Part 4

Blessed are you, my Sons, of the Lord who made Heaven and Earth, who have received me into your House with such Fulness of Charity that it seems to me as if, being with you, I had to-day been in Paradise. Wherefore I am full of Joy and abound in Consolation, and I ask pardon of you for having so long delayed my Coming. Verily the Lord is with you, {Gen. xxviii. 16.} and I knew it not. Behold, what I longed for I see, what {Antiphon at the Benedictus in the Feast of St Agnes.} I desired I hold, for I am joined to them that are a type upon Earth of Him to Whom I am espoused in Heaven. The Lord bless your Fortitude, {Deut. xxxiii. 11.} and receive the Work of your Hands. I pray and most earnestly beseech you, as most dear Sons, to persevere in those Things which you have begun by the Inspiration of the Holy Ghost, not abandoning your Perfection as is the Custom with some, but avoiding all the Snares of Darkness, strive ever after Things more Perfect. Most high is your Perfection, above Man and the Strength of Man, and it excels in its Brightness the Perfection of your Forefathers. Have no Doubt or Fear concerning the Kingdom of Heaven, for you already hold the Earnest of Future {Eph. i. 14.} Inheritance and a Pledge of {2 Cor. v. 5.} the Spirit, being sealed with the Seal of the Glory of Christ, and are like in all things, by His Grace, to that first Company of Disciples which He gathered about Him when He came into the World. For that which they did when He was with them, you have done not seeing Him, and you need not fear to say: Behold we {Matt. xix. 27.} have left all Things and have followed Thee.

Let not the Greatness of the Fight, nor the Magnitude of the Labour hinder you, for Great shall be your Reward. {Heb. x. 35.} Looking unto the Author and {Heb. xii. 2.} Finisher of All Good Things, Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who having Joy set before Him, endured the Cross, despising the Shame, hold fast to the {Heb. x. 23.} Confession of your Hope, without wavering. Run with Charity to the Fight that is before you; run, too, with Patience which is most necessary to you, that by so doing the Will of God you may receive the Promise. For God is able by His Holy Grace to bring to a happy Consummation, the Work which is above your Strength, because He is faithful to His Promises. Let nothing be found in you pleasing to the {Eph. ii. 2.} Spirit of the Children of Unbelief, let there be no Doubt or Hesitation, lest in working their Wickedness against you, they convict you of Consent. For it is a proud Spirit, but {Isa. xvi. 6.} its Pride and Arrogancy are greater than its Strength. This Spirit is exceeding wrath with you, and it will turn against you all the Arms of its Cunning. It will seek to pour out the Venom of its Malice upon you, like one who in fighting had thought all his Enemies vanquished, and now rages to see you looking down upon him. All the Inhabitants of Heaven, O dearest Brothers, rejoice exceedingly in your Conversion, and have sung a new Song before the Face of the Eternal King. The Angels rejoice because of you, for through you many shall continue Virgins, they shall be resplendent in Chastity, and shall fill the empty places in the City on High, where Virgins are established in especial Glory, for those that neither marry {Matt. xxii. 30.} nor are given in Marriage are like the Angels in Heaven. The Apostles exult at seeing their Life renewed, and their Doctrine preached, and because you show an Example of the Highest Sanctity. And the Martyrs exult, waiting to see their Constancy in the Shedding of Blood made manifest in you also. The Confessors dance before the Lord, knowing that their Victory in the Face of the Enemy is often to be repeated in you. The Virgins who follow the Lamb {Rev. xiv. 4.} whithersoever He goeth, likewise rejoice, knowing that by you many will be daily added to their Number. The Whole Court of Heaven is filled with Joy, for daily shall they keep the Festival of some new Inhabitant, and because they shall be continually incensed with the Odour of Holy Prayers ascending from this Valley of Tears.

