At this point it will not, I think, be out of place to give a brief description of the order within whose ranks the one-time baron had now irrevocably chosen to lead the rest of his life. The history of Franciscanism is the history of a long-drawn-out struggle between a pious worldly wisdom on the one hand and, on the other, uncompromising primitive Christianity. Francis himself had stood for primitive Christianity; his successor, Brother Elias, for worldly wisdom. During the first generations of Franciscanism a party of Moderates was opposed by a party of ‘Zealots’ or ‘Spirituals’; but in the course of time the names were changed: In later centuries the cause of worldly wisdom is represented by the ‘Conventuals,’ while over against them stand the ‘Observants,’ so called because they tried, albeit with considerable reservations, to observe St. Francis’s original rule. Custom and finally papal authority had stabilized the position of these two branches of Franciscanism, when, with the Counter-Reformation, a new enthusiasm for reform began to spread through the Church.
Among the Franciscans we have the reforms represented by the Alcantarines, the Recollets, the Riformati, and finally, the Capuchins. This order had its first beginnings in Italy about the year 1520, was regularized by a papal bull of 1538 and had begun to do fairly well, when its third Vicar, Bernardino Ochino, turned Calvinist and, in 1543, fled first to Geneva, then to England, where he became a prebendary of Canterbury and wrote a kind of cosmic allegory, in which Lucifer raises up the Pope as Antichrist, only to be thwarted in his machinations by the providential appearance of Henry VIII. Not unnaturally, the new order had to suffer for its Vicar’s escapades and for a time there was even talk of dissolving it altogether. Finally, however, it was spared and its privileges restored. Within a few years it had become, next to the Company of Jesus, the most powerful instrument in the Church’s entire armoury.
The Capuchin rule was a nearer approximation to St. Francis’s original than that of any of the other Franciscan orders. Thus, the law enjoining poverty was strictly observed. Neither overtly, nor covertly, by a subterfuge, might the monastic houses own any property. The wants of their inmates were to be supplied exclusively by begging, and the convent was not allowed to accumulate stores for more than a few days. No friar might use or even handle money. (When representing the King on diplomatic missions, Father Joseph, as we shall see, was compelled to accept, albeit reluctantly, a dispensation in regard to this matter.) The Capuchin’s habit was of rough grey cloth and so rarely replaced that most of the friars were permanently dirty and in tatters. To the hardships of poverty were added those of a rigid discipline. Fasts were numerous in the Capuchin’s life and penances severe. A midnight service cut short the hours of sleep. Over and above the time set for the canonical offices, two hours were reserved for private prayers.
Outside the convent, the life of the friars was one of incessant activity. Their work was to preach, save souls and help the poor. Abroad, among the infidels, and at home, among heretics and ‘libertines,’ the Capuchins were the great missionaries and converters of the period. Where the spirit of Catholicism had become lukewarm, they were the great revivalists. Nor were their ministrations exclusively spiritual. They worked hard to palliate the chronic miseries of the poor, and wherever disaster struck, they were always presentas stretcher-bearers with the armies; as intercessors for the lives of the conquered; as nurses and grave-diggers in times of pestilence; as relief workers among the famine-stricken. It has been pointed out that, between 1500 and 1600, the popular attitude towards the regular clergy underwent a profound change.
At the earlier date, monks and friars were regarded either with an angry resentment or else with mere derision. And such attitudes were already traditional. The fury of the first Reformers recalls that of the author of Piers Plowman; the humorous contempt displayed in the Epistolae Ohscurorum Virorum is fundamentally the same attitude adopted by Boccaccio and Chaucer. Reformation produced Counter-Reformation. By the end of the sixteenth century the friar of popular imagination is no longer the lecherous and greedy incubus depicted in the Decameron and the Canterhury Tales. He is the new model Capuchin, the man who respects his vows, who shares the hardships of the poor and is always ready to he a help in trouble.
