The record survives of many of Eleanor’s grants to individuals, often made in the name of Richard, “our son of blessed memory; may his soul be at peace forever.” There can be no doubting the anguished sincerity of Eleanor’s hope. She was no saint and would likely have ridiculed the notion of a Saint Eleanor (and, perhaps because of her realistic view of human activity, of a Saint Anyone). She was, rather, a smart, spirited, incautious young woman, who developed into a wise, effective, generous old woman.
One is hard pressed to find examples of unbelievers anywhere in medieval Europe. Henry and Eleanor’s youngest child, John, could be named as such. He was famous in his day for chatting and giggling his way through mass, refusing communion, and hooting at the preacher to hurry up and finish so he could eat. When Bishop Hugh showed John a new depiction of the Last Judgment, a favorite medieval subject, and pointed out the happy souls ascending to Heaven, John scandalized all present by pointing to the damned, pulled down to Hell by demons, and shouting, “Show me rather these, whose good example I mean to follow!” But even this was more likely braggadocio than an expression of atheism.
What is discernible, however, in John’s taunts, as in his mass-frequenting father’s threats against God, is a disjunction between their undoubted beliefs and their daily lives. The biographies of medieval royals are reminiscent of the formula for a Cecil B. DeMille film—lots of sex and violence followed by a pious ending—which does not, however, discredit the authenticity of their piety. They did use the church and its doctrines to their advantage—twisting the arms of clerics as needed, confessing their sins and receiving absolution and then returning to their sins, leaving grants to monasteries so that masses would be offered in perpetuity for their imperiled immortal souls—but they didn’t trust churchmen any more than they trusted other princes, and the lives they led were nearly as pagan as those of their barbaric forebears.
Throughout Europe two languages were used: Latin, the high-minded language of the church, and one’s vernacular, Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-French or Langue d’Oc or High German or whatever. In the emerging vernaculars, there was plenty of room for practical matters, for concerns of fleshly existence, and even for sensuous delight and erotic need, but there was little room for God and the things of the spirit. There was still a fissure in European consciousness between flesh and spirit that needed to be healed, a fissure symbolized by the two languages of life, Latin and vernacular, language high and language low.
As local languages slowly gained ascendency, fewer and fewer people understood Latin, which was on its way to becoming the language of power, of priests and lawyers, of deeds and charters and mysterious ceremonies, no longer the language in which a mother caressed her children or a man embraced his wife or a friend gave his hand to a friend. Somehow or other, for the sake of an integrated consciousness, the Incarnation—the original, early medieval resolution of the tension between flesh and spirit—needed to penetrate the vernacular. To experience the impact of the most extraordinary experiment in vernacular spirituality since the parables of Jesus, we must make our way from Fontevraud Abbey in the lush Loire Valley and, crossing the barrier of the Alps, return to Italy.
In 1182, three years after the death of Hildegard and in the same year Eleanor turned sixty, a boy was born to Pietro di Bernardone, a worldly-wise, tyrannical cloth merchant, and his long-suffering wife, Pica, who lived in a prosperous hill town of Umbria called Assisi, nestled in the foothills of the Apennines. The child was christened Giovanni shortly after his birth. His father, however, on returning from one of his many business trips to the larger France of Philip II,l where he purchased the bolts of stylish cloth he would sell to Italians, demanded his new son be renamed Francesco, “the Frenchman,” Francis in English. Francis of Assisi was to become, in the course of his forty-four years, the greatest of all medieval saints, for many thoughtful commentators the greatest Christian figure since Jesus Christ.
But for the first half of Francis’s life there was nothing remarkable about him. A spoiled rich man’s son, he became in his teens a dissolute layabout, whose supremely practical father tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to interest him in the particulars of the cloth trade. Though bored by the business of the business, Francis appears to have enjoyed his many trips with his father to France, picking up along the way the songs, stories, and easy morals of the early French poets. He had a good ear and a fine memory and was an excellent mimic, all of which enabled him to retain the Provençal verses he heard and to sing them back throughout his life whenever a situation seemed to require entertainment or a crisis needed to be defused by a moment’s jollity.