{Rom. xii. 1.} Therefore, I beseech you, dear Brothers, by the Mercy of God, for which you have made yourselves thus Poor, carry out that which you have come to do, for which you left the Rivers of Babylon. Receive in all Humility the Grace which has been given you, use it worthily in All Things, and always for the Praise, Honour, and Glory of Him Who died for you, Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who with the Father and the Holy Ghost, liveth and reigneth, Victorious and Glorious, Eternal God, World without End,

AMEN

HERE ENDETH THE TREATISE CONCERNING THE LADY POVERTY AND OUR SERAPHIC FATHER, THE BLESSED FRANCIS.

This Work was done in the Month of July, after the Death of the Blessed Francis, in the Year One thousand two hundred and twenty-seven after the Incarnation of OUR LORD and SAVIOUR, JESUS CHRIST.

ON THE SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE OF EVANGELICAL POVERTY

BY

FATHER CUTHBERT, O.S.F.C.

THE SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE OF EVANGELICAL POVERTY

“This is the sublimity of most high Poverty which has made you, beloved brethren, heirs and kings of the Kingdom of Heaven.”[27] Thus wrote St Francis of Assisi when he gave his disciples the Rule which obliged them to “serve the Lord in poverty and humility.” It is easy to recognise in these words the note of exultation and achievement which made St Francis the most inspiring personality in Mediæval Christendom, and which gives to his name, even to-day, a singular power over the imagination of the Christian World. Clad in his peasant’s dress, and with no possessions of his own in the world save his soul and body,[28] he is nevertheless the man rich in all things that are of vital interest, the clear spiritual vision, the perfect joy, the encompassing sympathy, which gathers all palpitating life into its own. Francis _lived_, if ever a man lived. His was the liberty of soul which finds the joy of life in all Creation.

Artificial stimulus and transient excitement could add nought to the Joy that was his. To him the sky and the earth, the sun and the flowers, the fields and all living things, spoke with articulate speech of the life that is in them. As for his fellow-men, their life was his life. He had come to pass beyond the bounds of his own personality, and to enter into that spiritual communion with all living things, whereby man escapes from his own limitations, and the world lives in him as he in the world. And above all, and yet in all, he beheld the ever blessed God, the Author of all life that is. To Francis, God was ever present in the Creation, the Life behind all life. “The Heavens show forth the Glory of God, and the Firmament declareth the Work of His Hands.” The intimate relationship binding creation to its Creator was to him an abiding perception; he could not think of Earth apart from Heaven, nor of finite man apart from the Infinite God. Whatever was good and beautiful was to him an indication of the Divine Goodness and Beauty, a portal of the Eternal Kingdom; and with keen spiritual intuition he discovered the good and the beautiful, where men of lesser sensibility would only find the commonplace and the material. “To them that love God, all things work together unto Good;”[29] the truly spiritual man discovers the imprint of the Divine Life along all the highways and byways of Creation: just as the poet’s eye discovers beauty in the woodland through which the ordinary wayfarer passes unheeding.

Thus the whole creation poured into the Soul of Francis an unceasing stream of spiritual life, and with the inflowing life came joy--joy unutterable; and sorrow too. For life as it is, has no joy altogether separate from pain. There is tragedy in the purest romance, death even where there is life. And so the “joyous troubadour of God” sorrowed much because of the shadow that lay across the sunshine. To him personally life was joy, such was his liberty of spirit; but it was not so to all men. Many are they to whom life is sorrow; they walk as in a dark valley with but the twilight around them; nay, at times with no light at all, but only darkness, and their souls are starved for lack of light and warmth; even when in their ignorance or despair they seek pleasure in the immediate objects of sense around them. For these he sorrowed with the sorrow of Christ weeping over Jerusalem. It was a sorrow which kept him at long vigils when the world lay asleep, praying for mercy for the souls of men. Yet this sorrow could not destroy the essential joy of life which was his in a super-eminent degree. He sorrowed as many a man and woman sorrows over a friend who is deprived of the happiness which is their own.

Truly was Francis a “King and heir of the Kingdom,” if Kingship means sovereign possession; for he found what is best in life and had it as his own, nought else than the very joy of life. Francis himself has told us how this joy of life came to him with the absolute renunciation of what the world at large holds most dear--wealth, place, and power. In renunciation he found spiritual freedom, and with it joy. No man is truly joyous whose joy does not spring from his own soul, or from that inalienable possession of the world which comes of spiritual communion with what is good and true in it, and therefore Eternal.

