The first fact to realize about St. Francis is involved in the first fact with which his story starts; that when he said from the first that he was a Troubadour, and said later that he was a Troubadour of a newer and nobler romance, he was not using a mere metaphor, but understood himself much better than the scholars understand him. He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubadour. He was a lover. He was a lover of God and he was really and truly a lover of men; possibly a much rarer mystical vocation…For the modern reader the clue to the asceticism and all the rest can be found in the stories of lovers when they seemed to be rather like lunatics. Tell it as the tale of one of the Troubadours, and the wild things he would do for his lady, and the whole of the modern puzzle disappears. In such a romance there would be no contradiction between the poet gathering flowers in the sun and enduring a freezing vigil in the snow, between his praising all earthly and bodily beauty and then refusing to eat…All these riddles would easily be resolved in the simplicity of any noble love…His religion was not a thing like a theory but a thing like a love-affair.
G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi, pp. 7-8
As is the case with my posts from time to time, this is really a stream of consciousness about something that piqued my interest. It may be of little or no interest to anyone other than myself. Yet I write.
Chesterton gives by far the best defense of asceticism I have ever read, but there’s a ‘but’ coming. It is true that love can drive someone to do extreme things, nonsensical things, paradoxical things etc. I think it is also true, then, that love for Christ can, and probably should, at times drive us to make rash vows and (to borrow a phrase from Chesterton) fast as though we were fighting a dragon.
But I do not think that long-term love looks like this. It will have its fainting fits (in a good way) of asceticism, but it will not live in it continually. Extreme self-discipline must give way to sustainable self-discipline, the self-discipline of holy common sense. The ascetic who attempts to ‘pray without ceasing’ by heading to the monastery and fulfilling the letter of the law is doomed to misery; for he will fail, and he has banked his whole life upon not failing. The normal Christian who breathes out silent prayers throughout the day and then fights dragons when necessary is surely more sane and happy – for this is what God created him to do – to live.
If we stick with Chesterton’s idea that asceticism makes sense, at least in Francis of Assisi, if we understand the lengths to which the Romantic will go, then still, it would seem that such fits would be fainting indeed. Romance is not all about holding up boom boxes outside of the beloveds house, or chanting soliloquies and singing troubadourial songs outside her window. It is not all poetry, though the poetry will come. There are times for those things to be sure, but those times are sparse compared with the rather mundane, by comparison, acts of simple conversation, sitting in silence together, paying the bills, raising children, and eating meals together. Even if the Romantic refuses to eat for a time for the sake of love-sickness, he only does so for a time – or he dies of starvation – and the romance ends. He would rather sit at the table with his beloved and feast.
And that is really my point. Chesterton paints Francis’ asceticism with beauty using bright colors; but the fact remains that Francis essentially killed himself by fasting. Even if he did it for love, he still did it; even if it was Romantic, it stopped his heart. This is not the death of a martyr, but the death of an ascetic: there is an essential difference. The martyr gives himself over to the flames for love; the ascetic internally combusts. And it is where all such asceticism leads – death – in many cases, the death of the self-righteous who saw themselves as more vile than those who had received alien righteousness as a free gift. From time to time we need to go to extremes in order to put sin to death and express a deep sense of romance precisely because righteousness has been counted to us. But it must be from time to time. There is a time to fast, but there is also a time to feast. And thanks be to God that we are allowed to feast more than we fast – because we can celebrate the fact that we have been justified in Christ alone.