The poems young Bernardone committed to memory exhibited all the gai saber of the troubadours and told of brave knights and beautiful ladies, of furtive romances and whispered assignations. They provided the adolescent with a worldly, even a fashionable, education and with models of conduct that set his imagination afire. They also gave him whatever literary and historical grounding he had beyond three meager years of schooling from his parish priest, who had taught Francis to read, to write, and to parse elementary Latin—a typical education for the time. For tucked away within the gai saber were references to lost traditions and buried knowledge. As Chrétien de Troyes wrote in the prologue to Cligés, a long poem about a knight’s quest:
Par les livres que nos avons
Les feiz des anciiens savons
Et del siecle qui fu jadis.
Ce nos ont nostre livre apris,
Que Grece ot de chevalerie
Le premier los et de clergie.
Puis vint chevalerie a Rome
Et de la clergie la some,
Qui or est an France venue.
Deus doint qu’ele i soit retenue …
From books of ours we ken
The deeds of ancient men
And ken the days of old.
These books of ours have told
That Greece was first in yearning
For chivalry and learning.
Then chivalry came to Rome
And of all learning the sum,
Which came to France at last.
God grant we hold them fast …
Cligés, which concerns a knight’s love for the married lady of the title and involves hideaways and love potions and is set in part at Camelot, runs to more than a hundred pages, even in modern editions. However extended some of these romances were, they were simple singsong affairs, rigidly bound in rhyming couplets, each line containing exactly four iambs (which, because of the terseness of English, cannot be simulated in translation). But they offered incidental learning (or clergie in the Old French of Chrétien, showing just how closely knowledge and learning clung to the clergy) about many things. These early lines, for instance, were intended to demonstrate how the refined manners and intellectual seriousness of Greece and Rome had found their way to contemporary France—here seen not just as the tiny realm of Louis VII but as the broad country of all Francophones. In their wide-ranging references, the troubadour poems, whether long or short, opened Francis to a changing world far beyond the bounds of his Umbrian parish. These business trips with his overbearing father provided him with his true school of learning.
But for all that, Francis could not seem to rise above the role his fellows had designated for him, rex convivii, master of the revels. The emerging middle class, to which the Bernardones belonged, did not exist in isolation from the rest of Assisi, a typical European town of its time, full of extremes of poverty and wealth, charity and violence. Women and girls had to be closely guarded at all times to prevent rape, while the streets clanged with strutting young male revelers, such as Francis and his friends—so much so that we could almost be in the Verona of Romeo and Juliet, of the Montagues and Capulets, as in the Assisi of the Bernardones.
Assisi was then a commune—that is, a new kind of town with elected officials—but it still owed allegiance to the German emperor, for Assisi lay within the Holy Roman Empire. After the burghers of the t
own decided to cut all feudal ties, they found themselves in a pitched battle with the aristocrats they had previously expelled—and who arrived at the walls of Assisi with overwhelming reinforcements from Perugia, Assisi’s ancient enemy, twelve miles to the west. Francis, thinking himself a knight of the new order, answered the call to man the battlements and soon found himself imprisoned in Perugia, where he languished for a year in a dark, airless dungeon and contracted malaria. Ransomed at last, he returned home but would never be his old self again. No longer master of the revels, he had become a depressive who “began to regard himself as worthless.” He did make one quixotic attempt to join the forces of a Norman nobleman in Apulia. He even assembled an expensive knight’s costume in preparation for his role as vassal. “I know that I shall become a great prince!” he vowed to all who would listen. But the malaria returned and his unrealistic plans for chivalric glory had to be laid aside. He would remain sickly for the rest of his short life.
On a bright afternoon in the summer of 1205, Francis, returning from an errand for his father, took refuge from the heat in the ruined coolness of the chapel of San Damiano at the foot of the hill of Assisi. There above the cracked altar, surrounded by signs of neglect and decay, was a miraculous survival: an intact crucifix of painted linen, stretched across a wooden frame. The image on the cloth, a crucified Christ in the Byzantine style, its severity mitigated by Italian tenderness, was looking directly at Francis. Then the young man thought he heard a gentle voice saying, “Francis, don’t you see my house is being destroyed? Go, then, rebuild it for me.” Francis felt a mysterious change steal over him, a change he could never afterwards describe. “So,” writes Thomas of Celano, Francis’s first biographer, “it is better for us to remain silent about it, too.”