The joy which is dependent upon the possession of the merely visible and material can never reach the inmost spirit of man, even were such possession not, at best, uncertain and of its nature transitory. Nay, the joy of life, which springs from man’s own spirit, is impossible to him whose heart is set upon the merely external world. For the spiritual and the material are in the immediate aspect a simple antithesis; so that where the one is, the other cannot be. “You cannot serve God and mammon.” You cannot satisfy your nature with the transitory, and yet retain an appetite for the Eternal. Consequently, he who would be free and retain a relish for the life of the Spirit, must beware of the lust of the earth, and keep a detached heart towards what is of its nature unspiritual.

To St Francis, a man amongst men, the lust of the earth was radically allied with pride of class, an inordinate ambitiousness of glory, and a love of luxury. Poverty, as Francis understood it, meant the antithesis of all this. The Lady Poverty (to borrow the Saint’s own imagery) was an outcast; she was the despised of men; and she walked amid the rough ways of the earth with threadbare garments and bruised feet.

The story how Francis found his ideal bride and came to love her with chivalric devotion, is too well known to need repetition. The final act in the drama came when one day, riding in the plain before Assisi, he was met by a leper who besought an alms, and, filled with disgust, he at first thought to pass on, but, moved by a nobler impulse, cast himself from his horse, and not only gave the alms, but folded the leper to his breast and embraced him. From that moment he himself has told us that “what had seemed bitter was changed into sweetness of soul and body, and not long afterwards I left the world.”[30]

The embrace of the leper marked the final abandonment in Francis’ soul of the sense of separation between himself, the son of the wealthy Bernardone, and the outcasts of society. Henceforth to Francis, the poor and the outcast were human brethren, worthy of a brother’s intimate love and care. In the same moment he cast aside, once for all, his youthful dream of entering the ranks of chivalry, and seeking renown in battle and tournament. Henceforth he would be the servant of his brothers the poor, and “serve the Lord in Poverty and Humility.”

The path of renunciation was further determined for him when his new ideal of life clashed with the commercial interests of his family. In the newly-awakened consciousness of his kinship with the poor, he considered his share in the family business as their share, and freely parted with what he had a right to consider his own. Pietro Bernardone, his father, foresaw commercial ruin from such a course, and when he found that Francis was indissolubly wedded to his ideal, promptly disinherited him. Henceforth Francis was without house or property of his own. With the keenness of a soul set free, he at once recognised in his father’s act of disinheritance the charter of his spiritual freedom. “Now in truth can I say: Our Father Who art in Heaven!” Heaven and earth became his when in the moment of abandonment he called God his Father. Thus he cast from himself forever the three dominant tyrannies which in his own age and since, have oppressed the souls of men--wealth, place, and power. He had become in very truth the Poor Man of Assisi, and yet who was richer than he?

Never did Francis regret his renunciation, but ever did the thought of it fill him with gratitude and joy. One day, some years after his disinheritance, the Saint and one of his disciples, Brother Masseo, were eating a scanty meal of broken bread, begged by the way; they ate near a fountain, and a large stone was their table. “O Brother Masseo,” said Francis, his soul bubbling with joy, “we are not worthy of so great a treasure;” and he repeated these words several times. Brother Masseo answered: “Father, how canst thou talk of a treasure where there is so much poverty and indeed a lack of all things? for we have neither cloth, nor knife nor dish, nor table, nor house; neither have we servant nor maid to wait upon us.” Then said the Saint: “And this is the very reason why I look upon it as a great treasure, because man has no hand in it, but all has been given us by Divine Providence, as we clearly see in this bread of charity, in this beautiful table of stone, and in this clear fountain.”[31] Surely here we find the very apotheosis of poverty; of the poverty which, discarding the artificial, is happy in the simple realities and in the bounties of nature, and feels no barrier between itself and the spiritual possession of the very earth itself.

