Mystics and heretics in Italy at the end of the Middle Ages

MYSTICS AND HERETICS
IN ITALY

NICHOLAS-KMILE GEBHART
1S39-19CS

I i_\,»— 1 *-■

a.

MYSTICS & HERETICS
IN ITALY

AT THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES

BY

EMILE GEBHART

TRANSLATED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION,

BY

EDWARD MASLIN HULME

\ 3 bQ S(^ ■

n , i ■ ^^

LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET W.C. i

This translation
First published in ig22

\

{All rights reserved)

TO

THE MEMORY OF

MY MOTHER
ANNIE LOUISE HULME

THIS VERSION OF " LITALIE MYSTIQUE"

A BOOK THAT REVEALS THE SPIRIT OF AN AGE

IS DEDICATED

Youth fades, love droops, the leaves of friendship fall.
A mother's secret hope outhvcs them all.

INTRODUCTION

Although the French historian and man of letters
who is the subject of this brief sketch lived almost
exactly the traditionally allotted term of three score
years and ten, the frost of age had failed to chill
the fires of his youth ; his poet's heart still beat high
within his breast ; his enthusiasms had lost nothing
of their old intensity ; his interests were ever widen-
ing and deepening ; and his sympathies, more inclusive
than ever with the passing of the years, had but
mellowed in the autumnal glow. To have devoted half
a century to the writing and teaching of history (for
though he sat in a chair of literature he emphasized
the historical aspect of his subject), to have written
many exquisite historical sketches, one ambitious
historical novel impregnated with the authentic spirit
of its time, and at least two important historical
works unsurpassed in insight and synthetic power in
their respective fields, and, in addition, to have created
in the minds of many students an understanding of
the significance of two great periods in the story of
the human past, and to have enkindled in their hearts
a deep and abiding love for those times, for the noble
men who lived in them, and for the beauty of the
art that still gives voice to their ideals, to have done
all this, and without stain in the doing, is surely
an enviable accomplishment and one well worthy of
commemoration. Yet thus far only one of his books
has been done into English, and that a minor one ;
in no paper published in the English-speaking world
did his death evoke more than a brief paragraph ;

8 MYSTIC ITALY

and in his own country he seems to be generally under-
rated as a writer of mere exquisite miniatures rather
than esteemed as a scholar of insight and learning as
well as of grace.

Nicholas-£mile Gebhart was born in 1839 ^t Nancy,
the old capital of Lorraine, which at that time was
not as prosperous and animated as it afterwards came
to be, but which could nevertheless boast a grace now
vanished. The men of Lorraine, so one of their number
has said, have three ruling passions — the army, art,
and the forest. Gebhart and his two brothers, although
of Alsatian parentage, personified these three passions.
The eldest was a soldier and rose to the rank of
general ; the youngest became a commissioner of
forests ; and the second was the man of letters whose
life we are to narrate and whose work we are
to estimate.

The sensitive and imaginative boy proved to be an
excellent pupil in the pubhc school at Nancy, and
among the prizes he won was a copy of the Journey
from Paris to Jerusalem. No other writer made
a deeper impression upon French literature in the
nineteenth century than Chateaubriand. His extra-
ordinary faculty for the description of nature, his
exquisite sense of style, his impassioned eloquence, the
richness of his imagination, the ardour and the violence
of his passions, his sombre fidelite pour les causes
tombees, and, above all else, the touch of Celtic magic
that distinguishes so many of his pages, enchanted the
child Gebhart and induced him to dream, beneath the
pale sky of his northern town, of the olive and
the oleander, of purple seas and purple mountains, of
distant lands where the temples are fallen and where
the silence of the long summer days is broken only by
the hum of the insects. The passion he conceived for
Chateaubriand never left him. And, as was the case
with little Pierre in Le Lys Rouge, from these school
days dated a taste for sonorous Latin and elegant French

INTRODUCTION 9

which he never lost despite the example, and, indeed,
if not even the counsel, of many of his more famous
contemporaries. In due time he continued his studies
at Nancy under the newly-estabUshed Faculty of Letters,
of which five of the professors had been members of
the French School at Athens. When he received the
degree of Bachelor of Letters his father, who was
himself a provincial magistrate, sent him to Paris to
study law. There he became a lawyer, and, although
it is not recorded that he ever pleaded a case, he long
maintained a nominal connection with the profession.

But even while preparing for his degree in law,
young Gebhart did not neglect letters. He frequented
the Sorbonne and was in particular attracted by the
lectures of M. Saint-Marc Giradin. One day, in
speaking of La Fontaine, the famous professor
vigorously denounced the idle and improvident grass-
hopper. The next week he read a letter of protest,
received, he explained, since the last lecture, which,
pleading the cause of the light-hearted insect, was
signed " A Grasshopper of the Latin Quarter." So
delighted were the auditors with the cleverness of the
reply that they requested the name of the author. Thus
did Gebhart enjoy the intoxication of a first literary
triumph. Strange that a defender of la cigale should
be found in a youth w^hose race has always been noted
for its ant-like industry !

Gebhart was not yet twenty-one when he sustained
his two theses for the doctorate of letters. In the
first one, De varia Ulyssis apiid veteres poetas persona,
he reviewed the various characters lent to Ulysses by the
poets of antiquity. The second, Histoire dii sentiment
poetique de le nature dans Vantiquite Greque ei Romaine,
based upon his own reading of the classical authors
and upon lectures to which he had listened in the
Sorbonne and the College de France, was a larger
theme. It betrays the immaturity of its author, of
course, but scattered throughout its paragraphs are

10 MYSTIC ITALY

quotations from Chateaubriand and Goethe that reveal
something of the intense longing that possessed him
for the classical countries. Fate was kind to him.
He was appointed to teach logic in the public school
at Nice, the gateway to the land of his heart's desire.

The thoughts of the new school teacher were not
always confined to his half-empty classroom. They
often followed the sails that winged their way over
the blue sea and disappeared in the east. Fortunately
the new charter of the French School at Athens rendered
it no longer necessary that the candidates should be
men distinguished for scholarly research. Gebhart
received an appointment without opposition. To Athens,
by way of Italy, he accordingly went.

For the first time he saw Florence, suave and austere,
whose soul is revealed in the work of Fra Angelico
and Dante, in that of Donatello and Michelangelo, her
severe grandeur always penetrated with grace, her
exalted mysticism never unregardful of the daily and
common life of man. To Siena he went also, the
winsome city, seated aloft upon her hills, her walls
and towers the colour of the rose, whose beauty is
matched only by the memories that surge within the
brain. " There is a soul in the charming body of the
old city ", he wrote a generation later, " a memory
universally present that unceasingly carries the thoughts
of the living back to distant times ; an angelic vision
ever hovers in the pleasant atmosphere of Siena. There
Saint Catherine will always be queen." He entered
Rome by coach and put up at the Villa Medici, from
whose windows he could see the Eternal City spread
before him. He told at a later day with how keen a
pang he saw the ancient ruins despoiled of their mantle
of clematis and the river no longer running between
reeds and willows but canalized with granite walls. On
he went through Naples and Pompeii to Palermo, that
city which, with its plain, the Golden Shell, lies
so picturesquely within half-encircling heights and

INTRODUCTION 11

fronts upon a gently curving bay. A place of
thronging memories, indeed ! Phenician, Greek, Roman,
Carthaginian, Saracen, Norman, Angevin, and Aragonese
has each contributed to its story. In its cathedral,
eloquent with echoes of the past, Gebhart stood before
the tomb of Frederic II» Saint Catherine at Siena and
the Emperor Frederic at Palermo ; the most fragrant
flower of mysticism and the pioneer of rationalism ;
the sweetest exponent of religious rapture and the
forerunner of the Renaissance ! What greater antithesis
could there be? Yet to each was the young student
attracted, and of each was he to write with insight,
sympathy, and charm. His imagination had been
stimulated by the Middle Ages. Let him now follow
Ulysses over the violet sea and make his way to
Greece, there to " learn the art of tempering the
imagination by reason and of wedding sentiment with
judgment ".

The great memories of Greece were vividly revived
and the fascination of that marvellous civilization came
over him with increased intensity. Four years (1861-
1865) he resided there. The time was not spent in
archaeological research. For such work Gebhart had
little capacity and less taste. Something had to be
done, of course, to discharge the debt contracted when
he entered the School at Athens. So he set to work
upon a book having for its subject Praxiteles. Clearly
he cannot be counted among the few sons of fame
who win their kingdom in a single night. The book
is not a scholarly work. The archseologists gave it
a harsh reception. Yet in it one catches a glimpse of
the later writer, who reveals to us the significance of
art as an expression of the spirit of the time
that witnessed its birth, the nation in which it was
born, and, above all else, of the personality of the
artist who created it. And though it has many of
the faults it has also many of the engaging qualities
of youth, exuberance, obvious delight in the exercise

12 MYSTIC ITALY

of talent, in a word the fougue de vingt ans.
.While in Greece he wandered from place to place —
Peloponnesus, the Ionian Isles, Beyrouth, Jerusalem,
Memphis, Constantinople. With Renan he stood before
the Parthenon. From his window in Athens he often
looked upon Hymettus with its violet tones, upon the
azure gulf, and upon the Acropolis. At times his eyes
were filled with tears, for nature had bestowed upon
the young humanist the gift of reverie. So the old
enchantment came upon him ; the miracle of Greece
was renewed.

Upon leaving the School at Athens a place was
found for Gebhart in his native town. He was
appointed assistant professor of foreign literature in
the Faculty of Letters at Nancy. There, in the towoi
that was the scene of his first successes, that was always
dear to him above all others, he taught for fourteen
years. His very first lecture was a general survey
of the Renaissance in Italy. Thenceforth his public
life was made up of two activities, that of lecturing
and that of writing. In 1880 he began his work as a
professor of foreign literature at the Sorbonne, where
he continued to lecture until 1906, two years before
his death. The record of the subjects of his courses in
the first three years, 1 880-1 883, is lost and it seems
impossible to find it ; but we have that of the remain-
ing twenty-three years. The large preponderance of
his courses was devoted to the literature and the
civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Occasionally
he gave courses devoted to the Spanish theatre of the
Renaissance period and to Don Quixote and its sources.
Only once did he deal with a more recent subject, and
that was in 188 5-1 886, when he gave a course of
lectures on the poetry of Leopardi.

In 1895 Gebhart accepted the seat, left vacant by
the death of Constant Martha, in the section of the
Academy of Moral and Pohtical Science that is con-
cerned with morals. And in 1904 he was elected to

INTRODUCTION 18

take the place in the French Academy that had
belonged to Octave Gr6ard.

.What manner of teacher was Gebhart? That is a
question which can be answered only by those who
were his auditors. Let our first witness be M. Henry
Bordeaux. " M. Gebhart speaks better than he writes.
When he teaches he throws his whole being into his
lesson. He explains clearly and his improvizations are
always methodical. He seems ever to be pursuing his
subject at random, and always finds himself travelling
on the right road. He has a wonderful faculty of
pausing at the right moment, so that one is tempted
to ask, as children do, ' And what happened then? '
Then he unfolds learnedly and slowly the sinuosities of
his narrative, preferring to the stronger emotions those
that are tender. He combines a modicum of irony
with the most exalted sentiments ; an irony akin to
good nature ; an irony that conceals a taste for
credulity, a taste disciplined by intelligence." We may
summon, too, President Poincar^, likewise a native of
Lorraine, who took the seat in the French Academy
left vacant by the death of Gebhart. " He began his
lessons in a serious tone, laying stress upon the words
and emphasising the syllables. But this solemn com-
mencement was succeeded very quickly by a freer
manner, made up of witty good nature and roguish
familiarity. At times, when he had taken pains to
arrange his subject well and to elaborate its form, he
offered his delighted audience a foretaste of the best
chapters of his coming works ; and sometimes, when
he gave himself up to his inspiration, he carried the
minds of his auditors through a labyrinth of readings
and quotations, varied with ingenious comments."
Finally, we may repeat the words of M. Ren6 Doumic.
" Gebhart's was one of the most complex characters
imaginable ; even for those who came most closely
into contact with him and lived longest upon familiar
terms with him, he never ceased to be in a certain

14 MYSTIC ITALY

undefinable way an enigma. As to the rest, his
colleagues, his pupils, and men of the world, who
gradually, from being strangers to him, became his
friends, these are the stages they passed through and
the series of discoveries they made, which made their
delight all the greater when they really knew him.
The first sight of him was disconcerting enough : a
head quite round in shape, cheeks and neck fat and
pufify ; one would have sworn he was some Rabelaisian
canon or monk. Only the small, lively and mobile
eye, that was wont suddenly to light up, betrayed the
mind that watched beneath this sleepy appearance, a
mind that was curious, observant and amused with the
things of life. ... It was quite impossible not to con-
ceive an affection for him. None of those who have
spoken of him since his recent death have been able
to remember him without emotion. In the French
Academy, where he was almost a new-comer, he
had at once made himself loved : the last time he
appeared there, bearing upon his face those signs that
cannot be mistaken, every heart was touched with
grief."

Gebhart spoke little of himself ; and, with the excep-
tion of the quality of his prose, was content always
to adopt a tone of careless irony about his own
achievements. His character, despite what has been
said of the undefinable and enigmatic element in it,
was essentially simple, clear-cut, and masculine. He
had the distinction that comes from personality and
intellect rather than from the accidents of a career.
Courtesy, like a subtle fragrance, interpenetrated all
that he did or said. His life was not one of incident,
but rather one of thought. Outwardly it is lacking in
variety. Like most teachers he did not make history
himself, but he instilled into his students and readers
the spirit that directs the course of history. He lives
not so much by virtue of action as by virtue of the
thought, and still more by virtue of the sentiment, he

INTRODUCTION 15

aroused and developed in others. For his thoughts
dwell in the mind as well as in the memory, and his
emotion is contagious and passes into deeds. The way
to understand him, then, is not to attempt a record
of his daily life, but to study his writings ; for in
them we shall find his most vivid experiences, his
deepest feelings, and his most pregnant thought ; in
them his inward and spiritual life stands revealed.

The first of Gebhart's books to attract serious atten-
tion was his study of Rabelais, published in 1877, and
issued in 1895 ^^ ^ revised form. His five previous
publications may be passed over lightly as souvenirs
(Venlance. M. Poincare does not think very highly
of this book. " After the recent progress in Kabelaisian
studies," he says, " one cannot dream of remarking any
great degree of erudition in Gebhart's work. Let us
not require of the author either new researches in the
biography of Rabelais, or learned dissertations upon the
authenticity of the fifth book. Instead of pursuing
truth along precipitous paths, Gebhart tries to attract
it into spacious alleys bordered by beds of roses. Yet
the portrait he presents to us, if not very deeply thought
out, is exceedingly life-like and placed in a good light.
Here is the mediaeval man, recognizable by the turn
of his satire and the freshness of his Gallic intellect ;
and here is the first French representative of the new
age, revealed by his intellectual richness, his critical
sense, his intoxication with life, and his worship of
science." It is quite true, as M. Poincare observes, that
Gebhart was not an authority in the field of Rabelaisian
studies. His book is not a contribution to our know-
ledge of the subject. Yet something less than justice
has been done to it in the remarks we have repeated.
Gebhart's study of Rabelais is careful and accurate, and
it is distinguished by insight (particularly the chapter
on Rabelais' religion) and sympathy, by sound
judgment and breadth of view, qualities not possessed
by every grubber of facts, and qualities without which

16 MYSTIC ITALY

facts would be comparatively meaningless. Biography
makes exceptional demands upon sympathy and
judgment, and in these qualities few of Gebhart's
contemporaries excelled him. He displayed but a slight
disposition to participate in the work of delving into
dusty archives, and he had never a very sedulous regard
for the " petty decalogue of mode." But there is
an ampler air and a broader outlook upon humanity
in his books than are to be found in those of many of
his better known and more highly estimated con-
temporaries. And if Bolingbroke was right when he
declared genius to be " great coolness of judgment
united to great warmth of imagination," then something
more than talent may be claimed for Gebhart upon
the warrant of this his first important book.

In 1879 there came from Gebhart's pen a much
more important book, The Origins of the Renaissance
in Italy, a book crowned by the French Academy. This
and Mystic Italy are the two books by which he must
be judged as a historian. It is an attempt to discover
the remote origins of the Renaissance, to ascertain why
that movement began in Italy and not in France, and
then to analyse, in the early writings and works of
art, the genius of Italy in the period of the
Renaissance. It is a masterly work and one of absorb-
ing interest. There is, of course, the perennial interest
of the Renaissance itself ; but what attracts us most
is the skill and the charm with which the Renaissance,
in its beginnings and its early stage, has been revealed.
It is not an exaggeration to say that to the study of
this period, and this people whom he loved, he brought
the eye of a painter, the touch of a pianist, the heart
of a poet, and the mind of a philosopher. All the
essential factors that denied to France the high privilege
of becoming the birthplace of the new movement and
bestowed it upon Italy are segregated' from their
accompanying and inconsequential circumstances with
unfailing insight and analytical power, and are then

INTRODUCTION 17

grouped into a most illuminating synthesis. His induc-
tions are made from a wide range of facts, so that
when he begins to subsume the characteristics of the
Italian people and the life of the period with which
he is dealing his conclusions are accepted with
confidence. And this has been done without over-
loading the book with details. So many historians
of to-day give the public too much of their material.
It is true they sift and arrange, but as the interest of
their work grows, so also grows in them, apparently,
an irresistible desire to permit their readers to share
in the preparation of materials, and to give them, there-
fore, not results but processes. To do away with un-
necessary and oftentimes tiresome detail, to abstract
unessentials for some great end, to leave out for the
sake of revealing what was hidden or only dimly
discernible — these are the necessities ahke of great art
and of great history, which is so largely an art. If
this book proves nothing else it proves that its author
had the shaping touch. But the book reveals beyond
all doubt that its author penetrated into the genius of
Italy and the spirit of the Renaissance as few others
had succeeded in doing, and this is in itself sufiicient
to establish Gebhart's claim to the title of historian.
For surely it is a deHcate task to comment upon a
national psychology and the psychology of an era alien
to one's own. On so sHppery a path even the surest-
footed may occasionally stumble and fall. The historian
of a country or a period not his own, if he be not
content with a chronicle of external and easily
apprehended facts, is likely to miss an occasional nuance
of vital importance. And it is just this difiicult work of
intellectual and spiritual diagnosis with which our author
is always primarily concerned. It may be added,
furthermore, that not the least of the merits of this
book, and of every other book that Gebhart wrote, is
the delicacy of feehng and the skill which, while
retaining the impression of a comprehensive and

2

18 MYSTIC ITALY

accurate study of its subject, have suppressed all
parade of learning and sifted and sublimated the
residuum of research in the crucible of a reconstructive
imagination.

The third of Gebhart's important historical works
is the one here done into English, Mystic Italy, pub-
lished in 1890, which by many is regarded as his
masterpiece. It is a study of the religious history of
Italy from the heart of the Middle Ages to the dawn
of the Renaissance. It deals with the transition from
the age of faith to the age of reason. Stimulating and
suggestive studies of Italian thought and life in those
centuries had been made by Michelet, Ozanam, Renan,
Thodc, Miiller, and Schmidt ; but it remained for
Gebhart to group the results of the researches of these
men and his own studies into a revealing synthesis,
rendered attractive not only by the interest of its theme
but also by his rich and romantic yet always direct
and lucid style, by his extraordinary sense of the
picturesque, by the unfailing charm that comes from
his enthusiasm, by his true insight, his poetic sensibility
to emotional experience, and by the fragrant sentiment
that exhales from so many of his pages.

The scalpel of Gebhart's analysis was employed with
skill. With a delicate hand he has disentangled the
threads of Italian life throughout the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries and revealed their strange inter-
connections. The springs of action are all exposed.
It would seem, as we have already said, that a foreign
observer, and especially one writing at so distant a
day, could not perceive every subtle current in the
stream of national progress ; but that which mere
analytical skill would have failed to lay bare was dis-
closed by Gebhart's unusual power of divination, of
intuitive insight, the faculty that enables those who
possess it to apprehend the subtle essence of an alien
personality, or period, or nationality.

In Mystic Italy our author leads us upon what the

INTRODUCTION 19

French call a promenade a travers les ages. But he
is no mere showman content to point out the external
and obvious things of an historical pageant. What an
illustrious roll of diverse personalities it is that he has
given us ; no mere harlequinade of marionettes, but fnen
who represent the mingling currents in the religious life
of Italy and who li\e for us once again after the lapse
of many centuries ! Arnold of Brescia, who met so pitiful
a death on the banks of the Tiber ; the abbot Joachim
of Flora, a restless soul who traversed Christendom
for more than three-score years seeking for truth, and
who gave as his final injunction to the world the old
truth that " the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth hfe " ;
Frederic II, whose intellectual initiations constituted of
themselves a Renaissance pathetically premature ;
Francis of Assisi, the Spouse of Poverty, whose brave
and kindly eyes pierced the wrappings with which the
ages had ever more thickly veiled Jesus of Nazareth
from the sight of men ; John of Parma, successor of
the Seraphic Father, counsellor of moderation in
the quarrel between the strict and the easy-going
Franciscans, illustrious in his day for learning and for
saintliness, who devoted himself to the memory of
Francis with the tenderness that John had displayed
for the memory of Jesus ; Fra Salimbene, the itinerant,
timid, and egotistic friar, a joyous representative of
the second generation of the Franciscans, whose
Chronicle is so interesting a history of its period ;
Jacopone da Todi, the singular poet, the " jongleur
of God ", who protested against the secular interests
of Boniface VIII, and who in consequence w^as chained
to the wall in the dark and narrow prison of Palestrina ;
Giotto, true son of Francis, whose frescoes still tell
their stories of that gracious and comely spirit on the
walls of the church in Assisi ; and, finally, Dante,
whose personal religion flowed from the Franciscan
fountain : Idd'lo non vuole religloso di noi se non il
cuore.

20 MYSTIC ITALY

Every thought of all their thinking sways the world for good

or ill,
Every pulse of all their life-blood beats across the ages still.

The power that enabled Gebhart to reveal to us all
these various personalities and to lay bare for us the
hidden penetralia of their remote period was not, as
we have already said, a thing of the intellect alone ;
for the soul of a single person or of a people can
never be explained by the unaided process of scientific
rule. It was created in large part by those qualities
of insight and imagination that enable a writer to re-
think himself into a society other than his own and
so to reconstruct a vanished world that it acquires reality
for a later age. These indispensable qualities of the
historian were Gebhart's in abundant measure.

But it is by its sweeping synthesis, as well as by
its power of analysis and insight, that Mystic Italy
appeals to aU who would rightly understand the life
of the peninsula from the rise of the communes to the
appearance of Petrarch. Its generalizations arrange
all the facts disclosed by its analysis and reveal to us
their significance in masterly fashion. In dealing with
form, the Aristotelian canon lays its first emphasis not
upon finish of detail but upon architectonics. Judged
by this canon of classic art the book is a noteworthy
achievement. Without this power of synthesis Gebhart's
explorations in the dim regions in which thought and
emotion are generated by elusive and impalpable causes,
his studies of the interior life and its laws, his concern
with the spiritual dynamics of humanity that were his
passion, would all have been left comparatively meaning-
less to us. Fortunately our author possessed not only
the power of seizing upon spiritual significances but
also of arranging and unfolding them in orderly and
illuminating form. The gift of wide perspective was
his. The events of two hundred years are brought
within easy view of the reader ; and the book has that

INTRODUCTION 21

unity that comes only from a logical organon histori-
cally defensible, justified by the facts with which it
deals. " The book throughout is a model of composi-
tion," says M. Rene Doumic ; " the historian has been
captivated by his subject : he has tasted that sublime
joy of pursuing an idea in its development through
time and in its individual expressions."

The Origins of the Renaissance in Italy and Mystic
Italy — these, as we have said, are the two books by
which Gebhart's name as a historian must live or die.
There are, however, other works that deserve notice ;
the two books that deal respectively with Botticelli and
Michelangelo, appreciating the dreamy mysticism of the
one and penetrating to the tortured soul of the other ;
and then there are the essays and sketches in which
appear a long pageant of historical and fictional
personages, which reveal a remarkable facility for
exploring old chronicles for their buried riches, for
understanding and recreating the past. Gebhart was
always travelling up and down the centuries with a
mind prepared like a sensitised plate for impressions,
ever on the watch for the picturesque. That he wrote
many polished and pregnant essays and so many brief
and beautiful sketches is, perhaps, the reason why he
came to be generally regarded as a miniaturist rather
than as a historian, an artist whose genre was not
great but who may be thought to have been great in
his genre, a mere purveyor of " dainties that are bred
in a book."

This craft of thine, the mart to suit.
Is too refined, remote, minute ;
These small conceptions can but fail ;
'Twere best to work on larger scale.

But several of these essays have notable historic value,
and nearly all the sketches are steeped in the spirit
of the time and make an undiminished appeal by means
of their picturesque character. This last fact in itself

22 MYSTIC ITALY

speaks eloquently of their enduring worth ; for few
things go out of fashion so quickly, so soon become
stale, flat and unprofitable, as the picturesque element
in historical writing when it has been laid on as a
veneer, instead of having had its origin in the nature
of the subject and in the temperament of the writer,
■when it is gilt and not gold. Aye, even when it be
pure gold, the flight of years often steals from
picturesque history an absolute quality it once possessed
and that won for it a meed of popularity at the moment
of its publication. The flight of time, then, is an
exacting test ; and the fact that, after a generation,
Gebhart's picturesque sketches have not been left pale
and bloodless is proof not to be passed unnoticed of
their vitality and staying power. In all these briefer
products of his pen, as in his larger works, his main
interest is in the currents of intellectual and spiritual
change. The observation, the thought, and the emotion,
of these miniatures are entirely his own ; they possess
the quality the French call vecu ; the personal note is
everywhere, though linked, as it must ever be in work
that is to count, with the note of the universal. And
quite as much as his larger books they bear witness
to the perfection and the consecration of his work.

There remains Gebhart's one historical novel, pub-
lished in 1893, Around a Tiara. To write a success-
ful historical novel is no easy task. It requires for its
subject-matter a wealth of learning, for its movement
a well-devised plot ; and then, in order to make it
live, it must have insight, imagination, and the dramatic
sense. Mere erudition amassed from books will not
suffice. Learning that has not been assimilated will
be found, indeed, to weigh upon the wings of fancy,
to check the flight of imagination. Not in the seclusion
of a library shall one prepare himself fully to realize
and adequately to represent a vanished age. These
things require a knowledge not only of books but of
men ; and lacking this knowledge a writer shall give

INTRODUCTION 23

us not men but the phantoms of men, incapable of
moving us either to love or to hate. For the springs
of action to-day are much the same as they were
yesterday. " The eternal life of man," says Robert
Louis Stevenson, " spent under sun and rain, and in
rude physical effort, lies upon one side scarce changed
since the beginning." Autour d'line Tiare follows the
plan approved by the best masters of historical romance
in that the leading roles are assigned to imaginary
characters, whereas the real historical characters, though
exercising a profound influence upon the fortunes of
the principal dramatis personcB, are relegated to the
rank of minor figures and are permitted to cross and
recross the stage only at intervals. Thus a constant
demand is made upon the imagination, and only occa-
sionally is there a dependence upon the mere recital
of historic fact. It deals with Italy in the late years
of the eleventh century and interweaves a somewhat
idyllic love story with the austere and tragic history
of the pope of Canossa. The great defect of the novel
is that it is not an organic whole. Various scenes, the
incantation at the beginning, for example, and the inter-
view at Canossa, stand out by themselves more or less
detached from the current of the story and give to
the book its fragmentary character. And it is not only
entire scenes that give the impression of lacking organic
relation to the whole ; many a sentence proudly isolates
itself from its neighbours. Then, too, most of the
characters are mere types, not quivering figures with
the blood in them, and often the only motive for their
entrances and exits is the medium they oft'er to the
author of completing his picture of Italian society under
the great pope. Gebhart did not see his fictitious
characters with such clearness that they pressed upon
updH him for representation ; and, in a work of this
kind, no truth to history will atone for the absence
of the vital spirit. Yet if the book fails, on the whole,
as an historical romance, it succeeds as a history ; for

24 MYSTIC ITALY

it gives us a faithful picture of Rome in the eleventh"
century, an admirable portrait of Gregory, and a vivid
idea of the character of the Papacy at the time of
its great struggle with the Empire.

Such, briefly, is the story of Gebhart's work as a
teacher and writer of history. The present writer
cannot hope to have succeeded in conveying to his
readers anything more than a suggestion of Gebhart's
charm and ability as a lecturer, and scarcely more than
a suggestion of his grace and power as a writer. He
never heard Gebhart's voice ; and he realizes keenly
his limitations as a translator. It is not the easiest
task in the world to translate one of Gebhart's books.
It was Shelley who said that " It were as wise to
cast a violet into a crucible in order to discover the
formal principle of its colour and odour as seek to
transfer from one language into another the creations
of a poet.''' And that Gebhart was a poet, yet a poet
in whom the historian was not lost, is beyond denial.
There is no English for Ronsard's Mignonne, allons
voir si la rose ; nor for his Quand vous serez bien
vielle, an soir, a la chandelle ; and there does not
seem to be an equivalent in English for many, passages
in Gebhart's subtle and musical prose, every line of
which has been as delicately pondered as though it
were poetry. But this brief estimate of his life and
work, and still more the translated book to which it
is prefixed, may serve to indicate that Gebhart has a
genuine claim to be considered as one of the notable
historians of our time. I do not mean to place his
accomplishment upon a level with that of Von Ranke
or even of Taine. He would not gain by any such
appreciation as that ; and I feel sure he would have
been the first to have disliked and disclaimed it. No
one knew his limitations better than did he himself.
But his claim to be considered as a noteworthy historian
is justified by the catholicity of his distinguished and
delicate mind, by the fairness of his judgment, by the

INTRODUCTION 25

logic of his exposition, by the swiftness cond the sure-
ness of his intuition, and by the indefinable quality of
charm with which all that he has written is inter-
penetrated. It is quite easy to name historians who
possessed a greater range of knowledge, and others
who have done more creative work with the original
sources of history, but it would be difficult to name
one whose knowledge was more subtle and more
idiomatic. " The original merit of the man and writer,"
says M. Rene Doumic, " is that he succeeded in com-
bining in so happy a harmony those qualities which
in others are too often mutually exclusive : imagina-
tion with knowledge, irony with good sense, and
attachment to tradition with complete liberty."

FOREWORD

I HAVE attempted to study the religious history of
Italy during the Middle Ages. Religion was at that
time the chief product of the Italian genius. Poetry,
art and politics, which from the thirteenth century
onwards made Italy the principal centre of western
civilization, received a constant and very noble in-
spiration from the religious sentiment. The particular
manner in which Italy early conceived the idea of the
kingdom of God and the way that leads to it ; the
astonishing freedom of thought with which she treated
dogma and discipline ; the serenity which she succeeded
in preserving in face of the great mystery of life and
death ; the art wherewith she reconciled faith and
rationalism ; her slender aptitude for formal heresy
and the boldness of her mystic imagination ; the impetus
of love which often carried her to the loftiest Christian
ideal ; finally the anguish she felt at times in her
relations with the Church of Rome, and the right she
allowed herself of denouncing its weaknesses without
pity, of stigmatizing its deeds of violence, and of
thwarting its ambitions — such was the original religion
of Italy, the religion of Pietro Damiano, Arnold of
Brescia, Joachim of Flora, Francis of Assisi, John of
Parma, Fra Salimbene, Catherine of Siena, Savonarola,
and Contarini. It was also the religion of Dante and
Petrarch, of Giotto, Fra Angelico and Raphael, and of
Olimpia Morata, Vittoria Colonna, and Michelangelo.
Of the two dates which mark the beginning and the
end of this form of Christianity, the first is very un-
decided, by reason of the scarcity of documents and
the harshness of the times, but undoubtedly Gregory
the Great (590-604) nursed it in his heart, and

27

28 MYSTIC ITALY

Gregory VII (1073-1085) would have eagerly embraced
it if the fatality of the temporal and feudal interests into
which the Empire and the Holy See were plunged had
not carried him away from it and kept him on that
battle-field where he struggled for liberty, and on which
he died doubting the existence of justice in the world.
Down to the thirteenth century Italian Christianity had
harbingers, prophets and martyrs ; it did not attain
to the full consciousness of its genius until the time
when the glad tidings of Assisi were proclaimed in
the valleys of Umbria. From the time of Francis
onwards it illumined every great soul and penetrated
to the inmost recesses of the Italian character. But
the date of its end is weU known. The Council of
Trent, aided by the Inquisition, imposed upon Christen-
dom a moral rule, a devotion and a religious method
of an absolute uniformity, at the same time that, re-
pairing the breaches made in the pontifical power by
the councils of the fifteenth century, it assigned to
the Church of Rome an uncontrolled and unlimited
disciplinary authority over the episcopate, the monastic
orders, the secular clergy, and the simple believer. On
that day was fulfilled the saying of the Gospel, " There
shall be one fold and one shepherd." Roman Catholic-
ism was in fact instituted and almost immediately
strengthened by the religious police of the Society of
Jesus and the political sympathies of the old European
system. It was a great creation, which long charmed
the world by the pomp of its worship, the heroism of
its missionaries, the virtues of its preachers and the
elegance of its literary education. But this magnificent
edifice gives a similar impression to that produced by
St. Peter's at Rome There the implacable regularity
of the plan, the unvarying flood of light which descends
from the dome, the sumptuous adornments, arrest the
soaring flight of personal piety ; in that inflexible order
of all the lines there is no room left for that freedom
of fancy whereby in former days men conjured up

FOREWORD 29

at will the vision of things divine. Where are the
churches of olden days, which the humble entered
familiarly as the Father's house, and whose walls covered
with paintings presented to them in so simple and artless
a fashion a free interpretation of liturgical texts?
There, seated in the shadow of the little chapels, the . '
Christian was wont lovingly to meditate upon Paradise :
he listened far less to the distant psalmody of the priest
than to the joyous song of his own heart. Here, should
the soul, weary of the splendours of the great temple
and its worship, essay to take its flight heavenward,
it beats its wings against the immense shining cupola ;
the sacred bird will fall back again on the marble
slabs of the altar.

The reforming work of the Council of Trent, the
effects of which were long attenuated in France by
the political tradition and by Jansenism, was not slow
in producing an extraordinary result in Italy. The
religious sentiment had owed its life so far in that
land to freedom, individual faith, and love. On the
day when, contrary to the prophecies of the abbot
Joachim and the expectation of John of Parma, the
age of servitude returned once more and put an end
to the age of filial obedience, when the age of thorns
delayed the coming of the age of lilies, men's con-
sciences fell into a state of indifference, powerless to
receive a new form' of Christianity or to welcome it
with fervour. They accepted its outward practices,
sought no spiritual nourishment in it, and quietly closed
their minds alike to enthusiasm and fanaticism. The
less cultured transformed the ardour of the old faith
into superstitions of an entirely pagan sort ; the more
lettered took their religion as a ceremonial incumbent
upon well-educated persons and prudent citizens. It is
easy to perceive the cause of this religious sterility.
If Italy, unlike Spain, refused to hand herself over
to the Council of Trent and to enclose the whole of
her moral life in a narrow and austere Catholicism,

80 MYSTIC ITALY

analogous to the religion of the Spaniards, it was
because a long rationalistic education, carried at times
to the limits of scepticism, had accustomed her to a
free intellectual life. Classical culture, which was never
entirely destroyed even in the darkest ages, continual
intercourse with certain of the ancient moralists, and
a very lively sense of reality, had saved the Italians
from the excesses of scholasticism. Their neighbour-
hood to dissident religions, the Greeks and the Arabs,
had preserved them from religious egotism. Tolerance
led them to adopt a very liberal interpretation of
orthodoxy : the story of The Three Rings was in the
Novellino long before the time of Boccaccio. They
early learnt to reason without syllogisms upon the soul,
its destiny and its duties ; to see this it is only
necessary to recall the writings of Brunetto Latini,
Dante's Convito, and the letters of Petrarch. The
Italians were, in fact, the first men in Christendom to
look nature in the face and to study her methodically.
The decisive moment of this intellectual development
was the reign of Frederic II (i 212-1250), his
troubadours, physicians, inams, and alchemists. But the
first essays in free thought and reasoned doubt go
back further still. The wandering- students of the
Carmina Burana, and the so-called heretics whose
memory disturbed Villani, belong to the twelfth century.
Observe that there was never any serious conflict
between the religion of the Italians and their rational-
istic thought. The thirteenth century was able, with-
out any historical scandal, to couple Francis of Assisi
with Frederic II. Where the spirit alone gives life
to souls and the letter counts for little the faithful is
able to ascribe to the supernatural whatever part he
pleases, and he always does so. He believes that God
is not a very severe creditor and that He lavishes His
blessings on men of goodwill. But where the letter
has killed what the sixteenth century called " profound
faith," the Christian can choose only between an un;-

FOREWORD 81

reserved abdication of his reason and the discreet
incredulity of devout politicians, between the painful
piety of the simple, who submerge their whole life in
the supernatural, and amiable piety of men of the
world who make the supernatural subservient to the
fair fame and elegance of their life. Italy had passed
through too long a period of rational culture to be
lulled to sleep in a kind of religious infancy.
Deprived of freedom to believe, she unconsciously
retained of her freedom of thought that measure
of scepticism which, while permitting the external
observance of religious rites, preserves men from
mystic passion. But that form of Christianity which
is no longer sustained by poUtical interest, and whose
mysteries and discipline have no more meaning for the
crowd, slowly dies out, like a lamp lost in the depths
of the sanctuary.

Thus, in this history of Italian religion, we can
distinguish three chief elements, or, if you prefer it,
three leading actors in the drama: (i) the Church
of Rome ; (2) the Christian conscience ; and
(3) rationalism, ironic unbelief or free investigation,
the spirit of secular independence, lay resistance, or
scientific indifference. I purpose in this book to
describe the heroic period of that history. The first
attempts at heresy or schism, Arnold of Brescia,
Joachim of Flora, Francis of Assisi and his religious
creation. Frederic II and the civilization of southern
Italy, the revival of Joachimism in the institutions of
Assisi, the militant work of the Holy See between the
times of Innocent III (11 98-1 2 16) and Boniface VIII
(i 294-1 303), will occupy our attentpn one after
another. At the same time I shall indicate what part
Italian faith played in the renovation of the arts and
poetry, and what beam, sent forth by the "-reat
Christians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, rested
on the cradle of Nicholas and John of Pisa, Giotto
Jacopone of Todi, and Dante.

CONTENTS

PACE

INTRODUCTION . . . . . ,7

FOREWORD . . . . . -27

CHAPTER

I. THE RELIGIOUS AND MORAL CONDITION OF ITALY

BEFORE THE TIME OF JOACHIM OF FLORA . 35

II. JOACHIM OF FLORA . , . . '70

III. FRANCIS OF ASSISI AND THE FRANCISCAN APOSTOLATE . 94

IV. THE EMPEROR FREDERIC II AND THE RATIONALISTIC

SPIRIT IN SOUTHERN ITALY . . -133

V. EXALTATION OF THE FRANCISCAN MYSTICISM. THE

ETERNAL GOSPEL. JOHN OF PARMA. FRA SALIMBENE 165

VI. THE HOLY SEE AND THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS.

POPULAR ART AND POETRY . . . 202

YII. THE MYSTICISM, THE MORAL PHILOSOPHY AND THE

FAITH OF DANTE ..... 242

NOTES . . . . . . .271

LIST OF WORKS BY GEBHART . . . -279

INDEX ....... 281

a 33

MYSTICS AND HERETICS
IN ITALY

CHAPTER I

THE RELIGIOUS AND MORAL CONDITION OF
ITALY BEFORE THE TIME OF JOACHIM
OF FLORA

I

The words of Jesus ";My kingdom is not of this
world ", the promise of an entirely ideal religion, had
been impossible of fulfilment in the catastrophe of the
barbarian inundation. Life was then so hard that the
Church was compelled to take part in worldly things.
Until the time of the Carolingians it was the last
remaining organized society and the last tradition of
government ; and so it opened its gates, as a refuge
of peace, not only to souls possessed by the desire of
eternal salvation, but to the nations terrified by the
violent results of conquest. The more utter the ruin
of all civilization, the more necessary and the more
important appeared the temporal role played by the
Church. In Italy and at Rome the political work of
the bishop and pontiff was really, in its origin, a work
of charity. Beneath the shelter of the Holy See,
enveloped by barbarism, Christianity restored to civil

35

36 MYSTIC ITALY

society the springs of life that had been lost since the
fall of the Roman Empire.

Gregory the Great was the incarnation of that
apostolic period of the Church and the Papacy. He
came upon the scene at the bitterest moment of the
invasions. Alaric and Attila had passed like a hurricane
over Italy. The Ostrogoths had very quickly assimi-
lated the Roman civilization. But when the Lombards
arrived it was believed the end of all things was at
hand. The terror of the Lombard barbarism is still
visible in Paul the Deacon, who lived in the eighth
century, and who belonged to their race. These rude
heathens, with their green-tinted hair, erected their tents
everywhere, as far as the Straits of Messina, leaving
here and there a few wrecks of old Italy still floating,
Ravenna, more Byzantine than Italian, Naples, soon
to enter into alliance with the Saracens, and lastly
Rome, where a monk buried in his cell on the Cselian
Mount was the last hope of Latin Christendom. The
Benedictines of Monte Cassino fled to Rome. AU Italy
turned to Gregory, asking him to save her, and he did
so. He was a man of letters, of patrician family,
very gentle and pure ; by the culture of his mind and
the nobility of his race he represented all the memories
of a vanished world, and by his monastic austerity all
the promises of the future. He was, above all things,
an apostle. While treating with the Byzantines, the
Franks, and the Goths of Spain, he was at the same
time converting the Anglo-Saxons and evangelizing the
Lombards. He saw them bow beneath his pastoral
staff. A great peril was thus averted, and Italy hence-
forth sheltered from pagan or Arian contagion. Never-
theless, Gregory pined away in melancholy. He had
accepted with terror the charge of the pontificate. He
had a presentiment that the Church, once launched
upon the seas of worldly things, would soon depart
from its primitive mission. He died in affliction at the
thought of the tragic times that awaited his successors.

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL CONDITIONS 37

The Christian repubHc had been set up with pope
Gregory as its centre. At Rome he had been the
supreme bishop, but not the chief of a state. The
apostolic age of the Holy See, however, was about
to close. The Carolingian donation made of the pope
an Italian seigneur, and the feudal system made the
bishops counts and barons. The Church thus became
a secular power, superior to all the rest by the action
it exercised upon men's consciences, weaker than the
rest because the hereditary system never perpetuated
the power in a single family. The irony of history
obliged the vicars of God to enter upon a political and
military existence, while refusing them the vital principles
of every government, blood succession, the authority
of ancestral tradition, security for the morrow, the
right to undivided command over a w^hole hierarchy,
and the uncontested possession of a territory. From
the eleventh to the thirteenth century the Church
struggled against the absurd reality of its temporal
conditions. The quiet theorists who, from John of
Salisbury and St. Thomas to Dante, Marsilio of Padua
and William of Ockam, reasoned upon the pre-eminence
of emperor or pope, upon the two luminaries and the
two swords, did not keep sufficiently in view those
surprising conditions that were too strong for a saint
and man of genius like Gregory VII. They did not
understand that, in the feudal state of the world,
secular greatness was the Church's guarantee of religious
integrity. Outside Rome the Church found the Empire
overshadowing all Christendom ; the emperor, king of
the Romans or patrician, with his juridical claims upon
the Eternal City ; the feudal system that, embracing
the episcopate and the monastic orders, compelled the
bishops and abbots to fidelity towards the secular
suzerains and the empire as the foundation of the
European compact. Thus the feudal law put the
episcopate into the emperor's hands and in part removed
it from the pope's authority. In Italy the Church had

38 MYSTIC ITALY

to do with' the advocates of national independence who
forced it to choose between the Empire and the
restoration of the Italian kingdom ; it came into conflict
with the Lombard or Tuscan episcopate, closely related
by feudal ties to the Germanic Caesar ; with the Greeks,
attached to Byzantium by the bond of schism ; with
the Normans, who made mock of the Holy Father and
humihated him with their protection. At Rome, lastly,
the Church was in the den of lions, betrayed by the
cardinals of the factions opposed to the reigning pope,
done violence to by the counts of Tusculum who sold
the Holy See by auction, pillaged by the barons of the
Campagna, enslaved by the patrician families, again
and again dispossessed by the senate of the Capitol,
outraged by the people who drove the popes from
the city with showers of stones, threatened by the
republican tribunes who wished to despoil it of its
feudal rights. Add to all these the Saracens, who
came up the Tiber, burnt St. Peter's, and laid waste
the patrimony ; the Germans, who at each imperial
coronation made the streets run with blood ; the feudal
bandits, who carried off Gregory VII one Christmas
night from the altar of Santa JMaria Maggiore and
abducted Gelasius II (1118-11 19) when sitting in full
conclave ; and, finally, the robbers, disguised as priests
and monks, who roamed in troops round the church of
St. John Lateran and seized the apostolic treasure.
Ascend this scale of miseries in the contrary direction.
From the populace of the monti, the patricians who
encamped in the theatre of Marcellus or the Coliseum,
and the savage barons of Latium to the emperor
himself, through the whole of feudal society runs the
thread of the Church's temporal necessities and anguish.
If the pope were not master in his own house and
his basilicas, if the Roman commune rose against him',
if the patrimony was taken from him and the barons
denied him as their suzerain, he lost rank in the
Italian feudal system, in the political and social order

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL CONDITIONS 39

of the world ; he was a bishop deprived of his see,
and nothing more. Ten times in the course of a century
he was obliged to hide himself in the castle of St.
Angelo and to appeal to the emperor for succour, or
to flee with some faithful clerics to the Alps and wait
for the emperor's coming. It was always the great
lay suzerain of the West who said the last word in the
ecclesiastical crisis that began in some brawl at a street
corner in Rome.

But in all this it was not merely a question of temporal
interests. Undoubtedly in the unity of a Holy Empire
similar to that of Rome under Trajan, under a wise
master of the civilized world, the Church and the pope
would have enjoyed religious liberty ; they would have
been able to abdicate all secular ambition, remain pure
from all contact with earthly things, and think only
of the governance of souls ; that, in his De Monarchla,
was the dream of Dante. But in the feudal condition
of Italy and Europe, and in the communal state of
Rome during the Middle Ages, every temporal failure
of the Church and the Holy See was necessarily a
religious failure. Every time the pope was less
powerful than the commune, the nobles, or the people,
the rebellious cardinals or the emperor opposed an
antipope to him. Once there was seen on the same
day one pontift" at the Vatican, another at Santa Maria
Maggiore, and a third at St. John Lateran. Gregory VII
had an antipope at Tivoli, facing his metropolis —
Clement 111 (1187-1191), who survived him. In
the twelfth century Anacletus II (1130-1138) and
Innocent II (1130-1143) were elected in two
neighbouring conclaves at the same hour by two rival
factions of the Sacred College ; Bernard of Clairvaux
had to decide for Christendom which was its real pastor.
If the antipope did not arise from a popular upheaval
or a feudal intrigue, the Empire and the Germanic
church took it upon themselves to proclaim him. In
reality the most dangerous usurpations of the spiritual

40 MYSTIC ITALY

power came from the emperor. If he opposed the
Germanic church to the ItaHan, the imperial council
to the pontifical ; if he addressed, as Charles the Great
did, encychcals to the bishops, abbots, clergy and
faithful ; if a mystic dreamer. Otto III, " Serv^ant of
the servants of God," or politicians, such as Henry III
and Henry V, appointed or deposed popes, and, strong
in the holy unction that had touched their foreheads,
spoke and acted as the visible vicar of Christ, did
not the emperor thereby assume to himself the supreme
religious power? In the troublous times of Christendom
did he not appear between the Byzantine emperor, chief
of a schismatic church, and the Roman pontiff, ever
followed by the shadow of an antipope, as the lawful
ruler of men's souls and their universal pastor? i

II

Thus condemned to keep its rank in the temporal
hierarchy and to reign in order to avoid destruction,
the Church passionately clung to a strip of territory ;
it made the prestige given to it by the faith of the
bygone centuries subservient to its secular domination ;
it employed an unscrupulous diplomacy and pitiless
mercenaries, and was all the more haughty in proportion
as it felt its weakness ; it was passionately fond of
riches and set up a usurer's office hard by the altar
of the living God. Simony was at that time the most
efficacious means of government at Rome, just as was
nepotism at a later date when the Church was faced
by princely Italy. Everything was sold in the pontifical
market : red hats and mitres, forgiveness of sins, the
removal of excommunications, suzerainties, the right of
conquest by land and sea, relics of saints, the imperial
crown, the Roman tiara, and the gate of Paradise.
So irresistible was the current that carried the Church
towards the good things of the world that Gregory VII,

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL CONDITIONS 41

who had once entered Rome with bare feet and head,
was tormented more ardently than any other by secular
ambitions ; he attempted to assign to the Holy See,
by Matilda's donation, not only the allodia of his
friend between the Po and the Liris, but all the great
imperial fiefs of Tuscany, and then Spoleto, Camerino,
Mantua, Modena, Brescia, and Parma. The ambition
of Alexander VI (1492- 1503) was to be more
modest.

We meet here not only the abandonment of the lole
of the apostolic Papacy, but also a serious corruption
of doctrine and discipline. All the virtues that Jesus
had exalted were disdained ; the poor, the peaceable
and the simple, were no longer the elect of the Church ;
all that Jesus had disdained and stigmatized, the love
of gain, harshness towards the humble, the unbridled
pursuit of the goods of this world, the possession of
land and power, were raised to the rank of beatitudes
and took the place of the charity and renunciation of
the first Christian community. It seems as though the
Middle Ages had closed the Gospel for ever. Primitive
Christianity, which was derived from Paul and rested
upon justification by faith, had no meaning from this
time forward ; ideahsm retired from the sanctuary ;
narrow religion, the religion of works, w^as set up in
its place. Between God and the faithful was set the
Church, which hides God from the faithful. Feudal
practices invaded the refigious life. The Church in
those days needed devoted servants, vigorous arms,
generous friends ; legions of mystics were not worth
in its eyes a single well-armed vassal or a good
oondottiere ; the treasure of St. Peter was something
more precious in its eyes than the purity of men's
souls. In that rude combat it carried on against Rome
and Italy and Europe, the passive discipline of Christen-
dom was its strongest defence. It exacted obedience
by terror ; it curbed men's wills by the observance and
rigours of devotion. It struck at the impious emperor

42 IMYSTIC ITALY

and at intractable kingdoms and cities with the anathema
and interdict, thus rendering the conscience of peoples
uneasy, and shaking the loyalty of subjects. To the
middle classes, the serfs, and all the humble folk
who are consoled by the divine promises for the miseries
of life, it gave the priest, ever at hand and ever
needed, because of the sacraments, alms -giving, prayer,
pilgrimages, fasting, the fear of judgment and the
apprehension of purgatory. Thus it had a hold upon
all Christians and summoned them in long processions
to Rome to kneel at the tomb of the apostles, and to
Jerusalem, to kneel at the sepulchre of Christ. And
for three days of victory, which compensated for ten
centuries of humihation, the pontiff of this Church had
the joy of seeing at his feet the emperor, that is to
say, the feudal world, kneeling before him in the snow,
a suppliant, smitten to the ground under the ban of
excommunication. But he had forgotten the words of
the scriptural saying, Beati misericordes, quoniam ipsi
misericordiam conseqaentiir.

The Church of Rome was henceforth obliged to prove
that it was right and the Gospel wrong and to justify
its policy by the excellence of its morality. In order
to reassure Christians and confirm the sacerdotal system
of Christianity, it would have needed a pure clergy
and impeccable pontiffs. But at that time the pastors
were the scandal of the flock. Read the decisions of
ten councils against the married clergy and the Liber
Gomorrhianus of Pietro Damiano. The story of the
popes, from the ninth to the thirteenth century, staggers
belief. The follies of Caligula, the ferocity of Nero,
the lust of Heliogabalus, appear in the world once
more. In the tenth century the counts of Tusculum
abandoned the Holy See to courtesans and rufhans.
John XII (955-964), pope at seventeen years of age,
installed his harem in the Lateran and ordained a
deacon in a stable. Boniface VII (984-985), over-
thrown after being pontiff for forty-two days, fled to

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL CONDITIONS 43

Constantinople with the treasure of the Church. He
returned on the death of Otto II, starved his successor
John XIV (983-984), to death in the wells of
St. Angelo, and put out the eyes of his cardinals,
Benedict IX (1033-105 6), pope when only twelve
years old, led a life so horrible that the captains of
Rome tried to strangle him at the altar. He escaped,
sold the tiara, asked a girl in marriage, returned to
Rome, which was occupied by two antipopes, was
again driven out, had the German pope, Clement II
(104 6- 1 04 7), poisoned, mounted for a third time the
chair of St. Peter, and then disappeared for ever and
shut himself up like a wild beast in the forests of
Tusculum.

Astounding tragedies were enacted again and again
before the eyes of the faithful. Pope Formosus
(891-896), taken from his tomb and clad once more
in cope and mitre, was duly tried and condemned for
heresy ; the fingers that had given the papal blessing
were cut off, and his body was dragged through the
city and thrown into the Tiber. Some days later he
returned in triumph to the mortuary crypt of the popes,
and the statues of the saints were believed to have
bowed their heads as he passed. The bloody corpse of
Boniface VII was kicked by the people from street to
street as far as the statue of Marcus Aurelius. On
every road in Italy for two centuries processions of
exiled popes passed and repassed, Gregory VII, sur-
rounded by the Norman chivalry, Pascal II (1099-
II 18), prisoner of Henry V. Gelasius II and the
Sacred College fled by way of the Tiber on two
galleys pursued by the German archers along the banks
of the river. A storm prevented the ships from putting
out to sea. The cardinal of Altri lifted the pope on
his shoulders and carried him through the fields by_ night
to a castle in the neighbourhood ; at break of day
Gelasius embarked again and escaped to Gaeta ; he
returned to Rome on foot, begging the hospitality of

44 MYSTIC ITALY

the barons, and one evening knocked at the door of
one of his partisans in the city. But the Gennan
antipope was on the alert. On the day of St. Praxides
the pope was officiating in the church of that name ;
the Frangipani burst in, hurling stones and shooting
arrows towards the choir. Gelasius escaped by way
of the sacristy, hastened across Rome with his stole
on, followed by a cleric bearing the cross, took refuge
in the Campagna, and in the evening we find him alone,
seated on the ground, near the church of St. Paul
outside the walls. He was weeping like a child, and
women were weeping around him. O vos omnes, qui
transltls per hanc vlam, attendiie et considerate si est
dolor sicai dolor tneas!

