “chink a crumbling wall is,” as Brother Leo narrates, “the same as reinforcing the entire earth to keep it from falling, the same as reinforcing [the] soul to keep that too from falling” (86).
What better example of converting matter into spirit, or the creative force, that impulse Henri Bergson again calls the élan vital which distinguishes the endurance of heroic individuals.[xix] It’s more intimate than simple “that” word since for both Nietzsche and Bergson and by similarity to Kazantzakis this creative force is not the objectification of the human will so much as it is will itself characterized by a darting forward of human consciousness vitally and in the case of St. Francis a spontaneous striving of spirit and expression in service to God’s will.[xx]
Of that later tremendous moment of St. Francis’ stigmata, Chesterton, however, is more blasé than Kazantzakis: Chesterton opting to suggest that it was “meant for a crown and for a seal” (75). Kazantzakis, on the other hand, bejewels the story in a manner that recalls the story mentioned earlier by Bonaventure.
Here’s Kazantzakis on the stigmata which bears a remarkable resemblance to Peter Paul Rubens’ painting:
The night was collecting its stars and darkness, preparing to leave, when suddenly there was a vehement, brilliantly red flash in the heavens. I lifted my eyes. A seraph with six wings of fire was descending, and in the midst of the fire, wrapped in flames, was Christ Crucified. Two of the wings embraced his head, two others his body, and the last two, one on each side, enwrapped his arms…. The winged figure of the Crucified rushed down upon Francis with a hiss and touched him for the space of a lightning flash. Francis uttered a heartrending cry as though nails were being driven into him, and, spreading his arms, stood crucified in the air. Then I heard the six-winged seraph utter several words, rapidly, melodiously…. I distinctly heard Francis shout, “More! More! I want more . . . And the voice of Christ replied from amid the seraph’s wings, “Beloved Francis… Crucifixion, Resurrection, and paradise are identical.” Francis lay “stretched on the ground now, facedown, writhing convulsively. I bolted out from behind my rock and ran to him. His hands and feet were bleeding profusely. Lifting him up and opening his frock, I saw that blood was also flowing from a deep open wound in his side, a wound that seemed to have been made by a lance” (498-499).
It bears mentioning that both Chesterton and Iris Murdoch (again a favorite of mine) own complementary views on the imagination. Chesterton argues in St. Francis of Assisi a view of the imagination opposed to that of his own century, imagination having degenerated and become far from sacramental. Murdoch’s similar view of the imagination she argues is a concept that leads “toward a discussion of ‘pure things’ or ‘holy images’, omnipresent sacraments . . . . [But religion] is always menaced by magic, and yet faith can redeem and transform magic.”[xxi] Thus when we pay attention to the images of art, those icons, we may “intuit” with exemplary clarity something that has been lost, left behind, fallen out of our being but which in time past was an ordinary mystical discipline. Religious discipline Murdoch writes “now tends to mean intense personal impressions…. [xxii]
Here’s Chesterton imaginatively on the death of Saint Francis who in later life had become a pageant of sickness, or almost like a pageant of mortality and in that one mighty moment blessed us all:
.[H]e was lifted at his own request off his own rude bed and laid on the bare ground; as some say clad only in a hair-shirt, as he had first gone forth into the wintry woods from the presence of his father. It was the final assertion of his great fixed idea…. As he lay there we may be certain that his seared and blinded eyes saw nothing but their object and their origin. We may be sure that the soul in its last inconceivable isolation was face to face with nothing less than God Incarnate and Christ Crucified…. [T]he hours passed and the shadows lengthened. A man might fancy that the birds must have known when it happened; and made some motion in the evening sky… [T]here was a sudden stillness, where all the brown figures stood like bronze statues; for the stopping of the great heart that had not broken till it held the world (97-98).
In his final chapter, Chesterton comments that what St. Francis gave the world is beyond quarrel and for St. Francis beyond the great primal thing save for the Creation and the Story of Eden, the fist Christmas and the first Easter without which the world had no history. And for our own time the Testament of St. Francis is the story of a man who walked the world “like the Pardon of God” (101) which suggests that his appearance on earth, and his sainthood, marks a mean in which even modern men could be reconciled not only to God but to nature and most difficult even in their sins to themselves.
The saint was sane but with an elfish eccentricity. His life was like the birth of a child as in a dark house and lifts its doom and triumphs over it by his innocence.
