It may sound fine to proclaim a new age in which the primacy of love was to be paramount, as it was in the beginning. But it must not be forgotten that the love Francis was talking about was God’s love, the love that can change all things including us.
It was thanks to St Bernard and supremely to St Francis that the profound mystical spirituality of the early Church was, at least for those with eyes to see, reborn again in thirteenth-century Europe. When St Francis returned from the Holy Land he built the first Crib in Greccio to burn into the hearts and minds of his fellow countrymen what had happened at the first Christmas in Bethlehem. In subsequent centuries, inspired by St Francis, the practice of building cribs spread all over Christendom and down to the present day. He wanted this moving scene to do for others what it did for him. Now that Christ had returned for ordinary people, at least in a way that was not so evident in the Dark Ages, spirituality could return to do what it was originally meant to do. It could teach people once again how to learn to love Jesus so that the love they would receive from him in return would draw them into his glorified body, thence in, with and through him back to the Father.
St Francis not only longed for but continually prayed for physical martyrdom to complete the union with Christ that he desired above all else. Instead of red martyrdom, however, he was offered a form of white martyrdom that no one had ever received before. On the fourteenth of September 1224, the feast of the Holy Cross, he received the stigmata on Mount La Verna. However, lest St Francis or anyone else for that matter could misunderstand what was about to happen to him, he received a revelation only seconds before he was stigmatized, so that the suffering engendered by this privilege would not be misunderstood. The revelation is told in such a low key way that many people have either failed to notice it or paid scant attention to what is of utmost importance. It should have been heralded by fanfares from on high and with heavenly choirs hitting thunderous crescendos. The revelation was to proclaim loud and clear the “primacy of love”, that would become the heart and soul of Franciscan spirituality as it was the heart and soul of the God-given spirituality that formed the first Christians. The revelation that he heard from Christ himself was this. “It is not by suffering that a person is united with God, but by love.” The love in question was not our love alone, but our love suffused and surcharged by the love that at all times pours out of the Risen Lord. That is, of course, the Holy Spirit, and that is why Francis wanted him to be named as the General of his Order, leading and guiding them from within.
In the “Dark Ages” the pernicious heresy of Manichaeism mushroomed all over Christendom both in and outside the Church, making people believe that the body was intrinsically evil. It resulted in a rigorous stoical asceticism meant to subjugate the flesh and free the soul from its imprisonment in the body, that was seen as no more than its prison. It was easy to see how it came to be believed that the requisite suffering that this ascetism involved was the way to Union with God. That is why the revelation to St Francis about the primacy of love was of such absolute importance to people emerging from the “Dark Ages”. They had forgotten the God-given “spirituality of the heart” that prevailed in the early Church. It was not even the suffering of martyrdom, whether it was “blood martyrdom” or “white martyrdom” that united you with God, but love; the love of God that suffused and surcharged human love that was developed in deep personal prayer, purified and perfected in mystical contemplation. Love was the cause, heroic ascetism was the expression.
The acts of heroism and the eye-catching feats of asceticism in those early days were not the acts of Catholic stoics trying to make themselves perfect. They were outward expressions of men, women and children animated by and inspired with the love of God. Later admirers who were inspired by them and wished to emulate them, made the mistake of thinking they had to copy their acts of superhuman asceticism if they wanted to follow them. What was in fact needed, as the revelation to St Francis underlined, was that they should rather generate the quality of personal prayer that could alone enable them to generate the love that could unite them with the One who makes all things possible even the impossible.
At last, thanks to St Francis, it was not only the effects of Arianism and Macedonianism that were destroyed, but the malicious and pernicious influence of Manichaeism and the heresy of Pelagianism that made people think that everything depended on their own endeavours alone. We were no longer alone, left to make our own way against all odds. The heresy of Pelagianism was put to bed as the Holy Spirit moved in to do what was quite impossible without him. As the Holy Spirit raises a person upward and into Christ, it is to see that all things were created in him from the beginning and that, far from being evil, they are all good, for they are the work of God. Salvation then does not involve the arduous task of trying to free oneself from a world in which all things are evil and imposing on oneself a form of inhuman ascetism that you find nowhere in the teaching of Christ, but everywhere where Manichaeism abounds. On returning to Assisi after receiving the stigmata, St Francis, filled with joy, dealt with Manichaeism in his own unique way.
While St Dominic was trying to put down the latest virulent outbreak of Manichaeism in the form of Albigensianism in southern France, Francis was doing the same in Italy. He did not, however, dispute with the heretics like Dominic, nor did he write a theological treatise; he simply wrote a poem. It was the first poem in the Italian language dedicated to Brother Sun, praising God in the glory of his creation. A little feeble one might think – but far from it. The people loved it and learned and recited it, putting it to music. It was a pop-hit composed by the greatest celebrity of the time and whilst everyone was enjoying listening to it they were being enthralled by the vision of St Francis and relearning the truth of God’s goodness and its presence in the works of his creation. What better way to reach ordinary men and women in the market place, and help put to death a heresy that had been making their lives miserable for centuries. St Francis had himself been deceived, so after asking pardon of his own body for wrongfully mistreating it, he stood up at the general chapter to condemn all forms of asceticism that came, not from the Gospels, but from the scourge of Manichaeism that had for centuries been plaguing the Church and most particularly those who believed that subjugating the body was the only way to free the soul from its imprisonment here on earth. The terrible winter of misunderstandings, misapprehensions and mistakes was over.