This Papacy, either demoniacal or profoundly miser-
able, this Church, soiled by all manner of crimes and
overwhelmed by the brutality of the age, became the
horror and torment of Christendom. Some of the
protests made against it have com.e down to us ; as
the year looo approached there was a cry of pain
from a monk of Mount Soracte, and a cry of anger
uttered at the synod of Rheims by a bishop of Orleans.
Glaber thus concludes his chronicle of the pontificate
of Benedict IX : Horrori est quippe referre turpitudo
illius conversationis et vitce. In the eleventh century
Pietro Damiano, in a letter to the bishop of Fermo,
deplores the fact that the Church has the temporal
sword at its disposal ; he regrets the times when
Ambrose and Gregory appeased the pagans and bar-
barians by gentleness. The popular conscience, which
saw the hand of God in all the crises of history as
well as in all the disturbing phenomena of nature,
silently condemned the Church of Rome. If God
permitted such catastrophes, it was because he had
abandoned the shepherds of Christendom to the malice
of Satan. The terror of the antichrist from that time
forward seized upon the imagination of the Italians.
A bishop of Florence, Raineri, announced from the

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL CONDITIONS 45

pulpit that he had already been born and would soon
appear. From century to century, till the time of
Savonarola, this anxiety constantly reappeared and even
manifested itself in works of art. The sick souls of
men sought eagerly on every side to recover the true
way of salvation, (i)

III

Some of them, the noblest, took refuge in the
monastic life. Thus, while escaping from the world
in which the secular Church had lost itself, they thought
they remained faithful to Christianity. Monasticism,
in the century of horrible disorders which Benedict of
Nursia witnessed, had been a port of refuge ; but it
could receive only a very insignificant part of
Christendom. It rested, in fact, upon the idea that the
civil life is pernicious and that the isolation of the
faithful in the solitude of a cell is the best preparation
for the death of saints. Bruno, in the eleventh century,
founded the Chartreuse upon the same idea. O beata
solitudo ! O sola beatitiido I The cloisters, buried in
the shadows of the forests or lost on the mountain tops,
never seemed to be far enough removed from the towns
and the commerce of men. In order to conform to
the word of God, and to taste in its fulness the sweet-
ness of God, it was necessary first of all to purify
oneself from all pride, all love, and all earthly memories.
Absolute detachment from all that is not Jesus is the
most frequent precept of that book of the Imitation
which, towards the end of the Middle Ages, summed
up, as in a melancholy testament, the discouragement
and sadness of these friends of solitude. " Claude super
te ostium tuum. Shut thy door behind thee and call
to thee Jesus, thy well-beloved ; live with Him in thy
cell, for nowhere else wilt thou find peace so pro-
found." So the monk said good-bye to the world, or,

46 MYSTIC ITALY

rather, he despised and feared it. Even on the
threshold of the convent he put a trembling foot in
the diabolic region, full of snares and mortal seduc-
tions. The monk of Novalese, on Mount Cenis, was
persuaded that the demon roamed unceasingly over the
mountain, in the form of serpents or buffoons. (2) He
returned in haste to his brethren, and in the night all
sorts of childish or terrible visions disturbed his
slumber. The Benedictine rule, a fairly mild monastic
rule, had reserved its severest prescriptions for the
relations of the monks with the outside world. Fear of
the world was so decidedly the principle of all wisdom
that the Sicilian abbots at an early date had translated
into the vulgar tongue, as a breviary useful to the
less cultured of their brethren, the Mirror of Monks,
written in the eleventh century by Arnoulf of Beauvais,
a regular manual of monastic discipline. The monk,
it is there written, ought not to concern himself with
political events, or wars, or factions, or the joys and
vanities of the earth, or strangers, or even his own
relatives. His countenance should be neither sad nor
smiling ; he should merely preserve the cold serenity
of a man who has already half laid himself down in
the peace of his tomb. " Let the monk," says the
author of the Mirror, in conclusion, " be like
Melchisedech, without father, without mother, without
any relatives. Let him call no one father or mother
on earth. Let him look upon himself as alone and
upon God as his Father. Amen. Praise to Jesus
Christ. Amen." (3)

Undoubtedly in that lively Italian society that was
soon, by means of the communal revolution, to shake
off the triple feudal, pontifical, and imperial yoke,
monasticism had nothing to say, nothing to offer. The
serf, the artizan, the citizen, the petty country noble-
man, saw in these pious solitaries bent over their missal
neither allies against Rome, consolers for evil days,
nor charitable messengers of the divine word. If the

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL CONDITIONS 47

monks had found God for themselves they either could
not or dared not bring Him to the crowds and stretch
out a helping hand to their brothers of the outside
world in order to lead them back to the Heavenly-
Father. They kept themselves too far from humanity.
Their voices were uplifted in nocturnal psalmody beneath
the Romanic arches of their churches, but no longer
descended to the ears of the living.

And again the ideal conception of the first Benedictine
monasticism was every day being contradicted by reality^
in the strangest way. The monks had necessarily
entered, like the secular church, into the feudal system.
The abbots became counts on the same ground as did
the bishops. The Italian abbeys were moreover con-
strained, more than any other in Europe, to adopt the
military life. After the Hungarians and Arabs, the
bishops and the barons and the emperors pillaged them
and burnt them without mercy. Subiaco, the first refuge
of Benedict, had to defend itself several times against
the bishops of Tivoli and the counts of Sabinum or
the district of Preneste. Monte Cassino and the Cave
of Salerno were Benedictine strongholds that kept a
look-out from the summit of their rocks by turns for
the Saracens, the Roman barons, the Norman adven-
turers, and the Suabian princes. In 1192 Monte
Cassino took the part of Henry VI against the pope,
and all its monks found themselves excommunicated.
The possession of power very soon spoilt the monks,
and riches corrupted them more shockingly than they
had corrupted the lay seigneurs. At the very time
of the Cluny reform, that arrested the ruin of Benedict's
order, the monks of Farfa in Sabinum, one of the most
opulent feudal monasteries in Italy, poisoned their abbot,
sacked the convent and lived the joyous life of bandits.
Later on they welcomed Henry IV and supported him,
in spite of the anathema of Gregory VII. All tlie efforts
of popes and abbots to restore the rule in its primitive
purity, to bring back the monks to perpetual prayer.

48 MYSTIC ITALY

manual labour and abstinence, failed owing to the
temporal conditions of monasticism.

It was then that delicate souls, enamoured of silence,
sought better retreats for the life contemplative out-
side the monastic institution. In the tenth' and eleventh
centuries the piiieta of Ravenna, the solitudes of
Gubbio, Vallombrosa, the Sila Mountains of Calabria,
and Monte Gargano, the Athos of the west, were
peopled with hermits. They were still there at the
end of the thirteenth century. True fathers of the
desert, they sang psalms, fasted, and disciplined their
bodies. Several, such as Romuald, the founder of the
Camaldules, and Nil, the Greek hegoumenos of Calabria
and first abbot of Grotta-Ferrata (1002), enjoyed great
renown throughout the whole world. (4) Some, such as
Pietro Damiano, Dominico of Sora, and Bruno of Segni,
returned at times to the secular Church to purify and
direct it. Christendom admired them for their extra-
ordinary acts of penance, their renunciation of all
earthly consolation, and the long ecstasies during which
the secrets of God were revealed to them ; the masters
of feudal society, the pope and emperor, venerated them,
while they feared them at the same time for the very
grandeur of their sanctity and the gift of prophecy
that was attributed to them. Otto said to his barons
as they came dowm' from Nil's hermitage in the
mountains of Calabria : " These men are truly citizens
of heaven — they live in tents as strangers upon earth."
They had, in fact, set themselves free, as far as the
present life is concerned, from the human community.
Their social activity was even more insignificant than
that of the monks. Neither the hermits nor the monks
could therefore regenerate Christendom. They were
powerless to reform, even for a few days, ecclesiastical
society. Should a monk of Cluny, Gregory VII
(1073-1085), or an abbot of Monte Cassino, Victor III
(108 6- 1 08 7), mount the papal throne and require of
the clergy the austerity^ and obedience of the cloister.

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL CONDITIONS 49

this attempt at religious renovation lasted but the
time of a single pontificate. In no part of the west
was this eclipse of the apostolic work more obvious
than in Italy. It was among the Italians that the
preaching of the Crusades awoke fewest echoes.
Whilst Europe was rising at the call of popes and
monks, the great maritime cities, Venice, Genoa, Pisa,
and Amalfi, while exacting a high price for the help
of their fleets, indifferent to the fate of the Holy
Sepulchre, sought in the east nothing but the interests
of their poHtics and their trade, and sometimes also
relics that might be useful to those politics. (5) Thus,
at the very moment when the communal revolution
began, the spiritual role of the Church seemed to be
ended in the peninsula, and Christianity was retiring
from the social crisis in which the destiny of the weak
and oppressed was at stake.

IV ^

Between the appearance of the commune of Brescia,
at the end of the tenth century, and the completion
of that of Plorence, at the end of the twelfth, the
towns pulled down the strongholds of their counts and
bishops and took possession once more of their
civil franchises. They gave back to the children
the little fatherland that encircled the municipal cam-
panile ; at the time of the great Italian leagues
they were to succeed in waking the memory of the
greater fatherland that had embraced all Italy. But
they were unable to found social peace upon a
lasting basis.

The Italian city in fact was a work of liberty and
equality in appearance only. The community watched
over and fettered the individual, for the franchises of
republican association had as their guarantee the
abdication of all personal will. The citizen was

4

50 MYSTIC ITALY

attached to his city as rigorously as the cultivator to
the soil. The anonymous power upon which he was
dependent was a narrower constraint than the old
feudal pact. The contract that bound the man to his
lord rested upon a permanent and reciprocal interest,
whilst the arbitrary lordship of the commune, at once
irresponsible and changing, modified, twenty times in
a century, according to the needs or dangers of the
moment, the social agreement and rendered the lot of
the individual the more difficult in that it was more
uncertain. Here the man was enclosed in some one
of the groups whose sum total constituted the communal
state ; he belonged for his entire life to a determined
class, to a trade, a corporation, a parish, a quarter.
His consuls and councils not only assigned him his
share of political liberty, but regulated by decree the
acts of his private life, prescribing the number of fig
and almond trees he might plant in his field, the
number of priests and tapers that should attend his
funeral, forbade him to enter into taverns reserved for
foreigners, to give presents to newly-married couples,
to wear jewels or precious stuffs beyond a certain value ;
if he was a barber, to shave for more than a penny ;
if a ropemaker, to work on wet days ; if a huntsman,
to catch quails otherwise than in a snare ; if a fisher-
man, to sell his fish outside the city ; and if he were
a farmer he was commanded to bring to the commune
the corn he did not himself consume. Air and sun-
shine alone seems to have escaped this regulation of
individual rights. Exile, either voluntary or com-
pulsory, could alone restore a shadow of independence
to the Italian, the lamentable exile of the fuoruscito,
whom the neighbouring communes could receive only
as a vagabond or a suspect, who had no other resource
than to enroll himself among the mercenaries of a
baron of the highways, the enemy of all communes,
and had no other chance of seeing his birthplace again
than the hazards of civil war.

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL CONDITIONS 51

Down to the end of the twelfth century the Italian
commune was entirely permeated with the aristocratic
spirit. Later on it was disturbed almost everywhere
by the imperious claims of the democracy and with
terror saw passing through its streets and squares the
supreme power, from which there was no appeal, that
had gradually invaded the communal constitutions, the
demagogic parlamenio set in motion by the tocsin of
the public palace. But then, as the thirteenth century
waned, the communes, corrupted in their vital principle,
degenerated into tyranny. At the time with which we
are dealing, however, when the municipal form of
government was coming into being, this principle was
in its full vigour. The Italian Middle Ages were still
too powerfully possessed by the sentiment of the human
hierarchy to pass at a leap from the feudal system to
pure equality. The communes were set up for the
benefit of a nobility of the second rank, which at the
beginning of the new order even allowed itself for some
time to be ruled by the captains or vicars of the old
counts. It was the middle class that formed the Italian
city for its own great advantage. At Florence it even
succeeded in establishing in its midst the hierarchy of
the major and minor arts, of the " fat " and " lean "
people. But in all the towns there was set up in a
manner more or less rigorous a social system that
placed one according to the value of the industry or
commerce in which he was engaged and that con-
sequently depended upon wealth. At the top were the
notaries, money-changers, physicians, judges, weavers
of silk or of velvet or cloth ; beneath them were the
people of cruder manual occupations, wool-carders and
butchers ; and lower still came the minato popolo, that
had no corporation of its own and was attached to
one or other of the major or minor arts, the obscure
crowd of the Ciompl who wdnt barefoot, the popolani,
whom Dino Compagni shows us as incessantly insulted
and trampled upon by the " great and proud citizens ",

52 MYSTIC ITALY

the plebians of Milan whom a noble could kill at the
cost of a few cro\\Tis. (6)

As we see, the Italian hive, so ingenious and lively,
was by no means equally kind to all the bees. When,
in the days of Boniface Vlll (i 294-1 303), the factions
of Guelfs and Ghibelins, making use, as engines of
war, at once of the hates of families and quarters and
the deadly rancour of the wretched against the middle
class, had set fire to central Italy, poets and historians
had no difficulty in discovering in the social state of
their country those two irreconcilable elements, hard-
ness of heart in the great and envy in the humble.
" Thy city," says one of tlie damned to Dante, " js
so full of envy that the sack is overflowing." And
it is Campagni who tells us that " the weak were too
much oppressed by the strong." Later on Giovanni
Villani (1275 ?-i348), in his Chronicle of the history
of Italy, was even to say with regard to the fires that
ravaged Florence at the close of the twelfth century :
" Our middle class citizens were too fat and lived in
repose and pride." Florence was the first city that
was able to begin an actual class war, for she was
always in advance of the other towns as much in her
revolutionary logic as in her civilization. But every-
where else, in the first centuries of the communes, if,
to make use of a tragic expression of Dante's, " it
came to bloodshed," it was as yet by no means a simple
social struggle. The discontent of the nobles and the
upper middle class, whose personal liberty was stifled
by the municipal government, and the wrath of the
popolanl, for whom the ranks of the privileged classes
were closed, were rather manifested in religious un-
easiness. Anxiety about divine matters was too strong
at that time for men not to expect from God a remedy
for the ills that distressed men's souls, and for them
not to ask from religion consolation in their earthly,
life. And as, in this period of social renovation, the
Church always continued to be, between the feudal lords

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL CONDITIONS 53

whose power was declining and the communes whose
power was increasing, an august symbol of immovable
authority, it was to the Church that men's consciences
long turned, and for a century and a half Italy sought
in a freer faith and a more tender charity the liberty
and pity refused her by political institutions.

V

Deprived of all doctrinal method, and greatly troubled
in mind, Italy tried during this same period, and
without ever attaining satisfaction, several religious
creations. Indifference or negation certainly had their
adepts soon enough, especially in Lombardy and at
Florence. Among the heretics of whom Villani speaks
under the dates of 1115 ^''^d 11 17 we find "an
epicurean sect," that is to say, according to the defini-
tion of Benvenuto of Imola, referring to the unbeliev-
ing Ghibelins of Dante's epoch, men " who assert that
the soul perishes with the body." (7) On the other
hand we know that Lombardy gave birth to a great
number of those clerici vagantes, joyous fellows who /
were to be met with nearly everywhere in Europe at
that time. These men's infidelity was of a very original
kind, mingled with irony, sensuality, and a real instinct
of paganism. They made mock of the Church,
parodying the text of the Gospel and singing the mass
of the god Bacchus : Introibo ad altare Bacchic ud
Deum qui Icetificat cor hominis. They were men of
letters, precursors of the free-thinkers, who gaily broke
away from the scholastic pedantry and the Christian
gravity. They disconcerted the Middle Ages, which,
although they by no means spared either the secular
or the regular clergy, did not approve the mockery
of holy things. They were accused of believing " in
Juvenal rather than in the prophets,"

Et pro Marco legunt Flacciivi,
Pro Paulo Virgilium.

54 MYSTIC ITALY

But these first Tuscan or Lombard sceptics formed
only a small group lost in Italian Christendom. It
is not possible exactly to measure the scope of their
religious indifference. The contagion of it at any rate
caused no concern to the faithful at that time. For
the negation of the lettered to penetrate to the masses
of the people a century had first to see the triumph
of a great heresy, or the consummation of a decisive
schism, or the development of a philosophical civiliza-
tion. Free thought, in its modern sense, really began
only at the time of Frederic II (12 12-1250) and the
Averroist propaganda.

For those believing souls, who by no means wished
to renounce the hope of Paradise, schism and heresy
were a far stronger temptation than mere unbelief. In
the middle of the eleventh century there broke out in
Lombardy a schismatic revolt of a very remarkable kind,
which old historians and the poets, such as Pulci,
deceived by the analogy of names, often confounded
with the heresy of the Cathari. I am speaking of
the Patarins or the Pataria, an entirely popular and
monastic attempt, that was openly encouraged by
Rome, during the period of the reforming popes inspired
by Hildebrand. The rivalry of the two leading bishops
of Italy, a doctrinal debate between Rome and Milan,
was the cause of this religious war that ended in civil
strife. The Lombard church had long maintained
a schismatic attitude towards the Roman See. It
preserved the very peculiar liturgy of the Ambrosian
form of worship, tetanias execrandas writes the deacon
Arialdo. (8) The archbishop of Milan had claimed
since the time of Charles the Bald the right to dispose
of the crown of Italy, a privilege that was taken from
him by a constitution of Otto III. Medtolanensi
eplscopo papatum ablatum est. Supported by a rich
clergy and by the Lombard episcopate which derived
its powers from him alone and which he assembled
in council, indifferent to the anathemas of Rome, and

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL CONDITIONS 55

covered almost always by the buckler of the Empire,
the archbishop of Milan appeared to be the actual pope
of northern Italy. He coined money and raised armies.
He reigned over that powerful hierarchy of feudal
bishops that the Empire had favoured for the past two
centuries, in the secular order, with extraordinary
privileges, to the detriment even of the lay counts.
The commune of Milan, entirely aristocratic in character,
resigned itself to the political primacy of its pastor
out of fear of the Empire. But it looked with anger
upon the scandals of the Ambrosian church, the simony
of the superior clergy, the impudence of the married
priests, the Nicolaites, who laughed at councils and
replied to the decrees of Rome by the words of the
apostle : Qui se non continet, nubat. The grudges
of the lower classes were moreover kept alive by the
poor inferior clergy, who, in the presence of the
poverty-stricken people, incessantly commented upon the
Sermon on the Mount. " Do not forget," Arialdo said
to them, " that the Son of Man had not a stone whereon
to rest His head. But he said ' Blessed are the poor '.
Look now at your priests, with their palaces and
castles, their soft raiment, their pride, their lust and
idleness ! " In the sordid alleys of Milan, to which the
degraded trades were consigned as to a ghetto, the
booths of the sellers of old iron and rags, the bazaar
of the Pataria, there thus sprang up an enthusiastic
Christianity, quite democratic in character, that waited
only for the sound of its bell to assault the patrician
and simoniac Milanese Church.

The signal came from Rome, where the future
Gregory VII was endeavouring to restore the austerity
of monasticism. At Milan the clergy and noble laymen
began the revolution. One of these clergy, Anselm of
Lucca, became popve in 1061, under the name of
Alexander II (1061-1073). The military chief, Erlem-
baldo, carried a blessed gonfalon to Rome. The legates
of the Holy See, Hildebrand and afterwards Pietro

56 MYSTIC ITALY

Damlano, came to Milan to break down the resistance
of the Ambrosians. The archbishop Guido, a creature
of the emperor's, had to ^proceed to Rome in order to
receive the episcopal ring from the hands of his rival.
But the people, roused to revolt by their preachers,
rose against the Milanese Church and tore the Nicolaites
from their altars. The evangelical reform degenerated
into democracy. (9) Public worship became impossible
at Milan. When once Gregory VII was elected to the
pontificate, Erlembaldo instituted a reign of terror in
the city. He dared even to forbid the administration
of baptism in the metropolitan baptistery. The populace
pillaged the houses of the simoniacs, and in Holy Week
burnt the two cathedrals and the other churches. The
nobles then took up arms and sought out the Patarins.
A feudal battle was necessary to settle with these
tattered mystics. Erlembaldo fell in the front rank
of his men, holding in his arms the papal gonfalon,
and at his side fell also the priest Liprando, bearing the
cross. The incipient heresy of the vanquished Pataria
was not slow in disappearing from Lombardy. (10)

This first rehgious protest, quite local in character,
left the field free for the heresy of the Cathari. This
latter, at the end of the eleventh century, spread over
the whole of upper Italy to within sight of the very
walls of Rome. As early as 1035 the sect had appeared
in the region of Milan. There it grew in obscurity,
favoured by the fermentation of the Pataria. It is well
known that it was from Lombardy that it later made
its way into Waldensian France. In 1 125 it was already
mistress of Orvieto ; in 11 17 and 11 50 it was to be
found at Florence ; in 11 66 at Milan ; and in 11 84 at
Verona. In 11 94 Florence afforded asylum to the
heretics of Prato. This new heresy combined, in an
extremely confused manner, on the very old founda-
tion of Asiatic Manicheism, the majority of the old
heresies, the negation of the eucharist, for example,
and the traditional sacrament of baptism. For the

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL CONDITIONS 57

Cath'ari the primitive Church, anterior to pope Sylvester
and Constantine, when it had not yet secured its secular
power and was more or less unconcerned with secular
things, had alone been pleasing in the sight of God.
Of the great hierarchy of the mediseval Church they
retained nothing but the bishop and the deacon. They
kept the Gospel of John, the feasts of Christmas and
Pentecost and some of the sacraments in a very modified
form, such as baptism by the laying on of hands, and,
finally, the predominant theory of the Holy Spirit. The
perfect, the really pure, clad in a sad-coloured garment,
had to prepare for death by means of solitary medita-
tion or the fanaticism of a perpetual preaching. They
renounced all the good things of the world, condemned
themselves to the severest penances, to the insupport-
able weariness of religious communism, and to the
incessant espionage of the secret society. They
hastened the hour of death by the tortures of the
Endura, by horrible fasts, blood-letting or poison, (ii)
To those of their brethren who had not the vocation
to sanctity they accorded a less severe moral system.
Many of them were fond of riches and power. They
could thus come to an understanding with the political
order and fill the magistratures of the cities.

The Cathari were very numerous in Italy throughout
the twelfth century ; they did not succeed, however,
in calling forth a great proselytizing movement in the
peninsula. Their doctrines were incoherent ; and they
were repugnant to the great majority of the Italians
owing to their too pronounced character of asceticism
and pessimism. Theirs was a gloomy religion and in-
tolerant, according to which all sin was mortal, which
condemned joy, believed nature to be corrupted by the
operation of Satan, cursed marriage as prolonging
humanity's stay in a world of perdition, and by its
moral teaching and discipline detached the most ardent
of its behevers from public life no less than from
social life, ' \

58 MYSTIC ITALY

The Waldensian heresy came in its turn, in the second
half of the twelfth century, and presented itself to the
religious uneasiness of Italy. The Waldenses, or Poor
People of Lyons, whose founder, Pierre Waldo, an
heresiarch forerunner of Francis of Assisi, had volun-
tarily resigned his wealth in order to be poor among
the poor, had only a very mediocre theology ; they
referred all Christianity back to the simple text of the
Gospel, and did away with the entire clerical hierarchy.
They were never weary of repeating that it is better
to obey God than man, a good layman than a bad
cleric ; that the layman is the equal of the priest
for all mystic works, even for the sacrifice of the mass ;
thus they escaped the Church and confession, and
recovered the liberty of individual religion. The Italian
iWaldenses separated themselves from the credo of the
Church in a more radical fashion than their French
brethren ; with regard to the profession of absolute
poverty, on the other hand, they were more tolerant.
They were a community of humble folk who called
themselves the " humiliated ", who made a practice of
begging, and who were despised by the middle classes
of the townsfolk. At times they went forth to preach
in the public squares and to force open the doors of
churches ; at others they fled to the mountain or the
forest. When the day of persecution came their leaders
went through the villages and towns in order to comfort
their co-religionists. They were truly protean, says a
document of 1180 ; every morning they changed their
dress, being pilgrims, barbers, cordwainers, penitents,
as necessity arose. Their goodness of heart was
admirable. According to the confession of the Roman
inquisitors themselves, the Waldenses had returned to
the fraternity of the Gospel. They held out a helping
hand to the poor, the infirm, the orphan, the prisoner,
the exile. They founded hospitals for travellers and
the sick, opened free schools, maintained their students
at the University of Paris, and even extended their

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL CONDITIONS 59

beneficence to the orthodox. Christian equality seemed
thus to have been recovered by dissidents from the
orthodox Christianity of the time, to have been re-
suscitated by the enemies of the Church. (12)

But the ideal of the " humiliated " was very poor
and their morality Very austere for southern consciences ;
and their w^orship, deprived of churches, images, joyous
feasts, seemed too gloomy to Italy. Neither the
Waldenses nor the Cathari could win over a mobile
and refined people, whose sensuous piety required a
liturgy calculated to please the eye and the flattering
indulgence of the priest for the weakness of the heart.
These heresies, too much imbued with rationalism,
rendered God in some sort implacable ; in vain did
they deliver the believer from the shackles of the
Church, they could not regain that filial familiarity
towards God that marked the apostolic days ; they
left to man the weariness of the present life, the feeling
that all things here below are bad, and that the work
of salvation is in very truth too difficult for humble
souls.

And that was the most painful wound that the con-
science of the time could endure, a conscience that
henceforth could not turn towards God without fear.
The misery of the Middle Ages continued ; the deeds
of violence, which the monks and hermits fled to the
desert to avoid, never ended. The state of war seemed
to be everlasting. Men's minds, dismayed by the tragic
spectacle of life, saw in nature herself a deadly enemy ;
the unexpected phenomena of the heavens conspired
with the calamities of the earth against the sons of
Adam. The arm of God seemed at that time too heavy,
the image of the Redeemer was veiled, there remained
in His place only the formidable judge of the
Apocalypse. It was in vain that many of the fears
of the time proved to be unfounded. The skies were
still dark, and the Christian continued to perceive, on
a horizon that he believed to be very near, the appari-

60 MYSTIC ITALY

tion of the Last Judgment. The law of Christ, so
full of hope in the first ages of the Church, had become
a symbol of terror. Italy was no less tormented than
the rest of Christendom. The works of her first
mosaicists bear witness to the religious anguish of the
time quite as much as do the disquieting sculptures
of the French Romanic churches. I am not speaking
of the sombre and awkward mosaics anterior to the
close of the eleventh century, such as those of Santa
Maria in Navicella at Rome, in which the unskilfulness
of the hand may have betrayed the artist's feeling. But
in the works that issued from the Byzantine Renaissance
called forth by the abbot Didier in the time of
Gregory VII terror always dominates. At St. Angelo-
in-Fomiis, near Capua, above the central porch of the
church, it is at the very table of the Last Supper, at the
moment when He is giving His apostles His flesh and
blood, that Jesus rejects with a gesture of malediction
the damned at the last day ; on the friezes of the
great nave, nailed to the cross. He bends a threatening
face to His mother. The Gospel beams of love were
therefore extinct. And everywhere from that time forth
until the coming of the thirteenth century, in the
cathedral of Pisa as in that of Monreale, in the
baptistery of Florence as at St. John Lateran, there
appears, on the gold of the apses, the solemn Christ,
like an eastern despot. His look fixed and hard, the
stern God on Whose bosom Christian society no longer
dared to rest its head, as the disciple John had done
at the Last Supper of Jesus.

VI

However, in France, at the University of Paris, a
great eff'ort had just been attempted for the enfranchise-
ment of the human mind. It was not in vain that
Abelard (1079-1142) had endeavoured to reconcile

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL CONDITIONS 61

reason with faith, and that in the great University, in
the full sunlight, he had long nurtured the youth of
Europe upon the doctrine of liberty. The fundamental
notion of his philosophy contained the germ of a triple
revolution in science, politics, and Christianity. By
proving, in opposition to the idealism derived from
Scotus Eriugena, that ideas are not entities, but con-
ceptions of the mind, he had staggered the mediaeval
world. If man's thought is at once the source and
the measure of all reality, it is upon thought, and not
upon tradition and the syllogisms of the masters that
truth rests. Every man bears in himself a marvellous
cipher by the aid of which he can translate the laws
of nature and the Word of God. Reason is its own
authority and its own light. It has therefore the right
to investigate everything, to discuss everything, and to
judge everything. And Abelard had submitted the
whole of Christianity to his criticism. He had compared
and checked, the one by the other, natural philosophy,
the Jewish faith and the Christian faith. (13) He ex-
plained in a way that children and women could under-
stand the mystery of the Trinity ; he did even more :
he weakened the notion of mystery, removed the veils
of the tabernacle, and invited the Christian to look
upon God face to face. " The more we feel God,"
he said, " the more we love Him, and our intelligence
grows with our love. Cum profectu intelligenticB
caritatis accenditur flamma.'" (14) The distinction be-
tween the sons of God and those of the demon, Heloise
wrote to him, can be made only by charity, which,
according to the apostle, is the fulfilment of the law
and the end of the commandments. He had gone back
to the Christianity of Paul, and he restored to faith
the primacy over works. " The kingdom of God,"
Heloise said once more, " according to the apostle, is
not abstinence from meat or drink ; it is justice, peace
and joy in the Holy Spirit." At the same time that he
renounced the theology of the contemporaneous Christen-

62 MYSTIC ITALY

dom he renounced also its morality. For him virtue,
like truth, came forth from the depths of the soul,
and the root of sin was to be sought in the inmost
recesses of thought. Therefore it is not the act but
the culpable intention that makes the fault. Those who
crucified Jesus without knowing Him did not commit
sin. But who shall weigh the intention, if not the soul
itself, which has given birth to it, and which alone
can properly understand it? Of what value henceforth
are the sentence of the judge, that is to say the priest,
and the entirely external practices whereby the Church
believes it can vivify the conscience? An act of
faith, an impulse of tenderness, can bring the Christian
into closer communion with God than penance and
ceremonial. And if the master were asked what became
of original sin in the logical sequence of his teaching*
he would say that it is not sin but suffering. Then
had the Redemption been a useless sacrifice, and was
the Christianity that deemed it to be an essential article
of faith no more than a delusion? The redemption,
Abelard replied, was an act of pure love. (15)

VII

Did Arnold of Brescia (?-ii5 5) bring to Italy and
Rome these words of Abelard that suddenly burst forth
in the shadows of the twelfth century like the initial
text of the true eternal Gospel? Thousands of
scholastic students, clerics, and monks, who had
gathered round the great teacher had returned to their
cities with their hearts filled with his teaching ; his
books passed from hand to hand throughout the
peninsula, and were read with avidity by even the
bishops and cardinals. Arnold, who was surnamed
" Abelard's squire ", was able therefore to undertake
an apostolate, while remaining faithful to the tradition
of his friend. His school was ready waiting for him'.

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL CONDITIONS 63

But the apostle was eclipsed behind the tribune. He
hastened to the hurly-burly of public contests, and in
the religious crisis of his age he did not understand,
or would not see, anything but the reformation of the
temporal Church. Perhaps, moreover, even the same
man and the same city and the same age combined
had not sufficient strength to uplift both religious liberty
and social liberty simultaneously. This great figure long
remained enigmatic, the Middle Ages not having trans-
mitted anything concerning Arnold but a few obscure
or prejudiced evidences. His contemporaries, like the
cardinal of Aragon, saw in him a dangerous heresiarch,
or, like Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), they
believed him to be a schismatic ; and yet in matters
of faith they could reproach him only with holding
a peculiar view of the eucharist, the dogma conaeming
which had scarcely been determined till the time of
Berenger of Tours (?-io88), and of the baptism of
little children, of which, doubtless without immersion,
he disapproved. But Otto of Freysingen, who reports
this accusation, expresses himself in very vague terms :
non rede dicitur sensisse. There is nothing in that
which justifies the violence of the language used by
Bernard against Arnold's " poisonous " teaching, when
he calls him " the mortal enemy of the Cross," who
has "the head of a dove and the tail of a scorpion."
Evidently, upon the question of orthodoxy, queW infame,
as Luigi Muratori (i 672-1 750) says, in his monu-
mental work that deals with a thousand years of Italian
history, must have suffered from the ecclesiastical
hatred that pursued his master Abelard till the day
of his death. Innocent II (1130-1143), at the council
of Sens, hurled against both of them a decree of
malediction. Arnold at that time held his master's
chair at Paris, Abelard having been exiled to Cluny.
In this supposed heretic it was certainly the disciple
of the school of Sainte-Genevieve that Bernard and'
the Church wished to stigmatize ; but it was above

64 MYSTIC ITALY

all else the reformer and the man of action who
frightened them, and whom they crushed. Arnold's
personal theology did not extend to heresy, and it
stopped short upon the edge of schism. At Rome he
said not a word either against the universals or against
the Trinity, or against the spiritual authority of the
Holy See. The Italian of the twelfth century, the
child of free Brescia, had but one thought : to found
at Rome a communal form of government independent
of the pope, and to crown the royalty of the people
on the Capitol. What we know of Arnold's speeches
shows him to us preaching the evangelical simplicity
and poverty of the early Church, denying the right of
property to monks and the secular clergy, conferring
upon the state, that is to say upon the commune, the
goods of the ecclesiastics, exhorting Celestine II
(422-432), Lucius II (1144-1145), Eugenius III
(i 145-1 1 53), and Adrian IV (,i i 54-1 1 59), to renounce
the temporal jurisdiction and confine themselves to the
white staff of the apostolic popes. He took from the
bishops the feudal domain. He forbade them the enjoy-
ment of sumptuous clothes, delicate viands and illicit
games. He could appeal to Pietro Damiano, and even
to Bernard of Clairvaux himself, in writing to
Eugenius III : " Who will grant me before I die to
see the Church of God such as it was in the ancient
days, when the apostles cast their nets, not to catch
gold and silver, but souls? " The demands of Arnold
seemed for a moment to be not unlike the views of
Bernard, in his book De Consider atione, so that the
pope raised the ban that had been pronounced against
the exile. The tribune established himself for a few
days at Viterbo, then went to Rome, perhaps in secret,
and waited until the precarious peace concluded
between Eugenius and the commune should be broken.
In the spring of 1146 the pope fled for the second
time from his metropoHs, and Arnold's religious theory
was disclosed in all its gravity.

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL CONDITIONS 65

It was no longer a question of a moral reform,
but of a revolution in the historic tradition of the
Church. Bernard consented to relieve the pope of the
direct exercise of the temporal power, he was glad to
deliver him from the embarrasment of the feudal
sovereignty, but he always attributed to him the supreme
authority, exercised in the name of God, over all the
kings and all the cities of the world. The pope
disposes of the two swords : with his own hand
he wields the spiritual sword ; the emperor and
the princes, his vicars, wield the temporal sword as
he directs. (17)

Gregory VI 1 having no other kingdom than his
basilica — such was the ideal of Bernard. The Papacy
of the early centuries deprived of all power and all
right over political society — such was the ideal of Arnold
of Brescia, and, for some years, that of republican
Rome and communal Italy. The wretched Papacy of
Eugenius III seemed to Arnold to be unworthy of
the obedience of Christians. It is astonishing that he
did not then and there consummate the schism by
adding a new pontiff to the long list of antipopes.
Doubtless he had first of all to solve the problem
imposed upon Christendom at the time of the Carolin-
gians : could the Church and its chief pastor, in the
present state of the world, renounce the secular power?
Thus everything was called into question : ecclesiastical
discipline, the feudal situation of the higher clergy,
the possession of wealth, and works, the source of
that wealth, the oecumenical primacy of the bishop of
Rome. It was Christianity itself, as formed by the
tempestuous history of the Middle Ages, that had to
be refashioned from top to bottom. The citizens of the
episcopal cities had certainly been able, without stirring
up civil war, to bring about the downfall of their
bishops in the political sphere ; but at Rome, in order
to pull down the pope from his position of temporal
lord, the Church herself, absolute mistress of the

5

66 MYSTIC ITALY

pontificate by the electoral reform of Nicholas II, had
to be dispossessed. The secular allies, the petty
Roman nobility and the people, were not sufficiently
strong to enable Arnold to finish his work ; he called
to his side the lower clergy, who accepted the over-
throw of the higher ecclesiastical hierarchy. A sort
of fatality then drove Arnold to demagogy. Some
years earlier he had raised a revolt against the bishop
of Brescia. He renewed against the Roman See the
Lombard Pataria of the eleventh century. He was
condemned, as the Paterins had been, to all the excesses
of reformers who claim to regulate civil society upon
the pure maxims of the Gospel. Moreover, the internal
conditions of Rome rendered the religious revolution
still more difficult for him. He was obliged to go
beyond the programme of the Italian commune, that
in all cases had been set up for the advantage of the
middle class and the popolo grasso. But Rome, in
the twelfth centur}^, had no more a middle class than
it had possessed in Cccsar's time, and it was for the
household dependents of the monasteries and churches,
for the wild popolani of the Trastevere, that Abelard's
squire called Livy's republic into being. He had been
welcomed at Rome by the factions of the nobles, and
his first care was to abolish the aristocratic constitution
of the commune in favour of a popular senate. Thus
at one and the same time he prejudiced the two " great
luminaries " : if, by the institution of the democratic
city, he robbed the pope of his feudal dignity, he also
deprived the emperor of the mystic capital of the
empire, and removed the keystone of the arch that
upheld the whole political system of Christendom.
Abandoned by the barons, his allies of yesterday, and
harassed by the brutal mob to whom the demagogic
tradition had taught neither fidelity nor respect, Arnold
perceived suddenly, beyond the patricians he had de-
ceived and the temporal Church he had denied, the
emperor, the greatest the world had seen since

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL CONDITIONS G7

Charlemagne and Otto I, who descended the Alps and
marched against him.

So Frederic Barbarossa (ii 52-1 190) and Adrian IV
combined their justice and their hatred. The pope
demanded the heretic, the apostate cleric ; the emperor
claimed the tribune. An interdict closed the churches
in Rome. Arnold fled, was taken prisoner in the Val
d'Orcia, then rescued by the viscounts of that region,
who guarded him in their castles, honouring him as a
prophet. Barbarossa besieged the castles and recaptured
his victim. Arnold was strangled and then burnt
secretly on the banks of the Tiber, in that field of
Nero's where, in 1 1 i 5, Crescentius, a Roman patrician
who also had sought to free his native city from the
imperial yoke, had shed his blood under Otto III.

VIII

Arnold's dream had been too vast. He had tasted
the honey of the ideal and the reality killed him. From
the depths of his cell in the castle of St. Angelo
he could send up to heaven the desperate cry of
Abelard : A finibus terrce ad te clamavi, dam anxiaretur
cor nieum. Conceive the sadness of the martyr who,
in his last hour, comprehends that he has been mistaken,
and that he bears testimony by his death to the faith
of the past and not that of the future. Not only did
he fall for having imprudently attempted at Rome the
revolution that had been possible at Milan, Pisa, and
Florence, in fact, through all municipal Italy, but for
having believed, with the reformers of the last centuries,
that Rome and the Holy See were the whole Church,
and that the Church was the whole of Christendom.
As long as the souls of the Italians had this illusion,
they waited in vain for the dawning of the day of
God. All essays at religious creations ended in the
same disenchantment. Italy, still too young to give

68 MYSTIC ITALY

herself up to indifference or unbelief, could not deprive
herself of a positive faith ; she wished to remain
Christian ; Christianity had grown in her arms, and
she was attached to it with a sort of maternal tender-
ness. She also wished to remain Catholic ; the Holy
Roman See was in part her work, and she was not
forgetful of the great popes under whose mantle her
national liberties had at times been sheltered. She felt
herself to be united to the Church by the pride of
memories and the charm of common sufferings. She
departed from the Church's side every morning to
seek, somewhat at random, the way, the truth, and
the life, and every evening she returned, like a dis-
appointed and weary pilgrim, to the old cradle where
her hopes ever rested.

Now this painful period was about to close. Arnold's
stake is the last station on the way to Calvary.; A
breath of new life is already passing over Italy. The
Lombard communes are about to receive at Legano
the bloody baptism of liberty, and the idea of the
historic fatherland is about to re-enter men's con-
sciences. Already the first flowers of art and poetry
are budding. The masters of mosaic, the first sculptors,
the painters of Athos, have rejuvenated the adornment
of churches ; and the white cathedrals, the baptisteries
of sculptured marble, the slender campanili, rise
triumphantly in Lombardy, in Tuscany, and in the
Norman kingdom. Sicily is sending to the peninsula,
with the delicate models of Arabic art, a kind of
reflection of the sensuous graces of the east. Tomorrow
the first troubadours will come from gay Provence by
the passes of the Alps, and already the chivalric fables
of the France of Roland and the legends of Arthur and
Merlin rejoice the hearts of the lords of the valleys
of the Po and Adige. In this awakening of public
life and intellect we get a glimpse of an approaching
religious revival, for the universal joy of Italy would
be inexphcable if men's souls were still to languish

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL CONDITIONS 69

in the tribulation of the Middle Ages. Beams of the
approaching davvn fly from cupola to cupola, from the
Palatine chapel of Palermo to San Marco at Venice,
and on the mountains of Calabria there rises at last
the star of a new Christmas.

CHAPTER II

JOACHIM OF FLORA

Dante has placed in his Paradise, among the great
mystics (Anselm, Hugh of Saint Victor and Bonaven-
tura) the Calabrian prophet Joachim of Flora (1132-
1202),

II calavrese abate Giovacchino,

Di spirito profetico dotato.

A very audacious prophet if we mark the fortune of
his dreams and the doctrinal boldness of the disciples,
more or less legitimate, who, till the end of the Middle
Ages, proclaimed him their master ; the most dangerous
of heresiarchs, if his authentic works (19) are carried
to their logical conclusion, to wit, the downfall of the
Church and the Law of the Word : the gentlest of
Christians, if we take into account the childish grace
of his legend and the act of simple faith that he
inscribed at the beginning of the most important of
his books, the Concord of the New and the Old
Testament. He very nearly caused a most serious crisis
in the Church, and the latter, after having honoured him
in his lifetime, as the authorized interpreter of the
Scriptures, permitted the Cistercian family in the
Neapolitan provinces to venerate him as blessed and
to invoke him as a worker of miracles. In the dioceses
of Calabria, on his feast day, this anthem, of which
Dante's verses seem to be an echo, is still sung : Beatus
Joachim, spiritn dotatus propheiico, decoratiis intelli-
gentia, errore prociil hceretico, dixit futura ut prccsentia.

70

(

JOACHIM OF FLORA 71

Here we have a religious phenomenon containing
apparently absolute contradictions. The uncertainty of
the Italian conscience in the century of Arnold of Brescia
would only half explain it ; the reason for it must be
sought further in the secular anxieties of Christianity.

I

One of the most original and most tenacious ideas
of the first Christian society was that nothing, in the
rehgious state of the world, was yet definitive, that
revelation had by no means said its last word, that
the apostolate and death of Jesus were only a single
act in the drama of salvation, and that the consumma-
tion of the great mystery must be expected in a future
more or less close at hand. More than one word
spoken by Jesus, the vague promise of a glorious
return of the Son of Man, allusions to some unheard-of
catastrophe, kept alive a hope mingled with terror
during the evangelical generation. Persons whom no
dogma could re-assure, who were as yet disciplined
by no ecclesiastical hierarchy, debated upon the future
religion, and their curiosity about the unknown was
all the more lively because the very free interpretation,
inaugurated by Jesus against the Jewish Law and the
narrow letter, always continued in existence. Every
conscience, at the same time that it endeavoured to
read the final secret, freely created its own faith, every
Christian was indeed a Christ. The ascendancy of Paul
is explained by this doctrine of liberty, and the in-
spiration of primitive Christianity is manifested in the
Second Epistle to the Corinthians : " Ye are the
very word and message of Christ ; we are the ministers
of the New Testament, not as to the letter, but as
to the spirit, for the letter killeth and the spirit
giveth life. Where is the Spirit of the Lord, there
is liberty."

72 ]\IYSTIC ITALY

The Apocalypse and the Fourth Gospel are throughout
anhnated by this sentiment of divine becoming, of con-
tinuous revelation. Both of these books, the first by
the remarkable character of its images, the second by
the metaphysical obscurity of its language, marvellously
favoured the liberty of religious invention proclaimed
by Paul. The Apocalypse opens up a vision that will
long dazzle the Christian imagination, and will seem
by its gloomy symbols to justify the miseries of history,
while promising the revenge of the saints in the near
future. It rests upon the conception of a series of crises
that will precede the appearance of the heavenly
Jerusalem, and of a progress of supernatural things
necessary to the final triumph of the believers in the
bosom of God. After horrible convulsions, that will
destroy the Roman empire, the earthly reign of the
Messiah and his martyrs will begin, perhaps in Palestine,
and will last a thousand years ; then Satan, the
antichrist, will be let loose, God will be eclipsed, and
the Church will be on the point of perishing. God
will then reappear upon the scene, the general resur-
rection and the last judgment will conclude the history
of the visible world, and the definitive state, beatitude
and eternal peace, will be set up.

But the violent impression caused by the Apocalypse
upon men's souls was bound to grow weaker. The
quite material promises of the millennium were dis-
appointed by the actual events. Had the apostle been
mistaken in his calculations ; was the temporal reign
of Jesus but an illusion? The Fourth Gospel, a work
of the Greek mind, permeated throughout by Neo-
Platonism, came at the right moment to restore its
ideal to disturbed Christendom. With a serenity un-
known to the seer of Patmos it renewed the assurance
of a superior religion, reserved for a time in the near
future. " Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when
neither at Jerusalem nor on this mountain shall ye
worship the Father ; the hour cometh when the true

y"

JOACHBI OF FLORA 73

faithful shall worship the Father in spirit and in
truth." But the great originality of the Gospel of
John, the precious stone brought by that book to the
edifice of Christianity, is the first outline of a trans-
cendant theology and the creation of mysticism by
means of that very theology. To the Prophet of
Galilee, descended from Abraham, grandson of David,
whose carnal genealogy Matthew enumerated and whom
the Synoptics followed through the familiar details of
His earthly life, there succeeded the Word eternal, the
intelligence of God, God himself, clothed in mortal
flesh. He revealed Himself in the first chapter as a
pure divine essence, then as a phantom of light to
John the Baptist on the banks of the Jordan, and the
Baptist cried : " Behold the Son of God." In the last
lines of the book, after the Passion, he appeared again
to His disciples in the misty brightness of early dawn,
on the shore of the Lake of Tiberias : in the interval
between these two visions, He lived and talked among
men, but transfigured by a supernatural radiance and
like to an angelic fomi. He acted only in the name
of His Father and for the glory of His Father ; by
Him only can men go to the heavenly Father and
share in the divine. " I and the Father are one."
On the evening of the Last Supper the apostles heard
Him munnuring these words: "This is life eternal:
to know Thee the only true God and Thy Messiah,
Jesus Christ. ... I pray not for them only, but for
all those who shall believe in Me upon their testimony :
that they all may be one . . . that they may be but
one in Us." But in order to deserve by profound
faith to have communion with God and to live by His
breath, it is necessary first of all to accept the Spirit.
" It is the Spirit that quickeneth, the flesh availeih
nothing." This is indeed the final term of the mystic
initiation, for which the earthly mission of Jesus was ^

the preparation. The theory of the Holy Spirit, of ^!

which Paul had already caught a glimpse, dominates

r

1'

74 MYSTIC ITALY

the whole of the Fourth Gospel. The Holy Spirit,,
the Paraclete, is a mediator in the same way as the
Word, who will be sent by the Father in the name of
the Word and at His request, who will bear witness
for the Son as He had borne witness for the Father,
and will live for ever among men. By Him shall be
consummated the revelation of the Word, and faith
in the promises of the Word shall be confirmed. " He
will teach you all things, and shall bring to your
remembrance all that I have told you." But the coming
of the Spirit is absolutely distinct from that of Jesus.
" Lo, I am returning to Him that sent me, and none
of you asketh me, WTiither goest thou? And because
I have told you these things, sorrow hath filled your
heart. Verily I say unto you, it is expedient for you
that I go away, for if I go not away, the Comforter
will not come unto you ; when I go I will send Him
unto you." Jesus died. The testament that He had
brought into the world was then sealed. With His
death began a new religious era. In the securely
closed room wherein His disciples were hiding for
fear of the Jews, He suddenly glided in like a
shadow ; the breath of His lips gently touched their
brows, and He said unto them : " Receive ye the
Holy Spirit."

But the Spirit will descend only upon souls purified
by love. Love is the highest of the virtues and the
sign of election. The whole morality of the Fourth
Gospel is contained in this precept of the Master,
incessantly repeated : " Love one another and love Me
as I love My Father. Be united to Me by love as I
am united to the Father. Attach yourselves to Me as
the branches to the stem of the vine. Gather closely
round Me as the sheep gather round the good
Shepherd." He had pity upon the woman taken in
adultery. When Lazarus died He wept and the Jews
said : " Behold how He loved him! " From the cross
He fixed His eyes upon the beloved disciple to whom

JOACHIM OF FLORA 75

he bequeathed the mystic religion of love that he might
give it to the world.

The tradition of the first centuries attributed the
Apocalypse and the Fourth Gospel to John. The man
of Ephesus was regarded as a prophet who, from the
heart of the new Law, had caught a glimpse of the
Law of the future. Men's souls could await in peace
the manifestations promised by the Apocalypse : the
religion of the Holy Spirit was set up, consisting
wholly of faith, charity, and liberty. For very lofty
consciences and tender hearts a sanctuary was prepared,
the vestibule to the heavenly Jerusalem : how hence-
forth could they be affected by the evils of hfe, the
harshness of the age, the errors even or weaknesses
of the Church? Christendom in the gloomiest days
of the Middle Ages, was to return again and again
to these hopes, repeating the words of the Samaritan
woman seated at the edge of Jacob's well : " Lord,
give me of this water, that I may not thirst again."

II

The two great paths taken by the intellectual life
of the Middle Ages start, the one from Augustine
(354-430), the other from John Scotus Eriugcna.
The former created the doctrinal theology that proceeds
from Paul and John. For the interpretation of the
Johannine ideas Scotus beheved himself to be the
faithful follower of his master Augustine. He com-
mented upon the bishop's commentary, added a degree
to the precision of his views, detached himself in an
almost insensible manner front the orthodox line, and
sowed the seeds of heresy in Christendom.

The City of God is penetrated with the anguish of
the Apocalypse. Augustine witnessed the shipwreck of
the Roman civiHzation, the first act in the tragedy
announced by John. He did not doubt that the shadow

76 MYSTIC ITALY

of antichrist was already covering the universe ; he
heard from afar the approach of the victorious Christ,
he ah'eady saw the millennium dawning on the horizon.
He scrutinized the obscurities of the Johannine text,
invoked the testimony of Paul and Daniel concerning
antichrist, and endeavoured to fix the apocalyptic periods
by an exact calculation. He asked himself whether
the forty-two months that the final assault of Satan
upon the Church was to last would be comprised in
the thousand years or were in addition to them.
Moreover, in order to confirm his expectation, he
searched in the Old Testament for proof of a succession
of epochs of which the eternal sabbath would be the
last, that seventh day whereon the Church militant
would receive the rewards of its trials. The first epoch
extended from Adam to the flood ; the following ones,
in their order, are marked by Abraham, David, the
captivity, and the birth of Christ. The sixth, which
it is impossible to measure, was passing at that very
moment ; the seventh would be the day of peace, that
should have neither waning nor twilight. This last
epoch was to be the day of the Church triumphant,
that which John, the greatest of the apostles, the only
one who saw God in His essence, had glorified, and
of which the earthly Church, represented by Peter, was
only the figure. " This last," says Augustine, " is the
Church of faith, the other will be the Church of direct
contemplation ; the one is in the time of pilgrimage,
the other will be in the everlasting habitation ; the one
is on the journey, the other will be in the fatherland ;
the one is good and still unhappy, the other will be
better and blessed." (20)

Did the tenth century expect some great disaster?
One comes upon writings of the time that are filled with
dark forebodings. To Scotus Eriugena, in the ninth
century, the Church seemed to be already tottering,
and meditation upon the Fourth Gospel showed him,
with singular clearness, the past, the present, and the

JOACHIM OF FLORA 77

future of religious tilings. If he reproduced almost
exactly the succession of periods, as his master had
computed them, he classed them into three great
divisions, each one marked by its priesthood, thus giving
us to understand that, for the first two, the priest
himself, like the doctrine of which he was the guardian,
corresponds only to a transitory moment in the divine
thought. The first priesthood, that of the Old
Testament, caught only a glimpse of the truth through
the darkness of unintelligible mysteries ; the second
priesthood, that of the New Testament, shed some rays
of truth upon obscure symbols ; the third priesthood,
that of the future life, will permit us to see God face
to face. To the first corresponds the natural law, to
the second the law of grace, the third will be the
kingdom of God. The first Hfted up corrupt human
nature, the second ennobled it by faith and charity and
hope, the third will illuminate it by contemplation. The
first, figured by the material ark, was given to a carnal
people, whom the letter alone could touch ; the second,
by the tangible symbols of the sacraments, puts men's
souls on the way to the spiritual Ufe, which they will
fully taste only in Paradise. Thus the outward signs
of the present Church will be dissipated in the light
of the future Church. The soul will really possess
God only by communion with the Holy Spirit. Scotus
Eriugena, in his homily upon the first chapter of John,
is not afraid even to assert that the Holy Spirit, in
Jesus Christ, under a human form, was the principle
of the divine hfe. The Church of the New Testament
is therefore only the symbolical image of the eternal
Church. And already, in their earthly hfe. Christians
of the contemplative order have penetrated into this
superior Church and participate in the ideal spirituality
of the heavenly life. (21)

A whole religious evolution was contained in these
last views. John Scotus Eriugena combined the two
Johannine theories one with the other, the Apocalypse

78 MYSTIC ITALY

and the Fourth Gospel. The third revelation, that of
the Comforter, was given in advance upon this earth
to the purest souls, in primitiis contemplationis. The
promises of the apostle were not in vain ; God opens
to the contemplative even here below access to the
heavenly Jerusalem, he makes them ascend from the
Church of the Word to that of the Spirit. This singular
notion is found again at the basis of the doctrinal
crises of the Middle Ages, in the heresiarchs who
resolutely severed themselves from the Roman creed,
as in the dissidents, of a disposition more philosophic
than sectarian, who were content with spiritualizing
Christianity and freely modifying the old Credo. Both
alike were persuaded that they had at last embraced
the true faith and were walking in the divine path.
The Church accused them of apostasy, while they them-
selves believed they were the privileged interpreters of
the Gospel, and that the desertion for which many
suffered martydom was but the entry to the kingdom
of heaven.

John Scotus Eriugena's doctrine long dwelt in the
conscience of the Middle Ages. After more than three
centuries it suddenly reappeared, in a very dogmatic
form, in the school of Amaury of Chartres, and it
frightened the Church. Amaury said : " The Father's
power lasted as long as the Mosaic law, and as it
is written at the appearance of new things the old will
be rejected ; all the sacraments of the Old Testament
were abolished after the coming of Christ, and the new
law has remained in vigour until this day. But hence-
forth the sacraments of the New Testament are done
with, and the era of the Holy Spirit has begun. . . .
The Father was incarnate in Abraham, the Son in Mary,
the Holy Spirit incarnates Himself in each one of us
every day. The Son has worked hitherto, but the Holy
Spirit works from this time forth, and His work will
endure till the end of the world." This definite law,
according to him, was the Third Testanient. (22)

JOACHIM OF FLORA 79

All this might have been said by a Joachimite of
the group of John of Parma (1209 ?-i289), a disciple
of the tternal Gospel. Between Amaury and Joachim
of P^lora it is impossible to suppose there was any
intellectual relation. They both lived in the same age,
with a common hope that came to them from the
most distant sources of the Christian tradition. We
must recall that tradition. We shall then be better
able to understand why the dreams of a hermit of
Calabria were able to stir the Middle Ages and what

■^o^

secret bonds link the rehgious rcvi\al of Italy to the
past of Christianity.

Ill

Giovanni dei Gioachini was born about 1 132 at Celico,
near Cosenza, in Calabria. His father belonged to the
noble bourgeoisie of the Norman kingdom. He lived
in the time of Arnold of Brescia and Frederic Bar-
barossa. The Christendom in which he grew up to
man's estate was of a very peculiar kind : men felt
themselves freer in it than in any other province in
Italy ; narrow communion with Rome seemed less
necessary than elsewhere to the salvation of the soul.
The inspiration of the hermits of the tenth century,
the independence of the disciples of Nilus the Younger,
who was so ardent a propagator of the Basilian rule in
the southern part of the peninsula, was perpetuated
in that region. The masters of the Italian south, the
Byzantines and then the Normans, had greatly lightened
the papal yoke in spiritual matters that rested upon
the necks of their subjects. That alpine country of
Calabria, with its wild horizons and its vistas over
luminous seas, was favourable to the mystic life. And
mysticism took there a singular form : the solitaries,
from the mountain tops, looked out ujjon the two great
religions which, outside the Roman failh, di\ idcd between

80 MYSTIC ITALY

them the woiid as known to the men of the Middle
Ages — Islam and the Greek Church. Islam, still very-
flourishing in Sicily, under the Norman sway, recom-
mended itself by the elegance of Arabic customs, its
learned culture and the seriousness of its religious
conviction. Between the schismatic community of the
Sicilian Greeks and the Latin Church, the monks of
the Basilian order, faithful to Rome but keeping their
own liturgy and the Greek tongue, were a kind of
bond of union connecting the two Christian families.
Their convents were numerous in this region. While
northern Italy and Rome allowed themselves to be
tormented by the anxiety of heresy. Magna Grsecia
peacefully resumed the tradition of the ancient idealism
and, amid the diversity of symbols, theologies and rites,
contemplated the pure eternal truth.

