St Francis | Page 7

beginning of our story. Anybody who supposes that the Dark Ages
were plain darkness and nothing else, and that the dawn of the
thirteenth century was plain daylight and nothing else, will not be able
to make head or tail of the human story of St. Francis of Assisi. The
truth is that the joy of St. Francis and his Jongleurs de Dieu was not
merely an awakening. It was something which cannot be understood
without understanding their own mystical creed. The end of the Dark
Ages was not merely the end of a sleep. It was certainly not merely the
end of a superstitious enslavement. It was the end of something
belonging to a quite definite but quite different order of ideas.
It was the end of a penance; or, if it be preferred, a purgation. It marked
the moment when a certain spiritual expiation had been finally worked
out and certain spiritual diseases had been finally expelled from the
system. They had been expelled by an era of asceticism, which was the
only thing that could have expelled them. Christianity had entered the
world to cure the world; and she cured it in the only way in which it
could be cured. Viewed merely in an external and experimental fashion,
the whole of the high civilisation of antiquity had ended in the learning
of a certain lesson; that is, in its conversion to Christianity. But that
lesson was a psychological fact as well as a theological faith. That
pagan civilization had indeed been a very high civilisation. It would not
weaken our thesis, it might even strengthen it, to say that it was the
highest that humanity ever reached. It had discovered its still unrivalled
arts of poetry and plastic representation; it had discovered its own
permanent political ideals; it had discovered its own clear system of
logic and language. But above all, it had discovered its own mistake.
That mistake was too deep to be ideally defined; the short-hand of it is
to call it the mistake of nature-worship. It might almost as truly be
called the mistake of being natural; and it was a very natural mistake.
The Greeks, the great guides and pioneers of pagan antiquity, started
out with the idea of something splendidly obvious and direct; the idea
that if a man walked straight ahead on the high road of reason and
nature, he would come to no harm; especially if he was, as the Greek

was, eminently enlightened and intelligent. we might be so flippant as
to say that man was simply to follow his nose, so long as it was a Greek
nose. And the case of the Greeks themselves is alone enough to
illustrate the strange but certain fatality that attends upon this fallacy.
No sooner did the Greeks themselves begin to follow their own noses
and their own notion of being natural, than the queerest thing in history
seems to have happened to them. It was much too queer to be an easy
matter to discuss. It may be remarked that our more repulsive realists
never give us the benefit of their realism. Their studies of unsavoury
subjects never take note of the testimony they bear to the truths of
traditional morality. But if we had the taste for such things, we could
cite thousands of such things as part of the case for Christian morals.
And an instance of this is found in the fact that nobody has written, in
this sense, a real moral history of the Greeks. Nobody has seen the
scale or the strangeness of the story. The wisest men in the world set
out to be natural; and the most unnatural thing in the world was the
very first thing they did. The immediate effect of saluting the sun and
the sunny sanity of nature was a perversion spreading like a pestilence.
The greatest and even the purest philosophers could not apparently
avoid this low sort of lunacy. Why? It would seem simple enough for
the people whose poets had conceived Helen of Troy, whose sculptors
had carved the Venus of Milo, to remain healthy on the point. The truth
is people who worship health cannot remain healthy on the point. When
Man goes straight he goes crooked. When he follows his nose he
manages somehow to put his nose out of joint, or even to cut off his
nose to spite his face; and that in accordance with something much
deeper in human nature than nature-worshippers could ever understand.
It was the discovery of that deeper thing, humanly speaking, that
constituted the conversion to Christianity. There is a bias in a man like
the bias on a bowl; and Christianity was the discovery of how to correct
the bias and therefore hit the mark. There