Here it may be as well to take note how alien is the poverty of Francis from the vulgarity and squalor, the idleness and discontent, which mark too frequently the life of the poor. No greater misconception of Franciscan poverty could there be than to conceive it as sanctioning or condoning any condition that detracts from the proper native dignity of man. The “Lady Poverty” of Francis went with bare and bruised feet, her garment was coarse, and she ate but the bread of the peasant; but she retained her native dignity of soul, and bore herself as a Queen wherever she went. She delighted in the pure air, and the flowers, and the running stream, was honest and self-revering, simple and joyous.

The poverty of our city slums where hearts break in discontent, and souls are starved for lack of spiritual intelligence--such was not the poverty of Francis’ dream. To use again his own manner of speech, this is poverty in slavery, degraded and dishonoured by the vice and selfishness of man. With a full heart would he have set himself to rescue his Ideal from her modern degradation and restore her to her place of honour upon the earth. Knight-errant as he was, he would not have rested until poverty was made honourable amongst men. To rescue the poor from the conditions which have so effectually demoralised them during the past two or three centuries of unheeding individualism, would undoubtedly have been to Francis a first and urgent duty were he with us to-day. Even in his own time he regarded with anxiety the conditions which debased the poor; even then he considered himself the knight-errant sent to rescue the comely maiden Poverty from the neglect and heartless scorn of the world.[32] But was ever Italian peasant so utterly degraded as are many of the victims of modern industrialism? Poverty with Francis was the mother of spiritual freedom; poverty in the London slum is synonymous with hard materialism and irreligion. Was ever contrast greater? And yet Francis has made evident to us that beneath the squalor and degradation of the modern city, there is a spiritual possibility, if only it can be recovered. But will it ever be that poverty shall again regain amongst the hungry multitude the honourable estate with which the Saint of Assisi had endowed it? Will it ever be rescued from its present inhuman conditions? The future only can tell; and they who strive that it shall be so can only work in the strength of their faith; but faith verily can accomplish the apparently impossible, if faith itself be strong. Meanwhile the ideal of Francis has assuredly a prophetic message for the multitude which is not hungry.

Poverty, as Francis preached it, is an integral element in the Christian life. Christianity imperatively demands of all its followers an acceptance of the truth which Francis embodied so wonderfully in himself. No one can enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless he be as Francis was, a lover of Poverty. Such is the Gospel. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”[33] There are those who so interpret this beatitude as to empty it of all significance concerning material possessions. The meaning of Christ, however, is made clear, by His own earthly life and by the lives of His early disciples. “Poverty of Spirit” means nothing less than detachment of heart from the possession or achievement of material gain, and from its attendant pleasures. No man can be a disciple of Christ who is not free from the moral slavery which wealth and temporal possessions so easily set upon the soul. To no man is given the spiritual insight and vision which alone can bring rest eternal to man’s spirit, unless he have first put from him the lust of the earth. And according to the measure of his detachment is spiritual achievement possible.

Is then every man to imitate St Francis of Assisi, and cast off all wealth and become dependent upon the labour of his hands or the charity of his neighbour? No such claim is made by Francis, for it was not made by Christ. If Christ demanded of the young man that he should “go and sell what he had and give it to the poor” in order to follow Him, He also acquiesced in the rich Zacchæus keeping his wealth so long as he did not neglect his duty to those in need. Francis, too, following the Divine Model, gave no injunction to the Lord of Chiusi or to the Lady Giacoma to renounce their property, and he expressly forbade his friars, who like himself gave up all right of possession, to judge those who have possessions. No, it is not the holding of property, but the selfish misuse of it and the inordinate desire of material gain and its pleasures, which is opposed to the virtue of evangelical poverty. In few words may the Christian precept of poverty be set forth: Let no man set his heart on any material possession for its own sake, or for the mere holding of it; if a man is lacking in this world’s goods, let him not fret nor complain, but seek rather the life of the spirit. If, on the other hand, he is endowed with this world’s goods, either by inheritance or as the result of honest labour, let him bear in mind that such goods are not absolutely his own; they belong, in the first instance, to God, the Master of all, and may rightfully be used and distributed only subject to the Divine laws of justice and charity. No man has an absolute ownership before God, so that he may satisfy his own whim or pleasure without consideration for what is due by Divine Law to his fellow-men. Possession in the sphere of conscience is stewardship. The rich are God’s stewards, appointed to “give to every man his just measure in due season.” Such briefly is the precept of Evangelical Poverty--a precept which has no direct connection with any theory of social economics, but is based upon the fundamental law of religion, that only the poor in spirit are spiritually free and capable of citizenship in the realm of eternal life.

