From the Editor

The first thing we did, when we relaunched the ACQR, was to reaffirm the Review’s original salutatory, which contained this bracing assertion: “With politics, as they are commonly understood, and partisan contentions for place and power, the Review has nothing to do.”

However, the Review has always been deeply interested in public moral questions, especially in what Catholics need to know to be good citizens. Consider these titles from the archives: “The Sociological Aspect of Christian Charity” (1884), “The Morality of the Aims and Methods of the Labor Union” (1904), and “The Public Press and Public Morals” (1883).

In such a spirit, we are pleased to publish today a thoroughly reliable essay by a first-rate Thomist on the meaning of the “order of love” in St. Thomas—a phrase much invoked of late but seldom explained.

David M. Gallagher

Introduction: The Importance of the Ordo Amoris

To see the importance of the order of love (ordo amoris) for the moral life, let us consider that if there were only negative precepts prohibiting certain kinds of actions such as murder, theft, and detraction, then the moral life would ultimately be concerned only with evil actions and our moral options would be simply to commit or to avoid such acts. In fact one could be morally good simply by doing nothing at all; the negative precepts are such that they can all be obeyed simultaneously, indeed, simply by refraining from action. But the moral life consists of more than just avoiding evil. And as soon as we introduce positive precepts which command the performance of good actions, that is, precepts which enjoin positive duties and obligations, then the difficulty arises, at least potentially, that the fulfillment of one duty may conflict with the fulfillment of another. It may happen that I must take my sick child to the hospital precisely when I should be teaching my students.

This possibility of a conflict of duties points to the need each moral agent has of weighing up the various duties and obligations he has toward himself and others (including God). Such a weighing would be greatly simplified by the utilitarian view of John Stuart Mill, namely, that the goal of moral action is simply the highest possible sum of good/happiness (pleasure) and that I should not consider anyone, including myself, as somehow privileged in the calculation. [1] But if we reject such a view, then we must admit that we owe more to some persons than to others, that our obligation to seek the good of some persons outweighs our obligation towards others, and then knowing how to act rightly ceases to be a simple matter. Whose good an agent should seek over the good of some other persons is precisely the subject matter of the ordo amoris, for we seek the good more for those whom we love more.

I. The Structure of Rational Love

If to speak of the order of love is to speak of loving more or less, we must clarify first of all what we mean by loving. Thomas usually employs Aristotle’s brief definition: “to love is to wish or will good for someone.” [2] This definition refers not to love in general (amor), but rather to dilectio, the specifically rational form of love found in intellectual natures. Now, as the definition suggests, dilectio is always two-pronged: its object is simultaneously some person and some good that is willed for that person. The person for whom the good is willed is either oneself or another; the good willed for the person ranges from things as pedestrian as a drink of water to such noble things as virtue, knowledge, or even beatitude, that is, perfect happiness. [3] Thomas refers to the love of the person (whether self or other) as love of friendship (amor amicitiae) and to the love of the good willed for the person as the love of concupiscence (amor concupiscentiae). [4]

We can speak of an order of love, i.e., having a greater or lesser love, both in one’s love of concupiscence and in one’s love of friendship. In terms of love of concupiscence, among the many goods we can will for a person, we can will some more than others, that is, we can prefer some goods to others. Here, according to Thomas, the basic order to be observed is that spiritual goods are to be preferred to sensible goods; when this order obtains, one’s love is said to be just (dilectio iusta). [5] Thus one is said to love himself most truly when he seeks most the higher spiritual goods; the same applies to a person’s love for others. [6]

The main issue in Thomas’s discussion of the ordo amoris, however, is the order of love as it is found in the love of friendship, the love directed to persons as such. Which persons should be loved more and which less? This question is always applied to a single person and refers to the various loves that that one person has for different persons. We do not ask, for example, whether my love for person X is greater than your love for person X, but rather whether I should love person X more than I love person Y. The persons I can love are myself, God, and all other created persons (called neighbors). Thus the questions raised are the following: Should I love God more than myself? Should I love God more than any other person? Should I love any other created person more than myself? Should I love one created person more than another?

II. The Meaning of More and Less with Respect to Love

The next question is the following: just what does it mean to say that I love someone more or less? Thomas distinguishes two basic ways in which we can speak of a greater or lesser love. First, I am said to love person X more than person Y if the good I will for person X is greater than the good I will for person Y. Second, I love person X more than person Y if I love the good for person X more intensely than I love the good for person Y. [7]

Let us look more closely at the first way. Imagine some parents who have two sons, one of whom is extremely talented athletically and one who is not. With respect to sports, the parents will naturally wish for greater success for the talented son than they will for the untalented. In this respect (and only in this respect) the parents can be said to have a greater love for the talented son than for the untalented. Or imagine some parents whose child possesses average intellectual gifts while their neighbor’s child is extremely gifted. These parents would wish for a greater good for the neighbor’s child (greater academic success) than they would for their own child, and in this respect could be said to love the neighbor’s child more than their own. Now, the most important good a person can have is virtue (especially the acts of the virtues), and it is chiefly in wanting a higher degree of virtue for one person than for another that we are said to love the person more. In this way parents could be said to love their child more than the neighbor’s child if they want their own child to be the more virtuous. [8] Here we should note that wanting or willing a good for someone takes two forms: desiring the good that is absent and rejoicing in the good that is present. Thus willing the greater good for someone may mean simply rejoicing at his possession of the good (as opposed to envy, which is sadness at his possession of the good). [9]

The second sense of being greater or less refers to the intensity of a love. This intensity, like the intensity of such things as heat or physical force, must be described in terms of its effects. The stronger the love, the greater the effect it causes. The primary effect in terms of which we measure love’s intensity is beneficence, the seeking of the good of the other in deeds (as opposed to simple benevolence, the wanting of the good for the other which need not result in actions). In this sense, then, I am said to love a person more if I am more prepared to seek that person’s good. [10] And I am said to love person X more than person Y if I am more inclined to seek the good of X than the good of Y. The relative strengths of the loves will be most manifest in those cases in which a person has to choose between benefiting one person and another. For example, if a building were burning down we would expect that a man would rescue his own child before rescuing another child. Here the good sought for the two children would be the same: to escape from the fire. But since the man loves his own child more than someone else’s child, he saves (benefits) his own child and not the other (ceteris paribus). The relative intensity of the loves shows up in one’s choices; one chooses what one loves more intensely. The choice may be, as we have already noted, among the goods to be sought for a person (i.e., in the realm of amor concupiscentiae), or the choice may be among those persons whom I shall benefit; I will benefit more those I love more intensely. Let us note here that the determination of just whom I shall love more intensely can occur in the choice itself. This is important for understanding Thomas’s statement that there is such a thing as elective or chosen love (dilectio electiva). [11] I can, indeed must, freely choose whom I am to love.

It should be clear, by now, that it is possible to love person X more in the sense of wanting a greater good for the person, while at the same time loving person Y more in the sense of actually seeking the good for him with more intensity. To return to an earlier example, the parent may desire a higher level of academic achievement for his neighbor’s gifted child, while expending much more effort for the education of his own child of average intelligence. Consequently, it is not enough simply to say that I love person X more than person Y; we must also specify whether the “more” refers to the good willed for the person or to the intensity with which it is willed.

III. The Two Poles of the Order of Love

Having seen what it means to love more or less, we can turn to the question of who ought to be loved more and who less. This question takes us to the heart of the moral issue posed by the ordo amoris, for moral rectitude demands that a person’s loves be rightly ordered. What are the principles of this ordering? Thomas gives two basic principles. First, we should love more those who are objectively better. Second, we should love more those who are more closely joined to us. [12]

To love those more who are better, in the most fundamental sense, means to love more those who are more virtuous. The reason for this is that it is by moral (and theological) virtue that a person is said to be good (better) without qualification (simpliciter). To be more virtuous also means, for Thomas, to be closer to God, so that another way of expressing the principle, especially in the specific love of charity, is that we should love more those who are closer to God. In a secondary way—considering only some quality by which a person is good in a qualified way, secundum quid—we love a person more who is better in one respect or another. Thus in loving musicians as such, we should love more those who are better musicians. So too with philosophers, athletes, and so on.

The second principle is that we should love those more who are more closely joined to us. There are various ways one person can be joined (coniunctus) to another. The first is in terms of our shared humanity (the shared nature). On this basis alone, however, no one is more closely joined to any other, and so no order of love is generated. [13] But there are many modes whereby one person is joined to others without being joined to all others. The most obvious is family, including marriage and blood relatives. Another is the political relationship we have with fellow citizens (what Aristotle called political friendship). There are many others that arise from all the various forms of association persons enter into, such as, for example, our professional relationships. Each of these relationships demands a greater love than that arising simply from the shared nature. Yet within each of these distinct kinds of relationships there are also varying degrees of nearness. Within the family one is closer to one’s siblings than to one’s cousins, closer to one’s parents than to one’s aunts and uncles. So too, in something like the army, one is closer to those in one’s own unit than to those in another unit. In each case the order of love requires that those more closely joined be loved more. [14]

Given that there are these two principles governing the order of love, objective goodness and nearness to oneself, how does a person decide which principle applies with respect to any given person? Whom should I love more, a person who is nearer to me (e.g., my brother) or a person who is remoter yet more virtuous? In answering this question Thomas relates the distinction between the two poles governing which persons are to be loved more (oneself and God) to the distinction we described earlier, i.e., the distinction between the two senses of loving someone more (willing a greater good vs. willing the good more intensely). The relationship is the following. We should love those who are objectively better more in the sense that we will a greater good for them. For example, if my neighbor’s child is more gifted intellectually than my child, I should love the neighbor’s child more in that I will for that child his greater good. This would take the form, at least minimally, of rejoicing in the child’s intelligence and consequent academic success (vs. envy). But with respect to the intensity of our love, we should love more those more closely united to us. So I would will more intensely the smaller academic achievement of my own child; that is, I would do much more to develop the lesser talents of my own child than I would for the other child. [15]

IV. The Species of Friendship

There is yet another factor to take into account in determining the order of love. This is the variety in the species of friendship. A person has multiple friendships not only because he is friends with numerically distinct persons, but also because his friendships can differ in kind or species. All friendships are based upon some shared good (communicatio) and where there is a different good, there is a specifically different friendship. Thus Thomas distinguishes the friendships found within the family from those among citizens of the same polity, from those among fellow soldiers, and from those among fellow students. Thomas also refers to there being different attachments—coniunctiones—by which he designates the different ways people are joined on the basis of different goods. [16]

Now there is an order of love within each species of friendship. Thus among my family I can determine whom I should love more or less, keeping in mind both senses of loving more. So too among the military or the political friendships. The result is that if I ask whom I should love more, I must ask not only whether what is meant is willing the greater good or willing the good more intensely, but also within what species of friendship I will the good.

So long as the question refers to two persons loved within the same species, this issue does not arise. For example, when Thomas asks whether a person should love his children or his parents more, he replies simply that the person should love his parents as being better than his children and so should love his parents more by willing a greater good for them (i.e., honor), but the person should love his children as being more closely joined to him and so should have a more intense love for them (this appears in that normally he benefits his children more than his parents). [17] But let us suppose my brother and I are both in the army, in different units, and then ask whether I should love my brother more or another soldier in my own unit. The answer would be different depending upon the friendship we consider. In family matters, for example, I should love my brother more, since he is closer to me within that friendship. But in military matters, I must love the soldier in my unit more. Thus the answer to the question has to specify the species of the friendships. [18]

V. Priorities among One’s Loves: God and Self

The determination of priorities among one’s loves that we have seen up to this point has dealt solely with the loves one human person has for other human persons. In other words, we have seen what factors determine which of my fellow human beings I should love more and in what sense.

The next question to raise is the following: how should one’s love for oneself compare with one’s love for other human beings? Should I always and in all senses love myself more than other persons, or are there some persons whom I should love more than even myself? Thomas’s answer to this question is quite clear: I should always love myself more than the others.

Aquinas’s argument for this is quite simple. I love others with a love of friendship when I have some good in common with them, something that is ours; at the root of all such love is what he calls a communicatio, a sharing in some good (this is the similitude that he speaks of as a cause of friendship: we are alike in that we both share in the same good: our nature, our family, our city, etc.; see ST I-II, q. 27, a. 3). Thus I love my fellow professors in my department because we share in the common enterprise of teaching and research, that is, we are united because we aim at the same good. So too brothers are united around the shared good of their generation by their parents. Another of Thomas’s common examples is that of citizens who love one another with what he calls political friendship; the citizens love one another as united around the common good of the polity. This means, then, that I love the other person qua pertaining to the community of those who share this common good; I love that person, not as an isolated individual, but as ordered to that common good. Now, I only love those who belong to the communities to which I myself belong, for only thus can we be united around a common good. This means that I love those who are associated (consociati) with me in the community. But the very first condition for such an association to obtain is that I myself first belong to the community. Hence the common good must first of all be my good before it can be the basis for my loving others. I want the good, whatever it may be, first for myself and only then for the others joined to me. Thus self-love is the condition of loving any other person, and as such it must be more intense than the other loves. [19] Thomas expresses this point by comparing self-love to intellectus, the grasp of first principles. Just as intellectus is a superior and stronger form of knowledge than the scientia, or demonstrated knowledge, that depends upon it, so too self-love is superior to and stronger than the love of others that arises from it. [20]

While Thomas gives this argument with regard to the specific kind of friendship that is charity, it seems in principle to apply to all friendships. Hence it seems that any love of others is based on self-love and that consequently in any love of another, one loves oneself more than that other. We should note, however, that Thomas always maintains that the common good is loved more than one’s own private good (as long as we are seeking goods in the same order). But the common good is not a person but rather a good for persons, and so does not enter into the ordo amoris as Thomas describes it. [21]

There is, however, one case in which the common good is a person, and that is God. And it is precisely here that we encounter the one person who, according to Thomas, should be loved more than self. Thomas’s analysis rests on his view that God himself is the common good of the universe toward which every creature, as a part, is ordered. The universe is conceived of as a whole made up of subsisting parts whose unity consists in the order among the parts. This internal order constitutes a common good for the universe (as it does for any such whole, e.g., the political whole), but the internal order is itself directed to some external common good which is God. Thus, since the good of the whole is loved more than the good of any part considered in itself, God’s goodness is to be loved more than any good of any part; that is to say, God is to be loved more, both in terms of the good willed for him—his perfection—and in terms of intensity: all other goods are ultimately to be willed for the sake of God and consequently less than God. [22]

Thomas illustrates this with examples of his own. A hand will put itself in the way of a blow aimed at the head, because the good of the hand lies in the good of the whole body; so too a virtuous citizen will risk his life for the safety of his city, because he takes the good of the city to be more truly his own than his private safety. [23] In the same way, a creature who loves God more than himself does not give up his own good; he loves his own good in the whole to which he belongs.

Thomas also describes the relationship of creatures to God as one of part to whole in terms of participation. The perfections of all creatures are sharings or parts of the infinite perfection found in God. On this basis Thomas can relate the good found in any one creature as a part to the whole that God is; any created good is a part (a participation) of the good found in God. Thus any creature finds in God the same good that he loves in himself and finds it there more perfectly. That is to say, he can truly say of God’s goodness that it is his own, and so in loving God he is loving his own good as it is to be found in its most perfect form. A person should love his own good most intensely where he finds it most perfectly. [24] That a person should love as his own good a good that is not to be found in himself is not strange: this is what occurs any time a person loves a common good and takes as his own good a good that is a good not only for himself but also for persons other than himself.

It is important to note that, in his discussion of the ordo amoris, Thomas several times points out that the normal order (which he says is the per se order [25]) will change when the person to be benefited is in a condition of urgent need. In such cases it will be morally required to attend to the person in need, even though he may not be the person more closely connected to the agent. Here, Thomas says, there are no fixed rules and it is a matter of prudence to decide in each individual case what is required and appropriate. [26]

Conclusion

The order of love, then, is not a simple ranking of persons from nearest to farthest. To ask whom I should love more is to ask at least three further questions: whether “more” means a greater good or a more intense love; whether the person in question is better, or nearer to me, or both; and within what kind of friendship the question arises. Thomas’s answers yield a pattern at once realistic and demanding. I should rejoice in the greater goods of those who are better, even if they are strangers to me; I should labor most for those who are nearest, beginning with myself; and I should love God more than all, myself included, because in him I find my own good, and every good I share with others, in its perfect form.

Notes

1. See John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1979), pp. 16–17: “As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator.”

2. E.g., ST I-II, q. 26, a. 4, c.: “As the Philosopher says in Rhetoric II [1380b35], to love is to will good to someone.” For the incompleteness of this definition, see ST II-II, q. 27, a. 2, ad 1.

3. ST I, q. 20, a. 1, ad 3: “The act of love always tends toward two things: toward the good that one wills for someone, and toward the one for whom he wills it. For this is properly to love someone: to will good to him.” Cf. Quodlibet I, q. 4, a. 3, c.

4. ST I-II, q. 26, a. 4, c.: “The movement of love thus tends toward two things: toward the good that one wills for someone, whether for himself or for another, and toward the one for whom he wills the good. Toward the good that one wills for another, one has amor concupiscentiae; toward the one for whom one wills the good, one has amor amicitiae.”

5. ST II-II, q. 44, a. 7, c.; De perfectione spiritualis vitae, c. 14.

6. ST II-II, q. 25, a. 7, c.; q. 26, a. 5, c.; De perfectione spiritualis vitae, c. 14.

7. ST I, q. 20, a. 3, c.: “Since to love is to will good to someone, a thing can be loved more or less in two ways. In one way, on the part of the act of the will itself, which is more or less intense. . . . In another way, on the part of the good itself that one wills for the one loved; and in this way we are said to love that person more for whom we will a greater good, even if not with a more intense will.”

8. ST II-II, q. 26, a. 7, c.

9. ST I-II, q. 28, a. 2, c.; see also q. 25, a. 2, c.

10. De perfectione spiritualis vitae, c. 16: “Second, the perfection of love of neighbor is considered according to the intensity of love. For it is clear that the more intensely something is loved, the more readily other things are disregarded for its sake; from what a man disregards for the love of his neighbor, then, one can judge whether his love of neighbor is perfect.”

11. ST I, q. 60, a. 2.

12. ST II-II, q. 26, a. 4, ad 1; a. 9, c.

13. ST II-II, q. 114, a. 1, ad 2.

14. ST II-II, q. 26, a. 8, c.

15. ST II-II, q. 26, a. 7, c.

16. See, e.g., ST II-II, q. 26, a. 8 for the relationship of coniunctio and communicatio.

17. The good willed per se for one’s parents is honor and reverence. Per accidens, in time of special need, one would also benefit one’s parents as needed. See ST II-II, q. 101, a. 2.

18. There is still a question of what species take precedence over others; for this point see ST II-II, q. 26, a. 8.

19. ST II-II, q. 26, a. 4, c.: “God is loved as the principle of the good on which the love of charity is founded; a man loves himself out of charity insofar as he participates in that good; and his neighbor is loved insofar as he is his fellow in that good. Now fellowship is a reason for love by reason of a certain union in relation to God. Hence, just as unity is greater than union, so a man’s own participation in the divine good is a greater reason for love than another’s being associated with him in that participation. Therefore a man ought, out of charity, to love himself more than his neighbor.” I develop this argument at greater length in “Thomas Aquinas on Self-Love as the Basis for Love of Others,” Acta Philosophica 8 (1999): 23–44.

20. ST II-II, q. 25, a. 4, c.: “Since charity is a kind of friendship, we can speak of it in two ways. In one way, under the common notion of friendship; and in this respect we must say that friendship is not properly had toward oneself, but something greater than friendship. For friendship implies a certain union (Dionysius says that love is a unitive power), whereas each is one with himself, and unity is greater than union. Hence, just as unity is the principle of union, so the love with which one loves himself is the form and root of friendship; for we have friendship toward others in that we relate to them as to ourselves. As is said in Ethics IX, the marks of friendship toward another come from those toward oneself. So too, of first principles we have not scientia but something greater, namely, intellectus.”

21. ST II-II, q. 26, a. 4, ad 3: “The common good is always more lovable to each than his own good, just as the good of the whole is more lovable to the part itself than its own partial good, as has been said.” Cf. a. 3, c.: “. . . because each part naturally loves the common good of the whole more than its own particular good.”

22. ST I-II, q. 109, a. 3, c.; II-II, q. 26, aa. 2–3.

23. ST I, q. 60, a. 5, c.

24. ST I, q. 60, a. 5; In III Sent., d. 29, a. 3, c.

25. ST II-II, q. 26, a. 10, c.; q. 101, a. 2.

26. For this point see especially ST II-II, q. 31, a. 3, c.: “Absolutely speaking, each individual is to be given more of the benefit that pertains to that matter according to which he is more closely connected with us. Yet this can vary, depending on the time and place and situation. For in some instances a stranger should be helped more than even one’s own father—say, if the stranger is in extreme need and one’s father is not suffering such great need.” Also ad 1: “For one must understand that those who are more connected with us should be benefited more, all other things being equal. But if one of two individuals is more closely connected with us and the other is more needy, then there is no universal rule by which it can be determined which one should be helped more, since there are diverse degrees of both need and closeness. Rather, this requires the judgment of prudence.” This final text is Aquinas’s reply to an objection based on the Gospel admonition to invite the needy stranger to your dinner rather than family and friends who will invite you back (Luke 14:12–14). He takes this admonition to refer to the exception to the normal order of love, an exception based on a situation of urgent need. See also q. 26, a. 9, ad 3.

David M. Gallagher, formerly professor of philosophy at The Catholic University of America, lives in New York.

Cover: Agostino Carracci after Federico Barocci, Aeneas and His Family Fleeing Troy, engraving, 1595: Aeneas carries his father, Anchises, from the burning city, with his son, Ascanius, at his side. Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

Opening keynote, “AI and the Future of Work,” Leonum Institute for AI and Emerging Technologies, The Catholic University of America, September 25, 2026. Text as delivered, with sources added.

This is the second of two parts. Part I argued that the moral meaning of work, like that of having children, lies in the ranked goods to which it is ordered, and that the higher goods are learned by way of the lower.

4. Is There a Crisis of Work?

It would seem that there is not. Unemployment is relatively low. [1] Hours worked look pretty stable for the last forty years after a modest (7%) decline from 1960 to 1980. [2] Hours per person—including non-workers—actually rose as women entered the labor force through the 2000s. Email and devices have pulled work from the office into every corner of our lives: the commute and the hours after work. There was no major tech shift in work to correspond to the birth control pill, no work revolution to reflect the sexual revolution. Indeed, we professors still urgently assign Pieper to our students, as if the big problem were people working too much—the culture of “total work” that Pieper criticized in his day. [3]

On the contrary, there is a crisis of work that is still hidden, and we must take account of it before assessing AI and the future of work. I will give a summary account under three main headings: first, general work trends; second, the expansion of credit; and, third, the decline of marriage as a governing ideal.

First, as regards general work trends—and bear with me as I cite data that document my point—from 1965 to 2003 men’s “market hours worked” fell about 12 hours per week, while women’s hours rose about 7. At the same time, working at home fell for women, and leisure rose by 4–8 hours per week for both sexes. In other words, men worked less, while women worked more, supplementing household income. As a result, over those nearly forty years, leisure at home rose by almost a fifth of a 40-hour workweek. [4]

This recent trend falls within a long-term downward trend in male labor force participation (“LFP”). In 1954 virtually all American men aged 25–54—98%—were working or looking for work. It was 96% in 1965; 94% in 1980; 92% in 1990; 91.5% in 2000; it reached a low of 88% in 2014. It has hovered around 89% since 2019. [5]

A decline of nine percentage points may sound small, but it means that about one in nine prime-age men is neither working nor looking for work, versus one in fifty in 1954.

To understand this long-term trend among men, consider the following points. (1) It’s not that men switched to unpaid care. Time-use data show that non-working prime-age men spend less time on housework and childcare than working men and more time on screens. [6] (2) The decline is not a matter of weak demand for labor; it is, rather, a long-term trend that has persisted through booms and busts. (3) The case of women, by contrast, sharpens the point about demand. Prime-age women went in the opposite direction, from 37% LFP in 1950 to about 78% today, [7] which means that there has been a strong demand for workers—but men are not filling it. The downward trend in male LFP is seen mainly in non-college-educated men, and yet there are millions of unfilled jobs available in the trades. [8]

The downward trend in LFP is seen in other age ranges as well. I’ve just considered “prime-age” male and female workers. What about younger people? “Pre-prime-age” trends run parallel: teen LFP peaked in 1979 at around 60%. It fell to around 34% in 2011. And the reason is not that these young people are in school, because the participation rate of teens enrolled in school fell from 42% in 2000 to 25% in 2015. [9] If work begets work (as I claimed earlier), then our work formation pipeline is looking rather thin.

What about people at the other end of their lives, nearing retirement or “post-prime age”? In this group we see a massive retirement expansion made possible in part by Social Security and Medicare: LFP for men 65 and older fell sharply from 45.8% in 1950 to 15.6% in 1993. [10] This trend reversed in the 1990s, with the change from defined-benefit to defined-contribution plans. This reversal fits the lower motive/higher motive thesis beautifully: remove the lower motive and men leave; restore it and they come back. Nobody is staying for the higher one.

In sum, general work trends do point to a crisis of work.

The second main heading under which I wish to make my case is the expansion of credit supplied by fiat money. Household debt relative to GDP was about 25% in the early 1950s. It crossed 50% in the 1980s, and peaked just under 100% in 2008. [11] The ratio of household debt to disposable income went from about 30% in 1950 to about 130% at the peak. Consumer credit (not counting mortgages) ballooned from $21 billion in 1950 to $5 trillion today. [12] About half of Americans with credit cards do not pay off their balances each month. [13] We all know the story of government debt—how we recently passed $40 trillion in national public debt with some fanfare. But Americans in general—as households and as a nation—live permanently and structurally beyond their means. That is to say, they consume what they have not produced. Alternatively, we may say that they consume what they have not (yet) worked for. That is very much a crisis of work. It is a matter of income without production—feigned income. I won’t dwell long on the point here, but ultimately our nation’s full transition to fiat money in 1971 was a sine qua non of this phenomenon of feigned income. Of itself it was perhaps not sufficient to get us to where we are now, but it was absolutely a necessary precondition.

This phenomenon of income without work has cultural manifestations as well: consider trends in betting and gambling, meme stocks, and trash crypto; also, the wider acceptance of UBIs and transfers, not only on the political left but now also on the political right. This is why the California billionaire tax has garnered such broad appeal. [14] Redistribution of wealth is simply expected as a general right owed to everyone: everyone assuming that someone, somewhere, is doing the work. And yet, in fact, we are not doing the work: we are borrowing from our children.

I have been engaged in examining a disputed question, as it were: “whether America is a country obsessed with an ideal of total work” (as someone might claim in the spirit of Pieper). I have been giving a sed contra of sorts, based on trends in labor force participation and borrowing. My third and last argument in this sed contra draws on a point made by Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy in 1942. In a chapter entitled “Decomposition,” Schumpeter argued that a reason to suppose that capitalism might undermine itself was that “the family and the family home used to be the mainspring of the typically bourgeois kind of profit motive,” the locus in life, that is, of “the man whose views and motives are shaped by such a home and who means to work and to save primarily for wife and children.” [15] Schumpeter observed: remove the family, and one of the great lower motives for work goes too. His argument should be read in its entirety: I have not the space or time to do it justice here. But in his view “capitalist inventiveness” would produce “contraceptive devices of ever-increasing efficiency,” implementing new tastes formed by capitalism’s “rationalization of everything in life.” He saw that “a sort of inarticulate system of cost accounting” would reach this most private domain and be applied to children. [16] As it did so, he recognized, so too would the incentive to work decline.

Arguably, the culture of the sexual revolution at its origin in the 1960s was anti-work. But while there was no immediate, society-wide “anti-work revolution” corresponding to “the sexual revolution,” nonetheless, non-marriage and non-childbearing have been silent killers of work. In 1960 about 72% of American adults were married; today about half are. [17]

The relevant consideration would be that, in the final analysis, it’s not that people stopped getting married and having children because “things got too expensive.” It is rather that men stopped working insanely hard because they were able to have fewer children and split the working hours with their wives. Without the “wolf at the door” that one man in my recent fieldwork described, or the “twist of the knife” that another mentioned, they lacked ordinary, powerful human motives to work hard.

