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The problem of the penitential brotherhoods of laymen, and of the
anti-clerical, even anti-sacerdotal tendency of this movement, occupied
Innocent III from the first months of his reign. For the Lombard groups
of the Humiliati, no less than for the followers of Peter Waldo, the
decision of Lucius III in 1184 had been the occasion of division. Many,
the majority perhaps, left the Church rather than obey the prohibitions
as to preaching. Others remained, and fifteen years later they were
still following their special mode of life within the Church. These in
1199, for their better security, both against Catholic critics and
against their own changeableness, Innocent organised in a new religious
order. It comprised three classes. Those already married continued to
live with their families, though practising the poverty of the Gospel.
Others, without changing their lay state, lived a life in common under
a rule. A third class were monks or nuns solemnly consecrating their
new life by vows under a rule in which elements of the Benedictine and
Augustinian rule were combined.
The new order, once approved, began to spread rapidly, as, in fact, all
medieval orders spread. But long before the century in which it arose
was finished, it had ceased to be a factor of real importance in the
life of the Church, even in Italy. The first class -- its married
members and those living in their own homes -- had disappeared; the
other two had fused to become yet another monastic order. The
poverty-loving laity who once had filled the ranks of the Humiliati
were now being absorbed by a very much greater force, that had appeared
within a few years of Pope Innocent's approbation of that order. This
was the movement deriving from the life of St. Francis of Assisi.
Francis of Assisi -- Giovanni Bernadone by birth and baptism -- was one
of several children of a wealthy cloth merchant of that town, and his
Provencal wife. Francis was born about 1182. He was never a student,
and his literary education was apparently never completed. But his
wealth, his generosity, his wit, his musical gifts and gay disposition,
made him, as he grew to manhood, one of the leaders of the fashionable
youth of the city. With the rest of them he took his share in the wars
between Assisi and Perugia, spent some time in prison there, and fell
ill in consequence. The slow convalescence led to much self-analysis,
and to a determination, imperfect as yet, to do something better with
his life.
The next year he was once more in the train of a knight, in pursuit of
glory, but illness drove him back to Assisi. Much uncertainty of soul,
prayer, and solitude filled the next few months. Then an heroic act of
self-conquest sent him to embrace a leper whom, a moment before, he had
passed by with shuddering horror. He made the pilgrimage to Rome and,
another heroic victory over his tastes, he persuaded a beggar outside
St. Peter's to exchange clothes and surrender his pitch for the day.
Then he returned to Assisi, the same light-hearted Francis but a
changed man. He was twenty-four or five years old.
What was he to do with his life? As he prayed in the half-ruined church
of St. Damiano a voice bade him repair it. He loaded a horse with cloth
from his father's warehouse, sold it at Foligno, and offered the price
to the priest -- who refused it when he heard how the donor had come by
it. More important still, the incident ended his home life. For his
father renounced him, and Francis delightedly accepted the chance.
Solemnly, before the bishop, he took God for his only Father, stripping
himself even of the clothes he had so far worn. The bishop took him
under his protection, and gave him the minor orders. For the next year
he begged, and with what he gained he rebuilt St. Damiano and St.
Pietro and St. Maria degli Angeli, the Church of the Portiuncula. Even
yet, however, God had not shown him where lay his ultimate way.
One day, in 1208, as he assisted at Mass and heard the words of the
Gospel, they seemed a command to him personally: "Go rather to the lost
sheep of the house of Israel. . . . Do not possess gold nor silver nor
money in your purses: nor scrip for your journey, nor two coats, nor
shoes, nor a staff." [ ]
He knew now what God would have him do. He must live in absolute
poverty and preach repentance for sin, brotherly love and peace. then
followed the most literal following of the gospel that has ever been
seen. Companions came to join him, one a local magnate, another a canon
of the cathedral, and with them the famous Brother Giles. They lived in
huts built of branches and covered with mud; they ate what they managed
to beg; they watched; they prayed; and they preached -- simple
exhortations lit by that joy, that gaiety even, which was inseparable
from Francis' character.
Seven more companions came in. The band called themselves the Penitents
of Assisi. Francis compiled a rule for them, and in 1209 he set out for
Rome, to win for his enterprise the blessing of the pope.
