First, he may deal with this great and most amazing man as a figure in secular3 history and a model of social virtues4. He may describe this divine demagogue as being, as he probably was, the world's one quite sincere democrat5. He may say (what means very little) that St. Francis was in advance of his age. He may say (what is quite true) that St. Francis anticipated all that is most liberal and sympathetic in the modern mood; the love of nature; the love of animals; the sense of social compassion6; the sense of the spiritual dangers of prosperity and even of property. All those things that nobody understood before Wordsworth were familiar to St. Francis. All those things that were first discovered by Tolstoy had been taken for granted by St. Francis. He could be presented, not only as a human but a humanitarian7 hero; indeed as the first hero of humanism. He has been described as a sort of morning star of the Renaissance8. And in comparison with all these things, his ascetical theology can be ignored or dismissed as a contemporary accident, which was fortunately not a fatal accident. His religion can be regarded as a superstition9, but an inevitable10 superstition, from which not even genius could wholly free itself; in the consideration of which it would be unjust to condemn11 St. Francis for his self-denial or unduly12 chide13 him for his chastity. It is quite true that even from so detached a standpoint his stature14 would still appear heroic. There would still be a great deal to be said about the man who tried to end the Crusades by talking to the Saracens or who interceded15 with the Emperor for the birds. The writer might describe in a purely16 historical spirit the whole of that great Franciscan inspiration that was felt in the painting of Giotto, in the poetry of Dante, in the miracle plays that made possible the modern drama, and in so many other things that are already appreciated by the modern culture. He may try to do it, as others have done, almost without raising any religious question at all. In short, he may try to tell the story of a saint without God; which is like being told to write the life of Nansen and forbidden to mention the North Pole.
{9}Second, he may go to the opposite extreme, and decide, as it were, to be defiantly17 devotional. He may make the theological enthusiasm as thoroughly18 the theme as it was the theme of the first Franciscans. He may treat religion as the real thing that it was to the real Francis of Assisi. He can find an austere19 joy, so to speak, in parading the paradoxes20 of asceticism21 and all the holy topsy-turvydom of humility22. He can stamp the whole history with the Stigmata, record fasts like fights against a dragon; till in the vague modern mind St. Francis is as dark a figure as St. Dominic. In short he can produce what many in our world will regard as a sort of photographic negative, the reversal of all lights and shades; what the foolish will find as impenetrable as darkness and even many of the wise will find almost as invisible as if it were written in silver upon white. Such a study of St. Francis would be unintelligible23 to anyone who does not share his religion, perhaps only partly intelligible24 to anyone who does not share his vocation25. According to degrees of judgment26, it will be regarded as something too bad or too good for the world. The only difficulty about doing the thing in this way is that it cannot be done. It would really require a saint to write the life of a saint. In the present case the objections to such a course are insuperable.
Third, he may try to do what I have tried to do here; and, as I have already suggested, the course has peculiar27 problems of its own. The writer may put himself in the position of the ordinary modern outsider and enquirer28; as indeed the present writer is still largely and was once entirely29 in that position. He may start from the standpoint of a man who already admires St. Francis, but only for those things which such a man finds admirable. In other words he may assume that the reader is at least as enlightened as Renan or Matthew Arnold; but in the light of that enlightenment he may try to illuminate30 what Renan and Matthew Arnold left dark. He may try to use what is understood to explain what is not understood. He may say to the modern English reader: "Here is an historical character which is admittedly attractive to many of us already, by its gaiety, its romantic imagination, its spiritual courtesy and camaraderie31, but which also contains elements (evidently equally sincere and emphatic) which seem to you quite remote and repulsive32. But after all, this man was a man and not half a dozen men. What seems inconsistency to you did not seem inconsistency to him. Let us see whether we can understand, with the help of the existing understanding, these other things that seem now to be doubly dark, by their intrinsic gloom and their ironic34 contrast." I do not mean, of course, that I can really reach such a psychological completeness in this crude and curt35 outline. But I mean that this is the {11}only controversial condition that I shall here assume; that I am dealing36 with the sympathetic outsider. I shall not assume any more or any less agreement than this. A materialist37 may not care whether the inconsistencies are reconciled or not. A Catholic may not see any inconsistencies to reconcile. But I am here addressing the ordinary modern man, sympathetic but sceptical, and I can only rather hazily38 hope that, by approaching the great saint's story through what is evidently picturesque39 and popular about it, I may at least leave the reader understanding a little more than he did before of the consistency33 of a complete character; that by approaching it in this way, we may at least get a glimmering40 of why the poet who praised his lord the sun, often hid himself in a dark cavern41, of why the saint who was so gentle with his Brother the Wolf was so harsh to his Brother the Ass2 (as he nicknamed his own body), of why the troubadour who said that love set his heart on fire separated himself from women, of why the singer who rejoiced in the strength and gaiety of the fire deliberately42 rolled himself in the snow, of why the very song which cries with all the passion of a pagan, "Praised be God for our Sister, Mother Earth, which brings forth43 varied44 fruits and grass and glowing flowers," ends almost with the words "Praised be God for our Sister, the death of the body."
