SOURCES.

Go and preach two by two. Preach peace and patience; tend the wounded and relieve the distressed; reclaim the erring; bless them which persecute you and pray for them that despitefully use you. Fear not because you are small and seem foolish. Have confidence in the Lord who has vanquished the world. Some will receive you and many proud will resist you. Bear all with sweetness and patience. Soon the wise and noble will be with us. The Lord hath given me to see this—I have in my ears the sounds of the languages of all peoples who will come to us—French, Spanish, German and English. The Lord will make us a great people even to the end of the earth.

Upon their reuniting, four more were added to their number and Francis gave them a rule of which poverty was the basic principle and chastity and obedience were necessary requirements.

Papal confirmation was the next step. This Francis sought in 1210 from Innocent III. in a friendly interview at Rome.[529:1]The Pope in doubt submitted the question to the cardinals and it was carried in favour of Francis. His rule was approved orally and the members thus came under the spiritual authority of Rome and were authorised to receive the tonsure and to preach the word of God. A second rule less severe than the first was drawn up and approved by Honorius III. in 1223, and it remained the unaltered constitution of the Franciscan order.[529:2]The organisation according to this rule provided for a General Minister at the head, provincial ministers, and brethren, or minorities. Applicants were required to sell all their possessions for the poor, to promise to live according to the gospel, and to take the absolute vows of chastity, obedience,and poverty. Each monk was to have two gowns of vile cloth which were to be patched as long as possible. No shoes were to be worn except when absolutely necessary. All but the sick had to walk. No money could be received save for the poor and the needy. All who were able were compelled to labour and thus earn their food and clothing. "Brethren," said Francis, "know that poverty is the special path of salvation, the inciter to humility, and the root of perfection."[530:1]A very simple ritual with one daily mass and but little music was instituted.

Francis sent his disciples out over the whole world to preach his gospel, while he continued the simplicity of his earlier life, living in a little hut with a ground floor, preaching to and converting whole multitudes who came to hear and to see him, and continuing his acts of mercy and love. He founded a convent of women called the "Clarisses" or "Poor Clares," who became almost as famous as the "Poor Brothers."[530:2]In 1221 he established the "Brothers and Sisters of Penitence," a lay order whose members, though living under a rule, retained their social position and employments, but bound themselves to abstain from all worldly dissipations like dancing, theatre-going, and secular festivals, and to live godly lives.[530:3]This was a very sensible arrangement because by it Francis enlisted all classes in sympathetic co-operation.[530:4]Impelled by missionary zeal Francis journeyed not only throughout Italy but to Illyria, Spain, and with twelve brethren even went to the distant Holy Land,where he not only converted thousands to Christianity, but even attempted to win the Sultan himself. Failing in this he returned to Italy.[531:1]In his relations with Rome Francis was the truest son of the Church and formed an army trained in piety and absolute obedience which the Pope used later to great advantage. For himself, however, he demanded freedom to live and to act after his own heart. His life was spared to see his order cover the world, but at length worn out by his labours and consuming zeal he died in 1226 naked and in poverty.[531:2]After his death it is said that the five wounds of the Saviour, called the "stigmata," were found on his body.[531:3]He was canonised in 1228 by Gregory IX.

Few persons in the world's history have stamped their character and influence upon their age in a more marked manner than did St. Francis. His life is hallowed by countless miracles and it is not always easy to separate myth from truth. But a careful study of his career reveals the fact that he felt the unity of the universe in God and preached it to man in love and charity as a genuine religious philosopher. With an unparalleled ardour and spiritual industry, he taught every one that the salvation of a human soul comes through self-sacrifice. He and his followers aimed to realise the simplicity of Christ and his apostles. "No human creature since Christ has more fully incarnated the ideal of Christianity than Francis."[531:4]His chief happiness was in ministering to the needs ofhis fellow creatures. "The perfection of gladness," he said "consists not in working miracles, in curing the sick, expelling devils, or raising the dead; nor in learning and knowledge of all things; nor in eloquence to convert the world, but in bearing all ills and injuries and injustices and despiteful treatment with patience and humility." Through his insane, extravagant asceticism there shines forth a patience, humility, and depth of love necessary to oppose the pride and cruelty of his age. He inculcated the gospel of cheerfulness and declared that gloom and sadness were the deadly weapons of Satan. He had a poetic soul, was passionately fond of animals and flowers—called them his brothers and sisters—and preached some beautiful sermons to the trees, the fish in the streams, the birds,[532:1]and the posies. He wrote some rugged and touching verse—"The first broken utterances of a new voice which was soon to fill the world."[532:2]"Of all saints St. Francis was the most blameless and gentle. Francis was emphatically the saint of the people, of a poetic people, like the Italians."[532:3]In many ways he was the forerunner of Dante. In prayer, in picture, and in song, the worship of St. Francis vied with that of Jesus. In story and legend he soon outstripped Christ.