Innocent had reorganised the Humiliati, and he had allowed more than
one band of converted Waldenses to continue their life in common, but
the common poverty that now asked his sanction was something so much
sterner still that, for the moment, he hesitated. A vision or a dream,
it is said, showed him the Lateran shaken and falling, and only held by
the efforts of Francis. Finally he consented, gave a verbal approbation
to what had been done, sanctioned the rule and allowed the Penitents to
preach penance wherever they might go. But all were to be clerics at
least. They now received minor orders and Francis the diaconate.
The next ten years saw the incredible expansion. Francis and his
friends wandered through Italy, living as the day found them, sleeping
in barns or, when barns were closed to them, under hedges, working with
the labourers, utterly careless of hardships. and everywhere preaching
peace, reconciliation, penance and the love of God for man His
creature. Not every one of Francis' disciples had the gay disposition
natural to his master, but something of that innocent joy, mirth even,
lit the whole movement. To the perplexed Church there had been given a
new leader, in whose life Waldensian austerity and the poetry of the
Troubadours were combined, and all at the service of a faith wholly
orthodox.
These new "poor men" had, in fact, a theologian's appreciation of
religion as an objective thing; they were submissive to authority;
recognising authority as the way of spirituality; and they reverenced,
too, the visible means of spirituality, the sacraments, the Mass
especially and the priesthood by which alone the Mass is possible. What
St. Bernard had done for religious life, St. Francis now developed but
with an even vaster effect. The Cistercian had himself chiefly preached
in Latin, and the best of his work was directly addressed to the
sanctification of the monk. The new preaching was in the vernacular
tongues, and addressed to whoever would stand in the town square to
listen. The new mission had a greater range than the old, and it
developed the same powerfully effective treatment, the lesson of God's
love through the human aspect of the mysteries of His incarnate life.
When, for the Christmas of 1223, Francis at Greccio constructed the
first crib, the development of religion's appeal to the ordinary man
was set in a way where it was bound to advance with an altogether new
rapidity. The Franciscans were the first order of revivalists within
the Church, their whole aim and endeavour to rekindle love in hearts
long since cold for all that the mind remained true.
Their immediate success outdistanced anything seen, before or since.
Within ten years the number of those who had enrolled themselves as
followers of Francis had reached five thousand. At the general assembly
of the order in 1221 more than five hundred newcomers came to beg
admission. It was inevitable, if the movement was not to suffer from
its own success, that something of the happy informality of its cradle
days must be sacrificed to a rule of more definite character. The rule
as verbally approved by Innocent III, in 1209, the rule written down in
1221, which we still possess, left too much undecided and at the mercy
of contrary interpretation. Hence, in 1223, a careful revision of the
rule before it was solemnly approved by Honorius III.
About the share of others than St. Francis in this revision, about his
own willingness or reluctance to accept their suggestions, the
controversies still continue. Substantially it is the same rule as the
rule of 1221 and this, it would seem from the language of the bull
Solet of 1223, cannot really differ from that confirmed by Innocent III
in 1209. As Honorius III confirmed it in 1223 it has been, ever since,
the foundation of all Franciscan life; and for the century or more
which followed the confirmation, it was the subject of fairly
continuous controversy within the body of the order itself.
The rule of 1223, for all the legalist spirit which some would see in
it, is by no means the carefully thought out code of St. Dominic's
ordering, where a mass of detailed prescriptions logically derives from
two or three enunciated fundamental principles. It is a statement of an
ideal of life, and the bare precepts necessary to maintain the ideal.
Nor is the new family's organisation worked out in great detail. The
aim of these lesser brothers -- Friars Minor -- is stated to be the
Gospel life in obedience, without property, and in chastity. This
obedience Francis has promised to the pope -- the other brothers owe it
to Francis. There are clerics in the order and there are lay brothers.
There is a fast from All Saints to Christmas, on every Friday, during
Lent, and, if the friar so wishes, for the forty days from January 6.
The friar is never to touch money or coins, not even through an
intermediary. Those who can work may do so, but not so as to hinder
prayer or devotion. No one is to preach unless approved for the purpose
by the head of the order, and always with the consent of the local
bishop. The end of their preaching is declared to be "the utility and
edification of the people, announcing to them vices and virtues,
punishment and glory. . . ." The soul of the movement is in Chapter VI.
"The brethren shall appropriate nothing to themselves, neither a house
nor a place nor anything. And as pilgrims and strangers in this world
let them go confidently in quest of alms." Finally, they are to ask of
the pope a cardinal protector "so that being always subject and
submissive at the feet of the same holy Church, grounded in the
Catholic faith, we may observe poverty and humility and the holy
gospels of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which we have firmly promised."
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