Life of St. Francis of Assisi | Page 6

the Saint of Assisi.
For him, as for St. Paul and St. Augustine, conversion was a radical and
complete change, the act of will by which man wrests himself from the
slavery of sin and places himself under the yoke of divine authority.
Thenceforth prayer, become a necessary act of life, ceases to be a
magic formula; it is an impulse of the heart, it is reflection and
meditation rising above the commonplaces of this mortal life, to enter
into the mystery of the divine will and conform itself to it; it is the act
of the atom which understands its littleness, but which desires, though
only by a single note, to be in harmony with the divine symphony.
Ecce adsum Domine, ut faciam voluntatem tuam.
When we reach these heights we belong not to a sect, but to humanity;
we are like those wonders of nature which the accident of
circumstances has placed upon the territory of this or that people, but
which belong to all the world, because in fact they belong to no one, or
rather they are the common and inalienable property of the entire
human race. Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Michael Angelo,
Rembrandt belong to us all as much as the ruins of Athens or Rome, or,
rather, they belong to those who love them most and understand them
best.
But that which is a truism, so far as men of genius in the domain of
imagination or thought are concerned, still appears like a paradox when
we speak of men of religious genius. The Church has laid such absolute
claim to them that she has created in her own favor a sort of right. It

cannot be that this arbitrary confiscation shall endure forever. To
prevent it we have not to perform an act of negation or demolition: let
us leave to the chapels their statues and their relics, and far from
belittling the saints, let us make their true grandeur shine forth.
* * * * *
It is time to say a few words concerning the difficulties of the work
here presented to the public. History always embraces but a very feeble
part of the reality: ignorant, she is like the stories children tell of the
events that have occurred before their eyes; learned, she reminds us of a
museum organized with all the modern improvements. Instead of
making you see nature with its external covering, its diffuse life, its
mysterious echoes in your own heart, they offer you a herbarium.
If it is difficult to narrate an ordinary event of our own time, it is far
more so to describe the great crises where restless humanity is seeking
its true path.
The first duty of the historian is to forget his own time and country and
become the sympathetic and interested contemporary of what he relates;
but if it is difficult to give oneself the heart of a Greek or a Roman, it is
infinitely more so to give oneself a heart of the thirteenth century. I
have said that at that period the Middle Age was twenty years old, and
the feelings of the twentieth year are, if not the most fugitive, at least
the most difficult to note down. Everyone knows that it is impossible to
recall the feelings of youth with the same clearness as those of
childhood or mature age. Doubtless we may have external facts in the
memory, but we cannot recall the sensations and the sentiments; the
confused forces which seek to move us are then all at work at once, and
to speak the language of beyond the Rhine, it is the essentially
phenomenal hour of the phenomena that we are; everything in us
crosses, intermingles, collides, in desperate conflict: it is a time of
diabolic or divine excitement. Let a few years pass, and nothing in the
world can make us live those hours over again. Where was once a
volcano, we perceive only a heap of blackened ashes, and scarcely, at
long intervals, will a chance meeting, a sound, a word, awaken memory
and unseal the fountain of recollection; and even then it is only a flash;

we have had but a glimpse and all has sunk back into shadow and
silence.
We find the same difficulty when we try to take note of the fiery
enthusiasms of the thirteenth century, its poetic inspirations, its
amorous and chaste visions--all this is thrown up against a background
of coarseness, wretchedness, corruption, and folly.
The men of that time had all the vices except triviality, all the virtues
except moderation; they were either ruffians or saints. Life was rude
enough to kill feeble organisms; and thus characters had an energy
unknown to-day. It was forever necessary to provide beforehand
against a thousand dangers, to take those