SALVATION(ISBN=9780375708831)pdf/txt下载_在线阅读全文

内容简介

　　Inspired by the fresco cycles that depict the life of St. Francis of Assisi, acclaimed author Valerie Martin tells the life of Francesco di Pietro Bernardone in a series of vividly realized “panels” of moments both crucial and ordinary. Drawing from myriad sources and moving in reverse chronological order, she begins in the dark, final days, with a suffering Francesco on the verge of death, then shows us the unwashed and innocent revolutionary, unafraid to lecture a pope on Christ’s message. We see his mystical friendship with Chiara di Offreducci, a nobleman’s daughter who turns her back on the world to join him, and finally, the frivolous young Francesco on the deserted road where his encounter with a leper leads him to an ecstatic embrace of God. Salvation is at once an illuminating glimpse into the medieval world and an original and intimate portrait of the man whose legend has resonated through the centuries.

作者简介

　　Valerie Martin is the author of six novels and two collections of short fiction, including Italian Fever and Mary Reilly, and a biography of St. Francis, Salvation. She resides in upstate New York.

目　　录

Chronology
Introduction
On His Death
　Night in the Forest
　A Last Request
　Ella "s Joyful Message
　Ella Closes the Door
On His Illness
　A Convalescent
　A Visit to the Doctor
　Brother Body Wins the Day
On the Stigmata
　A Mountain Storm
　What Is an Eye

Chronology 
Introduction 
On His Death 
　Night in the Forest 
　A Last Request 
　Ella "s Joyful Message 
　Ella Closes the Door 
On His Illness 
　A Convalescent 
　A Visit to the Doctor 
　Brother Body Wins the Day 
On the Stigmata 
　A Mountain Storm 
　What Is an Eye 
　Brother Leone Is Transported 
On His Teaching 
　Wild Men and an Emperor 
　An Importunate Novice 
　A Friar Damned 
On His Simplicity 
　Brother Fire Desires a Blanket 
　Demons in a Tower 
　A Snow Family 
On His Travels to the Holy Land 
　At the Harbor 
　Going to Meet the Sultan 
　A Meal in an Exotic Setting 
On His Brotherhood 
　A Fool and His Money 
　An Interview 
　A Convocation of Friars 
　Innocent Calls the Faithful 
　A Funeral Sparsely Attended 
On the Poor Ladies 
　An Escape by Torchlight 
　A Sermon 
　A Last Visit to the Poor Ladies 
On His Youth and Conversion 
　In Hiding, in Chains 
　"4 Lesson from the Gospels 
　A Penitent; in the Background,a Hermit 
　A Rich Young Man on the Road 
Notes 
Sources

显示全部信息

在线试读部分章节

　　When San Francesco lay dying, he asked to be moved from thebishop's residence in Assisi to the chapel at the Portiuncula, adistance of about two miles outside the city walls. As they passedthe city gates, he bid the friars carrying him to set him down onthe road so that he might say farewell to the place of his birth."This town," he began, "has the worst reputation in the wholeregion as the home of every kind of rogue and scoundrel." Then hebegged God to bless the place and to make it the home of all whosincerely honored his name.
　　According to the brochure put out by the Commune's busy touristagency, Assisi is a city that cannot just be "seen," it must be"experienced," a place, perhaps the place, where "the spirit of St.Francis pervades all." Every year hundreds of thousands ofvisitors, art lovers, tourists, and pilgrims from all over theworld flock to see the famous basilica where the saint is buried.The narrow streets in which Francesco begged for bread are linedwith hundreds of shops selling all manner of atrocious trinkets andsome of the worst food to be found in Italy, at prices asbreathtaking as the view from the Rocca Maggiore, the late-medievalfortress that glowers over the prosperous town. The spirit thatpervades these streets is the same one that whistled down the stonestaircases and across the Piazza del Commune in Francesco'slifetime, the same spirit that drove him straight into theoutspread arms of Christ: the cold, relentless, insatiable, furiousspirit of commerce.

