Elizabeth Goudge - My God and My All The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi

Such a number of books have been written about Saint Francis, and so many of them works of scholarship, that a writer who is not a scholar should apologize for the presumption of attempting yet another. My only excuse is that I wanted to write it so much that I had to do so; my hope is that it may serve to introduce Saint Francis to a few who do not know him well and perhaps make them want to know him better. At the end of this book they will find a short list of books which will give them a deeper knowledge of him than this one can do. Though some are out of print they are all to be found in the public libraries. Where I have quoted from the Fioretti I have used the translation of Dr. Hugh Martin. The translation of The Canticle of the Sun is that of Matthew Arnold. The chapter headings from the Laude of Jacopone da Todi are from the translation of Mrs. Theodore Beck. The quotation at the end of the book is from Saint Bonaventures Life of Saint Francis.

O why didst thou create me,
Great God of heaven above?
Redeem me, and await me,
Through Jesus Christ my love?

JACOPONE DA TODI
LAUDA XCVIII

IT IS NEVER THE BEGINNING of the story to say a child is born, nor is it the end to say a man has died, for long preparation leads up to every birth, and a death leaves behind it a power for good or evil that works on in the world for longer than the span of life from which it grew. In the case of those whom we call the saints, this power is immeasurable. They are the true makers of men. Other great men may alter the material aspect of life for millions, for generations, but the saints make us for eternity. By emptying themselves, by getting rid of self altogether, they become the channels of Gods creative power and by him, through them, we are made. Not alone through them, we know, for every occasion in life makes us, and sometimes the touch of God comes directly upon us, but through them more than we realize. In this life we cannot know how much we owe to saints we have never heard of, or to saints who live with us unrecognized, but there are a few saints whose light sends such a beam through the darkness of this world that the darkness not only cannot extinguish it but is forced to recognize it and cannot forget it.

Francis of Assisi is one of these. He lived eight centuries ago and he died in early middle age, yet few of us in the Western world today, even if we know little about him, are not aware of him. Like a fresh stream springing up in the desert he is the source of so many good things. His influence upon European music, art, drama, and politics has been a study for many scholars, yet it is as a Christian that he matters to us, as a humble poor man who set himself to tread as closely as he could in the footsteps of Christ, perhaps as closely as any man has ever done, and by so doing shames us. Looking at him we see what it means to be a Christian, and what it costs. His story is not only endearing, it is terrifying. Yet without the fear and shame he would not have so much power over us, for we know in our hearts that what is worth having costs everything. And so his power lives on and we cannot measure it because it is nowhere near its end.

He was born in Assisi in 1182, but we do not know in what season of the year, though it is good to imagine that he who so loved light and fire was born in summer, in the days of the pride and beauty of the Italian sun, and that his mother, as she waited for his birth, looked out from some green bower upon her rooftop over the vast landscape of plain, forest, and mountain that was to be the setting for her sons life and death. The Italian ladies of the Middle Ages spent much time upon the flat roofs, for their houses were dark, with small windows that in the absence of glass had to be closed with shutters against wind and weather. Their turbulent menfolk lived mostly in the streets, when they were not riding out to fight their neighbors, and upon the roofs the women had peace and quiet to do their spinning and weaving and to sing their songs. All the people of Assisi sang a great deal, for this was a century of song. The country people had their laude, centuries-old litanies and hymns befitting the different seasons, and twenty years before the birth of Francis the singing bards of Provence, the troubadours, began to invade Italy, and their songs were sung everywhere in the castles of the nobles, the houses of the merchants, and up and down the streets of the city.

According to tradition the Lady Pica Bernadone was a lady of Provence, of gentle birth, the daughter of the Count of Boulement. Provence was at this time the most civilized of the provinces of Europe, and the Lady Pica was probably more cultured than the other ladies of Assisi, gentler and more fastidious and sensitive, and perhaps for this reason lonely in her fine house, in exile from her native land, and lonely too in her husbands long absences. Pietro Bernadone was a cloth merchant and much of his life was spent in commercial journeys. The richest of the merchants were those who dealt in textile stuffs. They were also the bankers of the time, and their wagons were often laden with the sums levied by the popes in England and France. They traveled to the great fairs in Europe in stately cavalcades that were strongly guarded. At these fairs they did business with merchants from every country in the known world, even from Africa, Egypt, and Greece, for the crusades had done much to break down the barriers between one country and another, and this was an age of travel. They talked to each other in the lingua franca, the international language of Europe. They were cosmopolitan men, and at this time they were fast becoming almost the equals of the nobles in importance, merchant princes whose arrival at a castle was a major event. In Provence they were considered nobles of a second order and when Pietro Bernadone came to the castle of the Count of Boulement, and wooed and won the Lady Pica, her marriage would not have been considered a msalliance for her. As our story goes on we shall think that Francis was more like his mother than his father. He was sensitive as she was, gentle and fastidious, and perhaps from her he inherited his capacity for fruitful loneliness, but it was probably from his father that he inherited his courage and determination, for success such as Pietro Bernadone enjoyed is not built up without these qualities, and certainly it was from his father that he inherited his early extravagance and love of ostentation.

The house where Pica waited for her child was built near the marketplace, in the center of the hum and stir of the citys life. Assisi in those days was not the quiet city that we know today but full of turmoil and excitement, rent at intervals by savage feuds with neighboring cities, and by the struggle against the German nobles that was convulsing nearly all Italian cities at this time. For seven hundred years Italy had endured one Teutonic invasion after another. This barbarous people passed over the country like a recurring pestilence, leaving each time not only devastation behind them but also new deposits of their hated selves. The German nobles built themselves strong castles on mountain crags, seized the lands about them, enslaved the peasants and assaulted the cities. But they never succeeded in subduing the cities in any social sense; they usually ended in being thrown out or absorbed. At the time of Franciss birth Assisi, after a hard struggle, had lost her independence to Conrad of Lutzen, now Duke of Spoleto and Count of Assisi. From his castle on the mountain above he looked down upon her and she lay at his feet in apparent subjection. But she was only biding her time. In the background of her life was the great continuing struggle between the pope and the emperor, between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, of which her own small struggle was an echo. On the whole the Ghibellines were the party of the nobles, who upheld the emperor and were opposed to the growing power of the papacy. The Guelfs represented the indigenous Italians and included the merchants and the middle classes, who looked to the pope for support in their fight for civic liberty. Later Francis was to fight his own hard battle for freedom, deliverance from the bondage of the world and of himself, but the love of freedom, that of all things seems to raise men and nations to the noblest endeavor of which they are capable, came to him in part from the spirit of the time.