This final point is somewhat dark. It encourages us not to look only at what has happened (downward trends in work, wanting to consume outside of our work earnings) but also to imagine a counterfactual: what would have happened to male work and productivity if men had not stopped getting married and having kids at the same rates as in the past? The decline in LFP is mostly a decline among unmarried men plus a collapse in the share of men who are married. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us, fathers of young children work the most, with a 95% LFP compared with 89% for all prime-age men. [18]

Let me deal briefly with a few objections you might want to raise. What about these households with more leisure? Isn’t that basically good, to have more leisure? Sure, in the abstract, leisure is good; but we are also flooded with memes and complaints about how the poverty line for a family of four might be reaching $140,000, [19] and about how a household cannot get by on one income as it could in the past. We are trying to square a circle: to praise the leisure effects of moving from one fully driven worker to two half-driven ones, while also complaining that the things households want seem increasingly out of reach.

You might also be concerned that I’m overstating the credit and fiat point: it’s one thing to object to debt, but quite another to accuse debtors of trying to get something for nothing. After all, they’re promising to pay it back with future work. There’s some truth to that, of course, as regards secured loans especially. I’ve paid off cars with my own work, and most of us hope to pay off a home with our own work. But with unsecured loans, it is a different story, and, in any case, structurally the point stands: household and public debt appears to have no “limiting” principle. We just “raise the debt ceiling” again and again.

The current tremors in the bond market have once again provoked astute commentators to worry about accumulating debt—the ten-year Treasury yield crossed 5% on September 14, 2026, and the man who coined the phrase “bond vigilantes” wrote on September 15 that he was starting to worry. [20] Is a debt crisis in our future? Maybe this year, maybe the next. I do not know. But I do know that living as we have lived since 1971—with no natural constraint on printing money or credit expansion—is a human experiment that has never before been tried. We are a little over fifty years into this experiment, which has much to do with how we see the meaning of work. I do not think the experiment will last, because natural law is against it. Money is a real thing that is merely the most tradable product of our work—not a notional one. We have behaved as if we could make it notional, and make it correspond by fiat to our consumption demands. But ideas have consequences, and if the products of our work are merely notional—not tied to any true purchasing power set by reality—then isn’t it easy to begin to see our work too as merely notional?

Finally, as regards Schumpeter’s point, you might argue that the family isn’t the only lower motive for work, since unmarried and childless men still work, and some of them work very, very hard. This is fair. I do not claim the family is the only mainspring of work. But historically it has been a mainspring that reached to every man, not just the ambitious. It has done so by nature, not by education or culture. What we see today, instead, is a concentration of work among the ambitious, whose hours have increased since the 1980s. It is difficult to estimate the magnitude of the counterfactual: what LFP and productivity would look like today if pre-1960s marriage and family formation patterns had held. To my knowledge, no one has attempted a full estimate; the causal identification would be formidable. But here is a back-of-the-envelope estimate: the six-point gap in LFP between fathers of young children and all prime-age men amounts to about 3.8 million workers. At perhaps $150,000 of GDP per employed worker, we get around $570 billion a year, which is about 2% of GDP before factoring in wage premiums, hours, and fertility effects on the size of the workforce (missing males). Adding in even 5% premiums on the remaining married-equivalent men would push the magnitude of the difference to over 3% of GDP. [21]

Getting those estimates more nearly right would make a great paper. Maybe AI can help me write it. But the gap is real, and it is hardly ever named. The point may be put in this way: we as a nation are less prosperous when men are less married.

Someone might say, looking over my three separate claims about a crisis of work, that in the end I have made only one: the change in marriage and fertility is the cause; the expansion in credit and fiat money is the means—and an accelerant. The fall in labor force participation is only the symptom, the part we can see.

5. In the Beginning

I have argued so far that (1) the moral meaning of work depends on the goods to which it is ordered; (2) the higher goods are learned by working for lower goods when this activity is illuminated by faith; and (3) there is a hidden crisis of work, which has been slowly generated by the crisis in the family.

I have also argued that the crisis in the family has arisen mainly through the erosion of the lower motives for marriage and having children. The result is that faith now correlates with robust family formation, because faith supplies the higher motives, and the higher ones are the only ones left. Putting this all together, one gets the conclusion: faith will increasingly correlate with the lived experience of work, the work that begets work, and faith will be increasingly vital to parsing the challenges presented by AI and the future of work.

I have often been asked: “Can we get the marriage and family ‘magic’ you describe in your book without the religion part?” I can’t say definitively “no.” I’ve interviewed some remarkable men and women who do what faith-inspired families do with apparently no faith. But they are rare, and they are outliers.

We have to be clear that living communities of people with faith help young people get married and have kids in several ways: (1) They name and define the eternal and transcendent value of the child against the false claims of a humanity constantly willing to sacrifice some human lives (the poor, minorities, the weak, or the young) in favor of the demands of other human lives. This is not new but a constant temptation of fallen humanity. (2) They present living models of marriage, including chastity and fidelity, to show that when we say “we believe in love” we mean that it is actually possible, that it is real. You can’t believe in love if everywhere around you are broken promises and failed covenants. (Then the devil whispers: you can’t.) (3) They dampen the sense of risk for young couples, since they say, in effect, “This community stands behind you. You will not fail. We will assist you.”

My prediction is that the same people who wonder today about the “magic” worked by faith for marriages will tomorrow ask about the “magic” worked by faith for a robust ethic of work. And I will say again: I cannot say definitively that nothing besides faith will work. However, in this domain as well, faith names the higher goods, presents models of hard work, and is the ultimate “I have your back” when the going looks risky. “God will provide,” we say—and here is a people who really believes it. That is the natural, hopeful, childlike outlook of people of faith, and it is our natural outlook at this university. Human work is ordered to prosperity, and prosperity is ordered to the growth of the human race, beginning with the growth of our families.

Now at last I can say this: the reason the analogy between children and work does its job, and the reason they both point back to the role of faith, in a time when lower goods give way to the higher, may be found in Genesis 1:28, where children and work arrive for the human race in one breath: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it” (RSV-CE).

In Laborem Exercens John Paul II wrote:

The Church finds in the very first pages of the Book of Genesis the source of her conviction that work is a fundamental dimension of human existence on earth. … Even though these words do not refer directly and explicitly to work, beyond any doubt they indirectly indicate it as an activity for man to carry out in the world. [22]

I’ve had reason to wonder, lately, whether our age is the first age for which “be fruitful and multiply” seems truly binding—for ours is the first age in which reproduction became most fully a matter of choice or human will. Until 1800 the world population hardly budged. But since 1800—we’ve all seen the hockey-stick graphs—human population has exploded, and with it, material and intellectual prosperity.

When Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum in 1891, barely a quarter of the world had escaped the grinding reality of the other three-quarters: hunger, poverty, and premature death. [23] This was “the social question,” as it was later called by Pius XI. [24] But today, in Pope Leo XIV’s time, thanks be to God, the proportions are nearly inverted. Fewer than one in ten still face material poverty of the type identified by Pope Leo XIII. [25] The “new social question,” if you will, was named by Mother Teresa, and by John Paul II in his turn: spiritual poverty. It is the same spiritual poverty that lies at the root of the crisis in fertility.

If the new poverty is spiritual, the remedy is not more work or less work, but more faith. And so: the future of work—and of greater progress on poverty and human development in all its forms—depends today as in no previous time upon the future of faith.

In the past, a stiff-necked people may have been fruitful for their own reasons; now, as we are still stiff-necked, we will be fruitful only for God’s reasons. The Commandments, from Genesis to the Decalogue, describe the order of reality. And they are a unity: loosen one and the others loosen with it, as the course of human history shows. Obey God. Honor your parents. Do not take innocent human life. Do not violate marriage or traffic in sex outside of marriage. Do not try to get something for nothing. Do not even think about trying to get something for nothing (the essence of “coveting”). From this vantage point, the commandment to “subdue the earth” through work takes a noble place in salvation history. As this is the first time we’ve been able not to multiply, is it any wonder that we are now tempted not to work?

Where do these remarks leave us on AI? That is not my job to decide, but it is ours to explore. At the very least, I hope we will avoid the hackneyed paths. AI will not replace human work any more than tractors replaced farming, though the number of farmers fell. It will change the nature of some work for some people. Likewise, AI will not free us from work—the Elon Musk–style vision—because AI cannot change the structure of reality given by Nature’s God. These are the fears and hopes of a people already in a crisis of work—already accustomed to getting something for nothing. As a consequence, they look upon AI with greedy eyes—maybe it is the diviner’s rod, or the Midas touch? And then we worry that it will conjure on its own. If you have worked with AI, you know that, of course, it must be guided, guarded, and judged. Human judgment will become even more important, not less so, because judgment is of a person. Nor can AI do work, for work is the domain of the person. “Only man is capable of work, and only man works,” John Paul II wrote in the opening lines of Laborem Exercens. [26]

Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying that AI erodes the lower motives for work, the way machines, pensions, and the pill eroded the lower motives for children. It is the erosion of the lower motives for family that has eroded the lower motives for work. AI is simply arriving at a strange moment—a moment when the motives for work are already reduced—and it arrives as a massive temptation to use it irresponsibly: the conjurer, the something-for-nothing. A patient assessment says otherwise: AI cannot replace the thinking and judgment that human work requires. So: in the hands of the diligent and the hard-working, AI is tremendously valuable. In the hands of the lazy or the greedy—I mean, with the structural laziness and greediness we see in our society—it is tremendously dangerous.

AI won’t challenge the meaning of work. And it won’t challenge what it means to be human, at least for those of us with the eyes of faith. Rather, it will call forth the gifts of the spirit of man—of whom Gaudium et Spes says: “by his interior qualities he outstrips the whole sum of mere things” [27]—and, we may now add, the whole sum of AI agents.

Notes

[1] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Current Population Survey.

[2] OECD; Penn World Table, annual hours per employed worker.

[3] Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1948).

[4] Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst, “Measuring Trends in Leisure,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 122, no. 3 (2007).

[5] BLS, series LNS11300061; see Nicholas Eberstadt, Men Without Work (2016).

[6] Eberstadt, Men Without Work, drawing on the American Time Use Survey.

[7] BLS, series LNS11300062.

[8] BLS, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.

[9] BLS, Current Population Survey, ages 16–19.

[10] BLS, labor force participation of men aged 65 and older.

[11] Federal Reserve; FRED series HDTGPDUSQ163N.

[12] Federal Reserve, Statistical Release G.19, Consumer Credit.

[13] Federal Reserve, Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking.

[14] California Proposition 40, November 2026 ballot.

[15] Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), ch. 14, p. 160.

[16] Cf. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, pp. 157–58.

[17] Pew Research Center.

[18] BLS, “Employment Characteristics of Families.”

[19] On the “$140,000 poverty line,” see Noahpinion.

[20] Ed Yardeni, as reported in Fortune, September 19, 2026; see also Bloomberg, September 13 and September 23, 2026.

[21] Author’s arithmetic: six points of roughly 63 million prime-age men ≈ 3.8 million; at about $150,000 of GDP per employed worker ≈ $570 billion, against a GDP of roughly $29 trillion.

[22] John Paul II, Laborem Exercens (1981), §4.

[23] Cf. Robert William Fogel, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100 (2004).

[24] Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (1931).

[25] Our World in Data, extreme-poverty series.

[26] John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, preface.

[27] Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes (1965), §14.

Cover: Jean-François Millet, The Sower (1850), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

From the Editor

This week the Review acts as the journal of record for American Catholic intellectual life, publishing two works that represent it at its best. Today and tomorrow, in two parts, we publish the opening keynote that Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, Director of the Gibbons Institute, gave last month at the Leonum Institute for AI and Emerging Technologies of The Catholic University of America. On Thursday we publish a lecture by David Gallagher on the ordo amoris, the “order of love,” in St. Thomas Aquinas. Dr. Gallagher, formerly Associate Professor of Philosophy at the same university, is a Thomist of the highest rank.

Demographic decline and the ordo amoris have been among the most discussed topics of recent public debate; readers will not want to miss these pieces.

The Moral Meaning of Work, Part I

by Catherine Ruth Pakaluk

Opening keynote, “AI and the Future of Work,” Leonum Institute for AI and Emerging Technologies, The Catholic University of America, September 25, 2026. Text as delivered, without the opening welcome, and with sources added.

1. The Wrong Invitation

I want to begin with a confession. I did not think the invitation to give this address was the correct one. Though I have followed AI with curiosity, it did not become personally useful to me for research and administrative work until this calendar year. I’m now an avid user of AI (hopefully responsibly), but I’ve made no specialty of writing or speaking on it. Rather, I’ve spent the last several years writing and speaking about the moral meaning of something else: children.

So when this invitation arrived it looked like a mismatch. Indeed, for a moment I wondered if they had meant it for that other Professor Pakaluk, the editor of the new American Catholic Quarterly Review, who addressed the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas in June on “Contradictions in Natural and Artificial Intelligence.”

After I confirmed that it was meant for me, one thing gave me pause before I declined: in helping my audiences to think more clearly about children, I’ve found it useful to draw a close analogy with work. A good analogy usually goes both ways. If familiarity with “why we work” can help us understand “why we have (or don’t have) children,” might familiarity with the “moral meaning of children” shed light on the “moral meaning of work”?

I hoped that it would be so. Let me explain.

2. Lower Motives and Higher Motives

The whole question about falling birth rates is a funny one: we are trying to understand why people do not do a thing. This is difficult, philosophically speaking!

Contrast this with other troubling trends: social media usage; drug addiction; divorce. In these we are trying to understand why people do a thing: addictive programming (social media); self-medicating for depression or anxiety; relief of suffering from living with a partner in disunity. Principles of human action suggest that we see in every “doing,” whether good or bad, the good that is sought: every action, as Aristotle says, aims at some good. [1] The first principle of moral life and of human action is that good is to be done (and evil avoided). [2] Thus, these actions have motives that can be understood—a good that is sought—even if we count the good as mistaken or harmful.

Let’s consider instead two possible “not doings” that might be troubling: not going to church; not breathing. Any departure from breathing is likely to be a real cause for concern: the person is gravely ill or impaired. However, not going to church we tend to analyze in a different way. We don’t say: “Goodness, people not going to church are gravely ill or impaired.” Rather, we say: well, why did people use to go to church? Why did they go in the past? We discover the reasons for “not doing” in the reasons “for doing.”

With not having children, the diagnosis depends on whether you think having kids is more like going to church, or more like breathing. A lot of the discourse seems to presuppose that having kids is like breathing. But of course, having kids is not like breathing at all: childbearing for a rational animal is (and is meant to be) a result of human decision in cooperation with the divine. We are no more compelled by nature to have children than we are compelled by nature to go to church, even though we would affirm that “having children is natural” just as going to church is natural.

So: Why do people have kids—or why did they have kids in the past? There are many types of reasons to have children: labor in an agricultural society; to ensure care in old age; for help around the home; as the fulfillment of sexual love; perhaps even because God says children are a blessing, and we believe Him. Each of these is a fine reason to have kids, but we would certainly want to rank them. Utilitarian reasons—labor, help—are what I call “lower motives.” To seek the end of a sexual union, “higher.” To seek the good (or blessing) of the child himself and give glory to God, perhaps “higher still.”

Let’s turn to: Why do people work? We might first do work as a child because someone tells us to do so—a parent. Or we might work as a child because we are rightly curious about nature, fascinated by how things go when we dig, build, and discover. Later, when we leave our home, we might work in order to make a living. However curious we are, or however much we love our work, every job has its tedium. What keeps us going is a drive to provide for ourselves and for others who depend upon us. But finally: we might work also to give glory to God, to cooperate with His ongoing creation, to submit ourselves to the toil and frustration that is our lot in this vale of tears, to become willing cooperators in God’s work of creating each of us anew, for man is the subject of work, as John Paul II says. [3] Here is a hierarchy of possible motives. Surely it is better to work for the supernatural motives above all, and to care less for the human ones. But we would rightly fault a man or woman for neglecting those good human motives, since God Himself intended them.

And for good reason! How many of us would work at all if the lower motives were not present? How many of us would come to know the higher motives? In fact, at first we work to eat (for ourselves); later we work to provide for other selves; and at last, with grace, we learn to work for God. That progression is ordinary, not a defect. A feature and not a bug. We become better by working; virtues and graces hang in the balance. We contribute our share to the common good, laying a foundation for greater abundance.

More goods turn out to be attached to working than merely making a living: almost like a divine trick. This is true for all work: for HVAC specialists, restaurateurs, bus drivers, and for any work assisted or enabled by AI. Work is an opportunity for transformation and sanctification because an eternal being is the subject: in the traditional sense, he who works is the subject doing the work; but he is also the object in a surprising sense, because he is himself made new when he applies his labor to the objects of his work. [4]

This is a critical insight of the Christian life, originating in the Gospels and found immediately in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 18:3; 20:34–35); it is evidenced in the great religious orders—think of the Benedictine motto, ora et labora. But for us today it is exemplified best by that saint of ordinary work, St. Josemaría Escrivá. [5] All human work is God’s work.

But woe to us if such lofty motives—to become transformed, to be sanctified—were a necessary starting point, for how many of us would pick up the work? Frankly, that doesn’t sound very appealing, does it? With work we must learn by doing: so the best preparation for work is work.

The point about children emerges more clearly now. If people have fewer children today, we should ask first about the motives: Why do people have kids? Or why did they have kids in the past? Perhaps the first mover, the motive, was originally the sexual love to which all men and women are drawn; perhaps also they willed and sought the more utilitarian goods: help at home, care in old age, the companionship of a family. But where nearly everyone has children because the lower motives make it so, as a rule, and with grace, society learns the wisdom of having children. The higher motives are slowly learned: that children really are a blessing from God, an expression of divine goodness, the purpose of marriage, and to be desired for their own sakes. The best preparation for having children is having children.

And why not? We are not angels. Most of us appear to need a nudge or a kick toward the path that is most noble. There is humility and realism in this. It’s not that men and women of the past were cold-hearted utilitarians. It’s rather that God’s design appears to draw us to higher purposes through lower ones.

With children the trouble is that the lower motives have been steadily eroded: economic growth and machines chip away at the need for labor; savings and pensions, the need for security; birth control and family planning, the identification of children as the fruit of sexual love. If, as an empirical fact in the modern world, only the most religious people have birth rates above replacement, that is because faith supplies the higher motives, and they are the only ones standing. [6]

3. From Motives to Meaning

How are motives related to meaning? The word motive comes from the Latin movere, “to move.” [7] Medieval Latin used motivum as a noun for “a moving cause, a reason.” [8] So a motive is a mover. Linguistically it is related to motion, and to e-motion (to move out or away). Aquinas’s term for what moves the will is motivum—a mover—in this sense. What we really mean, though, is what pulls or attracts: the subject is moved by the good that entices. [9]

The “reasons” or “moving causes” are simply the goods sought—what the will is after. Thus, if many goods are attached to one action, there are many possible motives, or moving causes. And, as the goods can be ranked or compared in value, so too the motives can be ranked or compared. They can also be assessed, against various standards, as right or proper.

The word meaning comes instead from Old English mænan, to intend, or to have in mind. [10] If a motive is the reason moving you toward a good, the meaning is the good that you intend to obtain. Motive and meaning are two sides of the same human action. In cases where many goods are attached to one action—such as work, or children—we can intend (or mean to achieve) only some of the goods, but we may get the others into the bargain. Or we can intend all of the goods attached to the action, which is more meritorious.

We can say that the meaning of an activity is the ranked set of goods to which the action is ordered. What does it mean to be ordered? Well, simply, that God intended those goods—or, if you prefer, Nature and the author of Nature. So the meaning of work is all the goods that God intended from my work; my own meaning is what I intend with my work. If I intend something disordered, then what the action means to me is different from what it means to God, or what it means “in reality.” But if I intend merely the lower ordered goods, God allows for that subjective meaning (or sense of purpose), and intends it; He may nevertheless bring about whatever higher goods He has willed. And thanks be to God for that!

So: the moral meaning of work includes the whole range of goods that God intended to come from our work. The word “moral” isn’t doing any extra work: every human activity has moral content. We can just as well say “the human meaning of work,” since the first principle of the moral law is that good is to be done and evil avoided. Work is a good for man (subject to all the necessary caveats for any particular work). So, to inquire about the “moral” meaning of work is to inquire about the right and proper goods that God attached to work, and how we appraise them (subjectively: aligning our purposes) and how we best seek them (objectively: fitting means to ends). (See in the word “means” exactly this meaning of mean.)

Likewise: the moral meaning of having children includes the whole range of goods that God intended to come from having children—including the children themselves, who are eternal beings.

Removing a lower good from an action doesn’t strip it of its meaning; rather, it exposes the higher goods that were there all along. This is what has happened with children. The activity survives (though changed) in society only by virtue of the remaining (higher) goods. The moral meaning of children has not changed through the erosion of certain lower goods intended or tied to it by nature; what has changed is that childbearing survives differently in society, with the sustaining role of faith emerging for the first time in human history.

This poses a question: has something similar happened to work? Before asking what AI will do to work, let us assess our moment briefly, as we have done with children. Is there a global collapse of work to correspond to the (coming) global collapse of workers produced by demographic decline?

Part II follows tomorrow.

Notes

[1] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I.1, 1094a1–3.

[2] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 94, a. 2.

[3] John Paul II, Laborem Exercens (1981), §6.

[4] Cf. John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, §9; on being made new, cf. 2 Cor 5:17.

[5] Cf. Josemaría Escrivá, Friends of God, nos. 55–72.

[6] See Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, Hannah’s Children (2024); cf. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde and Patrick Norrick, “Terra Incognita: The Economics of a Shrinking World”, NBER Working Paper 35809 (2026).

[7] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “motive.”

[8] Du Cange, Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, s.v. motivum.

[9] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 9, a. 1.

[10] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “mean,” v.1.

Cover: Jean-François Millet, The Angelus (1857–59), Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Arthur Waldon

This is the second and concluding part of Arthur Waldon’s essay from our number of January 1883; Part I appeared yesterday. Having sketched the poet and ascetic, Waldon now follows the stream of painters who came to Assisi to draw inspiration at the saint’s tomb. With it we close our week for St. Francis.

“Sanctitatis nova signa
Prodierunt laude digna
Mira valde et benigna
In Francisco credita,”

sings Brother Thomas à Celano, in his sequence of the Saint. In truth, the effects of that sanctity were at once wonderful and new. Still in the bloom of manhood, according to years, when he left the scene of his activity, his mark was there indelibly. And its impress only deepened and intensified by the shock which his sudden summons to heaven created among those who had felt dependent on him. If there was one thing more pronounced than another, in this influence, it was the fact of a new tendency towards the love of the beautiful as it is in nature, and of its dedication by a unanimous impulse to the highest ends of man. St. Francis was, as we have seen, a poet, and his poetry pervaded, impersonated everything, so that the very atmosphere of Assisi seemed sufficient to create and nourish the inspiration of Christian art.

Let us hear the Protestant Milman on the subject, who yet fails in his attempt to explain the singular phenomenon of this influence:

“Strange it might appear that the arts, the highest luxuries, if we may so speak, of religion, should be fostered, cultivated, cherished, and distributed by those who professed to reduce Christianity to more than its primitive simplicity, its nakedness of all adornment, its poverty. Strange that these should become the most munificent patrons of art, the most consummate artists; that their cloistered palaces should be the most sumptuous in architecture, and the most richly decorated by sculpture and painting; at once the workshops and the abodes of those who executed most admirably. Assisi, the birthplace of St. Francis, the poor, self-denying wanderer over the face of the earth, who hardly owned the cord which girt him, who possessed not a breviary of his own, who worshipped in the barren mountains, whose companions were the outcasts of human society,—Assisi becomes the capital, the young, gorgeous capital of Christian art.”[1]

He tells us, further on, that men who had an irresistible calling to be artists became Franciscans, because in that order they found those emotions which were to express themselves in art awakened, cherished, and strengthened. And no doubt, as the youth of Europe eager after science journeyed to Bologna, so that in a short time the two great bodies of the university, the Citramontani and the Ultramontani, counted among their hearers students from more than thirty different nationalities, so the youth that loved the arts came from afar to Assisi, there to gather inspiration and gain schooling. And in this concourse of the best geniuses a pious rivalry arose, giving an ever fresh impulse to the work that was going on. With noble generosity each left a monument of his achievements at the tomb of St. Francis as a token of gratitude to him to whom they felt that they owed all. Not a church or chapel, not a convent wall or ceiling in that favored city which is not sacred with the touch of some inspired brush. It is one vast academy, containing the noblest creations of human genius and piety; and though age has destroyed much of that which, after all, was but the faint expression of so much that is noble and admirable in the Christian’s soul, yet there remains enough to make that single town of Assisi, even at this day, the choicest collection of purely Christian art.

The disciples of St. Francis, who in his own day could be counted by thousands, who could be met with in every town and city throughout Italy, and even beyond the Alps and the sea, these perpetuated the spirit of their holy founder. It was not strange, then, that in the face of this new growth of feeling and devotion, the old mummy-like images of the Byzantine school were unable any longer to awaken a responsive echo in the soul of the Christian. Painting up to that time had been entirely in the hands of the Greeks. Their stiff, often grotesque forms, conventional coloring, and unnatural drapery had nothing in them of the ancient grace of their early masters. The new generation, growing up under the monastic discipline and general influence in all spheres of life of the Friars Minor, missed the freshness, the life, the something with a seraph touch in it at which their own hearts could catch fire.

But the young artist, the devout painter who drew the breath of inspiration from the hallowed Grotto of Alvernia, him they understood, and quickly his fame spread, and the builders and the guardians of God’s house sought him out, that he might breathe life into the walls, which were to instruct their people and at the same time fitly enshrine the holy of holies.

Some writers have dated the beginning of the mystic school from Gentile da Fabriano, perhaps because at that time it presents a more marked contrast to the Florentine and Bolognese schools, to which the anything but beneficial patronage of the Medici gave eventually so dangerous a direction that it actually undid much of the work of St. Francis by substituting the love of nature for its own sake in place of that love for God’s sake. Other writers place Oderisio Gubbio at the head of this school, whilst the honor of having been the first at least to abandon the manner of the Greeks is generally accorded to Cimabue. And yet such men as Giunta Pisano, Guido of Sienna, and others of the same day, unquestionably pointed the way to this departure. An old inscription, mentioned by P. Angeli, says of Giunta that he was the first Italian artist.[2]

It is true that in the works of these early painters there is still a great deal of indecision. It could hardly be otherwise. Art is not in every stage of its life the complete expression of either the spirit or the time that produces it. The soul may be said to be breathed into the rough mass of solid stone in the very conception of the artist, but it wants time to assume shape and form and become the perfect reflection of the original mind. It is in the mature man’s face that we trace the peculiar character which is his, developed, indeed, in action, but there in all its peculiarity from the days of his babyhood. Thus these artists served as the connecting link between St. Francis and the most perfect exponents in art of his spirit. They gathered the seed and scattered it about the surrounding mountains and valleys, and it was some time before the new flowers grew up to perfume the air about with their sweet odors. As for Giunta, he was certainly under the direct influence of St. Francis. We know that he went to see him at Assisi, where, as we gather from Lanzi, he painted the first known portrait of the Saint. Soon after the death of the latter he returned to Assisi, and here has left us his best pictures. His paintings in the Church of the Angioli are far superior to the best efforts of the Byzantine school, both in truth to human expression and in disposition of the drapery. He also directed the paintings that were to honor St. Francis in his church at Pisa, which Cimabue and Giotto, it appears, afterwards completed. “These paintings may be ruder, but they are not less expressive than the floating forms of Guido or Murillo.”[3]

Next in order we have Cimabue. He also had learned his art from the Greeks, and his early manner strongly betrays their style. All at once, however, he seems to have come under the spell of St. Francis. There is a picture of the Saint and various little legends surrounding it in the Church of Santa Croce accredited to him, and bearing decided marks of Byzantine training. If it be authentic, which Lanzi doubts, it certainly indicates the direction which his genius took. It seems as if he had vowed henceforth to paint only for the glory of our Saint. In Pisa he completed an altar-piece for the Sons of St. Francis. He then went to Assisi. Here, as in the case of Giunta, we find his best productions. “None of his frescoes,” says Lanzi, “give so good an idea of Cimabue’s power as the truly magnificent paintings in the Church of Assisi.”

Here we see the evangelists and doctors of the Church instructing the monks of the Franciscan Order, executed with an originality of conception and arrangement altogether new in the light of contemporary works.

