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Introduction
I
The first English translation of the Fioretti di Santo Francesco d'
Ascesi, that of Lady Georgina Fullerton, appeared in the year 1864; and
the first American translation, that by Abby Langdon Alger, was
published in the year 1887. This is a good four centuries after the
princeps edition of the Fioretti (Vicenza, 1476), and a half century
after the "standard" Italian edition by Antonio Cesari (Verona, 1822).
The tardiness of Anglo-Saxon recognition of this, one of the raciest,
most spirited, and most beloved of the Italian classics is not to be
grasped out of hand. Religious considerations, obvious as they might
seem could not account for the indifference of the fathers of English
printing. Once published, moreover, the Fioretti made their way in
their own right. The present century has witnessed numerous other
translations in England and America and dozens of reprintings in
America alone. I suspect, rather, that it was a strange case of
editorial oversight, a nugget of gold that was there for anyone, yet
was for centuries overlooked. The title may have had something to do
with it. The phrase "Little Flowers" has, in English, a vague aroma of
sentiment and propaganda, and by virtue of the diminutive it has
acquired a similar flavor even in Italian. Suppose this collection of
tales had been called the "Franciscan Anthology", a title at once more
exact and more majestic in its associations? Or suppose, somewhat
facetiously, but still within its spirit, it had been known as the
"Selected Miracles of Saint Francis and his Brethren"? The story as
regards the English-speaking world might, I believe, have been
different.
I have called the Fioretti "tales"; and tales they are, fixed upon
Saint Francis and his earliest disciples in the way in which legend
accumulates about any celebrated character in history. But, in this
case, and in contrast with the situation that usually prevails in
folklore, the "stories" have a certain authority as history. One
hundred years of Franciscan scholarship enable us even to evaluate the
authenticity of the Little Flowers.
Saint Francis died in 1226. But his amanuensis, secretary, and
confessor, his beloved brother Leo (who is quoted extensively in the
Little Flowers), lived on till the year 1271. The Friar, Giovanni dalla
Penna, one of the early missionaries of the Order in Germany, and
another of the sources, did not die till 1274. In the year 1257 had
come the great crisis in the Franciscan Order, whereby the Church,
frowning darkly on an orgy of religious "revival" which enabled humble,
ignorant and sometimes stuttering peasants to talk with God in His
Three Persons sicut amicus cum amico, had given a more ecclesiastical
temper to the Franciscan "Rule", and aimed at representing mystical and
miracle-working activity among the friars. This debate was conducted
bitterly and with some show of force. John of Parma, leader of the
"zealots" and Saint Bonaventura's predecessor as General of the Order,
stood, at one moment (1257), condemned to imprisonment for life.
Already two conceptions of Saint Francis himself were current in the
Order; and his biography was being recounted in different ways.
Eventually Saint Bonaventura was to write the "official" biography, and
to make it more "official" still by burning, so far as he could lay
hands on them, all conflicting accounts of the Saint's life. Meantime,
one thing is clear: the party "of good sense" was having many harsh
things to say of those extremists who courted public ridicule for the
benefit of their souls by preaching naked in the church pulpits,
changing capon's drumsticks into nectarines, and doing other things
disquieting to a theology which liked miracles in the principle but was
inhospitable toward them in the fact. The harsh words hurt. They hurt
directly men who had seen God walking in person among the hills of
Umbria and believed He had rebegotten His Only Begotten in the guise of
a lad of that humble countryside.
That was why, perhaps as early as the year 1250, and not much later
than the year 1261, a monk of the March of Ancona, friend to the
missionary, Giovanni dalla Penna, and known, or rather unknown, as
Ugolino of Montegiorgio, began writing his Floretum, or "garden of
flowers", the flores being simply "notabilia", or "more noteworthy
things", things omitted from the formal biographies of the Saint, and
the omission of which distorted and misrepresented, as old-timers knew,
the spirit and the fact of those glorious days when the Saint was still
on earth.
The Floretum of Ugolino of Montegiorgio, in the form in which that
devoted monk composed it, has been lost to the world, though a copy of
it seems to have been extant as late as 1623, when Wadding, the great
Franciscan annalist, was writing his history of the Order in the
Convent of Saint Isidore in Rome. Just what it contained is not known
with certainty. Its text has to be reconstructed by inference from the
numerous re-workings of it made at later times. The direct re-workings
- they are substantial enlargements - are two in number: one, the Actus
beati Francisci et sociorum cius, of which the earliest surviving trace
is a mention in a catalogue of a convent in Assisi, dated 1381; and the
other, the Fioretti themselves, of which the earliest known manuscripts
date from 1390 (Berlin) and 1396 (Florence) respectively. Though the
Actus and the Fioretti, as we know them at present, stand in such close
relation that they could be word for word translations one of the
other, the Actus contain twenty-two chapters not appearing in the
Fioretti, and the Fioretti six chapters not appearing in the Actus. It
seems necessary to suppose that they derive from some previous, and
undiscovered, source, more comprehensive than either of them. Of this
unknown anthology of Franciscan miracles something nevertheless may be
said. While the Floretum of Ugolino did not extend beyond the year
1261, the source of the Actus-Fioretti dealt with episodes occurring
late in 1322; and its compiler knew Ugolino personally and probably
utilized other writings of Ugolino, which the latter had not exploited
in the Floretum.