And here’s Kazantakis on the death Saint Francis whose final words were engraved on his followers’ hearts lest they be lost:
“What is love, my brothers,” he asked, opening his arms as though he wished to embrace us. “What is love? It is not simply compassion, not simply kindness. In compassion there are two: the one who suffers and the one who feels compassion. In kindness there are two: the one who gives and the one who receives. But in love there is only one; the two join, unite become inseparable. The ‘I’ and the ‘you’ vanish; to love means to lose one’s self in the beloved.”
The end then came near with the friars arriving from all directions including Captain Wolf who descended from the mountain and on tiptoe brought Francis a gift of grapes.[xxiii]
The brothers undressed him and laid him naked on the ground sensing the presence of the archangel above his body. In the distance oxen, horses, dogs, flocks on sheep were all coming toward the hut lamenting and then the wild animals emerged from the forrest and began to lament and then “thousands of winged creatures” began to sound a dirge.
Suddenly the heavens were filled with flashes of blue, green, gold, and purple. Brother Leo lifted his head. “The air was thick with wings. Thousands and thousands of angels came and placed themselves round the dying man, then folded their wings and waited with smiling faces, ready to carry off his soul . . . . His face was resplendent, his eyes wide open, and fixed upon the air . . . . His lips moved; he seemed to have some final words to say to us. I went close to him.
“Poverty, Peace, Love….”
VIII. Matter Converted Into Spirit: Can a Man Become a Donkey?
Somehow, a long time ago, what came into being ex nihilo was spirit coming into matter. It’s not inappropriate to say that such is a form of incarnation. As Brother Leo inscribed the final words a tiny sparrow came to the window and began to tap on the pane. “Its wings were drenched; I got up to let it in. And it was you, Father Francis, it was you dressed as a tiny sparrow” (598).
I confess to an equal amount of fondness for both Chesterton’s St. Francis of Assisi and Kazantzaksi Saint Francis. And I confess a tremendous fondness and debt to my mentor Dame Sarah Keith. I came to know her well in the numerous times we spent in her “rooms” and with tea. I learned she was early orphaned, her birth parents lost in the London World War II bombings. But adopted and wonderfully raised by a minor aristocratic family. She once showed me their photograph and another of a young man in uniform, the love of her life, gone missing in the Korean Conflict and the source of her sorrow, he, very much a gentleman. Because of Dame Sarah Keith I went to graduate school. And about the time of my doctoral defense came a phone call and I learned of her death and in her final testament her request for me to eulogize her in that same chapel where years ago the choir chanted “Make Me A Channel Of Your Peace.”
I agreed but asked that the old lectern I would daily heft from her “rooms” to her next door class room be placed up front in the chapel. I spoke for her in that chapel with my notes on that old lectern. I asked for forgiveness, inadequate as I felt to the task but recalled from memory a time in which we were talking about Heraclitus and Parmenides and flux and how in Parmenides’ poem the goddess says that, yes, there is “flux” but something must give motion to that flux and that something is “un-generated, whole and uniform and still and perfect” and which she said was an important stretch of metaphysical reasoning which at that young time in my life was one more example of befuddlement.
She asked if I agreed that because of flux all things in time change? I agreed. She asked if a man could make himself into donkey? I said yes but Dame Sarah fluffed for a moment and suggested I was confusing the word donkey with the word ass.
And then she smiled benevolently….
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This essay was first published here in March 2022.
Notes:
[i] In 1972 Franco Zeffirelli directed Brother Sun, Sister Moon, which portrays the life of St. Francis. Interspersed are lyrics from the Scottish singer/songwriter Donovan which became the sound tack for the movie which suggests St. Francis was an early version of someone mellow yellow.
[ii] To be clear, the prayer was not written by St. Francis but an anonymous French writer early in the Twentieth Century.
[iii] Sabatier is an interesting figure who’s at the forefront of more modern methods of textual research which is, arguably, more scientific than not. The consequence for Sabatier is that his “story” of the Franciscan order was in contradiction to the church’s Doctrine of the Faith and thus deemed heretical. In 1894, the book was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, the aim of which was to protect church members from reading “disruptive books.”
[iv] Spoto is something of a prodigy with numerous biographies to his credit including one on Marilyn Monroe and one on Joan of Arc. His biography of St. Francis intends to strip away all that has been obscure by years of pious iconography and hovers between disapproval by zealots on one hand and atheists on the other. The consequence is a book more befuddling than not.