But Giotto still excels him. The paintings of both masters are side by side. Giotto too, true to the love that gave birth to his conceptions, chose for the principal subject of his brush the life of St. Francis. He became the model for generations throughout Tuscany. With him at the same fountain drank Dante. As in the days of Pericles, so there existed at this time a close resemblance of spirit between the art of poetry and that of painting. It was but natural, then, that there should likewise exist an intimate friendship between men of similar talent and like aims. Dante seems even at one time to have given his attention to painting under Giotto’s guidance. He certainly was a master in the art of drawing, and we have it on the authority of Benvenuto da Imola[4] and of Baldinucci, in his Life of Giotto, that the latter painted at Naples from designs drawn for him by Dante. We may here add the name of Oderisio da Gubbio, who painted with Giotto. Imagine the intercourse of these three men, great souls, inspired by the same noble motives, they pictured, each in his way, yet all in the same grand way, the glories of St. Francis. They have likewise immortalized each other. The undoubtedly most correct portrait of Dante which we have is from the hand of Giotto, whose praises in turn, together with those of Oderisio, are chanted in the melodious stanzas of the Divina Commedia.

Restless in his activity and zeal, we see Giotto, so like his holy patron, spreading the newly-learned gospel of his art in all the cities of Italy, from Naples to Lombardy, and beyond.

We must pass over a host of great painters, masters such as Orcagna, Gentile da Fabriano,—so truly the gentle, in name and in character,—the Bartolos, especially Taddeo, and that remarkable devotee of St. Francis, Margaritone of Arezzo, all in turn continuing and swelling the stream that had its source on Mount Alverno. Following the central line of the Apennines, we see it dividing, one branch with sportive and sounding current passing up into the Romagna, the other peacefully and gently flowing southward through Umbria and towards the Eternal City, both reaching out far into the next century, and inundating with their sweet fresh waters the charming valleys of Italy. And looking north, we meet an angel keeping guard over the waters. His white robe is that of the Sons of St. Dominic. With Fra Angelico the Dominicans take the lead in the field of Christian art. Did the angelic youth of Fiesole, so superior in his way, owe aught to St. Francis of Assisi? We shall see.

It is admitted on all hands that Fra Angelico studied Giotto’s manner of painting with great assiduity. His angels—and in these he excels—are imitations of the great master-disciple of Assisi, with only the difference that Angelico applied purer colors. This fact alone might be sufficient to convince us that the genius which St. Francis had diffused about him must likewise have touched the young Dominican. We have seen how the flame that issued from the seraphic patriarch had laid its hold even on St. Dominic, in spite of his totally different genius; how he had sought out St. Francis, sat at his feet to listen to his tales of divine love, and eagerly asked permission to be present at the general chapter of the Friars Minor. He wished to learn from men who had no other school than that of charity, no training but that of unlimited obedience in executing works of love, no doctrine but that of Christian poverty and humility. Whilst his was the lofty intellect appointed by God to gather the straying minds, to confound the heresy of the Albigenses, to crush the serpent’s head of a false philosophy, St. Francis was the heart overflowing with affectionate sympathy for his fallen brethren, at war with one another, and without peace in themselves. To him had been assigned the giant task to stay the tide of the lust of the eyes, the passions of the flesh, and to counteract the false asceticism which had taken form in the vagaries of the Waldenses. Yet if we may be permitted to judge the comparative strength of two such giants, so different in parts yet exercising a mutual attraction towards each other, we should incline to call St. Francis the stronger. Love informing the will exercises a greater strain than intellect, convincing and moving to action. And like his master must have felt the disciple, the pure, the simple-hearted Fra Angelico. How often he traversed, as we read in his life, the beautiful valley between Foligno and Assisi to where St. Francis lay entombed and his daughter in Christ, St. Clare; and there, before the masterpieces we have mentioned, he kindled his devotion and animated his genius, for both were one with him; the handling of his brush was but a prayer of the uplifted soul in contemplation. Looking at his own pictures, and there are comparatively few that remain, we find St. Francis introduced wherever the unity in the conception of his subject permitted it. In almost all his more remarkable pictures of the Blessed Virgin the seraphic saint figures prominently.

If the teacher ordinarily transmits his predilections and his zeal to his pupils, Benozzo Gozzoli, the cherished disciple of Fra Angelico, stands as another proof of the spirit which animated the holy friar of San Marco. “Gozzoli,” says Rio,[5] “is another star which contributed to the formation of the crown of glory by which the arts encircled the tomb of St. Francis.” His pictures are almost transparent in their chaste purity, singularly so those found in the Franciscan church at Montefalco. When he had to paint the portrait of St. Francis he frequently copied the picture at San Marco. Strange to say, when Benozzo left these pure mountain regions to go to Florence, he seemed to lose his inspiration. His works executed between 1464 and 1467 are said to rise scarcely above mediocrity. Yet the frescoes at Pisa, painted in the decline of his years, are simply marvels of what has been called the patriarchal style of Christian art.[6]

We might go on recounting painters, not only such as nourished their talents with the spirit communicated to them by men who had stood in direct relation to the Saint and his order, but such as were devoted to St. Francis as if he were still their only master; who learned nothing from those whom he had taught, but all from himself; artists who flocked to the place of his birth, to the principal scene of his activity and now his earthly resting-place, as if to invoke the aid of his spirit where they could be nearest to his remains—Pinturicchio and Perugino, whose art was so exquisite that it seemed altogether new—Perdita si fuerat pingendi hic retulit artem; si nusquam inventa est, hactenus ipse dedit;[7] Francia also, friend and rival of Raphael, with Giacomo his son and Giuglio his relative, who sought shelter even in death in the Church of St. Francis, where they are buried. Raphael himself, in his earlier works, has acknowledged the tribute he owed to St. Francis. And when the Renaissance had given a new turn to art, even then Assisi was still the place where best men sought inspiration, and St. Francis still remained the subject and his glory the object of their labors. There was always enough to allure the artist to that singular spot, independent of the devout memory he might entertain of the saint. The eleven or twelve communities of Franciscans, in devout procession moving to the tomb of the Saint, their solemn chants, above all, the stirring harmonies of the patriarchal choir, famous by the traditions of several ages, would attune the soul to the right appreciation of those marvellous frescoes that adorn the walls. Wherever the eye turns, from chancel to choir, naves all and dome, even the mosaiqued floors, are wrought by the hands of the Umbrian masters. Nay, the streets of the city itself are full of devout representations in painting, many of rare artistic merit, all breathing the love and spirit of St. Francis.

Even architecture contributes here in an altogether unique way to verify what we have said in the beginning, that the genius of St. Francis had impersonated everything. The architectural structure of the Grand Basilica in Assisi expresses perfectly the idea of the life of St. Francis. “An Italian writer,” says the Abbé Riche,[8] “sees in the creation of so wonderful a monument a supernatural effect of divine Providence. He finds himself unable to explain in any other way its appearance at an age when mankind appeared scarcely to awake from barbarism and ignorance.”

Roman architecture, such as it existed before this time, expressed on the whole the idea of rest, of strength. It was, as such, not unworthy as an expression of the Christian faith and the security which it had begotten. But lately, the times had become troubled, not, indeed, with the troubles of the early persecutions, when men felt safest as they approached the torture-block—no, these were other troubles. Darkness of pride and strifes and false lights had dimmed the air, and they that felt the stifling atmosphere looked up and sought the pure light of the noonday, and prayed with raised heart and eye, as we see St. Francis pray, in ecstatic longing for the light. The Gothic architecture expressed, so to say, the new feeling. It was a striving upwards. Its long slender columns supporting the pointed arch seemed to end in heaven, all pointed to the infinite that awaits man. But we see much more than this in the temple which enshrines the remains of St. Francis. There are here two churches,—we might say three,—one within the other. In them we have the twofold aspect of his life. His penitence, with its train of voluntary poverty, sacrifices, and suffering resignation, symbolized in the tomb of the saint, who lies there on the ground as he had desired to die, poor, with barely a shroud to cover him; and his monument, the little church of Portiuncula, built with his own hand and still untouched as he had left it. And high above it there tower in noble proportion the marble columns and Gothic dome, speaking to the beholder without his asking for the meaning of the symbol, of glorious and immortal transfiguration. Whilst the inner edifice pronounces the idea of humility, of sweet sadness, that plaintive, childlike hope which is at once full of diffidence in self and trust in the strength on which it leans; the other expresses that ineffable joy which knows no limits and no bounds, rising higher and higher until it touches immortality. It was a beautiful but difficult thought to express. Nowhere has it been more successfully done than in this epic in stone at Assisi.

How much more might be said to show how the spirit of St. Francis was the mainspring which produced not merely the enthusiasm and true love for the beautiful in art, but which gave to it at the same time subject, style, and artist, all, in fact, that made Christian art what it was in the Middle Ages.

And wherever the Sons of St. Francis went, whatever the name or garb or particular rule under which they perpetuated throughout long ages his teachings and his spirit, everywhere we see traces of that same enthusiasm for the arts. The convents and churches of the monks became the treasure-houses and nurseries of painting and sculpture. Raphael, Guido Reni, Domenichino, gave them the best of their pencils in Rome. The Church of St. Francis at Rimini became one of the wonders of the age, for here worked, next to Giotto, his most illustrious disciples, and Giorgio da Rimini, who loved to call himself Giorgio Francesco. But it is time that we conclude our sketch.

Perhaps the reader has, to some extent, realized what the love of God in a single individual is able to effect for the benefit of succeeding generations. Art is certainly a valuable element in the production of human happiness, and the very eagerness with which even its shadow and its counterfeit are sought, stands in confirmation of this truth. May we not hope for a chaster growth of true and elevated taste from the intercession of St. Francis? Our venerable Pontiff, Leo XIII., has seen opportune to recommend, with fatherly solicitude, devotion to the Saint as a powerful means of counteracting the existing evils of modern society. And whilst in reality the conditions of our present society are fundamentally different from those in the thirteenth century, when there was still a strong faith underlying all the vagaries of the human intellect and heart, yet the spirit of St. Francis, if we could revive it in its freshness, would heal many wounds, would undoubtedly diffuse a purer atmosphere round about the world of art. The humble monk out of the dark ages, he could bring light to us. May he vouchsafe to do so!

Notes

[1] Milman’s Latin Christianity, vol. viii., p. 477.

[2] Juncta Pisanus ruditer a Graecis instructus Primus ex Italis artem apprehendit circa, Ann. Sal., 1210.

[3] “Schools and Masters of Painting,” A. G. Radcliffe.

[4] “Comento al Canto XI. del Purg.,” cited from “Vita di Dante,” Leon. Aretino.

[5] “The Poetry of Christian Art,” p. 133.

[6] These have been restored lately, but, according to accounts, to their utter ruin.

[7] Inscription cited by Orsini.

[8] Fioretti, by Abbé Riche.

Cover: Benozzo Gozzoli, St. Francis in Glory and Saints (1452), apse vault, San Francesco, Montefalco.

From the American Catholic Quarterly Review, vol. 8, no. 29 (January 1883), pp. 43–58.

The Influence of St. Francis of Assisi on Mediæval Art (I)

by Arthur Waldon

Arthur Waldon’s essay appeared in our number of January 1883, four months after Leo XIII, in the encyclical Auspicato Concessum of September 17, 1882, commended devotion to St. Francis on the seventh centenary of his birth; Waldon’s epigraph comes from that letter. His argument is that the love of God which made Francis a poet stands behind the whole revival of Italian painting, from Giunta Pisano and Cimabue through Giotto and Fra Angelico to the young Raphael. We print the essay in two parts, following the author’s own division, today and tomorrow. His spelling and punctuation are kept. Some of his attributions reflect the art history of his day.

Notice, by the way, the complexity of the sentences in this essay, and consider that it was written for a general readership; also, note that the author left Latin, French, German, and Italian largely untranslated.

“We owe to the mind of St. Francis that inspiration, nobler than human, which stirred the emulation of the greatest artists.”—Leo P. P. XIII., Encycl., 17 Sept., 1882.

At times convictions take possession of a human soul and develop therein with such astonishing power over and beyond all that surrounds it, assuming dimensions in their ultimate results which are out of all proportion with the source whence they appear to spring, that we are forced to look for their reason in some design of Providence bearing testimony to the unfailing truth on which they rest, and giving assurance of their predestined accomplishment. The Catholic Church is the soil on which such souls ordinarily grow. The fact of Calvary, of all human failures in an earthly point of view the most complete, yet with its prodigious effects, unaccountable unless in the light of a higher principle, has established a norm by which we may measure like phenomena. When St. Francis of Assisi suddenly departed from the common course of men about him, those who loved him best mourned, because, as they said, the beautiful youth had grown mad. But he had turned to follow a master, whom with less reason the enlightened world of old Rome had pointed out as a fool; and so he went on securely in his way, “ce fou sublime, dont la folie confondit la sagesse du monde.” [“this sublime fool, whose folly confounded the wisdom of the world'“] And when the few short years of his earthly life had come to their end, he had set into motion and given a lasting impulse to a revolution, which in due time overturned the political, social, and religious world from its existing state. Like the sun, which he affectionately calls his brother, and to which Dante aptly compares him, he, “when not yet much distant from his rising, began to bless the earth by his good influence.”[1] He illumined the darkness into which the world of those days was deeply merged, and created a new growth upon its face, breathing by the genial warmth of his spirit fresh life into the decaying members of society. Popes, emperors, nay, the obstinate princes of the East, who hated with a natural and religious hatred alike whatever bore the Christian name, bowed to his will and vied with one another in showering favors upon him to whom nothing was dearer than the contempt and poverty of Christ. Even St. Dominic, if we may believe the annalist of a past day [2], intimate and familiar friend of our saint, seemed for a moment to have lost confidence in his own distinct and stupendous mission, when he came within the circle of that radiant fire of seraphic love.

But it is not our purpose to measure the influence of St. Francis upon his own or later times except in so far as it caused the revival of the fine arts, which in point of time and place assumes definite form immediately after the death and at the tomb of the Saint. It were strange indeed if we could not trace the cause of this sudden change in the sphere of taste to the direct influence of him who from that time forth appeared for several generations at once the devout object and the patron of the fine arts. And no doubt it will be well to recall to mind the means which served to raise so admirable a structure as that which the school of Christian art presents to us in the 13th century, at a time when at least the outward conditions of society are much the same as they were then, with perhaps this difference in our favor, of a far more eager search after a high standard of taste.

In order to estimate correctly the influence of St. Francis upon the life of the fine arts for several centuries after his death, it will be necessary to cast a brief glance upon the character of the man, who, by the sole force of his personal endowments, without any assistance from without, was able to produce such gigantic effects. We shall next consider this influence in its further results.

I.

The most superficial reader of the life of St. Francis will be impressed with two features in the singular career of the Monk of Assisi: that peculiar asceticism, from which, as we know, arose the mystic school of thought, whose best exponent in theology became St. Bonaventure, and which found its truest illustration in the whole range of Christian schools of art, beginning in faint outlines with Giunta Pisano, the friend of St. Francis, and ending, at least for a considerable time, with Raphael, in his earlier works. The other trait, which aside from this strikes us, is the intense love of and sympathy with nature manifested by the Saint on every occasion.

Nature was, so to speak, poverty, whom he had chosen as his bride, in her fairest apparel. When he had relinquished all for Christ, he had gained all; the whole great world was now his own, and he felt this possession, and it made him happy beyond earthly happiness.

One day, before he had made his choice, when he was returning from a festival, his companions, seeing him strangely pensive and tarrying behind, asked him laughingly what could absorb the lighthearted Giovanni so profoundly at this time. “I was thinking,” said he, “of taking a spouse, but one so noble, so beautiful, that I know none like her on earth.” From that day the fair young Bernadone changed. “He is lovesick,” they said, and so he was. He had seen a glimpse of some beautiful being, a quick vision of some magnificent reality, and his heart went out to it; went out to God, that Beauty everlasting and surpassing all His creatures. And the Saint loved only the more these creatures, now that he recognized them as love-tokens of God’s munificent affection towards his humble spouse. He would cast aside the gilded deckings and don the wedding garment to please but his new choice. So by vigils and fasts, terrific stripes and crucifixions of his tender flesh, he called to heaven for a spotless robe, until the folly of a thoughtless boyhood had been wholly wiped out.

As sin disappears in man, its consequences vanish one after another, or lose their hold on him, and the former state of sinless happiness returns. In Paradise all nature had been subject to Adam. But once he rebelled against his Maker, creation declared enmity to its former master, man. Henceforth his life was one continued toil, and sorrow became as his daily companion. Then, as he bore the burden meekly, it lightened, or perhaps his strength increased, and he felt less of the old crushing weight. Nature grew more kind, the ground yielded more readily to the pressure of his spade, and it brought fruit and flower, which lighted up once more his aged care-worn features, and labor, duty, sacrifice, became a consolation. And when the end came they brought to the saintly patriarch the last born of his grandchildren that he might bless it. But he looked strangely out into the open field where stood the tree which he had planted, a twig of Eden’s sad tree of life. And in prophetic vision he discerned the fruit that was one day to grow thereon—arbor decora et fulgida! And he saw how the curse which he had brought upon his progeny was to depart by the strength of that fruit. It was a rapturous thought, and he loved the tree for its destiny, and the birds that nestled in it, and the flowers that grew beneath its shade; he loved all nature, for he saw in it expressed the ineffable love of his Maker. Then his dying hand blessed the babe with the strength of the expected Redeemer, and when with his last look he gazed into that blessed child’s eyes he saw there the joy which he had seen in Eve before the fall, the joy of innocence, like to no other joy on earth. How often has that process been repeated in the penitents, saints of the Catholic Church! It was in a manner the process which the soul of St. Francis experienced. He had become again a sinless child, in the baptism of penance, in the strength of his Redeemer’s Precious Blood. Nature spoke to him, and like a child he spoke to her, until both understood and loved each other as brother and sister of the same heavenly Father. See how it comes out, this love, in all its virginal freshness and innocence as we meet him in the byways around Assisi, sweetly caressing a rescued pair of turtle-doves: O sirocchie mie tortole, semplici, innocenti e caste—ora io vi voglio scampare da morte e farvi i nidi.[3] [“O my sisters, turtledoves, simple, innocent, and chaste… now I want to rescue you from death and make you nests.”] Or as we see him stooping to gather up the little worms from the road, lest they be crushed beneath the foot of some unthinking traveller; for he remembers how his Master had once said: I am a worm and not a man. Such was his tender love for the works of God’s hand, and like some magic spell it accompanied him wherever he journeyed, and where his shadow fell the ancient curse seemed forthwith to depart from the earth. The birds of the air, the beasts of the forest, came gladly at his call; the timid roe looked trustingly into that beautiful face and gathered its food from the hand that gave a blessing upon the dumb creature. All nature rejoiced when with him, and the lay “Laudate”[4] of the royal prophet seemed forever on his lips. Well could he write of “true and perfect joy,”[5] for it was always in his heart and round about him. But this intense love of nature, this perfect harmony between his inner being and the rest of God’s image in the outward creation, made St. Francis a poet, we might say an artist, in the truest sense of the word. Every artist is a poet. The history of the great masters amply illustrates this. We know how the genius of Giovanni Santi followed that of Petrarch and Dante, and how the father of the immortal Raphael was celebrated in his day alike for his verses and his paintings. Young Raphael himself was, as Lanzi informs us, a poet. Even Leonardo da Vinci, in spite of his practical turn of mind, has left us some verses. And most of the great painters of the early Italian school were enthusiastic students of Dante. On the other hand, there exists a close and necessary connection between true art and Religion. Indeed art is a species of religion, in which man pays homage to the divine Beauty. Such was the idea of art even among the Greeks in its best days. When high ideals in religion are united to most perfect natural forms, whether expressed in harmony of sound, or in painting, or in sculpture, we have art in its truest sense.[6] The mystic school of art had its source in the realization of the highest ideal of divine love expressed in the purest types of nature. If we trace the origin of the two most characteristic traits in the life of St. Francis, his asceticism and his love of nature, we shall find the one source an intense love, which made him identify everything about him with the motives of his Maker. This love terminates in a complete union with the divine will, and produces that harmony between the creature and his creator, identical in a manner with intuition, wherein the soul communes with God directly and faith yields to limited vision. No better argument than the fact of St. Francis can be brought against the assertion of Victor Cousin, that “he who pretends to commune with God in this mystic way, does thereby ignore Him in his manifestations in nature,” and that such communication “is a dream and an incredible rashness.”[7] Surely no one could have believed in God more essentially through “His manifestations in nature,” whilst few saints were more closely united to Him, receiving, as he did, almost all the important commissions regarding the institute of his order, like Moses, directly from God. With St. Francis self no longer existed. It was merged in God. And when he looked upon nature he saw it, too, acting in harmony with that sublime sentiment of entire unselfishness, so beautifully expressed in the lines of a German poet:

O welcher reine heil’ge Edelmuth
In der Natur und rings im All,
Wo Eins dem Andern, und wo Alles Allen
Mitwirkung, Hilfe, alle seine Kraft
Und Liebe, selbst sein eignes schoenes Dasein
Herzinnig treu, mit stiller Freudigkeit
Dahingibt, ohne je daran zu denken
Ob auch ein Stäubchen nur dadurch bezahlt sei.

[O what a pure and holy nobleness
In Nature and in all the cosmos round,
Where each to other, and where all to all,
Its cooperation, help, its every strength
And love, its very own fair being, even,
With heart-deep faithfulness and quiet gladness
Gives over, never pausing once to think
Whether a single mote be thus repaid.]

In reality this spirit has always done more, for art as even for abstract science, than did brush, or chisel, or toiling brain. The most devout painters have been more successful as Christian artists than those who possessed the secrets of perfect technique or the most accurate knowledge of anatomy. We know[8] how Cardinal di Lugo, that giant mind, went in his subtle perplexities of theology to consult the boyish novice John Berchmans, that God might reveal to the prayers of the saint the science withheld from his own comprehensive intellect. Hence, when we come to judge of the effect of this asceticism upon art, we must lay aside the rules of the connoisseur. “Mysticism,” says Rio,[9] “is to painting what ecstasy is to psychology. It is necessary, in order to estimate it correctly, to associate ourselves by a strong and profound sympathy to certain religious ideas, with which this artist in his studio, or that monk in his cell have been more particularly preoccupied, and combine the results of this preoccupation with the corresponding sentiments in the minds of their fellow-citizens.”

As St. Francis worshipped beauty because it spoke to him of God, the eternal Beauty, reflected in nature, so he found himself drawn to rival nature, or to seek its choicest types, and to beautify, by his own hand, whatever was, in an especial manner, to image forth that heavenly splendor, or to enhance its appreciation among men.

The habitations of his monks were to be severely simple. “Habentes quocum tegamur his contenti sumus,” he said [“Having that wherewith we may be covered, with these we are content, 1 Timothy 6:8], with the apostle. We remember how, on one occasion, he became all aglow with holy indignation when, on one of his visitations, he found that the monks had, with much labor, built a magnificent convent; and how it took all the influence of Cardinal Hugolino, the then protector of the order, to pacify him. “Nostram hanc domum non agnosco,” he called out, “neque meos fratres reputo qui in illa permanserint.”[“I do not acknowledge this house as ours, nor do I count as my brothers any who remain in it.”][10] But when he reared altars and temples to the Most High, his zeal for their adornment knew no limit. He wanted to be poor, and no other saint in the Church has so entirely made that title of il povero di Dio his own. His patrimony he gave for the restoration of a church. Long before he had laid the foundation of the order of Friars Minors, he had devoted himself entirely to the reconstructing and beautifying of the house of God. He went from door to door begging alms; crying aloud in the market-place: “Come, help me to build the Church of St. Damian.” It was a passion with him, and people wondered what he meant. Yet he went on restoring. Church after church arose, newly adorned; St. Damian, St. Peter Apostle, and the Portiuncula, in his native city of Assisi. Cardinal Newman tells us somewhere that it was architecture which directed the thoughts of one of the most zealous priests[11] he ever knew towards the Catholic faith. Well, it was architecture which, though in another way, led our Saint to the reform of the spiritual edifice that was swaying to and fro amidst many conflicting elements. When, prostrate before the crucifix in the church, he had first heard the voice of his Lord, bidding him rise and uphold his tottering house, he applied the command as referring entirely to the material church. Yet God had meant it in another sense, and the saint was imperceptibly drifting towards the accomplishment of God’s will by beginning his task in this way. With his own hands he set in order and embellished whatever about God’s habitation was out of order, and when in after days he found a lovely spot, he would dedicate it to the special glory of the Most High, by raising there a chapel or an altar, or a niche in which to place the statue of some saint, so that it might remind the passing wanderer how good God is in giving us such beautiful things. In a lovely grove between Gemini and Porcaria he erected a church in honor of the Blessed Virgin, very like to the one of St. Maria de Angelis, in Portiuncula. We read, in his life, how, returning from Arezzo to Florence, he was compelled by sickness to stop a few days at Gangheretti. God had blessed the place by causing a fountain to spring up at the request of the languishing saint. As if to guard and beautify the spot where “God had been,” he employed the brief time of his convalescence in building a wall about and adorning it.

Thus his love made him happy, for he was ever in full harmony with all that surrounded him. We said above that St. Francis was a poet. In point of time he is one of the first of Italian poets; no less in point of true and deep inspiration. “He burned, all on fire with love,” says the author of the last life of St. Teresa,[12] “and that heavenly flame inspired simple but immortal verses.” What he has left us of his unquestioned compositions shows that he was not neglectful of form. Poetry in all ages has had two principal sources, one secular, the other religious. Thus, at the time of St. Francis, the Provençal minnesinger sang in glowing words of his lady-love, and the Oriental element imported by the returning crusaders had done nothing to change the existing tendency towards the creation of a voluptuous literature. On the other hand, we find in Italy a healthy element of Christian poetry, asserting its sway from Dante down to Tasso, and beyond. And the sources of this stream, says Brockhoff,[13] we find in St. Francis and his disciples. A celebrated troubadour, whose real name has not come down to us, but who passed among the people as the “king of poets” (rex versuum), went one day, in frivolous mood, to hear the strange Assisian preach. Then he laid down his gold-and-purple-trimmed mantle, and begged the garb of a Franciscan monk from our saint. No longer did Brother Pacifico delight the princes in their banquet halls, or the people at high harvest-time; yet we cannot doubt that he sang for the monks, or that he taught St. Francis to put into rhyme the hymns which the saint uttered in his wanderings, and which Brother Leo, who generally accompanied him, always noted down. St. Bonaventure tells us that amidst his frequent infirmities St. Francis often expressed a desire to hear music.[14] Wadding cites among his writings canticles in the vernacular and hymns for the use of the nuns of St. Clare. If we may judge from the few specimens yet remaining and accredited to him, they must have been exquisitely beautiful. There is a peculiar simplicity of style, a sweet flow of melody, in the Italian of that day. Anyone familiar with Latin will be able to enjoy the following prayer, which the saint is said to have used every day:

“O altissimo omnipotente glorioxo Idio,
Illumina le tenebre del core mio.
Doname te prego per tua gran bontade
Fede drita, speranza certa, con perfecta charitade.
E fame da mi havere perfecto cognoscimento
A ciò che sempre obserua el tuo sancto comandamento.”[15]

[O almighty, glorious God on high, enlighten the darkness of my heart. Grant me, I pray Thee, in Thy bounty, right faith, firm hope, and perfect charity. And let me plainly know myself, so that I may ever observe Thy holy laws.]

“His canticum solis (de lo frate sole) is unquestionably,” says Schlosser, in his translation of I Cantici di S. Francesco, “one of the finest productions of sacred poetry.” The hymns In foco amor mi mise, and Amor de caritade, found in the works of St. Bernardine of Siena, are, by the weighty authority of Ireneo Affo, attributed to Fra Jacopone, the worthy forerunner of Dante. Yet they breathe all the spirit of St. Francis. Thus sang the Saint. Like a prophecy, reminding us of holy Simeon at once and Zachary, are the last words, the song of the dying swan, when prostrate on the ground, blind, and too weak to reach his beloved Assisi, he turns towards the cherished city with these prophetic words:

“Benedicta tu civitas a Domino
Quia per te multæ animæ salvabuntur
Et in te multi servi altissimi habitabunt
Et de te multi eligentur ad regnum aeternum.”[16]

[Blessed art thou, O city, by the Lord, for through thee many souls shall be saved. In thee shall dwell many servants of the Most High, and out of thee many shall be chosen for eternal glory.]