II
As is natural with a collection of wonder-stories, that same tendency
to growth which is manifest in the Actus-Fioretti as compared with the
re-constructed Floretum, is just as apparent in the history of the
Fioretti themselves. Two themes in particular were provocative of such
developments: on the one hand the life of Saint Francis, which moved
copyists of the Fioretti to supplement their deficiencies as a
biography with additions from other sources; the other, the parallelism
between Saint Francis and Jesus, which was always challenging the
ingenuity of the devout. These similitudes in the Fioretti are, with
characteristic humility, three; Bartolommeo Pisano, by the end of the
fourteenth century, increased them to forty; while Pedro Astorga, a
Spanish monk of the seventeenth century, who wrote with all the
characteristic vim of the Decadence, raised the number to four
thousand. Meantime there was a tendency to make the Fioretti an archive
of all Franciscan miracles - even at an early day those of Saint
Anthony of Padua began creeping in. That briskness, that contagious
chuckle, which is hidden in every paragraph of the fresh and vigorous
Tuscan original of the Fioretti was not long in producing additions in
the spirit of broad humor. We are encroaching on this sphere in the
familiar stories of Brother Juniper. We are surely in an outright
secular world in a fioretto which I picked up in Tuscany in my own
youth - the story of the Franciscan novice, who, on climbing the
blistering scorciatoie to his convent after the collect of alms on a
summer's day, sets his bushel of chestnuts on the ground, wipes his
brow, and then reflects, with a etaphoric worthy of Brother Elias, and
a Tuscan crudeness worthy of Brother Ruffino: "What a sell, if there
should be no heaven!" (Che fre...a se il cielo non c' e).
As regards, therefore, the many texts of the Fioretti, some of very
ancient authority, which circulate in the various editions, it may be
necessary to remember that, whatever the relation of the original of
the Actus-Fioretti to the Floretum, the Fioretti, proper, must have
contained fifty-three chapters, plus the five "considerations" on the
Stigmata of Saint Francis. This content, in fact, aside from internal
evidence, is vouched for by twenty-six manuscripts of the fifteenth
century and some of the early printed editions. Without entering into
the question of the varied adjuncts that were supplied at one time or
another from one source or another, we may note, simply, the
derivations of those additions which were accepted, with unsurpassed
discernment and for their intrinsic merits of spirit or beauty, by
Father Cesari in his classic edition of the Fioretti (Verona, 1822).
The "evidences" of the Stigmata presented in our chapters LIV-LVIII
were derived early in the fifteenth century from the Tractatus de
miraculous of Thomas of Celano, the earliest biographer and a
contemporary of the Saint. The "life" of Brother Juniper comes from an
early Latin manuscript (containing also a "life" of Brother Giles),
independent of the Actus-Fioretti, but which had been accreted to the
Fioretti also in the fifteenth century. The "instructions and notable
sayings of Brother Giles" are by a known Florentine author, Feo
Belcari, who died in 1484. Despite the several hands that must have
tinkered with the substance of the Fioretti before they reached their
more extensive forms, one would not go far amiss in recognizing in a
work of such surpassing literary charm the imprint of two unusual
personalities.
The one must be that unknown monk of Tuscany who translated these
stories (or compiled them, as the case may be) in such a sparkling and
vivacious Tuscan idiom, an idiom as simple, direct, and limpid as may
be imagined, but with an unfailing instinct for the enduring elements
in a still future Italian language, and an idiom, withal, that retains
the full vigor and picturesqueness of a peasant intelligence, wise in
its worldly wisdom but unspoiled by any involutions of culture.
The second must be that same Ugolino of Montegiorgio, who somehow
managed to condense into the pages of the old Floretum such a
distillation of the pure spirit of early Franciscanism as to strike a
tone and establish a mood which no later re-workings of his text could
vitiate. In the sphere of fact, we may say that through Ugolino, who
borrowed from Jacopo dalla Massa, an "eye-witness", and from legends
going back to Brother Leo, these stories arrive at the very days of
Saint Francis, without, for that matter, attaining any very great
amount of historical plausibility. But it is a case where the truth of
art transcends the truth of fact, and creates a verity more real than
science or scholarship could by themselves attain. To possess the
Fioretti is to re-live the early period of Franciscanism much as it was
lived by the friends and disciples of the Saint.
