Mimesis (31 page)

(If you feel the prickings of temptation, consider the brazen serpent raised on the wood; and suck not the wounds but rather the breasts of the Crucified. He shall be as a mother to you, and
you as a son to Him; nor could the nails hurt the Crucified save as they passed through his hands and feet to yours. But a man’s enemies are the men of his own house. They it is who love not you but their own joy that comes from you. Otherwise they would hear the words of our youth: If ye loved me ye would rejoice because I go unto the Father. “Did thy father,” says St. Jerome, “lie prostrate on the threshold, did thy mother, her bosom bared, show thee the breasts at which she gave thee suck, did thy little nephew hang on thy neck, walk roughshod over thy father, walk roughshod over thy mother, and hasten dry-eyed to the banner of the cross. In such case the highest mercy is to be cruel for Christ.” Be not moved by the tears of the fools who mourn because, from a son of Gehenna, you are become a son of God. Alas! What a mad desire these wretches have! What a cruel love! What an iniquitous delight! Evil communications corrupt good manners. Wherefore, as much as you are able, my son, avoid the conversation of your hosts, who, while they fill your ears, empty your mind. Learn to pray to God, learn to lift up your heart when you lift up your hands; learn to raise eyes of supplication to heaven, and in every need that befalls you, to show your pitiful face to the Father of pity. It is impious to think that God could close his heart to you and turn his ear from your sobs and cries. For the rest, remember in all things to follow the counsel of your spiritual father no less closely than the commandment of the Divine Majesty. Do this, and you shall live; do this, and blessing shall come upon you, so that for one thing you have given up you shall receive a hundred, even in this present life. Nor believe the counsel of him who would persuade you that this is overhasty and can be deferred until you have reached riper years. Rather believe him who said: It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. He sitteth alone, because he hath borne it upon him. Fare well, strive after perseverance, which alone gains the crown.)

This is certainly a living and inspiring text, and some of its thoughts and formulations—for instance, that of the relatives who do not love
you
but
gaudium suum ex te
, or the assurance that the hundredfold reward will come even in this life—are, if I am not mistaken, typically Bernardian. But how conscious the composition of the whole is; how many the prerequisites for understanding it, how many rhetorical devices it contains! To be sure, we must take into consideration that
in Cistercian circles anyone would immediately catch the figural import of the allusions to Scripture (the brazen serpent as a figure of Christ; the blood from Christ’s wounds as nourishing milk; participation in the torture of the cross, in the nails which pierce Christ’s hands and feet, as the ecstatic consolation of love in the
unio passionalis
). This type of interpretation and of thinking must have struck root even among the common people, for all the sermons are full of it. But the abundance of Bible texts, the way they are pieced together, the quotation from Jerome and that from Virgil, give this personal letter a highly literary appearance; and in the use of rhetorical questions, of antitheses and anaphoras, Bernard is quite on a par with Jerome, from whom he quotes a highly characteristic passage (possibly even increasing its rhetorical polish). Let me enumerate the most striking antitheses and anaphoras. As for antitheses, we have:
non tam vulnera quam ubera; ipse tibi in matrem, tu ei in filium
; his and your hands and feet;
non te, sed gaudium suum ex te
; in the Jerome passage,
pietas—crudelis
; then,
filius gehennae, filius Dei; crudelis amor, iniqua dilectio; dum aures implent, evacuant mentem
. As for anaphoras, they begin in the Jerome passage, which in its way is magnificent:
si prostratus, si nudato, si parvulus—per calcatum, per calcatam, et siccis oculis
…; then comes Bernard himself:
quis tam crudelis amor, quae …; disce orare, disce levare, disce erigere; hoc fac et vives, hoc fac et veniet
. And in addition there are plays on words, like
patri misericordiarum miserabilem faciem repraesentare
.

