St Francis | Page 6

point out that to begin the story of St.
Francis with the birth of St Francis would be to miss the whole point of
the story, or rather not to tell the story at all. And it is to suggest that
the modern tail-foremost type of journalistic history perpetually fails us.
We learn about reformers without knowing what they had to reform,
about rebels without knowing what they rebelled against, of memorials
that are not connected with any memory and restorations of things that
apparently never existed before. Even at the expense of this chapter
appearing disproportionate, it is necessary to say something about the
great movements that led up to the entrance of the founder of the
Franciscans. It may seem to mean describing a world, or even a
universe to describe a man. It will inevitably mean that the world or the
universe will be described with a few desperate generalisations in a few
abrupt sentences. But so far from its meaning that we shall see a very
small figure under so large a sky, it will mean that we must measure the
sky before we can begin to measure the towering stature of the man.
And this phrase alone brings me to the preliminary suggestions that
seem necessary before even a slight sketch of the life of St. Francis. It
is necessary to realise, in however rude and elementary a fashion, into
what sort of a world St. Francis entered and what had been the history
of that world, at least in so far as it affected him. It is necessary to have,
if only in a few sentences, a sort of preface in the form of an Outline of
History, if we may borrow the phrase of Mr. Wells. in the case of Mr.
Wells himself, it is evident that the distinguished novelist suffered the
same disadvantage as if he had been obliged to write a novel of which
he hated the hero. To write history and hate Rome, both pagan and
papal, is to hate everything that has happened. It comes very nearly to

hating humanity on purely humanitarian grounds. To dislike both the
priest and the soldier, both the laurels of the warrior and the lilies of the
saint, is to suffer a division from the mass of mankind for which not all
the dexterities of the finest and most flexible of modern intelligences
can compensate. A much wider sympathy is needed for the historical
setting of St. Francis, himself both a soldier and a saint. I will therefore
conclude this chapter with a few generalisations about the world St.
Francis found.
Men will believe because they will not broaden their minds. As a
matter of individual belief, I should of course express it by saying they
are not sufficiently catholic to the Catholic. But I am not going to
discuss here the doctrinal truths of Christianity, but simply the broad
historical fact of Christianity, as it might appear to a really enlightened
and imaginative person even if he were not a Christian. What I mean at
the moment is that the majority of doubts are made out of details. In the
course of random reading a man comes across a pagan custom that
strikes him as picturesque or a Christian action that strikes him as cruel;
but he does not enlarge his mind sufficiently to see the main truth about
pagan custom or the Christian reaction against it. Until we understand,
not necessarily in detail, but in their big bulk and proportion that pagan
progress and that Christian reaction, we cannot really understand the
point of history at which St. Francis appears or what his great popular
mission was all about.
Now everybody knows, I imagine, that the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries were an awakening of the world. They were a fresh flowering
of culture and the creative arts after a long spell of much sterner and
even more sterile experience which we call the Dark Ages. They may
be called an emancipation; they were certainly an end; an end of what
may at least seem a harsher and more inhuman time. But what was it
that was ended? From what was it that men were emancipated? That is
where there is a real collision and point at issue between the different
philosophies of history. On the merely external and secular side, it has
been truly said that men awoke from a sleep; but there had been dreams
in that sleep of a mystical and sometimes of a monstrous kind. In that
rationalistic routine into which most modern historians have fallen, it is

considered enough to say that they were emancipated from mere savage
superstition and advanced towards mere civilised enlightenment. Now
this is the big blunder that stands as a stumbling-block at the very