When San Francesco lay dying, he asked to be moved from the
bishop's residence in Assisi to the chapel at the Portiuncula, a
distance of about two miles outside the city walls. As they passed
the city gates, he bid the friars carrying him to set him down on
the road so that he might say farewell to the place of his birth.
"This town," he began, "has the worst reputation in the whole
region as the home of every kind of rogue and scoundrel." Then he
begged God to bless the place and to make it the home of all who
sincerely honored his name. 
　　According to the brochure put out by the Commune's busy tourist
agency, Assisi is a city that cannot just be "seen," it must be
"experienced," a place, perhaps the place, where "the spirit of St.
Francis pervades all." Every year hundreds of thousands of
visitors, art lovers, tourists, and pilgrims from all over the
world flock to see the famous basilica where the saint is buried.
The narrow streets in which Francesco begged for bread are lined
with hundreds of shops selling all manner of atrocious trinkets and
some of the worst food to be found in Italy, at prices as
breathtaking as the view from the Rocca Maggiore, the late-medieval
fortress that glowers over the prosperous town. The spirit that
pervades these streets is the same one that whistled down the stone
staircases and across the Piazza del Commune in Francesco's
lifetime, the same spirit that drove him straight into the
outspread arms of Christ: the cold, relentless, insatiable, furious
spirit of commerce. 
　　Francesco di Pietro Bernardone was born in Assisi toward the end
of 1181, the son of a wealthy cloth merchant, Pietro Bernardone,
and his wife, Pica, who may or may not have been French. Francesco
had an ordinary childhood, helping with his father's business and
attending the church school near their house, where he was an
unremarkable student. He grew to be a lively young man, fond of
music and parties, given to romantic tales, dreams of knighthood,
fantastic treasure quests, and prayer in solitary chapels. During
one such occasion, at the dilapidated Church of San Damiano, God
spoke to him from a crucifix, bidding him to repair the church.
Francesco took some bolts of cloth from his father's warehouse,
sold them, and delivered the profit to the resident priest to pay
for the repair of the chapel. Pietro, enraged by his son's
extravagance, brought a complaint against him, which was resolved
in the public square of Assisi. When the bishop advised Francesco
to return the money to his father, he declared, "My Lord Bishop,
not only will I gladly give back the money which is my father's but
also my clothes." He stripped off his clothes, placed the money on
them, and, standing naked before the bishop, his father, and all
present, announced, "Listen, all of you, and mark my words.
Hitherto I have called Pietro Bernardone my father; but because I
am resolved to serve God I return to him the money on account of
which he was so perturbed, and also the clothes I wore which are
his; and from now on I will say, 'Our father who art in heaven,'
and not Father Pietro Bernardone." The crowd wept in sympathy, and
the bishop covered the youth with his own cloak. 
　　Francesco then took refuge in the poor church, where he devoted
himself to making repairs, begging for food, oil, and stones on the
streets of Assisi. His former neighbors mocked him and drove him
away, but one rich young man, Bernardo of Quintavalle, impressed by
Francesco's sincerity and evident contentment in his new life,
decided to join him. Together the two men gave away all of
Bernardo's money and possessions to the poor. 
　　After that, there were more followers. In 1209, when they
numbered eleven, the group walked to Rome to ask the pope to
approve a Rule by which they might live as liegemen to the Church.
After a dream in which he saw the Lateran Basilica collapsing and
Francesco holding it up, the pope, Innocent III, gave them a verbal
and very conditional approval. 
　　Francesco's brotherhood, the Fratres Minores, grew rapidly.
Within a few years, the original twelve had grown to five thousand
(by contrast, the Dominican order, the Friars Preachers, as they
were known, founded at roughly the same time, had fewer than fifty
friars by 1220), and they gathered each year during the feast of
Pentecost for chapter meetings at the Portiuncula, a wooded area
owned by local Benedictine monks and leased to the friars for one
basket of fish per year. At these meetings, Francesco delivered
various admonitions, the friars were assigned to different regions,
the custos and ministers were appointed, and problems of
administration were addressed. Between these meetings, the mission
of the fratres was to wander homeless over the world, preaching
repentance, begging for their food, offering themselves as servants
to all. This was the way, they believed, the early apostles had
lived, the way Christ had adjured all his followers to live, giving
the world an example of virtue, loving poverty, making no
preparations for the next meal, the next bed, but leaving
everything to God. 
　　San Francesco's ministry lasted nearly twenty years. His health
was never good. In Egypt, where he went to attempt the conversion
of the sultan, he contracted an eye disease that made his eyes weep