Joachim, while quite a child, sought solitude ; he
passed long hours in prayer, resting on a great rock
under the shadow of a vine arbour. At fifteen years
of age, after having studied letters at Cosenza, he was
admitted into the offices of the royal curia of Calabria.
But the serious youth " with the angelic countenance "
was very soon weary of the rush of secular life.
While writing his diplomas he was dreaming of the
distant east, of the marvels of Byzantium, of the tomb
of Jesus and the vales of Galilee. His father per-
mitted him to set out, not as a humble pilgrim, but
with an escort of friends and servants, like a young
prince. He entered Constantinople in the midst of the
horrors of the plague, and the sight of human misery
disclosed his true vocation to him ; he sent back all
his companions, with the exception of one only, shaved
his head, took a poor tunic and set out on foot towards
the Holy Land. Some Saracens fell in with him when
he was worn out with fatigue, and, as they were devoid
of everything, he gave them his garment. He had
fallen ill, and so he stayed some time with these infidels,
caressed and entertained by their little ones. At last

JOACHIM OF FLORA 81

he reached the Holy City aiid retired for the space of
forty days to a grotto on Mount Tabor. On Easter
morning he had a glimpse of the plan of iiis prophetic
work ; henceforth he was to be the apostle of a trans-
figured Christianity. He went down again towards the
inhabited regions of Palestine, and " seeing towns, he
wept over them ". He returned to Sicily and hid
himself in a cavern, near a Greek convent, where he
fasted and prayed and wept for the sins of Sicily.
Then he returned to Calabria and hid himself among
the mountains. But when his companion was arrested
for picking a fig in an orchard, Joachim, in order to
save his friend, disclosed his identity. His father, who
thought he had died in Asia, let him enter, as a simple
lay brother, into the Cistercian convent of Sambucina,
where he became a porter. He stayed there a year.
One day, according to the legend, as he was walking
in the garden, meditating upon God, he saw before
him a young man of great beauty, holding a jar in
his hand. " Joachim," said the unknown, " take and
drink this wine, which is delicious." After quenching
his thirst, the young monk returned the jar. " O
Joachim," said the angel, " if you had drunk it to
the last drop no knowledge would have escaped you ! "

But Joachim had tasted enough of the mysterious
chalice to understand that the hour of his mission
was striking. As a simple layman he preached for
several years in the region of Renda. He possessed
the peculiarly southern art of speaking to the crowd
by making the spectacle of nature assist his oratorical
action. One day, at a time of disastrous rain, the sky
became darkened while he was preaching upon the sins
of his auditors ; suddenly the clouds parted and a
joyous ray from heaven illumined the church. Joachim
paused, saluted the sun, intoned the Veni Creator, and
went forth with the people to contemplate the country.

Joachim, however, did not advance very far along the
apostolic road, which he seemed at that lime to be

6

82 MYSTIC ITALY

preparing for Francis of Assisi. In 1168 the Church,
by obliging- him to take orders, brought him back
to the traditional discipline ; in the abbey of Corazo,
where he prepared for the priesthood, he must have
conceived a love for the peace of the cloister, more
congenial to his spirit than the labour of preaching.
So he enrolled himself among the Cistercians and
devoted his time to the determined reading of the
Scriptures. Towards the year 1178, yielding to the
importunities of his brethren, he accepted the dignity
of abbot. But the care of temporal concerns troubled
him, the quarrels of the monks, the diplomatic relations
with the Norman court, the government of a com-
munity, seemed like a falHng away to his melancholy
spirit which, in the twilight of the cell, passed such
pleasant hours with Isaiah or John. So he fled from
his monastery and went to Rome to beg Lucius III
(1181-1185) to relieve him of a charge that pre-
\ented him from meditating upon the word of God.
The pope gave him back his liberty and Joachim
returned to Calabria, hungry for solitude. He retired
into the desert of Pietralata, like a hermit of ancient
days, ceaselessly pursuing the composition of his three
great books, the Concordance, the Commentary upon
the Apocalypse, and the Psaltery with Ten Chords.
The Holy See encouraged him in his task ; after
Lucius III, Urban III (11 85-1 187) and Clement HI
(1187-1191) blessed his works, upon the sole con-
dition that they should be approved by the apostolic
censorship. Sometimes he went from cloister to cloister,
throughout the whole peninsula, closely observing the
evils of the Church and the decline of monasticism,
speaking of reform to the Benedictine houses, " where
the founder's rule is falling into disuse, where abstinence
and work are neglected, where wealth and indolence
are making men sickly valetudinarians, wliose delicate
stomachs can digest nothing but milk." (23) Joachim
announced the approach of very dark days to Christen-

JOACHIM OF FLORA 88

dom, to princes and republics. Italy was turning with
uneasy attention towards this strange person who
deciphered the secrets of God from beneath the text
of the Scriptures and who, by the austerity of his life
as well as by his preaching", said very clearly that
religious society was by no means in the right path.
Disciples came to him from all parts, learned monks,
such as Ranieri, from the abbey of the Three Fountains
of Formia, great sinners, seeking the appeasement of
their consciences, mystics who wished to penetrate in
his footsteps into the symbolic obscurity of the sacred
books. When the retreat at Pietralata had become no
longer suited to his purpose Joachim ascended higher
still into the solitudes of Calabria, and, on a plateau
of the mountainous forest district of Sila, in th-e heart
of the " very cold Alps ", writes his biographer James
the Greek, he built for his spiritual sons, like a second
John at Patmos, the idealistic church of Flora. He
dedicated it to John the Forerunner; and in 1196
Celestine III approved its statutes. There, while the
Norman kingdom was falling beneath the blows of
Henry VI (11 90-1 197) of Suabia, and a long cry
of horror passed over Magna Grascia, these dreamers
heard nought but the murmur of the pine forests and
the distant lament of the torrents.

In the first days of the thirteenth century Joachim,
seeing he was coming to the end of his long
pilgrimage, put the finishing touches to the books in
which his anguish and his hopes were to be perpetuated.
He chose a successor in the government of the Order
of Flora, and then had himself carried to Pietralata,
to the little convent of San Martino, in order there
to die. The entire Benedictine family of southern
Italy hastened to receive the last prophecies of the

84 MYSTIC ITALY

old abbot. "He preached to them the way of
sah-ation and announced to them the extermination of
the Order and unceasingly repeated to them : ' I leave
you this which I would have you ever remember — love
one another as our Lord Jesus has loved us.' " Then
he blessed them, beginning with those of Corazo, as
the eldest of his children, and ending with those of
Flora. On March 30, 1202, he expired.

No one in the Italian Church at that time had
seemed to be a more faithful follower of Jesus. " He
had learned from Christ to be gentle and humble of
heart." His simplicity and charity were admirable : he
warmed on his bosom the heads of the dying ; in the
winter that preceded his death, when famine was raging
in Calabria and Sicily, he gave his last garments to
the poor ; he washed with his own hands the floor
of the infirmary ; he saved the towns from the ferocious
brutality of Henry VI. He bent over every bed of
suffering, without troubling about the sufferer's religion.
One evening, at Treborna, he entered the house of a
Greek priest, named Leo, to ask his hospitality. The
priest's wife, being ill, threw herself at Joachim's feet
and said to him : " Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst heal
me." And the holy man, filled with pity, answered
her : " Dost thou believe that, by the goodness of
God, I can heal thee?" "Yes, lord, I do believe it."
Then the servant of Jesus, raising his two hands to
God, and then putting them on the brow of the sick
woman who asked for healing, after having made the
sign of the holy cross, said : " Rise, woman, thy faith
and piety have made thee whole." And from that
very hour the woman was healed.

Nevertheless it was chiefly as a visionary that
Joachim impressed the men of the twelfth century.
Brother Luke, who was his secretary and became
archbishop of Cosenza, has no doubt whatever that
the abbot of Flora lived in a perpetual vision, hearing
mysterious words that no other human ear could

JOACHIM OF FLORA 85

perceive, conversing with supernatural persons whom
his eye alone could behold. " I was seated at his
feet, and night and day he dictated, and I wrote, and
with me two other monks, Brother John and Brother
Nicholas. ... I served for him at mass, astonished
at the way in which he celebrated ; he raised his
arms higher than do other priests, blessing the Host
with more emotion : he whose face was usually as
livid as a dead leaf, during the holy sacrifice had a
countenance as radiant as an angel's. ... I have often
seen him weep at that time and in particular at the
mass when the passion of Our Lord is read. . . . When
he preached before the chapter he looked like an angel
sitting above us all ; he began in a low voice that
soon resounded like thunder. He passed nights in
watching, prayer, reading, and writing. He never
slept, ' even in the choir ', adds the good rnonk ; the
more he fasted the stronger and more joyous he seemed.
Many times I have surprised him on his knees, with
hands and eyes raised to heaven, conversing joyously
with Jesus, as if he saw Him face to face." At the
Passion-tide, writes James the Greek, " he was no
longer of this world ; he took part in all the sufferings
of the Saviour, and, carried away by the charm of
the divine agony, complained of the shortness of those
days."

When Joachim was dead his books were opened,
and it could be seen with what terrors the soul of
the old hermit had been ceaselessly harassed at the
time when he was dictating to the novices of the abbey
his calculations and dreams. It was nothing to have
lived, as he did, with the thought that antichrist was
about to appear, or to have hesitated an instant, like
a simple scholastic, oyer the dogma of the Trinity,
which he nearly changed into Tritheism, from fear of
the Quaternity of Peter Lombard. But he had received
from the sacred books themselves a prodigious revela-
tion according to which the secular Church, beneath

86 MYSTIC ITALY

which Christendom was sheltered, was no more than
a tent set up for the night, to be taken down and
folded up again the next morning. On the night of
Easter in the year 1200, when all was silent, he had
perceived the near future of Christianity. He feared
to remain silent and dared not to speak. The century
was closing in the fear foretold by the ancient Gospel,
and Joachim asked himself tremblingly with what
pangs the world would have to pay for the birth of
the Eternal Gospel.

V

It is indeed an Eternal Gospel that the Calabrian
prophet announces with a perfect consciousness of what
he is doing. The Holy Spirit will enter, according to
him, into the religion of the faithful as the Father and
Son have already done. " He will enter it by His
Gospel ", is written in the Psaltery. And what is this
Gospel? That of which John says in the Apocalypse :
" I saw the angel of God who flew in the midst of the
heavens, and the Eternal Gospel was entrusted to him ;
but what then is this Gospel? That which proceeds
from the Gospel of Christ, for the letter killeth and the
spirit quickeneth." It will emerge from the recesses
of the Christian revelation, as the idea issues from the
letter. Joachim writes : " This Gospel was called
eternal by John because that which Christ and the
apostles gave us is transitory and temporal in that which
relates to the mere form of the sacraments, but eternal
for the truths which those sacraments signify." The
spirit contained in the words of the New Testament,
by its very opening, will destroy the symbolic text in
which it was imprisoned, as the flower in opening
breaks the covering of its bud. Joachim thus qualifies
this ideal Gospel also as " the spiritual Gospel of
Christ ", that will shine in its full virtue as the sun^

JOACHIM OF FLORA 87

and no longer under a veil, or as the face of Moses
in a mist. Very often too he calls it Evangeliuni regni.
The gifts of the Old Testament were the veil of the
letter thrown over the truth ; the New Testament
delivered to the faithful the good things previously
promised, taking away the veil from the face of Moses.
When, proceeding from brightness to brightness, we
embrace in spirit the divine things, we shall see in
His glory the very form of Jesus, and we shall hear
on the mount of contemplation the voice of the Father
saying : " This is my beloved Son." By the Eternal
Gospel alone shall we truly be born in Jesus ; the

r literal Gospel, entirely temporal in character, will dis-
appear in great part before the re\elation of the Spirit,

•' and the faithful will possess a land " flowing with milk

' and honey."

»■ The progress of the divine in the past, the hierarchy
of the first two revelations, are, in Joachim's view, the
certain pledge of this definitive crisis in Christendom.
The distinction between the three ages or the three
religious states of the world is an essential point in
the doctrine that he established in his capital work,
the Concordia, with a remarkable wealth of com-
mentaries, historical parallels and calculations. Con-
cordance is with him the rigorous method of exegesis ;
he compares it to a road that leads from the desert
to the town, arresting the traveller on summits whence
he can look upon the road that lies before him. It
measures the first two Testaments the one by the other,
quoad mimerum, non quoad dignitatem, the Biblical
facts and figures reproduce themselves, in fact, in the
Gospel facts and figures. But these last surpass the
first in dignity, as John the Baptist surpasses Isaac,
as Jesus the man surpasses Jacob. The first religious
state, in which men lived after the flesh, extended from
Adam to Jesus ; it bore all its fruits from Abraham
to Zachariah ; the second, in which men live between
the flesh and the spirit, began with Hosea and

88 MYSTIC ITALY

Elisha and extends to the time when Joachim is writing ;
it has borne all its fruits from Zachariah to Benedict ;
the third, that in which men will live after the spirit
only, began with Benedict ; it will last till the con-
summation of the ages. To these three periods, of
which the last two are concurrent, by their origin, with
the end of the preceding epoch, correspond three orders
of persons whom God has charged to manifest the
religious life in its highest degree : to the first, the order
of husbands, that is to say the patriarchs, then the
kings ; to the second the order of clerics, which began
with the sacerdotal tribe of Judah and Hosea and
produced its greatest figure in Jesus, King and supreme
Priest ; to the third the order of monks, of whom the
first was Benedict. There had been monks before
Benedict, but only with him did monasticism take its
true form, " when the Holy Spirit showed his perfect
authority." And in the following passage, as stirring
as a hymn, Joachim concludes the historic vision of
Augustine and Scotus Eriugena : " The first period was
that of knowledge, the second that of wisdom, the third
will be that of full intelligence. The first was servile
obedience, the second filial subjection, the third will
be liberty. The first was trial, the second action, the
third will be contemplation. The first was fear, the
second faith, the third will be love. The first was
the age of slaves, the second that of sons, the third
will be that of friends. The first was the age of old
men, the second that of young people, the third will
be that of children. The first passed to the brightness
of the stars, the second was the dawn, the third will
be full day. The first was winter, the second the
beginning of spring, the third will be summer. The
first bore thistles, the second roses, the third will bear
lilies. The first gave the blade, the second the ear,
the third will give the full corn in the ear. The first
gave water, the second wine, the third will give oil.
The first corresponds to Septuagesima, the second to

JOACHIM OF FLORA 89

Quadragesima, the third will be the festival of Easter.
The first age corresponds to the Father, therefore,
Who is the author of all things, the second to the
Son, Who deigned to wear our clay, the third will
be the age of the Holy Ghost, of Whom the apostle
said : ' Where is the Spirit of tlie Lord, there is
liberty.' " (24)

In Joachim's view the great day is at hand. He
has reckoned between Adam and Jesus forty -two
generations of thirty years each, or say 1,260 years.
This number ought, according to the Concordance of
the two Testaments, to re-appear for the period that
will elapse between the coming of Christ and the
blessed era of the Holy Ghost. Then will the year
1260 see the mystery accomplished? Here the prophet
hesitates. The last two generations cannot, according
to him, be counted. It is with the year 1200
that the religious crisis, therefore, commences. The
first half of the thirteenth century will be filled with
the drama of the Church. Christendom will be first
of all overthrown by antichrist amid horrible tribu-
lation : " Sacrifice and offering will fail, the order
of the Church will be destroyed, to such a degree that,
in the multitude of the people, there will be no longer
any man left who will dare openly to call upon the name
of the Lord." At last the trumpet of the archangel
will sound, all the mysteries contained in the Scriptures
will be accomplished, and " that will be the time of
peace and truth for the whole earth." Joachim thinks
he can already hear the distant muttering of the storm.
He cries to the friends of God to provide for their
earthly safety : "If there be any of the family of
Lot, let him haste to flee from the walls of Sodom ; if
there be any of the family of Noah, let him make speed
to rejoin those who are within the shelter in the ark."
He writes the last lines of the Concordance in an access
of mortal sadness, he supplicates his reader to pray
to God for him. " If the last day finds me still living,

90 MYSTIC ITALY

may I have the strength to fight the good fight for the
faith of Jesus Christ and, in company with those con-
fessors of Jesus who are then living, ascend to the
kingdom of heaven. Amen. Amen. Amen."

To the era of rehgious truth, according to Joachim,
will correspond an evolution in men's consciences, in
the Church and in the whole body of Christianity. The
Eternal Gospel will be deciphered and understood only
by the spiritual intelligence, the mystic intelligence,
misticus intellectus, the only one that attains to the
Holy Ghost. So a wholly mystic and contemplative
Church will then be found flourishing, the Church of
the monks, " which, freed from the cares of the
world, lives by the spirit, occupied only in prayer and
psalmody." The order of the monks is fired, like the
Holy Spirit of which it is the type, with the love of
God, for it could not despise the world and the things
that are of the world without the impulse of the same
Spirit that carried off Jesus into the desert. (26) The
monastic life manifested in the ancient times by Elisha,
then by Benedict and the Benedictine houses of which
Jacob's ladder was the symbol ; but it has best repre-
sented the religion of the Spirit by means of Greek
Christendom and the hermits of the desert. The hermit,
alone in his rocky cave, the hermit whom the wild
bees feed with their honey, such is, for the abbot of
Flora, the perfect Christian, he whom the Church of
the New Testament h:as known at times. It is to him
that the future belongs. It is he who will reconcile,
in the transcendent faith of the Spirit, all the great
religious families of the human race ; he will be the
bond of union between the Church of the west and
the Church of the east. His apostolate will cover the
whole earth ; he will touch the hearts of the heathen,

JOACHIM OF FLORA 91

and he will bring old Israel, weary of long revolt,
into the fold of the eternal Church.

Thus Joachim expected not the end but the con-
summation of Christianity, not the ruin but the exalta-
tion of the Christian Church ; he did not believe that
the order of clerics was destined to disappear any more
than, under the law of the first Testament, the order
of Levites had disappeared ; the monks were to place
themselves at the head of religious society, as the
seculaL clergy had formerly done, when they took
precedence o\ cr the laity ; the traditional Gospel would
not altogether fall from the hands of^ the faithful like
a book that wa-^ Lhcnceforth useless. For the Eternal
Gospel itself would not be a book replacing either the
' Old Testament or the New Testament ; rather would
it proceed from both of them as the Holy Ghost
proceeds from the Father and the Son ; it would
give the final meaning of the anterior revelations ;
it would be the intimate communion of souls with
the Holy Ghost. And thus would be justified,
by the fulfilment of the Johannine promises, the age-
long hope of humanity.

The writings of Joachim startled Italy, from Sicily
to the Alps. All Christendom, the Holy See and the
princes of the west, were, so to speak, dazzled by the
vision of the hermit of Flora. This singular figure
was destined to leave a long memory and an impression
of mystery very likely to increase, in the course of
several generations, the reputation of a prophet.
Joachim answered the religious needs of his age, but
he answered them only in part. At first men would
not see the contradictions of his teaching, the deceptive
side of his theory. They did not understand the double
aspect of a character that turned at once towards the
past and towards the future, and entrusted to the
mystical tradition of the past the spiritual renovation
of the future. Joachim's loftier view, the completion
of religion in the bosom of Christianity itself, but a

92 MYSTIC ITALY

sublimated Christianity, disengaged from the narrow
letter, purified by the Spirit — this view was well
calculated to rejoice the Italian conscience, which the
heretical sects never succeeded in detaching from the
old faith. Italy willingly heard the announcement of
the fall of the clerical order, the temporal Holy See
and the secular Church, whose pastoral function would
pass to the contemplative and to the saints, " from
one sea unto the other." (27)

Arnold of Brescia's dream would therefore become
a reality But Arnold, who was a tribune far more
than a mystic and who sought religious liberty in the
enfranchisement of civil society, would certainly not have
accepted the state of hieratic immobility in which the
abbot Joachim wished to fix Christendom. In reality
the latter, instead of enlarging the Church in order
to embrace the multitude of the faithful in it, closed
its naves and left room in it for none but a few saints
kneeling under the sanctuary lamp. He exalted
monasticism at the very moment when secular Italy
had just set up the middle class commune in view of
the interests of the age, and was abandoning for ever
the conception that the ecclesiastical Middle Ages had
had of the social order. The lilies of the field that
do not spin could not be the symbolic flower of a
world whose activity was penetrating the Mediterranean,
Europe and the east. The life contemplative supposes
a pre-eminent nobility of soul, a detachment from
earthly things, a disdain of action, perfect solitude.
It loosens the bonds of the human community and
dispenses too easily with charity not to end in egotism.
It does not satisfy the divine words repeated by the
apostle John : " Love one another." The old Gospel,
whose text had so long consoled men, was surely richer
in hopes than the Eternal Gospel. Francis of Assisi,
upon reopening the Testament of Jesus, was soon to
discover the secret that no man before him had
suspected. He felt that the salvation of the Christian

JOACHIM OF FLORA 93

family, the salvation of pastors and flock alike, would
be the work of souls, even of the most obscure, and
that Christianity would be transformed on the day that
the humblest consciences returned frankly to the virtues
of the Gospel age. He wished neither to reform
Rome, nor to restore the ancient monasticism, nor to
dispossess the bishops and clergy, but simply to arouse
the inner man in each Christian, and by a unanimous
impulse of the faithful carry the Church along with
them. That is why, in his poor chapel at Portiuncula,
though not a priest, he was able to celebrate Joachim's
Easter and to invite all Christendom to the festival
that his forerunner had reserved exclusively for the
^lite of the monks.

CHAPTER III

FRANCIS OF ASSISI AND THE FRANCISCAN

APOSTOLATE

Joachim of Flora was only just dead, and Italy, thrown
back by him into the terrors of the Apocalypse, was
awaiting the catastrophe of the antichrist. Suddenly
on the district of Assisi, Perugia, Gubbio, Orviteo,
and Spoleto, there descended a bright beam of sun-
shine and as it were the exquisite grace of an April
morning. These little towns, that had never been
touched by the higher civilization of Florence, Milan,
and Venice, and that still formed, in the region of the
upper Tiber, around Lake Trasimeno, in the centre of
the old Etruscan wilderness of Chiana, an isolated and
simple-minded world, were the ideal cradle for a
religious renaissance. The Middle Ages had shown
themselves particularly rough in their dealings with
these districts that the emperors could not effectively
protect, and of which the popes had made a fortified
region for the defence of the ecclesiastical patrimony.
The communal form of government did not there soften,
as it did in the large towns, the annoyances of its
constitution by the pride it aroused in public life. Peace
was precarious in these little places ; the barons and
the Church disputed unceasingly the possession of
Orvieto, Spoleto, or Narni. The Church was less in
evidence there than elsewhere ; the ridge of Cimino
seemed to hide Rome from Umbria, the Order of
Benedict had placed no considerable monastery in those
parts ; the pope was looked upon merely as a some-

94

FRANCIS OF ASSISI 95

what inconvenient feudal master. Thus, at the first
appeal of Francis (i i82?-i 226), thousands of souls
expanded. Italy had never heard a more consoling
apostle. He did not preach the desperate asceticism
of the monks and hermits ; he did not attempt to
overthrow the faith, as the missionaries of the Cathari
or the .Waldenses had done ; he did not threaten men
with a crisis in their consciences and with' a new inter-
pretation of the Gospel, as did Joachim ; nor did he
raise a crusade against the old Church, as Arnold of
Brescia had attempted to do. From the very first acts
of his vocation there was seen in him a southern, an
Italian, a poet, a friend of movement and light, ignorant
of sadness, never disturbed by a bitter thought. ,We
must picture him as his first disciples have described
him for us, with his delicate and smiling face, his bright
red lips, his black and sparkling eyes, his slender figure,
his quick step, and not with the emaciated face and
mournful expression doubtless invented by Spanish
artists. He is undoubtedly the child of a century of
action. He believes that all is good here below,
society and nature. He seeks intercourse with his like ;
for all that lives, even for the humblest beasts, he
feels an emotion of tenderness and has a word of
blessing. He is at his ease in the paternal hand of
God. His heart is too pure to fear the snares of the
devil, his faith too childish ever to be discouraged.
When quite young he had hoped to achieve great
things, and did homage in advance to his own future.
When for a whole year he was a prisoner of war
at Perugia he astonished his guardians by his unvarying
cheerfulness. "What do you think of me?" he used
to say to them. " Are you aware that one day the
world will adore me? " His friends at that time thought
liim somewhat mad, and did not understand the meaning
of those other words he was fond of repeating : " My
body is in captivity, but my mind is free and I am
content."

96 MYSTIC ITALY

He was born in 1182. He belonged to the
privileged class of Assisi, at that time a commune
flourishing through its commercial relations with the
neighbouring cities. His father, Bernardone, was one
of the upper citizens, and used to go as far as France
to sell his cloth. As to Francis — -in his early youth
he made his father's florins spin. He was very joyous,
writes Thomas of Celano, his earliest biographer. He
used to walk by night in Assisi lighted by torches,
surrounded by young people of his own age, clad in
fine garments and holding the wand of office in his
hand. (28) It was the time when the Provencal
civilization was enlivening the Italian cities. The
troubadours were giving the peninsula the refined culture
of southern France, the taste for love -poetry and
brilliant festivals. Francis seems often to have made
use of French, that is to say Provencal, as a nobler
dialect than that of Umbria. These sons of middle-
class fathers, brought up upon French romances,
fabliaux and sirventes, even dreamed of chivalry and
great adventures in the Norman bands of Gaultier of
Brienne. " I shall be a great baron," he often said
to his friends.

A thousand painful impressions, however, the harsh-
ness of his father, the selfishness of these laborious
citizens, the misery he came upon at every turn, the
poor who crowded at the church doors, the lepers who
wandered in the fields, the dangerous pilgrims who
roamed about the district and who when evening came
transformed themselves into robbers, the fugitive serfs
who begged " for the love of God ", all these sights,
renewed day by day, cast a shadow over his pleasures.
In the smiling natural surroundings of Assisi, in the
heart of the Umbrian plain, everywhere adorned with
luxuriant vines, sheltered, as in a cradle, by its moun-
tains, in this land where life, liberty and joy seemed
to fall from heaven, man alone appeared to Francis
to be wretched and disinherited, compelled by the world

FRANCIS OF ASSISI 37

to carry on a thankless stru^^gle against his fellows,
disdained even by God himself. Whose ways were
darkened upon all sides. The Church, tormented by
heresy, suffered all kinds of violence from the secular
powers. At the end of the twelfth century men had
seen Henry, son of Frederic Barbarossa, wrest from
the pope all the cities in the region of Orvieto, Perugia
and Spoleto. Francis, when quite a child, saw for some
time, according to the words of a contemporary, the
Roman Church " reduced to beggary." The youth fell
sick, and when for the first time he looked again upon
the hills and fields, he received an impression of great
melanchaly. He wished to set out for the Neapolitan
pro\'inces ; but he had singular visions on his way.
He replied to God's call : " Lord, what wilt thou have
me to do? " The free voice of the personal conscience
began to speak in him. He returned to Assisi, and
once more took part in the pleasures of his friends
for some time. One day, at the close of a feast, in
which for the last time he had been crowned prince
of the youth, as they were carrying him singing
through the streets of the town, Francis stopped
suddenly and seemed to be plunged into a profound
meditation. " What is the matter? " his companions
said to him. "Are you thinking of getting married? "
" You are right, I am thinking of betrothing myself
to a noble and beautiful bride." The divine voice was
at that moment crying to him : " Francis, you must
hate and abandon what you ha\c heretofore loved on
earth." He set out to Rome, begged at the gate of
Peter, then returned to Assisi, where he devoted him-
self to the lepers, the sight of whom had formerly
filled him with horror. The chapel of St. Damiano
was falling into ruin ; the young man secretly con-
\eycd to Foligno the finest cloth his father had and
sold it in order to obtain money to repair the little
chapel of God. At this time Bcrnardonc deemed the
vocation of his spendthrift son to be dangerous ; he

7

98 MYSTIC ITALY

summoned him before the consuls ; but Francis refused
the communal jurisdiction and appealed from it to the
bishop, who was, he said, " the father and the lord
of souls."

Thus, for yet a moment longer, he turned towards
the Church's past, in order to escape from the grip
of the social gov^ernment whose discipline seemed to
him to be too hard for the independence and fraternity
of men's souls. Francis might have begged his bishop,
on the day when he threw himself at his feet, to confer
the priesthood upon him ; he might also have taken
refuge in some cloister and have died to the world
under the Benedictine robe. But he had a vague
feeling that neither the secular Church nor monasticism
would any longer favour in their bosom the apostolic
idea, that the old form of church government no
longer answered the needs of Christendom, and that
renovated Italy required, according to the expression
consecrated by the language of the Church herself, " a
new religion." He was at that time eager above all
things for liberty and wished to hasten to God along
untrodden paths. In a few hours he renounced the
world and his paternal heritage, and, covered with the
mantle given him by the bishop, went away to the
woods of Assisi, singing French verses. He was stopped
by robbers ; he told them, laughing, that he was the
herald of a great king. They left him in a ditch full
of snow. He went on his way and offered his services
as cook to a convent. He passed a month among the
lepers of Gubbio, and then begged on the roads that
cross the plain of Assisi. His former boon companions
railed him mercilessly, and threw mud in his face ;
his father and brother turned away at the sight of him.
" Of all the griefs that I have had to endure," he said
afterwards, " this was the most cruel." He tried to
find consolation by begging an old mendicant to accept
him as his son. But his apostolic novitiate was by
that time accomplished ; by charity and voluntary

FRANCIS OF ASSISI 99

poverty, by humility and love, this generous soul had
found the full liberty and the joy that sustained him
till the last day of his mission. He had succeeded
in opening the New Testament at the page that con-
tains the Sermon on the Mount ; he was ready to
restore to Italy the smile of pity and the words of
enchantment wherewith the Church had formerly lulled
Christianity to sleep in its infancy. When he had
gathered a few disciples round him he said to them :
" Let us go to our Mother, the holy Roman Church,
and show the Holy Father what God has begun to
do through our work, in order that we may pursue
our task according to the good will of the pope." It
was the year 1209. The pope was then Innocent III
(1198-1216). Francis carried to Rome the sketch
of his first rule. (29) The pontifical hierarchy and
the young Franciscan society, the historical tradition
of the Church and the future of Italian Christendom,
were about to meet in the solemn desert of the church
of St. John Lateran.

II

Now at this very time the Roman See presented an
appearance of incomparable grandeur. The recent
storms through which it had safely passed had carried
it to a greater height, perhaps, than it had occupied in
the days of Gregory VII (1073-108 5). Never had
the problem of the double pontifical power, the spiritual
and the temporal, seemed more difficult of solution than
in the last years of the twelfth century. The Church
was actually threatening to fall upon Innocent's
head. At Rome the commune, now oligarchic, now
democratic, and always hostile, was autonomous and
brutal ; demagogy, faithful to the memory of Arnold
of Brescia, again and again rose on the Capitol ; the
majority of the nobles entered into compact with the

100 MYSTIC ITALY

people ; the terrible Orsini had just entered into the
histor)^ of the Papacy ; everywhere, in the town, at
the Coliseum, at the baths of ^-Emilius Paullus, at the
Theatre of Marcellus, at the Quirinal, there rose the
towers of the rebellious barons. From the heights of
the Lateran, where he lived alone, protected by the
Annibaldi, the pope heard night and day the bell of
the Capitol ringing for civil war. Round about Rome
the barons and the communal senator were masters
of the entire country ; farther off the German counts,
the emperor's captains, were encamped in all the
Church's provinces ; farther off still, in the Two Sicilies,
Henry VI had set up the pivot of the empire. To the
north of Rome the communes, ill-disposed in Tuscany
and doubtful everywhere else, had by the ruin of the
feudal episcopate deprived the Holy See of its best
resource in Italy : they might any day have ranged
themselves upon the side of the emperor against the
pope. In the most flourishing half of Italy secret heresy
was taking possession of all ranks of society ; in one
half of France heresy, upheld by the lords, was
strikingly triumphant ; finally at Paris the scholastic
heresy of Amaury of Chartres denied the eternity of
Christianity. Italian Christendom seemed no longer to
be obedient to the voice of its chief pastor. Innocent III,
younger and more learned than Gregory VII, and as
pure as he, saw clearly what must be done to save
the Holy See, the Roman Church, and perhaps the
unity of the faith. Before all things it was necessary
for him to keep possession of Rome. He began in
1 198 by reducing the imperial prefect to submission
and imposing the oath of fidelity upon the communal
senator. The disorder that followed the death of
Henry VI restored him the patrimony of Peter and
the old Tuscan fiefs of Matilda ; the interregnum and
the competition of Otto IV and Philip of Suabia,
owing to the disorganization of the imperial party and
the loosening of the bonds that united a large number

FRANCIS OF ASSISI 101

of towns to the empire, finally permitted him to show
himself to the peninsula as leader of the national
independence, protector of communes, and, as he wrote
eight months after his election, " paternal guardian of
Italy."

Thus Innocent founded the tradition that sustained
the Papacy until the time of Boniface VlII (1294-
1303) and the exile at Avignon. It was a tradition
incessantly interrupted by revolts of the barons and
the Roman people, long compromised by the desperate
efforts of the last Hohenstaufen to make Italy the
imperial province par excellence, and always revi\ed
again by the Holy See which, already attacked in its
oecumenical suzerainty and its spiritual prestige, and
not yet possessing the ecclesiastical principate of the
fifteenth century, could maintain itself at the head of
the peninsula only by the moral and political hegemony
of the Guelf party. Innocent III devoted himself to
this work with a constancy that the misfortunes of
his own reign never relaxed. He fled from burning
Rome in the spring of 1203, and ten months later
re-entered his metropolis, hurled his partisans against
the demagogic master of the commune, Giovanni
Capocci, and while giving battle in the streets bought
over the leaders of the people with gold. This time
he obtained all he wished, the right to name and depose
the senator or podestd to whom the executive power
in the city belonged. By this constitution he covered
Rome once more with the mantle of the Church. If
he had endeavoured to destroy the Roman commune
at that time, and to establish the papal monarchy more
than a century before the peninsula began to move
unanimously towards tyranny, he would, by that
dangerous creation, have abdicated the protectorate of
the republican towns of Italy and left the Holy See,
isolated and undefended, between the empire and the
communes. It was not out of hurpility that he contented
himself with this measure of temporal power, seeing

102 MYSTIC ITALY

that about this time he said to the envoys of Philip
Augustus of France (i 180-1223) : "The Lord called
the priests gods ; the priesthood is alone a divine
institution ; the empire is only a thing invented by
man." But it was enough for him to be the
ecclesiastical overlord of Rome and the patrimony, to
group the communes round the pontifical cross, to be
without dispute the bishop of Rome, in order to speak
to the west as universal bishop, to regulate the integrity
of the Catholic faith, to impose upon Paris the decisions
of his theologians, and to decree a crusade of inquisitors
against southern France. He kept in tutelage, secluded
in an Arabian palace at Palermo, the grandson of
Barbarossa, the child who, when later on he became
emperor, was to be the cause of great tribulation to
the Church ; with Frederic of Suabia the whole of
the Ghibeline party seemed to have been brought into
the power of the pope. The double mission of the
Holy See in the thirteenth century, the primacy of Italy
and the restoration of religious discipline, thus began
with the wholly political work of a statesman pope ;
it could last and grow only by the pursuit of the same
policy ; and even more than in former times the moral
force and mystical ascendency of the Church of Rome
had as its first condition an essentially temporal
interest.

That is why Innocent and his Sacred College
welcomed with sincere astonishment the evangelical
dream of those twelve unknown men who came from
the heart of Umbria to ask permission from the vicar
of God to preach to the simple, to beg for the starving,
to console the dying, and to share in the conquest of
the world by possessing as their sole fief the little
field and ruined chapel of Portiuncula at the foot of
the hill of Assisi. They bowed themselves before the
pope, repeating the words of Jesus that are in Matthew :
" If thou wilt be perfect, go sell all thou hast, give
the money to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure

FRANCIS OF ASSISI 103

in heaven." But the secular Church could not under-
stand at that time that religious things were so far
detached from all earthly interests. The pope and
cardinals hesitated some days to accept the rule of the
new community ; they deemed the profession of poverty
and absolute renunciation too hard. Innocent III seems
even to have foreseen that a schism would not be slow
in dividing the rising order. But a cardinal said in
the papal council : " If w-e reject the request of these
men as too difficult, let us take heed lest we gainsay
the Gospel of Jesus Christ." So Innocent blessed the
founder and his work and sent back these pilgrims,
committing them to the grace of God. Then he had
a dream, that was long remembered by that age : he
saw the basilica of the Lateraa heeling over like a ^
v-essel struck by the tempest and the child of Assisi
lending his shoulder to support it.

Ill

We must consider closely the spiritual life of this
apostle who despoiled himself of the things of the world
not for his own salvation, like the monks, but for the
reformation of all his brethren ; not to find God in
the solitude of a cloister, but to seek Him and glorify
Him openly in the populous towns, on the mountains
and in the valleys. The more he forgot himself, the
more he seemed to be master of his will and heart.
He had so thoroughly vanquished, by the habit of self-
sacrifice, the egotism of the vulgar that suffering and
humiliation gave him a very lively pleasure ; the
humbler he made himself beneath the hand of God,
the stronger and more joyous he showed himself to
his disciples. One day he wished Brother Leo, with
" his dove-like simplicity ", to overwhelm him with
reproaches, and, in order that the essay might the better
succeed, he dictated to him with his ow^ lips all manner

104 MYSTIC ITALY

of terrible words. " O Brother Francis, thou hast done
so much evil and committed so many sins in this
world that thou art worthy of the nethermost hell."
But Leo spoke quite the reverse : " God will bring
about so much good by thy means that thou wilt go
to Paradise." Then Francis, smiting his breast, said in
a loud voice, with many tears and sighs, " O my Lord
of heaven and earth, I have committed so many sins
against Thee that I am verily worthy of Thy maledic-
tion." And Brother Leo made answer : " O Brother
Francis, God will make thee such that thou shalt be
singularly blessed even among the blessed." One
winter evening, as they were both walking in a very
biting cold from Perugia to Assisi, Francis, while (hasten-
ing behind his companion, taught him what " perfect
joy " really means. " Brother Leo, sheep of the good
God, dost thou know what perfect joy consists in for
the Minorites? It is not to edify the world by sanctity,
nor to restore sight to the blind, nor to cast out demons,
nor to raise those who have been four days dead ;
neither is it to possess a knowledge of all tongues,
sciences and scriptures, nor to prophecy, nor to know
the stars and the virtue of plants and of waters, nor
is it to preach so well as to convert the infidels."
"What, then, father," said Leo, "is perfect joy?"
" Well, when we arrive at Santa Maria degli Angeli,
drenched with rain, pierced with cold, covered with
mud, dying of hunger, we shall knock at the door ; the
porter will come in a great rage and say : ' Who are
you? ' ' Two of your brethren ', we will reply. ' It
is not true ', the porter will cry ; ' you are two ribalds,
two vagabonds who rob the poor of their alms.' And
he will leave us without in the rain and cold, and we
shall think with humility that this porter knows us well.
And if we continue to knock and he drives us away
with a stout, knotty stick, crying ' Be off with you, you
rogues, go to the hospital ; there is no supper or bed
for vou here ' ; if he takes us by our cowls and throws

MARRIAGE OK ST. FRANCIS TO POVERTY
Sassetld. Cliaiilillv

[To face p. 104

FRANCIS OF ASSISI 105

us down in the snow, and if wc bear all this thinking
of the sufiferings of the Blessed Jesus, Brother Leo, that
verily is perfect joy."

This religious gaiety was one of the forces of the
apostolate of Francis. He charmed his brethren, and
they in their turn charmed Italy, by the smiling serenity
with which they welcomed great misery and the little
distresses and humble joys of hfe. Once upon a time
he, being of mean appearance, received only a few
crusts of dry bread in a village, while Fra Masseo, who
was, the Fioretti tells us, " tall and comely in person/'
was given generous pieces of fresh bread. They spread
out their takings on a large white stone, near a clear
spring, in the sunshine, and Francis was amazed at
the beauty of the feast. " But, father," said Masseo,
" wc have neither cloth, nor knife, nor plate, nor table,
nor house, nor man servant, nor maid servant." "And
for what then," replied Francis, " do you take this
fine stone, this limpid water, and these pieces of
bread? " As he had always a merry heart he did not
like to have about him any but good-humoured faces,
and did not allow the mournful pre -occupation of mea
culpa to be brought into the cheerful chapter of his
Minorites. He used to say to a novice : " My brother,
why this sad face? Hast thou committed some sin?
That concerns God and thee alone. Before me and
my brethren keep always a look of holy joy ; for it
is not seemly, when one is in the service of God, to
show a gloomy and frow^ning air." (30) And in the
Rule of 1 22 1 he made joy a canonical obligation,
together with chastity and obedience. The true
Franciscans must always be guadentes in Domino,
" merry and of good courage." There is no valley
of tears in the Holy Land of Umbria.

Yet the Franciscans were very poor ; every day they
held out their hands at the doors of houses and
churches ; to shelter them they had but a few huts
made of rushes near Assisi. Communal Italy, the

106 MYSTIC ITALY

Guelfic Italy of money-changers and lawyers, for whom
the florin was a sacred thing and their daily bread,
was at once astonished and softened by the sight, so
marvellous in her eyes, of hearts so light in men so
utterly destitute of all earthly goods, A century later
Dante and Giotto were still lauding the marriage of
Francis with Poverty, " who, deprived of Christ, her
first bridegroom, for more than eleven hundred years,
had remained despised and obscure." It was in fact
the cardinal virtue of Franciscan Christianity. In the
winter of 1209, while mass was being performed,
Francis heard a voice saying to him : " Go, carry
neither gold, nor silver, nor money in your purse, nor
two coats, nor shoes, nor staff." And so he chose the
dress of the poorest artizans and fishers, the tunic of
coarse cloth, the cowl and rope girdle ; he forbade
on principle the use of sandals and absolutely prohibited
his followers to touch money, " Christ's poor," writes
Jacques de Vitry, " carry on their journeys neither
wallet, nor provisions, nor shoes, nor purse in their
girdle. They have neither convents, nor churches, nor
fields^ nor vines, nor beasts of burden, nor anything
in the world on which to lay their head." Of
their breviaries, their poor furniture, their household
utensils, they have, according to a brief of Gregory IX
(i 227-1 241), only the use and not the possession.
But even in the lifetime of Francis divergences
manifested themselves about this fundamental idea ;
and immediately after his death the Order was destined
to split upon it. The mere needs of discipline com-
pelled the immense institution of the Minorites to
possess convents more worthy of that name than the
huts with which they had at first been content. In
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the debate upon
evangelical poverty, exaggerated by the zeal of some
of the brothers who advocated the strict rule, agitated
the Church and even drove one part of the Franciscan
family to the verge of heresy. But these theological

FRANCIS OF ASSISI 107

quarrels did not impair in any sensible degree the
apostolic work of the Minorites in Italian society.
They could redeem by charity what they had gained
in temporal riches. The lofty ideal of Francis long
continued intact. By Poverty he had found the way
back to the spiritual leader, forgotten for ages, who
was born in the manger of a village inn, while the foxes
had their holes and the birds of the air their nests. He
said so himself to Jesus in that splendid prayer : " She
was in the cradle, and like a faithful squire remained
armed for the great fight You waged for our redemp-
tion. In Your Passion she was the only one who did
not abandon You. Mary, Your mother, stopped at the
foot of the cross, but Poverty, ascending it with You,
clasped You firmly in her arms until the last. It was
she who lovingly prepared the rough nails that pierced
Your feet and hands, and when You were dying of
thirst she, like a thoughtful wife, had gall made ready
for You. You expired in her ardent embrace ; she
left You not in death, O Lord Jesus, and would not
allow Your body to rest elsewhere than in a borrowed
tomb. It was she, finally, who kept You warm deep
down in the grave. O most poor Jesus, the grace
that I ask of You is to grant me the treasure of most
sublime Poverty : permit the distinctive sign of our
Order to be this, that it never possesses anything of
its own beneath the sun, for the glory of Your
name, and that it have no other patrimony than
beggary I " (31)

IV

Here we get a glimpse of the admirable passion
to which Francis of Assisi owed all his genius. His
heart was fired with lo\e :

In foco I'anwr mi mise,

108 MYSTIC ITALY

" Love put me in the furnace ; it put me in the furnace
of love ", we read in a poem attributed to him by
Bernardino of Siena (i 380-1 444). So violent was
his love that he reeled like a drunken man. Jesus,
he said, had stolen away his heart, " O gentle Jesus !
Embrace me and give me death, my lo\'e ! " The
pathetic God of the Gospel^ the God in the agony in
the garden on Mount Olivet, betrayed by his disciples,
sold by an apostle, outraged by his people, scourged
and crowned with thorns, the wretched God of Calvary
Who, dying on a gibbet, cried in despair that His
Father Himself had forsaken Him, Jesus crucified,
possessed the soul of Francis. In his retreat on Mount
Alvernia, Francis wished to live through the last hours
of the Son of Man's life one by one. " O my Lord,
I ask of Thee two boons before I die : grant that I
may feel in my soul and body all the bitter pangs
which Thou hast endured, and in my heart the boundless
love that led Thee to bear such sufiferings, Thee, Son
of God, for us, miserable sinners ! " But thesfe 'ecstasies
had nothing in common with the visions of Joachim
of Flora. The tears that Francis shed in these hours
of rapture were all of tenderness and bliss. An angel
appeared to him, holding a violincello, and at the first
stroke of the bow Francis swooned with love and saw
the azure Paradise open before him lighted with the
face of his God. The high rocks of Alvernia sparkled
before his eyes with more rubies and sapphires than
the triumphant Jerusalem described by John. Jesus
embraced the mystic of Assisi with his blood-stained
arms, imprinted on his hands, feet and heart, the
stigmata of His Passion, and bore him, beside himself
with love, to the bosom of the heavenly Father.

But high as his spirit carried him, Francis never
lost sight of earth and that suffering humanity whom
Jesus comforted, the crowd of the humble and simple
whose miseries were beguiled by the Sermon on the
Mount. He tended the lepers with his own hands,

FRANCIS OF ASSISI 109

with the gentleness of a sister of mercy, cleansing the
wounds of the soul no less than those of the body. To
the thieves whom the warder of one of his convents
had driven away he sent the bread and wine intended
for his own repast, with words so touching that they
hastened to throw themselves at his feet and beg him
to admit them into his Order. (32) If, on the day of
the general chapter, thousands of pilgrims gathered in
the plain of Assisi, there were seen about mid-day
coming along the roads that lead to Spoleto, Orvieto,
and Perugia processions of mules, horses and waggons
laden with provisions, bread, wine, beans and cheese,
says the Fioretti, " and other good things to eat for
the poor of Jesus." One Christmas night, in the valley
of Greccia, he invited the peasants and shepherds to
bid welcome to Him whom he called " the little child
of Bethlehem." At the peaceful hour of midnight the
woods were suddenly illumined by the light of torches
advancing in haste towards a stable where Francis was
wailing, near a manger filled with straw, between the
ass and the ox. When all were on their knees, he
read, as deacon, on the right side of the manger, as
if it were a high altar, the Gospel according to
St. Luke ; then he turned towards the faithful kneeling
in the shadow, and preached to them the birth of the
Saviour. Undoubtedly, at the same hour, there was
less faith and love in the basilica of St. John Lateran
and under the imperial dome of the Palatine chapel
at Palermo. Some thought they saw a child sleeping
on the straw of the manger, who seemed gradually
to awake and open his arms. It was in fact the God
of the poor, roused from a long sleep by Francis, Who
once more smiled in man's inmost heart.

And at the same time it was a new religion that v'
the men of goodwill received from Francis of Assisi,

110 MYSTIC ITALY

as formerly they had received it under the starry sky
of Bethlehem. ,\Ve are in contact with the main feature
of the Franciscan work. By love and pity Francis
led back Italy to the compact of the Gospel ; without
theology or scholasticism he restored primitive
Christianity ; without heresy or conflict he revived
the Church and gave religious liberty to his age.
He signed a new concordant betweem God and
Christendom.

V Francis reconciled God with man. He brought man
into the fold of Him iWho said : " Blessed are those
who weep ! " He did away with the age-long mis-
understanding that had cast a gloom over Christianity.
He drove away the old terrors and piercing anguish
of the Middle Ages ; he put goodness into God instead
of inflexible justice, and he brought back to the
Christian's heart the hope of Paradise, filial confidence
and peace in this earthly life. It was Jesus Who, in
place of the Church, was directly presented to the
conscience of men. The true mediator, according to
Francis, is Jesus, Who was willing to sufTer and to
die for the family of Adam, in order to pay their
debts ; Jesus is the true priest, the bishop of souls,
episcopus animarum nostrarum, it is written in the Rule
of I22I ; and Francis adds, with the apostle John:
" Ye are all brethren ; call no man father upon earth,
for your only father is He ,Who is in heaven. Take
not to yourselves the name of masters, for you have
but one master, He who is in heaven." So it is to
Him, the Father, Shepherd, Teacher and Supreme
Bishop, that men must bring their troubles for allevia-
tion and their wounded souls to be healed. He knows
better than any other the needs of His children, for
Francis repeated, "it is the eye of God alone that
judges the worth of man,." Before Him no conscience
stands higher than another, for he is the source of all
merit for them all with equal goodness. " All virtues
and all good things ", it is said in the Floretti, " are

FRANCIS OF ASSISI 111

of God, and not of the creature ; no one ought tO'
glorify himself in His sight, but if any do glorify him-
self, let it be in the Lord." The r61e of priest became
less important from the moment when the faithful
communicated spontaneously with God ; that of the
saint had no longer any ralson (Vetre, since the Son
freely presented his sufferings and wishes direct to the
Father. The intercession of saints in some sort dis-
appeared from the Franciscan Christianity. Mary, the
two Johns, and the angels, were the only ones who
shared the devotion offered to Jesus. The Christian
thus became his own priest, the umpire of his faith,
the architect of his own salvation. The religion of
works lost all that the religion of the heart had gained.
" Flatter not yourselves," he said, " that you can
become perfect by doing all that a wicked person can
perform : such a one can fast, pray, weep and mortify
his body : one thing only is impossible for him, to be
faithful to his Lord." {-^f^)

The Franciscan undoubtedly held closely to the
Church of Rome, through the integrity of the symbols
of faith, the necessity of the sacraments and the
authority of the pope and bishops, that P^ancis solemnly
recommended, not, however, without some reservations.
The brothers, say the two Rules, will submit to the
clergy " in all things appertaining to salvation " ; but
they add " and in all that is not contrary to our Order."
The Franciscans were dispensed from the festivals that
might be created by the pope outside the canonical
breviary, unless they are expressly imposed upon them.
In reality this essentially mystic Christianity took away^x
from the secular Church its ceaseless watch over 4:]
the spiritual life ; it escaped from the ecclesiastical)
hierarchy and organized itself outside of all traditional/
discipline. Francis observed literally the fine pontifical
formula : Servus servorum Dei. He himself and all
the chiefs of the Franciscan groups were only the
" ministers ", the guardians, the watchful servants, of

112 MYSTIC ITALY

their brothers. The monastic and feudal episcopate
of the abbots was unknown in the new institution. The
testament of Francis forbade the brothers to sohcit any
privilege from Rome for preaching or against persecu-
tion. The majority of the Franciscans did not take the
higher clerical orders ; the founder was but a simple
deacon ; but all of them fulfilled the apostoHc office
by excellence in preaching. The prayer of Francis
ascended as near to God as the liturgical words of
the bishop of Rome. The brothers who have duly
carried out the evangelical life, says the curious little
work upon the " Stigmata ", will enter straight into
Paradise, those whose zeal has been feeble will
languish in Purgatory only as long as Francis himself
determines ; each year, on the anniversary of his death,
the saint descends into Purgatory to take from it the
souls of his brothers and sisters of the three Franciscan
Orders and those of the other Christians who have loved
the penitent of Assisi. It had been revealed to him
that Brother Elias of Cortona, his first successor in
the generalship, would rebel against the order of the
Church and be damned. He contrived that the sentence
should be revoked, and that Elias, enlightened in his
hour, should die with the pope's pardon, clad in the
Franciscan robe.

The way of safety, once so difficult, was, therefore,
made smooth, and could be trodden with greater ease.
Religious observances were simplified, as if God were
content, in exchange for the love of men's souls, with a
greater virtue ; the duties of piety were made capable
of a more elastic interpretation. P>ancis prayed in-
cessantly, not as an obligation, but because prayer
gladdened him ; he believed that the silent prayer of
the heart is better than that which the lips stammer :
mentaliter potiiis qiiam vocaliter. According to him
a simple Pater, or a few tears shed upon the Saviour's
Passion are the finest of prayers. (34) " Thou dost
not know what true prayer is," said Brother Egidio to

FRANCIS OF ASSISI 113

a novice who refused to go to beg bread for the
community ujion the pretext that he was occupied with
his prayers ; " humble obedience is of more value than
the converse of angels." Francis would not have his
followers build great churches ; he exhorted them to
have only one mass celebrated daily in their chapels ;
" if the priests are many, let them be content with
assisting at the mass of one of their number ; for
God gives His grace abundantly to the absent as well
as to those who are present at the altar, provided they
are worthy of Him." In default of a priest of the
Order, or a secular priest, for the hearing of confession,
the Minorites were to kneel provisionally before one of
their brothers, confiteantiir fratri suo, according to the
counsel of the apostle James. (35) The externals of
worship atitected Francis very little ; he would rather
despoil the altar of the Virgin of its last ornament
than be untrue to the law of poverty by amassing
florins for the needs of his Order. An old woman,
whose sons had become Minorites, asked alms of him,
but there was left in the convent only the Bible that
was used for singing the office in the choir. " Give
her the Bible," said the saint ; " God will be better
pleased with the good we shall do this poor woman
than with our psalmody in the chapel ; she has given
her children to the Order, she is entitled to ask any-
tliing of us." " Francis," it is related in the Fioretti,
" was once, at the beginning of his Order, with Brother
Leo, in a place where they had no book with which
to say the divine office. When the hour of matins
came, he said to Brother Leo : ' My very dear friend,
we have no breviary wherewith to say matins, but, in
order to employ the time in praising God, I will speak
and thou shalt answer as I will instruct thee.' " A
similar accident had formerly befallen Joachim of Flora,
but that perfect monk, instead of cheerfully inventing
a very free rendering of matins, being suddenly inspired
by the Holy Ghost, recited the canonical office to his

8

114 MYSTIC ITALY

fellow-traveller, without forgetting a single v«rse, to
the very last syllable.