Assuredly to us who live our lives upon the pulse of a great industrial empire, this message of the Poverello comes with a distinctness not to be passed unheeded. As a race we are a prosperous people, and money-making is our first preoccupation. Luxuries are easily within our grasp; cheap luxuries, perhaps, which is all the worse, for that very cheapness is a snare blinding us to the fact that what we indulge in is a luxury. In money-making and luxury lie the elemental dangers to our spiritual life. “Money,” says Cardinal Newman, “is a sort of creation, and gives the acquirer, even more than the possessor, an imagination of his own power, and tends to make him idolise himself. Again, what we have hardly won we are unwilling to part with; so that a man who has himself made his wealth will commonly be penurious, or, at least, will not part with it except in exchange for what will reflect credit on himself or increase his importance. Even when his conduct is most disinterested and amiable (as in spending for the comfort of those who depend on him), still this indulgence of self, of pride, and worldliness insinuates itself.” And he adds: “If such be the effect of the pursuit of gain on an individual, doubtless it will be the same on a nation; and if the peril be so great in the one case, why should it be less in the other?”[34] The enduring strength of a nation, as of an individual, depends upon moral fibre and spiritual vision. If these be destroyed no nation can long remain save as a warning to the nations that shall come. Undoubtedly there are strong tendencies amongst us towards the worship of wealth and its attendant luxuries and towards a selfish accumulation of wealth beyond all possible needs, tendencies which acquire strength with the growth of empire and trade. Well for us is it that at this time Francis of Assisi is becoming widely known. To all who revolt against the vulgar materialism which dominates so much of our present life, Francis of Assisi is as a prophet sent by God. Standing against the dark background of Avarice and Luxury which had already infested the growing commercial centres of the mediæval world, he throws the light of his own clear personality into the dark corners of our own life.

We yearn, many of us, for a deeper spiritual life; we sorrow because the joy of life seems flitting ever further and further away from this complex social organism of ours. We seek direction, and the Poverello is here to lead us; and the way he leads is that of detachment and renunciation. But his own personality and life are an assurance to us that the renunciation he preaches, leads to richer gain; he leads us through death, only that we may find life even here, in some measure, upon the earth, and in the fulness of the spirit hereafter. Thus and not otherwise does he interpret to us the Poverty of Christ.

FATHER CUTHBERT, O.S.F.C.

Crawley, Feast of St Anthony of Padua, 1901.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX I

A PRAYER OF THE BLESSED FRANCIS TO OBTAIN HOLY POVERTY.

O Lord Jesus! Show me the ways of Thy dearly-loved Poverty. I know that the Old Testament was but a Figure of the New. In the Old, Thou hast promised that “every place that your foot shall tread upon, shall be {Deut. xi. 24.} yours.” To tread under foot is to despise; Poverty treads all Things under foot, therefore she is the Queen of all Things. But, O my dear Lord Jesus, have pity upon me and upon my Lady Poverty, for I am consumed with Love for her, and can know no rest without her. Thou knowest all this, my Lord, Thou who didst fill me with the Love of her. But she sitteth in sadness, rejected of all; she, the Mistress of Nations, is become as a Widow; the Queen of all Virtues is become contemptible; {Lament. i. 1.} and sitting upon a dunghill she lamenteth that all her friends have despised her and have become her enemies; for long now she knows them to be wantons and no Spouses of hers.