The Franciscan Spring had arrived, and it was inaugurated by a man who chose to be stripped of everything to imitate the poverty of Brother Jesus. Many, including some of his first brothers misinterpreted the reason why he wanted to be so absolutely poor, arguing that it was not a virtue that Jesus and his disciples embraced – but they missed the point. The absolute poverty of Christ that Francis wished to emulate was the poverty into which Jesus entered when he cast aside the riches of glory in heaven to enter into a weak human nature and subject himself to arrogant human nobodies for us. But the ultimate in poverty for Francis was Christ’s decision to continue to humble himself daily to become ordinary homemade bread. Why? So he could enter into our very bodies and there, radiant with the love that he first unleashed on the first Pentecost day, fill every part of our bodies so that we can be taken up into his mystical body where we can contemplate the Father in, with and through him, to all eternity. After he received the stigmata, Francis received a special indult from Rome giving him permission to have Mass in his hermitage. His joy was now complete.
It may sound fine to proclaim a new age in which the primacy of love was to be paramount, as it was in the beginning. But it must not be forgotten that the love Francis was talking about was God’s love, the love that can change all things including us. However, as love cannot be forced, only given to those who freely choose to receive it, Francis acted accordingly. He did what was to him so obvious, but which might not occur to us. He went into solitude with ever-increasing regularity and for ever longer periods of time. When you believe that the love that made the world is there, ready to make us into the image and likeness of his Son and fill you with the joy that nothing else on earth can give you, it seems the obvious thing to do; not to us perhaps, but it did to Francis.
As long as the contemplation that St Francis experienced in his prayer life also animated and inspired those who followed him, all would be well. They would not only see the truth with the wisdom that inspired him to show them what to do, but they would be given the power to do it. But take contemplation away and decline and fall would set in until contemplation returned. St Thomas Aquinas defined prayer, and he also defined meditation. He did not say pray, or meditate, and share the fruits of your prayer or meditation with others. He said contemplate and share the fruits of your contemplation with others.
While the Black death in 1349 killed almost half the population of Europe, far more were killed in religious orders because their charity opened them to the pestilence far more than the population at large. This led to religious decline, as in order to maintain all the religious houses that were rapidly emptying due to the plague, all too many new recruits were hastily signed up who were not suitable candidates for contemplation. As a result, decline set in across the board in almost all religious communities. The only hope was, “back to contemplation” and after seventeen years in solitude where he practised the contemplation that was to be his mainstay for the rest of his life, people, the faith was alive and well. I hope, from what little I have written, I have been able to show that it was alive and well in most religious Orders too, on whom the laity depended for leadership.
The popular devotional prayer known as the Jesus Psalter that endlessly repeated the name of Jesus was used perhaps more than any other form of prayer during Penal times by the Recusants in England who remained loyal to the Church. The prayer to Jesus was the last prayer that many of the martyrs made as they were being brutally put to death at Tyburn and elsewhere. The truth of the matter is that although there was more than enough depravity in high places thanks to the Renaissance Popes, particularly Alexander VI, on ground level the Franciscan reform movement was still bearing fruit. The Council of Trent (1545–1563) was not primarily called to combat spiritual degeneration, but Protestant heresies, and was preceded by great saints like St Catherine of Genoa, St Angela Merici, St Teresa of Ávila, St Peter of Alcantara, St Ignatius, St Philip Neri and so many others. Whilst older Orders were reformed, new Orders were raised up to embody and disseminate the spirit and the teaching of the Council.
Orders like the Jesuits, Barnabites, Theatines, Capuchins, Discalced Carmelites, and Oratorians were theologically and spiritually inspired and guided after the Council by such goliaths as St Robert Bellarmine, St Francis de Sales, St Vincent de Paul, and St John of the Cross. In the hands of such great leaders as these, for more than a hundred years after that Council, spirituality continued to thrive and prosper, surcharged from within by the profound mystical prayer that animated and inspired the Church since the great St Bernard. In his life’s work, Enthusiasm, Monsignor Ronald Knox makes it quite clear:
The seventeenth century was a century of mystics. The doctrine of the interior life was far better publicized, developed in far greater detail than it had ever been in late-medieval Germany or late-medieval England. Bremond, in his Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France, has traced unforgettably the progress of that movement in France. But Spain too, the country of St Teresa and St John of the Cross, had her mystics; Italy also had her mystics who flourished under the aegis of the Vatican. Even the exiled Church in England produced in Father Baker’s Sancta Sophia a classic of the interior life. (Chapter XI)
In his unique and masterly work, The Spiritual Life – A Treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Life, Father Tanquerey admits that he is deeply indebted to the spirituality of the French school of the seventeenth century in which mystical theology reached such an advanced stage of development. Perhaps the best and most detailed exposition of the mystical spirituality that blossomed in this period can be found in The Religious History of Seventeenth Century France by the renowned spiritual theologian Dr Louis Cognet. However, the clouds were beginning to gather. From small beginnings, a pernicious heresy was brewing that was going to do for the mystical life what Arianism did for the Christian life in earlier centuries. The heresy would be called Quietism, the movement that promises the Prayer of Quiet to those who have not been prepared to undergo the inner purification that would enable them to receive it. More on this topic must be said if we are to see and understand why it was put down so vigorously and how it resulted in the demise of true Catholic Mystical spirituality of which so few are aware, with the catastrophic consequences for the Church down to the present day, that we have all witnessed.
This essay is chapter twenty-three of The Primacy of Loving and is published here by gracious permission of the author.
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The featured image is “The oldest surviving depiction of Saint Francis is a fresco near the entrance of the Benedictine abbey of Subiaco, painted between March 1228 and March 1229.” This work of art is free, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.