It was in 1219 that St. Francis sent his disciples out to evangelise the world. Those who went to Germany and Hungary were regarded as heretics and roughly treated. In France at first they were mistaken for Cathari and an appeal was made to the Pope concerning them. Five suffered martyrdom in Morocco. They soon spread to all parts of theworld and many of them perished as martyrs in the cause they had espoused. When St. Francis held his first chapter in 1221 three thousand members[533:1]were present and Provincial Masters had been appointed in all European countries. In 1260 there were thirty-three provinces, one hundred eighty-two guardianships, eight thousand monasteries and two hundred thousand friars. The order has produced five Popes and many cardinals, bishops, theologians, writers, and poets.

A comparison of the two founders and their orders reveals some interesting facts. Both leaders were born about the same time, St. Dominic being the older by twelve years. Both were of Romance origin—one of noble, the other of ignoble birth. The early life of each was wholly dissimilar in disposition, education, and relation to the Church. The causes operating to make them reformers were very different. St. Dominic dreamed of an aggressive, skilfully-trained body of preachers of simple life to convert the heretics and to instruct the orthodox, thus keeping them firm. St. Francis on the other hand made poverty the first Christian grace and sought to lead all men back to Jesus as the great model. One laboured for doctrinal orthodoxy, the other for personal piety. Both applied to Innocent III. about the same time for a permit to found a new order and both were successful. Each order in its purpose was reformatory and in the monastic world revolutionary.[533:2]In organisation the two orders were essentially the same: each had a governor-general at Rome, provincial governors in the provinces, priors or guardians over single cloisters, which were simply "homes" and not convents in the old sense anddemanded a certain type of life for the members. The vows were essentially the same, although the Franciscans originated and the Dominicans adopted that of poverty. Both orders devoted themselves to preaching and to saving souls.

Education, art, morality, and religion of the later Middle Ages were in a large measure moulded by the influence of these two organisations. Both had great scholars, preachers, teachers, higher clergy, and popes.

Whenever in the thirteenth century we find a man towering above his fellows, we are almost sure to trace him to one of the mendicant orders. Raymond of Pennaforte, Alexander Hales, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, Roger Bacon, and Duns Scotus are names which show how irresistibly the men of highest gifts were glad to seek among the Dominicans or Franciscans their ideal life.[534:1]

The Franciscans were realists and Scottists; the Dominicans, nominalists and Thomists. The Franciscans believed in the immaculate conception; the Dominicans denied it. Both came into conflict with the secular clergy. They could not say mass, but were very popular confessors and thus tended to deprive the clergy of support and revenues and even threatened to supersede the old ecclesiastical system. Women and the pious as a rule upheld the begging orders, while the state, the soldiers, and the men took the part of the clergy. In both, the individual was compelled to remain poor, while the society became dangerously rich. The Dominicans were aristocratic; the Franciscans democratic.

Each order borrowed something from the other: St. Francis took St. Dominic's idea of itinerant preachers; St. Dominic adopted St. Francis's plan of poverty. Both became quickly popular and both had exemptions and privileges showered upon them by Rome.[535:1]Their members could not be excommunicated by any bishop and were exempt from all local jurisdiction save that of their own order.[535:2]They had a right to live freely in excommunicated lands. Being directly responsible to the Pope alone, they were used by him to raise money, to preach crusades, to sell indulgences, to execute excommunications, to serve as spies and secret police, and to act as papal legates on all kinds of missions. In addition to practically usurping and monopolising the functions of preaching and confession and granting absolution, they were finally permitted to celebrate mass on portable altars.[535:3]In return for these privileges each order gave the Pope a vast army which overran Europe in his name. Both orders helped to carry on the work of the Inquisition.[535:4]Both laboured incessantly in the missionary field and from the thirteenth century onward they were the great missionary pioneers in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. Both had a tertiary order of laymen which went far to remove the barrier between the ecclesiastic and the people. From this comparison it will be seen that the Franciscans and Dominicans were much more alike than unlike in their origin, leaders, aims, methods, and results. After the thirteenth century both departed from their original ideals, became corrupt, worldly, and very unpopular.