How soon the blessing was verified. Less than forty years after, Assisi had sent out of her noviciate 200,000 monks, bearing the seeds of the spirit of St. Francis into every land on the globe.

During his lifetime the saint had exercised great power over men. As Irnerius drew disciples around him by the fame of his learning, so St. Francis had attracted them by the rumor of his sanctity. Once they had seen him he kept them spellbound by his lovely ways. He was a beautiful man. His broad, chaste brow, and finely-chiselled features, his eyes, with their deep-dreamy joy, catching a spark whenever holy zeal prompted his heart to light them, the grace of his manner, and yet withal, his humble readiness to serve as beast of burden to the first that chose to claim such service,—all these things charmed the men that approached him, and they learned to love the things he loved, they hardly knew why; but there seemed to be so much superior wisdom and happiness in his choice. Now that he was dead, men wandered to his tomb. Assisi became the centre of inspiration, the fountain-head whence

“Many rivulets have since been turned
Over the garden Catholic to lead
Their living waters, and have fed its plant.”[17]

Notes

[1] Paradiso, Cant. XI., 53.

[2] Vita S. Francisci, Bolland.

[3] My dear little sisters, sweet innocent doves,—yes, I am going to save you from death and build you little nests.

[4] Ps. 148.

[5] De vera et perfecta laetitia—cited by Wadding.

[6] Ruskin goes so far as to maintain that the realization of the divine presence in nature, and the love of nature which springs from and accompanies this consciousness are essential to and the only promise of true art.—Modern Painters, vol. iii., p. 313.

[7] Victor Cousin’s Lectures, Wright’s translation, p. 103.

[8] Essay on the interest and characteristics of the Lives of the Saints, by F. W. Faber.

[9] The Poetry of Christian Art, p. 122.

[10] Vita S. Francisci, Boll.

[11] The Rev. Hutchison, of the London Oratory.

[12] Cited in the Civiltà Cattolica, Quad. 774.

[13] Brockhoff, Die Klöster.

[14] Ad jucunditatem spiritus excitandam alicujus audiendi soni harmoniaci desiderium habuisset.—Vita S. Francisci. [“He had conceived a desire to hear some harmonious sound, to stir up gladness of spirit.”]

[15] “O almighty, glorious God on high, enlighten the darkness of my heart. Grant me, I pray Thee, in Thy bounty, right faith, firm hope, and perfect charity. And let me plainly know myself, so that I may ever observe Thy holy laws.”—This prayer appeared first in an ancient life of St. Clara, printed in Milan, 1492. It is not stated that St. Francis himself composed it, though there can hardly be a doubt of it.

[16] “Blessed art thou, O city, by the Lord, for through thee many souls shall be saved. In thee shall dwell many servants of the Most High, and out of thee many shall be chosen for eternal glory.”

[17] Paradiso, Cant. xii., 96.

Cover: Giotto, Stigmatization of St. Francis (c. 1295–1300), Louvre, Paris (detail).

From the American Catholic Quarterly Review, vol. 8, no. 29 (January 1883), pp. 43–58. Part II follows tomorrow.

Father Cuthbert, O.S.F.C.

This is the third and concluding part of Father Cuthbert’s essay from our number of October 1900. Having traced the conversion of Francis, he turns to the love of Christ that made the saint at home again in creation, and to its meaning for the Church of Cuthbert’s own day. Himself a builder, Cuthbert writes: “The Church of the future has its own work to do; it cannot afford to lose sight of the work already accomplished.” The Italian verses in the notes are from the poem “Amor de Caritate,” attributed to Jacopone da Todi, and are given as the 1900 printing has them.

(While we would not endorse all of Father Cuthbert’s characterization of Protestants—such as his charge of their “worship of the Bible”—there is much truth in what he says, and in any case the Review reprints his essay as a document of its time.)

When this inward call made itself manifest, Francis was once more happy. He no longer went aside from his friends and groaned for the solitude of his soul. In surrendering himself to Christ he had again found the joy of life, only now it was a deeper joy—the joy born of an extended vision and of a deep personal love. He was once more at home in creation; but creation had now a larger aspect and a deeper significance. The vision of truth which was within his soul cast itself upon the vision of beauty without, and mingled in inexpressible delight. There were shadows there, wrought by man’s sin, especially by luxury and selfishness. But the vision of earth which Francis now saw was one of essential delight. And with all this Christ had put him into immediate relationship, because Christ was the centre of it all. It was Christ’s own kingdom. The glory of the earth was Christ’s glory; the sorrow of the earth, too, was Christ’s. Love of Christ therefore meant love of all creation, especially of all mankind.

The intuitive apprehension of this truth is the explanation of Francis’ subsequent career and of that widespread movement which for a period brought back to earth the primitive spirit and conditions of Christianity when men forsook all for Christ and learned from Christ how to love one another. This evangelical revival, which realized the yearnings and hopes of all the best spirits of the later middle ages, was remarkable chiefly in that it reconciled the religious spirit of the age with all that was best in the secular spirit. The reconciliation was brought about by a fuller appreciation of that central mystery of the Gospel, the Incarnation, and its influence upon life in general. In the Incarnation Francis saw the reconciliation of the world with God, a reconciliation which implies that of the secular spirit with the religious, of temporal interests with the eternal. But in Christ he also saw how this reconciliation is brought about only by suffering and renouncement. This is the cost man has to pay for making an idol of the Present and Visible and separating it from its proper relationship with the Unseen and Future. Not until Francis became impressed with the reality of the other world had Christ any real significance to him as the Reconciler of this world with the Father. At the same time the Incarnation taught him to give the visible creation a positive value, fraught as it is with eternal verities. With Francis renunciation was but the stepping-stone to a larger life; it gave him freedom to satisfy his spiritual aspiration and it likened him more closely to his Master, Christ. His renunciation of wealth and comfort had in it none of the Puritan’s belief in the wickedness of nature. Even to the last he could appreciate the spirit in which ordinary mortals make merry at the dinner board over the meeting with a friend. He would order the knight Orlando to go and entertain his guests, when the knight himself thought it becoming to converse on spiritual matters with the saint. His religious songs were couched in the style and phrase of the troubadour. He saw nothing improper in applying the titles and style of chivalry to his own disciples. The friars were on his lips, “God’s Knights of the Table Round”; St. Clara and her companions were “fair ladies of Poverty”; he himself was “the herald of the Great King.” He was, then, no hater of the world; he loved the world for what was good in it; he pitied it with a gentle sorrow for what was evil. The evils of the world were the thorns which tore the bleeding feet of God’s fair creation. This generous sympathy with all creatures it is which makes Francis so like unto Christ. Others have renounced the world for Christ’s sake as completely as did Francis; others have preached to the world and ministered to its wants, spiritual and temporal; but few have so utterly appreciated and sympathized with the world as Francis did. In this he is almost unique. Not more truly did the impression of the five stigmata on his body mark him out as Christ’s special follower than did his Christlike love of the world.

In his passionate love of Christ Francis again realized in the highest degree the aspiration of mediæval piety, which, as Harnack has pointed out,[1] found its first great expositor in St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and its complete expression in the Poor Man of Assisi. To attach oneself to Christ and to follow Him in all the humble estate of His earthly life—this was the ideal of the middle ages, especially of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It was an ideal which appealed at once to the imagination and the heart; and the secret of all great moral movements lies in the appeal to the imagination and the heart.

I doubt whether people brought up outside the Catholic Church can appreciate what such personal devotion to Christ meant to those mediæval revivalists. To them Christ was an ever-present Reality, without Whom there was no reality, but only vanity and disappointment. He was the unifying principle of creation; everything visible received a permanent value only in so far as it proclaimed the beauty and truth and love of Christ’s spiritual kingdom. Hence they sought for vestiges of Christ’s presence everywhere, and every discovery increased their joy because it bore witness to the fact of Christ’s presence among them. Thus Christ was the bond which united them to all external objects. Now Protestantism, whilst professing to be an evangelical reform, effectually severed this bond of direct spiritual relationship with Christ which was alike the secret of primitive Christianity and of mediæval Catholicism. The Reformers declared that the Catholic Church with its sacraments and dogmas had come between the soul and Christ; but they themselves created a barrier which experience has shown to be impassable in their worship of the Bible. They at once reduced Christianity to the servile observance of a moral code in place of that personal attachment to Christ, spiritually conceived by the believer, which mediæval Catholicism in its best representatives endeavored to foster. The influence of the rationalizing party among the Schoolmen undoubtedly tended to base Catholicism exclusively upon an intellectual assent to certain formulæ. And, too, there were the mediæval ritualists who in their multiplication of ceremonies tended to forget the significance of the symbol and to reduce religion to mere externalism. Oftentimes they put the jeweled cope in place of the clean heart, and sang psalms when they should have been teaching the poor. These were the abuses of the mediæval Church against which many a reforming spirit had protested long before Luther. But the constant teaching of the leading lights of the middle ages—of such men as SS. Bernard, Bonaventure and Aquinas—was that true religion depended upon communion with Christ as a present spiritual Personality. Only a few might attain to this intimate communion in any high degree; but all were urged to strive after it. To them the Bible was of value only in as far as it gave them some glimpse of the life of Christ, either in His earthly career or in His spiritual working, as the Divine Word, in the hearts of His chosen people. What they sought was, in a word, the Personality of Christ, that they might conform themselves thereto. The Reformers, on the other hand, did as many modern nations which have taken to themselves a written Constitution, and govern by conforming to the letter of the law rather than by fidelity to the national ideal. Hence to the mind steeped in sixteenth century Protestantism, the religious life of St. Francis and his mediæval compeers is as unintelligible as is the English ideal of free government to the peoples of the Latin race.

Perhaps nowhere is the character of the mediæval devotion to Christ more vividly expressed than in the dramatic poem, “Amor de Caritate,” sometimes, but erroneously, ascribed to St. Francis,[2] and more generally supposed to have been written by the friar-poet, Jacopone da Todi. The poem describes the surrender of the soul to Christ and gives utterance in the unrestrained style of a decadent period to the idea of mediæval devotion:

“I asked, not knowing, when I prayed,
For love of Christ; it seemed so sweet.
Methought in peace I should have stayed.”[3]

But the soul finds the love of Christ a consuming fire. It can find no peace now in mere creaturely delights. Heaven and earth do but cast the soul back upon itself with the sharp admonition:

“With all thy heart love thou the love
Which has created us that we
Might draw thy spirit heavenward
To love Him Who hath so loved thee.”[4]

And so the soul finds no peace except in entire self-surrender. Then

“Transformed by Christ, with Him made one,”[5]

the soul gains a new life and joy. It

“. . . . . . . is made
The likeness of its Lord to bear;”[6]

and in its new life [finds] indeed no soul-peace but the soothing ardors of a great love.

“In Christ I’m newly born again—
The old man dead, the new restored;
And whilst my heart is cleft in twain,
Transfixed by love as by a sword,
My spirit, all on fire, would fain
Behold the beauty of its Lord.”[7]

This beholding of the beauty of the Lord, or more correctly, of Christ all beautiful was the supreme ideal of the mediæval religious spirits. The beauty of Christ was the dream of their life, and it must be added that the sorrow of their life—a sorrow which finds expression nowhere more pathetically than in the life of Francis—was that the beauty of Christ was marred by the world’s sin and misery. Sin to those mediæval disciples was no mere disfigurement of a passing world; it was rather a gaping wound in the body of Christ. As Christ is spiritually united with the whole world in intimate relationship of joy and sorrow, so the world’s evolution was to their mind an extended drama of the life of Christ. Christ Himself was glorified in the pure heart, in the patient and in the just and in all the extension of His moral kingdom. He was also crucified again in the world’s suffering. The stricken leper, the hungry beggar, even the broken flower, were incidents in the mystery of Calvary. Hence to the mind of Francis suffering had a peculiarly religious significance. To him it was the price of the world’s redemption. Through suffering only could man attain to the perfect state; whoever would be of Christ must suffer with Christ the penalty of the world’s sin. Like Christ Himself, Francis would willingly have borne, had it been possible, the world’s burden upon his own shoulders; have suffered its pain and endured its varied wretchedness. As it was, his soul melted with compassion for his fellow-mortals. He welcomed all his personal pain because it identified him more and more with the suffering Christ and his suffering fellow-creatures. Days and nights he spent in prayer beseeching the Divine mercy to pardon a sinful world. He himself became an apostle, and willed that his friars should become apostles, to spread abroad the knowledge of God’s love to comfort the sorrowful and to preach repentance for sin that Christ’s passion might not be in vain nor the world’s suffering misery unending. In sin he saw the source of all suffering; in penance and reformation of life, the remedy. With this conviction he put aside the idea of living a hermit’s life and became a religious and a social reformer. “The world’s suffering, and Christ is still crucified in the world. Let us go forth and preach the Gospel of Divine Love and Eternal Life, that men may be stirred to put aside selfishness, hate and luxury, which are the cause of the people’s misery.” Such was in effect the precept he gave his disciples on the memorable day when he sent them forth to be evangelists, “to preach to the poor and heal the broken heart.”

Such then was Francis of Assisi, the most Christlike of saints, and such was the character of the evangelical revival associated with his name. Rightly to appreciate him, one must, as we have already pointed out, view him in connection with his own time. He was typically mediæval, of the thirteenth century. Yet in the circumstances created by his own time he solved the question that has puzzled many souls in every age, and not least in our own. He discovered in religion a unity and perfection of life, a harmony of life’s varied realities, such as the present world with its long tradition of Manichean duality is hungering for. It was said that he who would find heaven must leave the earth to the devil; that to take delight in the world that is, is to forfeit the heaven that is to be. For a time men tried to live by this doctrine with consequences sometimes heroic, sometimes hideous, according to the temperament of the individual and his circumstances. The doctrine produced a Cromwell and his hearts of iron—no mean advantage to a demoralized nation such as the England of the seventeenth century—but it also gave us the prime hypocrite and the soul-stricken gospeler of a later time. The revolt against so sore a heresy was sure to come in time. When it came there was danger of the Present and Visible being idolized and put in place of God Himself. Yet if Christianity teaches any truth at all it is that man is to look forward to another life and another world. Other-worldliness is the essence of Christianity. At the same time it has consistently fostered an appreciation of the Present and Visible, differing from that of ancient Greek and modern Pagan, because it teaches us to look through the Visible to the Invisible, through the Present to the Future. This world is the step to eternity. We are not to sit down and make ourselves comfortable on the step, but to pass over and enter in.

Francis of Assisi explains the problem on the mediæval background of his. He does not give us a direct solution of the problem in its modern details, but he gives us a key wherewith to work out the solution for ourselves. This key is a realization of and a personal devotion to Christ in His relationship with the world, and a Christlike love of the world. I say Christlike love, because there is another love which has for its patrons Epicurus and the leaders of the Pagan Renaissance, and in these days of catch phrases it is well to mark the significance of one’s words. The evangelists of the thirteenth century, inspired by the life of Francis, would have had little to say that was pleasant to such love as this. Not Epicurus, but Christ, was their ideal; and how their endeavor to give effect to their belief brought to the world for a while something of the glow of undiluted Christianity can be known by the perusal of those early “legends” written by St. Francis’ personal disciples and now once more published to the world.

As I have already said, it is well for us Catholics in the midst of the evolution of modern life and its necessary influence upon the life of the Church to keep in mind the heroic figures of the past. They have many a lesson to teach us which will be of value to us in these days, and save us perhaps much trouble and waste of energy. The Church of the future has its own work to do; it cannot afford to lose sight of the work already accomplished. A neglect of the history of the past would only entail greater labor in the days to come.

Notes

[1] History of Dogma, Vol. VI., chap. 2.

[2] The style of the poem is evidently of a somewhat later date than the opening of the thirteenth century.

[3]Inanzi ch’io provasse, domandava
Amor a Christo pensando pur dolzura;
In pace di dolzezza star pensava.

[4]Che celo e terra grida et semper clama,
Et tutte cose ch’io dibbia amara,
Lascuna dice: Cun tutto core ama,
L’amore che n’ha fatto briga d’abbrazzare;
Che quel amore perzo che te brama,
Tutto nui hà fatte per ti à se trare.

[5]In Christo transformata quasi e Christo
Cum Dio unita tutta stà divina.

[6]De Christo se retrova figurato.

[7]In Christo e nata nova creatura,
Spogliata homo vecchio, e fato novello;
Ma tanto l’amore monta cum ardura,
Lo cor par che se fenda cum coltello,
Mente cum senno tolle tal calura;
Christo se me tra tutto tanto bello.

Cover: Giotto, Stigmatization of St. Francis (c. 1295–1300), Louvre, Paris (detail).

From the American Catholic Quarterly Review, vol. 25, no. 100 (October 1900), pp. 657–674.

St. Francis of Assisi and the Religious Revival in the Thirteenth Century (II)

Nature and grace, and the conversion of Francis. From our number of October 1900.

Father Cuthbert, O.S.F.C.

This is the second of three parts of Father Cuthbert's essay from our number of October 1900; Part I appeared yesterday. Having set the primitive "legends" before us, he now states his thesis: that Francis resolved in his own life the apparent duality of nature and grace, of the temporal and the eternal. He then follows this thesis into the story of Francis's conversion.

Renan, in whose mind truth jostled so intimately against error, had long ago singled out St. Francis as one whose personality has a religious message for the present age; and in his brilliant critique of Karl Hase’s “Franz von Assisi” puts his finger upon the secret of the saint’s influence, both in his own age and in the present. “Francis of Assisi,” he wrote, “possesses for religious criticism an interest beyond expression. After Jesus, no other man has been endowed with a clearer conscience, more absolute ingenuousness, a more lively sentiment of his filial relation to the Heavenly Father. God was in very truth his beginning and his end.” Then after pointing out how the life and character of Francis transcends our ordinary conception of life so far as to be almost incredible, and that nevertheless we have incontestable documentary evidence to prove it, he proceeds: “Francis of Assisi has always been one of the strongest reasons which has made us believe that Jesus was nearly all that the Synoptic Gospels have painted Him to be.” In this last sentence we believe Renan has expressed in somewhat pedantic fashion the weightiest argument for Francis’ popularity. Francis is a unique witness of the Person of Christ. The study of his life makes one realize the beauty of the perfect Christian life and its possibility; for here in a mortal man like ourselves, without any claim to divinity, we have a character so supremely Christlike, that the Gospel itself, in the light of his history, becomes an actual palpitating truth, convincing beyond any argument drawn from speculative reason. After all the most persuasive argument for Christianity is the living Christian. Yet even when we have admitted this, we can hardly be said to have given a satisfactory answer as to the secret of Francis’ influence in the Christian world both in the Church and outside; nor can we be said to have given any sufficient reason for assigning to him, as many do assign to him, a special influence upon the further development of spiritual life in the Church of the future. Conformity to Christ is always the lever of spiritual power in the Church; but this conformity must not be merely of external life, but of the interior spirit. The real Christian embodies in himself the Truth of Christ, not simply the outward action; and it is in the degree that he helps us to realize truly and understand the very life and thought of the Sacred Humanity of Jesus that he is a permanent factor in the development of the Christian life.

Now we believe that the most potent claim of St. Francis to the reverence of the Church is that he in great measure solved in his own actual life the difficulty which has always faced, and still faces, earnest souls as to the apparent duality of life. From the very beginning, at least since men began to look into their own souls, human nature has seemed to be the battleground of two irreconcilable forces, each of which seems to claim the proper allegiance of man, and each of which seems necessary in opposition to the other. So that man’s nature has seemed to be an essential contradiction, and the only way to obtain interior peace has seemed to lie in sacrificing one element to the other. Yet, on the other hand, the instinct of the Church has been opposed to this view. She admits the apparent contradiction, yet points to a further development of man’s being in which the contradiction shall exist no more, and yet the apparently opposing elements shall be retained. How to harmonize the natural and supernatural, the temporal and the eternal, has always been the crux of philosophers; Christianity has given the only satisfactory solution. Yet how few Christians realize it! In St. Francis of Assisi, however, it has been realized in a notable degree, and it is in this fact that his power lies. In him religion and all that was best in the world-life of his time met and intermingled in a rich harmony; in him it may be said with truth the world-spirit of the middle ages took flesh and blood and was indissolubly allied to religion.

It has been sometimes urged against mediæval Christianity that it retained a great measure of paganism in its spontaneous delight in the visible world and in its worship of the palpable Present, whilst at the same time religion was held to represent something apart from the Visible and the Present. So that, it is urged, the life of the middle ages was a dualism; Sense and Spirit being the two poles of a perpetual antagonism. We must, however, admit that if our mediæval forefathers were conscious of this dualism, they had also an idea, more or less vague, that this dualism could be resolved into a deeper unity, as is evident from the manner in which they were able to bring their delight in the sensuous into the religious liturgy. In doing so they manifested a belief that harmony between the spiritual and the temporal is possible, however dimly they may have realized this harmony in actual life. They might not be able to reconcile the two terms of life; but they believed reconciliation possible. Their healthy instinct preserved them from that subtle form of Manichean heresy which has been so prevalent since the middle ages. Puritanism in all its forms (and we must bear in mind that Puritanism went beyond the Puritans) banned nature from the realms of grace, as an evil spirit is banned from heaven. But nature when thus banned is apt to become a troublesome enemy. The joy of life is not found in outcasting one of life’s constituent elements. Mediæval Christianity recognized all the elements of human nature, from an instinctive belief in their essential harmony; and this instinctive belief was vindicated by Francis in his own personality. He was, in fact, the hoped-for Messiah in whom the promise of the mediæval spirit was realized. The patient belief that life’s apparent dualism (represented in scholastic phrase as nature and [grace]) did but hide a deeper essential unity (also represented in scholastic phrase as regenerate nature) was realized in Francis. He was a manifest embodiment of regenerate nature. Others beside him realized this belief in their own inner life, as any one acquainted with mediæval biography knows; but Francis did so on a larger and more generous scale.

He had indeed the natural genius which enabled him to do this. Of a poetic temperament he was quick to take note of the beauty of all created forms and to recognize a universal kinship between himself and all creatures, whether man or beast, or the very elements. He lived, so to speak, in them, and their life was part of his. The flower of the field and the running brook sent him into an ecstasy of delight; he seemed to understand the mute language of the beasts; he would sing for very joy because of the mysterious beauty of the sun and stars. His soul moved in all the grand elemental forces of nature as the soul of the musician delights in the complex harmonies of the symphony. He was a poet, with a poet’s largeness of heart vision and intimate sympathy. But he was more. He was of that rare order of men to whom a right intellectual concept or an intuition is a moral conviction. Such men do not so much sing of truth or beauty as act it. They are themselves embodiments of the beauty and truth which they behold in the world outside themselves; in them the best that the world can give is mirrored and expressed. Such men are not merely artists: they themselves are an inspiration of art, and the value of their inspiration is in proportion to the generosity of their sympathy. Francis’ sympathy with the world outside himself was indeed great and generous, as any one can learn who will but open the “legends” of the saint—now easily accessible to all—or the Fioretti, that wonderful supplement to the historical narratives, embodying the traditions and impressions of a somewhat later age.[1]

Now this sympathy with nature in its various creations was the very groundwork of Francis’ religious life. With his poetic intuition he could never have acknowledged that nature was the work of the devil. In him the mediæval belief was strong that God and nature are allied, and that to love nature is to worship the Creator. He had an intuitive conviction of the great Catholic truth that the Divine is revealed in the Creaturely. “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein”—such was the song that the heart of Francis perpetually sang. It was the chant of his worship both before and after his “conversion.”

It was towards the end of his life that he composed his “Song of the Sun,” an unmetrical string of verses in which he praised the Creator for the beauties of the creation. But this was only a more conscious rendering of the religious sentiment of his youth.[2]

Francis’ conversion was, of course, the leading incident in his life, both historically and from the point of subjective analysis. He was in his twenty-fifth year and full of the ambition of youth when he fell sick of a fever. He was only just released by the Perugians, having been taken prisoner in a battle fought between the “patriots” of Assisi and the robber-nobility, who were assisted by the neighboring republic of Perugia. As soon as he was convalescent he longed once more for the freedom of the fields and the hills. But to his vast disappointment when he went forth the country had lost its charm, and he returned home with a chilled and stricken heart. Again he mingled in the civic revelries and led the light-hearted youth of the city as had been his custom; but the sunshine had gone out of it all, and in the midst of the fun Francis was sad and listless. The fact was that during his sickness he had been brought face to face with the thought of eternity; and the thought had taken hold of his soul and given him a new vision of life, or rather it had clouded the simplicity of his former view of life as a present enjoyment, and he could not yet grasp the mystery that had taken its place. He felt lonely in the midst of his former life; its joys had fled when the reality of eternity had first dawned upon his mind. Slowly and with much anguish of spirit which at times caused him to go out of the city to some solitary cave, and there cry aloud for very pain, Francis came to see the truth. He had now become conscious that there is a duality in life; that the temporal and the eternal, the secular and the spiritual, are two actualities. Hitherto he had professed this belief, and now he realized it. This realization it is which precedes any spiritual conversion. One must perceive life as a contradiction before one can attain to any perception of the deeper spiritual unity. It is the way in which the human mind is accustomed to work.

To such a man as Francis, so sensitive to the beauty and joy of life, the perception of any essential, or apparently essential, contradiction between the temporal and eternal, must be the acutest pain. He was ever too much alive to allow himself to be comforted by the belief, generally adopted by men of less spiritual energy, that things will right themselves somehow. For him to live, was to live in the full consciousness of the realities around him. Life might be a contradiction; then he must drink the cup of contradiction to the very dregs. Or beyond the contradiction of life there might be a higher truth and more essential unity; if so, such a man as Francis will discover it. It was the same problem as presents itself in the fascinating legend of the founder of Buddhism; but in Francis how differently it worked out. The solution as it came to Francis may be stated thus: “The eternal begins in the temporal; time is the seed of eternity. What you see to-day with your eyes is not wholly true, neither is it wholly false. Nature in so far as it is not spoiled by man, is the germ of heaven; the beauty you delight in to-day is the promise of a greater beauty hereafter.” Thus was Francis reconciled again with the visible world, from which the consciousness of eternity had for a time separated him. But the reconciliation was not yet complete. The visible world had gained with him a new reality; it had become part of the eternal; at least there was in the visible world the beginnings of eternity, mixed up with much that was a mere perversion of the original creation. Something was yet necessary to bring Francis into actual touch with the realities of his new spiritual vision, so that he might not be a mere stranger wandering through the Father’s Kingdom.

Never, as far as we know, had Francis felt the need of total self-surrender. He had enjoyed life with the irresponsible enjoyment of youth. This was no longer possible. Had he been other than he was, or had his realization of the eternal been less intense, it might have been possible for him to regain touch with the facts and duties of life by taking to himself a wife or attaching himself to some great leader of men. Some such surrender of oneself to a personality other than one’s own is necessary to every man who would live in actual spiritual contact with the world around him. Such is the law of human life. But no ordinary love was able to bring Francis into touch with the greater world now opened out to him. He must surrender himself to Christ only and for Christ’s sake renounce those lesser ties which bind lesser men to the realities of life. He must renounce all for Christ, as under other circumstances he might have had to renounce all for some chosen woman’s sake.

Notes

[1] See especially the twelfth part of The Mirror of Perfection, which treats of “His love towards creatures.”

[2] This song is supposed to be one of the earliest efforts in Italian literature. Generally St. Francis composed his songs in the language of the Provençal troubadours. The “Song of the Sun” takes its name from the verse coming immediately after the stately prologue. It begins:
Laudato sia Dio mia Signore contute le creature,
Specialmente messer lo frate sole.

From the American Catholic Quarterly Review, vol. 25, no. 100 (October 1900), pp. 657–674. Part III follows tomorrow.

St. Francis of Assisi and the Religious Revival in the Thirteenth Century (I)

The primitive legends, and the first friars.

Father Cuthbert, O.S.F.C.

We close our week for the eight-hundredth anniversary of the death of St. Francis with two essays from the Review’s own archive. The first appeared in our number of October 1900; we republish it here in three parts. Its author, Father Cuthbert, O.S.F.C. (born Lawrence Anthony Hess, 1866–1939), was an English Capuchin writing from Crawley in Sussex. He later published a fuller work, a Life of St. Francis of Assisi (1912), and became head of the Capuchin Historical Institute in Assisi and editor of its journal, Collectanea Franciscana.