This was the turning point of Francis’s life, the moment at which a new and unexpected vocation took hold of him and sent him racing along a path he could not previously have imagined choosing. An irreligious man, he had found the love of his life—God, or more precisely, God revealed in Jesus—and this discovery made sense of everything else, putting all others, whether people or things, in their proper perspective. As one looks back over Francis’s boyhood, one sees that bolts of cloth and columns of coins could never have held him. He required an overpowering vision to make him function properly; and it’s no wonder that the stimulus of poetry and the ideal of knighthood had been the only previous things to capture his attention or win his homage. He was in every sense of the word an extremist.
Donald Spoto, Francis’s most recent biographer, warns his readers that real saints are “not normal people.” As the screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce put it, “Even Saint Francis—who was one of the two or three greatest human beings ever to walk the earth—could be a bit weird.” I would go so far as to say that Francis was a naturally bipolar personality, a sort of less literary and more self-denying version of someone like Robert Lowell, who could never have settled down to oxlike domesticity but required a great and continuing enterprise if he was to function at all. Once that was sorted out, however, he could function brilliantly, excessively, erratically, eccentrically—which is what Francis did for his remaining twenty-odd years.
Crucifix of San Damiano that spoke to Francis. Like the apse of Santa Maria in Trastevere, it is an example of the new tenderness introduced by Italian artists of the twelfth century into their tradition of Byzantine-inspired art. (Photo Credit 2.5)
At first, he took literally the words of Jesus and painstakingly restored San Damiano to its previous beauty. As he did so, he often prayed his now famous Prayer Before a Crucifix:
Most high and glorious God,
enlighten the darkness of my heart
and give me true faith, certain hope, and perfect charity,
sense and knowledge, Lord—
that I may carry out your holy and true command. Amen.
In this, Francis’s first composition, he could hardly have been more plain, more humble, less adorned, less rhetorical. This is the prayer of a man who has left the startling colors and bold materials of the fabric shop behind him, a man without ornament or pretension.
He took to wearing a hooded peasant’s tunic, cinched by a wide leather belt, and sandals. He lived in a hermit’s cave and carried a pilgrim’s staff. When a little later he noted Jesus’s instructions to his disciples in Matthew’s Gospel, telling them to “take no gold or silver or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, nor two tunics nor sandals nor a staff,” he would abandon his staff, go barefoot, replace his belt with a bit of rope, and divest himself of all changes of clothes. His colorless vagrant’s costume would become the uniform of the early Franciscans, the world’s first hippies.
But Francis’s father, the cloth merchant, mortified by the mad behavior of his son, hauled him into Assisi’s central square and beat him brutally in the sight of everyone. When that failed to dissuade Francis from his bizarre behavior, Bernardone locked him in a storage room, from which he escaped with his mother’s complicity. When Bernardone discovered that Francis had sold some of the family’s precious bolts of cloth to get money for San Damiano’s repairs, he was overcome with rage and brought his case against his son to Guido, the exceedingly wealthy, no-nonsense bishop of Assisi. Guido conducted his court in the great piazza before the cathedral in the hearing of many witnesses.
To the amazement of all, Francis emerged from nowhere, bathed, trimmed, and elegantly outfitted in one of the plumed and patterned costumes from his abandoned wardrobe. Bernardone began his complaint before the bishop: his son was a thief who had mortally dishonored his father, who had the right to compensation for the cloths the young man had stolen. Sounding no more sympathetic than Shylock demanding his pound of flesh, the father was startled by the response of his son, who agreed to return all the money forthwith, as well as anything else he had from his father. Francis then ducked into the cathedral, reappearing shortly thereafter stark naked and holding his clothes in a bundle in front of him, surmounted by a purse full of coins. All these he handed to the imperious bishop, who could not mask his astonishment.