And now let us hear Francis of Assisi. There are only two personal letters which can be ascribed to him with any certainty: one
ad quendam ministrum
of the year 1223, the other to the favorite disciple of his last years, Brother Leo (Pecorella) of Assisi. Thus both belong to the end of his life, for Francis died in 1225. I choose the first, which is concerned with a difference of opinion within the order in regard to the treatment of brothers who had committed a mortal sin, and I quote only the first, and more general, part of the letter (after the
Analekten zur Geschichte des Franciscus von Assisi
, edited by H. Boehmer, Tübingen and Leipzig, 1904, p. 28):

Fratri N. ministro. Dominus te benedicat. Dico tibi sicut possum de facto anime tue, quod ea, que te impediunt amare Dominum Deum, et quicumque tibi impedimentum fecerint sive fratres sive alii, etiamsi te verberarent, omnia debes habere pro gratia. Et ita velis et non aliud. Et hoc sit tibi per veram obedientiam
Domini Dei et meam, quia firmiter scio, quod illa est vera obedientia. Et dilige eos, qui ista faciunt tibi, et non velis aliud de eis, nisi quantum Dominus dederit tibi. Et in hoc dilige eos et non velis quod [pro te? only in one of the six extant Mss.] sint meliores christiani. Et istud sit tibi plus quam heremitorium. Et in hoc volo cognoscere, si diligis Deum et me servum suum et tuum, si feceris istud, scilicet quod non sit aliquis frater in mundo, qui peccaverit, quantumcumque potuerit peccare, quod, postquam viderit occulos tuos, unquam recedat sine misericordia tua, si querit misericordiam, et si non quereret misericordiam, tu queras ab eo, si vult misericordiam. Et, si millies postea appareret coram occulis tuis, dilige eum plus quam me ad hoc, ut trahas eum ad Dominum, et semper miserearis talibus. …

(To Brother N., Minister [of the Order]. God bless you. I speak to you as best I can concerning your soul. All the things that would hinder you in your love of the Lord God, and all persons who obstruct your path—be they brethren or others—even if they beat you, you must consider it all a grace. And will it thus and not otherwise. And that you must consider your true obedience toward the Lord God and me, for I know for certain that it is the true obedience. And love those who do these things to you, and do not desire anything else from them but what God may give to you. And love them for this and do not desire that they be better Christians. And let this be more for you than the hermitage. And herein will I know whether you love God and me, his and your servant, in whether you do this, that is, if there be no brother in the world who, having sinned as much as he can sin, when he has come to see your countenance, shall ever go away from you without your charity if he seeks charity, and if he does not seek charity, that you try with him whether he wishes charity. And if afterwards he appears a thousand times before your countenance, love him more than you now love me, that you draw him toward the Lord, and always have charity for such. …)

In this passage we have no exegesis of Scripture and no figures of speech. The sentence structure is hurried, awkward, and uncalculated. All the sentences begin with
et
. But the person who writes these hurried lines is obviously so inspired by his theme, it fills him so completely, and the desire to communicate himself and to be understood is so overwhelming, that parataxis becomes a weapon of eloquence.
Like the ever-gathering waves of a strong surf, these
et
-constructions strike from the heart of the saint to that of the recipient, as is expressed at the very beginning in
sicut possum
and
de facto anime tue
. For the
sicut possum
expresses, together with humility (as best I can), the most complete dedication of powers, and
de facto anime tue
implies that the factual question under discussion carries with it the spiritual salvation of him who has to decide it. And that it is a matter “between me and you” is a point Francis does not lose sight of throughout the entire letter. He knows that the other loves and admires him, and he makes use of this love at every moment to draw him toward the right path (
ut trahat eum ad Dominum
):
et in hoc volo cognoscere si diligis Deum et me servum suum et tuum
, so he implores him. He commands him to love the backsliding sinner, even if he comes to see him a thousand times, more than “you love me at this moment.” The contents of the letter is the doctrine, carried to its utmost limit, that evil must be neither avoided nor opposed. It is an exhortation—not to leave the world behind—but to mingle with its torment and to endure evil with passionate devotion. Indeed, he is to wish for nothing else:
et ita velis et non aliud
. And Francis reaches an extreme which begins to look almost suspicious from the viewpoint of moral theology when he writes:
et in hoc dilige eos et non velis quod sint meliores Christiani
—for is it permissible, for the sake of one’s own trial through suffering, to repress the wish that one’s fellow be a better Christian? Only through submission to evil is it possible, according to Francis’ conviction, for the power of love and obedience to prove themselves:
quia firmiter scio quod illa est vera obedienta
. This is more than solitary meditation far from the world:
et istud sit tibi plus quam heremitorium
. The extreme character of this view is reflected in the language: in the numerous demonstratives which signify “precisely this and nothing else”; or in the clauses introduced by
quicumque, etiamsi, quantumcumque, et si millies
, all of which mean, “and even if …”