continuously, gave him such terrific headaches that he could not
stand any light, and eventually left him blind. He gave up the
stewardship of the order and retired to Mount La Verna with three
of his closest friends for a period of fasting and prayer. When he
came down from this mountain, he had two features that
distinguished him from all previous saints: his hands and feet were
pierced by nails and there was an open wound in his side, as from a
lance. 
　　With the possible exception of St. Paul, who wrote in his Epistle
to the Galatians (6:17), "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord
Jesus," San Francesco's was the first recorded occurrence of the
stigmata. It is not an exaggeration to say that the stigmata, as a
religious phenomenon, was his idea. How such a thing could happen
is, naturally, a great mystery, and before that mystery, many of
his biographers come to a grinding halt, as if, rounding a bend in
their pursuit of the humble saint, they suddenly encountered a
raging elephant. Some see this event as the crowning achievement of
Francesco's life, signaling his complete identification, hence,
union, with his beloved Christ. Others suggest that there was an
element of despair in the miracle; that Francesco saw himself as
one crucified by the unrest and infighting in the great movement he
had founded. His contemporaries, though they had never heard of
such a thing, seem to have accepted it and found it in keeping with
what they understood to be the nature of God's continual
interference in the world of men. In their view, Francesco had been
singled out and marked by Christ as his own. The stigmata proved
what everyone already suspected, that he was a living saint. Two
years later, in October 1226, Francesco died peacefully at Assisi,
revered by all, his devoted friars gathered around him. He was
forty-five years old. 
　　This is the story one can follow in the fresco cycles painted by
some of the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance-Cimabue,
Giotto, Sassetta, Bellini, Gozzoli-in colors and compositions that,
after hundreds of years, retain an astonishing freshness and a
heady exuberance, as if the artists were excited about the story
they were telling. Unconcerned with meaning, they throw their
energy into a personal vision, concentrating on atmosphere. Each
sees the saint differently (Gozzoli, for example, contrary to
several descriptions given by people who saw Francesco, paints him
as a handsome, healthy young man with curling golden locks), and
each brings the considerable force of his artistry to bear on "the
life." They know the stories, are of the environment that produced
the saint, speak the language he spoke, and believe, more or less,
what he believed. The humble friar wandering silently through the
landscape of the frescoes, his head encircled by light, is thus
both a construct and a memory. 
　　San Francesco is the patron saint of Italy, and nearly every town
has a church in his name, decorated with scenes from his life; but
the first cycle I saw was in the National Gallery of London nearly
fifteen years ago. It was painted by a Sienese artist known as Il
Sassetta sometime in the fifteenth century. I had seen prints of
it, and had for many years a framed detail of the panel entitled
The Mystical Marriage of St. Francis over my desk; it shows St.
Francis exchanging wedding rings with Lady Poverty, a pretty
barefoot girl with a wooden yoke over her shoulders. (I thought, as
a young writer, I might profit by a daily colloquy with this lady.)
But prints did not prepare me for the strangeness, the avidity, of
the actual paintings. Fortunately, there was a bench in front of
them, and I sat there for some time, admiring the otherworldly
view. 
　　When I moved to Italy in 1994, I made it a practice to visit any
church or monastery that was reputed to have good frescoes of San
Francesco. I was particularly drawn to the cycle painted by Benozzo
Gozzoli in Montefalco, which depicts the saint as the new Christ,
even reworking the nativity so that he takes his first breath amid
cattle (though we know San Francesco was not born in a stable). In
these paintings, as in the Sassetta cycle, the saint moves through
a world that is both ordinary and magical. He lies comfortably on
his bed while an angel enters the room from the ceiling, and
outside his window, his dream-a castle with flying pennants-rises
into the middle air. In another panel, he rushes down the street
before his house, a well-dressed youth in a hurry, about to be
waylaid by a poor man who prophesies that he will be a great saint.
From the doorway, Francesco's mother looks on with an expression of
mild foreboding. 
　　The various frescoes drew my attention to the character of San
Francesco; a lifelong interest in hagiography did the rest. I began
to pick up biographies, randomly at first, and then with more
direction, finding myself returning to the earliest sources, the
accounts collected by the saint's three closest friends: Brother
Leone, who served as his secretary for the last years of his life,
and Brothers Rufino and Angelo, who were with him in the early days
of the order. 
　　Because saints were presumed to have certain agreed-upon powers
and peculiarities, medieval hagiography has a tendency to emphasize
the sameness of its subjects. Saints, for example, routinely