Renan and Matthew Arnold failed utterly45 at this test. They were content to follow Francis with their praises until they were stopped by their prejudices; the stubborn prejudices of the sceptic. The moment Francis began to do something they did not understand or did not like, they did not try to understand it, still less to like it; they simply turned their backs on the whole business and "walked no more with him." No man will get any further along a path of historical enquiry in that fashion. These sceptics are really driven to drop the whole subject in despair, to leave the most simple and sincere of all historical characters as a mass of contradictions, to be praised on the principle of the curate's egg. Arnold refers to the asceticism of Alverno almost hurriedly, as if it were an unlucky but undeniable blot46 on the beauty of the story; or rather as if it were a pitiable break-down and bathos at the end of the story. Now this is simply to be stone-blind to the whole point of any story. To represent Mount Alverno as the mere47 collapse48 of Francis is exactly like representing Mount Calvary as the mere collapse of Christ. Those mountains are mountains, whatever else they are, and it is nonsense to say (like the Red Queen) that they are comparative hollows or negative holes in the ground. They were quite manifestly meant to be culminations49 and landmarks50. To treat the Stigmata as a sort of scandal, to be touched on tenderly but with pain, is exactly like treating the original five wounds of Jesus Christ as five blots51 on His character. You may dislike the idea of asceticism; you may dislike equally the idea of martyrdom; for that matter you may have an honest and natural dislike of the whole conception of sacrifice symbolised by the cross. But if it is an intelligent dislike, you will still retain the capacity for seeing the point of a story; of the story of a martyr52 or even the story of a monk53. You will not be able rationally to read the Gospel and regard the Crucifixion as an afterthought or an anti-climax or an accident in the life of Christ; it is obviously the point of the story like the point of a sword, the sword that pierced the heart of the Mother of God.
And you will not be able rationally to read the story of a man presented as a Mirror of Christ without understanding his final phase as a Man of Sorrows, and at least artistically54 appreciating the appropriateness of his receiving, in a cloud of mystery and isolation55, inflicted56 by no human hand, the unhealed everlasting57 wounds that heal the world.