This essay was written six years after Paul Sabatier’s biography had made Francis a hero of the modern imagination. While Father Cuthbert admires Sabatier, faulting only his distorted view of the Papacy, he holds that the real gain of the new Franciscan scholarship is the recovery of the primitive “legends,” the memoirs written by the saint's own companions. In them, he argues, we have the real Francis, more Christlike than in any later biography.

An article more than a century old? Start reading and see if you can put it down.

At a time like the present, when the Church is in the throe of a new development in history, and when with the dawn of the twentieth century she has to face a new world of ideas in life, social, intellectual and political, it is instructive to look back over her past history and seek an intelligent guidance from the lives of those who have already contributed to the Church’s greatness. “It is only a fool who learns from his own experience; a wise man learns from the experience of others,” is a reported saying of the German Bismarck. The study of the lives of the men who have made a people great is a wise precaution, especially at periods of quick development and necessary unrest such as we live in to-day. The movements which in the past have shaken the Church and finally brought to her new life, leave an indelible mark upon Catholic character which it would be fatuous to ignore at any subsequent period in history. For example, in the further development of Catholic thought which will mark the immediate future Catholics cannot afford to ignore the work already accomplished by the Christian Neo-Platonists and the Scholastics. The notion, not unfrequently broached in these days, that Catholic theology should now cast scholasticism behind it as a thing forever done with and useless, is historically untenable; a community cannot get rid of its history in that fashion any more than a man can get rid of his past life with all its moulding influences. So, too, in regard to the interior and mystical life of the Church there has been, and still is, a continuous development; a tradition, constantly unfolding from the days of the Catacombs to the present: the Holy Spirit working in the Church for the fuller realization of the Christian life.

This constant movement of life goes on universally in the Church, affecting the lives of the humblest members who are at all earnestly concerned with their religion, but it manifests itself typically in certain individuals, the spiritual giants of our race, who by the intensity of their character give point and body to the vague instincts and undefined convictions of the multitude.

Thus a St. Augustine becomes the centre of a widely scattered group of thinkers and apologists who think as he thinks, but have not his clear perception nor his power of expression; and a great intellectual movement thus becomes identified with his name. In his writings, too, the excelling genius of the movement will naturally be found.

Now, in the development of the moral life of the Church there is one period which for some time past has attracted the most sympathetic interest of students of Church history, both outside the Church and within; though it must be acknowledged that as in much else concerning Catholicism, so in this, the impetus came from outside. In the life of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries students have discovered one of the finest presentments of Catholicism, both moral and intellectual, but especially moral. It is the period when Catholic piety manifested itself in a most intense realization of Christ’s earthly life and in chivalrous devotion to His sacred humanity: the age of the Crusades and of the Crib. It is to be noticed that at a period marked by strenuous speculation in the Christian schools, tending to a cold rationalism, there blossomed forth this intense devotion to the earthly, concrete Christ—the Man-God of the Gospels and of Tradition—and that the moral reformation which saved Christendom in the thirteenth century was chiefly connected with this development of piety.

Of this movement the classical expression is St. Francis of Assisi, the moral and social reformer, whom Pope Innocent III. saw in vision upholding the tottering walls of the Church. And the interest aroused in the history of the movement has resulted in a vast quantity of literature dealing with the life of the saint and his influence on his contemporaries. Not the least valuable result of this literary activity has been the republishing of the ancient “legends” or memoirs of St. Francis, written by his own friends and companions. For centuries these precious documents, unique in the history of Catholic literature, were hidden away and almost forgotten. About half a century after the death of St. Francis discussions arose among the members of his order as to the interpretation of the rule which he had given them. The more zealous members appealed to the “legends” in support of their contention against those who were anxious for relaxation. The authorities in the order desired to put an end to division by compromise; but this the “zealots,” as the upholders of the primitive austerity were called, would not hear of. In order to overcome their opposition it was decreed that the “legends” should be destroyed—a drastic measure which it is difficult to condone. Fortunately some copies were preserved. The most ancient of the “legends”—the “First Legend by Thomas of Celano”—was published by the Bollandists, as was also a fragment of the “Legend by the Three Companions,” which is a compilation of personal recollections by the saint’s three most intimate friends. In 1806 the “Second Legend by Thomas of Celano,” a supplement to the “First Legend,” was again given to the world by a learned Franciscan friar.

This “Second Legend” threw light upon several doubtful points in the received “lives” of the saint and gave rise to a more critical study of the sources already recovered. But it was reserved for the last two or three decades of years to see the outburst of a worldwide interest in the study of early Franciscan literature. As already noticed the impetus to this study came in great measure from outside the Church, and it is only just to acknowledge the debt we Catholics owe to non-Catholic efforts. And to no one is greater praise due than to M. Paul Sabatier, whose “Life of St. Francis of Assisi,” published in 1894 and translated into most European languages, has done much to make the saint and the mediæval revival connected with his name known to the world. M. Sabatier’s work had many defects arising from a somewhat distorted view of the action of the Papacy in regard to the Franciscan movement; but he was able to make St. Francis live in the imagination. He did still better work in editing the long-lost “Mirror of Perfection: The Blessed Francis,” the greater portion of which was written by Fra Leone, the saint’s most cherished companion. M. Sabatier is now engaged in preparing other primitive Franciscan documents for publication. Not less valuable have been the labors of two friars of the order, Padre Marcellino da Civezza and Padre Teofilo Domenichelli, who lately edited the entire text of the “Legend by the Three Companions,” the most delightful of all the “legends.”

The value of these discoveries in confirming the popular cultus of the saint cannot be exaggerated. We can now see Francis as he appeared to those who knew him most intimately, and the result of this increased knowledge is to deepen our reverence and love for his name. “Those that loved him before may love him better now. We knew him saintly and human. We find him more human and saintly than we knew. The more clearly we see his features, the more clearly may we trace their likeness to those of the Man of Sorrows. It is the likeness of close kindred, the mystic likeness that once seemed a peril and has always been a glory to the Church of Christ.”[1] Yes, in these original documents Francis stands out with a glory brighter than ever. His features, faithfully limned by his own companions and personal disciples, are more Christlike than we find them in any of the later biographies. These have generally drawn the saint as they conceived he should have lived: by deepening the shadows here and heightening the colors there, they have often caricatured and even falsified the saint’s true features. The Francis of the later biographies is like an ancient masterpiece of art restored by inferior hands. But in the primitive “legends” we have the real Francis. To be sure, he is ever the hero and the saint and no common man in the mind of the writers; but then he really was a hero and a saint. With charming simplicity they relate what they heard and saw. There is no attempt to criticize, for they are disciples of a great master and they write with the candor of faith. They do not think to hide his human infirmities or temptations; these do not detract from his moral grandeur. They evidently do not think him the less a saint because he was more a man. To them he was verily a prophet sent by God to form a “chosen people” whom God had called out of the midst of religious laxity and degeneration, to bear witness to the true character of the Gospel; another Abraham, father of a mighty spiritual race that should endure unto the end of time. No less than prophet and patriarch was Francis to them, and with delightful simplicity they found parallels in Scripture to apply to the saint and his religious family. The Chapel of the Portiuncula is another Jacob’s stone; the promise of God to Abraham is repeated to Francis; the followers of Francis are the new Israel. But in Francis the Old Law is transfigured and becomes the New. He bears the character not of Abraham nor of Moses, but of Christ. Assisi is as Bethlehem, Alverna as Calvary, Umbria as Galilee. In the company of Francis they seemed to themselves to walk with Jesus in the far-off Holy Land.

How all this worked out in daily life may be read in the “Legend by the Three Companions,” of which the following extracts are a specimen:

“The Blessed Francis, being already filled with the grace of the Holy Spirit, called unto him his six brethren (this was, of course, in the very earliest years of the movement) and spoke to them of the things that would happen to them, saying: ‘Let us consider, my brothers, our calling, wherein God has mercifully called us, not for our own salvation only, but for the salvation of many others; that going forth into the world we may exhort other men, more by example than by word, to do penance for their sins and be mindful of the commandments of God. Fear not because you seem weak and foolish, but without faltering preach simply penance, and put your trust in God Who conquers the world, because by His Spirit He speaks in you and through you, for the exhortation of all men, that they may be converted unto Him and observe His commandments. And you will find some men believing, gentle and kind, who will with joy receive both you and your words. But many others you will find unbelieving, proud, and blasphemous, who will resist you contumeliously, both you and the words you will speak to them. Therefore lay it up in your hearts to bear all things humbly and with patience.’ Now when the brothers had heard these words they began to fear. To whom the saint said: ‘Fear not, for after no long while many will come to you, learned and noble, and with you they will preach to kings and princes and many peoples, and many will be converted to the Lord Who will multiply and increase His family throughout the world.’ And when he had said these things and blessed them, the men of God devoutly went forth, observing what he had taught them.”

This was the first missionary journey of Francis’ disciples. They went two and two, after the fashion of the Gospel, in various directions; nor were they long in experiencing the various receptions foretold by the saint. Some received them with the reverence and affection due to holy men; others took them to be tramps and assaulted them, pelting them with mud and even stripping their clothes from their backs. Such treatment must have been peculiarly trying to men of sensitive temperament like Fra Bernardo, the saint’s first disciple. But they bore all patiently, “according to the Gospel, praying fervently and solicitously for their persecutors.” At the end of their missionary period they all returned to Portiuncula, outside Assisi, and says the Legend: “No sooner did they meet each other again than they were filled with such joy and sweetness as to forget altogether the injuries of perverse men.” The Legend then gives us a glimpse of what we may call the friars’ home-life.

“Every day they gave themselves to prayer and manual labour that they might altogether flee idleness, the enemy of the soul.[2] They rose in the middle of the night and prayed most devoutly with sighs and tears. They loved each other with an intimate affection, and each served the other and cared for him as a mother loves and cares for her only son. So great was the charity which burned in their hearts that each one would have deemed it an easy thing to give his life, not only for the love of Christ, but for the salvation of the soul of his brother, and even to save his body. Thus it happened one day, when two of the brethren went out, that a madman met them and began to throw stones at them. Whereupon one brother, seeing that the stones were hitting the other, at once threw himself in the way, willing that he himself should be hit rather than the other, so great was their mutual love. Thus were they prepared to give their very lives for each other.

“So grounded were they in humility and charity that each reverenced the other as his father and lord, and those who were superiors or who were in any way distinguished above the others, appeared only the more humble and unassuming. Moreover, they were all anxious to obey, and were so ready to carry out the will of him who commanded that they never thought to distinguish between just and unjust precepts; because whatever was commanded they took to be in accordance with the will of God. Hence it was easy and sweet for them to obey. They put from them all carnal desires. They judged themselves without indulgence, and especially did they beware lest they should in any way offend each other. And if it happened at any time that one said anything which hurt another, he was seized with remorse and could not rest till he had acknowledged his fault. . . . No one of them considered anything as his own; their books and whatever else they had were for common use, according to the tradition handed down from the apostles. But, although they themselves were truly poor, yet out of the things God had given them they liberally and ungrudgingly, for the love of God, gave to others, especially the poor who sought an alms. Sometimes when they were traveling and met beggars, having nothing else to give, they would share with them their garments, sometimes giving away their hood, sometimes tearing off a sleeve: that so they might fulfil the Gospel which says, Give to them that ask.

“When the rich ones of this world came to them, the brethren received them readily and with kindness, being anxious to draw them from evil and lead them to penance. They were anxious not to be sent to their native places, in order to be free from the company and conversation of their relatives; thus observing the prophet’s words: ‘I am become a stranger to my brethren and as an alien to the sons of my mother.’ Thus did they rejoice much in their poverty, . . . and they were joyful in the Lord at all times because among themselves there was no cause for sadness.”[3]

No wonder that Jacques de Vitry, traveling through Italy in A.D. 1216, in the early days of the Franciscan movement, was struck with astonishment at this new body of men and women whose life recalled to him “the manner of life of the Primitive Church, concerning which it is written: ‘The multitude of them that believed had but one heart and one soul.’”[4]

Surely in the whole history of Christendom since the days of the Apostles themselves, there has been no such another evangelical movement as this. Never has the world seen such another dramatic setting of the Gospel, played with such fidelity in the minute details of daily life. It was too sublime really for general acceptance. As the number of Francis’ disciples increased (and they increased with surprising rapidity) the first high fervor waned. There were still some who walked on the high road of Francis’ heaven; but the majority could not attain thereto. Historians lament the decline of the movement. Need we be surprised? The life of Francis and his early disciples was an inspiration rather than a set rule of life. Other men of less spirituality came after them, who aspired to walk in their footsteps. Most frequently they followed only at a distance; yet the world has been the better even for such a following as theirs. The humblest follower of Christ is still a witness to the Christ, even though he point to the Christ from afar off, and were he to disappear the world would oftentimes be lost in utter spiritual darkness. We must be grateful when Providence sends us the greater lights of religion; but let us not despise the lesser lights who are more constantly with us.

Besides these humbler, but honest, disciples of Francis, there were others who called themselves disciples—and they were not a few—who seemed destined to subvert, if it could have been subverted, the noble ideal of Francis’ life. They saddened the saint’s last years; after his death they well nigh brought the Franciscan movement into contempt. They gathered round Francis like moths around a lamp. They were not of his; they only usurped his name. We may therefore leave them to their fate in the contempt of history, and fix our gaze upon the pure and heroic figure of the saint himself. For by doing so we shall be able most surely to understand the spiritual motive which lay at the back of that wonderful religious revival of the later middle ages.

Notes

[1] Preface to the Mirror of Perfection, by Sebastian Evans.

[2] This phrase, “idleness, the enemy of the soul,” was frequently on the lips of St. Francis, and occurs several times in his Rule and Last Testament.

[3] “Legend by the Three Companions,” chaps. x. and xi.

[4] This letter of Jacques de Vitry is most valuable to the student of the early Franciscan movement. But its significance will easily be exaggerated unless we bear in mind that it is the letter of a traveler giving his impressions. M. Sabatier has, it seems to me, done violence to the text when he draws the conclusion that the religious Sisters of the order were “sœurs hospitalières,” and not contemplatives, because Jacques says: “They dwell together in various hospices; they receive nothing, but live by the labour of their hands.” But this is quite consistent with the contemplative life. Francis did eventually enlarge the scope of his order, so as to include women devoted to a more active life.

From the American Catholic Quarterly Review, vol. 25, no. 100 (October 1900), pp. 657–674. Part II follows tomorrow.

St. Francis has been celebrated in many ways over the last few years. In short succession, we have witnessed the anniversaries of the Nativity at Greccio, the reception of the Stigmata, and the composition of the Canticle of Creatures. Now, as summer turns to fall in the year of Our Lord 2026, there is one last Franciscan 800: the 800th anniversary of the passage of Francis into eternal life.

That passage was celebrated in many places, above all in Assisi, on October 4, the day before this publication appears. Despite the fact that October 4, 2026, already lies in the past, the 800th anniversary of Francis’s passing is still to come. In the perennial puzzle of being and seeming, this essay appears to be late, but is, naturally, still early.

William Henry Draper paraphrased the Canticle of Creatures for the English world in “All Creatures of Our God and King.” “Thou burning Sun,” he writes, “with golden beam… praise Him.” Without denigrating Draper’s work in any way, I would like to begin by drawing attention to the difference between his phrasing and St. Francis’s. For Draper, we speak to the Sun, exhorting it to praise a Divinity who stands at the grammatical remove of the third person. Francis, on the other hand, addresses himself directly to God.

When Francis, gazing on the heavens, praises God, he speaks of “messor lo frate Sole.” That “frate,” Brother Sun, is surely at the heart of the Francis of popular legend. Here is someone who sees Nature in warm and familiar terms. Due attention, however, should also be given to “messor,” an Umbrian cousin of the French “monsieur.” The Sun is not just Brother Sun but My Lord Brother Sun. Familiarity stands with respect.

Respect means looking again—re-spicere. A person worthy of our respect gets a second glance when entering the room. When we corral a gaggle of elementary schoolers, we hope even for a single look. We want to be respected: “Hey! Look at me.” Let us join Francis in considering the Sun as worthy of our respect, by looking again at the word “year,” for the true year is not the product of human conventions but rather the work of our Brother above.

You could stop here and look up a specific decimal number for the length of the year (more specifically, the “tropical year”) when measured in days.^¹ Let us ignore that number for a moment, though, and think simply about the things that we can see with our own eyes. In summer, the sun climbs high in the sky and the days are long. In winter, the midday sun is low, and evening falls too soon. When the cycle of seasons runs its course a single time, we say that a year has passed.

That coarse description lets us talk about “roughly a year.” In a very primitive society, it would be difficult to distinguish between 365, 365.2, 365.25, and 365.24 days as measures of the “true” length of the year. How do we get from “roughly” to “exactly”? The way to do this is to consider long periods of time, not single years but scores of them. Take a culture that is slightly more refined, and suppose that its members can do two things. One is to keep accurate records over a century, and the other is to pick out the day in the summer when the sun achieves its highest midday elevation. That is called the summer solstice.

We can imagine recreating a society like that, even if all our technology were to crumble and accumulated scientific knowledge were to disappear. After a few generations, this society arrives at 100 years of keeping records. Its members find that a certain number of whole days have passed between one summer solstice and one 100 years later. That number is 36,524. It is important that this is a whole number. We are presuming the capacity to count days, but not supposing that we have accurate clocks, or indeed any clocks at all. And we are not supposing that we can track down the “exact” time of the solstice (which is a moment rather than a day) but just the day that it occurs.

By taking a long period of 100 years, we are able to overcome the poverty of our instrumentation. Little bits of uncertainty are rendered moot by a large denominator. We found that there were 36,524 days in 100 years, so dividing gives us 365.24 days in a single year.

Julius Caesar introduced a calendar in 45 BC, with leap years occurring every fourth year. This means that four consecutive calendar years have 365, 365, 365, and then 366 days, for a total of 1,461 days in 4 years. Dividing 1,461 by 4, we see that the Julian calendar approximates the true solar year as 365.25 days.

What happens when a calendar’s approximation of the solar year does not correspond exactly to the real thing? Here are two extreme cases that illustrate the results. Suppose that we chose to make a calendar of twelve 30-day months, so that there were 360 calendar days in one calendar year. If the summer solstice happened on June 20 one year, it would occur around June 25 the next year, since 5 days would remain in the solar year after the passage of a single calendar year. Suppose, on the other hand, that we make an overestimate, with a calendar containing twelve 31-day months. Then, by the time we get back to June 20 on the calendar, the solstice is already seven days (372 − 365) in the past.

The inaccuracy in the Julian year, the difference between 0.24 and 0.25 days per year, is quite small when we limit our attention to the span of a single human life. Over centuries, though, the error accumulates. Season as marked by the sun decouples from season as marked by the calendar. This gap slowly became evident. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII called for a new calendar, one that would give a better approximation. This correction removes three Julian leap years out of every 400 years. The Gregorian calendar, therefore, approximates the solar year as 365.2425 days.

When Gregory introduced his change, he did two things. One was to modify how leap years would be observed going forward. The other was to make a one-time adjustment to correct for the error accumulated since the Council of Nicaea. The Julian year is an overestimate. Recall from the 372-day example: this means that the solstice was occurring too early in the calendar year. To fix this, one needs to remove calendar days. Within the sphere of Roman influence, calendars skipped from October 4 (the Feast of St. Francis) to October 15, 1582.

Great Britain and the colonies waited to adopt the Gregorian calendar. They came around while George Washington was a young man, and September 2, 1752, was followed by September 14, 1752. In the future United States, then, the transformation of time was subtly marked by the sign of the Holy Cross (celebrated September 14).

Now we need to put all this together, finally getting to the real question. What does it mean to celebrate 800 years of Francis? Solstices and equinoxes are the way that the sun marks time. We need to ask, then: how long after the autumnal equinox did Francis die? Let us work our way backward. This year, the autumnal equinox was on September 22. The Gregorian/British deletion of days means that before 1752, the autumnal equinox occurred eleven days earlier, according to the calendar (i.e., around September 11). Going back further, we must note that Julian leap years were observed in 1700, 1500, 1400, and 1300, which shifts the equinox four days in the other direction, calendrically. The difference 11 − 4 gives 7. So we conclude that the equinox in 1226 occurred around September 15.

Sister Death embraced Francis sometime in autumn; to measure this moment according to Our Lord Brother Sun means forgetting about every human calendar. October 4, 1226, happened about 19 days after the autumnal equinox. Nineteen days after our autumnal equinox, this year, is… October 11. The celebration has not yet come to its natural end.

There are two points that I have overlooked but cannot omit any longer. One is that the Gregorian year, like the Julian, is only an approximation. The accumulated difference, over 800 years, is roughly a quarter day, so our calculations have not been too inaccurate. Another is that the Transitus of Francis and his liturgical feast are not wholly identical; it seems that he passed from this life after the sunset of October 3. Days can be reckoned from sunset instead of midnight, so his feast was established on the 4th. Some uncertainties will always remain, in this life.

In Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, the life and Stigmata of St. Francis are a jumping-off point for investigating how the human mind ascends through created things. I would like to offer a kind of mirror image of the Bonaventurian presentation. Having begun with the scientific work of the mind, let us conclude by turning to Francis. Here are three points about his life, in the light of our study of the measurement of time. The first concerns convention, the second lowliness, and the third beauty.

This essay has pointed out that a certain convention—October 4, according to calendars—is missing something. St. Francis is renowned, and perhaps beloved, because of his willingness to transgress convention. The calculations above showed us that it costs something to see the nature beyond convention. Authentic “transcendence” of the convention involves submission to an order even more rigid, austere, and demanding. We might pause, then, for self-examination before we undertake to overstep conventional bounds. St. Francis sold his father’s wares, but he also acquired something: the wounds of One Crucified.

As his life drew to an end, Francis removed his clothes and lay upon the ground. He could not be lowly enough. The Franciscans who chose to expose Francis’s mortal remains for veneration this year drew inspiration from John 12: the seed must fall to the ground and die, lest it remain alone. In an age of dramatic scientific advances, we might hope to catch a glimpse of God in a new subatomic particle or in the latest galaxy revealed by a space telescope. I have no problem with new science, and I publish it myself. I hope, though, that we keep our eyes on lowly things, things like seeds and yeast and the familiar Sun. It seems that they have been imbued with a power to speak to us in every age.

Finally, what can the Christian believer call beautiful? Those of us with business in the world need to dress well and keep our lawns tidy. We want to offer pleasing fare when guests arrive. All of this is surely to the good. St. Augustine, like St. Bonaventure, was inspired by the perfection of the number six. In the Julian calendar, the residual part of the year has six hours, exactly. Sometimes the numbers seem so clean, so beautiful. St. Augustine took it as a sign.^² Sometimes, though, things do not work out. We are left with a mess, ever to be fiddled with, never to be fully grasped. Christians see beautiful things as beautiful. But they have learned of a more-than-mortal beauty. Francis speaks of it like this. “When I was yet in my sins, it seemed to me unbearably bitter to see lepers. And the Lord himself led me among them, and I showed kindness to them. And as I went away from them, that which had seemed bitter to me was now changed for me into sweetness of mind and body.”^³

Notes

1. There are many subtleties in the definitions of years and days that will not be mentioned here. To explore these ideas, see the rich website of Dr. Irv Bromberg, https://kalendis.free.nf/seasons.htm#years, and the many beautiful graphs therein.

2. Augustine, De Trinitate IV.4.7–8.

3. Francis of Assisi, The Writings of St. Francis, trans. Ignatius Brady (Assisi: Edizioni Porziuncola, 1983), 143.

Cover: Cimabue, St. Francis, detail of the Maestà (c. 1285–88), Lower Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi, after the 2023 restoration. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Peter Ulrickson, a Fellow of the Gibbons Institute, is Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at The Catholic University of America.

from the Catholic World, April 1877

by Maurice Francis Egan

From the Editor

Today is the feast of St. Francis, eight hundred years after his passing. It is also the Lord’s Day, on which the Review does not ordinarily publish; we make an exception for the great saint.

We offer a poem, “St. Francis of Assisi,” which appeared, unsigned, in the Catholic World in April 1877 and is attributed to Maurice Francis Egan, the subject of Joshua C. Benson’s essay on Friday, “Everybody’s Francis.” Egan was then twenty-four. He went on to teach English at Notre Dame and at The Catholic University of America, and to serve as Theodore Roosevelt’s minister to Denmark.

It is a poem about missing Assisi. A husband and wife spent a summer in Umbria with the town in sight across the valley, but they never made the short journey. The conceit is not plausible, and so it invites interpretation. In the first four stanzas she voices the regret; in the rest he consoles her. The saint, he says, is not confined to his town: he is found in his poverty, his wounds, his creatures, and his Canticle, which the poem paraphrases in its ninth and tenth stanzas.

Those of us blessed to have visited Assisi may nonetheless ponder this lesson with profit.

The last stanza turns to Dante, who sets the praise of Francis in the fourth heaven of Paradise, the heaven of the Sun, and who says that Assisi ought rather to be called the East, because a sun rose there. That is the sense of Egan’s closing line.

Michael Pakaluk

O Love! you lay the volume by
  That held you like a holy chime—
Life of St. Francis—with a sigh
  Which says: “That was a pleasant time
In old Perugia’s mountain-town
On the Umbrian valley looking down—
  Flushed like an Eden in sublime
Environment of mountains vast;
  And do not you, as I, recall
What, morn and even, and first and last,
  Attracted most of all?

“The peaks of Apennine we knew
  By heart—the many-citied land
Where-through the infant Tiber drew
  A thousand streams in silver band,
Filled with the murmur of the pines
That told the olives and the vines
  They heard the sea on either hand.
But, kindled on its lofty cape,
  A light-tower to that inland coast
O’er waves of greenwood, corn, and grape,
  What object charmed us most?

“Assisi seated in the sun!
  All round from Monte Sole’s height
The insistent fascination
  Of its white walls enthralled our sight.
And moon and starlight on its slope
Showed but a dimmer heliotrope.
  We watched it many a mellow night:
Once when a warrior comet came,
  And flashed, in high heaven opposite,
A sheathless sword of pallid flame,
  Drawn from out the infinite.

“To sweet St. Francis’ native town,
  Alas! we made no pilgrimage;
Nor to St. Mary’s, lower down,
  His Portiuncula hermitage.
We knew but by its star-like shine
The splendors of Assisi’s shrine,
  In mystic triple stage on stage.
It only asked one summer’s day—
  How strange it seems in you and me!—
That narrow vale of Umbria
  Made severance like the sea.”

O gentle wife! I cannot tell
  To wistful eyes of retrospect
What dolce far niente’s spell,
  In that midsummer, caused neglect;
What imp, procrastination hight,
Seduced us when we meant no slight.
  In life, all paradox and defect,
Easy is difficult—the friend
  Next door to visit—duties small,
To be done any day, that end
  In not being done at all.

“How can this trite philosophy
  Console me in my great regret?”
Nay, love, look not so tearfully,
  And we will find some comfort yet.
What figure, think you, in those streets
The gentle, loving youth repeats,
  Singing his gay French canzonet?
Doth either temple’s sumptuous pride
  Suit stone and crust for bed and board,
And bridegroom joyful in his bride—
  The poverty of our Lord?

O brown serge holier than the cope!
  Was mystery veiled in long-sleeved gown?
And awful was his girdle-rope?
  Were skirts that swept his ankles brown?
Bore he, in hands and feet and side,
The five wounds of the Crucified?
  Did high God send his seraph down,
On the lone mount, to imprint such sign?
  His brethren wondered, overawed;
Yet not even this made more divine
  That sweet-souled man of God!

O happy swallows! circling skim
  And twitter o’er the gray church-towers.
He called you sisters; ye with him
  Chirped sweetly when he sang the Hours.
And ye, his brothers innocent,
With whom he talked where’er he went,
  Play, lamb and leveret, in the flowers!
Wise foolishness and melting ruth—
  That move deep chords, O love! in you—
Born of child-instincts, or a truth
  He and the angels knew!

“O Sun, my brother above all!
  Stars, Sister Moon, in praise accord.
Chaste, humble, useful, precious, full,
  O Sister Water, freely poured!
Robust and jocund, strong and bright,
O Brother Fire! illume the night.
  Live tongues of beauty, praise the Lord!
O Brother Wind! thy wonders weave
  In clouds and the blue sky above,
Wherefrom all creatures life receive,
  And weave them all of love.

“Confess the Lord, O Mother Earth!
  Through whom so beautiful thou art.
To herb, fruit, flower, he giveth birth
  And color from Love’s eyes and heart.
Serve God!” he sang. His sermons good,
Dear to shy creatures of the wood,
  Could even to bole and branch impart
Their glowing sense: a conscious soul
  Kin to his own in all things moved.
His monument is grand—the whole
  Creation that he loved.

