The Writings of Saint Francis of Assisi

US little if any information as to the life of their author, a fact which may perhaps account for their comparative neglect by so many of the Saint's biographers, but it is not less true that they bear the stamp of his personality and reflect his spirit even more faithfully than the Legends written down on the very morrow of his death by those who had known him the best of all." For this reason they are well worth all the serious study that scholars outside the Franciscan Order are now beginning to give to them. To say that the writings of St. Francis reflect his personality and his spirit is but another way of saying that they are at once formidably mystic and exquisitely human; that they combine great elevation of thought with much picturesqueness of expression. This twofold element, which found its development later on in the prose of mystics like St. Bonaventure and in the verse of poets like Jacopone da Todi, and which has ever been a marked characteristic of Franciscan ascetic literature, leads back to the writ, ings of the Founder as to the humble upper waters of a mighty stream. St. Francis had the soul of an ascetic and the heart of a poet. His unbounded faith had an almost lyric sweetness about it; his deep sense of the spiritual is often clothed with the character of romance. This intimate union of the supernatural and the natural is nowhere more strikingly manifested than in the writings of St. Francis, which, after

' See Opuscula. Ed. Quaracchi, p. vi.

the vicissitudes of well nigh seven hundred winters, are still fragrant with the fragrance of the Seraphic springtide.

Important as the doctrinal aspect of St. Francis' writings must of necessity be to all who would understand his life — since " the springs of action are to be found in belief, and conduct ultimately rests upon conviction " — it is foreign to the object of the present volume. I am here concerned with the literary and historical aspect of these writings. Suffice it to say that St. Francis' doctrine,' which received, so to speak, the Divine Imprimatur upon the heights of La Verna two years before his death, is nothing more or less than a paraphrase of the Sermon on the Mount. Nowhere can \ there be found a simpler literalness in the following of the "poverty, humility, and holy Gospel of the Lord Jesus " than in the writings of St. Francis, and any attempt to read into them the…