" God will have mercy," said Francis, " and not
sacrifice." (36) The gloomy austerity of the believer
who tortures himself in order to please God had no
meaning in the Franciscan form of Christianity. It
seemed to be a lack of confidence in God. Francis
included all kinds of temperaments in his precepts in
order to support human weakness. He permitted his
brothers, as Jesus once did with his apostles, to eat
and drink whatever their hosts set before them in the
course of their journeys. If the feast of Christmas
fell upon Friday he forbade the rule of abstinence
to be observed. " It is a sin," he said, " to do penance
on the day when the Child Jesus was born ; on that
day the very walls ought to eat meat." One night
one of his friars, worn out by fasting, was taken ill.
Francis rose, laid the table and sat down beside the
young man, and obliged all the brothers to partake of
an extraordinary supper, that the novice might not be
humiliated by eating alone. " I tell you of a truth
each man ought to take account of his strength and
take the nourishment that is necessary to him, in order
that the body may render true and loyal service to
the spirit. Let us avoid two excesses : we must neither
eat too much, for that will harm body and soul, nor
fast immoderately, because God prefers works of
charity to the external observance of religion." {2)7)
If Brother Sylvester were secretly fond of eating grapes
Francis took him to the vineyard, blessed it, and let
his friend eat his fill of the delicious fruit. At the
general chapter at Assisi, if he heard that a certain
number of the Minorites w-ere wearing rings studded
with spikes, or that they were wearing metal scapulars,
he forbade such painful practices and ordered these
instruments of penance to be collected immediately ;
more than five thousand of them were gathered and
abandoned in the fields. Towards the end of his life,

FRANCIS OF ASSISI 115

Francis was conscioiis of having chastened his body
too severely. One night he heard these words :
" Francis, there is not in the world a single sinner
whom God does not pardon if he returns to Him ;
but he who kills himself by excess of austerity will
find no compassion in eternity." Once even he made
confession of this severity towards "his brother ass",
that is to say his body. He had at the same period'
a desire to hear once again the musical airs he had
loved in his youth ; but he dared not ask that
musicians should be summoned. In the night, as
suffering kept him awake, he heard the vibration of
an invisible lyre whose notes seemed to fall from the
stars ; the melody came nearer and nearer, ever
sweeter, and he fell asleep lulled by the song of angels.
For this tender heart the love of all living things
was not merely the effect of an instinctive poetry ;
Francis believed that in the creature he was embracing
God. In the flowers of the field he breathed the odour
of the stem of Jesse, whose perfume restores the dead
to life. The Umbrian country was for him a veritable
earthly Paradise, where he conversed familiarly with
the beasts, whom he called brothers and sisters. He
greeted all these little creatures, carefully removed the
earthworm from the path trodden by the foot of man,
and, during the winter, had pots of honey or wine
placed for the bees. The sight of a lamb, the symbolic
figure of Jesus, always filled him with emotion ; in
order to redeem one he gave his cloak and cowl to
the butcher. And the beasts attached themselves to
him, as to a sure friend ; he spoke to them with great
seriousness, and the legend has no doubt whatever
that they answered him according to their ability. A
young hare caught in a snare and brought to him;
leapt into his bosom, then, set at liberty, followed his
footsteps, like a dog, to the nearest forest. A grass-
hopper chirping on the branch of a fig tree, near his
cell, when called by him perched on his hand. " Sing

116 MYSTIC ITALY

my sister grasshopper, and praise God with thy cry
of joy." For a week it came back, at the same hour,,
to accompany the prayer of Francis with its little
canticle. The lamb that had been given him entered
the church behind him, stopped at the same altar,
and at the moment when the Host was elevated knelt
down. In the desert at Alvernia a falcon, his neighbour,
woke him every night at the hour of vigil ; when
the saint was sick the bird waited till the dawn was
whitening the mountains before giving the signal for
the office. If a young boy gave him some wild
turtle-doves, he tamed them and with his own hands
made them nests in the bushes that encircled his
community at Assisi. Thomas of Celano relates that
one day, as he was preaching to the people in the'
open country, the swallows made so shrill a noise that
he had to stop ; he waited patiently for some time,
and then, as they continued to cry their loudest, he
said to them : " My dear sisters, it is my turn to
speak, for you have cried enough ; listen, therefore,
to the word of God and hold your peace until the
end of the sermon." They ceased their cries and did
not fly away until he had said " Amen ". Another
time, near Bevagna, he preached expressly for the
little birds. " Always praise your Creator wherev^er
you are, for He gives you the air of heaven for your
kingdom, the rivers and springs to quench your thirst,
the mountains and valleys for a place of refuge, and
also gives you warm clothing for yourselves and
children ". The birds, who covered the earth and
trees, joyously fluttered their wings, shook their heads
and chirped with pleasure. The saint walked as he
spoke and touched them with his robe, and none of
them was frightened or took to flight. Then he blessed
them with the sign of the cross, and all, ascending
straight towards heaven, with a song of triumph, dis-
persed in the form of a cross towards the four
quarters of the horizon.

FRANCIS OF ASSISI 117

Francis freely acceptied all the caresses of nature
without being anxious, like the monks of old, about
the seductions that wicked angels might have con-
cealed in them. The invisible world manifested itself
to his eyes with a simple grandeur that the troubadours
of Provenge, his masters in poetry, had never known ;
in his Galilee in Umbria at the edge of the limpid
lake of Perugia, under the foliage of the oaks of
Alvernia, he heard the boundless and eternal murmur
of divine life. In his turn he wished to share in the
universal choir ; in the Canticle oj the Sun he glorified
God for all things excellent and beautiful that His
hands had lavished :

Laudato sia, Dio mio Signove,
Con tutte le tue creature !

The Alleluia of Assisi, in which the light of day, the
starry sweetness of the southern nights, the warm
breath of the wind, the rippling of living waters and
the maternal graces of the earth, nostra madre terra,
beautiful with the green grass, with purple flowers
and with fruits, are evoked in turn, bursts forth, like
a festival chant, over the cradle of Italian poetry. But
it is also the canticle of Franciscan Christianity that
will not see any painful contrast between the serenity
of nature and the miseries of man, and that makes
a sacred thing of suffering itself : " Be praised, O
God, for those who pardon in the name of Thy love,
for the feeble who endure tribulation! Happy are the
unfortunate and the peaceful, for Thou, O Most High,
wilt 2:ive them a crown! "

G'

Laudato sia, mio Signore,
Per quelli che perdonano per iuo amore
Et sosteneno infirmitate et tribulatione ;
Beati quelli que sostenerano in pace,
Che da ti altissimo serano incoranati.

118 MYSTIC ITALY

VI

Thus about the year 1210 Italy saw a renewal of
the enthusiasm of the apostolic times. Men crowded
to Francis, whose words consoled and delivered their
souls. He shed upon all wounds the balm of the
Gospel. To those who bore with impatience the yoke
of the communal form of government, he showed the
Kingdom of God as the recompense for the injustice
and tyranny of their earthly life. He calmed the un-
easiness of consciences that, in order to escape from
the troubles of the world, had gradually detached
themselves from the Church : he bore testimony, by
the very example of his own conduct, to the treasures
of joy that could yet be reaped without one's ceasing
to be a regular Christian. He instituted, not free
investigation, but the liberty of love ; he lightened the
hand of the Church, that pontifical hand that the
Middle Ages had made so heavy, and beneath which
Latin Christendom was bowed ; to the Church itself
he brought the strength of the primitive apostolate,
he rescued it from the sterile melancholy of the cloister,
and from the pride of the feudal episcopate, to throw
it, no longer as a haughty mistress, but as a mother
of pity, into the midst of populous cities, into the
ferment of the communes and among the serfs of the
country ; he brought it back to its most beautiful
memories by restoring to it, as if it were a magic
word, the sublime cry of Jesus : Mlsereor super tiirham.

There is no doubt that the Franciscan apostolate
began by discovering the Gospel afresh. There was
no question, in its origins, of a new Order or of an
institution rigorously constituted. The first thought of
the founder stopped for some years at a free con-
fraternity, whose Rule of 1209 contains the essential
features which that of 1221 marked with more
precision. The great evangelical virtues are enjoined

FRANCIS OF ASSIST 119

in it, poverty, humility, charity, and prayer. The
practice of these virtues very soon assumed a pecuHar
aspect ; humiUty led to the absolute contempt of all
things ; humility and poverty led to beggary " for the
love of God." Charity was not content with the poor
and infirm ; in its solicitude it embraced the leper, the
criminal, and the pagan. Two functions were mani-
fested in the early days in a very clear way : preaching
and manual labour. This preaching took the form of
an active and perpetual message scattered broadcast
and destined to travel to the farthest regions of the
world. As to work, the wages of which were
represented by only the barest necessaries of life, we
must observe to what an extent the Franciscans of
the first period maintained the common conditions of
social life. There was nothing among the brothers
that recalled the customary conventual discipline : the
Rule of 1 22 1 imposed no extraordinary offices upon
the priests ; the offices of the lay members were con-
fined to the recitation of the Pater, the Credo, the
Miserere, and the De Profundis for the dead. The
Franciscan group of 1209 rather resembled the future
Third Order than a religious militia. That is why
from the very first all classes of Italian society, as
much reassured by Francis as they were comforted,
were stirred at heart and surrendered themselves to
him. The oldest of his disciples was a citizen of
Assisi, Bernard of Quintavalle, " one of the noblest,
richest, and wisest men in the town ", who, touched by
the self-denial of the young apostle, distributed all his
goods to the widows, orphans, prisoners, pilgrims, and
hospitals ; next came a priest, Silvester, who till then
had been covetous of money, and who gave himself
up to the party of perfect poverty, and was to con-
verse with God " as friend to friend " ; humble folk,
such as Leo, Ruffino; Masseo ; a soldier, Angelo ;
nobles, such as Egidio, Valentine of Narni ; a canon
of the cathedral of Assisi, Pietro Cattani, " jurisconsult -'

)>''

120 MYSTIC ITALY

and master of laws " ; a court poet, Pacifico ; two
students of Bologna, of whom one was " very learned
and a great decrctalist ", Pellegrino and Rinieri ; three
highwaymen, " murderous ruffians ", says the Fioretti.
The modus operandi of Francis was speech, and never
was there more popular preaching. The Scriptures
formed his whole theology. The development of the
Pater, the death of the sinner and the tender recital
of the Passion, were his favourite subjects. He
preached without any oratorical devices ; he laughed,
wept, and made others weep ; he played the character |

of which he was telling the crowd ; he leaped for
joy in the pulpit, and bleated like a lamb when he
pronounced the name of Bethlehem. One day he
preached before pope Honorius III (1124-1130) ; his '"
sermon had been prepared and learnt by hear^t. At
the very beginning he was troubled, lost his memory
and stopped short ; then he freely improvised, says
Bonaventura, as if the spirit of God spoke by his
mouth.

When he entered a town all the inhabitants ran to
meet him. At Bologna the great communal square
was too small for the concourse of the faithful. When
he passed through the country regions, the confra-
ternities of the towns, the corporations and the children,
went forth singing to meet him on the way with banners
and green branches ; the little bells of Umbria rang
as though for an Easter mass ; men crowded round
him to touch the hem of his garment or to cut the
cloth of his cowl for relics. At Borgo-San-Donnino
he fainted in the arms of his devoted followers, being
half stifled ; at Gaeta he was compelled to take refuge
in a boat, in order to put the sea between him and the
multitude ; at Rieti the inhabitants in their eagerness
trampled down the vineyard of the priest whose
hospitality Francis was enjoying ; the poor presbyter
lamented his lost vintage, but his guest consoled him
by promising him a miraculous harvest, and never had

FRANCIS OF ASSISI 121

the parish priest of Ricti seen a more smiling autumn
or his presses better filled.

Francis, as soon as he had had his first brethren
blessed by Innocent III, sent his missionaries by two
and two throughout Italy, saying to them : Ite ei docete.
" It is not only for your own salvation that God has
called you in His goodness, it is also for the salvation
of the people. Beware of judging and despising the
rich who live in luxury and wear sumptuous garments,
for God is their Lord as well as ours ; He may call
them and justify them. We must honour them as our
brothers and masters, since by their aid they help good
people. Go then and preach peace to men and re-
pentance for the remission of sins. Some will welcome
you with joy and hear you gladly ; others, impious,
proud and violent, will blame you and rise up against
you. In a short time many nobles and learned men
will join you. Be patient in tribulation, fervent in
prayer, courageous in work, modest in your discourse,
grave in your manner, grateful for the good that is
done you, and the kingdom of heaven shall be your
reward." (38) At the first general chapter, in 1216,
he renewed these precepts of tolerance and charity.
" Let peace be even more at the bottom of your
hearts than upon your lips. Give no man occasion
of wrath or scandal ; bring all men to benignity, concord
and union. To heal the wounded, comfort those who
weep, and seek the poor sheep who have gone astray,
such is your vocation. There are some among men
who seem to be devoted to, the devil, 'and who yet
will one day be disciples of Jesus."

So the friars went from town to town, from' village
to village, reading their breviary as they walked ; they
entered into houses, and preached familiarly under
church porches. This Franciscan world was one of
extraordinary activity. The founder permitted no idle
or " otiose " person in his Order. " Go, brother fly,"
he said to a novice who thought of nothing but eating

122 MYSTIC ITALY

and sleeping in the shade after dinner. " You have
lived long enough after the manner of the drones, who
make no honey and who devour that of the bees."
It was a sight to see Brother Egidio going eight
miles from Rome to gather faggots, or to gather nuts
in the woods, or to glean wheat, or to carry water in
the streets, for the benefit of the poor. Those who
were priests confessed the faithful ; men loved these
errant pastors who disappeared the next day, carrying
with them the vexatious secrets of the conscience, and
whom they never expected to see again. They
composed family quarrels, calmed the hatred of factions,
and appeased civil revolts. In 1210 they intervened
between the serfs and the barons in the neighbourhood
of Assisi, and they made the lords sign a charter of
enfranchisement. In 1220, at Bologna, Francis ex-
horted the communal factions, in vehemently persuasive
language, to become reconciled. The fierce wolf of
Gubbio, whom he brought back as docile as a sheep,
to the mystic city famous for its lovely illuminations
of missals, was doubtless, as the pious Ozanam
suspects, only a baron, a " Ysengrin " impatient of
control, or even " the people of the Middle Ages " ;
but I should almost be tempted to regret the wolf
who so devoutly, according to the legend, put his paw
into the saint's hand, swore to keep the peace in the
future, and grew to old age a friendly guest at the
hearth of the good folk of Gubbio. The Fioretti
almost gives us to understand that he died in the
odour of sanctity.

A very simple organization contributed to the rapid
progress of the Order of Minorites. It is not yet
found in the Rule of 1209, whei^ the "penitents of
the city of Assisi " seem to be confided to the exclusive
care of the secular clergy and the bishop. It is
manifested, in the Rule of 1221, by the somewhat
vague institution of the " ministers ", servants and
counsellors of their brethren ; it takes its final form'

FRANCIS OF ASSISI 123

in the definitive Rule of 1223, that was sanctioned
by Honorius III. Here we find a regular constitu-
tion of the Order rendered necessary by the needs
of disciphne. As the brothers did not >-et shut them-
selves up in great monastic houses, as they camped,
so to speak, in the heart of Christendom, they multiplied
very fast, without any concern for temporal interests,
and attracted to themselves those who were charmed
by the adventurous liberty of thfe new apostolate.
When they became an army it was very necessary
to give thenl a hierarchy. Francis mapped out western
Europe into provinces. The provincial minister watched
over the ministers or guardians delegated to govern
the convents ; the general minister, whose seat was
Assisi, was chosen by the provincials and the guardians
at the grand chapter convoked every three years in
Umbria on the day of Pentecost ; he could be deposed
by the same body. A cardinal was the Order's patron
in the councils of the Holy See. The general was
the responsible representative to the pope for the entire
Order.

The aristocratic titles of abbot and prior disappeared,
as well as the spirit of Benedictine monasticism, in
which the community, feudally constituted, depended
absolutely upon its abbot, and in which the sole federal
bond between the different convents was the Rule of
Benedict. The new wine, Francis was aware, needed
new bottles. So he presented communal Italy of the
thirteenth century not with an oligarchy, but with a
religious republic that, thanks to the parliament at
Assisi, was a very free one internally, that was very
strong in its unity in the face of the secular world,
and that, owing to the elasticity of its hierarchy, was
very independent with regard to Rome. In 121 9
Francis ottered rigorous confinement with the nuns of
Santa Clara to women whose weakness shunned the
dangers of the world. These sisters of Santa Clara
constituted a Second Order. Then he found a means

124 MYSTIC ITALY

of animating lay society to its very depths by the
genius of his institution. In 1221 h'e founded the
confraternity of the Brothers of Penitence, called the
Third Order in 1230, for men and women who
continued to live in the ordinary life of the world,
at the domestic hearth, for husbands and wives, and
even for secular priests. It was at P^aenza, and after-
wards at Florence, that he set up the first Tertiary
associations. The Third Order was open to all, rich
and poor, artizan and noble ; it was not regulated at
first by a written constitution. The pretended rule
of the Tertiaries of 1221 is subsequent to the death
of Francis. In 1289 it was altered, in the text that
we now possess, by the bull Supra montem of
Nicholas IV (128 8- 1292). All the observance pre-
scribed by the founder is confined to the great precepts
of Christian faith and charity, enhanced by a serious
discipline. The brothers were bound to respect the
commandments of God and the Church, to becom'e
reconciled to their enemies, to restore ill-gotten gains,
to dress simply, to make their wills within three months
of their profession, to avoid balls, festivals, theatres,
lawsuits, and vain swearing. " They will not wear any
offensive arms, unless for the defence of the Roman
Church or their country." Until the middle of the
thirteenth century the Tertiaries in no way resembled
an organized militia ; their lawful heads were the
diocesan bishops. Thus the Franciscan community
corresponded to the extent of the municipality, but it
united classes hitherto divided. The Third Order of
a town gathered round the samte altar, as round a
fraternity table, all those whom the government of the
arts and corporations separated from one another. It
softened the pride of the rich, raised the humility of
the lowly, and animated all hearts with pity. " Invite
the poor to your fine house, and to your sumptuous
feasts," writes a Florentine notary of the fourteenth
century to a merchant of the major arts, " in order that

FRANCIS OF ASSISI 125

God may not say to you reproachfully : ' Why hasit
thou never invited My friends to the house I gave
thee? ' " (39)

But the affiliation of the Tertiaries went even further
than the city Walls ; it made the same word of command
run through the entire peninsula ; it strengthened men's
consciences in a more intimate union with the Church ;
it fostered in the souls of the citizens the sentiment
of Italian liberty. A letter attributed to the chancellor
of Frederic II, Pietro della Vigna, but which probably
proceeds from the Ghibeline episcopate, is very signifi-
cant. " The Franciscans and the Dominicans have
risen against us. They have publicly reproved our
way of life and our undertakings ; they have taken
away our rights and reduced us to nothing ; and now
behold, in order to complete the destruction of our
preponderance and to rob us of the affection of the
people, they have created two new fraternities, that
embrace men and women without distinction. All men
are hastening to join them. There is scarcely a man
to be found whose name is not enrolled in them." (40)
In fact, beyond the boundaries of Italy, from the second
half of the century onwards, the Third Order restored
in the west, divided as it was by political interests, a
religious community independent of any national
Church, and similar to that of primitive Christianity.
A direct bond attached all the members of the Third
Franciscan Order to one another ; they formed a league
of prayer and peace from one end of Europe to the
other. We find, in this connection, a pretty legend
in the Fioretti, which, though destitute of all historical
value, is a kind of touching symbol of this European
fraternity. Louis IX (i 236-1 270) one day knocked
at the door of the convent of Perugia, clad as a poor
pilgrim, and asked for Brother Egidio. The friend
of Francis of Assisi, notified by the porter, at once
knew that this obscure passer-by was the king of
France. He hastened to the convent door and found

126 MYSTIC ITALY

the king ; they knelt before each other, and, without
uttering a single word, held each other in a Jong
embrace ; then, without breaking the silence, Louis
resumed his pilgrimage, and Egidio returned to his
cell. When the brothers reproached Egidio for having
said nothing to this extraordinary visitor, he replied
simply, " I read his heart and he read mine."

The conversion of heretics does not seem to have
interested Francis very much, whether it was that he
believed in God's boundless pity for those who dis-
sented from Catholicism, or that he foresaw that the
Dominicans, the Domini canes as the Middle Ages called
them, were sufficient to guard the flock and run after
the wandering sheep. He knew nothing of the depths
of theology ; he was still more a stranger to the
subtleties of the School. He had but small esteem
for the profane sciences, letters and books. Perhaps
also the exploits of the Inquisition in the south of
France, of which the Dominicans had charge, indisposed
him to an evangelical mission in which the secular
arm intervened so efficaciously, and where the cross
was almost invariably accompanied by the sword or
firebrand. So he left the Italian heretics to the
impetuous preaching of his Portuguese disciple, Antony,
formerly an Augustinian canon, who was the first
theologian and the first canonist of the Franciscans.
The genius of Francis felt more at home in dealing
with the heathen. The conversion of distant peoples
was one of the great Franciscan works from the
thirteenth century onwards ; Brother John de Piano
Carpini, who was the provincial of Saxony in 122,3^
was destined to go, in the name of Innocent IV, as
far as the heart of Tartary, thus paving the way for
Marco Polo. Francis had inaugurated this apostolate ;
in 1 2 1 9 he was under the walls of Damietta, in the
midst of the Christians besieging it, whom the Soldan,
encamped on the Nile, was endeavouring to drive out
of Egypt. He dreamt of converting the Saracens and

FRANCIS OF ASSISI 127

presented himself to Malck-al-Kamel, of whom he
demanded the ordeal of fire. In company with an
imam he was to pass through a blazing fire. No
Mohammedan priest had the curiosity to test the
miracle, and Francis returned to the camp of the
Crusaders, bringing with him, according to Jacques
de Vitry, archbishop of Acre, these comforting words
from the infidel prince : " Pray for me that God may
reveal to me the faith that is most pleasing to Him."
He had to content himself with preaching to the
Christians, who had great need of an apostle ; but
his trouble and his sermons were was,ted upon them.
The historian of this Crusade has the following to say :
" This man who founded the Order of the Minorites,
and who was called Brother Francis . . . came to the
army at Damietta and did much good there, and there
he remained until the town was taken. Francis saw
the evil and the sin that were growing among the
men of the army, and it so displeased him that he
departed and stayed for a time in Syria, and then
returned to his own country." (41)

VII

Francis found his community flourishing, loved by
the Holy See, and confirmed in 121 5 by the Lateran
Council. He passed seven more years in incessant
travel, visiting the Italian provinces of the Order with
the joy of the householder who sees the harvest ripening
in the field that he has cleared of stones and brambles.
In 1222, it is said, he met the emperor Frederic II
whose half-Mohammedan court he charmed by his
purity and innocence. More and more he secluded
himself for weeks at a time in the solitude of his
Umbrian mountains, feeling that the end of his
pilgrimage was near and that he would soon enter
the bosom of God. He was sick, exhausted by penance.

128 MYSTIC ITALY

scarcely able to stand, greatly distressed by eating, and
almost blind. He said to his physician : " It is in-
different to me whether I live or die," and to a brother
who thought God too severe towards him : " If I did
not know thy simplicity, I should send thee hence,
seeing thou dost dare to blame God for the sufTerings
He sends me." He said to another : " My son, the
cruellest martyrdom would be less painful than three
days of the suffering that I endure ; but I prefer my
suffering, since God has been pleased to send it to
me."

In the spring of 1221 Brother Elias brought him
back with difficulty, and by slow stages, from Siena
by way of Cortona to Assisi, where he wished to die.
All the inhabitants came outside the walls to meet
him. The bishop welcomed him in his house, where
he languished for several months. At that time he
added a stanza to the Canticle of the Sun in honour of
his sister, bodily death. The physician, having warned
him of the approach of his last hour, he had himself
carried in the arms of his brothers to Santa Maria
degli Angeli. The procession halted in front of the
convent. Francis asked to be put down, with his face
towards the tOA\'n where his cradle had rested ; he
raised his right hand and several times blessed Assisi,
saying : " Be thou blessed of God, holy city, for by
thee many souls will be saved, and in thee will dwell
many servants of God, and many of thy children will
be chosen for the kingdom of everlasting life! " The
brothers took him up once more and laid him in the
infirmary of Portiuncula. He had himself placed on
a bed of cinders, despoiled of his robe. The guardian
bade him, in the name of holy obedience, receive as
his last alms a borrowed tunic and cowl. Then he
opened his arms and blessed the Minorites. Night
had already descended upon his eyes ; he touched the
heads bowed before him, and one after the other each
of his sons was named to him ; he began with Elias

FRANCIS OF ASSISI 129

of Cortona and Bernard of Quintavallc. Then he had
the Canticle of the Sun read to him, as if to bid
farewell to the light of heaven and the smile of the
earth, and, following that, as though to take leave of
Holy Church, the chapter of the Gospel of John that
begins with these words : *' Before the feast of the
Passover, when Jesus knew that His hour was come
that He should depart out of this world unto the
Father, having loved His own that were in the world.
He loved them unto the end." The reader continued
until the last verse of the eighteenth chapter and stopped
at the Passion. Francis uttered the words of the Psalm' :
" With my voice I cry unto the Lord ; with my voice I
pray the Lord." The brothers, kneeling and in tears,
surrounded the bed of cinders and prayed in low tones.
According to Thomas of Celano and Bonaventura, his
last words were these : "I have accomplished that
which I had to do ; Jesus will teach you what you
shall do. Behold, God is calling me. Farewell, my
children. Live in the fear of the Lord. Trouble and
temptation wall come ; blessed are they who persevere
in the good way I As for me, I am going to God.
May He have mercy upon you all! " It was at the
beginning of October, in the early evening, an autumn
evening in Italy, with its long deep-blue twilight, and
in the deep silence of the country, lighted only by
the dying beams in the sky, that the Franciscan family,
waited for the soul of their founder to take its flight.
Then there happened a marvellous thing, according to
the legend recorded by Bonaventura. A flock of
larks, that never chirp except in the sunlight, AlaudcB
aves lucis amicce, came and lighted with song on the
church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, on the roofs of
the cells and in the court-yard of the little convent.
Francis drew his last breath, lamented by a choir of
birds.

That night the children of Umbria made the valleys
and hills resound with glorious canticles, according to

9

130 MYSTIC ITALY

the tradition of the primitive Church, that celebrated
with joy the death of martyrs and confessors. The
next day an immense number of people, carrying
branches of olive and lighted tapers, carried Francis,
with his white face uncovered, in triumph to the
cathedral of Assisi, passing by the convent of St.
Damiano, in order that the holy Clara and her nuns
might see him a last time through a window of the
nunnery. Two years later the old Gregory IX, who
had been the friend of Francis and the first protector
of the Order in the Sacred College of Innocent ,111,
came to proclaim over his tomb the " Blessing " of
the Seraphic Father — the first essential step in the
process of canonization. In 1230 the body of the saint
was lowered into a subterranean chapel of the gloomy
lower church of Assisi, access to which was redis-
covered only in the nineteenth century. In 1236 the
upper church was finished, the airy and luminous church
that crowns the shrine where the apostle sleeps in ,the
peace of eternity.

VIII

Francis of Assisi bequeathed a lasting and very great
work to Italy. The Franciscan Order, carried forward
by the soaring imagination called forth by the founder,
was destined to pass through many vicissitudes in the
peninsula ; at one time it defended the See of Rome
with ardour and the integrity of the old Credo ; at
another, in the character of a bold innovator, troubled
by its own mysticism, it fearlessly embraced the thought
of schism. But whatever the dominant inspiration it
followed, whether it allowed itself to be carried away
by John of Parma, who was the minister-general of
the Franciscans from' 1247 to 1257, or governed by
Bonaventura, who held the same office from 1257
to 1274, or took, in the fourteenth century, the part

FRANCIS OF ASSISI 131

of the poor Christ against His pontifical vicar, it was
always to be faithful to the vocation of its early years ;
it was to continue to be the active leaven of men's
consciences, and to keep alive in their souls the lofty
and tender religious emotions that Francis had aroused.
The distinctive features of the Franciscan religion,
liberty of mind, love, pity, joyous serenity and
familiarity, were long to form the originality of Italian
Christianity, so different from the Pharisaical faith of
the Byzantines, the fanaticism of the Spaniards, and
the scholastic dogmatism of Germany and France.
Nothing of all that everywhere else darkened or
straitened the conscience, neither subtle metaphysic, nor
refined theology, nor the uneasiness of casuistry, nor
the excess of discipline and penance, nor the extreme
scruples of devotion, was to weigh henceforth upon
the Italians. Compare Francis with Dominic, compare
the spirit of these two great founders of the mendi-
cants, compare Catherine of Siena with Ignatius Loyola,
or Dante with Calderon, or Savonarola with Calvin.
The former have no more anguish at the thought of
God because they count upon His goodness ; they have
no more terror of the Church because they make a
church of their own within themselves. Machiavelli,
who was no mystic, but who had the profound in-
telligence of the genius of his race, writes, in his
Discourses upon Titus Livius, after passing severe
judgments upon the social and political work of the
Roman Church in Italy, the following lines : " Religions
must seek fresh youth by returning to their first
principle ; Christianity would have become quite extinct
had not Francis and Dominic renewed it and restored
it to its place in the heart of men through poverty
and the example of Jesus Christ ; they thus saved
religion, which the Church was destroying." (42)

But a religious renaissance, by the very fact that
it renews the inner life and affects the social life,
necessarily takes possession of the whole civilization

132 MYSTIC ITALY

of a people. The Italian genius which, at the beginning
of the thirteenth century, was still seeking its path,
thus found itself carried along by the evolution of
Italian Christianity. Nevertheless it was enabled to
pursue an independent orbit in the bosom of this vast
movement. It was never lost in the transcendant
mysticism that, after Francis, continued ever more and
more to grow in the Franciscan world. A powerful
attraction, that of the entirely rationalistic civilization
of the Ghibeline south, was to moderate the impetus
of men's souls, temper their minds and permeate
Christianity itself with its influence (I mean secular
Christianity), and, without turning Italy away from the
Kingdom of God, to give her back her love for this
earthly life.

CHAPTER IV

THE EMPEROR FREDERIC II AND THE
RATIONALISTIC SPIRIT IN SOUTHERN
ITALY

An original civilization had been founded in the south
of Italy and in Sicily at the very time of the first
Franciscan apostolate, and was to grow there until
the final fall of the house of Suabia. The Norman,
and afterwards imperial, provinces of the peninsula,
which the abbot Joachim had fascinated towards the
end of the twelfth century with his prophecies, sud-
denly appeared with a culture entirely new for the
Christian Middle Ages and a political system remark-
able in the eyes of the feudal west. An astonishing
man, still in some degree an enigma to us, the emperor
Frederic II (12 12-1250), seemed to the Church alone
responsible for the dangerous inventions that troubled
the faith at that time. For history he continues to
be the actual creator of a religious and social system
of government, of which nothing in the past of
Christendom had given an inkling. With him began
an intellectual initiation, the effect of which was lasting
in the religious conscience of Italy.

I

If we view the life and work of Frederic II as a
whole, we quickly recognize in what respect he changed
the traditions upon which the world had been living

134 MYSTIC ITALY

since the close of the Carolingian age. Between him
and his grandfather, Barbarossa, there is undoubtedly
a great gulf. Frederic I (ii 52-1 190) was the
mediaeval emperor par excellence, a king of the Romans
analogous to all his predecessors : he incarnated the
European feudal order, and reigned in virtue of a
theological theory ; his power emanated from God as
well as that of the pope ; if he came into collision,
as his predecessors had done, with the pontifical
authority, it was because, like them, he had formed
too great an idea of his divine mission. His right
and power were two immovable bases : the right
derived from God, Whose vicar he was, and Who had
entrusted to him the temporal government of the west ;
the power of the feudal hierarchy, of which he was
the head, and which made him an oecumenical king.
The political community over which he presided was
also based upon a religious notion, and animated by
it : a mystic bond connects all men and all races
whom baptism has given to Jesus Christ ; it was
Christianity which, if it depended upon the emperor
for the things of the world, belonged to the Roman
pope as far as heavenly things were concerned. God,
in this conception of the world, was the universal
suzerain. But the pope had received a higher con-
secration than that of the emperor ; he went back to
Jesus, whereas the emperor descended only from Csesar.
The emperor could not strike the pope without sacrilege,
and every time that he opposed an antipope to him
he was violating the integrity of the Holy Church her-
self ; the pope could strike the emperor by means of
excommunication, and cut off the master of the world
from the communion of the faithful. P^or nearly three
hundred years Christendom had been vainly waiting
for some agreement that should restore peace between
God's two vicars, each of whom claimed an infinite
power, and each of whom, thanks to the feudal system,
being placed into too close contact with the other,

THE EMPEROR FREDERIC II 135

were constantly under the necessity of limiting and'
abasing themselves to one another. Such was the age-
long problem that Barbarossa's grandson wished to
solve in the thirteenth century.

Frederic II had the title, the prestige and the claims
of the traditional emperor. Upon several occasions,
in the time of his struggle with Rome, he wrote as
emperor, and with all the authority of his office, to
the kings, counts, and republics of Christian Europe.
Nevertheless he abandoned to his sons, Henry, and
afterwards Conrad, the exercise of the imperial power
north of the Alps, with the title of king of the Romans ;
he himself, born in Italy, Italian and Greek by education,
a Mohammedan even by a sort of secret instinct, took
Sicily, the old Magna Gra^cia, Campania, and Apulia,
as his domain. An entire district of northern Italy
was handed over to his legate Ezzelino. The attempt
he made upon Lombardy, the doctrine he disseminated
through the familiars of his court upon the excellence
of a Christian pontificate freed from all temporal
patrimony, permit us to suppose that one of the first
aims of his ambition was the restoration of the Italian
kingdom. It was in itself a singular novelty that he
effected this geographical revolution in the empire,
whose pivot was no longer at Aix-la-Chapelle, Nurem-
berg, or Spires, but at Naples, Foggia, or Palermo.
From the Mediterranean, that opened to him' the route
to all the political regions of the old world, Frederic
looked towards the Greek Empire, Jerusalem, and
Egypt. The Itahan royalty was for him the starting
point for a universal royalty into which the soldan of
Cairo and the emperor of Nicasa would enter as allies
or vassals, and that would extend from the shores of
the Baltic to the steppes of Mongolia. " His heart
had no other ambition," wrote Brunetto Latini, " than
to be lord and sovereign of the entire world."

But now we come to an innovation of far greater
gravity. The fundamental notion of the State, of the

136 MYSTIC ITALY

relations between the sovereign and those he governs,
was radically transformed by Frederic II. The feudal
Empire disappeared from the kingdom of the Two
Sicilies. The Norman princes had modified the feudal
system in these provinaes in favour of the nobility,
whose baronies had become in some sort independent.
Frederic imposed absolute monarchy upon these very
barons. The Church, the cities, the corporations,
every form of common life, were to be reduced to a
common level ; here the Middle Ages seem to have
ended two and a half centuries before they did so any-
where else in Europe ; the modern state, despotically
organized, the prototype of the tyranny of the Sforzas
or the royalty of Louis XI, was invented. All the
functions of the government hitherto exercised by the
aristocracy and the bishops and the communal
magistrates, were handed over to a hierarchy of
imperial officials and functionaries, appointed by the
imperial chancellery. Courts of justice, political
councils, the regulation of public administration and
the imposition of taxes, all depended upon the prince
and his delegates. That which was still left of local
and feudal jurisdiction was subject to the tribunals
of the empire through the right of appeal ; the juris -
consulte restored to Frederic, as a terrible weapon
against feudality, the essential principle of the Roman
law that knows no right of primogeniture or privileged
heritage, but which divides patrimonies into equal
parts. As to the towns that ventured to renew their
old communal elections, they were threatened with
devastation, and their inhabitants with servitude. By
an edict passed in his youth, dated from the basilica
of St. Peter, in 1220, Frederic inflicted infamy, exile
and confiscation, upon all heretics, men and women
alike, whether Cathari, Patarins, or Arnoldists, and
upon all those who claimed the right to think freely
about God and the way of salvation, upon the mere
suspicion, sola suspicione notabiles, of revolt against

THE EMPEROR FREDERIC II 187

"the eternal majesty." (43) One only will, one only
autonomy, one only reason, therefore, existed, the
emperor, who entitled himself " the living law upon
earth." Although a story in the Novellino credits
Frederic with the words of a king devoted to ideal
justice and stronger than the seductions of pride, history
compels us to suppose that in his eyes the law was
merely his own good pleasure. (44) And as he had
absorbed in himself all the political rights of his
subjects, he attracted to himself all the sources of
wealth existing in his kingdom. He filled his treasury
by means of the land tax and the duty upon food-
stuffs, the monopoly of salt and metals ; he was the
privileged shipowner in the ports of the Mediterranean ;
he retarded the departure of ships that did not carry
his merchandize. The youth of the Tw^o Sicilies were
compelled to study in the schools of Naples and
Salerno. The emperor felt himself so isolated in the
heart of his domains and in his relations with
Christendom, and he had so resolutely broken the
bonds of feudal fidelity, that he no longer formed the
main body of his armies with the help of the feudal
chivalry ; his Saracens and Janissaries, who out of
their fanatical devotion, were capable of every kind of
horror, were at once his knights, his imperial guard,
his police officers and his executioners. Such, in its
main outlines, was the system of government built up
by Frederic II. The men of that age had no difficulty
in recognizing in it a disquieting imitation of the
political administration of the cahfs, a wholly Moham-
medan conception of government. That Frederic was
a despot, crushing without pity all individual liberty,
the Middle Ages could wed have understood ; but wliat
seemed an unbearable impiety was the imperial attempt
against the collective liberties in the bosom of which
the Middle Ages, guided by their religious instinct,
had sheltered the weakness and curbed the pride of
the individual. Mediaeval Christendom was disinte-

138 MYSTIC ITALY

grated by the destruction of the framework wherein it
had been so long enclosed. The mystic primacy of
the Holy See vanished when, in the name of state,?-
manship as well as by the constitution of the state,
the emperor placed himself between the bishops and
the pope, between the bishop of Rome and the con-
sciences of men. Owing to the mere fact that he
completely secularized the state, he appeared to
his contemporaries to be the implacable enemy of
Christianity.

11

Frederic, in the eyes of all good orthodox Christians,
in the opinion pf the Church and the Guelfs, was a
tyfK3 of antichrist. The struggle that he carried
on against two inflexible popes, Gregory IX and
Innocent IV, had, in the minds of the friends of the
Holy See, the grandeur of an apocalyptic drama. Satan
alone could have stirred up such malice in the soul
of a prince whom' the Roman Church, in the time of
Innocent III, had held in its arms as a child. "He
was an atheist," aflirms Fr^ Salimbene (1221-1288?),
who enumerates all the emperor's vices, roguery, avarice,
lust, cruelty, and anger, and the strangle stories that
were whispered concerning him in the secrecy of con-
vents. At the moment when Frederic had denounced
Gregory IX to all kings and to the episcopate as a
false pope and a false prophet, the latter launched
the encyclical Ascendit de marl. " See the beast who
ascends from the dept^hs of the sea, his mouth full
of blasphemies, with the claws of a bear and the fury
of a lion, his body like that of a leopaixl. He opens
his mouth to belch forth insults against God ; he
incessantly hurls his javelins against the tabernacle of
the Lord and the saints of heaven." In the following
year Gregory wrote : " The emperor, raising himself

THE EMPEROR FREDERIC [II 139

above all that is called God and making use of un-
worthy apostates as the agents of his perversity, stands
aloft as an angel of light on the mountain of pride.
. . . He threatens to overthrow the seat of St. Peter,
to substitute for the faith of Christendom the ancient
rites of the pagan peoples, and, seated in the temple,
he usurps the functions of the priesthood." And the
unknown author of the Life of Gregory IX asserts that
" By dint of associating with the Greeks and Arabs
he imagines, reprobate that he is, that he is a god
in human form." (45) The pontifical advocate Albert
of Beham, familiar friend of Innocent IV, wrote in
1245 that "like another Lucifer, he has attempted
to scale heaven, to raise his throne above the stars,
in order to become superior to the vicar of the Moat
High ; he has laboured to create a pope ; he has set
up and pulled down bishops ; seated in the temple
of the Lord, as if he himself ^vere God, he has had
his feet kissed by prelates and clergy, and he gives
orders that he is to be called a saint." (46) And;
further on : " He has desired to sit on God's throne
as if he were God ; not only has he attempted to
create a pope and to subject the apostolic see to his
dominion, but he has tried to usurp the divine right,
to change the eternal alliance established by the Gospel,
and to change the laws and conditions of the life of
men." In 1245 and 1248 Innocent IV released the
clergy and subjects of the kingdom' of the Two Sicilies
from their oath of loyalty, removed the Sicilian Church
from the imperial jurisdiction, cut off from political
society and religious communion the counts and citizens
who remained faithful to the emperor's cause, authorized
the ecclesiastical lords to fortify their castles against
the emperor, and solemnly swore to crush to its last
offspring " that race of vipers." (47)

Pietro della Vigna and the courtiers of the Suabian
prince replied in as sonorous a tone as that of the
champions of the Church. Peter was Frederic's

140 MYSTIC ITALY

confidant. " I held the two keys to his heart," says
his soul to Dante, " which I opened and shut with a
very gentle hand." It may be believed that every time
he wrote he merely echoed the emperor's thoughts.
But the manner in which he exalted the religious
mission of his master, in the exaggeration of its ideas
and images, is too closely analogous to the invectives
launched by the defenders of the Holy See. In the
eyes of the chancellor, and even in those of Beraldo,
the archbishop of Palermo, in those of Nicholas of
Rocca, the imperial notary, and the Ghibeline prelates
who paid their court to Csesar with the help of texts
from the Gospel, Frederic was a kind of Messiah, an
apostle charged by God to reveal the Holy Spirit, the
pontiff" of the final Church, " the great eagle with
great wings " that Ezekiel prophesied. As to Pietro
della Vigna, he was to be Fr(ederic's vicar, v as the first
Peter was that of Jesus ; he was the comer-stone, the
fruitful vine whose branches shaded and rejoiced the
world. The Galilean thrice denied his Lord, the
Capuan will never deny his. The mystical funqtion
of the Roman Church was upon the point of coming
to an end. " The lofty cedar of Libanus will be cut
down," cried the popular prophe^ts. " There will be
henceforth but one only God, that is to say ono
monarch. Woe to the clergy! If they fall a newi
order is ready to take their place." Innocent IV
(1243-12 54) found on his table verses announcing
the approaching fall of papal Rome. (48) And the
Provencal troubadours, the exiles of the Albigensian
crusade, who had seen their towns handed over to
the inquisitors, sang in the palaces of Palermo and
Lucera the furious strophes of William Figueira against
Rome : " Treacherous Rome, avarice is ruining you.
You shear the sheep's wool too close. Rome, you
devour the flesh and bones of the simple ; you lead
the blind into the ditch. You take money for the
pardoning of sins. With too heavy a burden, Rome,

THE EMPEROR FREDERIC II 141

do you load yourself. I am g-lad to think, Rome,
that if the emperor, who loves justice, knows how
to make use of his fortune and docs what he ought
to do, soon you will come to a bad end. Rome, I
tell you of a truth, your violence will be seen to fall
to the ground. Rome, may our true Saviour grant
me soon to see your downfall ! " '

But these war cries and formulas of malediction
are very vague evidence for an inquiry into Jiistorical
reality. We must let the dust settle on this .field of
battle if we would see clearly what was the action of
the emperor against the Holy See and against the
Catholic Church. Some considerable documents and
one of the most important episodes of his life, the
crusade of 1229, permit us, we believe, to discover
the main features of the plan of campaign he had
conceived.

It is certain, above all things, that Frederic never
tried to provoke a schism in the Church. He con-
temptuously spoke of Milan as " the dregs of the
Patarins." He never opposed an antipope to his im-
placable enemies, Gregory JX and Innocent IV. He
did not support the false pope of 1227 who, with the
help of the Roman barons, besieged St. Peter's for
six weeks. In the deeds of his chancellery he called
the Church of Rome "my mother." He' called God
to witness his fidelity upon the approved symbol of
the Roman Church. (49) On hi,s death bed, wrote
his son Manfred to king Conrad, " with a penitent
heart, humbly, as an orthodox Christian should, he
recognized the sacrosanct Roman Church, his mother."
Thus till the last he maintained his external adhesion
to Roman Christianity. In .1242, in the long inter-
regnum that followed the death of Celestine IV, and at
the very time when he was returning again and ag^ain
to the walls of Rome, which the Guelfic barons
defended against him, he' wrote to the cardinals in as
pressing a manner as Louis IX himself, upon the

142 MYSTIC ITALY

necessity of restoring to the' Church without delay its
chief pastor. When Innocent IV was elected, he con-
gratulated him with words of a wholly filial character ;
but six months later he threatened the senate and
Roman people with his wrath if Rome did not submit
" to the absolute master of land and sea, whose every
wish ought to be fulfilled." In April 1244 he
announced to Conrad his reconciliation with the pope,
and rejoiced at having been admitted by the pontiff,
in his character of " devout son of the Church, and
as a Catholic prince, into the unity of the Churcli " ;'
but he added : "as eldest and only son, and patron
of the Church, sicut primus et unicus Ecclesie filius et
pair onus, our duty is to uphold its greatness. . . . We
are attempting with all our strength and we desire
with a sincere heart that reformation of the Church
that will give us peace, as well as our friends, and
faithful subjects, for ever." (50)

These are words that throw a singular light upon
the religious history of Frederic II. The patron and
protector of the Church means for him nothing less
than the absolute master of the Church. He intended
that it should bow as docilely as the feudal nobility
and the towns under the rigid law of the state. He
claimed the right to dispose of things ecclesiastical as
freely as of the secular interests of the empire. Already
in 1236 he wrote to Gregory IX upon the question of
the collation of benefices : " You are annoyed because
we have chosen young and unworthy persons. . . .
But is it not, in virtue of the divine right, sacrilege
to dispute the merits of our munificence, that is to say,
the question of knowing whether those whom the
emperor appoints are worthy or not?" In 1246 he
was to write to all the princes of Christendom : " The
pontiff has not the right to exercise any force against
us, even for legitimate causes." (51) In 1248, in a
letter to the emperor of Nicasa, his son-in-law, he
complained bitterly of the unbearable relations the

THE EMPEROR FREDERIC II 143

princes of the west have with the chiefs of the Latin
Church ; in all troubles of the state, in all revolts and
all wars, he detected the ever-present hand of the
Church, that made use of a pestilential liberty. For
him the east only, the schismatic east of B}<zantium
and the Mohammedan califates, have solved the
problem of the relations between church and state ;
they are not troubled with pontitif-kings ; with them
clerical society is not a body politic. That is the
plague of Europe and the west. Asia is indeed
happy ; she enjoys religious peace ; the power of the
prince there knows no limits, because in that part of
the world the Church does not exist outside the
sanctuary. (52)

But this imperial protectorate, this Cassarian govern-
ment of the church by the master of the empire, has
for its necessary condition the reformation of the Roman
Church. It is not enough that the poj>e and bishops
shall have no more political influence, and that the
temporal sovereignty of the pope at Rome shall dis-
appear, as well as the feudal sovereignty of the
bishops in their dioceses. The ecclesiastical hierarchy
must, in addition, renounce its social power ; the field
of its influence must be confined to the direct apostolate
of consciences, and Christians must no longer be
members of a political society in their relations to
the Church, but simply individual souls. In his en-
cyclical of 1246 Frederic wrote: "The clergy have
waxed fat upon the alms of the great, and they oppress
our sons and subjects, forgetting our paternal rights
and no longer respecting in us either the emperor or
the king. . . . Our conscience is clear, and therefore
God is with us ; we call Him to witness as to the
intention we have always had of reducing the clergy
of all ranks, and especially the highest placed among
them, to such a state that they may return to the
condition they occupied in the primitive Church, leading
a wholly apostolic life and imitating the humility of

144 MYSTIC ITALY

Jesus. The clergy of those days conversed with the
angels, performed marvellous miracles, tended the sick,
raised the dead, and reigned over kings by the sanctity
of their lives and not by force of arms. The clergy
of to-day, given up to w^holly worldly pursuits, drunk
with delights, forget God ; they are too rich and their
riches stifle religion in them. It is an act of charity
to relieve them of those riches that crush and damn
them. And so do all of you join with us in putting
hand to this work, that the clergy may lay aside their
superfluity and resign themselves to ordinary circum-
stances in order the better to obey God." (53) In
1249 he accused Innocent IV to the whole of Christen-
dom of having seduced the physician who tried to
poison the emperor at Parma ; he invoked the help
of all the princes for the salvation of " the Holy
Church, my mother ", which, he said, he had the right
and the will " to reform for the honour of God."

Thus Frederic II returned to the theory of Arnold
of Brescia, a theory that his grandfather, Frederic
Barbarossa, had thought to destroy in the person of
Arnold. But the legendary emperor, who suddenly
disappeared in a valley of distant Asia on his way
to the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre, could hardly
have foreseen the strange way in which a Hohen-
staufen would one day understand the meaning of
a crusade and would treat one of the m.ost august
historical traditions of the Empire, of Rome, and of
Christendom.

This crusade of 1229 is closely connected with the
political work of Frederic II. It disconcerted the
Middle Ages. The Holy See saw in it merely an act
of apostasy ; Gregory IX declared that the emperor
started for the Holy, Land not as a knight and pilgrim,
but as a Mohammedan pirate. He had condemned
him for his delay in carrying out the vow made in
12 1 5 to Innocent III ; he excommunicated him for
the entirely novel manner in which he proceeded to

THE EMPEROR FREDERIC IT 145

fulfil that vow. Frederic embarked only after having
negotiated with the soldan of Egypt, the master of
Palestine, by usurpation from his nephew, the soldan
of Damascus. At Jaffa the two princes signed peace
and divided the kingdom of Jerusalem between them.
The holy city was given back to the Christians, with
the exception of the mosque of Omar and the temple
of Solomon, into which only the Mohammedans were
to enter. The evangelical towns, Nazareth and
Bethlehem, and all the chain of posts between
Jerusalem and Jaffa, and those between Jaffa and
St. John of Acre, were given to the emperor. Frederic
and the soldan entered into an alHance against all
enemies, even Christian, of their Asiatic domains. This
clause was aimed at the Templars and Hospitallers.
The treaty was to last ten years, five months, and
fourteen days.

On March 17, 1229, Frederic entered Jerusalem.
When evening came the Christians illuminated their
houses and made the streets resound with festal songs.
On the next day the emperor penetrated with a few
of the faithful into the Holy Sepulchre, where neither
priest nor monk awaited him. There, on the Saviour's
tomb, with his own hands, he crowned himself king
of Jerusalem. On the day after, in his turn, there came
the archbishop of Csesarea who laid the church and
the city under an interdict. The emperor hastily
provided for the fortification of Jerusalem. Then,
almost alone, he traversed the sacred city, now silent
and deserted, and, pursued by the pontifical anathema,
made his way towards Jaffa. He was well aware that
this conquest, that had not cost Christendom a single
drop of blood, was regarded by the Church as a
sacrilege, and that, being the result of a diplomacy
indifferent to the faith of the age, it could not last.

Nevertheless, this crusade of the excommunicated
Caesar had one very important consequence that
Frederic had certainly foreseen and sought. The

10

146 MYSTIC ITALY

peaceful alliance between Europe and Asia, between
Islam and Christianity, modified the ideas upon which
the Middle Ages had been nurtured since the time of
Peter the Hermit. The prejudice of the crusades was
dissipated on the day when it was made evident that
it was by no means necessary to wear the cross, and
win a sterile martyrdom, in order to obtain from the
infidels permission for the cradle and tomb of Jesus to
be made an enclosure reserved to the Christians in the
midst of the Saracen country. The enterprise of 1229
marked the limit of the oecumenical crusades. Never
again was Christendom to be seen quivering and
leaping to arms at the thought of the woes of Jerusalem.
From this time forth the Germanic and Italian prin-
cipalities, and consequently the Empire, renounced
Palestine. It was no longer at Jerusalem but in Egypt,
and afterwards in Tunis, that the last of the crusading
kings tried to recover the key of the Holy Sepulchre.
And what Christendom lost thenceforth in enthusiasm,
the Holy See was to lose in prestige ; that age-long
duel, that judgment of God, had been a cause of great-
ness to the Papacy ; every time the Holy See had
summoned a crusade it had made an impressive display
of its spiritual strength and had evoked a recognition
of the claim of the bishop of Rome to include in his
diocese no less than the entire Christian world. Hence-
forth, until the sixteenth century, each time it appealed
to princes and peoples to undertake a crusade it was
to make manifest its powerlessness, to reveal itself to
be a vox clamant is in desert o. An ideal patrimony
had just been taken from the Church ; a very noble
period in its apostolate was closed for ever.

in

The system of government set up by Frederic II,
so little favourable to the liberties of public life,

THE EMPEROR FREDERIC II 147

encouraged the liberties of the mind by the very attack
it deUvered upon the traditions of the Middle Ages.
Southern Italy, that had been kept awake by the sight
of new things, lent itself with a kind of joy to this
revival of human thought. Upon the other hand, the
emperor's rehgious policy called forth against the
Church and the faith the spirit of criticism and all
the boldness of unbelief. It was dangerous, doubtless,
to profess in the Two Sicilies the old heresies of the
Catharians or to appeal to Arnold of Brescia ; in such
a case a man was looked upon as a revolutionary, or
at least as an old-fashioned thinker. There the state
of men's consciences, in which doubt and indifference
and irony were already interacting with a wholly modern
grace, was really philosophic. Reflection was applied
to matters of faith quite calmly, as though they were
objects of disinterested research ; the value of religion
was pondered by souls no longer tormented by concern
for their religious destiny, that were accustomed to
compare one with another the known religions of the
age and to judge them with serenity.

A book that is invaluable for the understanding of
this singular epoch in the history of southern civiliza-
tion, the Novellino, has preserved for us some of the
popular recollections of Italy about the crisis that
Christianity passed through at that time. The Novellino,
which is, in its earliest texts, the work of a single
compiler, probably a Florentine of the last thirty years
of the thirteenth century, contains a distinct group of
stories proceeding from the Suabian court and the
friends of Frederic II. The emperor is celebrated in
them as " the veritable mirror of the universe for
wisdom ", the spirit of moderation, justice and liberahty ;
his son Conrad, still a child, out of a delicate feeling
of pity, watches over his owoi faults in order to save
his pages from being punished for them. In that court,
in which men's souls soared so high, the narrow practice
and Pharisaical customs of the conventional Christian

148 MYSTIC ITALY

worship are disdained ; they disappeared before the
upright intention of the conscience. A smith, " who
worked continuously at his art, who respected neither
Sunday nor Easter, nor, indeed, any other festival
great or small," was denounced to Frederic. (54) The
emperor, as " lord and master of the law ", had the
artizan summoned into his presence and questioned him.
" I must earn four sous a day ; I give twelve deniers
to God, twelve to my father for his living, for he is
now so old that he can no longer earn anything ; I
throw twelve out of the window, the ones I give my
wife ; the last twelve are for my own expenses." The
emperor resolved without difficulty to sacrifice the letter
of religious observance, upon condition that the work-
man could prove his words and avoid a snare. The
artizan successfully achieved an ingenious test, and
obtained at the same time a hundred golden bezants
from the lords of the court. The emperor, hearing his
story, began to laugh and said to him : " Go, my worthy
fellow, thou hast been stronger than all my wise men.
God give thee good luck I " The smith returned home,
therefore, safe and sound, with permission to do as
he pleased.

As a foil to Frederic, we find in the Novelllno, Saladin
(1138-1193), the soldan of the third crusade, "a very
noble lord, chivalrous and liberal." Through him Islam
occupied a splendid position by the side of the
Christian religion ; upon one occasion he even gave a
lesson in piety to the Christian knights. One day, in
the midst of a truce, Saladin paid a visit to the camp
of the crusaders. He saw the lords eating at tables
*' covered with very white table-cloths " ; he saw the re-
past of the king of France, and highly praised its order
and seemliness. " But he saw the poor folk seated
miserably on the ground, and loudly blamed their
leaders, saying that the friends of the Christian God
ate in a viler fashion than other men." Then it was
the turn of the crusaders to go to Saladin's camp.