O Life, that sought to imitate
  The one pure type, its perfect Chief,
By its own purity separate
  As is the dew-drop on a leaf,
Which yet doth from its luminous veil
A glory to the flower exhale!
  Close sympathy with no touch of grief!
Let fair Assisi on its slope,
  An unremote yet reachless star,
Lend to our hearts another trope,
  So near and yet so far.

O Poet, who in faltering rhyme
  First wove the Tuscan into song!
O poem and miracle sublime,
  Thyself, in Dante sweet and strong!
To his fourth circle of Paradise,
To the King-splendor of the skies,
  Dost thou, the elder seer, belong.
Thee “Sister Death” hath glorified;
  And what an image we have won:
Through kindled mists of mountain-side,
  Assisi in the sun!

From the Catholic World 25, no. 145 (April 1877): 11–14. Obvious misprints have been corrected and the spacing of punctuation modernized. Cover: Assisi from the plain, photograph by Gunnar Bach Pedersen (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

From the Editor

Francis died at the Porziuncula on the evening of October 3, 1226, eight hundred years ago tonight. He had asked to be laid on the bare ground, and he had lately added to his Canticle a verse welcoming Sister Death. By the reckoning of the time, which began the day at sunset, he died on October 4; that is why his feast falls tomorrow, and why Franciscans keep this evening, rather, as the Transitus, his “passing over.”

Simply, we mark the hour with the closing pages of a popular life of the saint, which E. Leahy wrote for this Review in July 1923. Leahy was not a critical historian. He took the old stories as they were passed down. But the stories are indeed old. The music at Rieti comes from Thomas of Celano, who wrote within a generation of the saint’s death; the larks over the roof come from St. Bonaventure. The “violin” is Leahy’s own touch: Celano’s word is cithara, a lute or zither, which is what the angel holds in Francisco Ribalta’s painting below.

The pages begin, fittingly, with the sun, and they end with sunset—just as the hymns of the Divine Office greet the dawn and the dusk.

Leahy’s writing is beautiful and a witness to the kind of Catholic reflection we wish to revive.

Michael Pakaluk

The Transitus of St. Francis

From “The Little ‘Poor Man’ of Assisi” (1923)

But of all created things Francis loved best the sun, and next to it fire.

“In the morning,” he would say, “when the sun rises all men ought to praise God Who created it for our use, for all things are made visible by it. But in the evening, when it is night, all men ought to praise God for brother fire, which gives our light at night. For we are like the blind, but God gives light by means of these two brothers.”

. . .

We have already spoken of the saint’s love for the woodland hermitage of Porziuncola, a love which grew and deepened as the years went by. It may be said with truth that the only spot on earth that Francis ever allowed himself to regard as home was Porziuncola. Thus it is that in the autumn of 1226 we find him returning to the loved retreat, a weary, worn-out man; broken with austerities, physical sufferings, many sorrows and much disappointment. Francis had come home to die.

It is related that a short time previously, whilst sojourning at Rieti, the saint, being in greater pain than usual, requested one of the brothers to play and sing to him some sacred song which might soothe his suffering. The Brother demurred, alleging as an excuse that the people of the house would be disedified if they heard the sounds of a violin issuing from the sick man’s room. The meek Francis did not press the matter further. But that night, as he lay sleepless on his couch of pain, he heard in the stillness strains of unearthly sweetness outside his window. Well the saint knew that never did earthly musician produce from instrument fashioned by mortal hands such melody. All through the hours of darkness the celestial harping continued, and when morning came Francis said to the Brother: “The Lord did not forget me this time either, but comforted me, as He always does. Instead of thee, He sent me an angel who had played for me all night.”

On the 3d of October, 1226, the Master’s call came. As the day waned Francis seemed to gain strength, and lifting up his voice he sang the 141st Psalm [Psalm 142 in the Hebrew numbering], beginning, “I cried to the Lord with my voice.” And then as the golden light of sunset was illumining the Apennines, there fell a sudden stillness round the couch of Francis, that stillness which is like no other, and the weeping Brothers knew that their father had left them.

God’s peerless knight, God’s sweet singer, had gone home. After the first few moments of silence there came a burst of harmony sweet and loud. The saint’s “sister larks” were filling the air with hymns of praise.

From The American Catholic Quarterly Review 48 (July 1923): 185–208. The text is reprinted as it first appeared, with evident misprints corrected; words in square brackets are the editor’s. Cover: Giotto, The Death of St. Francis (detail), c. 1325, Bardi Chapel, Santa Croce, Florence; Wikimedia Commons.

On the evening of October 3, 1226, as the light was leaving the Umbrian hills, Francis of Assisi died at the Portiuncula, the little chapel below the town that he counted his only home on earth.

The American Catholic Quarterly Review will mark the eight hundredth anniversary of his death with a week of writing on St. Francis, beginning today and running through Saturday, October 10—the eve of a second anniversary, which I will leave to a mathematician to explain on Monday.

The Review has done this before. When Leo XIII kept the seventh centenary of the saint’s birth with the encyclical Auspicato Concessum in September 1882, the Review answered in its next number, in January 1883, with a long essay on what Francis had done for the arts. We will republish that essay this week.

We begin with a genial essay by one of our associate editors, Joshua C. Benson, on Maurice Francis Egan’s Everybody’s St. Francis (1912), a life of the saint written before the garden statue and the “Peace Prayer” settled our picture of him.

Michael Pakaluk

Everybody’s Francis

Maurice Francis Egan’s life of the saint, written before the garden statue and the “Peace Prayer”

Joshua C. Benson

As we approach the 800th anniversary of St. Francis of Assisi’s death—strictly the evening of October 3, but observed traditionally on October 4, on the principle that the next day began at sunset—it is right for this Review to pay tribute to Everybody’s St. Francis, a remarkable life of the saint by Maurice Francis Egan published in 1912. Though Egan’s name is little known today, he was an important American Catholic literary voice of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the very period when the ACQR flourished.

A gifted editor, prolific writer, and professor of English at Notre Dame and The Catholic University of America, Egan was also a close friend of Theodore Roosevelt and an accomplished statesman. As U.S. minister to Denmark (his title was “Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary”), he helped broker the deal that made the Danish West Indies the United States Virgin Islands.¹

Egan was born in Philadelphia on May 24, 1852, to parents who prized education. They planted him in a world of letters and art at a young age, a world which became the rich soil for a life that would bear much fruit. Egan attended La Salle College and Georgetown. A sharp student, he studied law as a young man with his boyhood friend James Gibbons Huneker, who himself became one of the most important cultural critics of the early twentieth century.² In the 1870s and 1880s, he became a widely published Catholic author across a variety of venues. This led Egan into editorial work culminating in the editorship of the New York Freeman’s Journal, which he assumed on the death of its principal editor, the convert James A. McMaster.³

In 1888, the very year the cornerstone of Caldwell Hall was laid at Catholic University, Egan began his appointment at Notre Dame. Seven years later, in 1895, CUA, looking to bolster its offerings in English, wooed Egan away from South Bend. Egan taught at CUA until May 22, 1907, when he accepted Roosevelt’s offer to become minister to Denmark. While in that distinguished position, Egan, a longtime devotee of the Poor Man of Assisi, wrote in serialized form for the magazine Century the pages that would become Everybody’s St. Francis.

Egan’s fascination with Francis must have originated in his youth. In 1877 he published a poem in the Catholic World dedicated to Francis, which anticipates some of the themes of his later book, above all love: in Egan’s rendering, Francis’s Canticle bids the wind weave all creatures “of love.”⁴

O Love! you lay the volume by
That held you like a holy chime—
Life of St. Francis—with a sigh
Which says: “That was a pleasant time
In old Perugia’s mountain-town
On the Umbrian valley looking down—
Flushed like an Eden in sublime
Environment of mountains vast;
And do not you, as I, recall
What, morn and even, and first and last,
Attracted most of all?

The poem also shows that Dante influenced Egan’s approach to Francis. Indeed, he views Dante and Francis as the first two poets of the Italian tongue, as evidenced by the last stanza of the poem:

O Poet, who in faltering rhyme
First wove the Tuscan into song!
O poem and miracle sublime,
Thyself, in Dante sweet and strong!
To his fourth circle of Paradise,
To the King-splendor of the skies,
Dost thou, the elder seer, belong.
Thee “Sister Death” hath glorified;
And what an image we have won:
Through kindled mists of mountain-side,
Assisi in the sun!⁵

In a letter of 1892, cited by Brother Raymond Weitekamp, Egan reveals more about how he would later approach Francis.⁶ “The Lives of the Saints should be rewritten,” Egan explained, “because young people do not understand the blundering, cumbersome, foreign way in which they are generally presented. They lack ‘style,’ and no writer can teach young Americans in print without a knowledge of the art of the modern way of putting things.” He then noted that while a life of St. Francis published in 1870 by Margaret Oliphant may excel in its style, it “fails in an understanding of the mystical character of the saint. Francis d’Assisi was a poet, a man of genius, a hero and he did far more for the world than Columbus or George Washington.” One might imagine that Egan hoped to correct these perceived failings and even improve upon Oliphant’s modern style in his later work. The passage also makes clear that Egan was concerned that good literature on the saints be provided to Catholic youth.

Everybody’s St. Francis was clearly written for a more general audience, as its length and style show. This was a wise decision on Egan’s part, since two much larger works on Francis preceded his own. Paul Sabatier’s landmark study of Francis, first published in 1894, set a new standard for the discussion of St. Francis and began paving the way for what has since become known as the “Franciscan Question,” which has dominated scholarship since that time: How can a scholar access the historical Francis, who has been transmitted to us through so many different sources?⁷ Moreover, just as Egan was publishing his own work, Johannes Jørgensen’s Saint Francis of Assisi: A Biography was translated into English from Danish. Everybody’s St. Francis is not like either of these works, nor is it like Oliphant’s, which drew Egan’s criticism. Egan sought to write more simply, more briefly, and yet with clear attention to history and scholarship. Egan’s volume also distinguished itself from all other Francis texts before or since because it included tender, colorful illustrations by Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel, whose cycle of paintings on Joan of Arc is still displayed today at the National Gallery of Art.

Egan, then, had to contend with earlier lives of Francis in order to make room for Everybody’s St. Francis. The precise moment of his composition also preceded significant developments that affect our own perception of Francis, though they did not influence his own perceptions or those of his readers. While Francis’s love of nature has always been lauded, our contemporary memory of Francis has certainly been shaped by St. Francis garden statues. These quaint renderings often depict Francis not merely as a serene contemplative to be lodged in our garden but also as a functional birdbath to cleanse its avian visitors. These statues started appearing in the 1920s, according to historian Patricia Appelbaum, but only reached mass-production levels a decade later.⁸ At about the same time, near the last centenary of Francis’s death, in 1926, the now much-loved “Peace Prayer” first appeared in English, having been published in a French magazine, La Clochette, in 1912.⁹ This prayer, which does so much to shape our thoughts about Francis, exists in no medieval manuscript or early printed edition. It is not an authentic text of the saint but an invention of the twentieth century. Along with the mass-produced garden statue, the prayer has contributed to the image of Francis the proto-hippie: tree-hugging and peace-loving. Franco Zeffirelli’s 1972 film Brother Sun, Sister Moon helped to cement that image, portraying Francis as a starry-eyed youth gazing longingly at fields of flowers and speaking breathlessly, sometimes to no one in particular.

Egan writes in a world before any of this became the popular perception of the little poor man. His own portrayal begins with love, and love remains his consistent theme. At first glance one might suppose that such a Francis is but a variant of the proto-hippie. But the “Summer of Love” is not easily fitted to the love Egan describes in Francis. “The power of St. Francis of Assisi . . . over the Western world of his time, and over our hearts in our time, has been explained in many ways,” Egan writes in his opening paragraph. “But it has only one source and that is love. Love made him a poet; love made him a saint; love gave him life and fire and understanding and all the things that were added to him. Let us see if this is not true.”¹⁰

As his portrayal moves forward, Egan focuses on Francis’s specific love of poverty, a theme he could have absorbed from Dante (see Paradiso, Canto 11). In fact, Egan holds that we will find it hard to understand Francis’s commitment to poverty “unless we have something in our hearts that yearns to love as he loved.”¹¹ It is only our love of the same things that Francis loved that will enable us to understand the depth of Francis’s commitment to poverty. Egan even ties Francis’s love of nature to his love of poverty, for it is in having nothing that Francis can concentrate on the created world. Thus, not possessing books, he can tell his brothers “that created things were the best of all books.”¹² Egan concludes on the same page, “They [i.e., the brothers] must always be in sympathy with nature as well as with poverty.”

Egan links Francis’s miraculous hold over birds, other natural things, and even human hearts to his great love: “The mighty love in the heart of Francis drew all pure-hearted things to him . . . no sinner was hopeless in his eyes, and there was no sinner who might not be called brother.”¹³ His power was perhaps greatest, for Egan, over the heart of St. Clare, whose story he tells at length in connection with Francis. When Egan comes to the great miracle of the stigmata, he yields to the pens of Thomas of Celano and St. Bonaventure, but still he does not hold back his own judgment, that the stigmata flowed from Francis’s greatest love: his desire for union with Christ and his constant contemplation of Christ’s own wounds, which Christ himself “endured for love.”¹⁴

Egan’s life of Francis is well informed, its themes well chosen, its illustrations lovely, and its prose clear. Unfortunately for the legacy of Egan’s work, G. K. Chesterton would publish his own St. Francis of Assisi little more than a decade later, in 1923. The 114 years since the publication of Everybody’s St. Francis have also seen an explosion of research on “Il Poverello.” But none of this makes Egan’s work inadequate. To be sure, his text is a product of his moment. But each age since Francis’s death has rightly felt the pressing need to tell his story.

I myself have felt this need and have added to the vast sea of literature on this great saint.¹⁵ In part, this is because the telling of the lives of the saints is as important as Egan believed it was. Telling the stories of the saints reminds us that the Gospel can be followed, that God’s grace can and will come to us in wonderful, unexpected ways, because the Holy Spirit is at work in time. We must keep writing about the saints: I mean, not simply biographies, stories that tell the facts of their lives. No, we must learn again to write genuine hagiographies—stories that show the saints themselves as living exegeses of the sacred page, and that invite us to assume the risk of the Gospel with them. Maurice Francis Egan understood this need in his own way.

There is an interesting symmetry between Egan’s portrayal of Francis and his comments about his own life in his memoir, Recollections of a Happy Life. At the book’s end (p. 367), Egan reflects in these words:

If I had my life to go over again, I should never worry about anything that might happen—during my long life the things that I worried about never happened, and the things to which I gave no unhappy thought always happened. I should like to say, too, for the benefit of the young, that when one is old, one regrets not the sins one has committed so much as the good deeds one might have performed. As a Christian, I trust that I can leave my sins to Christ, who is more merciful than man; but I can never forgive myself for not having been keener to discover means of helping others. It may be considered sentimental to say or to repeat what is often said—that the only treasure for the old is the love of one’s family and one’s friends . . . I still feel that it is love which gives me the will to live and the will to live really means living.

Egan, writing in 1924 as an aging man, had absorbed the lessons of the two Italian poets he had praised in 1877. All his work and his high thoughts had come to completion, his will and desires turned by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars (Dante, Paradiso, 33.142–145). We remember him now with gratitude, understanding his zeal, because we love too the saint whom he loved.

Egan’s poem “St. Francis of Assisi” will appear in full in a companion post on Sunday.

Notes

1. On Egan, see his own Recollections of a Happy Life (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1924). For a biography of Egan, see the dissertation of Brother Raymond Weitekamp, F.S.C., “Maurice Francis Egan: Writer, Teacher, and Diplomat 1852–1924,” The Catholic University of America, 1962. More briefly, see David Jayne Hill, “Commemorative Tribute to Maurice Francis Egan,” American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1924.

2. On Huneker, see Arnold T. Schwab, James Gibbons Huneker: Critic of the Seven Arts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963). Huneker’s name is no accident—his mother was related to James Cardinal Gibbons. He largely left Catholicism behind in later life, but it was the soil out of which he grew with Egan.

3. On McMaster, one could consult another CUA dissertation, this one published by the press. See Sister Mary Augustine Kwitchen, O.S.F., James Alphonsus McMaster: A Study in American Thought (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1949).

4. Weitekamp notes the poem (p. 5). The poem may be found in Catholic World 25 (April 1877): 11–14. Weitekamp seems to report that the poem in the Catholic World was a translation of, perhaps, the Canticle of the Creatures. In fact, the poem is an original work of Egan, as Weitekamp acknowledges in the bibliography to his dissertation (p. 354).

5. “St. Francis of Assisi,” 14.

6. Weitekamp (p. 37). I have not been able to access the full letter.

7. On this see Augustine Thompson, Francis of Assisi: A New Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), “On the ‘Franciscan Question,’” 153–170.

8. Patricia Appelbaum, St. Francis of America: How a Thirteenth-Century Friar Became America’s Most Popular Saint (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 78–88.

9. Appelbaum, 70–72.

10. Egan, 3.

11. Egan, 96.

12. Egan, 97.

13. Egan, 109.

14. Egan, 127, 176.

15. Joshua C. Benson, Francis of Assisi: A Meditation on His Life and Writings (New York: Paulist, 2024).

Joshua C. Benson, an associate editor of the American Catholic Quarterly Review, teaches in the School of Theology and Religious Studies at The Catholic University of America. He is the author of Francis of Assisi: A Meditation on His Life and Writings (Paulist, 2024).

We follow this principle at the American Catholic Quarterly Review. In the brief four weeks since our relaunch, we’ve brought out things old—the last essay of Orestes Brownson, the 1938 proposal by an American Blessed for an Institute of Catholic Culture—yet also things new, such as a reflection on how we grow in virtue, and, today, the remarkable story, told engagingly by brilliant Gibbons Fellow Thomas Clemmons, of how the mortal remains of an early Roman martyr found their way to Annapolis, Maryland.

Indeed, if you live in the Washington, DC, area, you can make a pilgrimage to the relics of an early Christian martyr just as easily as if you lived in Rome.

In the weeks to come, we will publish recent lectures and talks by prominent Catholic intellectuals, more treasures from our archives, and continuing contributions by our able group of editors—all in our quest to become “the journal of record” for American Catholic intellectual life.

Enjoy today’s essay—and, if you'd like to support our work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Michael Pakaluk

St. Justin of Annapolis

by Thomas Clemmons

In Annapolis, Maryland, in the quiet cemetery of St. Mary’s Church, is a tombstone marking the resting place of “St. Justin the Martyr.”

As a professor of Patristics, I have been told on a few occasions that a short distance from Washington, D.C., lie the remains of the famous second-century saint Justin Martyr (c. 95–165).^[1] Is it possible that the relics of St. Justin Martyr, author of the two Apologies and the Dialogue with Trypho, were at some recent point moved, or translated, to the United States?

A little investigation shows that the relics of St. Justin Martyr are all said to rest in Italy, though in three different churches: Santa Maria della Concezione and St. Lawrence Outside the Walls, both in Rome; and Saints John the Baptist and Blaise in Sacrofano. It quickly becomes clear that the relics in Annapolis are not those of Justin Martyr, the well-known second-century martyr. Who, then, is this Roman-era martyr buried at St. Mary’s in Annapolis?

A century after the execution of Justin Martyr there lived a second Roman martyr named Justin. This Justin was a priest in the city of Rome before and during the Valerian persecution (257–260). According to tradition, he arranged the funerals and burials of many murdered Christians, including several famous martyrs such as Pope Sixtus II, St. Hippolytus, and St. Lawrence. This “second” Justin was himself arrested and probably executed under Claudius II in 269.^[2] Like many of those he buried, he was laid to rest in the Catacomb of Cyriaca. His relics, however, did not remain in Rome (nor did they go to Annapolis); in the ninth century they were taken to Freising, where they remain in the Cathedral of Sts. Mary and Corbinian.

Neither of these two famous Roman martyrs of the second and third centuries is the St. Justin of Rome now in Annapolis. Rather, our St. Justin of Annapolis was a martyr of the severe and widespread Diocletianic persecution of the early fourth century. It is likely that he was martyred in Rome under Maxentius, sometime between 306 and 312. The plaque at St. Mary’s over his resting place, however, reads: “Martyred in the persecution of Maximinus (308–314)[,] buried in the catacombs of St. Callixtus until 1757[,] transferred to Annapolis from the abbey in Subiaco, 1873[,] interred here July 24th, 1989.”^[3]

Who, then, is this St. Justin the Martyr of Rome? Is there an extant passio, acta, or vita of him? Is he found in an older martyrology?

Our St. Justin was unknown, it seems, to much of posterity. There is no extant, or even known, account of his life or martyrdom. The oldest martyrologies do not mention him. Even the Roman Martyrology of Pope Benedict XIV, first published in 1749, near the time Justin’s relics were discovered, does not mention this Roman martyr.^[4] Our Justin, buried in the fourth century, was known only through his discovery in the Catacombs of Callixtus. Indeed, his namesake, martyred under Claudius II some forty years earlier, had labored in these very catacombs, where Pope Sixtus II was laid to rest and where this more posthumously obscure Justin would come to rest.

This is a remarkable point: St. Justin, who came to rest in Annapolis, was an early martyr, buried and venerated in the Roman catacombs, but not remembered in literary history. He would be “found” again only in more recent times.

In modern scholarship it has become a superficial commonplace that the accounts of the early martyrs are often fictitious literary productions, multiplied and elaborated over time. The Bollandists have labored for centuries to apply a scientific approach to adjudicating the veracity of these accounts, both martyrial and hagiographical. But whatever one makes of such judgments (and one may rightly be suspicious of them, since their principles of exclusion are flexible at best), our St. Justin of Rome presents a different consideration: a martyr preserved within the Catacombs of Callixtus, lost in many ways to history, until rediscovered in the eighteenth century. The sole points of reference are his resting place and his very bones.

The catacombs of Rome were well known to the early Christians, and they were in various ways developed, preserved, and supported by the Roman Church. The earliest periods of Christian use have left graceful ornamentation, such as the famous frescoes of the Good Shepherd and of the Bread and Fish. By the fourth century, proper shrines, altars, and even churches had been established in the catacombs. Christians continued to visit the catacombs and to venerate the martyrs there even after the Edict of Milan (313). St. Jerome recounts his youthful visits to the catacombs while he was a student in Rome. Popes throughout the fourth and fifth centuries were devoted custodians of the catacombs, the resting place of so many Roman martyrs.

With the long decline of the city of Rome, many of the catacombs were no longer frequented by the ninth century. By the fourteenth century, their entrances could no longer even be found. Only in the sixteenth century, more than a thousand years after our St. Justin’s interment, did occasional excursions into the catacombs begin (it has been argued that controversies between Catholics and various Protestant groups over the veneration of relics prompted these expeditions). Focused study and excavation began only in the nineteenth century, with the founding of the Commission of Sacred Archaeology by Pope Pius IX in 1851. In this period the wonders of the Catacombs of Callixtus, including the tomb of St. Cecilia and the Crypt of the Popes, were discovered by Giovanni Battista de Rossi.^[5]

It was in these Catacombs of Callixtus that Justin the Martyr (of Annapolis) was discovered, not, however, during the nineteenth-century excavations, but during the occasional excursions of the century before. The plaque above St. Justin’s resting place gives the date 1757,^[6] which places his removal from the Catacombs of Callixtus before the period of organized study and preservation. This early removal also explains how his relics, together with those of two other early martyrs, Nazarius and Sergius, came to be housed in the private chapel of a noble family in Perugia, where they remained for nearly a century.

At some point in the 1860s, perhaps because of social, political, or even personal hardships during the tumultuous unification of Italy, the relics were removed for safekeeping by the Bishop of Città della Pieve. In 1869 they were entrusted to the Benedictines of Subiaco Abbey. According to a Redemptorist history, the “sacrilegious outrages” committed by those seizing the Papal States prompted the prior of Subiaco Abbey, Fr. Raphael Wissel, O.S.B., to offer, with the proper permissions, the relics of these three early Roman martyrs (Justin, Nazarius, and Sergius) to his brother, Fr. Joseph Wissel, a Redemptorist priest and rector of St. Alphonsus in Baltimore. The American Redemptorists accepted, and the Baltimore Province received the relics in September 1873.

The Redemptorist account preserves a telling remark by one of the U.S. Customs inspectors who examined the relics upon their entry into the country. The relics were allowed to remain sealed upon arrival. Redemptorist priests met them at the point of entry and, with the inspectors in tow, escorted them to the rectory of Most Holy Redeemer on East Third Street in Manhattan (the church that would later house the relics of St. Datian). There, under the custodianship of the Redemptorists, the three sealed containers were opened and inspected by U.S. Customs. One of the inspectors observed, “What a strange religion this must be to pay all of these import charges for three boxes of bones!”^[7]

This (notably perennial) response does in a way sum up something of Catholicism. Early pagans often remarked on how Christians buried and revered their holy dead. The catacombs of Rome testify to the elaborate care and veneration that Christians gave their dead, especially the martyrs, who were often brutally and publicly executed. Indeed, the “second” St. Justin mentioned above caught the attention of Roman officials precisely because of the funerary services and care for the dead that he offered to martyrs such as St. Lawrence. Our St. Justin, as unknown as he has been, received a noble burial in the Catacombs of Callixtus. Once removed, he was venerated in a private chapel and ultimately, at some cost and with great care, sent far from the land of his martyrdom to a place and a people enlivened by the Redemptorist missions.

I will discuss in a future essay how these three other early Christian martyrs, Sergius, Nazarius, and Datian, were at the center, or perhaps in the thick of things, during the prominent Redemptorist missions in the East Coast metropolises. By contrast, St. Justin, now of Annapolis, moved ultimately to a small plot in the parish cemetery, points to the witness of the martyrs: at times obscure, yet powerfully perduring.

It is no small thing that Justin, a martyr of the most protracted persecution of the early Church, now rests beside the ordinary faithful of St. Mary’s in Annapolis. There is no need for elaboration, just the witness of bones.*

Thomas Clemmons is Associate Professor of Church History at The Catholic University of America and Associate Editor of this Review.

^[1] For a recent discussion, see George Matysek, November 10, 2023, Catholic Review, https://catholicreview.org/saint-in-the-graveyard-how-did-the-bones-of-st-justin-wind-up-in-annapolis/.

^[2] See Martyrologium Romanum Gregorii XIII: editio novissima Benedicto XIV (Venice: Francisci ex N. Pezzana, 1784), 183. His feast is celebrated on September 17^th. See references to this St. Justin in the Passions of Saints Polychronius and Parmenius, Abdon and Sennen, Pope Sixtus II, Lawrence and Hippolytus. This may be the same Justin commemorated with Crescentius on August 4^th in the Martyrologium Hieronymianum. For evidence of the arrests of Christians, see Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 3035.

^[3] The plaque reads “Maximinus”; more likely he was martyred under Maxentius, who was in control of Italy from 306 to 312.

^[4] See Martyrologium Romanum Gregorii XIII, “Index” (Venice: Francisci ex N. Pezzana, 1784), 19.

^[5] See V. Fiocchi Nicolai, F. Bisconti, and D. Mazzoleni, The Christian Catacombs of Rome: History, Images, Inscriptions (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2025), esp. 9–13.

^[6] An internal Redemptorist publication by Barnabas Hipkins, C.Ss.R., “When the Saints Came Marching Over…,” pp. 5–8, gives the precise date of April 18, 1757. St. Justin’s relics were found along with those of St. Nazarius and St. Sergius. St. Nazarius’s relics ended up in Boston, and St. Sergius in the Redemptorist formation house in Ilchester, MD. A fourth saint, Datian, was discovered in 1762, and by a different route his relics came to rest in New York City.

^[7] Hipkins, “When the Saints Came Marching Over…,” 6.

—

*I sincerely thank Dr. Patrick Hayes, Archivist for the Baltimore Province of the Redemptorists, and my colleague Dr. Maria Cecilia Ulrickson.

From the Editor.

Question the First

“The plan herein suggested assumes that since the Church is living in an order and world-spirit radically different from the past, it must change its method of approach to meet the new situation.”

What was Sheen’s watershed, the dividing line in his mind between past and present? Was it the French Revolution? The Industrial Revolution?