The wholly unliterary directness of expression, then, so closely related to the spoken language, supports a very radical content. To be sure, it is nothing new, for from the beginning suffering within the world and submission to evil are among the major Christian motifs; but the stresses are placed differently. Suffering and submission are no longer a passive form of martyrdom but an unremitting self-humiliation in the everyday course of things. While Bernard dealt with secular affairs as a great politician of the Church and withdrew from them into the solitude of contemplation to attain the experience
of
imitatio Christi
, Francis considers secular affairs the proper setting for
imitatio
, although, to be sure, in his case secular affairs are not the great political events in which Bernard played a leading part, but the everyday doings of random persons, whether within the Order or out among the people. The entire structure of the mendicant orders, and especially that of the Franciscan organization, drove the friars into everyday public life, among the people, and even though it is certainly true that solitary meditation lost its great religious importance neither for Francis of Assisi nor for his successors, it yet could not rob the order of its pronouncedly popular character.

Now, the saint’s public appearances, as we said above, are always impressive, graphic, and indeed scenic. The anecdotes which relate them are very numerous, and among them there are some which strike later taste as almost grotesque or even farcical; as when we are told that, celebrating Christmas in the stable at Greccio, with ox and ass and praesepium, both in singing and preaching he pronounced the word Bethlehem in imitation of a bleating lamb; or that after an illness in the course of which he had taken some choicer food, upon his return to Assisi he ordered one of the brothers to lead him through the town on a rope, as though he were a criminal, shouting: Behold the glutton who crammed his belly full of chicken behind your backs! But in their time and place such scenes did not produce a farcical effect. Their arrestingness, exaggeration, vividness did not appear shocking, but as a graphic, exemplary revelation of a saintly life, directly illuminating, comprehensible to all, and inspiring all to examine themselves in comparison and to share in the experience. Together with such arresting and persuasively effective scenes, there are other anecdotes which bear witness to great delicacy and gentleness and reveal a considerable, purely instinctive psychological gift. At crucial moments Francis always knows what is going on in others’ hearts, and hence his intervention usually strikes the crucial spot; it arouses emotion, it staggers. Everywhere it is the startling and graphic directness of his character which produces such strong, such exemplary, and such unforgettable effects. Here I should like to quote one more anecdote which (although the occasion is comparatively insignificant and ordinary) gives an excellent description of one of his characteristic appearances. It is taken from the
Legenda secunda
by Thomas of Celano (
S. Francisci Assisiensis vita et miracula … auctore Fr. Thoma de Celano
…
recensuit P. Eduardus Alenconiensis
. Romae, 1906, pp. 217-218).

Factum est quodam die Paschae, ut fratres in eremo Graecii mensam accuratius solito albis et vitreis praepararent. Descendens autem pater de cella venit ad mensam, conspicit alto sitam vaneque ornatam; sed ridenti mensae nequaquam arridet. Furtim et pedetentim retrahit gressum, capellum cuiusdam pauperis qui tunc aderat capiti suo imponit, et baculum gestans egreditur foras. Exspectat foris ad ostium donec incipiant fratres; siquidem soliti erant non exspectare ipsum, quando non veniret ad signum. Illis incipientibus manducare, clamat verus pauper ad ostium: Amore domini Dei, facite, inquit, eleemosynam isti peregrino pauperi et infirmo. Respondent fratres: Intra huc, homo, illius amore quem invocasti. Repente igitur ingreditur, et sese comedentibus offert. Sed quantum stuporem credis peregrinum civibus intulisse? Datur petenti scutella, et solo solus recumbens discum ponit in cinere. Modo sedeo, ait, ut frater Minor. …

(It happened one Easter Day that the brothers at the hermitage of Greccio set the table more lavishly than usual with linen and glassware. When the father comes down from his cell to go to the table, he sees it with its vain decoration. But the pleasing table no way pleases him. Furtively and quietly he retraces his steps, puts on his head the hat of a pauper who happened to be there, takes his staff in his hand, and leaves the house. Outside he waits until the brothers begin, for they were accustomed not to wait for him when he did not come at the signal. When they begin their meal, this true pauper calls out at the door: For the love of God, give this poor sick pilgrim an alms. The brothers answer: Come in, man, for the love of Him whom you have invoked. So he quickly enters and appears before the diners. But what surprise do you think seized the household at sight of this stranger! At his request he is given a bowl, and alone he sits down on the floor and sets his plate in the ashes. “Now,” he says, “I am seated like a Minorite. …”)