[v] Once again, using more modern historical methods, the second part of which, following a stand alone biographical narrative, examines the reams of historical sources about St. Francis. The consequence is a meticulous study. Thompson was recently appointed President of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies
[vi] G. K Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi, Arcadia Press, 2019, p. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent citations are from this edition and cited by page number. Renan’s Life of Jesus, which appeared in 1863, was immensely popular. Writing on the origins of early Christianity, Jesus is depicted as a man but not God which then argues that the life of Jesus is no different than the life of any historical person. Arnold is sometimes compared to Newman as a conservative Catholic but later abandoned Christianity in favor of agnosticism. For Arnold, most of the metaphysical apparatus of traditional Christian theology .had become literally meaningless which suggests his relation to Newman became in time more subversive than not.
[vii] Nikos Kazantsakis, The Saviors of God, Simon and Schuster, 1960, p. 4.
[viii] See G. K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw, Gutenberg On-Line Edition, p. 184. Chesterton skewers Shaw gracefully with such phrases as this “eloquent sophist” and that Nietzsche was “a frail, fastidious, and entirely useless anarchist. He had a wonderful optic wit . . . [with] a remarkable ability of saying things that master the reason for a moment by their gigantic unreasonableness:” p. 181.
[ix] Shaw, p. 220.
[x] Care must be attended when rendering an interpretation because of the “uses” made over the years following Nietzsche’s death. It’s clear that he understood the historical narrative of the Enlightenment’s doctrines as the source for the diminution of classical values, especially Christianity. The paradigm shift suggested that the sole source of values that resulted would arise from empiricism which meant that the concept of God as the ultimate expression of values which included other-worldly fulfillment would in effect die. The consequence, however, and of which Nietzsche was profoundly aware, was that the ultimate expression of these new values vectored into nihilism. Nietzsche projected such but also argued that the “BeyondMan,” as an object of serious aspiration, was no Nazi bogeyman but an actual historical person like other historical persons in time who represented a sort of eschatological redemption. It’s esoteric, of course, but suggests that the “Beyond-Man” who has creatively evolved would represent an eschatological redemption and defeat nihilism. The problem has always been to think of the “Beyond-Man” as the Lex Lothor of Superman comic fame which is a bit like tearing out a single sentence—such as God is dead— from the whole of a philosophical, albeit aphoristic, work.
[xi] Ian Ker, Chesterton: A Biography, p. 500.
[xii] Shaw, p. 225.
[xiii] Nikos Kazantzkis, Saint Francis, Loy.ola Classics, pp. 25, 30. Unless other wise indicated, all subsequent citations are from this edition by page number.
[xiv] “Wretched man that I am,” Paul cries; “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” Roman’s 7:24. Similarly in Odyssey 5, Odysseus’ cries, “Miserable man that I am, who is going to save me?”
[xv] Martin Scorsese, for example, directed a film version of Kazantzakis The Last Temptation of Christ. Catholic and Protestant views were much alike in their condemnation of the film as morally offensive to what Christians believe.
[xvi] G. K. Chestertpm. Orthodoxy, p. 51.
[xvii] Dame Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, p. 301. “The idea of negation (void) or surrender of selfish will is to be understood with the idea of purified desire as purified” cognition.
[xviii] Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God. Human existence, Kazantzakis notes, is a struggle to discover and restore the spirit. Thus by analogy life itself is a crusade in the service of God. “Whether we wished to or not, we are set out as crusaders to free—not the Holy Sepulcher—but that God is buried in matter and in our souls.” See also his Saint Francis where Brother Leo writes early, “So, you fought the flesh, vanquished it mercilessly, then kneaded it with your blood and after a terrible struggle that lasted many years, transformed it into spirit” (19).
[xix] It should be mentioned that Bergson’s élan vital has little scientific application or as an explanation of phenomena as most scientific concepts do. If one thinks, however, as the élan vital as vital spirit the world of experience is distinct from the physical world. Bergson argued for the independence of the former from the latter; the élan vital is the self-procreating energies transforming matter into spirit.
[xx] The difficulty, however, is the suggestion on the part of some Bergson admirers that the élan vital, this vital force, is capable of surmounting all obstacles which could include death. With that in mind, C. S. Lewis rejected Bergson’s concept by arguing that nothing can reverse the second law of thermodynamics. See his essay “The Weight of Glory.”
[xxi] Murdoch, Metaphysics p. 337.
[xxii] Murdoch, Metaphysics, p. 341..
[xxiii] Captain Wolf is understood to be the wolf of Gubbio who submitted to St. Francis and placed one of his forepaws on St. Francis hand to mark the agreement.
The featured image is “St Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata” (circa 1635) by Peter Paul Rubens, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.