No, I think his dividing line was “the Great War” as culminating in the Russian Revolution. The following paragraph and others in the proposal will be seen to corroborate this judgment:

War, depression, economic chaos, the surrender of science to war, and a disappointed hedonism which turned to pessimism turning minds from a Philosophy of Progress to a Philosophy of Despair and a sense of human frustration and anticipated catastrophe. This modern despair unlike other despairing periods of history a) has no hint nor hope of a brighter future supplanting the evil present, b) nor does it look to the past. Its ideal is not retrospective, but anti-traditional.

Remember, he began his studies at Louvain in 1920, only six years after the German army had burned the university's library, destroying medieval manuscripts and over 200,000 volumes.

But Sheen is unusual in the array of problems he sees as arising specifically in this new era:

Birth control, living wage, family rights, sex, public morals, Totalitarianism, class conflict, racial snobbery are all so many problems issuing from the value of a human person.

His worldview (as is evident elsewhere in the proposal) is mainly European, not American. He still presumes that American culture will be determined by European culture. So his dividing line is drawn from European history, the Great War and the Russian Revolution, rather than from American history, say, the New Deal.

Question the Second

He refers to his Institute as “a university within a university.” He envisioned it as a unit within The Catholic University of America.

Even so, could his proposal be used as a blueprint for a freestanding university? Is the proposal his own “Idea of a University,” corresponding to Newman’s? Might we someday even see a “Blessed Fulton Sheen University” based on it?

No, I think not, but it could be used as a plan for a college teaching a core curriculum within a research university. I will explain why.

It is usual to say that the members of a research university have three duties:

• first, to discover truth, which is “research”;

• second, to pass on truth, which is “teaching”; and

• third, to contribute to the common good in some way, of the university and of society, which is “service.”

Pope St. John Paul II uses this schema in Ex Corde Ecclesiae.

But Sheen is innovative for discerning, rightly, that there is a fourth duty, namely the “application” of truth:

There is not only much truth yet to be learned, but there is also much more acquired and revealed truth which has yet to be applied. Catholic education is not merely an exhortation to extend the frontiers of truth; it must also be primarily the announcement of salvation, not only for the individual soul but for society as well.

This work of “application” must be integrative. It would require that professors from different departments actually talk with one another, and also grow in their understanding of theology and philosophy, so that they can begin to represent within themselves the unity of faith and reason:

It would break down the assumption that religion is a department of life and restore its dignity as the soul of life. The present teaching of religion is that it is something to be learned; the Institute would add that it is something to be realized for Catholic Action is nothing but Catholic realism, or the remarriage of thought and action.

The modern research university ignores “application” in this sense completely. And, therefore, so does a Catholic university, if it models itself on a modern research university.

(Although Ex Corde Ecclesiae uses the three-duty schema, it speaks of the integration of knowledge, the dialogue of faith and reason, ethical concerns, and evangelization [nn. 15–20 and 48–49]. It contains Sheen's “application” in substance. Indeed, one might say that Sheen anticipated its most important themes.)

Newman uses the language of a “naked college” and a “naked university.” He disapproves of both.

• A naked college is a residential college not placed in the broader community of a research university, which has professors who are leading experts, who can lecture with care on the most advanced topics in their disciplines.

• A naked university is a research university with experts like that but with no residential college where students are formed in their character and, in the first instance, are intent on studying disciplines handed down from the past.

Sheen’s Institute is a remedy for a naked university but on its own would be a naked college.

His phrase “a university within a university” is misleading. He uses this language because he is thinking of the professors, who would have their own work to do within it. But from the point of view of the students, his Institute would be “a college within a university,” presenting an innovative core curriculum designed to equip Catholics for living effectively in the modern world.

INSTITUTE OF CATHOLIC CULTURE

A. AN ARGUMENT FOR A NEW RELIGIOUS APPROACH

  1. The purpose of this paper is to suggest in broadest outlines, the contribution the Catholic University can make to the religious and cultural life of the Church and the nation.

  2. The peculiar contribution which the University can make will naturally depend upon the philosophy, the temper and the spirit of the times in which we live. The plan herein suggested assumes that since the Church is living in an order and world-spirit radically different from the past, it must change its method of approach to meet the new situation. The religious affirmations of the Church depend in part on negations by the world, as infallible decisions of the Church are motivated in part by the nature of the environment at any given time.

  3. The proof of a new world spirit is apparent as one contrasts old and new ideas in philosophy, politics, economics and religion.

  4. Conclusion: The Church is no longer homogeneous with the world but heterogeneous to it. Its principles were once ignored; now they are to a great extent in some countries repudiated and repressed. Since then the religious program of the Church in relation to the world must take cognizance of the errors of the time, and since the new errors are quite radically different from the past, it follows that the Church must present its eternal verities with a new emphasis.

B. THE BASIC PROBLEM OF A NEW PROGRAM

  1. The nature of the new approach will depend upon the fundamental and basic problem which underlies all other problems. It is the position of this paper that the basic problem is:-

    MAN.

a) The authority of the Church supports this view, for the Holy Father in his encyclicals: Quadragesimo Anno, Divini Redemptoris, Divini Illius Magistri and Mit brennender Sorge begins a discussion of the social order, Communism and education with “the fundamental doctrine of man”.

b) The best of contemporary thinkers, Dawson, Jerrold, Berdyaev, Hoffman, Madariaga, Maritain, summarize the modern errors as “the dehumanization of man”.

c) All social, political and economic problems are resolvable to the problem of man, e.g. Political Liberalism which isolated man from social responsibilities and Totalitarianism which absorbs man into the collectivity are both errors concerning man, who from the Catholic point of view is above the State because he is a person and yet subject to it because he is also social by nature. The Capitalist contention that capital is entitled to all the profits and the Communistic solution that labor is entitled to all the profits are each exaggerations and defects of the Catholic doctrine which holds that since human labor is both individual and social, therefore both Capital and Labor should share to some extent. Birth control, living wage, family rights, sex, public morals, Totalitarianism, class conflict, racial snobbery are all so many problems issuing from the value of a human person which St. Thomas has called “id quod est perfectissimum in tota natura” (Summa 1 q. 29 a. 3)

C. NEGATIVE SIDE OF THE NEW PROGRAM

  1. The abandonment of Apologetics as the cornerstone of the religious approach because:

a) It is too negative and defensive

b) It was shaped to answer the objections of theological Protestantism which are no longer urged.

c) It was adapted to answer a world which had religious difficulties but not a world which is irreligious.

d) The Catholic presentation of motives of credibility was in a large part determined by the positions taken by the enemy, instead of by ourselves.

  2. The abandonment of an approach which takes its form and content from the error to be answered rather than from the truth to be presented. For example, ethics as a branch of philosophy is philosophy’s answer to Deism and Naturalism. But a philosophical ethics however valid it be is not the Catholic solution to all the problems discussed.

  3. The relegation of apologetics as a genus in the hierarchy of sciences to that of a species, i.e. it should be one among other sciences treating the problem of man. Such is the mind of the Church as revealed in the “Letter of the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities to the Rectors of Universities and Seminaries” (May 1938) which ranks apologetics as one of a body of sciences, to wit, “biology, history, philosophy, apologetics, the juridical and moral sciences.”

D. POSITIVE SIDE OF THE NEW PROGRAM

  1. The new program should take account of integral man, i.e. as natural and supernatural, personal and social. a) Hence it should include the theological, philosophical and the scientific study of man, and b) it should embrace social and juridical sciences as well as courses touching the individual such as psychology and theodicy.

  2. It should integrate Catholicity (not merely the philosophy of man) with every sphere of human activity: political, economic, social, juridical, scientific, historical, etc., thus breaking down the assumption that religion is a department of life distinct from and often unrelated to other departments, valid only in its own sphere and with a principle of operations different from those in the secular sphere. As St. Thomas put it: “All human activities are at the service of Divine Truth.”

  3. This integration would imply a scheme of courses built not as so many distinct compartments, but as a hierarchy or pyramid. At the peak would be the principales or superior sciences of theology and philosophy stating the basic principles concerning the nature, destiny and value of man as supernatural, personal and social.

    Next in order would follow a group of courses called the auxiliares which would apply the above principles to economics, politics, law, social work, etc. For example, why does the Catholic social program insist on a living wage, the right to organize, a share in profits, right to property, its social use, the transcendence of person to State, the subjection of citizen to common good? Both Catholic and non-Catholic programs share some of these positions in common, but the Catholic reason for any of them is different than the secular. The Catholic reason for a living wage is not “the abundant life” but in order that man, dispensed from economic worry, may be free to save his soul. Hence the necessity of courses applying the Catholic doctrine of man to man in the concrete, historical and social order.

    Finally, there would be a group of courses entitled the speciales. These courses would not be constituted by the application of Catholic principles of man to the social and economic order (auxiliares) for there is a group of sciences which derive but little illumination from superior sciences, e.g. the empirical sciences, anthropology, statistics, psychology of conversion, etc. These and similar sciences have their own methods of investigation and their own distinct formal and material objects. Catholic theology and philosophy would not impose their principles on these sciences but rather utilize their findings, for both the deductive and inductive sciences are derived from and serve the common cause of God’s truth.

  4. The general name for a school teaching such a group of courses might be “The Institute of Catholic Culture”. The word ‘cultivation’ in relation to nature means inciting nature by human labor to produce fruits which nature of and by itself is incapable of producing. Applied to man, culture means the unfolding of human possibilities through reason and grace, or the rational and spiritual development of the whole man. Civilization is the effect of this culture in the domain of the civil, the political, the scientific and the artistic.

E. GENERAL EFFECT OF SUCH AN “INSTITUTE OF CATHOLIC CULTURE”

  1. Socially:

     It would break down the enforced isolation of Catholicity from the secular.

     In order to understand this statement recall that religion in general purchased its freedom for the last three hundred years on the assumption that it would not interfere with the secular order. To call any activity “business” or “politics” was to throw a cloak of immunity about it and to justify the exclusion of religion and morality in either of these domains. The secular order said to religion: ‘we will not interfere with you if you do not interfere with us.’ Three disastrous effects followed:

a) Religion became a circumscribed area of life, water-tight in its influences and insulated from all contacts with the political or the economic.

b) While religion was tending to its own business, irreligion preempted the social order.

c) Religion discovered too late that though it left politics and economics alone, politics and economics did not leave it alone, but began to include Divine religion under a State-religion and to regard the Church as “counter-revolutionary”.

     By reaffirming that Catholic truth is organic with all truth, the Church will challenge the world’s assumption that the spiritual is an affair of individual morality. It will re-emphasize with Pius XI that “economic reconstruction is conditioned upon spiritual regeneration” and thus restore the relevance of God to the secular order, by the new policy of initiative as against abstention and by forming a civilization instead of being formed by it. The greatest social effect on such an Institute would be to place the Church ahead of movements for social and political betterment rather than behind them.

  2. Nationally:

    The contributions of such an Institute would be:

a) The protection of democracy against the invasion of all “isms” which impose a false ideology upon man, claiming him as its own as regards both body and soul.

b) The restoration of the lost virtue of Patriotism as a form of Pietas or a corollary of love of God and love of neighbor. This does not mean the imposition of religion on the State, but it does mean effectively laying the resources of religion at the service of the State.

  3. Educationally:

    Such an Institute would be a kind of university within a university in the sense that it would give a complete philosophy and theology of man as a person, a citizen, a rational animal, a social animal, a creature of God and a child of the Heavenly Father. Its claim to autonomous existence is that:

a) There is not only much truth yet to be learned, but there is also much more acquired and revealed truth which has yet to be applied. Catholic education is not merely an exhortation to extend the frontiers of truth; it must also be primarily the announcement of salvation, not only for the individual soul but for society as well.

b) It would break down the assumption that religion is a department of life and restore its dignity as the soul of life. The present teaching of religion is that it is something to be learned; the Institute would add that it is something to be realized for Catholic Action is nothing but Catholic realism, or the remarriage of thought and action.

Publication of this proposal is courtesy of The American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives (ACUA), The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC.

On Sheen’s Proposed Institute of Catholic Culture

(the second in a two-part series)

by Jonathan A. Buttaci

What is man that you are mindful of him,

and the son of man that you care for him?

After more than a decade of teaching—first in the School of Theology, later in the School of Philosophy—the then-Monsignor Sheen proposed a new Institute of Catholic Culture at Catholic University. In doing so, he sought to meet the new challenges presented by contemporary culture, while drawing on the University’s academic strengths—especially in philosophy and theology—and the Church’s perennial intellectual tradition.

His proposed Institute was to be integrated, operating across disciplinary boundaries as “a kind of university within the university.” Sheen was looking for a way to facilitate greater collaboration among traditional departments and schools, while respecting their proper boundaries and areas of expertise. He envisaged a “hierarchy or pyramid” of studies, “at the peak [of which] would be the superior sciences of theology and philosophy.” Even so, he insisted, these disciplines should not “impose their principles on [the social] sciences but rather utilize their findings.” He wished his Institute to supplement, and not replace, the academic work that the University was already pursuing.

In taking this approach, as in many others, Sheen proved to be well ahead of his time.

The Review will publish tomorrow the full text of his proposal. In this essay, as a guide to understanding the proposal and its significance, I shall explain his overall vision.

To start, someone might reasonably ask, “Apart from its having some niche historical interest, why should we—here, today—study an outline of a proposal for an academic cultural Institute from a very different time and academic culture, especially when Sheen’s Institute never came to be?”

In reply, I would draw attention to a common and important theme of his teaching. When discussing politics, both civil and ecclesial, and especially in view of proposals for social reform, Sheen would insist on the reform of the individual:

If we would remake the world, we must begin by remaking the individual man; then the institutions will be good enough, for they will resemble the good men who made them. (The Way to Happiness [1949], 189)

This provides the key to how Sheen himself would have wanted us to learn from him most deeply.

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There are, of course, several obvious lessons. The first concerns strategy. Sheen’s Institute is intended, most centrally, to equip the Church to “meet the new situation” in which she finds herself:

The plan herein suggested assumes that since the Church is living in an order and a world-spirit radically different from the past, it must change its method of approach.

It is easy to underestimate how striking these words would have been in 1938.

Sheen identifies a number of changes that the Catholic academy needed to address. Some of these would have been familiar at the time: for example, the rise of outright unbelief and the shift away from Protestantism as the Church’s chief antagonist. But others would likely have seemed novel. He highlights a shift in modern culture from progressive optimism to despair. He describes how this shift is manifested in contemporary scientific and philosophical approaches, as well as in political and economic programs. And yet he also notes that modern culture, in abandoning its hope for progress on its own terms, has seen even science change:

Today Science has become idealistic and even mystical. It is now “too religious.” The new attack is not from the domain of science, but from the social order.

Here again his words prove prescient, and we find them no less true today.

His extended diagnosis of this “new situation” is worth reading, but it can be summed up as follows:

Since then the religious program of the Church in relation to the world must take cognizance of the errors of the time, and since the new errors are quite radically different from the past, it follows that the Church must present its eternal verities with a new emphasis.

What, then, will give the requisite unity to the proposed Institute’s approach? Sheen bases his remedy on his diagnosis:

The nature of the new approach will depend upon the fundamental and basic problem which underlies all other problems. It is the position of this paper that the basic problem is: – MAN.

Sheen then goes on to articulate, in a second section, the end or purpose of his strategy. He notes that ecclesial and scholarly authorities agree that the Church is uniquely situated to articulate “the fundamental doctrine of man” against “modern errors” that seek to dehumanize us. In this, Sheen anticipates an important teaching of the Second Vatican Council:

… the council wishes to speak to all men in order to shed light on the mystery of man and to cooperate in finding the solution to the outstanding problems of our time. … The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. (Gaudium et Spes 10, 22)

This is why Sheen focuses not only on an integrated and comprehensive anthropology—including both philosophical principles and the work of social science—but also on theology and “Catholicity”:

The new program should take account of integral man, i.e. as natural and supernatural, personal and social. … It should integrate Catholicity (not merely the philosophy of man) with every sphere of human activity: political, economic, social, juridical, scientific, historical, etc., thus breaking down the assumption that religion is a department of life distinct from and often unrelated to other departments, valid only in its own sphere and with a principle of operations different from those in the secular sphere.

That is to say, nearly ninety years ago, Sheen was saying (as is commonly said today) that the contemporary problem is the problem of what it is to be human. Sheen once again sees further than most of his contemporaries, insisting not only that the Church is uniquely situated to speak prophetically about human nature, but also that the Church must not forget why she is so situated.

He concludes powerfully by quoting St. Thomas:

“All human activities are at the service of Divine Truth.”

There are many other insightful observations in Sheen’s proposal. Here are a few that are worth noting in brief:

(1) He takes the traditional task of apologetics to be too negative and reactive, and thus unsuitable for the present challenges. Sheen proposes that we move away from:

an approach which takes its form and content from the error to be answered rather than from the truth to be presented. … a philosophical ethics however valid it be is not the Catholic solution to all the problems discussed.

(2) Among other things, a more positive approach, he says, would be the greatest “protection of democracy against the invasion of all the ‘isms’ which impose a false ideology upon man,” securing “the restoration of the lost virtue of Patriotism as a form of Pietas.”

(3) Sheen emphasizes the cultivation of our nature, reminding us of the core meaning of culture:

The word “cultivation” in relation to nature means inciting nature by human labor to produce fruits which nature of and by itself is incapable of producing. Applied to man, culture means the unfolding of human possibilities through reason and grace, or the rational and spiritual development of the whole man.

Hence, presumably, his choice of the name, The Institute of Catholic Culture.

Finally, one cannot help noticing the practical urgency of Sheen’s tone throughout the proposal. In his brief cover letter to the Rector, then-Monsignor Corrigan, he wrote that the Church “must be put upon a new war-footing to meet the changed conditions.” Sheen is martial in his intensity, while also sober and clear-eyed in his strategic analysis. Although the Rector had apparently invited the proposal, Sheen’s own eagerness is revealed by his choice of closing in that letter: “With Christian impatience to serve you and the University, I remain, respectfully yours in Christ.”

Sheen insists on the need for “Catholic Action [which] is nothing but Catholic realism.” He sought real and practical effects from this proposal. He had no time for empty theorizing and endless deliberation.

In conclusion, think again about Sheen’s principle that all reform begins with reform of the individual. Taking that approach seriously, one wants to say: every teacher and professor, every parent, priest, and principal stands to gain from a personal reflection on the model of Christian cultural engagement in Sheen’s proposal. Perhaps most of all we can imitate his impulse to go beyond merely speaking out in criticism. It is also necessary to build, since, as he says, the Catholic religion is not only “something to be learned” but also “something to be realized,” “in the remarriage of thought and action.”

Some of us will enjoy having the resources and opportunity to reform old institutions or found new ones. But if Sheen is right, all of us—with Christian impatience—must embark upon a program of self-reflection and self-reform, by first “remaking the individual man.”

Jonathan A. Buttaci, an Associate Editor of this Review, is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America and a Senior Fellow in the Gibbons Institute.

Photos courtesy of The American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives (ACUA), The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC.

From the Editor

The beatification Mass for Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen will be held this week on Thursday, September 24, 2026, at 2:00 p.m. Central Time, at The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis, Missouri, presided over by Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle as the Papal Representative.

To celebrate the event, this week the American Catholic Quarterly Review is devoted to Sheen, particularly his 1938 proposal to reform Catholic higher education in response to the crises of the times, through an “Institute of Catholic Culture.”

We will publish that seven-page proposal in its entirety on Wednesday. You will not want to miss it.

As a lead-up, we begin today and tomorrow with two essays by Jonathan A. Buttaci, Associate Editor and Gibbons Institute Senior Fellow.

Enjoy, and celebrate with us!

—Michael Pakaluk

“Someday You Will Be Just as I Am”

On Sheen, Spalding, and the Teaching of Divine Providence

(the first in a two-part series)

by Jonathan A. Buttaci

For here the saying holds true, “One sows and another reaps.”

I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor;

others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.

The Venerable Fulton Sheen, to be beatified later this week, often reminds us to look for the work of Providence in all things. The more we do this, he recommends, the more joyful and peaceful we become; the less we do this, he warns, the more upset we are likely to be, even at the pettiest annoyances and disappointments of life.^[1] In this counsel he joins many others among the blessed; like theirs, his life bears witness to its truth. Indeed, as a preacher he seldom let pass an opportunity to tell a charmingly self-deprecating story that revealed his own struggles with humility, trust, and peace of soul amid the trials and disappointments of his life.

Sheen served for twenty-four years on the ecclesiastical faculties at the Catholic University of America. The young priest-philosopher took teaching quite seriously and actively worked with the students on campus. Already in his first year he was invited to preach the Mass of St. Thomas Aquinas in March of 1927.^[2] He was always seeking fresh ways to engage with students and the wider culture.^[3]

Even so, biographers (and Sheen himself) report that he sometimes found other aspects of academic life a source of frustration.^[4] Often his “Christian impatience”—a striking term that he would later use to close the cover letter to his 1938 proposal—resulted directly from his commitment to excellence in education and his insight into what its achievement would require. Despite the occasional difficulty or even conflict at the university, Professor Sheen was afforded many opportunities to pursue his work as an educator with countless young people, thinking life through with them and cheerfully answering their questions, while also preparing for the larger audiences that were already beginning to hear his voice.

Sheen’s university years were, in short, both intellectually and socially formative. It is therefore striking that he should be beatified a century after joining the faculty of Catholic University, a hundred years almost to the day since fall classes began in late September 1926; the Mass inaugurating that academic year was offered on Sunday, September 26.

This fact invites our reflection on his time at the university and his place in its early history. We can be confident that Sheen now clearly appreciates the providential contours of his life, including his time as a professor, with both its tears of sowing and its joys of reaping, all punctuated by the energy and occasional excesses of youth. Perhaps we too might catch a glimpse of his position in the providential course of things and thereby come to have greater trust and peace of heart regarding our own. Here a very large subject opens up to which I can only allude in the most oblique way (see John Henry Newman, “Wisdom and Innocence,” in Sermons Bearing on Subjects of the Day).

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The Catholic University of America claims Pope Leo XIII as its founder, who formally approved its statutes in 1889. Its founding was, of course, the work of many American clerics, scholars, and benefactors over several decades. Though the general idea was conceived much earlier, the first formal proposal seems to have been made at the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1866, with Archbishop Martin Spalding presiding. The resolution was both brief and indeterminate: “A desire is expressed to have a Catholic university in the United States.”

Although the idea continued to be discussed by Catholic authors, work did not begin in earnest until almost twenty years later, after the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884. It was, in fact, Archbishop Martin Spalding’s nephew, John Lancaster Spalding, whose clear vision and singularly persuasive efforts led to the university’s eventual founding in the late 1880s. All great works take time.

Cardinal Gibbons said of this younger Spalding, in his address on the university’s Silver Jubilee:

All great works have their inception in the brain of some great thinker. God gave such a brain, such a man, in Bishop Spalding. With his wonderful intuitionary power, he took in all the meaning of the present and the future Church in America. If the Catholic University is today an accomplished fact, we are indebted for its existence in our generation, in no small measure, to the persuasive eloquence and convincing arguments of the Bishop of Peoria.

The Bishop of Peoria! It is yet another curious accident of history, if not a wondrous sign of Divine Providence, that the same Spalding—that “great thinker” and towering figure of Catholic education in America, whom one might regard as an unofficial founder of the Catholic University of America—should also have been the first bishop of Peoria, Illinois.

Peoria is, of course, where Fulton Sheen grew up. As a boy he attended Mass at St. Mary’s Cathedral. In his autobiography, Treasure in Clay, Sheen recounts an episode in which he dropped a wine cruet while serving Mass for “the great Bishop John L. Spalding”:

There is no atomic explosion that can equal in intensity of decibels the noise and explosive force of a wine cruet falling on the marble floor of a cathedral in the presence of a bishop. I was frightened to death. What would the bishop say?

After Mass, the bishop comforted the understandably distraught lad. Ever the educator, he then inquired about Sheen’s plans for higher studies, “when you get big.” Spalding reportedly told him that he ought to study at Louvain in Belgium, where Spalding himself had earned his degree, adding that “someday you will be just as I am.”

This story is familiar to many devotees of Sheen, especially the near-prophetic suggestion that he would someday join Spalding in the episcopal rank. Sheen himself reports forgetting about the conversation until his arrival at Louvain as a young priest in 1921. There he earned a doctorate in philosophy before returning to the United States, soon to teach at the very university Spalding helped to found, which by then had surely become “an accomplished fact.”

Doctoral robes and episcopal rings did not exhaust the likenesses foreseen by Spalding. This week the Review will be highlighting some of the insights of Sheen’s university years, especially in view of intellectual culture at large. Of chief interest will be his 1938 proposal for an Institute of Catholic Culture. In it, Sheen sought to “meet the new situation” in which the American Church found herself, thereby reiterating Catholic University’s original mandate some fifty years after its founding.

Sheen, then, came to be very much like the bishop of his childhood cathedral in Peoria, who, as Gibbons attested, “took in all the meaning of the present and the future Church in America.”

But in today’s essay I wish to recall a more general likeness between these two great American Catholic teachers and their “wonderful intuitionary power.” Although both men worked tirelessly to develop concrete proposals to “meet the changed conditions” of the surrounding culture, neither lost sight of the higher aim of teaching: it is essentially a spiritual transformation, which equips us for living a “higher life.” Such a transformation is not merely a matter of learning various disciplines: it must be realized in “the remarriage of thought and action,” as Sheen puts it in his proposal.

In order to affirm and realize this high educational vision—especially in view of the frustrations, challenges, and conflicts of the modern world—both men often reminded their audiences that life is worth living because a providential and loving God directs the course of our lives. The truth that life is worth living so animated Sheen’s teaching that it became the name of his television program.

Spalding chose to begin an important address about university education in precisely the same way:

Life, more life, ever-increasing life, is the aim and end of all we think and do. To inquire whether life is worth living is absurd, for life loves itself, and love originates all worth. Misconduct or misfortune may in individual instances enfeeble or even destroy the will to live, but the love of life—and therefore the belief in life’s goodness—is indestructible. … Wherever we are, however surrounded and attended, we cannot live except in our minds and hearts. If all is well there, the rest need give us little concern. Let us learn to trust the Power by which we live, and to place less reliance on what is adventitious.^[5]

Despite the occasional disappointments and frustrations of his university years, then—indeed, perhaps precisely because of them—Sheen gradually came to realize this “Teaching of Divine Providence” in his life, having himself learned to trust and be untroubled by “what is adventitious.” Nearly ninety years on, though he did not himself see his proposed Institute come to be, we can see many such endeavors committed to similar principles and methods, including the Gibbons Institute at the Catholic University of America.

For here too the saying holds, “One sows and another reaps.”

Sheen’s beatification proposes that we too should work to learn this Teaching of Divine Providence, even in the most intense, frightening, or disappointing episodes of our lives, whether they be a delayed academic proposal, a discouraging faculty meeting, or even a fallen cruet. With Sheen and Spalding as our teachers, “let us learn to trust the Power by which we live,” the One Who both gives the growth and makes all life fruitful and worth living.

^[1] See, for example, Fulton J. Sheen, Treasure in Clay (1980), 314 and 344. See also the preface to the revised edition of The Life of Christ (1977). For the latter reference I am grateful to Peter Ulrickson.

^[2] The Tower, Vol. 5, Issue 20 (March 9, 1927).

^[3] He would give special lectures about the Catholic intellectual tradition in relation to the modern world that seem to have garnered student interest (see, e.g., The Tower, Vol. 7, Issue 3 (October 17, 1928)). He was also actively involved in extracurricular student groups like the Abbey Club (see, e.g., The Tower, Vol. 7, Issue 7 (November 14, 1928)).

^[4] See, e.g., Thomas C. Reeves, America’s Bishop (2001), especially Ch. 3. See also, again, Treasure in Clay, especially Ch. 5.

^[5] “The University: A Nursery of the Higher Life,” in Opportunity (1903), 69, 77–78.

Photos courtesy of The American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives (ACUA), The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC.

The re-launching of the ACQR has been a great success. We are now into our third week. In the first week, we announced the Review, re-publishing the Salutatory from the Review’s original launch in January 1876.

In our second week, we featured Orestes Brownson’s last essay, “The Philosophy of the Supernatural,” from the first issue of the Review. Already in that very first week we brought out our first new contribution—an appreciation of Brownson’s political philosophy, by Michael Lucchese.

This week we feature a new essay by our own Associate Editor, David Elliot.

And you won’t want to miss next week, which will be devoted to Fulton Sheen.