THE EMPEROR FREDERIC II 149

The soldan received them iii his tent, where they trod
a bright carpet whose design consisted of crosses ;
" they spat on it as if on the bare earth." Then he
spoke, severely rebuking them : " You preach the cross,
yet you come and insuk it under my very eyes ; you
love your God in word and seeming only, not in
deed." (55)

There remained one religion to be uplifted, the old
Jewish faith, the mother of the two others which, in the
west and the east alike, treated it with great harshness.
It was in Saladin's presence that the Old Testament,
according to the story-teller, revenged itself upon the
New Testament and the Koran. The soldan had need
of money ; he had a rich Jew brought to him in order
to despoil him. He asked him which of the three
faiths was the best. If the Jew answered the Jewish,
it was an insult to his master's faith ; if he said the
Saracen, it was apostasy ; in either case an excuse for
confiscation. But the Jew had an edifying story in
reserve, one that goes back, perhaps, as far as the
Babylonian captivity. "My lord, there was a father
who had three sons and a ring, the best in the world,
adorned with a precious stone. Each of the ,sons begged
the father to leave him the ring at his death. And
the father, to content each of them, called a good
goldsmith and said to him : ' Master, make me two
rings like this one and put in each a stone similar to
this.' The goldsmith made the rings so alike that no
one but the father could distinguish the true one. He
called each of his sons to him separately, and each
believed he had received the true ring, which only the
father really knew. That, my lord, is the story of
the three religions. The father who gave them knows
which is the best, and each of his sons, that is to say
we men, believe that we have the good one." The
soldan was amazed, and let the Jew go without doing
him any harm. (56)

That is an apologue that was bound to be very

150 MYSTIC ITALY

popular in that southern land which was so little prone
to fanaticism, whether religious or political, x^fter the
Byzantines, the Italian south had accepted the Arabs
in Sicily, then the Normans in the Two Sicilies ; it
had seen, without surprise, the Suabian princes take
the place of the Norman adventurers, and when at
the semi -oriental court of Frederic II it contemplated
the good understanding between Latin and Greek
bishops, Arab imams and Jewish rabbins, this harmony
of all religions and all clergy seemed to it a touching
symbol of its varied history. But this religious peace,
viewed from afar by Guelfic Italy and the world of
monks, looked like an abominable compact with Satan,
a new and more odious treason against the Christian
faith upon the part of the emperor. The very peculiar
manner in which Rome has at all times regarded
opinions contrary to Roman orthodoxy was bound to
display the reality to the partisans of the Holy See in a
strange light. To tolerate and conciliate as equally good
all revelations had soon the effect of an insult inflicted
equally upon them all. Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed
thus received the same buiTet from the imperial hand.
The De Tribus Impostoribas, that caused the Middle
Ages a terror all the more profound because no one
ever saw a single line of it, that legendary book, was
accordingly attributed, without hesitation, to Frederic.
At first the title. The Three Imposters, had been only
a blasphemy gratuitously attributed by the scholastics
to the Arabic philosopher Averroes. Pope Gregory IX
made a doctrine of it, and deliberately named the
inventor of it : " That pestilential king asserts that
the universe has been deceived by three imposters,
tribus baratoribus ; that two of them died in glory,
while Jesus was hanged on the cross," (57) And of this
devilish doctrine the popular imagination, inflamed
mercilessly by the preaching of the mendicant orders,
made in the emperor's lifetime a book that was searched
for and whose authorship was disputed for five centuries.

THE EMPEROR FREDERIC II 151

After Frederic II, Pietro della Vigna, Machiavelli, and
Giordano Bruno ; one of the last philosophers accused
of having written it was Spinoza.

IVi

And Gregory IX said of Frederic II, in the same
document from which 1 ha\e just quoted : " He lies
to the extent of affirming that all those are fools who
believe that God, creator of the universe and omnipotent,
was bom of a virgin. . . . He adds that it is impossible
to believe anything absolutely except that which is
proved by the laws of things and by natural reason."
,We have at last reached the emperor's real heresy. It
is now no longer a matter of reducing the political
power of the Church, of taking from the popes the
supreme control of Christendom ; it is the very prestige
of the conventional Christian faith that he wishes to
assail ; and, just as he has secularized the state, by
subjecting all the forces of society, the Church included,
to the will of a single master, so he is bent upon
secularizing knowledge, philosophy, and faith, by
giving to them reason as their sole and sovereign
mistress.

To carry out this great revolution Frederic has allies
drawn from many sides, who have no difficulty in agree-
ing with each other and with him, the Arabs, the Jews,
and the Epicureans, that is to say, the infidels scattered
throughout all Italy. Add to this army that is recruited
throughout the entire world, in Syria and in Spain alike,
learned Greeks, Asiatics or Sicilians, such as Master
Theodoros, who was a kind of philosophical chancellor
to the emperor, who drew up his master's correspon-
dence with the sultans of Cairo, Tunis, and Morocco ;
mathematicians, such as Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa,
the first Christian algebraist ; refugees from the
Albigensian lands of southern France, troubadours or

152 MYSTIC ITALY

rabbins, who brought memories of a country where the
chivalric civilization had accommodated itself both to
heresy and to religious indifference. With the aid of
all these free-thinkers or malcontents, Frederic showed
the Middle Ages, at the very moment when scholas-
ticism was about to begin its most brilliant period in
France, that human thought, emancipated from all
theological discipline and texts of Scripture^ could in-
vestigate the secrets of God, search into the mysteries
of the soul, and discover the laws of nature.

What chiefly characterizes the intellectual revival
directed by the Hohenstaufen is the predominance of
the Arabic culture. But, we must remark, it was not
Islam that the emperor opposed to the conventional
Christianity of his day ; the Mohammedan tradition
to which he attached himself was that of the dissidents
from Islam. The movement in favour of free investi-
gation, inaugurated at Bagdad as early as the eighth
century, and directed against the divinity of the Koran
and the dogma of predestination, had passed into Spain
with the Ommiades. There, in spite of the popular
fanaticism and violent conduct of the Almoravides, it
had spread in Andalusia, in the school of Cordova,
and in the twelfth century had been incarnated in the
person of Averroes. Averroes (1126-1198) was for
the Middle Ages the philosopher par excellence, and
the sum total of negations, accumulated by four
centuries of dialectic and gathered together by him,
seemed so monstrous an impiety that the Church
designated him in his turn as " patriarch of atheism "
and antichrist. Ibn To fail, who passed as one of his
masters, had already professed absolute indifference in
matters of religion and the right of the conscience
freely to distinguish the good and the true. Averroes
was filled with utter aristocratic disdain for the mediocre
devotee, condemned to the faith of the simple, and
to theological superstitions ; he proved from the Koran
itself that God orders inquiry into the truth by the

THE EMPEROR FREDERIC II 153

reason and by science, and that philosophy alone truly
understands religion. " The proper religion for
philosophers ", he says, " is the study of what
is ". (58) The current beliefs about God, the angels,
prophets, sacred ceremonies, prayer and penitence, are
excellent for the ignorant, for the common man. As
to the sage, he governs his conscience as he pleases,
he can choose the noblest among several religions, or
content himself with an idealistic interpretation of the
creeds and dogmas of the established religion. His
reason contains in itself a complete revelation ; in it
he finds his doctrine, morality and worship, according
to the measure in which they reside in a choice soul.

Averroism, therefore, was welcome to the Suabian
court, where, for some time, according to an uncertain
tradition, the two sons of Averroes represented their
father's wisdom. Sicilian civilization gladly allowed
itself to be penetrated by that elegant scepticism of
the Arabs that became its ally against the enemies of
the emperor, the intolerance of the popes, the gloomy
zeal of the Guelfs, and the outcry of monks and petty
clergy. Frederic II showed, by the entire conduct of
his life, to what an extent the disdainful eclecticism
of the Mohammedan doctors suited his temperament ;
he succeeded in maintaining with the dominant religion
of the west those relations that were indispensable for
the policy of the empire, while at the same time
waging an incessant war against the Holy See and
reserving for himself, in his secret harems at Lucera and
Capua, among his eunuchs and astrologers, opportunities
of perpetual recourse to Islam.

But the Arabs, and side by side with them the
Spanish or Provengal Jews, their immediate disciples,
were destined to initiate the Two Sicilies into a rational
work loftier than scepticism or religious indifference.
The natural function of the reason, as soon as it is
disengaged from theology or faith, is to propound to
itself the problems that religion solves, and to explain

154 MYSTIC ITALY

the sum total of things without having recourse to
divine action. This very free inquiry, of which science
is the fruit, had been inaugurated by the Greek
philosophers, and now for some centuries the Arabs,
guided by the unerring sentiment of intellectual tradi-
tions, had been advancing along the road once trodden
for humanity by Greece. On this highway of thought
the Arabs had at once come across Aristotle ; they
had read him, commented upon and translated the
prodigious encyclopaedia. Under their guidance the
>< Christian west and the University of Paris had formed
for themselves an idea, often a very confused one, of
the peripatetic philosophy and ancient wisdom. The
Church, surprised that solutions so contradictory could
be derived from Aristotle, at one time condemned and
at another embraced with veneration the old master.
It put forth all its energies to bend him beneath the
scholastic system, to put Greek rationalism at the service
of theology, to find in the treatises of the Stagirite a
continuous interpretation for its religious metaphysics,
physics, and cosmology. At the very period at which
we have arrived, towards the middle of the thirteenth
century, Aristotle was about to reign over the school
through his great interpreters, Alexander of Hales
( ? -1245), whose Summa Theologia, of slight intrinsic
value, is the first work of the mediaeval centuries based
upon a knowledge of all the writings of Aristotle and
those of the Arabian commentators, Albertus Magnus
(i 206-1 280), and Thomas Aquinas ( i 225?-! 274).
But that Aristotle, whom the Church regarded at that
time as a sort of pagan forerunner of Christ, and who,
in the fourteenth century, in the paintings of Orcagna,
Gozzoli, Gaddi, and Traini, stands, sometimes after the
manner of a deacon, beside Aquinas trampling under
foot Averroes and Mohammed, was no longer a very
disturbing teacher ; he was the master of the syllogism,
who allowed the scholastics to reason in a very
innocuous way upon matter and form, the principle of

THE EMPEROR FREDERIC II 155

individuation, the last incorruptible heaven, and the first
immovable source of motion.

The Aristotle of the scholastics was by no means the
heresiarch Aristotle of Averroes and the Arabs with^
whom the Emperor Frederic had associated himself in
his philosophical enterprise. At Bagdad, Cairo, Toledo,
and Cordova, the Mohammedan peripateticism had
extracted from the Metaphysics or the Treatise upon
the Soul two dangerous questions, the solution of which
singularly confirmed the revolt of unbelieving con-
sciences in the very bosom of Islam. Now the books
of Averroes clearly presented the last phase of these
questions, the one, the eternity of matter, which implies
the negation of a creating God, the other, the active and
universal intellect, which leads to the negation of
personal immortality. (59) Upon the first of these
problems, the gravest problems that every theology has
to solve, the Arabic interpretation very closely followed
the ideas of the Stagirite. If original matter is only the
simple possibility of being, every substance is thus
eternal by its matter, that is to say, by its power to be.
Matter was not engendered, it is incorruptible. The
series of generations proceeding from this eternal source
is infinite ; movement, which is the condition of
coming into being, is also eternal and continuous,
since every movement has its cause in that which
precedes it. The world therefore is uncreated and
eternal ; God knows only general laws ; He is occupied
with the species and not with the individual, for if He
knew the particular there would be perpetual innova-
tion in His being. The doctrine of the one and only
intellect is parallel to this metaphysical system ; but,
as it proceeds with less precision from Aristotle's work,
the philosophical imagination of the Arabs, who never
had, says Ernest Renan, a very clear sense of the
personality of the conscience, left a less definite impress
upon it. With Averroes the active intellect, common
to all the human race, is nothing else than the

156 MYSTIC ITALY

universality of the principles of reason, the unity of
psychological nature in the entire species. The reason,
independent of the individual, is an absolute and im-
passible thing ; humanity, which is the very act of
this reason, is necessary and eternally springing to birth.
The universal intellect, separable from the body^ is
incorruptible. It alone is immortal, like the laws that
it conceives ; the individual intellect, sensibility, memory,
passion, suffering, love, all that makes of a man a
person distinct from other men, is corruptible and perish-
able, and it is dissipated with the mortal elements of
the body. But the immortal intellect is absolutely
devoid of conscience. Therefore let not man expect
resurrection or the joys of Paradise and let him laugh
V at eternal woe. The Arabic peripateticism drove away
as the dreams of a child the two great hopes, as well
as the supreme anguish of humanity, the creating and
paternal God and the future life.

Frederic II (12 12-1250) was sincerely interested in
these lofty problems, not as a Christian who asks for
the coniirmation of his faith from profane wisdom, but
as a free spirit that aspires to the truth, however distress-
ing it may be for the common beliefs of his age. He
presided over a regular philosophical academy at his
court. A disciple of the schools of Oxford, Paris, and
Toledo, Michael Scot (1175 ?-i234 ?), an orthodox
Christian, patronized by Gregory IX, ,had brought him
in 1227 the chief Aristotelian treatises of Averroes
translated into Latin, and among them that of the
Treatise upon the Soul. In 1229 the emperor, while
negotiating with the soldan, charged the Mohammedan
ambassadors with learned questions addressed to the
doctors of Arabia, Egypt, and Syria. Later on he
again questioned upon the same metaphysical points
Juda ben Salomo Cahen, a Spanish Jew, author of an
encyclopaedia, the Inquisitio Sapientice ; finally, towards
1240, he renewed this rational inquiry throughout the
whole of Islam, and then to Ibn Sabin of Murcia, the

THE EMPEROR FREDERIC II 157

most celebrated dialectician in Spain. The latter replied,
" for the love of God and the triumph of Islam ", and
the Arabic text of his answers has been preserved, under
the title of " Sicilian Questions ", , together with the
inquiries of the emperor, in a manuscript at Oxford.
" Did Aristotle ", P^ederic asked, " prove the eternity
of the world? If he did not, of what use are his argu-
ments? What is the aim of theological science, and
what are the preliminary principles, if it depends upon
pure reason? Wliat is the nature of the soul? Is it
immortal? What is the proof of its immortality?
What is the meaning of these w^ords of Mohammed :
The heart of the believer is in the hands of the
merciful? " (60)

ITiese bold ideas, towards which thus far the Middle
Ages had turned only to exorcize them, passed through
the civilization of imperial Italy, following, in a kind
of parallel course, the same direction as the emperor's
politics. The Ghibeline party felt itself all the freer
in dealing with the Church of Rome in that, to a still
greater extent, the philosophy patronized by its prince
resolutely enfranchised the human reason from the
obsession of the supernatural. And as all metaphysics
conceals at its basis a moral doctrine, the partisans of
the emperor, those who loved temporal power and
earthly riches and happiness, while troubling very little
about the eternity of the world and the one and only
intellect, eagerly welcomed a wisdom that reassured
them about what comes after death, rendered the
present life more agreeable, disconcerted the priest and
inquisitor, and extinguished the pope's thunderbolts.
The " Epicureans " of Florence, in whom the twelfth
century had seen the worst enemies of the social peace,
since they brought down the anger of heaven upon the
city, were upon two occasions, towards the end of the
reign of Frederic and under Manfred, the masters of
their republic. The Uberti at that time were at the
head of the imperial party in upper Italy ; they ruled

158 MYSTIC ITALY

with harshness and grandeur of soul, and, by their
side, " more than a hundred thousand nobles ", says
Benvenuto of Imola, " men of high condition, who
believed, with their captain Farinata and Epicurus,
that Paradise should be sought only in the present
world." (6i) Until the end of the thirteenth century,
through all the vicissitudes of their political fortune,
these indomitable Ghibelines carried their religious un-
belief to a very high degree, perhaps even to a radical
materialism. " When the good folk saw Guido
Calvalcanti passing in deep meditation through the
streets of Florence," says Boccaccio, " they used to say,
' He is seeking reasons to prove that there is no
God ' ". (62) The same had been said of Manfred,
who did not believe, says Villani, " either in God, or in
the saints, but solely in the pleasures of the flesh."
To the Tuscan cardinal Ubaldini, who valiantly upheld
the accursed part of the Hohenstaufen at Rome, were
attributed these words, which are quite Voltairean in
their flavour : " If the soul exists, I have lost mine in
the cause of the Ghibelines." We can see that in these
freethinkers all the characteristic features of unbelief
are the same ; they have rejected, as superstitious, the
essential beliefs of all the conventional theologies ;
whether they know it or not, they are pupils of Aver roes.
Dante has grouped some of them, Farinata, Frederic II,
Ubaldini, and Cavalcante Calvalcanti, in the same pit
in hell ; but the most ** magnanimous " of them all,
Farinata, will not believe in hell, whose flames are
devouring him ; he holds himself erect, from the waist
upwards, from out his fiery sarcophagus, and casts a
haughty eye over the horrible region which he will
despise through all eternity :

Ed ei s'ergea col petto e colla fronte.

Come avesse I'inferno in gran dispitto. (63)

To this metaphysic of unbelief and this effacement
of the supernatural in the life of the conscience there

THE EMPEROR FREDERIC II 159

corresponds a new view of nature. Here miracle has
vanished ; the omnipresence of God, that joy of pure
souls, and the perpetual ambush of the devil, that terror
of weak spirits, have both disappeared ; there remains
nothing but the unalterable laws that rule the indefinite
evolution of living things, the combinations of forces
and elements. The revival of the natural sciences had
as its first condition a wholly rational theory of nature.
It was once more toward Aristotle, the natural and
physical philosopher, that the Arabs, as alchemists and
physicians, brought southern Italy back. About 1230
Michael Scot translated for Frederic the abridgment
made by Avicenna (980-1037) of the History of
Animals. Master Theodore was the chemist of the
court and prepared syrups and sundry kinds of sugar
for the imperial table. The great school at Salerno
renewed medical study for the west, following the
methods of Arabic science, the direct observation of
the organs and functions of the human body, the quest
of salutary plants, the analysis of poisons and experi-
ments with thermal waters. Frederic revived the
regulation of the Roman emperors that forbade the
practice of medicine to any one who had not undergone
an examination and obtained a degree. He fixed the
medical and surgical course at five years. He had the
properties of the warm springs at Pozzuoli studied. He
himself gave prescriptions to his friends and invented
receipts. There were brought him from Asia and Africa
the rarest animals, and he observed their habits ; the
book De arte venandi cum avibus, that is attributed
to him, is a treatise upon the anatomy and training of
birds of chase. Simple people told talcs about his
experiments. He disembowelled men, it was said, in
order to study the process of digestion ; he brought up
children in isolation to see what tongue they would
invent, whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic, or the
language of their parents, says Yrh. Salimbene, whose
mind was much perturbed by all these strange things ;

160 MYSTIC ITALY

he had the whirlpools in the Strait of Messina sounded
by his divers ; he was interested in the distance that
separates the earth from the stars. The monks were
scandalized by this universal curiosity ; they saw in it
the signs of pride and impiety ; Salimbene, with
ineffable disdain, characterizes it as superstition, accursed
perversity, criminal presumption and madness. (64)
The Middle Ages did not like the secrets of the divine
operations to be too closely scrutinized, or the play
of human life or the celestial machine to be investi-
gated. The natural sciences seemed to them to be
suspect of witchcraft and sorcery. Italy, led by the
Hohenstaufen in the path of experimental observation,
was long to be the only province in Christendom where
men could contemplate the phenomena and laws of the
visible world without uneasiness.

V

Finally, wherever the Suabian culture spread, we find
centres of poetry in the vulgar tongue, in which the
religious indifference and natural philosophy I have just
described are once more manifest. Love is its only
theme, but it is no longer a love purified by a kind t>f
mysticism, love stronger than death itself, such as
northern France knew in the romances of the Round
Table ; nor was it ardent and sensual love, yet tortured
by shame and the fear of sin, such as the woeful letters
of Abelard and Heloise had revealed to the Middle Ages.
It was instead an elegant passion, curious of pleasure,
a stranger to all acute suffering, very resigned to change
and with a keen enjoyment of the little storms it
delighted to raise, the refined love of which the
Provencals had been singing for the last two; centuries.
Here obviously the models, too closely imitated by
the Sicilian troubadours, have somewhat impaired the
originality of the sentiment ; one can hardly suspect

THE EMPEROR FREDERIC II 161

the violent voluptuousness of the seraglios of the Two
Sicilies in the caressing sighs, the petty quarrels in
subtle language, the charming, thoughtless and childish
music of the Provengal lyre. (66) All, the emperor,
king Frederic, king Enzo, Pietro della Vigna, as well
as poets of less illustrious name, sing in the same tone
the smiles and treachery, of their mistress, " flower
among flowers ".

La fiore d'ogne fiore ;
so delicate, of so pure a countenance,

Tant e fine e pura ;
fair, with face white as silver,

Bionda, viso d'argiento.

Believe only half what they say when they tell you,
as does Pietro della Vigna, that they " are dying of
love ", or, like Tommaso di Sasso di Messina, that they
'* arc going mad because of their love ".

Son divenuto paccio, troppo amando.

This chivalrous devotion is only a /eu d'esprit ; these
rationalistic souls have too frankly renounced idealism
to bear with the great anguish of unhappy love ; they
are too ingenuously on the lookout for the actual
pleasures of passion, willingly to taste its disenchant -
ments and bitterness. If they bewail the death of their
imistress, they give us to understand that all is
over and hopeless ; they have not a glimpse of
that " other world " of the true love poets, the
region where the immortal phantom of earthly love
survives. The past and its joys, now destroyed,
occupy all their heart. A lover cries : " Cruel,

11

162 MYSTIC ITALY

pitiless death . . . thou hast taken from me my
pleasures and delights ",

Tolto m'cli 'I soUazo e'l gioco.

A mistress who is weeping for her lover says to death :
" Thou hast taken away from me my delights and
gladness, thou hast changed my joys into great
sorrow ", (67)

del mio disporto
Messa m'di in gran tristeza.

This emotion is sincere. It owes nothing to literary
artifice. It is the cry of Boccaccio's Fiammetta, deserted
by her lover. The Epicurean, to use the name given
by the Italian Middle Ages to the representatives of
the Suabian world, cannot find consolation for the lost
joy in the melancholy charm of memory, still less can
he live for a love without voluptuousness, and, as it were,
enfranchised from its natural law. It is not easy to
imagine Dante or Petrarch singing of Beatrice or Laura
at the Saracenic festivals of Frederic II.

' ' , VI

•We can now determine with precision what was the
importance of the Ghibeline civilization for the Italian
conscience. In the emperor's historical work, the
enterprises that most struck the imagination of the
age, namely, the struggle against the Holy See, the
endeavour he made to despoil the pope of his social
primacy, the wholly diplomatic crusade of 1229, the
constitution of a despotic empire freed from the feudal
compact and the old mystical tradition about the balance
of the two powers, were, we believe, the least serious
innovations ; they merely confirmed the Italian Middle
Ages in some of their most ancient ideas, those, for
example, that the state of pohtical society, as well as

THE EMPEROR FREDERIC II 163

that of the Church itself, was by no means unalterable
as a dogma ; that the relations between men and their
temporal or spiritual masters might be changed to meet
the needs of the time ; that the ascendency of the
Church over humanity was the result of transitory con-
ditions, and consequently as mobile as those very
conditions. We shall see almost immediately, in the
course of the thirteenth century, that the most dangerous
enemies, not only of the Holy Sec, but of Roman
orthodoxy, were the most fanatical in their Christianity,
that they believed themselves to be the followers of
Joachim of Flora &nd Francis of Assisi, and cursed in
the most vehement manner the name and memory of
Frederic II. No. It was not by means of such
external events as these that Frederic most deeply and
permanently influenced Italian thought and life. It was
through the philosophical spirit of the civilization that
he encouraged that something new brought into the
rehgious Hfe of Italy. This spirit showed that it is
possible, by the natural development of the reason, for
a man to detach himself absolutely from Christianity.
But as the Hohenstaufen, with their really free minds,
never sought to substitute a different religion for the
Roman communion, or a hostile heresy, they never gave
men to understand that it was rigorously necessary
to abandon orthodox Christianity. They gave the
peninsula a lesson in intellectual independence. There-
in they responded to the profound instincts of the Italian
soul. They permitted men convinced of the excellence
of the rational Hfe, as well as those who most openly
resisted the influence of the priest over the individual
and the influence of the Church over society, to reserve
in their hearts that measure of the Christian faith which
they thought good for them. The Sicilian culture gave
birth to many unbelievers or persons who were indif-
ferent, but it strengthened in the Italians the taste for
personal religion and the free investigation of divine
things. In the age of Francis, and as Francis himself

164 MYSTIC ITALY

did, it removed them for a long time from the scholastic
Christianity that Abelard had withstood in the twelfth
century, and which the University of Paris was about to
set up with so toilsome an effort. Only, by the mere
efforts of its dominant philosophy, it placed in the
heart of Italian Christendom a very useful ballast that
kept the most reasonable of its Christians far from the
extremes of individual mysticism.

CHAPTER V

EXALTATION OF THE FRANCISCAN MYSTICISM.
THE ETERNAL GOSPEL. JOHN OF PARMA.
FRA SALIMBENE

Francis of Assisi, like all religious founders, had
formed a very high opinion of human nature. He
believed that the ideal of purity, asceticism and charity,
embraced by his first followers would always continue
to be the light of his Order and the consolation of
Italy. His excellent soul was only half mistaken. For
more than a century the mystical impulse survived in
the institution of Assisi, at times it even went so high
and so far that the Franciscans, who sincerely wished
to remain faithful to the master's revelation, lost sight
of earth, civil society, and even of the Church. Francis
had not foreseen that the virtues that formed the nobility
of the rising Order would become a danger when that
Order, permeating all Christendom, would manifest an
apostolic Christianity contradicting the discipline, the
historical traditions, and the temporal needs of the
Roman Church. The apprehension of a conflict
between the " religions " perhaps crossed the mind of
Innocent III for a moment. Francis was incapable
of suspecting it. At the most he had an inkling, in the
last days of his life, that many of his brothers would
soon grow weary of too rigid a rule, and, through
weakness or discouragement, would seek to compromise
with the world. He may have thought of apostasies,
but he had too simple a confidence in God for the; sad
thought of schism ever to enter his mind.

165

166 MYSTIC ITALY

I

The increasing exaltation of Franciscan Christianity
is explained by two very cogent reasons. The first
lies in the very prestige of Francis, He had left an
almost divine image in the memory of his disciples.
The people used to say even in his lifetime : " He
listens to those whom God will no longer hear." He
was regarded as a sort of Messiah, charged by God
to fulfil the promises of Jesus. It needed but a step
to pass from that view to regard the good tidings
of Assisi as the definite canon of religious belief, and
the chapel of Portiuncula as the tabernacle of the
universal Church. The second reason is the extra-
ordinary liberty given by Francis to individual con-
sciences that were fired by zeal for an ever-higher
perfection. It was a ferment ever at work that uplifted
the thirteenth century in Italy and brought forth a whole
crop of religious creations. Moreover, men believed
they were imitating the founder by seeking to draw
nearer to God, as he had formerly done, through a
purely personal movement. Thus the adoration of
this great figure and the high esteem in which individual
findings of the way of salvation were held were bound
to cause the Franciscan body to look upon themselves
as a chosen family, more jealous of the independence
of its faith than of common obedience to the
ecclesiastical hierarchy, and of respect for the narrow
letter of doctrine.

It was the characteristic virtue of the Order, perfect
poverty, the one most easy for each affiliated member
to practise, since it was at the cost of the entire
community, that was the occasion of a long crisis, of
which only the first period comes within the scope of
this book. Down to 13 12, at the time of the Council
of Vienne, the debate apparently turned only upon a
question of Franciscan discipline. The truly faithful

FRANCISCAN MYSTICISM 167

followers of Francis, the Observants or Spirituals,
defended the precept of absolute renunciation against
those known as the Conventuals, who built great
convents, and who returned to monastic property, to
humane letters, and to the profane sciences. From
1312 onwards the question assumed larger proportions ;
the very poverty of Jesus and the apostles came into
debate. It was held by the Spirituals that Jesus and
the chosen twelve, having possessed nothing of their
own, had made the virtue of perfect poverty a strict
article of faith for Christians. The secular Church and
the Papacy of Avignon were profoundly moved by this
new view sustained by the most ardent of the Spirituals,
of the Little Brothers or the Fratlcelli. The matter
was complicated, moreover, by the intrusion of politics
into theology, and by the interest shown by the emperor
and the princes in a doctrine well calculated to diminish
the temporal power of the Church. The Franciscan
Order at that time had heretics and martyrs in its
ranks, especially in the south of France. (68)

■We are dealing here only with the long preparation
for that acute crisis, with the period marked by
the singular book of Fra Angelo Clareno (1247 ?-
^liTil)^ the Historia Septein Tribulaiionum ordinis
Minorum, with which Wadding was only imperfectly
acquainted. (69) Angelo in this book, in conformity
with the chronological method of the Joachimites,
summed up in six epochs of tribulation the struggles
and woes of the community of the Spirituals from the
middle of the thirteenth century onwards ; the seventh
epoch, that began at the time when the author was
writing, was to carry the true brothers to the day of
the final triumph of their form of Christianity. Fra
Angelo struggled against persecution for seventy years ;
he was accused of heresy, condemned to perpetual
imprisonment, delivered in 1289 by the general of the
Order, Raymond Gaufridi ; and then, after a short
period of repose under the pontificate of Celestine V

168 MYSTIC ITALY

(1294), he was obliged to hide in an island of the
Adriatic, or in the hermitages of the Roman Campagna
and the kingdom of Naples, in order to escape from
Boniface VIII. He died in 1337, well stricken in
years, after having collected in his chronicle the recollec-
tions of the last companions of Francis of Assisi and
the evidence of the great fight he himself had carried on
for more than half a century, between the age of John
of Parma, who was the general of the Franciscans from
1247 and 1257, and that of Dante, on behalf of the
doctrine.

In 13 1 7 Angelo had written to pope John XXII
(13 1 6-1 334) a long apologetic letter defending the
orthodoxy of his brothers ; at the same time, from his
residence at Avignon, and later on from the neighbour-
hood of Rome or the recesses of the Basilicate, he
wrote letters to the Spirituals, scattered throughout all
Italy, in order to confirm them in their faith, according
to the tradition of the first apostles. These documents
are most precious ; they expound, with greater clear-
ness and serenity than the History of the Tribula-
tions the foundations of the doctrine of the strict
Franciscans, in the manner in which they were fixed
immediately after the death of Francis and were per-
petuated as a creed adopted by all kinds of sects,
accepted by the Joachimites of the thirteenth century,
down to the crisis of the Fraticelli. The Episiola
excusatoria bears witness to a firm attachment to the
faith of the Roman Church, " the only true Church ".
It refutes the calumnies with which the mystics had
been overwhelmed under Boniface VIII, those, among
others, that in their view the Church of Rome had
lost the Holy Spirit, that the true priesthood resided
in the communion of the Spirituals,, and that the Eastern
Church is better than the Western. " We are merely
poor men or hermit brothers, who observe in the desert
the poverty to which we have pledged our lives." But
to his brothers Angelo wrote in less humble a tone.

FRANCISCAN MYSTICISM 169

" Christ has spoken to us by the fathers, the apostles,
the prophets, the martyrs, the doctors, and the saints.
He has spoken to us in the last place by His seraphic
son Francis, heir of all His other witnesses. . . . The
blessed Francis was in the world under the form of
Jesus crucified. He humbled himself and that is why
Christ has exalted him. Jesus called Francis to the
practise of perfect poverty ; He chose him for that
mission and bade him adopt the evangelic rule. And
pope Innocent proclaimed to the world, in a general
council, that, by obedience to the Holy See, Francis
had chosen the evangelical life and had promised to
keep it to please Christ." " To seek heavenly things,
desire the spiritual and despise the earthly, reach out
to those things that are before, forget those that are
behind, that is our vow, the imitation of Christ, the
pledge of our immortality, the perfect observance against
which neither law nor decree can avail anything, to
which all authority and all power must yield. ... If
king or even a pope bade us do anything contrary to
this faith, to the confession of this faith, to this
charity and its works, we will obey God rather than
men. . . . Christ, the only Saviour, teaches all men,
by the example of His life and His divine preaching,
the way of salvation and justice, to husbands who have
wives and goods, to the clergy and canons who possess
in common, to those who, imitating His life and that
of the apostles, possess nothing, make a vow that they
will possess nothing and wish to have nought of their
own. . . . Fly from those who live evil lives and obey
their belly and their greediness ; speak not to them,
but weep over them and pray for them. Honour the
lord archbishop and the other clergy, and consider
not their sins, for you have promised to live as if
you were dead to them and strangers to the things they
do. . . . The Rule is superior to all other authority ;
obedience to the Rule goes before obedience to the
ministers, the general, the cardinal-patron. . . . There

iro MYSTIC ITALY

is no authority in the Rule against the Rule, as there
is none in the Church against the Church. . . . The
Rule is the remedy against the tyranny of false prelates,
for nothing can prevail against it. . . . Francis put
nothing therein of himself, he wrote under the dictation
of Jesus Christ." The bold Franciscan ended this letter
with a very curious consultation upon the case of a
man " of good and holy will," to whom the ecclesiastical
authority has forbidden the holy mysteries, and who
craves the pontiff's absolution. Angelo quoted the
apostle : " All that proceedeth not from faith is sin " ;
faith, he added, is the very judgment of the conscience.
Doubtless it would be good for the pope to give absolu-
tion to this man, but Angelo did not wish the conscience
to be straightened by casuistry and this sinner to be
frightened by the difificulties of the sacrament. *' We
are all confined, by reason of our sins, in the shadow of
death ; let us therefore pray with a penitent heart,
in order that grace may wash out the stains of our
faults ; thus we shall have, through this anticipated
confession, confessione previa, a remission and internal
absolution wider than those who would absolve us could
comprehend. All fear will be driven from our hearts,
we shall enjoy peace through faith and the testimony
of our heart and the spirit of Christ. For, when the
spirit of contrition touches the soul, it removes the stain
of sin, and it then teaches us the obedience and respect
that are seemly to accord to the ministers of the Church
and the divine sacraments ".

II

This theory, written only at the beginning of the
fourteenth century, corresponds, from the middle of the
thirteenth century, to the inevitable evolution of the
Christianity of Assisi. Through poverty and the inner
life this world of the Spirituals was escaping from

FRANCISCAN MYSTICISM 171

the hand of the Church. He who is devoid of all
things, but who will never suffer from lack of alms,
is unassailable ; he is as free as the birds. And the
man who undertakes to purify himself and his own
conscience by his tears need no longer trouble about the
priest, the works he enjoins and the penance .he imposes ;
salvation results from a direct understanding between
the Christian and God. It is clear that a religious
society in which so free a theology is manifested forms
a church within the Church, a Christendom independent
of all conventional Christianity. The mystics detached
themselves from Rome, returned to the solitude of the
old hermits, and gradually removed themselves from
the orthodox Christian family. They went back to
the asceticism of Joachim of Flora, thus compromising
the very foundation of Francis in its work of charity.

Scarcely was the apostle dead when the conflict
broke out between the brothers who wished to remain
united to the Holy See and those for whom the
evangelical inspiration was superior to the hierarchical
discipline. The Spirituals of the early days came into
collision with the vicar of Francis, Elias of Cortona,
who from 1232 to 1239 governed the Franciscan 30ciety
with remarkable energy and cleverness.

Elias was a politician and a capable man, not averse
from cunning, and perhaps a man of letters. He
thought of substituting a despotic form of government
for the parliamentary constitution of the Order. He
told the brothers that the strict Rule was very harsh,
intended only for men like the founder and " neighbours
of God " ; at the same time he obtained from the
Holy See mitigations in the law of poverty and per-
mission to receive money per interpositas personas.
That was a way of evading the Rule and bringing the
Order nearer the Church by community of earthly
interests. All those " who maintained the inspiration
of Francis " secretly combined, for fear " of the power
of this man and the number of his adherents ", Elias,

172 MYSTIC ITALY

it was said, lived like a prince, thanks to the money
received for the basilica of Assisi ; he had valets,
horses, a sumptuous table, the train of a feudal bishop ;
the worthy Bernard of Quintavalle, the first disciple of
Francis, used sometimes to enter the general's house at
the dinner -hour and sit down without being invited,
saying : "I also wish to eat with you the good things
that God lavishes upon His poor ". But Antony of
Padua (1195-1231) took things tragically: he re-
proached Elias for ruining the Order by these privileges
and with destroying " the evangelical state that they
had promised to obsen^e." This Portuguese theologian,
a man of action, irascible and obstinate, who ventured
to attack the vicar of Frederic II, Ezzelinq, gathered
together the timid flock of mystics and took them to the
feet of Gregory IX (i 227-1 241). The pope, troubled
by Antony's outcry, sighed and consented to depose
Elias. The latter took his fall with admirable good
feeling ; he quietly passed over to the emperor Frederic,
with whom he stayed at first as pacific intermediary
between the pope and Caesar. Later on, under
Innocent IV, defeated at each chapter at Portiuncula
for the generalship which he sought anew, he openly
revolted and embraced the imperial cause ; he was
even for a time Frederic's ambassador at the court
of Constantinople. When the emperor died, Elias
returned to his home at Cortona. There he built a
great Franciscan church with his riches ; excommuni-
cated, he was free, very happy, obeying neither bishop
nor pope, with no uneasiness about his salvation until
his last hour. When upon the point of death he made
his peace with the Holy See and God " in the name
of the merits of Francis ".

Elias had outHved his adversary Antony more than
twenty years. If these two heirs of the work of Francis
of Assisi, instead of making war upon each other and
driving the Order to a dogmatic crisis of which the
consequences were so grave, had combined their good

FRANCISCAN MYSTICISM 173

will, passion and genius, the Franciscan history and
the religious history of Italy, and even that of
Christendom, would have been very different from what
they were. The apostasy of Elias caused scandal in
the Church ; Antony of Padua was canonized. Never-
theless it was with the party of Elias that the Church
of Rome was soon to find it most easy to agree. The
Conventuals, rendered prudent by the care of their
secular interests, soon made common cause with the
Holy See, which, in exchange for their services, lavished
bulls upon them tempering the severity of the primitive
Rule. Antony, who died in 1231, had time to train
his brothers in the most characteristic attitudes of mind
df the Spirituals. He inspired in them their superstitious
respect for the very letter of the Rule. We can see,
from the sermons of the fiery Franciscan, what value
he attributed to the words of every sacred text. They
are nothing but quotations from the Scripture, rapidly
commented upon. Even the symbolical figures of the
Old Testament are rigorously applied to his demonstra-
tion ; it was at Coimbra, beneath the learned pulpits
of the Augustinians, that he had acquired this very
scholastic method of preaching. Now the precept of
poverty having been once embraced, for the sole reason
that it was found in the canonical words of the Rule,
it was no longer possible to mitigate it by the spirit of
moderatjpn and charity that had been the soul of the
Franciscan constitution and one of the apostolic gifts
of its founder. Antony moreover bequeathed to his
followers an original tradition of the Observants, distrust
of the secular clergy, prelates and bishops, carried at
times to the length of contempt. He preached against
the Church in as passionate a tone as Savonarola,
reproaching it for its riches, its power, its sensuality
and the decline of morality, with as much passion as
the Florentine friar, and sought in the biblical texts
the lively images with which, in the famous Lent of
M93^ Savonarola was to make so powerful an appeal.

174 MYSTIC ITALY

Circumdederuiit me vitult multi ; tauri pingues obsede-
runt me. He aggravated this first text by the biting
insult that Savonarola was to borrow in his turn from
the prophet Amos : Audlte verbum, vaccce pingues.
From this inspiration he drew a picture of a wholly
popular triviality that Savonarola did not dare to present
to the Florentines lof Lorenzo de' Medici's day : " The
flesh of heifers is hung in the smoke, where it waits
to be eaten. Thus the demons will hang the flesh
of the wicked prelates in the smoke of hell, where it
will await a burning yet more cruel, the fiery heat
. whereof the Scripture speaks, that is to say, hell, the
^ place of anathema, mourning and ineffable pain ".
Brother Antony, to whom Francis had given neither his
tenderness nor his pity, again and again returned
to this vehement satire upon the clergy ; the friars
were long to repeat the same invectives ; but this
Portuguese cried aloud to Italy the conclusion for which
he had prepared his hearers, namely, that the worship
celebrated by the covetous and libertine clergy was
illusory and sterile, unworthy of God, who rejected it,
and useless for the salvation of souls. " Our fat canons
think they are quit in the sight of God if they sing in
a clear voice in the choir an alleluia ^or a response ; then
they return home to amuse themselves and sup well
with their mummers and jugglers ". Antony was too
good a logician not to carry his ideas to their conclusion,
extraordinary as it might be ; true religion had departed
from the Church of the secular clergy, prelates and
doctors, to take refuge with the laity. " Carmel is
invaded by the brambles of the desert, for the clergy
bear no more fruit, the laity alone have a fruitful faith,
clericL sunt infructuosi et laici fructuosi.''

Thus on the one hand the split was final between
the moderate and the rigid ; on the other it was
beginning to be foreseen between the mystics and the
secular Church. The contradictions of the chroniclers
of the Order as to the names and succession of the

FRANCISCAN MYSTICISM 175

early generals prevent us from seeing clearly the
formation of two irreconcilable communities, distin-
guished from each other by theology and discipline and
even by dress. Brother Crescentius, canonist and
physician, who was general from 1244 to 1248, accord-
ing to the History of the Tribulations, followed in the
same path as his predecessor Elias of Cortona,
showed the same eagerness for riches and knowledge,
the same aversion for the poor convents scattered in
the solitudes, that he changed into sumptuous monas-
teries ; under his guidance the brothers . became
legacy -hunt erSj summoned their debtors before the
- courts, attached themselves to schools of dialectic, and
neglected prayer and the Scriptures for the " useless
curiosities of Aristotle ". Crescentius surrounded him-
self with arch -scoundrels, such as Bonadies, his juris-
consult, " who drank fraud and lying like water " ;
he looked with a malevolent eye upon the growing sect
of the Spirituals, " who did not walk," he thought,
" according to the truth of the Gospel, who despised
the rules of the Order, who believed themselves better
than the others, who lived according to their own
pleasure, who referred everything to the spirit, omnia
spiritul tribuebant, and who even wore their mantles
too short, niantellos curtes usque ad nates.'' (72) Soon
Crescentius openly accused before the pope those
brothers who " in appearance and in the opinion of
the laity are saints, but who in reality are superstitious,
proud, turbulent, indocile, and champions of dangerous
innovations ". Innocent IV, who was then engaged in
his great war against Frederic II, expected the Church
as a whole to marshal itself under his crosier ; so
he granted Crescentius permission to pursue and correct
the dissidents, and to tear up by the roots " these
occasions of schism in the Order ". The, general, " with
the agility and treachery of the leopard ", laid an ambush
for the " pious and simple brothers, who were steadfast
in truth and charity ", and they, in their turn, journeyed

176 MYSTIC ITALY

to Rome ; he had them arrested, overwhelmed them
with ill-usage, and then sent them, two by two, preceded
by calumnious letters, as arrant heretics, to the guardians
of the most remote provinces. " But God wished that
their virtue should spread abroad as a light and a
perfume among the brothers charged with their punish-
ment, who were rejoiced by their angelic conversation ",
says Angelo Clareno. The hand of God was stretched
forth over the Spirituals. The election of 1247 or
1248 raised Brother John of Parma to the government
of the Minorites, a man " illustrious for learning and
saintliness ". The first act of John was to recall the
proscribed. The house of Assisi thrilled with joy ;
the old friends of Francis, the last apostles of the first
Franciscan community, " Egidio, Masseo, Angelo, Leo,
burst into transports of gladness, because they beheved
they saw in John of Parma the very soul of Francis
come to life again " ; Egidio, enlightened by the
prophetic spirit, said to him : " It is well, thy coming
is welcome, yet thou comest but late '\ {73)

III

The ten years, ending with 1257, that John of Parma
spent at the head of the Order of Assisi are of vital
importance for the religious history of the Middle Ages.
Round the new general were grouped the whims of
opposition, the bitter rancour and still vague aspira-
tions of the Spirituals. The Joachimite ideas that, for
nearly half a century, had been floating in Itahan
Christendom, suddenly showed an extraordinary re-
crudescence and became fixed in certain very precise
views to which the mystics eagerly rallied. Already
in 1240 Brother Aymon, an EngHshman by birth, the
predecessor of Crescentius, had returned to the prophetic
method of the Calabrian monk by a commentary upon
Isaiah. Immediately upon his election John of Parma

FRANCISCAN MYSTICISM 177

appeared to his brethren as the representative of the
purest Franciscan ideal. Against the Conventuals and
the lukewarm he played the part of a reformer, going
incessantly from house to house to restore the Rule
of 1209. (74) The enthusiasm' for Francis, brought
back to its first impetus, had no difficulty in carrying
this body of exalted men back to Joachim of Flora.
Had not Joachim, moreover, been the forerunner of the
Messiah in Umbria? Had not the "man clothed in
linen " announced the approach of the " angel bearing
the sign of the living God? " Were not those perfect
Christians of the last religious epoch, who were to
live by contemplation and love, the children of Assisi,
who, delivered by their evangelical poverty from all
earthly care, would enter into ineffable communion with
the Holy Ghost? Doubtless it was forgotten that
Francis had provoked a reaction against that monastic
egotism proclaimed by Joachim as the condition of
sanctity, and that he had commanded his Minorites
to work with their hands and to watch unceasingly over
human pain. They were about to forget that the
founder had always proclaimed himself the most sub-
missive and the humblest of the sons of the Church ;
in the effervescence of rehgious invention, towards the
middle of the thirteenth century, the Spirituals were to
look upon themselves as the final Church, better than'
the former one, and, driving the abbot Joachim himself
into heresy, were eagerly to seek in his works, inter-
preted by the aid of a feverish exegesis, the date of the
great day when the rehgion of the Holy Ghost was to
take the place of the law and the Word. Now
Joachim, who had passed the last years of his life in
calculating the moment when the spirituales vlri, the
perfect cenobites, would uplift the Church and Christen-
dom, had fixed the year 1260 as the final term of
expectation. One of the most curious witnesses of this
singular age, Fr^ Salimbene, sincerely expected the
fatal year, that seemed to be confirmed by the death

12

178 MYSTIC ITALY

of the emperor Frederic. The emperor had been
regarded as the apocalyptic beast whose appearance,
conformably with the old theory of the millennium, was
to precede the radiant Church of the perfect. But
Salimbene, who feared the crisis although he gloried'
in being a Joachimite, breathed again on the last day
of 1260. "I abandoned that doctrine for ever, and
determined to believe only those things I saw."

This mighty religious movement and this fermenta-
tion in the Franciscan society resulted partly from the
action of John of Parma. Salimbene 's interlocutor
says, on that same page of the Chronicle: Brother
John of Parma troubled himself and his Order ; his
life was so saintly, he was so learned, that he might
at that time have amended the Roman curia ; but,
having followed the prophecies of men who were half
mad, he greatly injured himself and did much evil
to his friends. ... If Brother John had imitated your
prudence, he would have pacified the minds of his
brethren." I believe, nevertheless, that it would be
a mistake to look upon John of Parma as a sectary
who played with heresy, a visionary haunted by the
thought of an approaching overthrow of the Church.
The portrait of him drawn by Salimbene, in conformity
with that of the History of the Tribulations, is that
of a very gentle mystic, " with an angelic countenance,
gracious and ever smiling ", of a singular patience,
humility and charity. Consolabatiir mcestos, corripiebat
inguietos, suscipiebat infirmos, foVehat debiles, simplices
familiariter et Icete erudiebat. Very eloquent when he
preached the divine word, of a melting piety when
he celebrated the holy mysteries, he spoke but rarely.
In church he never sat or leant against the wall, but
always stood upright with bare head. He was of
middle height, very brisk in his gait, and charming.
The old brothers could trace in him the dear form of
their founder. His Joachimism probably did not go
beyond the moderate provisions of the abbot Joachim.

FRANCISCAN MYSTICISM 179

But that was enough to encourage the fancy of the
Spirituals, whose hazardous hypotheses were already no
longer contented with the authentic works of Joachim.
They needed more precise prophecies, and they found
them incessantly, commentaries upon Jeremiah, Ezekiel,
Merlin, the Sibyl Erythrcca, and fearful books against
the emperor Frederic or the Holy See. This pseudo-
Joachimite literature occupied the ample leisure of the
brothers ; in case of need they tried to decipher sure
tidings of the antichrist between the verses of the
Bible, for " he is already born and come to man's
estate ", and revelations concerning the kings of Europe.
Salimbene and Gerard of San-Donnino, Bible in hand,
conversed upon these formidable themes, one summer
afternoon, beneath the shade of a vine arbour, in the
garden of the convent of Modena.

These dreams did not disturb the noble conscience
of John of Parma. He wished nothing more than
the greatest progress of men's souls in spirituality, the
perfection of his brothers by poverty, contemplation
and love. He attached himself to the memory of the
Seraphic Father wilh the tenderness that John had
for that of Jesus. He wrote a book, De sacro com-
mercio sancti Francisci cum Domina Paupertate.
Around him the legends about Francis continued to
grow, becoming ever more marvellous ; the Tres Socii
embellished the primitive biography of Thomas Celano ;
the Messianic theory of the thaumaturge of Assisi, that
was to end in the Liber Conformitatum of Bartolomeo
of Pisa, had already begun. But the current that
carried the Franciscan family far beyond Francis was
stronger than the wisdom of John of Parma. The
Joachimites, escaping from the discipline of the Order,
multiplied in Italy and France, far from the general's
eye. In the convents of Provins and Hyeres were
elaborated the most audacious prophecies of the sect.
Hughues de Digne (?-i28 5?), "one of the greatest
clerics of the world ", says Salimbene, a friend of John

180 MYSTIC ITALY

of Parma, seems to have been the recognized chief of
French Joachimism ; a popular preacher, ardent in
dispute, paratus ad omnia, admirable when he pictured
paradise or hell, a strange mystic, spiritualis homo ultra
modum, like Paul or Elisha ; when he spoke men
trembled " like reeds in the water." Hughues preached
before Louis IX. He possessed all the books written
by the Calabrian abbot ; he dehvered oracles in his
cell at Hyeres. At his table nothing was spoken of
but Joachimite hopes. But, side by side with his
open-air Joachimism, upon which the neighbourhood of
the episcopal inquisition, the malevolent curiosity of
the Dominicans, and the distrust of the secular
authorities, imposed a certain amount of reserve, a
glimpse could be caught, in the recesses of the small
convents, of the mystery of an occult doctrine, the
turbid effervescence of the secret society. Salimbene
saw, about 1240, an old abbot of the Order of Flora,
vetuliis et sanctus homo, furtively bringing the books
of the sect into the Franciscan house at Pisa, in order,
he supposed, to remove them from the violent hands
of Frederic IL Was it not rather from the pope and
his theologians that the Joachimites were hiding at
that time? The prophetic, but apocryphal treatises of
the Calabrian hermit were slipped from hand to hand ;
^ they were concealed in the least suspected cells, in
angulis et nostris, say the acts of the Council of Aries.
Conferences were carried pn in whispers at Provins
and Hyeres ; the affiliated laymen of the Third Order
took part in them ; in Hughues de Digne's room, on
the great festival days, we find notaries, judges,
physicians, men of letters, scrutinizing the dark sayings
of the Scriptures under the direction of the Provengal
prophet. They were evidently somewhat troubled in
conscience ; they felt they were impairing the integrity
of the old Credo, that they were deserting the Church
and creating a new religion that appealed to them
with the attraction of forbidden fruit. On the other

FRANCISCAN MYSTICISM 181

hand the good folk who remained faithful to the age-
long faith looked upon Joachimisni with extreme terror.
About 1250, in Sicily, men crossed themselves in the
name of the Father, the Son, and Matthew, in order
not to compromise either with the Holy Ghost or with
the Gospel of John. Signiimi in Patre, e in Filio,
et in Santo Aiatteo, we read in the Contrasto of Ciullo
of Alcamo.

The mystic exaltation rapidly passed through all
ranks of society. It was not until 1260 that the
epidemic of flagellants was seen. But as early as 1248
Provence and the region of Genoa were full of
penitents, male and female, who crucified their flesh
in the privacy of their own houses. A singular woman,
Douceline, sister of Hughues de Digne, stirred up the
south of France. " She never entered a religious
order ", says Sahmbene, " but always lived chastely and
holily in the world." She wore the girdle of Francis
of Assisi and traversed Provence, followed by eighty
ladies of Marseilles ; the gift of healing and even of
raising little children from the dead was attributed
to her. She entered into all the churches of the
Franciscans that she passed on her way ; she stopped
in them in ecstasy, with her arms raised aloft, from
the first mass until compline ; " she was entirely
absorbed in God." And her biographer adds that
" She made a vow, with her hands in those of the
holy father Brother Hugues de Digne, that she would
preserve with the greatest ardour the holy poverty of
Jesus, as Francis observed it and gave it to his
followers." (75) She founded an institution of
Beguines ; " women, virgins, and widows, and even
those who were married, left their husbands and
children and came to her." She could not hear God
or our Lady or Francis spoken of without being
carried into an ecstacy, *' and, experiencing in that
state superhuman emotions, she knew nothing of what
was going on around her. . . . Sometimes she was

182 MYSTIC ITALY

suspended in the air, without any support, without
touching the earth with her feet, or only with her big
toes. . . . She was one day enraptured in a church
of the Minorites, someone approached her, and, as
doubting the truth of the ecstasy, drew out a bodkin
and cruelly plunged it into her. The holy mother did
not move or feel it. But afterwards the cruel pricks
were found that had been given her, so that the sain,t,
upon returning to her ordinary state, felt great pain
from them. , . . The first time that king Charles saw
her in a trance, he wished to try whether it were
genuine. ... He had a quantity of lead melted and
thrown boiling over her bare feet in his presence. The
saint did not feel it. In consequence the king con-
ceived such an affection for her that he made her
his intimate friend." " She could not hear any sound,
or almost any song, even that of the birds, without
becoming beside herself. One day she heard a
solitary sparrow singing, and she said to her com-
panions, ' What a lonely song that bird has ! '
Immediately she fell into a trance, drawn to God by
the song of that bird."

Charles of Anjou, who was somewhat afraid of
Douceline, did not fail to consult her upon all important
matters. When she was plunged into her mystic
slumber, her words were observed as a divine revelation.
One Good Friday, at the moment when the cross was
raised, she began to cry with sobs : " O false and
deceitful world, what a terrible chastisement awaits
thee I Come, come, enter the boat, for all who are
left out of it will perish." Then, raising her voice :
"Do you not hear the pilot cry? Do you not hear
he cries : ' Enter the boat, for all who are left out
of it will perish'? Alas! they are souls covered with
the blood of Jesus I " And to the anxious question
of a sister she replied cheerfully : " Yes, verily, under
the wings of Francis you will all be saved." But
one night, in the convent dormitory, she was seen

FRANCISCAN MYSTICISM 183

walking " as if she had followed a procession." She
was singing in a melting manner and repeating at
times : " A new Jesus I a new Jesus I " At other
times she sang: "A new Jerusalem! a new holy
city! " The poor Beguines comprehended nothing of
what she said. The great dream of Joachim of Flora,
the vision of an ideal faith and a purer Paradise, had
just crossed the soul of the prophetess.