possessed the ability to communicate with and tame wild animals.
(St. Columban, an Irish saint who died within two hundred miles of
Assisi, was known for his preaching to birds.) The oft-illustrated,
well-loved stories of Francesco taming the wolf of Gubbio and
preaching to the birds are probably apocryphal, intended to place
him among a select company. Edward Armstrong points out one variant
of the bird sermon story that strikes me as quite plausible,
however. In this one, Francesco's preaching is ignored by the
birds, who fly away, and he then chastises himself for being so
vain as to imagine they would listen to him. This version has the
ring of truth both because of the way Francesco chooses to
reprimand himself-he calls himself "You stupid son of Pietro di
Bernardone"-and the likelihood that he might want to try his hand
at something saints were generally expected to do, for there can be
no doubt that Francesco had every intention of becoming a
saint. 
　　But, in spite of their fidelity to the form of the inspirational
text, the early hagiographies of San Francesco differ from accounts
of other medieval saints. They contain surprising, small personal
details (the saint's fondness for sweets, or the fact that his
eyebrows met over the bridge of his nose), and represent a
concerted effort to write down the exact manner and tone of his
speech. The authors, who were with the saint for years on end, keep
track of his moods and lament over his illnesses, complaining of
the doctors' inability to do anything but make him worse. One has a
sense of their urgency to get down for posterity this remarkable
personality which was unlike any they had ever known. They quote
Francesco confidently, not reverentially, and with an ear to the
incisive wit and irony that surprised all those who knew him. 
　　A second difference in these accounts is more difficult to
describe, because it is more a matter of tone than content, an
insistence that borders on stridency-as if the saint needed
defending, as if there was an accusation to answer, as if San
Francesco was on trial. This defensiveness on the part of his
biographers persists to the present and can be explained in part by
the events just preceding and following his death, for, though he
died peacefully, in the odor of sanctity, the steely charge of
controversy was in the air as well. 
　　Before he died, the order San Francesco founded had begun to
self-destruct-a fact that poisoned the last years of his life. As
soon as he was gone, the Fratres Minores split into two factions
that viewed each other with distrust and contempt. The crucial
issue was Francesco's insistence, repeated in the various Rules he
composed during his lifetime and with much force in his final
testament, dictated on his deathbed, that the friars were to own no
property, either personal or communal, excepting "one habit,
quilted inside and out if they wished, with a cord and
breeches." 
　　In 1228, barely two years after his death, San Francesco was
canonized by Pope Gregory IX (formerly Cardinal Ugolino of Segni,
Francesco's old friend and patron of the order). The cornerstone
was laid at Assisi, and Brother Elia, then minister general of the
order, began the excavation for the great basilica in which the
saint was to be buried. To this end, Brother Elia solicited and
received in abundance that which Francesco had forbidden the friars
even to touch: money. 
　　Two years later, in September 1230, in the bull Quo elongati,
Pope Gregory decreed that the testament, because it had been
written without the consent of the minister general, had no binding
power over the order. The friars could not own property, but they
could have use of property owned by someone else-for example, the
pope. They could, then, establish houses; have the use of books and
furniture; rely on a supply of food; and attend the universities in
Bologna and Paris. So fearful was the reaction to this decree in
the widespread brotherhood (by this time some twenty thousand
strong) that Francesco's earliest companions, Rufino, Angelo, and
Egidio, were forced to go into hiding to escape persecution. 
　　From the start, Francesco's biographers have been forced to
address this controversy, to take sides, defending either the
Church, which acted to preserve peace inside the order and to
guarantee its continuance and governability, or Francesco, ignored
and traduced by weak-minded followers who refused the rigor of his
rule and betrayed his most treasured principle, the vow of total
poverty. The fact that Francesco was also adamantly submissive to
the Church, and especially to the pope, adds a certain piquancy to
the struggle to settle the question of whether the founder actually
intended to create anything resembling the order that bears his
name. Evidently, he saw no conflict between his determination to
respect Church authority and his need to follow the dictates of his
own conscience, which he believed was in direct communication with
God. He saw no contradiction even when these two were at
loggerheads. Like a soldier who understands the chain of command,
he took his orders from anyone who was over him, but when the
battle raged and the general appeared on the field, he knew what to
do.

显示全部信息

SALVATION(ISBN=9780375708831)下载

SALVATION(ISBN=9780375708831)

发布书评

相关图书推荐