The practical reconciliation58 of the gaiety and austerity I must leave the story itself to suggest. But since I have mentioned Matthew Arnold and Renan and the rationalistic admirers of St. Francis, I will here give the hint of what it seems to me most advisable for such readers to keep in mind. These distinguished59 writers found things like the Stigmata a stumbling-block because to them a religion was a philosophy. It was an impersonal60 thing; and it is only the most personal passion that provides here an approximate earthly parallel. A man will not roll in the snow for a stream of tendency by which all things fulfil the law of their being. He will not go without food in the name of something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness. He will do things like this, or pretty nearly like this, under quite a different impulse. He will do these things when he is in love. The first fact to realise about St. Francis is involved in the first fact with which his story starts; that when he said from the first that he was a Troubadour, and said later that he was a Troubadour of a newer and nobler romance, he was not using a mere metaphor61, but understood himself much better than the scholars understand him. He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubadour. He was a Lover. He was a lover of God and he was really and truly a lover of men; possibly a much rarer mystical vocation. A lover of men is very nearly the opposite of a philanthropist; indeed the pedantry62 of the Greek word carries something like a satire63 on itself. A philanthropist may be said to love anthropoids. But as St. Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ. Say, if you think so, that he was a lunatic loving an imaginary person; but an imaginary person, not an imaginary idea. And for the modern reader the clue to the asceticism and all the rest can best be found in the stories of lovers when they seemed to be rather like lunatics. Tell it as the tale of one of the Troubadours, and the wild things he would do for his lady, and the whole of the modern puzzle disappears. In such a romance there would be no contradiction between the poet gathering65 flowers in the sun and enduring a freezing vigil in the snow, between his praising all earthly and bodily beauty and then refusing to eat, between his glorifying66 gold and purple and perversely67 going in rags, between his showing pathetically a hunger for a happy life and a thirst for a heroic death. All these riddles68 would easily be resolved in the simplicity69 of any noble love; only this was so noble a love that nine men out of ten have hardly even heard of it. We shall see later that this parallel of the earthly lover has a very practical relation to the problems of his life, as to his relations with his father and with his friends and their families. The modern reader will almost always find that if he could only feel this kind of love as a reality, he could feel this kind of extravagance as a romance. But I only note it here as a preliminary point because, though it is very far from being the final truth in the matter, it is the best approach to it. The reader cannot even begin to see the sense of a story that may well seem to him a very wild one, until he understands that to this great mystic his religion {16}was not a thing like a theory but a thing like a love-affair. And the only purpose of this prefatory chapter is to explain the limits of this present book; which is only addressed to that part of the modern world which finds in St. Francis a certain modern difficulty; which can admire him yet hardly accept him, or which can appreciate the saint almost without the sanctity. And my only claim even to attempt such a task is that I myself have for so long been in various stages of such a condition. Many thousand things that I now partly comprehend I should have thought utterly incomprehensible, many things I now hold sacred I should have scouted70 as utterly superstitious71, many things that seem to me lucid72 and enlightened now they are seen from the inside I should honestly have called dark and barbarous seen from the outside, when long ago in those days of boyhood my fancy first caught fire with the glory of Francis of Assisi. I too have lived in Arcady; but even in Arcady I met one walking in a brown habit who loved the woods better than Pan. The figure in the brown habit stands above the hearth73 in the room where I write, and alone among many such images, at no stage of my pilgrimage has he ever seemed to me a stranger. There is something of harmony between the hearth and the firefight and my own first pleasure in his words about his brother fire; for he stands far enough back in my memory to mingle74 with all those more domestic dreams of the first days. Even the fantastic shadows thrown by fire make a sort of shadow pantomime that belongs to the nursery; yet the shadows were even then the shadows of his favourite beasts and birds, as he saw them, grotesque75 but haloed with the love of God. His Brother Wolf and Brother Sheep seemed then almost like the Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit of a more Christian64 Uncle Remus. I have come slowly to see many and more marvellous aspects of such a man, but I have never lost that one. His figure stands on a sort of bridge connecting my boyhood with my conversion76 to many other things; for the romance of his religion had penetrated77 even the rationalism of that vague Victorian time. In so far as I have had this experience, I may be able to lead others a little further along that road; but only a very little further. Nobody knows better than I do now that it is a road upon which angels might fear to tread; but though I am certain of failure I am not altogether overcome by fear; for he suffered fools gladly.