IV

The Middle Ages were too fond of dogmatic show
and the authority of written texts to leave Joachimism
long in the state of a floating and secret doctrine. 'The
new religion needed a Gospel ; Joachim had predicted
" the Eternal Gospel ", but none of his books bore
that title. It was at Paris, in 1254, in the bosom of
^ the University, that the manifesto of the final Church
of the Holy Ghost burst forth. This strange book,
that we know only by the denunciations of its enemies
and the condemnation of Rome, was the Introductorius
ad Evangellum cctenium, by Gerard de Borgo-San-
Donnino, a colleague of Frk Salimbene and a disciple
of John of Parma. According to Jean de Meung,
who is wrong by a year, the book appeared,

By evil intention,

In the year of the Incarnation

One thousand two hundred and fifty-five ;

and it was publicly exposed '

In the parvis before Notre-Dame. (76)

This book. The Eternal Gospel, contained the most
radical revolution that the Church, and, indeed, all
conventional Christianity, had ever had to face. The

184 MYSTIC ITALY

three great works of Joachim, the Concordia, the
Expositio in Apocalypsim, and the Psalferium, formed
its three chapters. Gerard himself had perhaps time
to pubhsh only the first, the Concordia. The only
original parts of the book were the introduction and
the comments ; these explained the mystery contained
in the hermit's writings. {77) According to the
Protocol of the inquisitors of Anagni, Gerard said, at
the beginning of the Introduction, that about the year
1200, that is to say at the period when Joachim had
finished writing his revelation, the spirit of life had
departed from both the Old Testament and the New
Testament, to pass into The Eternal Gospel. In this
very first proposition Gerard impaired the primitive
Joachimism by a truly schismatic view. While Joachim
had regarded the Gospel of the future only as a
wholly mystic intelligence of the two Testaments,
reserved, according to him, to the spiritual Christians
of the final Church, the author of the Introduction
announces that the hermit's three works constitute the
very text of the Eternal Gospel and are the last to
appear of the tria sacra volumina, that they are the
completion of the triplex littera that began with the
Old Testament and was continued with the New
Testament. What was for Joachim only an interpre-
tation of the Scriptures, contained within the limits of
the traditional dogmas of Christianity, became for
Gerard a new Scripture, a revelation of a third Law,
the Law of the Holy Ghost, that was to replace and
extinguish the Law of Christ, as the latter had replaced
the Law of the Father. For the Church of the monks,
living on the quintessence of Christianity that Joachim
had imagined in his desert at Flora, Gerard substituted
the communion of souls that henceforth, indifferent to
the sacramental symbols, will at last enjoy the fulness
of divine things.

Did the man who thus derived a heresy from the
prophecies of his master represent, in the middle of

FRANCISCAN MYSTICISM 185

the thirteenth century, the actual beUef of all the
Joachimite family, or was he only an isolated inno-
vator? Father Heinrich Denifle (1844- 190 5), a great
pakeographer and historian, is of the opinion that he
spoke only for a very restricted group of persons.
I believe rather that he expressed with a compromising
precision the vague faith that was troubling many
souls, in Italy still more than in France. He it was
who first dared to show towards what goal men's
consciences agitated by the Franciscan apostolate were
journeying. For he proceeded no less from Francis
than from Joachim. The latter is in his view *' the
man clothed in linen, angel and teacher, who came
down from heaven, holding an open book in his
hands " ; but Francis is the angel who appeared, about
the year 1200 after the Lord's Incarnation, bearing
the sign of the hving God, and the Order that he
founded " came equally from the laity and the clergy."
It is the immense militia of brothers " who walk
bare foot ", Franciscans of the strict letter, already
separated from the Church of Rome, who lend to the
Messiah of Assisi, as to his forerunner of Flora, a
formidable revelation, the new faith, destined to put
an end to the prevailing Christianity of the time in
five years, and to reign " from one sea to the other."
The scandal caused by the Introduction, the outcry
of orthodox Christians and the sentence of the Holy
See were soon to open the eyes of these enthusiasts ;
they were to perceive the abyss into which they were
upon the point of faUing. Many disowned Gerard.
Salimbene cannot find words severe enough to condemn
the " follies " of this madman who has seduced " the
ignorant brothers " by his book, and who was " so
well punished ", valde bene fait punitus ; in other
respects, the most amiable man in the world, courteous,
modest, temperate, gentle and humble, but one who
spoilt all these gifts by a criminal belief.

Assuredly Gerard had chosen the most suitable place

l^

186 MYSTIC ITALY

and time to give his heresy a singular celebrity. The
University of Paris did not allow any theological
novelty to pass without discussing it to death. The
age-long practice of the syllogism, the incessant inter-
pretation of the Scriptures and the passion for long
disputes, put into the hands of the doctors of the
institution terrible weapons against all suspected
doctrines. By means of its scholastic function the
University really held, in the words of the Romaunt
of the Rose, the " key of Christendom." It was then
asleep, says Jean de Meung, but

At the sound of the book it awoke.
And could hardly go to sleep again ;
So it armed itself for the encounter
When it saw this horrible monster.
All ready to give battle.

Whatever the troubadour, Jean, may say, the
University of Paris was wide awake at the time when
the first part of the Everlasting Gospel was published.
The quarrel of the masters with the begging friars,
Dominicans and Franciscans, who claimed the right
to teach publicly, had for some time been agitating
the Latin quarter of Paris. The most fiery defender
of the privileges of the University, Guillaume de Saint-
Amour ( ? -1273 V), without waiting till the Com-
mentary upon the Apocalypse and the Psaltery were
published in their turn, preached against the accursed
book that, represented by the Introduction and the
Concordia, seemed to him more voluminous than the
Bible itself. Matthew of Paris ( ? -1259) tells us
that the doctors appointed a commission instructed to
convey the grievances of the University to the pope.
Then the preaching friars hastened to choose a counter
embassy, ut magistris in faciem contradicerent. (78)

According to Richer de Senones, Guillaume himself
sent to Alexander IV (1254-1261) a copy of the
Introduction. In 1256 Guillaume, at the synod of

FRANCISCAN MYSTICIS]\I 187

Paris, once more demanded an inquiry into the conduct
of the false preachers " who are creeping into the
house of God ". His book De Periculis novissbnorum
temporum is full of vehement accusations, mainly
directed against the Dominicans, " who claim to give
a new discipline to life and to reform the Church."
The University displayed such passion in seeking heresy
between the lines of Gerard's book and in those of
Joachim, and so feverishly drew up a list of the
doctrinal errors in the new Gospel, that it did violence
to the text and falsified its propositions in a very
serious manner. This singular proceeding at first
astonished the theologians of the Holy See. " Charges
of heresy have been brought before us ", says the brief
of Alexander IV to the bishop of Paris, " that cannot
be found in this book, and that have been treacherously
inserted in it ". The famous Excerpta, to the number
of thirty-one propositions, that have been transmitted
to us by several manuscripts, by the Chronicle of
Matthew Paris, the Liber de Rebus memorabilioribus
of Henry of Hertford ( ? -1370), and the Directorium
of Nicholas Eymeric (1320?-! 399), a Spanish theo-
logian and inquisitor, are thus a most suspicious source
for the religious history of the thirteenth century. For
instance, not Gerard but Joachim himself is made to
say in them .that God will grant peace and salvation
to certain Jews, however obstinate they may be in
their blindness, whereas Joachim had asserted upon
several occasions that at the beginning of the third
religious state of the world new apostles would
evangelize the Jewish people and bring back to *' Our
Saviour Jesus Christ " the last remnant of the
Synagogue. The Excerpta declare that, according to
the Concordia, upon the approach of the third revela-
tion, many chiefs of orders will detach themselves from
the secular Church, that is to say, from Rome, and will
prepare to return to the ancient faith of the Jews ;
the Concordia says on the contrary that at that time

188 MYSTIC ITALY

the Jews will allow themselves to be touched, and will
see the pure light of the faith, that the Church will find
again the joy of the apostolic times, and will embrace,
as formerly, with the same closeness the Jewish family
and the crowd of the Gentiles. Joachim' had said :
" One day the preachers will go to the infidels to
bear them the good tidings, and these new converts
will serve as a defence to the apostles against the
wicked Christians of the old community." The
Excerpta translated : " The preachers, persuaded by
the clergy, will pass over to the infidels, and it must
be feared that they will unite them to lead them to
the assault of the Roman Church." But perhaps the
most audacious alteration of the original text is the
following. In the second book of the Concordia,
Joachim, recalling the separa/tion of the Greek and
Latin churches and the schismatic pontificate of the
bishop of Constantinople, he added : ambulantes usque
in finem in error ibus suis. In the fifth book he had
reproached the Greeks with having, in their forget-
fulness of God, embraced the things of the flesh and
persecuted, even to that present day, those who live
according to the Holy Spirit : persequuntur eos qui
ambulant secundum splritum usque in presentem diem.
Now the Excerpta deliberately translated the passage
thus : " Sixth error— the Greek pope, or the Greek
people are more in the ways of the Spirit than the
Latin pope or the Latin people ; that is why they are
more in a condition to attain salvation, and we ought
rather to attach ourselves to them than to the Roman
pope or to the Roman Church."

The theological tribunal of Anagni, formed by the
cardinals Odo, Ugo, and Stefano, accordingly heard,
in July 1255, the accusation brought by the clergy
of the University of Paris, and perhaps aggravated
by the opening speech of the prosecutor, Florentius,
bishop of Acres. But the inquisitors carefully read
the impeached passages not only in the Concordia but

FRANCISCAN MYSTICISM 189

also in the Apocalypsis and the Psalterion. Guillaume
de Saint-Amour had not been mistaken when he
announced in the preceding year that these books had
their defenders in the councils of the Holy See. The
orthodoxy of the old abbot of Flora came out un-
scathed from the long " Protocol " of Anagni, which
is really the most complete explanation of the Joachimite
system. The heresies peculiar to Gerard of San-
Donnino were alone retained. The Introductorius was
therefore condemned by three bulls of Alexander IV,
but with a real moderation, without anger and, so to
speak, without criticism ; (79) while, a little later, the
provincial synod of Aries, presided over by that same
Florentine, fulminated against Joachim and all the
Joachimites as guilty of sacrilege. Alexander IV, with
the greatest urgency, recommended the bishop of Paris
not to disturb the Franciscan Order by investigations
in the monastic libraries. He ordered that the copies
of the " new book " should be burnt, says Matthew
Paris, secrete, sine fratrutn scandalo. But it does not
appear that Rome itself was very severe towards
Gerard's person ; he was merely, in the first instance,
deprived of the priestly functions, preaching and the
hearing of confessions ; the harsher penalties inflicted
upon him subsequently, the dungeon, the bread and
water of affliction, and the deprivation of ecclesiastical
burial, were, according to Salimbene and Angelo Clareno,
the doing of the Minorite brothers who were irritated
at the obstinacy that Gerard showed in not abjuring,
the Joachimite belief. Guillaume de Saint-Aniour paid
very dearly for the scandal that he had trumpeted
abroad ; he found himself dispossessed of his pulpit
in consequence of his book De Periculis, exiled from
France and deprived for ever of the right of preaching
and teaching. (80) John of Parma was in his turn
implicated in the effects of this serious affair. " He
had received ", says the History of the Tribulations,
" from Francis himself the chalice full of the spirit

190 MYSTIC ITALY

of life, and having devoutly drunk it, he became as
luminous as the sun". (8i) But he was to drink it
to the dregs. The Franciscans who were loyal to the
Holy See summoned him before a chapter of the Order,
the first one limited in its membership, at Castello
della Pieve ; he had to defend himself against a
suspicion of heresy, says Fra Angelo, " though filled
with the Holy Spirit ", against the calumnies " of the
least fervent Christians." To the furious brothers who
obeyed the directions of Bonaventura he replied in a
lofty tone : Credo in uniim Deum, Patrem omnipo-
tentem. Cardinal Ottoboni, the future Adrian V, con-
trived that the general of the Minorites should not be
cast into prison. In 1257, at the general chapter of
Ara Coeli, he resigned his office, and then he reitired
to the little convent of the Greccia, near Rieti, in the
alpine valley, where Francis of Assisi had celebrated
the mysteries on Christmas night. There he passed
thirty-two years, " in an angelic life ", writes Angelo,
honoured and flattered by the popes, who upon several
occasions offered him' the cardinal's hat. In 1288,
at the age of eighty, he obtained from Nicholas .IV
(128 8- 1292) permission to go to Greece in order to
convert the schismatics and restore the unity of
Christendom. In the neighbourhood of Camerino he
felt his end approaching and said to his companions :
" Here is my eternal rest, here I shall dwell for ever."
Some days later he died, at peace with the Church.

y.

It is easy for us to appreciate the part, sometimes
an unexpected one, taken by the University of Paris
and the Holy See in this singular crisis. The former
was certainly disconcerted by the hesitating attitude of
the Church ; Rome must have been astonished by the
noisy zeal of the Parisian doctors who seemed to take

FRANCISCAN MYSTICISM 191

upon their own shoulders the exclusive task of saving
Christendom and preserving the integrity of dogma.
I believe, however, that Paris and Rome dealt with
the Eternal Gospel in the manner most conformable
with their respective interests and traditions.

For the University the enterprise of Brother Gerard
was an excellent opportunity for compromising the
begging orders and getting rid of its rivals for a long time
to come. By accusing them of heresy it was undoubtedly
pro domo sua that it was working. But let us not
see in all this the action of a mediocre egotism. It
was a question with the University of a nobler privilege
than the possession of pulpits, coveted by the
Franciscans and the Dominicans. Joachimism, whether
taken from the authentic writings of Joachim or the
pseudo-prophecies attributed to him after his death,
was the contradiction of scholasticism'. To the de-
ductive reasoning, based at times upon a sophism, the
new sect opposed the direct intuition of eternal things,
the intimate conversation with God. All the work of
the human mind, of which the University had been
the centre since the time of Abelard, was thus nothing
but vanity and falsehood ; the whole of science,
deprived of its age-long method, was to be started
afresh ; or rather it became useless. Mysticism has
no need either of syllogisms or of experience. It
reads, without any effort of demonstration, the secrets
of God and disdains real things as pure illusions of
the senses. The mystics live on dreams and ecstasy,
at an infinite distance from nature, society and
history ; like Francis of Assisi, they are content, for
all nourishment, with the chirping of a grasshopper.

Now the University of Paris represented in a certain
way the practical and sober spirit of France, I will
even say the lay spirit, that was to grow without
ceasing until the period of Philip the Fair. It dis-
trusted the mystics and had no love for idealism. More
and more it was assimilating the rational genius of the

192 MYSTIC ITALY

philosophy of Aristotle. It used 'its influence to clear
from its path the metaphysical chimeras of Scotus
Eriugena and Guillaume de Champeaux, that doctrine
of the universals that always came back to it, like the
stone of Sisyphus. It saw in Gerard's Introductorius
a more dangerous innovation even than the heresy of
Amaury of Chartres had been fifty years before. The
Joachimite prophecy seemed in fact to have been
already half realized ; and was not the swarm of
friars, who were impatiently awaiting a religious
revival, beginning the final era of the spirituales virl?
The preaching of the new Gospel was about to close
with a triple seal of the two Testaments, the revelation
of Moses as well as that of Jesus. The Holy Scripture,
the light of the old science, whose texts were per-
petually illuminating the reason of the doctors, for
physical researches no less than for political theories —
was that Scripture about to fail and deprive the human
mind of an august collaboration? If, then, this group
of illuminati succeeded in imposing itself upon the
world, what would become of the Trivlum and the
Quadrivium, the methodical labour of the reason, the
culture of the school, aye, of the school itself?

Quite other was the interest of the Church and the
Holy See in this affair. Rome felt no uneasiness
about the orthodoxy of the father of the sect, Joachim ;
and it held the huge family of the Mendicants too
firmly in its hand to feel much anxiety about the credit
enjoyed by John of Parma in the Order. The reign
of the Spirituals and the ascendency of monasticism
constituted no new historical phenomenon. Had not
the Church of Gregory VII been the Church of the
monks? Had it not even in former days favoured
the Lombard Pataria, that is to say, the insurrection
of the regulars against the secular clergy of Milan?
The Holy See, since the days of Innocent HI, had
been passing through a period of increasing greatness.
The boldness of the Eternal Gospel seemed to it with-

FRANCISCAN MYSTICISM 193

out doubt to be weakened by its very excess. AVhat
could be feared from the prophecies of a few visionaries
fixing the downfall of traditional Christianity for so
near a date? The terror of the year 1260 would
soon pass. And so Italy measured with a tranquil
eye the value of this strange heresy. Rome was by
no means ignorant that, among the Franciscans of the
peninsula, many, without waiting for the issue of the
fateful year, treated the dream of the Joachimites with
irony. As early as 124S Peter of Apulia said to
Hugues de Digne, in the presence of the principal
members affiliated to the sect : "I have certainly read
the books of Joachim, and I do not believe them ".
He said also to John of Naples : " I regard Joachim
as the fifth wheel of a carriage, quantum de qu'mta rota
plaastri". (82) In reality the theory of absolute
poverty, that from the second half of the thirteenth
century onwards was directly aimed at the temporal
power of the Church, caused the Holy See far more
affliction than the preaching of the Eternal Gospel.

Rome, finally, at this period of the Middle Ages,
had much to ask of the friars. In the crisis it had
been passing through since the revolt of Frederic II
it found itself closely bound up with monasticism. The
emperor was dead, but the " nest of vipers ", the family
of the Hohenstaufen, was not yet crushed. What
subsisted of the work of Frederic, the entirely rational
civilization, religious indifference and the spirit of
irony as well as that of tolerance, compelled the Holy
See to gather about itself the militia of the regulars,
and consequently to close its eyes to the errors of
their interpretation and the exaggeration of their
mysticism. Exact theologians would have been of less
service to the Church at that time. Unbelievers or
mockers are not to be answered with scholastic
discussion, but with enthusiasm and the glorification
of the ideal. The mendicant friars, that is to say
the active and democratic monasticism of the time,

13

194 MYSTIC ITALY

counted at that time for far too much in the moral
hfe of the Italian communes for Rome, whose buckler
they were, not to pardon them a little theological
licence. The Ghibeline and imperial party, Frederic II,
Pietro della Vigna, and king Manfred, who claimed
to be restoring civil society outside the Church or in
opposition to the Church, had no more constant
adversaries than these pious vagabonds who preached
to the crowds at the cross-roads of towns, under the
trees in the fields, and talked to them of public
liberties as much as of the kingdom' of God. As to
the direct descendants of the abbot Joachim, the
reformed Cistercians of Flora, whose convents filled
southern Italy, the policy of Rome had again good
reasons for treating them with forbearance. At all
times the Holy See had coveted the suzerainty, at
any rate in name, of the Neapolitan provinces. It
had solicited it from the Normans ; it was about to
impose it upon the Angevins ; could it therefore
embroil itself with monks whose founder was famed
as a prophet and a saint, who were its certain political
allies, and who, from the point of view of the primacy
of the Latin Church, alone seemed capable of
balancing in that region, isolated from' the rest of
Italy and attached by a thousand bonds to the east,
the still very powerful influence of the Greek
communion?

,VI

The University of Paris had thought it recognized
in the excessive Joachimism of Gerard of San-Donnino
an invention all the more disturbing, in that it
manifested itself on the northern side of the Alps
as an isolated and unexpected phenomenon. But for
the Holy See this sect was only an evidence of the
spirit of religious liberty that the Church granted

FRANCISCAN MYSTICISM 195

to Italy, and of which it hindered only the most
glaring errors. Never, since the Alexandrine period
and the time of the Council of Nicaea, had such a
ferment of the faith been seen, so rich a harvest of
mysticism. The precious Chronicle of Frk Salimbene
of Parma gives a glimpse of the degree to which
Italy was at that time alive and what fertile germ's
Francis had sown in the consciences of all men.

Undoubtedly the Parisian scholastics would have

been disconcerted by so strange a spectacle ; they

would have failed utterly to have understood the very

particular notion of orthodoxy that animated Italian

Christendom in the middle of the thirteenth century.

There, under the motherly eye o.f the Church, it was

agreed that the faithful, individually or combined in

free communities, might seek the way of salvation at

their will. And each wen.t his own way according

to his own humour. One, a layman of Parma, shut

himself up in a Cistercian convent to write prophecies.

Another, a friend o,f the Minorites, founded a religion

" for himself alone, slbl ipsi vlvebat ". He recalled

the person of John the Baptist, with his long beard,

his Armenian cloak, his skin tunic, his leathern girdle

and " a terrible copper trumpet ". He preached in

churches and on the squares, surrounded by a band of

children bearing branches of trees and lighted tapers.

The text of his sermons was always the same and in

the vulgar tongue : " Laudato e henedetto e glorificato

sia to Patrey The children would repeat these words.

And then the preacher would glorify the Son and the

Holy Ghost, and all the listeners would cry

Alleluia I

Hermits multipHed — ^Iiermits of Augustine, hermits of
William of Monte Vergine, and hermits of John the
Good. The fraternities were of the most diverse sorts.
In 1260, the great Joachimite year, the flagellants
appeared in the north of Italy. " All, great and
small, nobles, soldiers, common folk, bare to the waist,

196 MYSTIC ITALY

went in procession through the towns and lashed them-
selves, preceded by bishops and monks ". The mystic
panic spread like wild fire ; all men lost their heads,
confessed, restored what they had stolen, embraced
their enemies and composed canticles. The end of
all things seemed to be at hand. He who did not
lash himself was reputed " worse than the devil ", he
was pointed at and ill-treated. On All Saints' Day
they came from Modena to Reggio, and then marched
to Parma and Cremona. The podestd of the latter
town refused them entry and raised a gibbet on the
banks of the Po for the use of flagellants who forced
the passage ; no one presented himself. At Perugia
and Rome the inhabitants lashed themselves on their
naked bodies in the streets. (83) With the gaudentes
the scene changes. These latter did not lash them-
selves, but lived merrily in chivalrous fraternity ; they
were instituted by Bartolomeo of Vicenza, who was
a bishop. They devoured their substance cum
hystrionibus, writes Salimbene. They never gave alms
or contributed to any pious work. They derived as
much as they could from rapine. Once ruined, they
had the audacity to ask the pope to assign them the
richest convents in Italy. Dante met them in the
procession of the hypocrites in copes of gilded lead,
and he conversed with Loderingo, one of the founders
named by SaHmbene.

Undoubtedly tares were abundantly mixed with' the
good seed. The ribaldi, the trutani, and the trufatores,
the ribalds, the vagabonds, and the rogues, are
denounced by Salimbene. In his Chronicle we have
the saccati or boscarioli, men clothed in sacks or men
of the woods. They were a sect of false Minorites,
proceeding from the Joachimite group of Hughues de
Digne, who had usurped the Franciscan costume.
Hughues had said to them : "Go into the forests,
live upon roots, for the tribulations are at hand ".
They swarmed in the woods, on the highways, in

FRANCISCAN MYSTICISM 197

the towTis, preaching", confcssmg, and begging, for
they were furious foragers, more alert than the real
mendicants and leaving them' nothing but the crumbs.
One of them became archbiship of Aries. .Among
them were apostoli, false apostles, vagabonds, iota die
otiosi, qui volant vivere de Lahore et sudore allorum.
They lived in a state of anarchy, did not work or
pray, preach or confess ; they sought only to " see
the women ". These wanderers attracted children to
their ranks, making them' preach ; and women, mulier-
culas, clad in long mantles, attached themselves to the
apostoli, calling themselves their sisters. With these
women complete communism was practised. Their
chief, Gerard Sagarelli, whom' the Minorites had expelled
from their Order, passed himself off as the son of
God. Around him his followers chanted Pater! Pater!
Pater! But he had his gallant adventures, copied from
Robert d'Abrissel, that revolted Salimbene's sense of
decency. This scandal roused the bishop of Parma,
who imprisoned all the apos.tles upon whom he could
lay his hands. Then Gregory X condemned the sect,
but they refused to submit. The saccatl, however, who
were more humble, had already done so.

Everything is found in Salimbene's Chronicle : the
enthusiasm of a whole district that built a church
for the preachers at Reggio in Emilia ; soldiers, women,
peasants and citizens carried the stones and lime on
their shoulders ; the pious industry of the Franciscans
and Dominicans who, at Parma, " came to an under-
standing as to the miracles that should be wrought
that year at the feast of Easter " ; the joyous miracles
of Nicholas of Montefeltro, who, simply by pulling
his nose behind the altar at the close of mass, cured
a novice whose noisy sleep had disturbed the whole
convent ; the false relic of St. Albert of Cremona,
that the clergy of Parma had adored in their churches
and honoured with edifying pictures, ut melius oblationes
a populo obtinerent ; the testamentary song of an

198 MYSTIC ITALY

epicurean canon, who vowed he would end, glass in
hand, a life enlivened by all the deadly sins. In this
astonishing Christendom boon companions elbowed
ascetics, charlatans honoured saints with their friend-
ship, and the Church let all these people play at their
ease in the house of God. Had it not words that
could stop, whenever it pleased, the want of religious
discipline, and had it not a strong hold upon the most
intractable of its children through the mystery of
death? (84)

VII

But the most curious personage in this Christendom
is its own historian. Brother Salimbene. This good
friar was born in 1221 at Parma. At seventeen years
of age, in spite of his parents and the emperor
Frederic II, to whom his father had recourse, he took
the Franciscan habit. He drew up his Chronicle
between 1283 and 1288. He died A\dthout doubt in
1289. As a child he might have looked upon
Francis of Assisi ; he saw the first flowers of the
seraphic legend in bloom in all their spring-time
sweetness. For the space of forty years he journeyed
in Italy and France, from convent to convent. He
conversed with the greatest men of his century. He
saw Frederic II, the antichrist, face to face, vidl earn
et aliquando dilexi; he was upon familiar terms with
John of Parma and Hughues de Digne. At Sens he
heard John de Piano Carpini, the predecessor of Marco
Polo, explain his book on " the Tartars ". At Lyons
he accosted Innocent IV, the haughty pope, who had
sworn to exterminate the race of the Hohenstaufen.
Lastly, in 1248, he saw Louis IX at Sens at Whitsun-
tide. The king was setting out for the crusade,
travelling on foot, apart from the escort of his
chivalry, praying and visiting the poor, " a monk

FRANCISCAN :MYSTICISM 199

rather than a soldier ", he says. The portrait that
Sahmbene drew of Louis is an exquisite one, and
cannot be translated : " Erat aiitem rex subttlis et
gracilis, macilentus convenienter et longiis, habens
viiltum angelica in et faciem gratiosam ". Our little
friar accompanied the king as far as the Rhone. One
morning he entered a country church with him that
was not paved. Louis, out of humility, wished to sit
in the dust, and said to the brothers : Venite ad me,
fr aires mei dulcissimi, et audite verba mea; and so
the band of cowled friars sat round the king of
France.

Surely, for an obscure friar, that was a life with
experiences of no common sort. Add thereto
Salimbene's great mystical adventure, his vocation to
Joachimism, that he embraced with simplicity, because
all around him Avere becoming Joachimites. In the
refreshing silence of the Italian cloisters he questioned
the prophet Gerard of San-Donnino, and knew all the
charm of the apocalyptic terror. And yet, in spite
of the moral shocks that fortune had in store for him,
Salimbene continued to be an innocent friar, of very
moderate intelligence, a little timid soul, who would
not give, if one judged too quickly, a very high idea
of the Franciscan society thirty years after the death
of its founder. He had all the hamiless vices of
those members of the clergy who wished to be neither
saints, nor doctors, nor apostles. His egotism is
wonderful. >\Vhen quite a child he was in his cradle
at the time a hurricane was passing over Parma ; his
mother, fearing the baptistery would fall on the house,
took her two little girls in her arms, leaving the future
chronicler to the grace of God. "So I never loved
her very much ", he says, " for she ought to have
carried me away, the boy ". When his father begged
him to renounce the convent, he repKed : Qui amat
patrem aut matrem plus quani me, non est me dignus.
Yet he was a very moderate friar, discreet in his zeal.

200 MYSTIC ITALY

He speaks of liturgical matters with' an astonishing
off handedness. " It is very tedious to read the psalms
at the office on Sunday night before chanting the
Te Deum. And it is very annoying, as much in
summer as in winter. For in summer, with the short
nights and great heat, one is really too much
tormented by the fleas ". And he adds " moreover,
there are in the ecclesiastical office many things that
might be changed for the better ". He was fond of
the large monasteries, " where the brothers have
delights and consolations greater than are found in the
small ones ". He makes no mystery about these
" consolations ", fish, game, capons, and tarts, temporal
graces that God lavishes upon those who make a vow
to be His. You will find in the Chronicle four or
five Franciscan dinners, all very succulent. The most
curious is the " fish " dinner ofi"ered by king Louis
to the brothers on Whitsun Eve. First the noble
wine, the king's, then cherries, fresh beans cooked in
milk, fish, lobsters, eel pies seasoned with " an excellent
sauce ", tarts and fruit. This was very dififerent from
the dry bread and spring water of Francis and Fra
Masseo. But the founder had said in his Rule : " Eat
all dishes that are put before you, necessitas non habet
legem. And Salimbene on that day humbly submitted
to the Rule. ^

At bottom this by no means ascetic soul was really
good and Christian. He was a sheep belonging to
the great monastic flock, somewhat wandering by
nature, but always ready to come back to the
shepherd's side. He resigned himself to discipline, but
did not trouble himself with too minute a devotion ;
incapable of the slightest tendency to revolt, he had
made for himself a quiet reltreat within himself. As
he believed himself to be assured of a good place
in Paradise, he willingly tarried to enjoy the pleasures
of his earthly pilgrimage, and by no means aspired,
with the melancholy impatience of the monks of old.

FRANCISCAN MYSTICISM 201

to the splendours of the heavenly Jerusalem. He
amused himself at times in a somewhat trivial manner ;
he tells us convent stories of a very Gallic flavour ;
he quotes drinking couplets, received from wandering
students, that he must have sung many a time to the
melody of some hymn on the afternoons of holy days.
But I am not sure that in the very circle of Francis
of Assisi there was not formerly more than one
Sahmbene, and that the Seraphic Father did not smile,
with the indulgence of the truly great at heart, at
the sallies of their good humour. Had he not pre-
scribed gladness as a virtue of the Order : ostendant
se gaudentes in Domino. And all the promises of
the Eternal Gospel were not worth the joy that
Francis had awakened in the soul of the old Church,
and that new beatitude he seemed to have added to
the Sermon on the Mount : Beati qui rident!

CHAPTER .VI

THE HOLY SEE AND THE SPIRITUAL FRAN-
CISCANS. POPULAR ART AND POETRY

The condemnation of the Eternal Gospel by no means
relaxed the zeal of the Spiritual Franciscans, who,
according to the words of John of Parma, " cared
only for eternal things, desired nothing carnal or
earthly, looked only to Jesus, and, attaching them-
selves to the evangelical life, naked and dead to the
world, carried the bare cross of the Saviour ". The
deposition of John of Parma, brought about in 1257
by their opponents, the Conventual Franciscans, seemed
to them the accomplishment of the words of Francis
of Assisi announcing the religious falling away of
certain brethren, the tribulations that his better disciples
would suffer, and even the persecution that several
popes would visit upon them. The mystics, therefore,
were expecting the dark days of war and schism.
Hughues de Digne had said at Lyons : " The Christians
are about to lose the Holy Land. The Templars will
be destroyed. The Franciscans will be divided. The
Dominicans will aspire to riches ". John of Parma
said in his turn : " Those who wish to observe the
testament of the founder must sever themselves from
those who claim privileges contrary to the Rule." (85)
Italy, for half a century and down to the Avignonese
captivity, was to be occupied with this gross question
of heresy : Is the true Christian life, based upon a
pure imitation of the Gospel, always in agreement with

the spirit of the secular Church?

202

THE SPIRITUAL 1 RANCISCxVNS 203

The problem would have been easy of solution if
monastic society had remained faithful to the tradition
of wisdom and liberty belonging to the first Franciscan
epoch. The Holy See wished only for religious peace.
It had always left great independence to the ascetics
and hermits. It had just given evidence, in the case
of Joachimism, of its indulgence of the mystics.
Between Innocent IV and Boniface VIII the Church
elected several popes of a very gentle disposition and
of true pohtical genius, who asked for nothing better
than to welcome under their mantle the more adven-
turous of the Franciscans. These genial pontiles were
Alexander IV (i 254-1 261), vir placidus, sanguineus,
jucundus, risibilis, says the chronicler of St. Bertin ;
Gregory X (i 271-1276), who was elected under the
inspiration of Bonaventura, general of the Minorites,
and who endeavoured to reconcile all the hostile
brothers in Christendom, Ghibeline and Guelf, Greek
and Latin, the Papacy and the Empire ; then, after
the Portuguese John XXI (i 276-1 277), who hated
the regular clergy, who occupied himself with medicine
and scholasticism, and who was accused by the regulars
of magic, the Church chose a cardinal-patron of the
Order of Assisi, John Gaetani Orsini, Nicholas III
(i 277-1 280), the author of the constitution of 1278,
who restored civil liberty to the Sacred College and
to the pontilT by casting out of the senate and the
magistracies of Rome every prince or captain who did
not belong to the Roman families. After Honorius IV
(128 5- 1287), a valetudinarian pope, who pacified his
states to the advantage of his family, the first
Franciscan pope appeared in the person of Nicholas IV
(i 288-1 292), who organized the Tertiaries into a
society independent of the parochial clergy and the
bishops, a society that left them subject only to the

204 MYSTIC ITALY

supervision of the regular Minorites. Finally, towards
the close of the century, a hermit, a Fraticello,
Celestine V (1294), sat for a few days in the chair
of St. Peter. (86)

But the causes of dissension between the two great
factions of the Franciscan Order, and those between
the Holy See and the mystics, were too deep to be
easily eradicated. The Spirituals no longer accepted
any but the heroic aspects of Christianity, and the more
they detached themselves from the earthly life, the
more they isolated themselves by the harshness of their
discipline from the common life, the more they
supposed they were carrying out the intention of their
founder and the Gospel. They were no longer
capable of understanding moderation in faith and
virtue. As soon as a brother interested himself in
the government of religious affairs or of temporal
society, as soon as he entered into the councils of
the Church or devoted himself to the study of profane
science, he became suspect and lost all authority.
The powerlessness of Bonaventura to pacify these
restless souls is well worth attention. Bonaventura
(1221-1274), known as the Seraphic Doctor, was
himself a mystic ; but he had been a deep student
of scholasticism and had taught with distinction in the
School of Paris ; dialectic and exegesis had developed
in him a respect for the reason, and, as he was
rational, his actions were for a long time very in-
fluential in the Order as well as with the Holy See.,
There was not in the thirteenth century, and after
John of Parma, any Franciscan leader who more
poetically retained the memory of Francis and who
was more suited to put the first tradition of Assisi
in agreement with the real conditions of Latin
Christianity. But he was a cardinal and a doctor,
a theologian who had the ear of Rome, the enemy
of pious chimeras, convinced that the doctrine of
absolute poverty would weaken the social value of the

THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 205

Order ; finally, he succeeded John of Parma, and
although the latter had nominated him to the chapter
for election, he seemed to the exalted to be in
possession of an illegitimate power. " He was created
general ", says Angelo Clareno, " and under him began
the fourth persecution ". Angelo is not afraid of
accusing Bonaventura of duplicity and lying ; in the
course of the inquiry set on foot to deal with the faith
of John of Parma, "when he shut himself up with
John in his cell, he thought as he did ; but in the
presence of the brothers he spoke against John ".
Bonaventura, having read in a sermon by a Spiritual
a vehement criticism of prevaricating prelates, recognized
his own portrait and wept, and that was one of the
four cases of the new persecution. When it was
necessary to pronounce serytence against John, the
wisdom and saintliness of Brother Bonaventura suffered
eclipse, his gentleness changed into furious anger, and
'he cried : " If I had not regard for the honour of
the Order I would chastise him as a heretic ". The
Spirituals saw, in their ecstasies, John of Parma
clothed in light, and Bonaventura, with his fingers
equipped with iron talons, rushing upon the saint 'to
tear him into pieces. Jesus and Francis then appeared
and disarmed the hands of the sacrilegious man. (87)
But in dealing with the Holy See the Spirituals
closed their ranks and put themselves on the defensive,
after the manner of a sect decided to resist to the point
of schism. The Seraphic Father, in communicating
to his sons the free inner life, had .formerly relaxed
the bonds that united the faithful to the hierarchy ;
but he maintained for the Church a tender veneration,
and for the dogma of which the Church is the
tabernacle the simple faith of a child. Here religious
liberty was troubled by a breath of revolt. The
excessive contempt for things of the earth threw the
mystics into a very pecuhar form of Christianity, one
that was no longer that of the Church of Rome. The

206 MYSTIC ITALY

secular progress of the Church, begun by Innocent III
(i 1 98-1 2 1 6) under the eyes of Francis, grew so
rapidly that the strict Christians, who hated riches and
power, looked upon Rome with no feelings but those
of anguish ; they asked of themselves whether this
bishop, so keen in his search for the good things of
the world, was still the vicar of God contemplated by
the Bible. The thought never occurred to them that
perhaps the very history of the age imposed upon the
pontiffs that extraordinary passion for temporal great-
ness. In the desperate struggle they sustained against
Frederic II (121 2- 1250) and Manfred, a natural son
of Frederic, who was crowned king in 1258, the popes
had judged that the basis , given by the masterful
Innocent III to the apostolic authority was too
narrow. It was no longer sufficient for them to be
masters of Rome now that the Empire claimed to be
mistress o'f all Italy. In order to preserve the
hegemony of the Guelfic party they had to assure them-
selves of the alliance of Guelfic Tuscany, and, con-
sequently, they had to guarantee this political compact
by their territorial and military power. So too with
the Angevin alHance. When the house of Suabia had
fallen for ever at Benevento and Tagliacozzo, the Holy
See understood that, if it were not as strong as possible,
it ran the risk of becoming the client of its French;
vassal ; later still it seemed to it that Florence would
be a dangerous ally if not pacified by the very heavy
arm of Charles of Valois. Between Clement IV
(1265-1268) and Boniface VIII (1294-1303) the
Papacy undertook finally to free itself from the
constraint imposed upon it by the old theory of the
imperial law. At the council of Lyons, in 1274,
Gregory X (1271-1276) had no difficulty in obtaining
the greatest results. Rudolf of Hapsburg (1218-1291)
recognized the ecclesiastical state and renounced the
exercise of the traditional powers of his predecessors
at Rome and in the patrimony ; he accepted Charles

THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 207

of ."liijou as king of Sicily (i 266-1 285) ; he bowed
himself, and so did all the princes of Germany with
him, before the religious primacy of the pontiff, " the
greatest luminary " ; he avowed himself ready to draw
his sword for the defence of the Church at the first
sign made by the Holy See. The emperor in 1278
confirmed these engagements and in addition recognized,
at the request of Nicholas III (i 277-1 280), the old
donations granted to the Holy See as far back as
the Carolingian era, the Pentapolis and Romagna, " the
garden of the empire ". The tyrants of the Romagna
saw the pontifical suzerainty imposed upon them. Then
the pope took from Charles of Anjou the function of
senator of Rome. But these conquests of the Holy
See, every day compromised by the permanent
revolution of the Roman commune, were quite illusory.
The Roman families, upon which the hand of the
foreigner no longer weighed, became very formidable
to the pontiff's. Nepotism, that is to say, dynastic
security, seemed then to be a constitutional necessity
of the papal monarchy.

Nicholas HI made the Orsini, of which family he
was himself a member, the greatest lords in his
domain. He dreamt of creating military tyrannies for
them in Lombardy and Tuscany. "He was too fond
of his family," writes Ptolemy of Lucca. " He built
up Sion for the benefit of his relatives, as several
Roman popes had done," writes Salimbene. He was
also fond of gold, the first instrument of all political
power. Dante met him in hell, in the region of the
simoniacs. " I was so greedy to enrich my bear cubs
up there that I filled my purse, and here I am cast
to the very bottom of the infernal pit ". (88)

This pope, whom Dante damned, was certainly
considered by the Spirituals as unworthy to preside
over the Church of God. From that time forward
the thought of schism, that was to break out quite
frankly only after Boniface VIII, silently grew in the

208 MYSTIC ITALY

conscience of the mystics. The idea that they
formed of true Christianity is clearly characterized by
these words of a bull of John XXII in 1318 : "They
imagine two churches, one carnal, overwhelmed with
riches, lost in luxury, soiled with crime, over which,
they say, the Roman pope reigns ; the other spiritual
and free in its poverty ". This separated Church of
the Spirituals had to wait until the election of the
antipope Nicholas V (1328), the Franciscan Peter of
Corbara, before it got a government distinct from the
Holy See. But for half a century past it had been
nurtured on the sentiments expressed by Angelo
Clareno. Francis of Assisi, writes Angelo, predicted
that " there would be seen on the papal throne a man
who had not been catholically elected, who would think
ill of the way of Christ and the Rule that Christ has
given by Francis to his sons and that the Church
has confirmed. If the sovereign pontiff, by his decrees,
renders sure truths doubtful, and defines as heresies
what the Church, the doctors and the rules of the
saints, teach as articles of the Catholic faith and the
consummation of all perfection, no one will judge him,
but he judges himself and condemns himself by the
decrees that he precipitately promulgates, urged by his
own will and in virtue of his authority, against the
doctrine of the saints and the rules approved by the
Church ". (89)

II

Between the Franciscans of the strict rule and the
Conventuals reconciliation was as difficult as between
the mystics and the Holy See. Those Minorites who
were attached to the monastic tradition of Elias of
Cortona thought that Rome interpreted the Gospel more
sanely and that the rigid penance, the bed of cinders
and the black bread, were by no means the best con-

THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 209

ditions of the. apostolic life. Then they replied to the
intolerant austerity of their brethren by the hatred that
the rich are fond of showing to the wretched and
revolutionary. Each time the Conxentuals felt them-
selves the stronger, they treated the Spirituals with an
implacable harshness, hunted out suspected doctrines,
burnt books and, not yet daring to burn them, subjected
the theologians to the most odious tortures. From the
deposition of John of Parma onwards the History of
the Tribulations, by Fra Angclo, becomes a veritable
martyrology.

Pierre Jean d'Olive, a Franciscan friar of the diocese
of Beziers, a pupil of the University of Paris, (90) was,
under Nicholas IV and Boniface VIII, the most interest-
ing victim of the religious rancour of his brethren.
He wrote much, saw all his books condemned, and
was even obliged to burn some of them with his own
hand. He was moderately chastised by , several
generals of the Order, by Jerome of Ascoli, the future
Nicholas IV, by Bonagratia, at Strasburg and afterwards
at Avignon, and by, Arlotto of Prato at Paris ; a second
time, in 1292, at Paris, he had to explain himself
before the general chapter presided over by Raymond
Gaufridi, He died quietly in the convent of Narbonne
in 1298, after an edifying profession of the Catholic
faith and an act of submission to pope Boniface. For
the space of some years the festival of his death was
celebrated with great devotion by the clergy and humble
folk of Provence. Later on, under John XXII, those
friars who, in spite of numerous censures, persisted in
reading his writings, were ill-treated. Finally he was
formally accused of heresy, and his body was disinterred
and burnt.

Pierre Jean d'Olive had written two treatises, the
De paupere usu and the De Perfectione evangelica, that
have disappeared, and commentaries upon Genesis, the
Psalms, the Proverbs, the Song of Songs, the Gospels,
and the Apocalypse, a treatise On the Authority of the

14

210 MYSTIC ITALY

Pope and the Council, and an Explanation of the Rule
of Francis, of which we possess the manuscripts. His
views upon poverty, that are summed up by; the historian
of the Tribulations, are very, clear ; he grants his
brothers merely the use of the daily necessaries of life
and the objects, breviaries or sacred vestments, that
are used in the divine office. He forbids them to
exact payment for burials permitted in the churches
of the Minorites or to receive legacies. The basis of
his doctrine was, according to his censors and his
apologists, a Joachimite idea. He proclaimed a future
state of the Church more perfect than the preceding,
of which Francis was the forerunner and the coming
of which was to be hastened by the reform of
monasticism. He came back to the Joachimite vision
of the angel who carries the Eternal Gospel. Nicholas
Eymeric did not fail to transcribe in his Directorium
Inquisitormn the list of the heresies exumed from books
of Pierre Jean d'Olive. The articles that follow recall
the pure tradition of the Eternal Gospel, but with a
singular accent of violence : " The Rule of Francis is
truly the evangehcal law. The law of the Franciscans
is reproved by the carnal Church, as the law of the
Christians was by the Synagogue. It is inevitable that
the carnal Church, in order to merit its destruction
completely, should condemn the Rule of Francis. The
evangehcal law of Francis is called to prosper among
the Greeks, the Jews, the Saracens and the Tartars,
more than in the carnal Church of the Latins. That
Church, which is called universal, catholic and militant,
is merely the impure Babylon, the great prostitute,
meretrix magna, precipitated into hell by simony, pride,
and all other vices. It appertains to the doctors of
the perfect state, much more than it ever appertained
to the apostles, to open the spiritual gates of the
Christian wisdom ". Later on, when the storm called
up by the revolt of the Fraticelll had long been
dissipated, the Church itself proved more indulgent to

THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 211

the memory of Pierre Jean d'Olive. Antoninus, a
Dominican, praised him for his orthodoxy and docility ;
Sixtus IV (147 1- 1 484), a Franciscan pope, permitted
the reading of his books. But we know, through the
chronicler of the Seven Tribulations, to what excesses
the Italian Conventuals were carried against the
immediate disciples of Pierre Jean. One of them, Ponce
of Buontugato, who had refused to surrender the
master's books, was chained at the bottom of a dark
well and fastened in some manner to the wall ; his
food, consisting of paneni artum et aquatn brevein, was
lowered to him ; greatly cramped, and sickened by
the filth of his dungeon, he awaited death " with a
joyous soul and burning with love." The same fate
was in store for Thomas of Casteldemilio. Some
others, such as Peter of Macerata, who had likewise
been condemned to perpetual imprisonment, the
deprivation of their breviary, of confession and of
ecclesiastical burial, were delivered in time by the
general Raymond Gaufridi. They asked to be sent as
missionaries to the east, convinced that they would find
among the Saracens the pity and liberty they no longer
expected from their brothers.

Thus, in the last years of the thirteenth century, the
rupture between the religious of Italy, who laid claim
to absolute perfection, and the rest of the Franciscan
family, between the rational and the lukewarm, who,
satisfied with a less sublime state, chose, after the
manner of the secular Church, a less thorny path to
salvation, was completed. This detachment from all
things was at that time very noticeable even among
a great number of afflicted members of the Third Order,
who endeavoured to escape the obligations of their
social condition and sought the peace and egotism of
the cloister in the midst of the populous towns. The
Franciscan pope, Nicholas IV;, had in 1289 renewed,
by the bull Supra montem, the constitution of the
Tertiaries, or the Brothers of Penitence, whose first Rule

212 MYSTIC ITALY

was fiv^e or six years subsequent to the death' of Francis.
In 1290, by the bull Unigenitiis, he confirmed the
visitors of the Order in the privilege of watching over
the afflicted members who, withdrawn from the inquisi-
tion of their bishops, thus formed a kind of religious
institution. A considerable part of the middle class in
each commune was, by virtue of this new Rule,
dependent upon the chiefs of the Minorites and in con-
sequence upon the Holy See. In 1291, by the buU
Ad audientiam, addressed to the bishop of Florence,
Nicholas IV published information to the world regard-
ing the crisis that had rapidly been produced among
the Tertiaries ; those among them who, rebellious to
the constitution of the bull Supra moniem, had raUied
round their bishop, and who had received as a reward
for their attachment to the old discipline the privileges,
breviaries, furniture and goods of the old fraternity.
The pope thus took up the cudgels in defence of the
others, more docile to the Holy See, who, in the eyes
of the bishop and parochial clergy of Florence, are the
real apostates. This resistance of the Itahan episcopate
to the reforms of Nicholas IV, is one of the numerous
incidents in the struggle of the secular Church against
the mendicant orders. But in the very course of this
crisis we can perceive a conflict no less serious between
civil society and the Brothers of Penitence. The rela-
tions between the state and this vast community were
extremely difficult. From the very first the Tertiaries
had escaped from military service, from their feudal
duty, and from the exercise of public offices. The
popes were constantly occupied in withdrawing them
from the requirements of the communal law.
Gregory IX determined the strict cases in which
they could take an oath in a court of law, and assist in
the solemn engagements of their cities. Nicholas IV
confirmed, " by the indulgence of the apostolic see ",
these exceptions to the general rule of civil abstention.
He moreover renewed the privile^ge accorded to the

THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 213

Tertiaries of disposing of their goods iii favour of
the poor or the Church, to the exclusion of their
families or the State, to which these strict Christians
refused bread and taxes, in the name of the Gospel
poverty. (91)

III

As soon as the ideal embraced by, the exalted members
of the Franciscan religion detached them more and
more from the real world, the return to solitude and
the flight to the desert were bound to appear excellent
things to these intemperate mystics. So they went
back in great numbers to the distant tradition of
Romuald (950 ?-i027), who seems to have wandered
up and down Italy for thirty years founding monasteries
and hermitages, and Nilus the Younger (910-1005).
They buried themselves in the woods, in the wastes of
the Roman Campagna, in the desolate gorges of the
Apennines, praying and sleeping beneath a roof of
rushes, waiting for a raven sent by God to bring them
their daily bread', as in the legendary time of the hermits
of Syria or Egypt. Under the last pontificates of
the century a certain Pietro, a peasant of the Abruzzi,
a narrow-minded fanatic, had gathered together a few
deserters from the Franciscan Order on Mount Murrone,
near Sulmona. Nothing was spoken of in Italy but
the sanctity of this solitary. Had not the founder
of the new community, in the presence of Gregory X
( 1 271-1276), hung up his cloak on a sunbeam? But
this miracle seems even less surprising than the election
of Pietro himself to the pontificate. The conclave that
gathered after the death of Nicholas IV (i 288-1 292)
divided hopelessly between the Orsini and Colonna,
terrified by the anarchy that for two years reigned in
Rome, had fled, or a part of it had fled, to Rieti, and
then at the end of 1293 had proceeded to Perugia.,

214 MYSTIC ITALY

The Church, dominated by a revolutionary senate, and
threatened by Charles II of Anjou, was upon the eve
of a schism. Cardinal Latino Orsini then conceived
the extraordinary idea of proposing for the choice of
the Sacred College the hermit of Mount Murrone, whose
prophetic visions were disturbing the peninsula. On
July 5, 1294, Pietro was elected. Three bishops were
deputed to take to him, amid the rocks and moors
where he hid, the news of his election. In a rude hut,
whose window was defended by a grating, they found
an old man covered with a ragged shirt, with a wild
beard and a face emaciated by fasting, and eyes worn
with tears. The bishops uncovered their heads and
threw themselves on their knees. Pietro, in his turn,
thinking it a miraculous \'ision, knelt also. The deputies
of the Church then told him that he was pope and
handed him the parchment bearing the report of the
election. Pietro, terrified, wished to escape, but his
brothers, who saw old Joachim's Gospel being suddenly
fulfilled, constrained him to accept the tiara. Thus
the new pope was carried oflP, and before long he met
upon the way, ascending the mountain, king Charles
and his son, claimant to the crown of Hungary, with
barons, priests, and an immense crowd of people. The
procession entered Aquila ; the pope, still clad in his
miserable robe, rode on an ass, the bridle of which was
held by the two kings, followed by the Angevin chivalry
and all the regular clergy of the district. The author
of the election, cardinal Orsini, died at this moment
at Perugia. Pietro ordered the Sacred College to join
him at Aquila. The cardinals, and among them the
proud Benedict Gaetani, the future Boniface VIII, came
therefore to look upon the pontifical mummy they
had just placed on the throne of Gregory VII and
Innocent III.

On August 29, 1294, Fr^ Pietro was consecrated
and took the name of Celestine V. His very short
reign was assuredly one of the most astonishing pages

THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 215

in the history of the Church. If he had possessed
pohtical genius, and had had sufficient time, he mig^ht
perhaps have given an unheard-of shock to Christendom.
But from the very first he foimd himself in the hands
of Charles II, Avho took him to Naples, in spite of
the resistance of the cardinals. Altogether bewildered
by the noise of the great city, he at first shut himself
up for some weeks in a cell of the New Castle, like,
says a chronicler, " the pheasant that hides its head
under its wing and thinks thus to escape the eyes of
the hunter ". On that pontifical throne, whereon he
had seen himself flung as in a dream, the unhappy man j^
felt himself seized by a terrible giddiness. ^ He regretted'^
the peace of his retreat in the sacred silence of the
lofty plateaus of the Apennines, his long colloquies
with God, his childish ignorance of the things of the
world. For five months he struggled in the anguish
of his weakness, then, perhaps induced by the
treacherous counsels of cardinal Gaetani, he suddenly
decided to abdicate. On December 13, after having
read to the consistory a bull sanctioning the act of
renunciation, he laid down the supreme power in the
Church. Outside a popular rising brought about by
the hermits and Fraticelli tried in vain to alter Celestine's
resolution. Under the eyes of the cardinals he took off
the pontifical cope and resumed his patched shirt. The
Sacred College and king Charles let him return to his
mountain. But Boniface VIII, directly after his elec-
tion, took measures to suppress this vagabond pope whom
a religious or political crisis might bring back to the
government of the Church, and in face of whom hfc
himself, for the turbulent mob of the regulars, was but
an antipope. Celestine V, pursued as a wild beast
in the woods of Apulia by the emissaries of his successor,
succeeded in reaching the sea ; he went on board a
fishing-boat, hoping to gain the shores of Dalmatia,
but he was carried by a storm back to Italy. The
inhabitants of the coast where he was driven ashore

216 MYSTIC ITALY

paid homage to him' and begged him to declare himself
the true pope. Celestine simply went to give himself
up to the podestd of the district ; the latter handed
him over to the king of Naples. In May, 1295, the
constable of Charles II conducted him to the frontier
of the Papal State. Boniface had no difficulty in
persuading the old hermit to submit to perpetual
seclusion. He was shut up in a tower, at the top of
a mountain, near Alatri. The cell was so narrow that
he slept with his head resting on the altar where he
celebrated mass. He died in the following year. He
had suffered sufficiently to be venerated as a martyr.
In 13 1 3 the Church canonized him. But Dante, who
could not pardon him for having ceded the tiara to
Gaetani, placed him in hell, among the colourless souls
that had lived " without infamy or glory ", and that
were " disdained alike by the divine pity^ and the divine
justice ",

Vomhra di colui
Che fece per viltate il gran rifinto. (92.)