Disinterestedness and active kindness wield an extraordinary influence over men’s minds and are the sources of a curious kind of non-compulsive power. In the first fifty years of their existence the Capuchins had thoroughly earned this power and influence. It is one of the tragedies of history that this moral force should everywhere have been exploited, by the rulers of Church and State, for the furtherance of their own generally sinister ends. This harnessing by evil of the power generated by goodness, is one of the principal and most tragic themes of human history.
Austerity of life, the assumption of voluntary poverty, a clarity of collaboration, not of patronage -these were the characteristics that had earned for the Capuchins the respect and affection of the masses. It was for precisely the same reasons that the order appealed so strongly to men of a certain type in the very highest classes of society. François Leclerc was by no means the only gentleman-friar. Many noblemen and even some persons of royal blood had joined and were to join the order. What attracted them was precisely the thing that might haye been expected to repel them -the extreme severity of the rule, the evangelical poverty, the familiar contact with the poorest and humblest.
Of those who are born with silver spoons in their mouths, the greater number are only concerned to keep and, if possible, increase their privileges. But at all times there has been a minority of men and women, on whom the possession or privileges has acted as a challenge to their latent heroism, a spur to renunciation. The underlying motive is sometimes a genuine love of God, but more often a kind of pride.
The privileged individual wants to prove that he is somebody on his own account, and apart from his bank balance and his social position, that he can win the race against all comers, even when he starts from scratch. A course of noble actions begun in pride may be continued in pride, so that the last state of the hero is not appreciably better than the first. On the other hand, it sometimes happens that noble actions begun in pride transform the doer, who ends his career as someone fundamentally different from, and better than, the person he was when he started. There are fashions in magnanimity, and the opportunities for heroism change from age to age.
Thus, in recent years, young people with too many privileges have sought a life of heroic austerity in politics, or sport, or science. They have flung themselves into unpopular political movements, gone mountain climbing or big-game hunting, campaigned against disease, volunteered in other people’s wars. For the over-privileged of an earlier age, fighting and exploring strange lands also offered excellent opportunities for heroism and renunciation; but they were opportunities that public opinion thought less highly of than those provided by organized religion.
‘This is a soldier’s life,’ François wrote to his mother a short time after his entrance into religion, ‘but with this difference : that soldiers receive death
for the service of men, whereas we hope for life in the service of God.’
To François Leclerc’s counterpart in the modem world, the equivalent of becoming a Capuchin would have been to join the Communist Party or enlist for service in the Spanish war. But the equivalent would not be complete; for the life of a Capuchin was a soldier’s life with a difference -a soldier’s life with the addition of another dimension, that of eternity. It is the existence of this other dimension which imparts to certain biographies of earlier times their peculiar poignancy. Even the baldest recitals of these lives have about them some of the depth and intensity of significance, which distinguish Claudel’s extraordinary Catholic fantasy, Le Soulier de Satin. Consider, for example, the life story of that Père Ange who, in 1600, performed the ceremony of our young novice’s final and definitive reception into the Capuchin order. Like the future Father Joseph, Père Ange had been a gentleman-a gentleman of a lineage incomparably more illustrious than that of the Leclercs.
Before his entry into religion, this friar was known as Henri de Joyeuse, Comte de Bouchage. One of his brothers was a cardinal and had held successively the three archbishoprics of Toulouse, Narbonne and Rouen. Another, Anne de Joyeuse, had died at Coutras in 1587, leading the troops of the League against Henry of Navarre. At the time of his death he had been admiral of France, duke and peer, Governor of Normandy and, by his marriage to Marguerite de Lorraine-Vaudemont, brothering law to Queen Louise, the wife of his master and passionately devoted friend, Henri III. Yet another brother, Antoine Scipiory, had been Governor of Languedoc. These family connections, the support of his brother-in-law, the Duc d’Epernon, and finally the friendship of the king, seemed to guarantee for young Henri de Joyeuse the most brilliant future. But in 1589 his wife died and, a few days later, he carried out an intention which he had in mind even at the height of his