A third begging order was created in 1243, when Pope Innocent IV. authorised the organisation of a band of Italian monks under the rule of St. Augustine. Lanfranc Septala of Milan was made general of the order and provincial rulers were appointed for Italy, Spain, France, and Germany. Under Alexander IV. in 1256 they assumed the rights and duties of a mendicant order and in 1287 they were taken under the particular protection of the Pope. They soon spread rapidly over western Europe and by the fifteenth century covered forty-two provinces, had two thousand monasteries, and thirty thousand monks. It was this order which young Martin Luther entered in 1505 at Erfurt.

No better summary of the general results of the begging orders has ever been made than that of Lea when he says:

The Mendicants came upon Christendom like a revelation—men who had abandoned all that was enticing in life to imitate the Apostles, to convert the sinner and unbeliever, to arouse the slumbering sense of mankind, to instruct the ignorant, to offer salvation to all; in short to do what the Church was paid so enormously in wealth and privileges and power for neglecting. Wandering on foot over the face of Europe, under burning suns or chilling blasts, rejecting alms in money but receiving thankfully whatever coarse food might be set before the wayfarer, or enduring hunger in silent resignation, taking no thought for the morrow, but busied eternally in the work of snatching souls from Satan, and lifting men up from the sordid cares of daily life, of ministering to their infirmities and of bringing to their darkened souls a glimpse of heavenly light—such was the aspect in which the earliest Dominicans and Franciscans presented themselves to the eyes of menwho had been accustomed to see in the ecclesiastic only the sensual worldling intent solely upon the indulgence of his appetites.[537:1]In the busy world of the 13th century there was then no agency more active than that of the Mendicant Orders, for good and for evil. On the whole perhaps the good preponderated, for they undoubtedly aided in postponing a revolution for which the world was not yet ready. Though the self-abnegation of their earlier days was a quality too rare and perishable to be long preserved, and though they soon sank to the level of the social order around them, yet their work had not been altogether lost.[537:2]

In the busy world of the 13th century there was then no agency more active than that of the Mendicant Orders, for good and for evil. On the whole perhaps the good preponderated, for they undoubtedly aided in postponing a revolution for which the world was not yet ready. Though the self-abnegation of their earlier days was a quality too rare and perishable to be long preserved, and though they soon sank to the level of the social order around them, yet their work had not been altogether lost.[537:2]

The degeneration which soon crept into both orders was not allowed to increase without efforts of reformation. Within fifty years after the death of St. Francis, Bonaventura, the governor-general who succeeded him, complained that the vow of poverty had broken down, that the Franciscans were more entangled in money matters than the older orders and that vast sums were lavished on costly buildings. He declared that the friars were idle, lazy beggars given to vice and so brazen that they were feared as much as highway robbers. He said further that they made undesirable acquaintances and thus gave rise to grave scandals, and that they were too greedy of burial and legacy fees and thus encroached upon the parochial clergy. St. Francis himself had been compelled to resign his generalship on account of the abuses and offered to resume it only on condition of reformation.[537:3]The second general, Elias, the shrewdest politician in Italy, was removed by Pope Gregory IX. It was high timetherefore that a high-minded reformer like Bonaventura appeared, for by a series of steps the Franciscans changed from a body of pietists to a band of the boldest swindlers. As preaching and soul-saving died out, the begging propensities were developed. As early as 1233 Gregory IX. told the Dominicans that their poverty should be genuine and not hypocritical.[538:1]The wide use of the friars by the Pope for political purposes still further diverted them from their spiritual functions and tended to make them worldly.

As a result the Franciscans soon broke into two parties: (1) The liberals who were not averse to dropping the vow of poverty and imitating the older monastic orders were very strong. (2) The reform party who desired to adhere rigidly to the preaching and practice of St. Francis were probably a minority and were weakened by subdivisions. One faction of the strict party was called Spirituales,[538:2]and in turn was represented by the Cæsarins who revolted against the public activity of Elias and were punished as rebels; the Celestines who were permitted to exist as a separate order by Pope Celestine V. in 1294, and were later denounced as heretics; the congregation of Narbonne which was formed in 1282; the Clarenins who were accused of heresy in 1318; and the congregation of Philip of Nyarca which was formed in 1308. A second reform element within the rigid party were the Fratricelli, authorised by Celestine V., who became revolutionists, repudiated the Papacy, left the Church, joined the Beghards, thought that they were possessed with the Holy Spirit and were exempt from sin, andrepudiated the sacraments of the Church. They were condemned as heretics and the Inquisition was turned against them in Italy, Sicily, and southern France, but they lasted until the Reformation. Later reform factions among the Franciscans were the Capuchins (1526), Minims (1453), Observants (1415), and Recollects. These internal reformers failed to change the order because the rule of St. Francis was utterly incompatible with social life in any form.