IV,

Celestine V left the Church two instruments to
avenge his memory, a new religious order, that took
the name of Pauperes heremitce dominl Celestini, and
a poet, Jacopone of Todi. The Celestines, who were no
other than the former anonymous community of Frk'
Pietro, with which the last devotees of Pierre Jean
d'Olive had affiliated themselves, were destined to seek
exile in Greece in order to escape the pursuit of
Boniface VIII. They lived for some time in peace
on the coasts of Morea, on the shore of the Gulf of
Lepanto, in Thessaly and in the islands of the
archipelago. But the Minorites, hearing from merchants
and sailors the manner of life led by these, hermits '" who
ate no meat, drank no wine, lived far from men, heard

THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 217

no mass, and recognized neither pope nor Church ",
denounced them to the Latin bishops and the barons.
The majority of these reports were false, but they, came
to the ears of Boniface VIII, who ordered the patriarch
of Constantinople and the archbishops of Athens and
Patras to recall the Celestines to the Catholic faith.
Solemnly excommunicated, to the sound of the sacred
bells, in the church at Negropont, the hermits, led by
their chief Frk Liberato, resolved to return to Italy, in
order to plead their own cause before the pope. The
general of the Minorites, hearing that they were in
hiding in the hermitages of the kingdom of Naples, had
them arrested by the police of Charles II and handed
over to the judgment of the inquisitor, Thomas of
Aversa. The latter, a Dominican, who formerly under
Nicholas IV had been deprived of the right of preach-
ing in consequence of a disrespectful sermon upon the
stigmata of Francis, hastened to absolve these poor
people ; he advised them to disperse, travelling by
night, by devious ways, promising them his support
in the councils of the pope. Frk Liberato went to die
near Viterbo in the seclusion of a hermitage. The
part played by the Celestines was ephemeral, as had
been the pontificate of their founder. But the seed
of schism that the anchorites of Murrone had received
from the hands of Celestine V was gathered up by the
Fratlcelli of the fourteenth century who made it bear
a rich hars-est. The chronicler of the Tribulations tells
us, in fact, that the hermit-pope, immediately after
his elevation, had absolved his brothers in solitude from
all obedience towards the heads of the Order of Assisi,
and delegated to Frh.' Liberato, for the government of
this community of dreamers, the plenitude of apostolic
power. This was a most artless way of recognizing
the right of religious insurrection. Thus, from the
earliest days of tl>e reign of Boniface VIII (i 294-1 303)
we see reappear in Italy, in the little sects that were
formed here and there under the inspiration of the

218 MYSTIC ITALY

Holy Ghost, the anarchy whereby the Church had been
troubled forty years before in the days in the Joachimite
ferment. (93)

But this host of turbulent sectaries would hav^e
passed almost unnoticed through the tragic pontificate
of Boniface VIII if a singular poet, Fra Jacopone of
Todi (?-i3o6?), had not made himself the mouthpiece
of all the rehgious and political hatred that had
combined against the Holy See. Ser Jacomo Benedetti
had adopted the mystic life somewhat late in his career.
Born about 1230 on the confines of Umbria and the
Papal State, he had studied law, taken the red robe
of the doctorate, and for some time carried on the
profession of a lawyer. He was at that time looked
upon as a man of a v^ery harsh nature, proud, rapacious
and impious. (94) A domestic catastrophe made him
change his vocation completely. His wife, who was
of a Ghibeline family, perished in 1268, being crushed
beneath the ruins of a platform at the time of a
festival. Under her rich garments was found a hair
shirt. That was enough to convert Ser Jacomo to
God. He bade farewell to jurisprudence, distributed his
goods to the poor, and, clad in a coarse tunic with a
cowl, became a Tertiary of St. Francis and a hermit.
At the end of ten years of penitence, he entered the
Minorite Order as a lay brother. His devotion was
displayed in a somewhat strange manner. He repro-
duced the excesses of fervour whereby Francis of Assisi
had marked his rupture with the world : he was seen
walking, half naked, on all fours, saddled and bridled
like an ass ; or perhaps, with his body smeared with
resin, he would roll in a mass of feathers and thus
face the ridicule and insults of the mob. He was
then surnamed Jacopone out of mockery. At night, far
from all prying eyes, he wept, prayed and smote his
breast. This painful piety, this " madness for Christ ",
was by no means a novelty for those who remem-
bered the extraordinary epoch of the flagellants. But

THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 219

Jacoponc also appeared in the character of the
troubadour or " jongleur of God ". He exhorted him-
self, he glorified his God and his penitence, in vehement
language, as unequal and free as the theology that was
therein contained. " I am going to a great battle, a
great labour, O Christ, help me, in order that I may
be victorious. I am going to love the cross with a
burning ardour and ask it to penetrate me with its
madness. I am going to find peace and joy in the
sweetness of agony. ... I shall see whether I can
enter Paradise by the path I have chosen, to enjoy
there the songs and the smiles of eternity. Lord, permit
me to know and fulfil Thy will here below ; what
matters it then whether Thou dost damn or save me
according to Thy good pleasure? " This disdain of
salvation, in a mystic of the Middle Ages, is a novelty
that testifies to the revolutionary genius of Jacopone.
" I have asked God for hell ", he says again, " loving
Him and losing myself ; all evil that comes from Him
is sweetness to me." When Celestine was carried to
the Holy See, Jacopone thought he had at last
a pope after his own heart. After the rifiuto he refused
allegiance to Boniface VIII, who denied the hermits the
privileges granted them by Celestine, and declaimed
against the new master of the Church with a fury
that Dante himself did not surpass.

V

The conflict offered itself to Jacopone of its own
accord. In 1297 the pope took part in a family
quarrel that divided the Colonna, and became embroiled
with the cardinals Giacomo and Pietro, uncle and
nephew, the two greatest lords in the Roman Church.
They, aided by their cousins, Stefano and Sciarra,
rallied the Ghibcline party to their side, entered into
an intrigue with James of Aragon against the Angevin

220 MYSTIC ITALY

dynasty, and, crying aloud that Boniface was not a
lawful pope, refused to accept the pontifical garrisons
in their fiefs in the district of Palestrina. Boniface
launched a bull against them and despoiled the two
cardinals of their ecclesiastical dignity. The Colonna
took up the challenge hurled at them by the pontiff.
On May loth they held a family and war council at
Longhezza on the Anio, at which there were present
doctors of jurisprudence, French prelates, and two
Minorite brothers, Diodati and Jacopone. The con-
spirators drew up a manifesto in which they declared
Boniface an antipope and the abdication of Celestine
invalid because of fraud and violence ; they finally
demanded the convocation of a general council. This
deed was published at Rome and even on the altar at
St. Peter's. But Celestine had been dead two years,
the cardinals Colonna had voted at the conclave for
Gaetani, and the latter, strong in his right, excommuni-
cated by a bull all the rebellious Colonna as traitors
and schismatics. He stigmatized them with infamy and
cursed any, who gave them asylum. The Colonna for-
tified themselves in their towers and in the citadel of
Palestrina. The pope, by a third bull, summoned all
Christendom to the crusade against his enemies and
sold indulgences to pay for the zeal of the crusaders.
A fairly large number of them came from Tuscany
and Umbria, while the Colonna saw themselves
abandoned by king Frederic of Sicily, by the Ghibelines
of the Papal State, and by the aristocracy and people
of Rome. It was undoubtedly at the end of this year
II 297 that Jacopone composed rimed pamphlets against
Boniface and the secular Church. " O pope Boniface,
thou hast played deeply the game of the world. I
believe that thou wilt not leave it with pleasure. . . .
Thou hast shown great diligence in heaping up riches ;
things permissible are not enough for tliy insatiable
hunger, and behold thou dost rob like a highwayman.
. . . iWhen thou didst celebrate thy first mass, darkness

THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 221

fell upon the city and the sanctuary remained without
light. . . . When thou wast consecrated forty men
perished on coming out of the church, and by this
miracle God showed how far thou wast well pleasing
to Him." Then Jacopone pictured the Church in
tears, weeping for the apostles, martyrs, and priests,
of the ages of faith ; he stigmatized, by the mouth of
Jesus Christ, the ingratitude of the Church of Rome
that had shown itself unworthy of the Saviour's love.
" The false clergy have slain atid destroyed Me ; they
have caused Me to lose the fruit of My labours, and
they have inflicted on Me pain greater than death :

Lo falso dericato
Si m' ha morto e destrutto :
D' ogne mio lavereccio
Me fon perder lo frutto ;
Major dolor de morte
Da lore aggio portato."

The Cyclopean fortress of Palestrina, the last refuge
of the Colonna, was compelled to capitulate. The
cardinals Giacomo and Pietro were taken to Rome,
dressed in mourning garments and with ropes round
their necks ; they knelt at the feet of Boniface, who
was surrounded by the Sacred College, and they were
compelled to honour him as pontiff. Palestrina, which
Sulla had razed to the ground fourteen hundred years
before, was utterly destroyed by the Holy Father's
orders, although it was one of the seven episcopal
mother cities of the Church of Rome. All the heads of
the Colonna family fled into exile, loaded with fresh
excommunications ; the cardinals retired to the
Ghibelines of Tuscany ; Sciarra, after hiding in the
woods and marshes, reached the coast, where he was
captured by pirates and compelled to row as a galley-
slave ; Stefano, whom Petrarch was to compare with
Scipio Africanus, found refuge in Sicily. Fr^ Jacopone
was taken and shut up in a dungeon at Palestrina itself.

222 MYSTIC ITALY

a living witness, among those ruins, of the implacable
wrath of Boniface. Fastened to the wall, in perpetual
night, he continued to sing his verses : '* I am chained
for ever, chained like a lion " ; he disputed his bread
with the voracity of the rats ; he paid his tavern-
keeper for his pittance with Paternosters. During the
first months of his imprisonment he retained his
schismatic's pride and his cheerfulness, as a FratlcellQ
whom God at last permitted to know absolute poverty.
" Come, Jacopone, behold thou art put to the test. . . .
Thou hast been given a subterranean dwelling as thy
prebend, thou must be content therewith. . . . Behold
for thirty years I aspired to the suffering that is being
inflicted upon me ; the day of consolation has at last
come. . , . I lie beneath the earth, chained for ever ;
so good a benefice have I gained at the court of
Rome I " But little by little the weariness of the dark-
ness told upon him ; he solicited the pope's pardon
in tones more and more humble. At the Jubilee of
1300 he asked for grace in the name of the universal
peace that was reigning in men's souls ; he bleats, he
says, " to the shepherd who has driven him from the
fold "; he would fain see the sun rise again and once
more chant on Palm Sunday the hosanna of the little
children.

Messer, chi io riveggio la hice /
Ch' io possa cavtar a voce
Quello osanna puerile.

Let Boniface resign him into the fatherly hands of
Francis and cry to him : " Vecchio, surge I Old man,
arise ! " Legend would have it that one day the pope,
passing by the prison of Palestrina, said to the
" jongleur of God " : '- When wilt thou come forth
from here?" Jacopone replied: "On the day when
thou dost enter here ". (95)

As a matter of fact Jacopone did not recover his
freedom until the year 1303, in the pontificate of

THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 223

Benedict XI (i 303-1 304), the successor of Boniface.
He was then nearly seventy-five years old. He went
to the door of the convent of Collazzone and knocked'
thereon as a last haven of refuge. There he lived yet
three years longer. ^When he was upon the point of
death, on Christinas night 1306, he declared that he
would receive the sacraments only from the hands of
Giovanni della Verna, his old friend, and as the brothers
were dismayed at this dangerous fancy, the dying man,
in a joyous voice, began to sing the laud : " Aniina
henedetta, soul blessed by the Creator, look to thy
Saviour, WTio awaits thee on His cross." Hardly had
he finished when Giovanni della Verna appeared on
the threshold of his cell. Jacopone then turned towards
God, and afterwards sang the first words of the popular
canticle,

Jesu, nostra fidanza,
Del cor somnia speranza,

and gave up the ghost at the very moment when, in the
convent church, the priest who was celebrating the
midnight mass began to intone the Gloria in excelsis.

VI

Over the tomb of Vra. Jacopone there reappeared
the religious enthusiasm with which the humble folk
had formerly greeted the death of Francis of Assisi.
He had suffered persecution and exalted the religion
of the poor and humble ; that was enough to make
him reckoned among the best friends of God. In him
was venerated not only the ascetic and the martyr, but
also the poet. The satires and war songs by which
the hermit of Todi had buffeted Boniface VIII were
doubtless soon forgotten ; but his lauds, written in the
vulgar tongue, and his Latin hymns, had been piously

224 MYSTIC ITALY

stored up in the heart of the crowd. These composi-
tions with their tender smiles, full of the love of Jesus,
corresponded marvellously with the artless mysticism
of worthy people. They were sung in the churches, in
order to enliven the austerity of the liturgy ; they were
sung by the processions of pilgrims as they passed
through the fields in the sunshine, in order to beguile
the weariness of the way.

It is not quite certain that Jacopone, as Ozanam
thought, was the author of the Stabat Mater of the
cross, or even of the charming Stabat Mater of the
crib. " The gracious mother was standing joyfully near
the hay on which the little one was lying :

Stabat Matey speciosa,
Juxta fcenum gaudiosa,
Diim jacebat parvulus.

But the laud OfMaria dolce is of a very similar senti-
ment to that of this second Stabat. " Thou hast laid
the Child in the hay of the crib, thou hast wrapped!
Him in some poor swaddling clothes, then thou didst
admire him with extreme joy." M. d'Ancona sees in
this hymn the delicate work of some Florentine of the
fifteenth century rather than the fresh fancy of
Jacopone. The same inspiration, however, 'appears more
than once in the lauds of the Umbrian poet, with a
descriptive charm that seems to announce the tradition
at once free and pious of the first efforts of Italian
painting. " See how the Bambino kicked in the straw ;
the mother was there and covered him and put the
little mouth to her breast. And the Child seized the teat
with His little lips ; He pressed it with His mouth
that had as yet no teeth ; with her left hand she
rocked Him, and with holy songs lulled her dear Love
to sleep. . . . And aU. around danced the angels,
singing verses most sweet and speaking of nought but
love. ... A new star appeared to the kings of the

THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 225

east ; they found Him all radiant, between the ox and
the ass ; the tender Flower did not rest on a bed of
fine linen ; the dazzling Lily was laid on a handful of
straw. . . . What didst thou feel, Mary, gracious lady,
when God sucked thy milk? Oh ! how is it thou didst
not die of joy in embracing Him? " Do we not already
see in these verses the saintly pictures of Lorenzo di
Credi or those of Sandro Botticelh?

iWe must perhaps refer to Jacopone the canticle of
passionate love, long attributed to Francis of Assisi :

A more, Amore, chest m' hai fcrito,
Altro che Amove non posso gridare ;

Amore, Amore, teco so iinito,

Altro lion posso che tc abbracciare.

But it matters little enough whether the paternity of
this poem remains doubtful between the two troubadours
of Jesus ; both of them made Umbria hear the same
cry of loving suffering. There was less serenity, never-
theless, in the soul of Jacopone than in that of the
founder of the Franciscans. The thought of death
extends its shadow at times over the poetry of the
lauds. And it is no longer the angel of peace
descending towards the faithful that was summoned up
by Jacopone, but the funereal figure, that Orcagna wias
at a later time to fix on the walls of the Campo -Santo :

Ecco la pallida morte,
Laida, scura e sfigurata.

He displays, with a mournful emphasis, all the miseries
of the tomb. "Their flesh, that was so brilliant, is all
eaten by worms. Behold this is death, that slays
knights, ladies and pages, that gives back to the earth
nuns and monks, priests and laymen, the ugly as well
as the beautiful. . . . Human filth, be no longer so
proud ; ashes, glorify, not yourselves ; earthworm, thou
must die ; grass of a day, thou must be withered.

15

226 MYSTIC ITALY

To-day a man all brilliant with' glory walks with head'
erect, proud and haughty ; to-morrow he lies as a vile
thing, hideous and dead, and his corrupt flesh is full
of worms." •

VII

Jacopone's laud is a plcbian song, and owes nothing
to the imitation of ecclesiastical hymns. The first bands
of flagellants, who in 1258 arose at the voic^ of an
old hermit of Umbria, Raineri Fasani, and afterwards
the dtsciplinatl di Gesii Crista, who multiplied in
central Italy, used to sing, according to Salimbcne, lauds
in honour of God and the Blessed Virgin, while they
marched and lashed their shoulders ". (96) When
these pious vagabonds were organized into lay brother-
hoods, attached to the parishes, the laud, towards the
end of the thirteenth century, gradually took the
dramatic form. The dialogue seemed more touching
than the earlier form of the monologue. On certain
church festivals the devout members of the laity, aided
at times by a few of the clergy, dressed themselves in
the costumes of Gospel characters and sang a scene
from the sacred legends. The oldest of these popular
dramas had been the midnight mass, celebrated in a
barn, where Francis preached beside the crib between
the ox and the ass. Soon the imagination of the
faithful added to the Uturgical text " what might have
happened ", for, said Bonaventura, " the evangelists did
not write everything ". (97) The same doctor, in his
Meditations, imagines all sorts of incidents of a pathetic
kind and pictures that fitted into the framework of
the historians of Jesus. There was no need of a
practised art thus to detach from the Gospel a few
scenes in dialogue, in which the Brothers of Penitence
sometimes spoilt the great simphcity of Mark or
Matthew by somewhat poor developments. At times

THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 227

even the monologue was sufficient to the UmbVian poet
in order to edify the audience ; thus Jesus would relate
simply to his disciples, who remained silent, the parable
of the Prodigal Son, from which the authors of the
mystery plays were afterwards to deduce a whole
drama.

Two subjects, however, the greatest to be found in
the New Testament, gavie the primitive theatre of
Umbria material for the amplest invention, the Last
Judgment and the Passion. The laud for the Sunday of
Advent was recited by numerous personages : antichrist
and the kings of his court, the people of Jerusalem,
the archangel Gabriel, Satan and his demons, the elect
and the damned, Mary beseeching her Son, Christ the
sovereign judge. Jesus reminds the accursed of all
the trials of His earthly life, of which He accuses them
as the authors : " You who saw Me suffering hunger
and thirst and gave Me nought to eat or drink. . . .
I was wandering as a pilgrim and you refused me
a lodging ; I was walking naked on the road and you
turned aside your heads as if I were unknown to you ;
I was sick and in prison and you visited me not ".'
The damned answer : " Lord, when we saw Thee over-
whelmed with such evils we knew not Thy distress ;
why, O Lord, hast Thou condemned us? " " When a
poor man asked alms of you ", replies the judge, " it
was I iwho was in him. At every sin you have crucified
Me, and yet I have waited with gentleness, hoping
always that I need not smite you. . . . Depart,
accursed race 1 " The sinners turn to Mary and beseech
her to intercede, and the Virgin tries in vain, in the
name of her miraculous motherhood, to alter the terrible
decree of the Church. " By the milk wherewith I
nourished Thee, hearken to me a while, my Son, pardon
those for whom I plead. . . . Nine months I bore
Thee in my virgin womb, and Thou didst drink of
these breasts when Thou wast a little child ; I pray
Thee, if it may be, repeal Thy sentence ".

228 MYSTIC ITALY

The Lamentation of the Madonna of the Passion of
her Son Jesus Christ makes the voice of the people, the
voice of the martyrs, or even that of the poet, alternative
with the desperate words of the mother, showing the
Virgin the successive scenes of the drama. " O, Pilate,
torture not my Son, I can prove to thee that He is
wrongfully accused ". " Crucify Him, crucify Him, the
man Who says He is our King : according to our law
He has sinned against the senate. Let them bring the
thieves to be His companions I Let them crown Him
with thorns. Him wliQ is called our King." " LWoman,
behold, they have taken His arm^ they have stretched
Him on the cross, and have nailed His hand ".
"Mother, wherefore art thou come? Thou dost pierce
My heart with thy tears ". " My Son, they called
me ; my Child, my Father, my Husband, my Child,
who has smitten Thee, my Child, who has stripped
Thee of Thy garments? . . . My Son, Thou hast given
up the ghost, my, Son so white and red. Thou hast
abandoned me ; my Son so white and fair, my Son
with Thy charming face, why has the world so crueUy
outraged Thee? John, son that has just been given
me, thy Brother is dead, and I have felt the sword
concerning which it was prophesied me and which with
the samei stroke has slain both the mother ,andvher Son ".

These poems, still more lyrical than dramatic, that
have been attributed to Jacopone of Todi, sufficed for
the edification of the faithful of the thirteenth century.
They were devotions in popular language, celebrated,
at the close of the parochical mass, by the Brother-
hood of Penitence, either in the nave or in some chapel
of the church. The Dramatic Offices of the Penitents
of Umbria, of which several are remarkable for the
presence of the strophe in ottava rima, derived from
Sicily, already testify to a precise distribution of the
parts, of a commencing evolution of the drama and
even of the decoration of the stage. (98) The Laud
of Good Friday opens with these words from a group

THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 229

of devout persons : " Raise your eyes and behold.
Jesus Christ died for us to-day, His hands and feet
nailed to the cross, His side pierced ". And the Virgin,
Mary Magdalene, the apostle John, and the holy women,
relate at the foot of the cross the different pictures
of the Passion, down to the Lord's pardon of the good
thief, and the last cry of Jesus, that rent the veil of the
Temple.

It was thus that, little by little, the dramatic move-
ment and the picture of holiness, added to the edifying
words and the procession of the characters in the sacred
tradition, made the primitive laud assume the scenic
form of the mystery-play. The Italian mystery-play
of the fourteenth century is, in a general way, very
like the pious representations of the rest of Christendom.
An original clement, nevertheless, shows itself there
more than elsewhere, irony. I mean the Florentine irony
of Boccaccio and Sacchetti directed towards both the
regular and the secular clergy, as bitter at times as that
of Dante, that re\eals, in the simple theatre of this
people, the influence of the lay spirit, curious of
criticism and easily moved to mockery, that grew so
rapidly in Italy. There were doubtless scenes of a
comic kind in that famous pantomine of Hell celebrated
in 1303 at Florence, that ended with so lamentable an
accident. And in the drama A Holy Father and a
Monk, the date of which is undecided, but which is
certainly very old, the following words contain even at
that early period a very lively satire upon the monastic
life : " Nowadays they are nothing but merchants, and
under the device of their order they wish to be
venerated, holding all others as damned ... a proud,
ungrateful and foolish race, who show to others the
narrow path to salvation, and, if they tliought they
could win a great gain, would not hesitate to kill Christ
a second time . . . greedy people, full of all impiety,
who think they have the right to enter Paradise when
they have separated a son from his father ". (99)

230 MYSTIC ITALY

VIII

At the very time when the Italian imagination began
to return to the evangehcal past of the Church, in order
to seek there subjects for a rehgious drama, a mystic
writer had set out to collect, with charming simplicity,
the most venerable memories of the apostoHc history
and the traditions scattered as well in the memory
of the faithful as ini the tales of the hagiographers about
the saints inscribed in the breviary, disciples of Jesus,
martyrs, doctors, bishops, fathers of the desert, virgins,
and thaumaturges. From John and Paul to Francis,
Dominic and Bonaventura, the old bishop of Genoa,
Jacobus de Voragine, gives us a procession in his
Golden Legend of the noblest figures in the Church
triumphant, without any historical order, , without
criticism, and without theological theory. He believed
with a childhke faith in, the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus
who, flying from the persecution of Decius, slept in the
recesses of a cavern for two centuries and whose
countenances, when they awoke, " had the freshness
of roses ", no less than in the existence of Thomas
Aquinas^ with whom he had certainly conversed at some
time or other. " They say they had slept three hundred
and seventy-two years, but that is not certain, for they
revived in the year of the Lord 448, and Decius reigned
one year and three months, in the year 252 ; so that
they, slept only one hundred and ninety-six years." He
believed in the most surprising miracles, even in magic
spells and enchanted formulas that summon up or drive
away the demons ; he had no doubt whatever that the
devil is incessantly coming to tempt, in the guise of a
young girl or a young man of ravishing beauty^
the modesty of virgins and the chastity of ascetics.
Simple as a Christian lulled to sleep by the legend of
Assisi, Jacobus believed in the familiar intercourse of
wild beasts with the confessors, in the wolf who led

THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 231

Antony to the cell of Paul the PIcrmit, in the raven
which, on that day, brought the two solitaries a double
ration of bread and fruit, in the two lions who, on the
very evening of that day, piously presented themselves
in order to dig Paul's grave, " and, when they had
buried him, they retired into the woods ".

Although the Golden Legend is dedicated mainly to
the history of martyrs and the stern penance of the
most faithful friends of God, it contains only consoling
lessons for simple souls, and seems to endeavour to
fill up the abyss that separates the very pure and
glorious saints from the humble crowd of Christians
engaged in the seductions of the world. It does not
exhibit evil and sin as enemies of too formidable a
kind ; it takes pleasure in pointing out the shameful
and sometimes ridiculous defeats of the demon. Here
the devil, in spite of his malice, carries off only a very
meagre booty— here and there, the soul of some pagan
proconsul who insisted upon commanding the worship
of his gods of bronze and clay. With a little
good will. Christians, surrounded by a strengthening
atmosphere of miracles, succeeded in assuring their
salvation. God holds out a helping hand to them and
complaisantly lifts them up to His throne. The virtues
that arc within the reach of the humble, goodness of
heart, charity, uprightness, tenderness, and faith, are,
equally with the bitter sacrifice of life or the renuncia-
tion of all earthly joy, certain pledges of bhss. The
priest is little found in the Legend ; he does not trouble
the faithful about his heavenly Father. Here faith is
of more account than works ; an emotion of penitence
is sufficient to purify one's conscience. A young man
whom John the Evangehst had converted made himself
the chief of a band of robbers. The apostle went in
search of him and pursued him to the mountain crying :
"My dear son, why dost thou fly from thy father?
Fear nought, for I will ofi"er up prayers for thee to
Jesus Christ, and I will willingly die for thee, as Jesus

232 MYSTIC ITALY

Christ died for us. Return then, my son, for Jesus
Christ has sent me to thee ". And, when the young
man heard that, he repented and returned and shed
very bitter tears, and the apostle fell at his feet and
kissed his hand^ as if he had been made white by
penitence." A woman who had committed a horrible sin
did not dare to confess it to, John the Almoner, patriarch'
of Alexander. " At least write it do\Mi ", said the
indulgent confessor^ " and seal the writing, and bring
it to me, and I will pray for you ". The woman
brought her sin written down and sealed ; some days
later John died ; the woman, uneasy for her honour,
went to weep at the tomb of John in order that he might
restore her secret to her. He came forth from the
tomb, dressed as a bishop, and handed the woman the
confession, the seal of which was unbroken. She
opened it, found her sin obliterated, and in its place
these words : " Thy sin is done away by the merits of
My servant John ". One day when the same bishop
was praying alone, he saw by his side a very beautiful
virgin, who wore a crown of olives on her head, and
when he saw her he was seized with astonishment and
asked her who she was. And she said : " I am Mercy,
who caused the Son of God to come from heaven ; take
me for thy wife, and it shall be well with thee ". And
John, understanding that the olive signified mercy,
began from that day to be so merciful that he was
surnamed the Almoner and always called the poor his
lords. But is not the spirit of this Christianity that
smiles at the weakness of men already to be found
in those words of John the Evangelist, that are recalled
by Jacobus de Voragine as having been told by St.
Jerome : " John was at Ephesus, having arrived at
an extreme old age, and, when he was brought to the
church, he could no longer say anything but these
words, which he repeated to his disciples : •' My
children, love one another '. And at last the brethren
who were with him were astonished that he always

THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 233

repeated the same words, and they asked liim : * Master,
why dost thou always say these words? ' And he
answered : ' Beoiuse that is the commandment of our
Lord, and if that alone is fulfilled, it is enough ' ".

IX

Italian art, in its early youth, painting and sculpture,
drew upon the same sources as the popular poetry^
the sacred drama and the edifying history of the distant
ages of Christianity. The school of the Pisan masters
and that of Giotto present two original features tliat
are always to be met with down to the end of the,
sixteenth century : the sense of living nature and the
taste for the pathetic and for religious tenderness. The
education that a few remains of Greek sculpture gave
the Pisans, the delicate instinct of the antique nobility
that can be recognized in Giotto, maintained Tuscan
art, whose naturalism was for ever preser\-ed from
the middle -class vulgarity of the French artists of the
fourteenth century. And this naturalism, in its turn, at
the time when Dante wrote the Paradise, protected
Italian painting from the seduction of mystic candour
that, in the middle of the fifteenth century, reappeared
under the brush of the friar Angelico of Fiesole.

Religious art possesses its full historical value only
if it is very sincere and corresponds by its very artless -
ness to the conscience of the faithful. The hieratic art
of the Italians, the mosaics that lasted without inter-
ruption from the Byzantine epoch to the Roman school
of the Cosmati in the thirteenth century, the painting in
fresco or distemper of the image masters, anterior to
Cimabue, well expressed, in spite of the awkwardness
of the compositions or the inexperience of the processes,
the sentiment of sadness, often of terror, with which
men's souls were filled in the Middle Ages. The idea
that these old artists form of the divine majesty is

234 MYSTIC ITALY

painful. He is a judge, an emperor, seated on an
inaccessible throne high up in the apse ; still in his
sacerdotal purple, He looks far otT into vague space,
and never lowers His black eyes towards the crowd
prostrated on the stones of the church. The first
painters of Italy, down to Cimabue, dare not imagine
anything beyond the inert Madonna and the Crucifix,
that is to say, personages of the Passion grouped round
the cross, with their emaciated bodies, grimacing faces,
stiff hair, looking at the Saviour Whose suffering is
exhibited in a manner that is grim rather than touching.
The rehgious revival of Assisi gave new life to
Italian art at the same time that it raised man's con-
sciences. The airy and luminous church that Jacopo,
faithful to the tradition of the cathedral of Pisa, built
above the sombre Romanic church where the remains
of Francis lie, is truly the symbol of the renewed youth
of all the arts. The thirteenth century had by that
time rejected the age-long anguish of the Middle Ages ;
it sought the brightness of day, nature, the human heart,
it threw itself open to pity and to love. On all sides,
at Pistoia, Orveito, Siena, Arezzo, and Lucca, the house
of God, by its external decoration, the delicate tracery
of its porches adorned with foliage, flowers and fruit,
by its covering of marble courses in various colours and
the marquetry of the framing that occupies the level
surfaces, called Christians from afar as to a place of
festival ; inside, it grouped and harmonized, for the
delight of the eye, the original elements of the diverse
architectural periods of the peninsula ; it made the
Norman arch rest lightly on the solid pillars with
capitals at once Norman and 'Corinthian ; it resumed
the oriental arabesque and the paving of many-coloured
mosaics. All glittering in the sun, with its chiselled
garlands like an ivory jewel, the Italian church of this
time seemed to be singing the Canticle of all Creatures
of Francis ; every living form was welcomed by it ;
on the galleries of Santa Maria Maggiore, the mosaist

THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 235

of Nicholas IV, Jacopo dclla Turrita, represented, on
a background of azure, the crowning of the Virgin
by the Saviour's hands ; above pray, the angels ; on
the two sides Peter and Paul stand in adoration, with
the two Johns, Francis of Assisi and Antony of Padua ;
lower down the two donors, Nicholas IV and cardinal
Jacopo Colonna lie prostrate ; but on the golden mosaic
that represents the ground are green vine stocks round
which fly all sorts of birds, that remind us of the winged
hearers of the sermon of the Fioretti. The disquieting
beasts, shapeless as the dreams of a sick man, which
the Romanic sculptors lavished on the front of churches,
disappeared from the Italian church ; the Gospel beasts,
symbols of gentleness and fidelity, took their place.
Gugiielmo d'Agnello, the greatest of the pupils of
Nicholas of Pisa, in the pulpit of San-Giovanni-Fuor-
Civitas, at Pistoia, showed, in life-like attitudes and
appearance, the ox and ass looking at the crib, the
three browsing sheep, forgotten for the moment by
their shepherd, and the crouching greyhound, attentive
to the adoration of the three Magi. At Assisi, a pupil
of Giotto, Puccio Capanna, in the Christ at the Column,
put a monkey, going on all fours, on the roof of a
house ; in the Last Supper there is a dog licking a
platter, and beside it a curled-up cat. And, at Padua,
Giotto painted in profile, with a striking correctness
of movement, the colt of the ass ridden by Jesus when
he entered Jerusalem. (loo)

The austere and sacerdotal art of the early Middle
Ages would certainly never have admitted into religious
scenes this amiable familiarity that the schools of Italy
preserved down to Titian and Veronese. It would
perhaps have accepted the grave architectural sculpture
of Nicholas of Pisa (1207?-! 280), while at the same
time making reserves for the antique reminiscences that
the master put into the sarcophagus of Dominic, and
the classical attitudes of his Nativity. But the tendency
to realism that appears in the Last Judgment of the

236 MYSTIC ITALY

Baptistery of Pisa, iri the twisting and writhing bodies
of the damned, permits us to see what, progress .Nicholas
owed to a sincere observation of nature. His son
Giovanni (i 240-1 320) rushed into complete naturalism
by his violent work in the pulpit of the cathedral at
Pisa and that of Sant-Andrea at Pistoia. But the blows
of his rude chisel were always ennobled by some generous
emotion derived from the most striking pages of the
Gospel. In the Massacre of the Innocents at Pisa the
distracted mothers tear their little ones from the hands
of the assassins, clasp them wildly in their arms, turn
them over and feel them to assure themselves they are
dead, and then, cowering down, weep over their beloved
ones quia noii sunt. At the top of the picture Herod,
sitting with his crown on his head, turns to the right
towards the executioners, and with his outstretched arm
makes them a gesture both imperious and impatient,
while on the other side the mothers beseech his mercy.
In the Massacre at Pistoia the Jewish king looks down
with a grim pleasure on the lamentable crowd of
executioners and victims at his feet. But the school of
the Pisan sculptors could also express the religious
serenity of the century that had just ended ; it showed
a singular sweetness in honouring " our sister bodily
death ", so joyfully greeted by Francis. At the tomb
of Benedict, XI in the church of St. Dominic, at Perugia,
two angels, despoiled of their hieratic wings, bend over
the head and feet of the pope who sleeps on his marble
couch ; with a familiar gesture, as if they were watching
the pontiff as he sleeps, they lift the curtains of the
mortuary canopy. At the feet of St. Margaret at
Cortona there lies the dog that led the young woman
to the blood-stained corpse of her lov^er. Giovanni's
fellow student, in the studio of Nicholas, Amolfo del
Lapo, attaches as a pledge of hope to the tomb of
the cardinal De Braye, at Orvieto, the purest vision that
Italian art ever saw, even down to its latest days.
■While the dead man is supported by two angels whose

THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 287

faces breathe a great sadness, higher up, in the arch
of a gothic tabernacle raised on two wreathed columns,
the Madonna is seated on a throne, grave and benignant,
crowned with a diadem whose veil falls down on her
shoulders ; she holds on her knees the Bambino and
quietly rests her right hand on the arm of the chair.
This Florentine with his delicate genius communicated
to the school of Pisa, in the person of Andrew of
Pisa (I 270-1348?), the author of the first bronze door
of the Baptistery of San-Giovanni, in Florence, the
touching candour, sustained by the simple harmony of
the attitudes, that was in all the arts the character
peculiar to the genius of Florence.

Through Giotto (i 276-1 336) this originaHty seems
to have become fixed in its principal features for
Florentine painting. Dante's words about his friend,
ed ora ha Giotto il grido, were true as long as the
school of Florence lasted, of which he was the perpetual
master. It is well known that he practised miniature.
In Italy that delicate art, celebrated by Dante in the
person of Oderisi, the onor d" Agobbio, rivalled French
illumination towards the end of the thirteenth century.
Giotto retained from his essays in miniature not only
the bright and smUing colouring and the piety of
composition, but also the hberty of invention so dear
to the painters of missals, who, narrowly confined to the
margin of the liturgical parchment and compelled to
interpret the scenes of the sacred text by minute details,
enlivened the grave tradition of the Scriptures by the
intimacy of the ornamentation and the familiarity of
the sentiment. But the constant study of nature
prevented, in Giotto and his pupils, that familiarity of
rehgious painting from becoming fixed in a school of
convention. The spectacle of Hfe gave the master an
abundant store of picturesque variety ; in his first
frescoes in the upper church at Assisi we see a man
running along devoured by thirst, who, coming across
a spring, rushes feverishly towards it as if he wished

238 MYSTIC ITALY

to plunge therein. While the brothers bend over the
bed on which Francis has just expired and weep, one
of them, looking upward has seen the soul borne off
by angels, and the astonishment that enraptures him is
so powerful that he seems to be rising himself and
ready to follow tlie miraculous ascension of the apostle.
And this unrestrained art, that rejects no feature of
reality, will never be vulgarized by the faces or gestures
of the characters, the disposition of the groups or the
decoration of the scene ; the painter evokes only noble
scenes, while in France the gothic painting and sculp-
ture, stricken by a premature malady, are about to
fall into triviality in the representation of Madonnas
with the Child, who, playing with an apple or a toy,
" is merely a burgher's son amusing himself ".

Giotto had the generous faith of the Italians of his
age. In the two churches at Assisi as well as in the
chapel of the Bardi in the Franciscan church of Santa -
Croce, in Florence, he wished to glorify Francis, his
miracles inspired by a great charity for the humble,
and the lofty virtues of his Order, obedience and poverty,
that render man purer and more gentle. In the chapel
of the Scrovegni at Padua, under the eyes of Dante, he
painted the great scenes of the Gospel : the Resurrec-
tion of Lazarus, the Kiss of Judas, the Watch in the
Garden on the Mount of Olives, the Crucifixion, and the
Descent from the Cross. His Christianity confines itself
by preference to the evangelical cycle that proceeds
from the legend of Joachim, grandfather of John, to
the Ascension and of which the drama of the Passion
forms the chief poem. At Padua he painted a Hell
more calculated to excite the curiosity of little children
than anguish in the breasts of sinn.ers. The Hells of
the Campo-Santo at Pisa and of Santa -Maria Novella
at Florence were not to be much more awe-inspiring
to gaze upon ; fear of everlasting torture was to be
manifested for the first time in Italian art in the frescoes
of Luca Signorelli at Orvieto, and then in the Last Judg-

THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 239

ment of Michelangelo. The story of the Redemption,
from the stable of Bethlehem to Calvary, the miracles
of mercy lavished by the Saviour upon all who came
to him with a cry of suffering or a word of love, became
the Credo of the Italian schools, following the example
of Giotto. Giotto's Christ has laid aside the formidable
majesty of the Byzantines ; He is rather the Son of
man, superior to His disciples in the solemn grace of
His demeanour and the melancholy purity of His
features ; such He appears at the grave of Lazarus,
and above all in the Garden of Gethsemane, half
enveloped by the red mantle of Judas, as though by
the wings of a bird of prey, and receiving with a
sad disdain the traitor's kiss. This Christ, incessantly
ennobled by the progress of art, was to appear later
on in the frescoes of Masaccio (1402- 1429?), then in
the Cenacolo of Leonardo and that of Andrea del Sarto,
blessing the last supper of the apostolic family.

But the most tragic work of the old master is the
Descent from the Cross at Padua. The holy women,
John and the friends who were present at the last
hour, standing or prostrate, adore and weep for Jesus
Whose head rests on His mother's heart. Mary seeks
in the discoloured face of her Son the traces of the life
extinguished ; the Magdalene holds the Saviour's feet ;
a tree covered with spring buds stands on the slope of
the hill, and, from the mourning sky, angels, their faces
covered with their hands or their arms wide open, hasten
with outstretched wings to greet the dead God with their
lamentations.

This religious idealism, that Giotto received from the
thirteenth century, deservedly attracts the attention. It
continued in Italy down to the schools of the
Renaissance at its height. It succeeded in holding its
own with the painters and sculptors outside of all
positive belief or convinced adherence to the super-
natural and the very rules of the Christian life. It is
to be found again in Fra Filippo Lippi (1406- 1469),

240 MYSTIC ITALY

despite the disorders of an adventurous youth more
worthy of a corsair than a friar of old. It sometimes
visited even Benvenuto CeUini (i 500-1 570), who,
when sick in a dungeon in the castle of St. Angelo, sang
psalms and conversed with Christ and His angels.
Raphael maintained it intact in the midst of the elegant
corruption of the court of Leo X ; it re-appears again in
Sodoma's Christ at the Column, as well as in Perugino's
Descent from the Cross. Here, beyond the persons
kneeling in the foreground and gathered as it were at
the foot of an altar, nature seems to be keeping holi-
day, and celebrating by the serenity of the landscape,
the smile of the sky, the peace of the azure hills,
the transparent waters and the flowering meadows, the
hope of the approaching resurrection. And yet the
Umbrian master, who was penetrated by the incredulous
spirit of Florence, " had no religion ", writes Vasari,
" and could never be persuaded of the immortality of
the soul ; but with words well worthy of his granite
brain he ever refused with obstinacy the good way.
He believed only in earthly goods ".

Thus Giotto was the initiator, for all the succeeding
Italian art, of a mysticism without which truly Christian
painting could not live, and which, combining the
veneration for holy traditions with the sentiment of
their ineffable poetry, continues even in our day deep
down in many souls long since alienated from the
ancient Church. But in Giotto's heart there also
reposed emotions and hopes that the world will never
know again, the last religious ^visions of the age whose
conscience I have just been studying. For the chapel
of the Peruzzi at Santa-Croce he painted the apostle
John, lonely and asleep on the rock of Patmos, while
above his head the great mysteries of the future, that
the Middle Ages had endeavoured to decipher among
the verses of the Apocalypse or the Fourth Qospet,
march on the clouds like gods. Then in the neighbour-
ing fresco we have the evangelist's resurrection, when

THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 241

he came forth from his tomb before his astonished,
terrified, and dazzled disciples. It was the farewell
that Itahan art sent from its cradle to the Johannine
tradition, its farewell to Joachim of Flora, to John of
Parma, and to Jacopone of Todi.

16

CHAPTER VII

THE MYSTICISM, THE MORAL PHILOSOPHY,
AND THE FAITH OF DANTE

Amid the vicissitudes of Italian Christianity in the
Middle Ages we have marked three replies to the
problem of the relations of the soul to God and
the relations of the Christian to the Church : (i) the
communion of Arnold of Brescia ; (2) that of the
abbot Joachim, Francis of Assisi, and John of Parma ;
and finally (3) that of the emperor Frederic and his
suite of philosophers. At the bottom of each of these
three theories is a doctrine of liberty, the absolute
liberty of political society in relation to the temporal
Church, the liberty of individual religion, in which
faith and love are superior to obedience and penance,
the liberty of the individual reason in its relation to
dogma and its ministers. The Arnoldists, the Joachim-
ites, the intemperate Franciscans, the Fraticelli, and
the unbelievers of Ghibeline Italy, caused some bitter
hours to the Church of Rome. Against these re-
fractory persons who disobeyed the old discipline the
popes launched resounding bulls. Yet nevertheless
these very free bodies of Christians never brought about
a rupture with the creed of the Church, never fell
into formal heresy or schism. Dante, who was the
greatest witness of his race and century, received all
these influences of religious liber'ty. In him were
reconciled all the original manifestations of Italian
religion. This austere Christian, whose orthodoxy many
suspected, has been placed by Raphael, in the Dispute

DANTE 243

of the Holy Sacrament, by the side of the fathers and
doctors of the universal Church. He is, with Francis,
the loftiest figu.rc of the story I have just sketched.

I

But the features of this figure are very complex,
for Dante's soul was as troubled as his life. While
Francis of Assisi, in the earthly paradise of Umbria,
sings, in company with the birds, a perpetual LcBtare,
Dante writes about himself : "I am a ship wdthout
sails or rudder, driven by the tempest from port to
port and from shore to shore ". He lost one after
the other the objects of his first tender affection ;
Beatrice, whom he had loved while quite a child, his
mother city and his biaptistery, his " beautiful San
Giovanni ", his political faith, and his Florentine
devotion to the Church of Rome. From' a moderate
Guelf, partisan of the Holy See, and still more of
the communal liberties of Florence, he had become
a Ghibeline when Boniface VHI had with his own
hands destroyed the Guelfic party. But after the
descent of Henry VII he despaired of the empire as
he had despaired of the Church ; he was then seen,
travelling with his sadness and dreams throughout
Italy, the " hostelry of sorrow ". One evening he laid
down and died in the shadow of one of the beautiful
Byzantine basilicas of Ravenna.

Among so many ruins one thing, in which consisted
all his genius, was left to Dante, — his faith. God,
redeemer and spirit of life, the justice of God the
supreme mistress of the unjust history that men make,
consoler of those to whom the world refuses earthly
happiness ; and then the noble certainties whose beam
God has planted in the human reason, and the immortal
love wherewith He enchants the human heart ; Dante
embraces all these truths with the adoring emotion
of the priest who bends over the Host and the qujet
conviction of the geometer who proves a theorem. He

244 MYSTIC ITALY

not only believes but sees ; he moves in the region
of the supernatural without more astonishment than
the thaumaturges of the Golden Legend, and the
children who fled at the sight of his cowl were not
mistaken when they cried : " There is the man who
has come back from hell ! "

It is in the first awakening of his heart, at the dawn
of his " new life ", that we must first study him. iHe
was nine years old when, on the first of May, the
festival of the Primavera, he met little Beatrice
Portinari. She was clad in a blood-coloured dress.
At the sight of the young girl he trembled and heard
a voice within him that said : Ecce Deus, fortior me.
Nine years later he saw her again for a second time ;
she was clad in a white dress and returned his saluta-
tion so courteously that he thought he was carried
away into bliss. One day when Beatrice had not
returned his salutation he saw a young man all in
white who wept and said : " My son ". The Vita
Nuova contains eight visions. In it Dante is always
hearing airy voices, and meeting phantoms of light.
Someone speaks within his heart. The last of these
visions, on the day when Beatrice died, was so
astonishing that he had not the strength to tell it.
He closes his story by praying God to give him in
Paradise the sight of Beatrice, •" who gloriously
beholds the face of Him' Who is blessed for ever and
ever ".

Here we discover in the child and the youth tlife
extraordinary gift that has visited the souls of the
greatest saints and also those of philosophers possessed
by the perpetual thought of the divine, namely, the
faculty of mysticism. But these others had suffered
in their manhood sorr;e profound shock to their .con-
science, some incurable weariness of things here below ;
they had experienced either the emptiness of sensuous
happiness, or the weakness of the reason, or the terror
of the unseen, and the shock that detached them from

DANTE 245

passion or knowledge threw them' into the bosom of
God, whence they never again wished or were able
to escape. The visionary who wrote the Apocalypse
has passed through the fatal days of Nero's reign ;
Plotinus (204-270) and Proclus (410-485) the most
systematic of all the Neo-Platonists, had lived amid
the strangest ferment of religious dreams that history
has ever known and had had recourse to the dangerous
seductions of theurgy. Joachim of Flora had known
the pomp of the Norman court, and before hearing
the Holy Ghost speaking into his ear he had traversed
oriental Europe, Constantinople, and Asia Minor.
Francis of Assisi had stirred his imagination by
reading romances of chivalry and, as a young man,
had devoted himself to all kinds of pleasures ; a long
sickness and disgust for all voluptuousness and then
his desire for superhuman charity had brought him
back to (the Gospel. All these mystics, by contemplation
and asceticism, had destroyed in themselves all earthly
affection and put off, like a garment soiled with mud,
their carnal covering. Their union with God was so
intimate that they abandoned themselves distractedly
and felt themselves fall into His arms as into an abyss.
" I am about to rest in the peaceful sea, God Eternal ",
Catherine of Siena was to say on her death bed.
Plotinus had said at his last hour : " I feel that God
is departing from me ". Almost all, even those who,
like Francis and Catherine, took part in the affairs of
the world, reached without effort the last term of the
ecstatic life, the familiar vision of God and the
mysteries of the other world. For them sensible
objects seemed to be as nothing but shadows of beings ;
the conscience of each of them was dissipated and
mingled with the conscience of God, and the last
personal and living sentiment that remained in it was
the ineffable joy given them by this daily communion
with things eternal.

But here we have a young boy, the son of middle-

246 MYSTIC ITALY

class parents, belonging to a family of legists, brought
up in the study of the Latin poets and early trained
in military exercises ; he grew up in that commune of
Italy that was most tormented by political violence ;
his grandparents and his father, engulfed by the
eternal conflict at Florence between Ghibeline and
Guelf, had known the sorrows of exile. In that city
of merchants and bankers, where only earthly passions
had strength and where religion was of so moderate
a temperament that, down to Antoninus (138 9- 1459)
in the fifteenth century, none of her sons obtained an
illustrious place in the Italian Paradise, in that Florence
that loved joy, that invented the ironical conte and
had, as far back as the eleventh century, rediscovered
the incredulity of Epicurus, the child, still too young
to have suffered, too pure also to suspect the ugliness-
of life, had no sooner seen on the face of Beatrice*
the reflection of a beauty higher than all earthly beauty,
than he discovered in himself and embraced with
extraordinary ardour the vocation to the supernatural.
From that time forward he received a permanent
revelation from Beatrice living and Beatrice dead, and
through the young girl miraculously conversed with
God and the angels. At times, when the initiation
struck him with too dazzling a light, he felt himself
faint and about to die. Like all great mystics he
experienced two contrary sentiments from his ecstasy :
the beatific rapture in viewing the mystery, and a
melancholy bitterness for earth and life, as soon as he
lowered his eyes towards them. The world seemed
to him to be covered with a mourning veil ; he
imagined that the pilgrims who traversed " the city
of woe " would break forth into sobs if they knew the
reason of its suffering. Real objects lost their colour,
real joys all savour, the body in which the soul was
imprisoned perished. " I became in a short time so
frail and feeble that the sight of me shocked my
friends." In such a state of the conscience all the

DANTE 247

operations of the mind are disturbed ; the conditions
of the intellectual life are in some sort " transposed " ;
the moral fever that possesses the poet transforms
every vision and every emotion ; by a singular
duplicating of the consciousness it is his own passion
that he sees, under the form of an angelic figure, at
the end of some path, and the sighs and plaints that
the mysterious passer-by gives utterance to are only
the echo of Dante's heart. If Beatrice appears to him
and salutes him he faints as if overpowered by an in-
finite sweetness ; it seems to him that his soul is
nought but love ; his senses die, and love alone lives
in him and looks at Beatrice. " It often happened at
that time that my body moved as a thing dead ". At
the same time symbolism became, as it were, the
dominant category of his thought. All that he saw,
all that he heard, had value only through a secret
relation to the unseen and divine. The colour of
Beatrice's garments was for him a mysterious language
that he understood more clearly than any mortal
tongue. Beatrice herself was transfigured, and, under
the appearance of a Florentine virgin, theology or the
eternal wisdom -was to welcome Dante in the outer
sanctuary of the heavenly Jerusalem. The aspects of
nature, of sea and sky, the gHttering of the stars
" which seemed to weep ", the movements of the wild:
beasts, the accidents of history, great minds, such as
Virgil, great traitors, such as Judas and Brutus, were
to serve him as means to decipher and translate a
sublime Word.

By this first feature of his genius, then, he was
attached to the mystic idealism of the Middle Ages,
that manifested itself in manners so diverse, — in the
sickly fancies of gothic sculpture, in the heraldry of
the feudal age, in the very noble dreams of the best
Christians, and in the transcendent Platonism of. the
greatest scholastics. But in his case the very chjld
was father to the visionary. Imagine Dante's entering

248 MYSTIC ITALY

a cloister in his early youth, removed for ever from'
Italian life and sheltered from political storms, nurtured
only upon the Scriptures, disdainful of ancient literature.
As a poet he would resume the Franciscan tradition
of Brother Pacifico and write pious lauds in imitation
of Jacopone ; as a painter he would essay the mild
and timid art of Fra Angelico ; as a popular preacher
he would perhaps terrify the faithful by the apocalyptic
images of a Savonarola ; as a teacher he would
mount the pulpit of Bonaventura. He would be a
monk, enlightened and passionate above all others, the
greatest in the religious history of Italy, but still merely
a monk.

TI

The very grief that he felt at the death of Beatrice
restored Dante to the rational life. Among the books
in which his master Brunetto Latini taught him to read,
he chose the most serious, the philosophers, Aristotle,
Cicero, and Seneca. " I began to read the book with
which Boethius, when a prisoner and in exile, consoled
himself. And, knowing that Cicero had written a book
in which, treating of friendship, he had quoted the
consoling words of Lselius, that excellent man, upon
the death of Scipio, his friend, I began to read it. I
penetrated as far as possible into the thought of these
wise men, and like a man who, seeking silver, finds
gold, I who sought only consolation, found not only
a remedy for my tears, but also names of authors,
sciences and books, and I considered that philosophy,
which was the mistress of those authors, sciences and
books, is a thing supreme. Then I began to go where
that gentle lady truly showed herself, to the schools
of the religious and the disputations of the philosophers,
and in thirty months I felt so penetrated by her
sweetness that her love drove out every other
thought." (loi)

DANTE 249

The Convito, or the Banqiift, the books of which
were written at very different periods of Dante's hfe,
contains in some sort the recollections of this pil-
grimage in search of rational wdsdom. But at Padua
and Bologna, and perhaps at Paris, on the Mount of
St. Genevieve, if he took part in the arguments con-
cerning QiioUbet and heard the Book of Sentences
commented upon, if he studied the theology of Thomas
of Aquinas and received the laborious culture of
scholasticism, neither the teachers nor the doctrines
could form him to that consoling philosophy to which
his afflicted soul aspired. The philosophy that he
desired was not merely an intellectual operation, the
science of interpretation and reasoning, the art of
treating by means of the syllogism all the notions of
the human mind, all the facts of nature and all the
data of sacred literature. It was above all else, through
intercourse with the best philosophers and the purest
poets, through the meditation of the conscience, a
personal process, much more living than the discipline
of the Rue du Fouarre, more generous than the logic
and dialectic of the School ; it was the reason and
the heart penetrating and completing each other in an
excellent intimacy, and, to repeat the words that Dante
himself addressed in the midst of hell to " the dear,
kindly, and fatherly phantom " of Brunetto Latini, the
science that teaches come V uom s' eterna, how man
makes himself eternal.

It was in fact with the lessons of Brunetto Latini
that Dante's philosophical initiation had begun.
Brunetto also had lived under the shadow of the
French scholastic schools ; but he had taken thence
to Italy a ray of pagan light. He was by no means,
in his Treasure, the compiler of an encyclopaedia, like
Vincent of Beauvais, but a sage who, amid the
promiscuous knowledge heaped up by the Middle Ages,
had been able to attain to the great simple notions
of which the ancients had the secret. The Treasure

250 MYSTIC ITALY

is sown with maxims that seem to proceed from the
moralists of Greece or Rome. In it we find again
the fundamental thought of the Socratic or Stoic
morality, that science is nothing without conscience, and
that virtue is the finest fruit of wisdom. •" A worthy
thing it is that the words of a wise man should be
believed when his deeds testify to his sayings ". " To
speak well and do ill is nothing less than to condemn
oneself from one's own mouth ". Latini was,
according to Giovanni Villani, " a great philosopher,
an eminent master of rhetoric, but a man of pleasure,
mondano homo. He was " worthy of being placed
among the best orators of antiquity ", writes Filippo
Villani, " of a cheerful disposition and amiable in his
talk ". He was also the master of the great poet
Guido Cavalcanti, whose elegies were now pathetic and
now sensual, one of the frankest unbelievers in the
epicurean circle at Florence. By combining all these
features we can reconstruct Brunetto's original figure.
Even if we add the annoying mystery that Dante
leaves regarding the memory of his master, we shall
see in him a kind of forerunner of the humanists of
the Renaissance, in whom character was not always
as strong as intellect, but whose intellect, refined by
classical literature and above all seduced by the
oratorical beauty of the Latin writers, very unconstrained
and much inclined to irony, was able to restore, \\athout
too much pedantry, along with the sonorous language
of Rome, the rationalistic genius of antiquity to the
Christian ages.

Undoubtedly all the lettered men of the Middle
Ages read the Greek and Roman poets, historians and
philosophers, whom Latini explained to Dante. But
in this case a veritable novelty sprang up between the
master and the pupil. The religious admiration that
the master inspired in the pupil for the ancients called
forth in the young man's soul a, moral crisis very
like that which Plato has described ; in the impetus

DANTE 251

of his enthusiasm and the effort of his love, Dante
tried to imitate those noble models, " to give birth
himself ", as Plato used to say, " to fine discourses."
He was not content with venerating, at the entrance
to hell, the school of his beloved Virgil, the majestic
shades of Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan ; with
contemplating", in their garb of immortal light, Socrates,
Plato, Diogenes, Anaxagoras, Zeno, Hippocrates, Cicero,
Livy, and Seneca, " the philosophic family " all grouped
around Aristotle the king of teachers,

il maestro di colov die samio.

In his turn he would enter the band of these sages,
he would endeavour to stammer their language and
find once more the age-long liberties of the conscience
in the tradition of their doctrines.

Ill

Dante's Banquet is in fact a work of free investi-
gation. The scholastic and geometric apparatus, so
rigorous in his treatise On Monarchy, there disappears
behind moral empiricism, the discussion of possible
objections, the testimony of ancient writers, of the
doctors of the School or the Arabs, the discussion of
popular prejudices, the observation of the manners of
the age. Authority is to be found in it in the measure
suitable to a free mind ; the Christian appeals in it
at times to revelation upon obscure points where the
reason and doctrine hesitate in uncertainty, for example,
the question of the immortality of the soul. (102) The
philosopher relates the opinions of his masters, but
only after having explained his own, not to decide
his belief, but to enlighten and to strengthen it. Inter-
pretation in accordance with the syllogism is at last
pressed into the service of rational research.