“Listen to me, all of you,” the unashamed naked man addressed the crowd, “and understand. Till now, I have called Pietro di Bernardone my father. But because I have proposed to serve God, I return to him the money on account of which he was so upset, and also the clothing that is his, and I wish from now on to say only ‘Our Father, who art in Heaven’ and not ‘My father, Pietro di Bernardone.’ ” As Bernardone stumbled off with his bundle and purse, Bishop Guido descended the steps of the cathedral and covered the naked man with his enormous cloak.
There is no record of a reconciliation between Francis and his parents nor of any words he ever spoke of them again. There can be no doubt that Francis, for all his blunt simplicity and spontaneity, was capable of forethought and even guile. There was nothing unrehearsed about the episode before the cathedral, nothing Francis had left to chance. He had played it all out beforehand in his mind’s eye and planned it for maximum dramatic effect. No one present could ever forget the plain force of Francis’s nakedness or of his uncompromising and quite final words. As Hildegard had used the symbolic sensibility of her age to fashion allegorical word pictures, Francis used that same heightened sense to create gestures of renunciation and attachment that left such a searing impression on human imagination that they could have been firebrands.
Symbolic gesture, Francis’s natural language, was the profound source he was able to call on throughout his life, though seldom as dramatically as he did that day before the cathedral. He was no good at organization or at long-range strategies, and he knew it. As men, and then women—led by the self-denying and steel-willed Clare of Assisi—began to present themselves as followers, Francis accepted them, befriended them, told them to hear the gospel and to stand beneath the Cross. But he gave them little else, certainly nothing resembling an elaborated rule of community, such as Benedict had left behind. Francis expected his brothers and sisters to l
ive like him as the Lesser Brothers and Sisters, as laypeople rejecting any distinctions of class among themselves and lacking all honors of church or king or commune, taking the words of Jesus literally, never owning anything, married to their poverty and suffering for God’s sake, befriending every outcast—heretic, highwayman, leper—that God thrust in their path. They must not remain at home, making themselves virtuous and fat like the established religious orders.m They must go forth on the roads to live the gospel of God’s love and preach it to all—farmer, bishop, emperor, pope—yet condemn no one. Judgment was the exclusive province of the all-merciful God; it was none of a Christian’s concern. “Give to others, and it shall be given to you. Forgive and you shall be forgiven” was Francis’s constant preaching.
“May the Lord give you peace” was the best greeting one could give to all one met. It compromised no one’s dignity and embraced every good; it was a blessing to be bestowed indiscriminately. May the Lord give you peace, George and Jacques. May the Lord give you peace, Osama and Saddam. May the Lord give you peace, my annoying aunt. May the Lord give you peace, my unbearable neighbor. May the Lord give you peace, my loathsome enemy. Francis’s great insight was that humanity could find its way back to the Garden of Eden, to the aboriginal innocence, but only if we blessed both the murderer and the murdered, the defrauder and his victim, the robber and the robbed. And so Francis went on his way.
Such an approach, in an age when the most visible signs of the Christian religion were the wars and atrocities of the red-crossed crusaders, was shockingly otherworldly—and slyly effective. It silenced sermonizing windbags and brought archbishops up short. It even impelled Francis himself to join the Fifth Crusade, not as a warrior but as a healer. He sailed across the Mediterranean to the Egyptian court of al-Malik al-Kamil, nephew of the great Saladin who had defeated the forces of the hapless Third Crusade. Francis was admitted to the august presence of the sultan himself and spoke to him of Christ, who was after all Francis’s only subject. The attempt to proselytize a Muslim would have been cause for on-the-spot decapitation, but Kamil was a wise and moderate man who was deeply impressed by Francis’s courage and sincerity and invited him to stay for a week of serious conversation. Francis, in his turn, was deeply impressed by the religious devotion of the Muslims, especially by their fivefold daily call to prayer—and it is quite possible that the thrice-daily recitation of the Angelusn that became current in medieval Europe was precipitated by the impression made on Francis by the repeated call of the muezzin. Francis was not impressed by the crusaders, nominal Christians whose sacrilegious brutality horrified him. They were entirely too fond of taunting and abusing their prisoners of war, who were often returned to their families minus nose, lips, ears, and eyes.
Mysteries of the Middle Ages Page 16