For three centuries the Franciscans and Dominicans practically ruled the Church and state. They filled the highest civil ecclesiastical positions; they taught authoritatively in the universities and churches; they maintained the prerogatives of the Roman Pontiffs against kings, bishops, and heretics; and they were to the Church before the Reformation what the Jesuits were after the Reformation. The Mendicants increased so rapidly however that they soon became a burden to the Church and the people. Hence in 1272 Gregory X. in the Council of Lyons suppressed the "extravagant multitude" by reducing them to four orders: the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Carmelites, and the Augustinians.

FOOTNOTES:

[510:1]SeeCh. XI.

[510:2]SeeCh. XVIII.

[510:3]Migne, vol. 204, pp. 1005-1046.

[511:1]Milman,Lat. Christ., bk. viii., ch. 4.

[511:2]Mabillon,Life and Letters, 2 vols.; Ogg, § 43, 44.

[511:3]Storrs,Bernard of Clairvaux; Eales,St. Bernard; Eales,The Works of St. Bernard, 4 vols. SeeChap. XX.

[512:1]Dict. of Nat. Biog.

[513:1]Thatcher and McNeal, No. 266. Privileges granted by Anastasius IV. in 1154.

[513:2]Thatcher and McNeal, No. 265a.

[515:1]Lea,Hist. of Sacer. Celib.

[516:1]Lea,Hist. of the Inq., i., 39, 53, 54.

[516:2]Ibid., i., 70.

[516:3]Thatcher and McNeal, No. 267.

[516:4]Lea,Hist. of the Inq., i., 35.

[517:1]Lea,Hist. of the Inq., i., 36, 37.

[517:2]Ibid., i., 37, 38.

[517:3]Ibid., i., 34.

[517:4]Ibid., i., 268.

[518:1]Sabatier, 28ff.

[518:2]Mon. Ger., xx., 537;Jaffé, i., 404; Hausrath,Arnold of Brescia; Franke,Arnold of Brescia; Gregorovius,Rome in M. A.

[519:1]Migne, 193, 194;Mon. Ger., iii., 131-525; Wattenbach,Geschichtsquellen, ii., 308, 520.

[519:2]Lea,Hist. of the Inq., i., 244.

[519:3]Ibid., i., 75.

[519:4]SeeChap. XVIII.

[519:5]Lea,Hist. of the Inq., i., 246.

[520:1]Mosheim,The Beghards and Beguins. In 1311 Clement V. suppressed both orders.

[521:1]Milman,Lat. Christ., bk. ix., 250. See Drane,Hist. of St. Dominic, Lond., 1891, who narrates all these legends as true.

[521:2]Afterwards transferred to Salamanca.

[521:3]It is related that at Toulouse, Dominic's host was an Albigensian and that the young religious enthusiast spent the night in converting him.

[522:1]Milman,Lat. Christ., bk. ix., 242.

[523:1]The Inquisition was not organised until 1215. See Drane, 109; Lea,Hist. of the Inq., i., 300.

[523:2]Lea,Hist. of the Inq., i., 250.

[524:1]In the dream the Pope saw the great Roman Church about to fall had not Dominic upheld it.

[524:2]Conway,Frachet's Lives of the Brethren.

[525:1]The "Soldiers of Jesus Christ" later became the "Order of Penance" and is now known as "The Third Order." There are many editions in English of theTertiary Daily Manual.

[525:2]Moeller, ii., 412ff.

[526:1]Jameson,Legends of Monastic Orders as Represented in the Fine Arts.

[526:2]Sabatier, 8.

[527:1]Robinson,Readings, i., 387.

[528:1]Matt. x., 7-10.

[528:2]Sabatier, 70.

[528:3]See Ogg, § 63.

[529:1]Matthew of Paris, ed. by Watson, 340.

[529:2]Henderson,Hist. Docs., 344; Thatcher and McNeal, No. 269.

[530:1]Lea,Hist. of Inq., vol. i., 264. See his curious prayer to Christ.

[530:2]Read the legend of St. Clara in Butler,Lives of Saints.

[530:3]Milman, iv., 270.

[530:4]Maclear,Hist. of Christ. Missions in the M. A., ch. 16.

[531:1]Milman, iv., 267.

[531:2]Thatcher and McNeal, No. 270; Robinson,Readings, i., 392; Ogg, § 64, gives the will of St. Francis.

[531:3]See Sabatier, 443ff., Hase, and other authorities.

[531:4]Lea,Hist. of Inq., i., 260. See Jessopp,The Coming of the Friars, 47ff.

[532:1]Robinson,Readings, i., 391.

Back to Index Next