252 MYSTIC ITALY

The whole of this philosophy proceeds from the
idea that Dante had formed of the human reason.
The reason, he says, is the chief nobility of man, it
is his form, and it is from it that he derives his
essential qualification ; for him to live is not to live
merely by the senses, like the beasts, but also by the
intellect. The lofty value of our reason, that ponders
the eternal truths, lies in its relation to the thought
of God, in which those verities reside. Our soul, which
is aware of its affinity with the divine soul, tends to
unite itself in the closest fashion with God by means
of love ; despoiled of all matter it shines with divine
light, like the soul of an angel ; man is thus, thanks
to his rational soul, a divine animal. This reason
is free, because it is in its own service only ; the
senses and passion are servants to it. It is the
mistress of man's entire person ; man becomes great
by obeying it, and he who, endowed with a perverse
nature, dominates his evil instincts, and by struggle
attains to wisdom, is better than he whose virtue never
fights an internal battle. The man who enjoys the
plenitude of his rational life possesses at once wisdom
and knowledge and receives the philosophic blessing,
the measure of which is fixed by the limits of his
philosophic desire. He does not wish to know things
that are too sublime for his intellectual vision, such
as the intimate nature of God and that of elementary
matter ; consequently he will not suffer by being
deprived of that knowledge. Dante affirms God's
existence, but does not define Him ; no place is found
in the Convito for the mystical process, the ascension
of the soul towards the supernatural. Dante reserves
infinite knowledge and happiness exclusively for the
souls of the elect. (103)

Dante's peculiar views upon morality make all human
life depend upon this theory of the reason. " To live
without using the reason is to be dead ". x^id is
it not a renunciation of reason when a man does not

DANTE 253

reflect upon life and the way he ought to follow?
The reason cannot alter the verities of the divine order
or the geometric order ; nor can it change the conditions
of the animal life or the laws of nature ; but it is
sovereign for all the actions of the will, " such as
the good or evil we do to others, courage in battle or
flight, chastity or debauchery ". So it is the rule of
manners, the living law to which all the works of
life are subject, as in the political order every operation
of public life is dependent upon the imperial authority.
And this ever active primacy of the reason makes
virtue a state or intelligent habit of man. Here Dante
returns to the theory of the Peripatetic ethics, the
distinction between the intellectual virtues, such as
prudence, and the moral virtues, such as courage,
liberality, magnanimity, and justice. The latter are
essentially states or rational choices, based upon the
mean, habits equally removed from the two contrary
excesses, and this measure in virtue is for the soul
at once a perfection and the cause of moral happiness.
The felicity that results from the action is excellent,
just as is the state of blessing that results from con-
templation ; it is, moreover, common to a greater
number of souls ; but, just as contemplative happiness
was shown to us separated from all mysticism, so moral
felicity, understood by Dante in the Aristotelian sense,
requires none of the painful joys of asceticism, the
monastic renunciation of the world, the heroic excesses
of the saints and martyrs. (104)

Dante owed to this sentiment of moderation, that
was one of the conditions of ancient \visdom, the
tranquil optimism of his Convlto. If man, by the
constant operation of his reason, is, as the ancients
thought, the architect of his own destiny, that destiny
is easy and may be pleasant. He himself lightens
the path on which he walks, without illumination
coming from above or supernatural grace granted by
God in answer to his prayers. It is not a valley of

254 MYSTIC ITALY

tears that he painfully passes through, but a peaceful
region rendered lovely by his virtues. Adolescence,
that ends at the twenty-fifth year, is a happy period,
in which the soul receives all the germs of virtue ;
it has its peculiar gifts, obedience, modesty, sweetness
(soavitd), the charm of face and body. Sweetness
of manner, that will be necessary at the time when
public life begins, gives adolescence the friendships
without which there is no perfect life. Dante pauses
complaisantly to consider the privileges and virtues of
this age that, in his case, had been so gloomy ; the
welcome that greets the adolescent upon all sides and
that smiles in response to the courtesy of his words
and his deeds ; the artless admiration he feels for
things of which he knows nothing ; the modesty that
keeps him free from all that is low, and as soon as
a suspicion of sensual attraction creeps into his mind
makes him blush or turn pale ; the shame (verecundla)
that combines with the fright for the evil he has
committed a bitterness of which the memory will
prevent him from falling into the same fault again.
Lastly, the beauty and nimble agility of the body
{snellezza) *' the sight of which causes a pleasure of
admirable hamiony ", the good health " that clothes
the person with a colour pleasant to behold ", are a
final effect of the interior beauty of the soul that takes
pleasure in adorning and enlivening its own dwelling
place. Dante has rediscovered the Socratic maxim, the
soul artist that fashions the body and face of the man ;
and his theory of adolescence, enlightened as it were
by a reflection from Plato, once more conjures up
before our mind's eye the elegant and slender young
men of the Florentine schools of art, the supple and
delicate bodies of Luca Signorelli, the modest dreami-
ness of the young figures of Luca della Robbia or
Donatello.

To the qualities of adolescence, youth and man's
estate add the rational government of the appetites

DANTE 255

or passions, fiery coursers that now rush onward, now
pause and flee ; the good horseman who succeeds in
mastering them checks them by the bit when they run
too fast, chastens them with the spur when they rear
or cowardly recoil ; the bit is temperance, the spur
is magnanimity. Here again Dante is faithful to the
doctrine of the Platonists or moderate Stoics. He is
as far as possible removed from the monastic theory
of the Middle Ages, the absolute renunciation of all
earthly things, the death of the heart to every passion.
For him man's merit consists in energy of mind
regulating a nature enfeebled by no moral mutilation.
And this long effort towards the good receives its
reward in old age. The old man, tested by the storms
of the world, sure of his virtue, may spread abroad
the treasures of goodness slowly amassed in his con-
science. He is, says Dante, " like a full blown rose,
whose perfume is given to all alike ". He lavishes
his prudence, derived from memory, for the past ; of
right judgment, for the present ; of foresight, for the
future. He lavishes his justice, and for the public
good enters the councils of his city. He takes part
with pleasure in conversations of an exquisite re-
finement. " The older I grow ", said Cato the Elder,
" the more pleasure I find in conversing ". But the
old man's great nobility lies in the nearness of God
to Whom he is drawing closer, and the vision of death,
that seems to him the eternal port that he is about
to enter in peace, rejoicing at the good and prudent
voyage of his life. Already the sails of the ship are
furled, the oars are lowered and now only skim the
tranquil water ; on the bank his fellow citizens and
friends are assembling to welcome the pilgrim's
return, the friends of the heavenly fatherland, the
ancestors long since dead, the friends of God, by
whom he is worthy to be received. Soon he will
land from his vessel as one leaves a hostelry, and,
blessing his past life, will return to his home.

256 MYSTIC ITALY

It is the hour holy above all others, the hour that,
consecrating the religion of the three ages of man,
brings back the soul of the just man to the bosom
of God. Here, on the last page of the Convlto,
Dante expresses for the first time his sentiments
concerning the religious duty that unites man to God,
and those sentiments correspond exactly to the ration-
alistic theory of the whole book. " It is an idle
excuse ", he says, " to blame the bonds of matrimony,
in old age, if we are unable to return to religion, as
do those who embrace the discipline and take the
habit of Benedict, Augustine, Francis, or Dominic ; for
a married man can return, even in the married state,
to the good and true religion ; God in fact desires
only our heart to be religious." Iddio non vuole
religioso di iioi se non it cuore. (105)

Was not the " religion of the heart " also that of
the mystics of the Italian Middle Ages, and by means
of that free religion, the work of individual faith, did
not Dante's mysticism and rationalism become reconciled
without discordance in the unity of a great conscience?
The combination of spiritual faculties so diverse
formed an admirable Christian, capable at once of
pious exaltation and serene reason, a poet's soul,
worthy of the most beautiful days of the revelation
of Assisi, but tempered by the wisdom of ancient
thought and by that exact sense of realities which
the intellectual civilization of Sicily had restored to
the Italy of Frederic II. Dante's moral character
might have stopped short at the features we have just
described ; a kind of Florentine Epictetus, often
visited by visions of paradise. It needed the pontifi-
cate of Boniface VIII (i 294-1303), the treason of
the Holy See towards Florence and the flight of the
papacy into France to complete the religious originaHty
of this figure with the keenness of passion and the
boldness of personal theology.

DANTE 257

IV

Boniface VIII was regarded by Dante as an actual
antipope, because he had received the tiara in the
lifetime of Celestine V ; he was regarded as an
apostate pontiff because of the excess of his simony,
and as a bad Italian because of his political crimes.
The poet firmly believed that the Holy Roman See,
under the rule of Benedict Gaetani, had ruined the
Church and separated itself from all genuine
Christianity. " He was a pope of great boldness and
lofty spirit ", writes Dino Compagni, " who led the
Church whither he would and who crushed all his
adversaries ". And Villani testifies that Boniface used
to say that " everything was permissible that was in
the interest of the Church ". The fault of Boniface
lay in the fact that, through pride, he misunderstood
the real situation of the papacy and the actual
relations of the Holy See at the end of the thirteenth
century with Italy and Christendom. There were
combined in him a Gregory VII and an Alexander VI
who neutralized each other. He wished to be at once
a pope of the eleventh century and an ecclesiastical
king of the fifteenth. The contradiction between
these two parts brought about the ruin of his work.
While at Rome he was fighting for the greatness o£
the Orsini, the secular fortune of his nephews, and
the absolute authority of the pontifical monarchy, he
was trying to resume the mystical primacy of the past
ajid the right to regulate in the name of God the
affairs of princes and republics. The lofty majesty
of his bulls reminds us of the claims advanced of the
quarrel about investiture. " Every human creature is
necessarily subject to the Roman pontiff. For the
pope is the spiritual power who institutes all earthly
power and judges it if it be not good. God has set

17

258 MYSTIC ITALY

up the Apostolic See above kings and kingdoms, and
every soul ought to obey that supreme master through
whom princes receive their authority ".

But this great theory was repudiated by the France
of Philip the Fair (1285-13 14) ; as to Italy and
Germany, they deemed it too sublime for the conscience
of the pontiff whom his contemporaries called magna-
nimus peccator. Gregory VII and Innocent III could
speak in this tone because Christendom saw God by
their side. But Boniface, owing to the selfishness,
knavery, and even cruelty, that characterized all the
actions of his public life, was no more than an
ambitious and greedy-minded pope, after the manner
of his successors in the fifteenth century. Not content
with lavishing fiefs, bishoprics, and red hats, upon his
friends, he bought them signorial domains in Latium,
contrary to the bulls of Martin IV (1281-1285) and
Nicholas IV (1288-1292); for Pietro Gaetani he
formed, by traffic or violent confiscation from the
Colonna, a principality extending from Sulmona to
Terracina. He spent the treasures of the Church
without scruple for these acts of liberality towards his
family. In the Jubilee of 1300, to which the
Christian world hastened with the faith of ancient
days, there were seen, wrote a pilgrim, " night and
day two clerics standing near the altar of the apostle
Paul with rakes in their hands gathering the piles
of money ".

One after the other Boniface cast down all the
secular supports of the Holy See. He isolated him-
self from the Roman communes by taking part in the
quarrels of feudal families ; he isolated himself from
the Guelfs of Italy by calling in the brother of Philip
the Fair, Charles of Valois, and handing over to him
the White Guelfs of Florence. He profited by the
weakness of the empire in his desire to restore, in a
theoretical manner, the oecumenical power of the
emperor to the papacy. He was suzerain of the

DANTE 259

Angevins of Naples, and he wished to drive the
Aragonese from Sicily or to impose upon them political
obedience to the Holy Sec. He drenched Latium
with blood. He understood nothing of the strength
of the French royalty ; he did not know that it was
upheld by the parlement, the university, the clergy, and
the estates ; he believed that three or four haughty
bulls would suffice to render Rome mistress of the
public law of Church and state in France. Philip
had the bull Ausculta fill burnt before Notre-Dame ;
the parlement declared the pontiff a heretic ; and
Nogaret, a royal legist, together with Sciarra Colonna,
were sent into Italy. All the malcontents of the
peninsula, the barons of the Roman campagna, the
clients of the Colonna, hastened to the legates of the
F'rench king and went with them to assault Anagni,
where Boniface, seated on the throne, with the tiara
on his brow, underwent the cruellest aftront a pope has
ever endured. After three days of horrible scenes,
the people and the Guelilc cardinals rescued the
pontiff and took him back to Rome half mad with
rage. There he refused all food, beat his head
against the walls, and wept with fury at his impotence.
He died at the end of 1303, at the age of eighty-
six. With him disappeared the feudal papacy and
the pontifical Middle Ages. The Roman Church,
exiled on the Rhone, began slowly to prepare for its
evolution into the tyrannical or monarchical state to
which almost all Italy submitted in the course of the
fourteenth century.

Dante was for a moment moved with pity by this
unheard-of fall. " Christ was captive ", he said, " in
the person of His vicar ". But it was the outrage
inflicted upon the Christian pontiff, upon the august
head of the Church, and it was also the insolence of
the fleur de lis entering Anagni, that he resented. For
the person of Boniface he never felt anything but
implacable hatred. He could not forget that he

260 MYSTIC ITALY

owed his exile to the duplicity of the pope who, in
1302, had detained the Florentine embassy, of which
he was a member, at Rome long enough to complete
the ruin of the moderate Guelfs of Florence. He
could not forgive him the brutality of his legate Charles
of Valois, and the strange manner in which that
pacifier had appeased Florence by pillaging and
burning it. He deemed that this pope, by reversing
the national tradition of the Holy See towards the
Itahan cities, had put the coping stone to the attempts
of the Papacy against the liberties of Italy. He
thought himself thenceforth absolved from loyalty to
the visible Church of Rome, in the very name of his
love for the eternal and mystical Church of Jesus.
And, as he was at once a humanist and a visionary, a
Fraticello enlightened by communion with the ancients,
he was able, in his Divine Comedy to manifest a wholly
revolutionary Christianity, strangely personal, but very
logical, combined of ecstasy and rationalism, the last
originality of the religious invention of Italy.

V.

The Divine Comedy is, in the greatest part of its
development, a political pamphlet directed against the
Holy See. In order to shut up a pope in the burning
tombs of the heresiarchs, Dante confuses pope
Anastasius II with the emperor Anastasius who was
led astray by Photius. In the circle of the simoniacs,
in which the damned are plunged head do^vnwards in
flaming pits, he meets Nicholas III who cries to him :
"You already, and still erect, still erect, Boniface?
Prophecy then has deceived me by several years? "
Then, after having thus greeted the approaching
coming of Boniface VIII, the Orsini pope announces
that of Clement V, the first Avignon pontiff, " a pastor
without authority, who will come from the west and

DANTE 261

cover Boniface and me ". And in his anger Dante
questions the greedy pontilT : " Tell me what treasure
was it that Our Lord asked of St. Peter before en-
trusting the keys to him? He asked nothing of him,
but said ' Follow me. . . ." It is your avarice that
desolates the world, your avarice that tramples the
good under foot and exalts the wicked. It is you,
the pastors, whom the evangelist saw when he beheld
the woman sitting on the waters prostitute herself with
the kings. . . . You have made a god of gold and
silver". (io6) He consents to punish merely with
purgatory pope Adrian V, who, with his neck twisted
round, thus makes his confession 1 "See to what a
degree, through my avarice, my soul was miserable
and abandoned by God I " But in the midst of
paradise he lends these terrible words of St. Peter
himself I " He who upon earth usurps my seat, my seat
vacant in the sight of God, has made of my tomb
a sink of blood and corruption! " (107)

Inexpiable political rancour is not sufficient to
explain such a passion. This severe Christian, in
order to reassure his conscience and justify his hatred,
possessed in fact a dogmatic theory that seemed like
good orthodoxy to him. The last word of his belief,
that " rehgion of the heart " of which he spoke in the
Convlto, is contained in the twenty-fourth canto of
the Paradise, and it is to Peter himself that he makes
his confession of it. He has come back to the very
simple creed of Paul, faith, hope, and love. For him,
as for the apostle, faith itself at bottom is nothing
but hope, fides sperandarum substantia rerum. And
when the first of the popes asks him to affirm more
exphcitly the object of his faith, he replies : Credo
in uno Dio solo ed eterno. He believes in the name
of Moses, the prophets, the Gospel, and in the name
of the doctors of the Church. He believes in the
Trinity : E credo in tre Persone eterne.

And this is the essential of Christianity, the initial

262 MYSTIC ITALY

belief of the Christian family between the Apostles*
Creed and the metaphysical Nicene Creed. To
believe, to hope, to love,— what else is this than the
reasoned adhesion of the heart to the truths " which
are not visible to the reason? " is the repeated question
of Dante. (io8) And if faith, hope, and love are the
triple source of all religious life in the human soul,
if on this earth and beyond the grave these three
virtues raise men to the rank of the elect and justify
them, what becomes of " works ", — of prayer, of
penance, of the observance of the Christian who
trembles before the Church, of the bloody labour at
the price of which he believes he can redeem his sins
and win paradise? Is it not upon the jurisdiction of
this inner Church, built, in freedom, in every man's
conscience, that each one of us depends, and does not
the beauty of this hierarchy in which there are only
two degrees, the soul and God, cast into the shade the
splendour of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, of which the
visible summit is the bishop of Rome?

Thus the capital point in the Divine Comedy is a
latent doctrine that reveals itself in a thousand ways,
a doctrine that concerns at once the dogma of sin and
the part played by the Church in the religious life
of every soul. " You must know ", wrote Dante to
Can Grande della Scala, when he dedicated the Paradise
to him, " that the meaning of this work is not simple
but manifold. The first meaning is that which appears
from the written words, the second is that which is
hidden beneath the things enunciated by the words ;
the first is called the literal meaning, the second the
allegorical or moral." The first meaning in fact is
quite literal, consisting of a return to the most
canonical traditions of the Middle Ages, traditions
theological, poetical, and scholastic. That picture of
the three regions of the other world is derived from
a hundred edifying poems and a multitude of legends
that proceeded from the Celtic world of Patrick and

DANTE 263

Brandan, the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, the
visions of Paul, the vision of Brother Alberic, a monk
of Monte Cassino in the twelfth century, and the
Fioretti of Francis of Assisi. But what seems to
dominate in the Hell is the doctrine of Satan as it
had been understood since the Apocalypse, Satan, the
enemy of God, who at times and for a few short
hours is stronger than God. All the ontological and
cosmological apparatus, the theory of the capital sins,
the manner of analysing the play of the soul's passions,
the movements of the heavens and the harmony of
the world, come from his masters, Albertus Magnus
and Thomas of Aquinas, the two angels of light whom
he meets one after the other at the head of the group
of great teachers, in the tenth canto of the Paradise;
it is from them that he received the method and
treasures of the scholastic science. As in the treatise
On Monarchy and the dissertation upon Land and
Water, he is, for all that escapes the jurisdiction of
the individual conscience, the exact and scrupulous
disciple of traditional Christianity and the School.

But the intimate and personal thought of the mystic
and the rationalist is hidden behind the veil of
tradition. We may put that veil aside and see Dante's
true religion. Undoubtedly, as Ozanam showed, there
is no belief and no sacrament of the Church that
he does not dutifully accept. But the poet's
originality lies in the agreement of this regular
faith with the views peculiar to himself of justifica-
tion, salvation, and damnation. Tradition gave him
hell ; he adds to it the almost happy region to which
are relegated the shades of the ancient sages, the
pleasant meadow where the great pagan souls, and with
them the anti-christ Averoees, converse in everlasting
peace. Tradition gave him purgatory ; and it is Cato,
again a pagan, a Stoic, who killed himself with his
own hand, who is made the guardian of it. Tradition
gave him paradise ; he places in it Ripheus, the Trojan

264 MYSTIC ITALY

who died for his country, and the good emperor
Trajan. With him the supreme sin, that which he
punishes with crushing contempt, is not heresy, nor
unbehef, which he has shown, by the very disdain
and lofty countenance of the damned, to be superior
to hell ; it is viltd, the timid renunciation of active
duty, devotion, and life, the cowardice of pope
Celestine, more criminal than the treason of Judas.
And yet it is not among the mortal sins or the venial,
and it greatly resembles the humility of the ascetics,
the fearful egotism of the monks. For these " vile "
he creates the Prelnferno, the lamentable vestibule
where languish " those who were for themselves ".
You wall seek in vain in the Inferno for the place
where the souls of irregular Christians suffer, I mean
those who failed in the duties of devotion, sacramental
assiduity and the pious w^orks prescribed by the
Church ; all the lukewarm, the indifferent, those who
wait till the last hour to make their peace with God,
Statius, who from fear hid his baptism and faith, and
was per paura chiuso cristian, are sent by Dante to
purgatory, and that purgatory is very mild, in full
sunshine, visited again and again by the angels with
their songs. The poet's reason has freely revised the
ecclesiastical theory of salvation.

VI

The personal doctrine of Dante regarding justifica-
tion is manifested in a very daring manner by the
way in which he placed one soul, that of Siger de
Brabant, in paradise, and another soul, that of king
Manfred, in purgatory. Master Siger, a professor in
the University of Paris in the latter part of the
thirteenth century, had been condemned in 1270 by
bishop Etienne on account of thirteen heretical opinions
tainted with the philosophy of Averoees and that of

DANTE 265

Aristotle. (109) Vet for seven years he continued to
preach from his academic chair these do<trines of
incredulity. On January 12, 1277, John XXI (1276-
1277) wrote from Viterbo to bishop Etienne ordering
him to condemn before his episcopal court the errors
that were again swarming in the University, the pope's
attention having undoubtedly been called to them by
the great inquisitor for France, the Dominican Simon
du Val. On March 7 the bishop of Paris, after
having consulted the teachers of the Scriptures,
denounced and condemned two hundred and nineteen
propositions detected in the books and teachings of
several doctors as contrary to the Catholic faith, among
others those of Siger de Brabant and Bocce of
Denmark, (iio) Here again the offensive doctrines,
that separated God from the world and the human
soul from God by an unfathomable abyss, had come
either from the Arabic science or from the excessive
fx^ripateticism of the University. Siger and his accom-
plices denied the substantial unity of the Trinity ; and
they also declared themselves unable to believe in
Providence, creation, miracles, and the possibility of
God's knowing anything beyond himself. They
recognized the eternity of celestial matter, of the
world of motion, and of the human race. They denied
Adam, and also the fall of man, which is the starting
point of the doctrine of redemption ; they proclaimed
the necessity of all existing things, the powerlessness
of God to modify the order of the forms of life de-
creed by fate, of the earthly soul and the heavenly
soul, and of the souls of the celestial bodies ; they
insisted that man's soul is inseparable from the body
and dies of the same death ; impersonal reason was
the only thing they deemed to be immortal ; the
celestial bodies they declared to be masters of our
will ; they preached the nothingness of theology, the
vanity of continence, and of humility and prayer ;
only earthly happiness is real, they asserted, death

266 MYSTIC ITALY

being the last term of human terror beyond which
there is neither paradise nor hell ; and, finally, they
contended that Christianity and its fables form an
insurmountable obstacle to perfect science.

The theological edifice was thus overthrown in its
entirety. Dogma and morals, the New Testament and
the Old Testament, the Church and the University,
were thus destroyed from top to bottom. And in
order to show better the truly devilish character of
these prodigious errors the bishop of Paris by the same
sentence prescribed books of necromancy, sorcery,
conjurations, and diabolical invocations, the painful
religion of Satan which in France had preceded and
survived the Albigensian heresy. Those who persisted
in retaining these books were in their turn threatened
with the condemnation of the Church and the punish-
ment of the secular power. Master Siger was expelled
from his chair and driven out of the kingdom. We
know from a triplet of the Flore, which is the Italian
Roman de la Rose, how he ended. " Master Siger
was not very happy," says False-Seeming ; " I made
him die in poverty, in bitter anguish, at the court of
Rome, at Orvieto ".

Masiro Sighier non andd guari lieto,
A ghiado il fe' tnorire a gran dolore,
Nella corte di Roma, ad Orbivieto. (iii)

Dante as a child may have seen the exile pass
through Florence. He may also have heard the echo
of these strange doctrines either in Paris, or from the
lips of Brunetto Latini, or from the Epicureans of
Tuscany. It is then with a very clear understanding
of the doctrinal misadventures of Siger that he dared
to place the old master in paradise, in the sphere
reserved to the greatest doctors of the Church, amongst
the companions of St. Thomas Aquinas. " Here is
the eternal light [the soulj of Siger, who, reading

DANTE 267

in ihe University, proved by syllogisms truths that
excited the malice of the envious ".

Essa i la luce eterna di Sigieri,
Che, leggendd nel vico degli Strami,
Sillogizzo invidiosi veri. (112)

Here we certainly find a very curious mystery. It is
impossible to admit, in spite of the last line of this
triplet, that Dante had accepted as truths the condemned
propositions of the Parisian teacher. And it would
be very hard to think that, blinded by his passion
against the Holy See, he would have deliberately
introduced into such an august place, into the very
radiance of God, an impertinent heresiarch. The
explanation that was then made of Siger's opinions,
that is that as a philosopher he thought differently
than he did as a Christian, is absurd, especially for
a mediseval conscience, and therefore it serves only
to becloud a subject already obscure. Finally, the
hatred displayed by the Dominicans, and consequently
by the Inquisition, against the University and Siger
could not justify such a multitude of accusations, such
an abundant harvest of religious negatives. The
calumny would be really excessive, even for the period
of narrow discipline imposed by the popes upon the
University which lasted until the reign of Philip
the Fair. One answer alone remains, the expiation
of the doctor, the great misery, to which the Fiore
testifies, when he languished between the walls of
gloomy Orvieto, perhaps, also, the tortures and
the violence that shortened his life. (113) "Death",
says Dante, " had seemed to him very slow in
coming ".

Hence, according to the poet, the supreme moment,
the last breath of life, the expiring light of conscience,
belong to God and to God alone. The entire work
of salvation is contained in that moment, quick as

268 MYSTIC ITALY

lightning, when through th^ lips of the dying man
the soul exhales itself, far from the priest, without any
sacramental formula. Buonconte di Montefeltro, the
Ghibeline captain, when wounded at Campaldino, expired
alone, without confession, on the bank of the river
Ermo ; but as he died he murmured the name of the
Virgin Mary, and God, despite the crimes of his life,
received him into purgatory. " The angel of God
took me and the angel of hell cried out : O Thou
Who cometh from heaven, why dost Thou snatch him
from me and carry off his eternal soul? Why should
a little tear rob me of my prey? " Per una lagrimetia
die' I mi toglie. (114) That "little tear", whose
secret is known only to God, was without doubt
sufficient for the perfect redemption of Master Siger,
the woes of exile and the malice of the papal
court having already paid his debt to purgatory.
On this mountain of expiation Dante meets a very
unexpected person, Manfred, son of Frederic II, for
whom the Church of Rome had not thunderbolts
sufficient. "He was fair and beautiful and of noble
aspect, but one of his eyebrows was cut by a wound ".
And Manfred smilingly shows the poet a second
wound near his heart. The vanquished of Ceperano,
the heir of the great designs of the Suabian emperor,
says to Dante : " When my life was reft by two
mortal blows, I resigned myself with tears to Him
who willingly pardons. My sins were horrible, but
the infinite goodness has arms so wide that it receives
all who turn to it. If the bishop of Cosenza, whom
pope Clement sent in pursuit of my body, had under-
stood that truth, my bones would still be at the head
of the bridge near Benevento, guarded beneath a heap
of stones ; now they are bathed by the rain and tossed
by the winds, outside of my kingdom, near the banks
of the Verde, where the bishop took and cast them
with extinguished torches. But no, their malediction
cannot damn us or prevent us from finding eternal

DANTE 269

love as long as a single flower of hope blooms in
our heart ".

Per lor maledizion si non si perde,

Che non possa tornar I' etcrno amove,

Mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde. (115)

It was the cry afterwards uttered by Sav^onarola to the
bishop who degraded him, in the presence of the
executioner, of his dignity as priest and friar. " It
is in your power to cut me off from the Church
mihtant, but not from the Church triumphant I " The
Church disarmed, priests and bishops and even the
pontiff rendered powerless to change the sentence of
God,— every time the Italian mystics disclose the
inmost recesses of their heart that is the doctrine and
the hope to which they bear testijnony.

It needed long misery, immeasurable rancour and
the shipwreck of his earthly fatherland to make Dante
confess, with so rough a frankness, his opinion about
Rome and the Church. It will cause no astonishment
that he undoubtedly placed in paradise only the martyr
popes, the first successors of Peter, and Gregory the
Great, the apostolic pope whose figure I have placed
on the first pages of this history. But it was in the
name of the inner religion that he could thus protest
against the priesthood ; and that religion, that went
back to the Gospel, to John and Paul, that creed of
a faith certainly eternal since it answers to all that is
excellent in the human heart, had been for a century
and a half the fruitful work of Italy and, as it were,
the original function of the peninsula in the historical
destiny of Christianity.

NOTES

1. For all that precedes see Ferdinand Gregorovius, Geschichte
der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter. Vols. 1-4. Stuttgart. 1872. There
is an English translation of this work. London. 1894-igoO.

2. George Heinrich Pertz. Editor. Alonumenta Germanics His-
torioa. 5 : 43-45. Hanover. 1839.

3. Vincenzo di Giovanni. Ftlologia e Lettcratura Stciliana.
Palermo. 1871. Page 129.

4. FeUce Tocco. L' Eresia nel Medio Evo. Florence. 1884.
Pages 387 ff. See also Francois Lenormant. La Grande Grlce :
paysages et histoire. Paris. 1881-84. Vol. i, chap. 6.

5. The conflict between Venice and Pisa over the relics of St.
Nicholas is to be found in Marino Sanuto's VitcB Ducum Venetorum.
These biographies of the Venetian doges are to be found in Vol. 22
of Muratori's Rerum Italicarmn Scrtptores, Milan, 1750; and also
in Parts 3-5 of the new edition of Muratori. Sanuto's works have
been edited by G. Monticolo. Cittk di Castello. 1900.

6. Gabriele Rosa. / Feitdi ed i Communi della Lombardia.
Bergamo. 1854.

7. Benvenuto d' Imola. Benvenuti de Rambaldi de Imola
Comentum super Dantis Aldigherii Comoldiam. Florence. 1887.

8. Arnulji gesta archiepiscoporum Mediolanensiwn. To be found
in Muratori, 4 : 20. Also in Migne, 147 : 39. And in Pertz, 3 : 17.

9. Ludovico Antonio Muratori. " Vilium personartim congeriem,
ac deinde seditionem abjcctoruni artificum."

10. Archivio Storico Italiano. florence. 1842, etc. Vol. 6;
series 3. Muratori. Antiquitates Italics Medii Aevi. Vol. 5,
division 60. Milan. 1738-42. Tocco. Ibidem. Page 207.

11. Charles Guillaume Adolphe Schmidt. Histoire et Doctrine
de la Secte des Cathares ou Albigeois. Paris. 1849. See also the
Liber Inquisit. Tholos. Pages 33, 174, and 204.

12. Charles du Plessis d' Argentre. Collectio Judiciorum de novis
Erroribus. Paris. 1755. See the annales for the year 11 80.

13. Victor Cousin. Editor. Abcslardi Omnia Opera. Paris. 1849.
2 : 646.

14. Theologia Christiana. Page 456. To be found in Cousin s
collection of Abelard's works.

271

272 MYSTIC ITALY

15. " Non fuisse necessarium in mundo Christi adventum." See
Jacques Paul Migne. Patrologice Cursus Cotnpletus. Latin series.
108 : 269. Paris. 1844, etc. Also Martin Bouquet and others.
Editors. Recueil des Histoires des Gaules et de la France. 14 : 370.
Paris. 1 738-1906.

16. Bernard of Clairvaiix. Episiolce 195. To be found in
Migne's Patrologia. Bernard's complete works have been trans-
lated by the Abbe Charpentier into French. Paris. 1873.

17. Bernard of Clairvau.x. De Consider atione. 4 : 3. See also
his EpistolcB, 256.

18. For this entire chapter see the following works. Heinrich
Suso Denifle and Franz Ehrle. Archiv fur LiUeratur- und Kirchen-
ge^chichte des Mittelalters. Berlin. 1885, etc. Volume i. No. i.
Herman Ferdinand Renter. Geschichte der Religiosen Aufklarung
im Mittelaltev. Berlin. 1875-77. Dom de Riso. Delia Vita e
ddle Opere dell' Abhate Gioachino. Joseph Ernest Renan. Nouvelles
Eiudes d' Histoire Religieuse. Paris. 1884. John Boland and
others. Editors. Acta Sanctorum. Three editions. Antwerp —
Tongerloo — Brussels; 1643-1902. Venice; 1734-70. Paris ; 1863-
83. See Volume 7 for May.

19. Joachim of Flora. Divini Vatis Abbatis Joachim Liber
Concordia novi ae veteris Testamenti. Venice. 1519. Expositio
magni Prophetcs Abbatis Joachim in Apocalypsin. Psalterium decern
Chordarum. Venice. 1527. For a list of the unedited works of
Joachim see Denifle and Ehrle as cited in note 18.

20. Augustine. De Civitate Dei. Chapters 20 and 22. In Joannis
Evangelium Tractaius. Pages 36 and 124. Both these works,
with Augustine's other writings, are to be found in Migne's Pairo-
logie. Latin Series. Volumes 32-47. Nearly all Augustine's
writings have been translated into English. They are to be found
in the " Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers." Buffalo. 1886, etc.

21. Joannes Scotus F.rigena. Expositiones super Hierarchias
Sancti Dionysii. Book 2. To be found in Migne's Patrologia
Latina. 122 : 39. Erigena's Cotnmentary upon the Fourth Gospel
is to be found in the same volume of Migne, page 308.

22. D'Argentro (as cited in note 12). See the annales for the
years 1204-10. Nicolaus Eymeric. Directorium Inquisitorium.
Rome. 1578.

23. Joachim of Flora. Expositts in Apocalypsin. Pages 80
and 3. See note 19.

24. Joachim of Flora. Concordia. Book 5, division 84. See
note 19.

25. Ibidem. Book 5, divisions 116, 117, and 119. See note 19.

26. Ibidem. Book i, division 8.

27. Ibidem. Book 5, division 57.

28. For the biography of Francis of Assisi see the following

NOTES 273

works. Acta Sanctorum, volume 2 for October, where arc to be
found the two Liva by Thomas of Celano (translated into English
by A. G. Ferrers Howell. New York. 1908), the so-called Legcnda
Trium Socionim, finished in 1246, and the Legend of Bonaventura,
finished in 1263. Lucas Wadding. Annates Minorum sen Trium
Ordinum a S. Francisco Institutorum. Rome. 1731, etc. For the
intimate character of the saint one should read the Ftoretti, the
popular gospel of Franciscanism in the fourteenth century. There
are several translations into English of The Little Flowers of St.
Francis. The Liber Conformitatum, upon which Brother Bartolom-
meo, beginning in 1385, spent more than fifteen years, displays,
with subtle analysis, the resemblance, feature by feature, of Francis
to Jesus. Milan. 1510. For the first apostolate one should read
the Chronica Fratis Jordani a Giano. Leipsic. 1870. A second
edition is to be found in the Analecta Franciscana. Quaracchi.
1885, etc. For the crisis that occurred immediately after the
death of Francis recourse should be had to the Htstoria Sep tern
Tribulationuin. The text of this Chronicle of the Tribulations by
Angelo Clareno is to be found, though not in its entirety, m the
second volume of the Archiv fiir Litter atur und Kirchengeschichie
des Mittelalters (see note 18). For the influence of Francis upon
poetry and art in Italy see Henry Thode's Franz von Assist und
die Anfdnge der Kunst der Renaissance in Jtalien. Berlin. 1885.
And for information regarding the works and the spirit of Francis
the following books should be consulted. Karl Hase. Franz von
Assisi : Bin Heiligenbild. Leipsic. 1856. Renan. Nouvelle
Etudes d' Histoire Religieuse. Antoine Fr6deric Ozanam. Les
Poetes Franciscains en Italie au TrezUme Siicle. Paris. 1852.
Johann Gorres. Der Heilige Franciskus von Assisi, ein Troubadour.
Strassburg. 1826. To these references cited by Gebhart there
should be added, for general information regarding Saint Francis,
Paul Sabatier's Life of St. Francis of Assisi. London. 1907.
And for further information regarding the early Franciscan litera-
ture one should see W. Goetz's Die Quellcn qur Geschichte des hi.
Franz von Assisi. 1904.

29. This rule of 1209, now lost, has been restored with a great
degree of probabiUty, by Karl Miiller, in his Die Anfdnge des
Minoriten Ordens und der Bussbruderschaften. Freiburg-in-Breisgau
1885. It ought to be substituted for the first traditional Rule,
which belongs to 1221.

30. Bartolomaeus of Pisa. Liber Conformitatum. Bologna. 1590,
Page 185.

31. See the Legend of the Three Companions in note 28.

32. See The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, division 26. See
also the Rule of 1221, division 7 : Et quicumqu^ ad eos venerint,
amicus vel adversarius, fur vel latro, benigne recipiatur.

18

274 MYSTIC ITALY

33. Acta Sanctorum. October. 2 : 757.

34. Liber Conformiiatum. Edition of 1590. Page 178 and 262

35. Rule of 1 22 1. Division 20.

36. Liber Conformitatmn. Edition of 1590. Page 243.

37. Ibidem. Page 244.

38. Wadding. Annals Minorum. i : 61. See note 28. The
Liber Conformiiatum omits the entire passage relating to the rich.
See page 146 of the 1590 edition.

39. Lapo Mazzei. Letiere di un Notaro a un Mercante del seccolo
XIV. Florence. 1880.

40. Epistolarum Petri de Vineis. Basel. 1566.

41. Jean Fran9ois Michaud. Histoire des Croisades. Volume 2,
book 32, chapter 15. Paris. 1857. L'Esioire des Erodes Empereur
et la Conquest de la Terre d'Outremer. Book 32 ; chapter 15. Paris.
I 841, etc. ,

42. Machiavelli's Discorsi sopra la Prima Deca di Tito Livio is
to be found in his Opere Complete, published at Florence in 1843.
There are several English translations. The present quotation is
to be found in book 3, division i. Machiavelli saw Dominic through
the eyes of Savonarola. The Florentine reformer had listened
with eagerness to Dominic. But had Savonarola lived in the
thirteenth century he would undoubtedly have been much more
of a Franciscan than a Dominican.

43. Jean Louis Huillard-Breholles. Historia Diplomatica Frederici
Secundi. 2 : 2 and 6 : 257. Paris. 1852-61. Jules Zeller, His-
toire d' Altemagne. Passim. Paris. 1872-91.

44. Cento Novelle Aniiche. No. 52. Naples. 1879.

45. Muratori. Rerum Italicarum Scriptores. 3 : 585.

46. Huillard-Breholles. Vie et Correspondence de Pierre de la
Vtgne. Page 196. Paris. 1864.

47. Huillard-Breholles. Historia Diplomatica. 6 : 326, 614, 618,
and 676.

48. Ibidem. Introduction.

49. Ibidem. 6 : 336, 473, and 811.

50. Ibidem. 6 : 176.

51. Ibidem. 4 : 910. 6 : 391.

52. Ibidem. 6 : 685,

53. Ibidem. 6 : 391.

54. Cento Novelle Antiche. No. 139.

55. Ibidem. No. 71.

56. Ibidem. No. 112.

57. Historia Diplomatica. 5 : 339.

58. Renan. Averrois et V Averroisme. Second edition. Page
167. Paris.

59. Ibidem. Chapter 2,

60. Ibidem. See also an article by Michele Amari in the Journal

NOTES 275

Asiaiique. 1853. Page 240. Vincenzo di Giovanni. Sloria della
Filosfia in Stcilia. i : 124. 1873.

61. Benvenuto d' Imola. See note 7. Comm. ad Inferno. 10.

62. Giovanni Boccaccio. // Decameronc. VI, 9. Included in
his Opere. Florence 1723-24. There are a number of Enghsh
translations of // Decamerone.

63. Dante. Inferno. X. 35. For the original see Tutte le
Opere di Dante Alighieri. E. Moore. Editor. Oxford University
Press. 1904. Charles EHot Norton's prose translation of the
Commedia is recommended. Of the renderings into English verse
that by Longfellow is the best known and that by Melville Best
Anderson the most scholarly.

64. Era Sahmbene. Chronicle. All the editions of this work
are defective. The best is probably that of the PYanciscans of
Quaracchi. It is to be found in the Analecta Franciscana. The
translator does not know what edition was used by Gebhart. The
citations to pages of the Chronicle in the original of Mystic Italy
are therefore omitted in the translation.

65. Adolf Gaspary. Die Sicilianische Dichterschule des Dreizenh-
ten Jahrhunderts. Chapter 2. Berlin. 1870.

66. fimile Gebhart. Les Origines de la Renaissance en Italic.
Chapter 6. Paris. 1879.

67. Allesandro d' Ancona. Domenico Comparetti, Editor. Le
Aniiche Rima Volgari. i : 51, 17, 38, 21, 74, and 75.

68. Bibliothique de I' Ecole des Charles. A periodical publi-
cation of the Ecole Impiriale des Charles. See the thesis by M. L.
Richard, entitled Jean XXII et les Franciscans, which appeared in
1886. See also in the Archiv fiir Litteratur - und Kirchengeschichte
des Mittelalters, Volume 3, No. i, an article by Ehrle entitled Zur
Vorgeschichte des Concils von Vienne.

69. See in the Archiv fiir Litteratur - und Kirchengeschichte des
Mittelalters, Volume i. No. 4, an article by Ehrle entitled Die
Spiriiualen, ihr Verhdltniss zum Franciscanerorden und zu den
Fraticellen. See also Volume 2, No. 2 for The Chronicle of the
Tribulations. And see Felice Tocco's article Dociim. Franciscani
in the Archivio Storico Italiano for 1886, Disp. V.

70. The first chronicles do not agree as to the time he was elected
general, nor are they in accord as to the number of times he held
that office.

71. Antony of Padua's works are to be found in Migne's Patrologia
Latina. 6 : 1206.

72. See The Chronicle of the Tribulations in the Archiv fiir Lit-
teratur - und Kirchengesch des Mittelalters. 2 : 256.

73. Archiv fiir Litteratur - und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters.
2 .* 259-63. Bene et opportune venisti, sed venisti tarde.

74. Histoire Littdraire de la France. Begun by the Benedictines

276 MYSTIC ITALY

of the Abbey of St. Maur. Volume 20, pages 30 and following.
Paris. 1733, etc. Salimbene. Chronicle. See note 64. Renan.
Nouvelles Etudes d' Histoire Religieuse. 246.

75. La Vie de Sainte Douceline, Fondairice des Beguines de Mar-
seille. Written in the thirteenth century in Proven9ale. Trans-
lated into modern French and edited by the Abbe Joseph Hyacinthe
Al banes. Marseilles. 1879.

76. Jean de Meung. Le Rommant de la Rose. Volume 2, verses
1 198 and following.

77. See the Archiv fUr Litter atur - und Kirchengeschichie des
Mittelalters, Volume i, No. i, for an article by Deniile on The
Eternal Gospel and the Commissioners of Artagiti.

78. Herman Haupt. Zur Geschichte des Joachismus. Gotha.
1885. See also an article by fimile Gebhart on the History of
Joachimism in the Revue Historique for May- June, 1886.

79. D' Argentre. Collectio Judicioruni. Volume i, pages 165
and following.

80. Cesar Egasse du Boulay. Historia Universifaiis Parisiensis.
3 : 342. Paris. 1665-73.

81. Archiv fiir Litteratuv - und Kirchengeschichie des Mittelalters.
Volume 2, No. 11, page 280.

82. Salimbene. Chronicle. See note 64.

83. Ibidem. See also the Cronaca di Bologna, in 18 : 271 of
Muratori's Rerum Italicarum Scriptores.

84. Salimbene. Chronicle. See note 64.

85. See the Chronicle of the Tribulations in the Archiv fiir Lit-
teratuv- und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters. \'olume 2, No. 2,
pages 271, 278, 282, and 283.

86. Gregorovius. Volume 5. See note i.

87. See pages 271 and following of the Chronicle of the Tribu-
lations, as in note 85.

88. Inferno. XIX, 69.

89. Archiv fiir Litter atur - und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters.
Volume I, No. 4, pages 566-67.

90. Ibidem. Volume 3, pages 409 and following. Histoire
Littdraire de la France. 21 : 41. See note 74.

91. Miiller. Chapter 3. See note 29.

92. Inferno. Ill, 59.

93. Archiv fiir Litteralur - und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters.
2 : 309. Luigi Tosti. Storia di Bonifazio VIII e de suoi tempi.
I : 205. Rome. 1886.

94. See an article upon Jacopone by D'Ancona in the
Nuova Antologia di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti for May 15 and
June I, 1880. Published at Florence and Rome.

95. Wadding. 6 : 77. See note 28.

96. Salimbene. See note 64.

NOTES 277

97. Allessandro d' Ancona. Origini del Teatro in Italia. Volume
I, pages 117 and following. Florence. 1877.

98. Offices Dramatiques des Penitents de I' Ombrie. Published by
Monaci. Imola. 1874.

99. D' Ancona. i : 189. See note 97.

100. Eugdne Miintz. Histoire de I' Art pendent la Renaissance.
I : 285, Paris. 1889-95.

loi. Convito. II and 13.

102. Ibidem. 11, 9.

103. Ibidem. 11, 8 and III, 14-15.

104. Ibidem. IV, 17.

105. Ibidem. IV, 27-28,

106. Inferno. XIX.

107. Paradiso. XXVII, 22.

108. Ibidem. XXIV, 65.

109. Chartularium Universii. Parisians. Volume i, No. 432.
no. Ibidem. Volume i, No. 473.

111. Roman de la Rose. XCII.

112. Paradiso. X, 136.

113. See an article by Haur6au in the Journal des Savants for
April, 1890.

114. Purgatorio. V, 107.

115. Ibidem. Ill, 133-35.

A LIST OF BOOKS BY tUlLE GEBHART

Year.
i860.
i860.

1864.

1869.
1876.
1877.

1879.
1884.

1887.
1890.

1893-
1895-
1896.

1897.
1899.
1900.

I90I.
1902.
1905.
1907.
1907.
1908.
1908.
I910.

igii.
1911.

Title.

Publisher.
Durand.

De Varia Ulyssis apud Veteres Poetas Persona.
Histoire du Sentiment Poetique de la Nature dans

r Antiquite Grecque et Romaine. Durand.

Praxitele ; Essai sur 1' Histoire de 1' Art et du

Genie Grecs, de Pericles a Alexandre. Tandou.

Essai sur la Peinture de Genre dans 1' Antique. Thorin.
De r Italie ; Essais de Critique et d' Histoire. Hachette.

Rabelais ; la Renaissance et la Reforme. Hachette.

Les Origines de la Renaissance en Italie. Hachette.

Introduction a 1' Histoire du Sentiment Religieuse

en Italie depuis la fin du Douzieme Siecle au

Concile de Trente. Berger-Levrault.

Etudes Meridionales ; La Renaissance Italienne et

la Philosophie de 1' Histoire. Cerf.

L'ltalie Mystique ; Histoire de la Renaissance

Religieuse au Moyen Age. Hachette.

Autour d' une Tiare. Colin.

Rabelais. Lecene et Oudin.

Moines et Papes ; Essais dc Psychologic His-

torique. Hachette.

Au Son des Cloches ; Contes et Legendes. Hachette.

La Baccalaureat et les fitudes Classiques. Hachette.

Cloches de N06I et de Paques. This is merely a

reprint of three stories from Au Son des Cloches

with the addition of illustrations and decorations. Piazza.
Conteurs Florentines du Moyen Age. Hachette.

D' Ulysse a Panurge. Hachette.

L' Ulysse a Panurge ; Contes Heroi-Comiques. Hachette.

Sandro Botticelli.
Petite Legende Doree.
Rome et Italie.

Michel-Ange ; Sculpteur et Peintre.
La Vieille figlise.
Les Jardins de 1' Histoire.
Souvenirs d' un Vieil Athenien.

279

Goupil.
Blond et Gay.
Bloud et Gay.
Manzi et Joyant.
Bloud et Gay.
Bloud el Gay.
Bloud et Gay.

280 MYSTIC ITALY

Ybar. Title. Publisheh

igii. De Panurge a Sancho Pan9a ; Melanges de Lit-

terature Europeenne. Bloud et Gay.

1912. Petits Memoires. Bloud et Gay.

1913. Les Sidcles de Bronze, Bloud et Gay.

1914. L'Age d'Or. Bloud et Gay.

The last seven books, made up of contributions to periodicals,
were all published posthumously. One other. Alma Mater, was
announced, but its pubUcation is doubtful. The Botticelli, as
first published, was, like the Michel- Ange, a richly illustrated and
expensive book. A cheap edition of the text was pubUshed in
1908 by Hachette.

INDEX

Abelard, Peter, his efforts to
enfranchise the human mind,
60-62

Adrian IV, Pope, 64 ; his persecu-
tion of Arnold of Brescia, 67

Albert of Beham, his opinion of
Frederick II, 139

Alexander of Hales, his extension
of the knowledge of Aristotle
and the Arabic philosophers,

154

Alexander II, Pope, 55

Alexander IV, Pope, his attitude
towards liberal religious thought,
186-190; 203

Anacletus II, Pope, 39

Andrew of Pisa, the spirit of his
art, 237

Angelo Clareno, Fra, his book as
a source of information for the
history of the time, 167-170

Anthony of Padua, 126; his in-
fluence and his death, 172-174

Arnold of Brescia, his thought and
his life, 62-67, 92 ; support of
his views by Frederick II, 144

Aristotle, his influence upon the
thought of the later medieval
centuries, 154-160

Arnoulf of Beauvais, his Mirror of
Monks, 46

Art, early Italian, 233-241

Augustine, influence of his thought
upon the life of the Middle
Ages, 75-76

Autour d' une Tiare, Gebhart's
historical novel, 22-24

Averroes, Arabic philosopher, in-
fluence of his thought upon the

m

later medieval centuries, 152-
160
Avicenna, Arabic philosopher, influ-
ence of his thought in medieval
Christendom, 159

Benedict IX, Pope, 43, 44

Bernard of Clairvaux, his decision
in a contested papal election,
39 ; his attitude towards Arnold
of Brescia, 63 ; his views on the
reform of the church, 64-65

Bernardino of Siena, 108

Bonaventura, the Seraphic Doctor,
his testimony as to the death
of Francis of Assisi, 129 ; his
influence as General of the
Franciscans, 204-205

Boniface VII, Pope, 42-43

Boniface VIII, Pope, his attitude
towards Celestine V, 214-218;
his attack upon the Colonna,
2ig-22i ; his persecution of
Jacopone da Todi, 221-223;
his destruction of the Guclfic
party in Italy, 243 ; how
regarded by Dante. 257 ; his
nepotism, 258 ; his struggle
with Philip IV of France, 258-
260

Botticelli, Sandro, Italian painter,
Gebhart's book on, 21

C^hari, the, their origin and their

views, 56-57
Celestine II, Pope, 64
Celestine III, Pope, 83
Celestine V, Pope, 204, 215-217
Clement II, Pope, 43

282

MYSTIC ITALY

Clement III, Pope, 39, 82

Clerici Vagantes, their spread of

heresy, 53-54
Communes, life in the Italian,

49-53
Conventuals, the Franciscan, i66-

241
Crescentius, Fr^, General of the

Franciscans, 175

Damiano, Pietro, his book on the
popes, 42 ; his attempts to
reform the Church, 48

Dante, his rationalistic thought and
his mystical religion, 242-269

Douceline, Franciscan nun, 181-183

Elias of Cortona, General of the
Franciscans, his character and
his policy, 128, 171-174

Eriugena, John Scotus, 61, influence
of his thought, 75-79.

Eugenius III, Pope, 64, 65

Figueria, William, his denunciation
of the papacy, 140-141

Formosus, Pope, 43

Francis of Assisi, his thought and
his life, 94-132 ; exaltation of
his religion after his death,
165-201 ; influence of his spirit
in Italian art and literature,
202-241

Franciscan religion, its exaltation
after the death of its founder,
165-201 ; its influence in Italian
art and literature, 202-241 ; its
influence upon Dante, 242—269

Fraticelli, the, 167-201.

Frederic Barbarossa, Emperor, his
persecution of Arnold of Brescia,
67 ; as the characteristic medie-
val emperor, 134

Frederick II, Emperor, 30-31 ; his
centralized government and his
rationalism, 133-164

Gebhart, Nicholas Emile, his life

and his books, 7-25
Gelasius II, Pope, his abduction,

38 ; his flight, 43-44

Giotto, the spirit of the new age
revealed in his work, 237-241

Golden Legend, The, 230-233

Gregory I, Pope, his attachment to
the religion of Italy, 27 ; and
the temporal possessions of the
papacy, 36-45

Gregory VII, Pope, his attachment
to the religion of Italy, 28 ; his
relation to the conditions of his
time, 37-38, 40-41, 55 ; and
the Norman chivalry, 43 ; his
opposition to Henry IV, 47

Gregory IX, Pope, 106, 130, 138,
144-145, 151, 172, 212

Gregory X, Pope, 203, 206

Gerard de Borgo-San-Donniuo,
author of the Introduction to
the Eternal Gospel, 183-201

Henry VI, Emperor, 83, 84, 100
Honorius III, Pope, 123
Honorius IV, Pope, 203
Hughues de Digne, leader of Joach-
inism in France, 179-183

Imitation of Christ, The, 45-56
Innocent II, Pope, 39, 63
Innocent III, Pope, his first meeting
with Francis of Assisi, 99 ;
character of his pontificate,
99-103 ; his hesitation at recog-
nizing the Franciscan Order.
165 ; his furtherance of the
secular progress of the Church,
206
Innocent IV. Pope, 138, 144, 175
Introduction to the Eternal Gospel,

The, 183-201
Italic Mystique, L' estimate of
Gebhart's book, 18-21

Jacopone da Todi, Fr^, his life and

his poems, 218-226
Joachim of Flora, his life and

thought, 79-93 ; 165-201
John of Parma, General of the

Franciscans, 176-179, 189-190
John of Pisa, the naturalism of his

sculpture, 236

INDEX

288

John XII, Pope, 42

John XIV, Pope, 43

John XXI, Pope, 203

John XXII. Pope. 208, 209

Lateran Council of 12 15, its con-
firmation of the Franciscan
community, 127

Latini, Brunetto, his opinion of
Frederic II. 135 ; teacher of
Dante, 249

Lucius II, Pope, 64

Lucius III, Pope, 82

MachiaveUi. Nicholas, his view
regarding the renewal of religion.

131
Manfred, son of Frederic II. 206
Michelangelo, Gcbhart's book on.

21
Michael Scot, his activity in making

known the writings of the

Arabic philosophers. 156. 159

Nicholas of Pisa, early Italian

sculptor. 235. 236
Nicholas II. Pope, his electoral

reform. 66
Nicholas III, Pope, 203, 207
Nicholas IV, Pope, 124, 203-204,

209
Nicholas V, Anti-pope, 208
Novellino, The 30, 137, its import-
ance in the study of the history
of the later medieval centuries,
147-151

Origines de la Renaissance en
Italie, Les, Gebhart's book on,
16-18

Pascal II. Pope, 43

Patarins, the, their origin and their

views, 54-56
Pierre Jean d'Olive, 109-211
Pietro della Vigna, secretary of

Frederic II, 125 ; his defence of

his master, 139-140
Provenfal poetry, its influence in

the kingdom of Frederic II.

160-162

Rabelais, Gebhart's book on, 15-

16
Rudolf of Hapsburg, Emperor,

206-207

Saladin, 148-149

SaUmbene, Fr^, his Chronicle as
a source of historical informa-
tion, 138-139 ; 177-179; 195-
201

Santa Clara, nuns of, 123-124

Siger de Brabant, medieval radical
thinker, 264-269

Sixtus IV, Pope, 211-212

Spiritual Franciscans, the, 165-
241

Third Order of Franciscans, its
establishment, 124

Urban III, Pope, 82

Victor III, Pope. 48-49
Vienne. Council of, 166

Waldenses. the. their origin and
their views, 58-59

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