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1
sketch
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| n.草图；梗概；素描；v.素描；概述 | |
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ass
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| n.驴；傻瓜，蠢笨的人 | |
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secular
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| n.牧师，凡人；adj.世俗的，现世的，不朽的 | |
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virtues
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| 美德( virtue的名词复数 )； 德行； 优点； 长处 | |
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democrat
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| n.民主主义者，民主人士；民主党党员 | |
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compassion
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| n.同情，怜悯 | |
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humanitarian
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| n.人道主义者，博爱者，基督凡人论者 | |
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renaissance
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| n.复活，复兴，文艺复兴 | |
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superstition
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| n.迷信，迷信行为 | |
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inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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11
condemn
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| vt.谴责，指责；宣判(罪犯)，判刑 | |
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unduly
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| adv.过度地，不适当地 | |
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chide
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| v.叱责；谴责 | |
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stature
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| n.（高度）水平，（高度）境界，身高，身材 | |
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interceded
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| v.斡旋，调解( intercede的过去式和过去分词 )；说情 | |
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purely
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| adv.纯粹地，完全地 | |
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defiantly
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| adv.挑战地，大胆对抗地 | |
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thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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19
austere
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| adj.艰苦的；朴素的，朴实无华的；严峻的 | |
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paradoxes
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| n.似非而是的隽语，看似矛盾而实际却可能正确的说法( paradox的名词复数 )；用于语言文学中的上述隽语；有矛盾特点的人[事物，情况] | |
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asceticism
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| n.禁欲主义 | |
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humility
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| n.谦逊，谦恭 | |
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unintelligible
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| adj.无法了解的，难解的，莫明其妙的 | |
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intelligible
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| adj.可理解的，明白易懂的，清楚的 | |
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vocation
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| n.职业，行业 | |
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judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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enquirer
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| 寻问者，追究者 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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illuminate
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| vt.照亮，照明；用灯光装饰；说明，阐释 | |
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camaraderie
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| n.同志之爱，友情 | |
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repulsive
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| adj.排斥的，使人反感的 | |
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consistency
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| n.一贯性，前后一致，稳定性；(液体的)浓度 | |
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ironic
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| adj.讽刺的，有讽刺意味的，出乎意料的 | |
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curt
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| adj.简短的，草率的 | |
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dealing
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| n.经商方法，待人态度 | |
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materialist
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| n. 唯物主义者 | |
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hazily
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| ad. vaguely, not clear | |
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picturesque
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| adj.美丽如画的，（语言）生动的，绘声绘色的 | |
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glimmering
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| n.微光，隐约的一瞥adj.薄弱地发光的v.发闪光，发微光( glimmer的现在分词 ) | |
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cavern
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| n.洞穴，大山洞 | |
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deliberately
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| adv.审慎地；蓄意地；故意地 | |
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43
forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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varied
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| adj.多样的，多变化的 | |
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utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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46
blot
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| vt.弄脏（用吸墨纸）吸干；n.污点，污渍 | |
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47
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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48
collapse
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| vi.累倒；昏倒；倒塌；塌陷 | |
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49
culminations
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| n.顶点，极点（culmination的复数形式） | |
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50
landmarks
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| n.陆标( landmark的名词复数 )；目标；（标志重要阶段的）里程碑 ~ (in sth)；有历史意义的建筑物（或遗址） | |
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51
blots
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| 污渍( blot的名词复数 )； 墨水渍； 错事； 污点 | |
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52
martyr
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| n.烈士，殉难者；vt.杀害，折磨，牺牲 | |
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53
monk
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| n.和尚，僧侣，修道士 | |
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54
artistically
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| adv.艺术性地 | |
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55
isolation
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| n.隔离，孤立，分解，分离 | |
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56
inflicted
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| 把…强加给，使承受，遭受( inflict的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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57
everlasting
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| adj.永恒的，持久的，无止境的 | |
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reconciliation
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| n.和解，和谐，一致 | |
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59
distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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60
impersonal
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| adj.无个人感情的，与个人无关的，非人称的 | |
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61
metaphor
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| n.隐喻，暗喻 | |
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62
pedantry
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| n.迂腐，卖弄学问 | |
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satire
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| n.讽刺，讽刺文学，讽刺作品 | |
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Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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gathering
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| n.集会，聚会，聚集 | |
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66
glorifying
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| 赞美( glorify的现在分词 )； 颂扬； 美化； 使光荣 | |
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perversely
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| adv. 倔强地 | |
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68
riddles
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| n.谜（语）( riddle的名词复数 )；猜不透的难题，难解之谜 | |
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69
simplicity
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| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
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70
scouted
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| 寻找，侦察( scout的过去式和过去分词 )； 物色（优秀运动员、演员、音乐家等） | |
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superstitious
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| adj.迷信的 | |
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lucid
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| adj.明白易懂的，清晰的，头脑清楚的 | |
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hearth
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| n.壁炉炉床，壁炉地面 | |
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74
mingle
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| vt.使混合，使相混；vi.混合起来；相交往 | |
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grotesque
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| adj.怪诞的，丑陋的；n.怪诞的图案，怪人（物） | |
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76
conversion
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| n.转化，转换，转变 | |
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77
penetrated
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| adj. 击穿的，鞭辟入里的 动词penetrate的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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