But, in this connection, one must raise a warning against reading the
Little Flowers with that long face of piety which is so easily put on
in the presence of any literature that has a sacred look. Such
sentimentalism, which blinds so many devout Christians to the art of
the Bible for instance, is a variance with the shrewd simplicity of
this folk masterpiece of Central Italy. What we have here, let us
insist on the point, is humor; and one who cannot - I will not say
laugh - one who cannot smile, will have read the Little Flowers in
vain. I am not so sure that this smile did not, on occasion, play about
the lips of Brother Ugolino himself. The world of humility, self-denial
and "love" is one thing; and the world of self-assertion and
competition is another thing; and they are things so antithetical to
each other, in their perfection, that the wisdom of the one is the
lunacy of the other, and vice versa.
One need not and perhaps should not further analyse the motivation of
the smile, which is the smile the sophisticated must always have for
the I. The I is always humor because it tends to simplify the majestic
and the complex, making it mechanical, but at the same time more
approachable and more lovable. The smile cannot be a laugh. A tear
lingers just behind it.
The artless art of Ugolino (if it be his) was pure art in the sense
that it presents concepts as image, each image replete with conceptual
suggestiveness. Saint Francis nibbling at his "second loaf", in order
not to sin by presumption in etaphor the Lord's fast of forty days; the
Pope's curiosity to see Saint Clare make the Cross appear in the crust
of her buns; the two dialogues of the friars with their translated
brethren; the Saint's long wrestling with the Devil; Satan's revenge by
causing a landslide with the swish of his tail; the astonishment of the
"ladies and the cavaliers" at the holy spectacle of the first
"Chapter"; Brother Bernard's founding of the Order at Bologna - the
Fioretti are all scenes that could be painted (and were painted, as
legend asserts, by Giotto). As the pictures multiply, the mood deepens
in beauty and richness - and we must not forget to smile, meantime; for
the perfection of humility and Christian love which the friars
exemplify is attained by the most humble and direct of mechanical
means. One can well understand the ancient quarrel in the Order. These
untutored converts of Saint Francis were playing with a magic art,
which evoked the Devil when it was black, and constrained the
appearance of the Divinity when of brighter hue (XLIX).
There is little, if any, theology about these simple friars. Such
questions belonged to those who were lettered and knew people off in
the big towns, Rome, perhaps. They cared little about such things,
having found in faith at all times, and now and again in "rapture", a
direct access to the benign powers. One feels a sort of regional
secretiveness in this technique of virtue, which also was practised in
individual secretiveness, lest pride success give Satan his chance. The
sweetness of this child-like literalism resides in part, I believe, in
an absence of a note of spiritual "arrivism", or spiritual "climbing",
which one so minded can find even offensive in a Dante or a Savonarola.
These straightforward souls of the brotherhood of Saint Francis wanted
to keep out of Hell because it was hot, and to get out of Purgatory
because it was uncomfortable. Yet they, too, like Jesus, visioned a
love so great that willingly the least of them would have accepted
damnation so only the world might have been saved. If one seek the
moral theme in this early Franciscanism, one finds at least a morality
that is made always for oneself and not for other people. Here again on
earth were men who judged not, who loved the lost even more than the
virtuous, and the bandit as much as the cavalier.
It was, after all, a snug and cosy world, the world in which these
early Franciscans lived, a world personally supervised by its Creator,
who walked the earth as a man among men, and who loved His creatures
with a parent's love, assisted in His care of them by His Son and His
Son's Mother. Thus warmly had Jesus thought of the world in His time -
a projection, perhaps, as Renan suggests, of a verdant Galilee
blossoming in the Syrian desert. This "naturalism" of the early
Franciscans, so beautifully expressed in the lauds and in the
"Canticle" of the Saint himself, finds surely in the Little Flowers its
most complete and beautiful expression. It has been through them that
the birds who stretched their throats and bowed their heads in approval
of the Saint's exhortation to praise have ever since made their
chirping voices heard above the noisy history of Europe. To savor this
naturalism in its full freshness one need only turn to some expression
of the naturalisms of a later day, that of the Rousseauians or of our
own Emerson or Thoreau. These two were efforts to being God back into
the world (from which He had been exiled by Cartesian logic). But how
vain the effort! How unsatisfactory a God that is only Nature, and how
literary and etaphorical a Nature which we must think of as God! It is
a more real and understandable thing, this Nature of the early
Franciscans, the "useful", "humble", "comfortable" invention of a God
who could be used, if one treated Him right, for the humble commonplace
needs of common everyday people.
And we have said nothing about Frate Lupo! There are those who say he
was a man, perhaps a bandit by that name. Anyone who can read the
Little Flowers without understanding that Frate Lupo was a wolf, will,
like those who cannot smile, have read them in vain!
Arthur Livingston
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