Here is Dr. Elliot’s fine essay.

The Lost Debate Over Growth in Virtue

by David Elliot

Academic debates which seem endlessly fascinating and all-consuming to their field often blaze for some time and then fade out, like brilliant but temporary solar flares. Amid generational turnover and shifting trends, a question around which a host of scholars concentrate (“like frogs around a pond,” Plato, Phaedo 109b) may gradually become relegated to the footnotes and finally forgotten.

However, sometimes we discover intricate debates which last whole centuries in a kind of intellectual arms race which builds to amazing complexity and then suddenly vanishes with little trace. A debate like this is less like a solar flare than a great supernova, whose dazzling career ends in a black hole.

In the history of Catholic moral theology and of Christian ethics, I know of just one such debate, namely, the vast, sprawling, and immensely sophisticated argument over the nature of growth in Christian virtue.

The debate concerned what exactly is required for a Christian to grow in virtue, and when one might expect to see progress in virtue taking place. These questions were believed to have eternal stakes. The various attempts at their resolution implied very different models of Christian discipleship.

Few have heard of this debate today, but it occupied the Church’s finest moral thinkers for whole centuries during which the talent pool was remarkably deep.

While the groundwork for the debate was laid in the 13th century, it reached its zenith between 1580 and 1750, particularly in Spain, with France in a supporting role. The Church’s major religious orders were eager parties to it, complete with trademark Dominican, Jesuit, Discalced Carmelite, and related positions. Waning around the French Revolution, the debate re-emerged with great vigor around Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical, Aeterni Patris, before it vanished in “the Great Forgetting” of so much other earlier theology that was well underway by the 1970s.

In a short series of articles here at the ACQR, I will trace the contours of this important debate. In this first installment, I will give a brief sketch of the general terrain. In subsequent entries, I will focus on the salient details.

The debate involves several interrelated questions. The Christian goal is to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48), and Christians do this “by progressing in virtue” (ST I II q. 98 a. 5 ad 3) through God’s grace assisting their moral exertions. At issue are seven virtues, which come in two modes. There are natural or “acquired” virtues, gained through long effort and directed to earthly flourishing. These principally concern the four “cardinal” virtues of justice, prudence, fortitude, and temperance. Then there are the supernatural or “infused” virtues, bestowed by God’s grace (e.g., at baptism) and directed to perfect beatitude in God. They include the three “theological” virtues of faith, hope, and charity (the greatest virtue), together with distinctly supernatural forms of the cardinal virtues.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of these seven virtues in the Catholic moral tradition. The largest part of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae is structured around them. They are staples of medieval and later art, which may depict them, for example, as seven branches on a mighty tree, or as seven great patrician ladies. Famous examples include Raphael’s great fresco, The Cardinal and Theological Virtues in the Vatican Museums, and the seven ladies surrounding the triumphal chariot of the Church in Dante’s Purgatorio (XXIX).

Growth in these distinctly Christian virtues is just about the most important practical consideration a Christian could have, for two reasons. The first is that the whole process of sanctification is proportionate to our growth in grace and the infused virtues, with the “heroic” virtue of the saint being the highest form. The Christian is homo viator: the human wayfarer, traveler, or pilgrim who is in via (“on the road”) through this world to attain God in heaven or in patria. For St. Thomas, we progress in via and grow closer to God precisely by growth in these virtues (ST II II q. 24, a. 7).

The second reason is that among the saved who arrive in patria, there are gradations of reward: “he who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully” (2 Cor 9:6). Led by charity, the soul which possesses greater infused virtue “will see God the more perfectly, and will be the more beatified” (ST I q. 12, a. 6). The beatific vision of St. Francis of Assisi will be different from that of a cruel murderer turned death-bed penitent who dies with almost no good works. The differing spheres of Paradiso, from the lower Moon to lofty Jupiter, capture poetically this principle of gradation in reward.

To grow in Christian or infused virtue, one must be in a state of grace (“sanctifying grace”). As concerns our moral efforts, growth takes place through cooperative grace and the attainment of merits. Like the man who uses his five talents well and receives five more, so likewise, St. Thomas says in his commentary on Matthew (as reported, C25.L2.n2071), that when “the Lord gives virtue, and you are diligent to use it well,” you “increase.”

But what counts here as “using one’s talent well”?

Unlike some contemporaries, St. Thomas took the generous view that God rewards even mediocre merits with some growth. But then, how do we account for the fact that even good Catholics may hit a moral plateau and seem to lack consistent growth? As the Imitation of Christ laments: we often “feel that we were better and purer in the first fervor of our conversion than we are after many years in the practice of our faith.” I may be a fairly devout churchgoer and decent neighbor in a state of grace who performs genuine if unremarkable acts of modest virtue. But after years of this, I may feel that, while I may be no worse, I am probably no better.

St. Thomas seems to resolve the difficulty when he holds that even a modest act of Christian virtue “merits an increase of charity; yet this increase does not take place at once, but when we strive for that increase” (ST II II q. 24, a. 6). Fervor acts like a growth stimulant. The virtues must be disposed for increase by more fervent conduct before we actually receive that growth from God. Thus, a man of one talent may have merited a second talent, and yet will not yet have received it, like a minor who is the beneficiary of funds withheld in trust. Even virtuous Christians whose good works merit increase will in this way routinely experience a time lag in virtue growth.

St. Thomas even held that infallibly we will receive at some point the growth which we merited, unless we forfeit it through mortal sin and damnation (ST I II q. 114, a. 8). Yet he notes that the man of lukewarm virtue is more likely to “rest in his state” and is not “easily carried toward better things” (De Malo q. 3, a. 13).

Therefore, the question arises: What if I settle for years of mediocre virtue and never “strive for… increase”? By my lack of fervor, I did not receive all of the growth in virtue I had merited. If I die in such a state, will I forfeit the growth that would have made my union with God more perfect for all eternity? If so, has the laborer been defrauded of his wages (see Lev 19:13)?

The great Jesuit scholastic, Francisco Suarez, proposed a controversial solution. He argued that the growth which follows upon virtuous acts is not delayed but received immediately. Suppose that, on Tuesday, I am charitable to a tiresome student, say my prayers, and take out my elderly neighbor’s trash: I receive the reward of growth in virtue, Suarez would claim, that very Tuesday.

We thus have two growth models. On the one hand, St. Thomas foresees intermittent growth spurts following increased fervor, like the periodic shifting of icebergs during a summer melt. On the other hand, Suarez foresees immediate even if modest and gradual growth proportioned to our efforts, like adding stalks of grain to a pile of wheat day-by-day.

Admittedly, the streamlined economy of the Jesuit model removes the tensions caused by a delayed growth model. But Thomists (among whom I count myself) object that this model fails to account for how a virtue as a habitus needs to be properly disposed for growth by more intense activity.^[1] There is the further problem of Christians who do modest good works over years but do not really seem to be progressing—whereas they should show evident progress, on Suarez’s model.

The Jesuits in general and many early and later modern scholastics adopted Suarez’s view, while the Dominicans, Discalced Carmelites, and others held to the Thomistic line.

But although Thomists presented a united front in relation to the Suarezians, they nonetheless disagreed among themselves over what to make of growth in virtue which is merited in this life and yet not received before death.

A major fault line rapidly emerged among Thomists, which endured for centuries. Some argued that growth which was merited but never received was essentially forfeited. The idea was that: Ubi cecidit lignum, ibi erit (‘where the tree falls, there it lies’ [Eccl 11:3]). Such a view has a bracing pastoral upshot: we must shake off our complacency and kindle our zeal while we still have time. Advocates of this “strict” Thomist position included Domingo Báñez (1528–1604), Vincent Contenson (1641–1674), Louis Billot (1846–1931), and others, with possible support from Cajetan (1469–1534).

By contrast, other Thomists held that, although of course we can no longer merit growth in virtue after death, nothing hinders us from receiving it, such as following a very intense act of charity in Purgatory, or just before the first moment of glory. (If the former, the act of charity would be the occasion for the reception of the growth; it would not merit that growth.) Within this camp were John of St. Thomas (1589–1644), the Discalced Carmelites of Salamanca (the Salmanticenses, 1631–1712), Charles René Billuart (1685–1757), and others.

The school of Thomists was vexed for centuries over these debates, not solely the debates with the Suarezians, but also among themselves. “It is amazing how much this torments expositors of St. Thomas,” admitted John of St. Thomas.^[2]

One reason the debate was felt to be so important is that each of these positions deeply affects one’s model of Christian discipleship. All three models—the Jesuit and two Thomist variations—prize zeal and moral progress. All three have a magnanimous air to them. But they have distinctive bases of attraction. The Jesuit position allows for greater patience with imperfection. The “moderate” Thomist position can hope for delayed gains after this life. By contrast, the “strict” Thomist position has more of an all-or-nothing approach, stressing that we need to spiritually wake up and move out of our comfort zone lest we forfeit our unallocated “talents” and it be said of us: Dormierunt somnum suum et nihil invenerunt omnes viri divitiarum in manibus suis (‘They have slept their sleep; and all the men of riches have found nothing in their hands,’ Psalm 75:6).

The night before Sir Austen Henry Layard excavated the lost ruins of Assyria and began to find their priceless treasures, he had a striking dream: “Visions of palaces underground, of gigantic monsters, of sculptured figures, and endless inscriptions floated before me.”^[3]

One can see how this debate over how precisely Christians grow in virtue, with its vivid and seemingly arcane features, lies analogously lost and buried in our own history. It likewise conceals treasures of great value.

Having now laid out the parameters of the debate, in subsequent entries I will discuss its fascinating contours in greater detail, the historical tapestry of which they are a part, and the pastoral implications which lie so suggestively behind each model.

^[1]See my “Perfection and the Problem of Lukewarm Charity,” in Law and Virtue, Nature and Grace: Engaging the Work of Jean Porter, ed. William Mattison and Joseph Capizzi (T. & T. Clark, forthcoming, Oct 2026).

^[2]John of St. Thomas (Joannes a Sancto Thoma [John Poinsot]), Cursus Theologicus, Tomus Septimus, I, Disputatio IX, a. IV (Lyceum Inst, New York, 2023), p. 450.

^[3]Sir Austen Henry Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains, 1849.

Dr. David Elliot, Associate Professor of Moral Theology, and the Grace P. Hobelman Chair in Catholic Moral Theology at The Catholic University of America, is a Gibbons Institute Fellow in the Houses of Social Thought and Beauty & Culture, and an Associate Editor of this Review.

“Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them.” — Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

John Locke has sometimes been revered as “America’s philosopher.” Widely read among our Founders, the seventeenth-century Englishman’s ideas about human nature, society, and government were in the air during the Revolution. His fingerprints, it is thought, may be detected in the Declaration of Independence itself, especially the ringing phrases about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The rousing assertion that “all men are created equal” has even become a slogan for a host of egalitarian political movements, successors in one way or another to the liberal ideology Locke, in some sense, founded.

And yet, even in this semiquincentennial celebration of our national independence, the Lockean account of the Founding leaves many dissatisfied. Rather than find the Declaration’s call to equality inspiring, critics of the Republic find the idea that American liberalism somehow “lowered the aims” of political life unsettling. Our social contract lies in tatters; rank individualism has led to an epidemic of loneliness; Americans’ faith in government institutions is at an all-time low. It is perhaps understandable why some have come to believe that liberalism has failed and the American Republic is in need of “regime change.”

One figure who would counsel against this despair is Orestes Brownson, among the nineteenth century’s greatest American men of letters. Rather than identifying the American Founding with a morally vacuous liberal ideology, he sought to uncover the deeper roots of our republican institutions and articulate an unwritten constitution supporting our political tradition. Especially in his 1865 magnum opus, The American Republic, Brownson demonstrated that the Union was something more than a Lockean social contract — he believed that Americans were blessed by what he called a “providential constitution.” Recovering Brownson’s wisdom will not only provide a patriotic answer to those discontented with liberalism, but also help us understand the true meaning of the American political tradition.

It is true that one must caution against overstating Locke’s influence on the Founding. As Russell Kirk put it in The Roots of American Order, “Locke has an eminent part in the American political mind, true, but he is no monarch in that realm.” Other historians, such as Donald Lutz and Forrest McDonald, have demonstrated that the Founders may have taken a rhetoric of revolution from his Second Treatise, but they looked to other sources of inspiration for actually constituting the American Republic. References to the Baron de Montesquieu, common law, and even the Bible came to the Framers’ lips far more readily than to Locke. Neither the Continental Congress nor the Philadelphia Convention acted as though the Second Treatise was a roadmap for creating a republic; other luminaries lit the way for them.

All the same, it is important to understand just how radical Locke’s ideas were — and how those who embraced them sapped away strength from the tradition upon which the Founders drew. In his 1953 book Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss uncovered how “his whole political philosophy” is “revolutionary not only with regard to the biblical tradition but with regard to the philosophic tradition as well.” Whereas the foundational figures of Western civilization, from Cicero to Richard Hooker, defended natural law and mankind’s duties, Locke embraced a modern shift away from this tradition. “Through the shift of emphasis from natural duties or obligations to natural rights, the individual, the ego, had become the center and origin of the moral world,” Strauss wrote, “since man — as distinguished from man’s end — had become that center or origin.” Motives which the ancients considered vicious, like greed and self-interest, were recast in liberal ideology as natural to us and even good.

Nowhere is this radicalism more apparent than in Locke’s description of political community as a “social contract.” In The Roots of American Order, Kirk contrasted his theory with the account found in biblical texts. “Locke’s emphasis upon primitive freedom endangers that spiritual continuity which we call human society,” he wrote. “There is no warmth in Locke, and no sense of consecration … Utility, not love, is the motive of Locke’s individualism. Locke’s isolated individual, a kind of social atom, has the possibility of life, of liberty, of property. But what sort of life, and liberty for what?” As Strauss put it earlier, Lockean liberalism and the vicious acquisitiveness it unleashed reduced “Life [to] the joyless quest for joy.” Untethered from tradition, the subjects of liberalism are cast out into the waste land to seek meaning for themselves.

In the nineteenth century, Orestes Brownson felt the pain of this situation deeply. Born to a Calvinist family in Vermont, Brownson was left profoundly unsettled by the intellectual and religious ferment of antebellum New England. Filled with inner doubts, Brownson would leap between religious traditions and political ideologies, adopting more and more radical positions, including Universalism and Transcendentalism. By the mid-1840s, however, he converted and regarded himself as settled within the Roman Catholic Church. Even if Brownson’s mature Catholicism was paired with a sometimes-intense sectarianism, not unusual for strong-minded converts, which conservatives might be wary of imitating today, one can still admire his search for a fundamental source of authority and stability, which he believed the American Republic required.

Like today’s critics of liberalism, Brownson always attributed his spiritual unease to the climate caused by ideology. “The great misfortune of modern liberalism is,” he wrote in an 1864 essay, “that it was begotten of impatience and born of a reaction against the tyranny and oppression, the licentiousness and despotism of governments and the governing classes; and it is more disposed to hate than to love, and is abler to destroy than to build up.” For Brownson, individualistic, revolutionary liberalism was a kind of political madness because it undermined the moral core of a just society. As an ideological habit of mind, liberalism discouraged citizens from understanding the common good in light of the highest good — communion with God — thereby “taking from law its sacredness, and authority its inviolability.”

It is important to note, though, that Brownson did not view liberal ideology as an inevitable consequence of the American political tradition. In the introduction to his splendid anthology of his writings, Richard Reinsch has observed that “The trajectory of Brownson’s mind, in many respects, had always been a rejection of modern political notions of self-interest, individualism, the social contract, and the belief that theory or reason operating apart from history, tradition, settlement, religion, and language, among other particulars would found an enduring polity.” Rather, as R.A. Herrera points out in his own biography of the man, “Brownson aspired to emulate the Founding Fathers” and saw their republicanism as a rejection of modern liberal speculation. “The statesmen of 1787 did not attempt to destroy or deface the work of Providence, but accepted it, and went on to organize the government in harmony with the real order,” according to Brownson — he understood that they were realists, not theorists.

Brownson therefore did not call for “regime change” to remake the American Republic according to Catholic political principles. Instead, he set it as his task to articulate the true meaning of the Founders’ Constitution, shorn of liberal ideology. “Of all conceivable states, the American state is the most complex, the most mysterious, and demands the most intelligence, the most study, the most thorough mental discipline for its scientific understanding,” he wrote in one essay. “No people ever had greater need than we of the profoundest political philosophy.” As a public writer, Brownson’s aim was to help the American people see beyond what he called “mere abstractions.” “A state, a real state, is a mysterious existence,” he wrote in the aforementioned essay. “It is not a voluntary association, a collection, or an aggregation of individuals, with no existence, no life, no activity, except what it derives from them.”

Brownson’s chief contribution to that political philosophy was his American Republic. Written in the wake of the Civil War — in which he tragically lost two of his sons — the treatise was an attempt to express the genius of the American Founding and defend the true basis of the Union for which so much had been sacrificed. Although the text is somewhat obscure today, it is a ringing achievement and a bracing tonic for those discontented with the simplifications of liberalism.

In the early chapters of the book, Brownson addressed several major theories about the origins of government, including the Lockean notion of the social contract. While he acknowledged that many of the West’s thinkers spoke of some kind of social compact, he denied that they “ever held that government has only a conventional origin or authority.” The analogy was only meant to clarify “the reciprocal rights and duties of governors and the governed.” Social contract theorists such as Locke, as well as his predecessor Thomas Hobbes and his successor Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “have abused the phrase,” stripping it of its moral content.

The most absurd element of social contract theory was the antecedent idea of the “state of nature.” Liberal theorists, he argued, “deceive themselves by transporting into their imaginary state of nature the views, habits, and capacities of the civilized man.” The Lockean myth has no correspondence with the actual history of humanity. “Man in civil society is not out of nature, but is in it — is in his most natural state; for society is natural to him, and government is natural to society, and in some form inseparable from it,” Brownson held. “The state of nature under the natural law is not, as a separate state, an actual state, and never was.”

Yet his rejecting the social contract theorists’ mythological origins of government did not mean Brownson rejected the Declaration of Independence’s principle of equality, nor the concept of universal rights. Instead, he asserted that the vision of equality at the heart of the Founding was derived from an honest appraisal of the human condition. “Man is not God, independent, self-existing, and self-sufficing. He is dependent not only on his Maker, but on his fellow-men, on society, and even on nature, or the material world,” Brownson wrote. “The right of that on which man depends, and by communion with which he lives, limits his own right over himself.”

Brownson went on to articulate an alternative theory of the social contract and popular sovereignty, rooted not in the speculations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century liberals, but in the reasoning of the Church Fathers:

“The people, holding their authority from God, hold it not as an inherent right, but as a trust from Him, and are accountable to Him for it. It is not their own. If it were their own they might do with it as they pleased, and no one would have any right to call them to an account; but holding it as a trust from God, they are under his law, and bound to exercise it as that law prescribes. Civil rulers, holding their authority from God through the people, are accountable for it both to Him and to them. If they abuse it they are justiciable by the people and punishable by God himself.”

By placing the republic “under God,” as it were, Brownson found a more secure guarantee against oppression than the centralizing tendencies of liberal ideology. “Religion is brought to the aid of the state, not indeed as a foreign auxiliary,” he wrote, “but as integral in the political order itself.” Where liberals sought to tear them asunder, Brownson sought to unite Christian faith and republican liberty, because he understood that among the best guards against unlimited power is religious belief.

That notion of course had many precedents in the American political tradition. In Federalist 48, for example, Publius notes that “a mere demarkation on parchment of the constitutional limits of the several departments, is not a sufficient guard against those encroachments which lead to a tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands.” And in his Farewell Address, coauthored with the minds behind The Federalist, George Washington famously observed that “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” Brownson agreed completely: though he loved the written US Constitution, he also wrote of the need to acknowledge the unwritten or “providential” constitution of society as a moral check against centralizing power. He defined this providential constitution as “the source of the vitality of the state, that which controls or governs its action, and determines its destiny,” bound up with the religious and cultural assumptions undergirding republican liberty.

Brownson, of course, was drawing on the Founders’ own insights about the providential character of the American constitution. In Federalist 2, for instance, Publius takes notice of the ways “that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country, to one united people … an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous and alien sovereignties.” And in Federalist 37, he even claims to perceive, with “astonishment,” in the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention “a finger of that Almighty Hand, which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution.” An “ingenious theorist” may have derived a more abstractly perfect constitution “in his closet, or in his imagination,” and yet the Convention “surmounted” so many disagreements and difficulties with incredible unanimity to produce a functioning frame of government that could be ratified by the whole people.

Borrowing a phrase from the rising British statesman Benjamin Disraeli, and echoing Publius in the aforementioned papers, Brownson argued that the “providential constitution” could only be expressed in a “territorial democracy.” Unlike the social contract of Locke, in which natural rights are an abstraction or even a fiction, a “territorial democracy” roots authority and liberty in a real people and a real place. Richard Reinsch and Peter Lawler summarized Brownson’s view nicely: “Citizens’ occupying a particular part of the world, joined together by borders, law, and defined accountability of rulers to ruled — this is what makes republican government possible.” Only by the light of the particular might we understand the universal.

For Brownson, then, these questions about the nature and meaning of republican liberty were anything but academic. The American Republic was written in the aftermath of a crisis — the bloodiest war in our nation’s history — which Brownson believed emerged because radicals embraced ideological theories at odds with the Constitution. As he put it in an 1873 essay:

“The people have forgotten its providential origin, treat it as their own creature, as a thing they have made, and may alter or unmake at their pleasure. It is not a law enjoined on them, and has no hold on their conscience. They give it a purely democratic interpretation. Men talk of loyalty, but men cannot be loyal to what is below them and dependent on their breath; and, therefore, they violate it without compunction, as often as prompted to do so by their interests or their passions.”

The cataclysm of secession came about because antebellum political radicalism — as expressed by both fire-eaters and abolitionists alike — sapped away the loyalty to America’s providential constitution necessary for our us, through our free institutions, to reach accord. Brownson maintained that slavery was a wicked contradiction of the Declaration of Independence’s principles. In the heat of the controversy over it, though, self-interested demagogues exploited political enthusiasm, and the nation itself was turned into a powder-keg. Rationalistic Lockean theory was by no means strong enough to rescue the country from this crisis.

Brownson had a complicated relationship with Abraham Lincoln, the man who arguably did the most to save the Union. He disagreed with his exercise of war powers and certain of his constitutional interpretations. But no statesman expressed the providential constitution of the American Republic so profoundly as Lincoln. Like Brownson, he ultimately found the cold theory of the social contract altogether insufficient. In its place, Lincoln asserted with Brownson that the true patriot’s loyalty must be placed in the eternal contract of society. As he put it at Gettysburg, we the living must “be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced” and ensure “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The last full measure of devotion is owed by all true patriots, in one form or another, as Justice Thomas has recently observed, but no one gives up his life for a mere contract.

This essay was adapted from remarks delivered at the Catholic University of America’s “Orestes Brownson and the Mission of America” conference in the spring of 2026. Its author serves on the board of the Orestes Brownson Studies Foundation, which co-sponsored the event.

Michael Lucchese is the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting, an associate editor of Law & Liberty, and a contributing editor to Providence.

We conceive of it as the analogue in this review of Fr. Neuhaus’s old Public Square.

We represent this new forum with Raphael’s image of Aristotle, who in the fresco (“The School of Athens”) in contraposition to Plato gestures towards the ground, that is, he recommends turning to ordinary human experience and human nature.

The phrase, “for the most part” (Greek: ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ, transliterated hōs epi to polu, pronounced hōss eh-PEE tǒh pǒh-LU), means that which is found to be true not as an absolute or necessary general law, but as typically so, as if the object of a natural propensity.

What is by nature, for instance, is what proves to be so “for the most part.” To say, for instance, that a human being is by nature an animal fit to live in a city is not to exclude the existence of sociopaths, inveterate hermits, or (as Aristotle notes) god-like and beastial exceptions.

Many of the best quotations were never said by the person to whom they are attributed, or by anyone at all. Someone makes them up, or gets something wrong, or misremembers, but because some famous person “ought” to have said that, or “could only” have said it, the made-up “quotation” lives on. (Someone ought to compile a book: Pakaluk’s Book of Famous Non-Quotations.)

For instance, you’ve heard it said that G.K. Chesterton once wisely observed, “When people cease to believe in God, they do not then believe in nothing, but in anything.” At least Malcolm Muggeridge said that he said this. But it’s easy to scan Chesterton’s writings today and discover that he never actually said that.

The Chesterton Society, after following the sleuth work of various investigators, concludes that the language originated in a biography of Chesterton by Emile Cammaerts, called The Laughing Prophet: “The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything.”

Here’s the full context. Cammaerts is talking about a shift in the Father Brown stories. He begins as follows:

There is an aspect of Chesterton’s courage which must be noticed here. He had an instinct for the supernatural and felt intensely the presence of a good or a bad spiritual influence. Of the former he tells us very little ; it is a side of his life which he hides from the world through shyness or, more probably, through sheer humility. But of the latter we hear a great deal. We find in many of his stories an eerie touch, bringing us back to the legends and fairy-tales which he defended so brilliantly against the attacks of a narrow rationalism. He was a master at creating atmosphere, although he found a special delight in dispelling it with the wind of laughter or the light of logic. He frequently dwelt on the importance given by the Gospel to exorcism, and his Father Brown devotes most of his time and power to exorcizing evil spirits — the evil spirits of superstition.

The shift is this: in the early stories, the good Father is mainly defending the supernaturalism of Christianity against the scientific naturalists; but in the later stories, the Father finds himself needing to defend Christian rationalism against the superstition of the spiritualists:

When the little priest first appeared in his works, in 1911, Chesterton was still engaged in fighting materialism and scepticism, and he provided his hero with a series of adventures which showed that the materialist’s reason could not reach the truth because it left out of account the imponderable, and was blinded by concrete evidence. But when the last stories were written, a considerable change had occurred. The religious instinct, long placed under restraint, had reasserted itself in a thousand directions. People who had refused to believe in Orthodoxy, because it was supernatural, were now disinclined to believe in it because it was not supernatural enough. They had rejected the miracles, they now rejected the reason and the common sense which justified the miracles.

The collection called The Incredulity of Father Brown, for example, has a story, “The Oracle of the Dog,” where the murderer’s pursuers are thrown off track because they superstitiously interpret the howling of a dog as an evil omen. Only Father Brown with his hard-headed reasonability sees that the dog howled because it was deprived of its toy, a swordstick, the murder weapon, which had been thrown into the sea. Superstition blinded the others from seeing the truth.

Cammaerts explains, quoting Father Brown in the story:

‘Because he [the dog] could not talk, exclaims the little Father, ‘ you made up his story for him and made him talk with the tongues of men and angels. It’s part of something I have noticed more and more in the modern world, appearing in all sorts of newspaper rumours and conversational catchwords : something that’s arbitrary without being authoritative. . . . It’s drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it’s coming in like a sea ; and the name of it is superstition.’ The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything : ‘And a dog is an omen and a cat is a mystery, and a pig is a mascot and a beetle is a scarab, calling up all the menagerie of polytheism from Egypt and old India, . . . and all because you are frightened of four words : “He was made Man.” ’ We can almost hear Chesterton’s falsetto through this flood of ecclesiastical eloquence.

And you can see that the important line, “The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything” contains the words of Cammaerts, not Father Brown or Chesterton.

Would it be a misguided patriotism for you and me to say that that distinctively American sage and proto-Chesterton, Orestes A. Brownson, should get some credit as well? After all, he quotes Clement of Alexandria:

The world outside of the Church may be credulous and superstitious, able, as Clemens of Alexandria said to the Greeks, ‘to believe anything and every thing except the truth’...

And, just like Father Brown, he traces modern superstition, and indeed all heresy, to the rejection of Verbum caro factum est:

The Incarnation is the key to all the Creator’s works, and we have not mastered theology or the philosophy of the supernatural, till we are able to say that the denial of any one item in those works involves the denial of the Incarnation, or the Word made flesh.

We might keep in mind these wise words of Brownson and Chesterton when we hear people lamenting today the “loss of enchantment,” while dwelling sometimes a little too much on demons and exorcisms, and furthermore might, when Christmas approaches, think that this holiday of the Incarnation contains all the wonder we need, and all that God in his wisdom has apportioned to us.

That Muggeridge’s quotation is from Chesterton?

True for the most part. But change it from “when people cease to believe in God” to “when Christians cease to believe in the Incarnation,” to be accurate.