St. Francis and Gandhiji

By Miss NAJOO BILIMORIA

On the fourth anniversary of the death of Mahatma Gandhi, a conference was held at Perugia, in Central Italy, to initiate a world-wide movement based on non-violence, love and service,–the cardinal virtues embodied in the lives of both St. Francis of Assisi and of Gandhiji. The moving spirit behind this gathering was Prof. Aldo Capitini,–a well-known writer on religion and philosophy and a firm believer in Gandhiji’s non-violent methods as a means for outlawing war and establishing peace and human fellowship. Perugia is only a few miles away from Assisi, the home-town of St. Francis–a beautiful town on the slopes of Monte Subasio–a town still alive and fragrant with the spirit of that gentle saint who has influenced and inspired so many generations of mankind, Christian and non-Christian alike.

This gathering brings vividly and forcefully to mind the striking similarities (and contrasts) between these two great personalities, who have proved by the example of their own lives how much more powerful is the spirit of love and sacrifice than physical force and might. And the power of this spirit is all the more forcefully revealed because the age, the ground and the circumstances under which the two lived are so very different. St. Francis, who lived from 1182 to 1226, was born in an age ofheroes and wars and romance,–an age of great passions and enthusiasms. Although it was an age when men were crude and unlettered and cruel, they were simple and straightforward like little children. And this directness and simplicity, albeit refined and elevated, characterised St. Francis as a true product of his age. He is one of the simplest and sincerest characters in European history. Gandhiji’s ground, even though in India, was typically 19th century ‘bourgeois’. Superficially, no contrast could be greater–and yet the same fire of the spirit moved them both. It is not improbable that, had St. Francis lived in an unfree India with its vast social and political problems, he would have been less of a mystic and more of a ‘social reformer’ and that Gandhiji, in the 13th century, would have devoted himself exclusively to religious and spiritual experiences.

Love and sympathy for the lowest of God’s creation is not a sentiment unknown to Indians. The unity of all life has been intuited by the most ancient of our sages, and our whole philosophy of life is based on it. But St. Francis at first lent himself to ridicule when he called the ass and the wolf his brothers and addressed the birds as his sisters. So much at one was he with the whole of creation, that he regarded the sun, the moon and even the fire as his brethren: “Praised be Thou, Lord, for all Thy creatures and especially for my brother the Sun which gives us the day, and by him Thou showest Thy light. He is beautiful, shining with great splendour: and of Thee, O Most High, he is the symbol.” Such wide pantheism was till then unknown in Christianity.

His love for the underdog, for ‘the poor, the lowly, and the lost,’ was well-known. “He had a great liking for people who had been put hopelessly in the wrong”...“He listened to those to whom God Himself would not listen.” Gandhiji was always more concerned about the one erring sheep than the ninety-nine whole ones. Both had that trait which mystics and genuises possess and which seems so ridiculous to ordinary people, a trait of not being able to distinguish between ‘small’ and ‘great’ things, ‘important’ and ‘unimportant’ ones. St. Francis once went to Rome to interview the Emperor and to appeal to him to save the lives of some little birds. He went with two companions to convert the whole world of Islam to Christianity! Gandhiji never sought refuge in numbers nor was he afraid to ‘walk alone’. He was prepared to, and did, disband organizations and movements of millions of people, if one little detail went wrong somewhere or if one man fell away from the ideals which inspired them all. St. Francis based his life on vows and ideals which seemed rash and impracticable at first, but which always turned out right. His life was a blend of an innate artistry and a deep faith,–a faith in the Whole, not in the minor details that provoke doubt. His whole life was a beautiful poem. Of Gandhiji it is said that he was a very ordinary man who set himself impossible standards and lived by them. He too had great faith and was an artist in action. All his acts breathed a pure and simple beauty because they came from the heart.

St. Francis achieved in his person that which is rare anywhere,–a harmonious mingling of a deep mysticism and a profound humanism. He was the world’s one quite sincere democrat and a divine demagogue’, the ‘first hero of humanism’ and the precursor of the modern spirit,–of the spirit of the Renaisance an anticipator of Wordsworth and Tolstoy. But he was not an ‘intellectual like Tolstoy; it was not ideas that moved him but the men embodying these ideas. “And as St. Francis did not love mankind but men, he did not love Christianity but Christ.” With an utter child-like simplicity and a ‘personal passion’, he loved and worshipped God as a Superior Person who was full of love and wisdom. To him, “religion was not a theory or philosophy but a love affair.” Because he loved God so passionately, he saw, loved and reverenced Him in all His creatures. “He treated the whole mob of men as a mob of kings.” A leper was to him more lovely and lovable than an average healthy man, for God would judge his love for Himself by the way he served and loved the leper. Gandhiji always found his home amongst those dubbed the lowest by society, for he considered them, above all, the real ‘children of God’.

The lives of both St. Francis and Gandhiji have been the noblest fulfillment of the Beatitude: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” In the persons of these two, the meek, the gentle, the poor and the lowly of the world have come into their own. One of the foremost of French writers today, Francois Mauriac, has pointed out how the same fire, the same faith that guided St. Francis driven out from the Christian Occident, has been “re-lit among the idols and found a niche between the ribs of that old, indomitable ‘skeleton’–Gandhi”. He calls it an all-powerful gentleness because it brooks no compromise with evil. The faith of St. Francis was that of a fighter, not that of an ‘appeaser’.

A great humility and personal modesty are the hall-mark of the meekness of the strong. St. Francis said of himself: “His most holy eyes have nowhere seen a greater, a more miserable, poorer sinner than I. Because in the whole world He found no more wretched being to do the wonderful work He wishes done, therefore He has chosen me, so as to put to shame the noble and the great, strength and beauty and worldly wisdom; that all may know that power and virtue come from Him alone, and not from any creature, and that no one can exalt themselves before His face.” Gandhiji has said: “I must reduce myself to zero. So long as man does not of his own free-will put himself last among his fellow-creatures, there is no salvation for him. Ahimsa is the farthest limit of humility.” Both Gandhiji and St. Francis were their own harshest critics. They forgave themselves much less readily than they did others. They willingly took upon themselves the burdens of others. It is said of St. Francis that his whole life was a penance–“He was always clearing away the rubbish in himself, and opening new windows through which the light of God could stream in.” Gandhiji always attempted to ‘purify’ himself by fasts or by other deprivations.

St. Francis was wedded to the ‘Lady Poverty’ and known as ‘Il Poverello’ (the Little Poor Man). His poverty was not a negative concept, but a positive ‘passion’. To quote G. K. Chesterton, “It was not a regimen or a stoical simplicity of life. It was not self-denial merely in the sense of self-control. It was as positive as a passion; it had all the air of being as positive as a pleasure. He devoured fasting as a man devours food. He plunged after poverty as men have dug madly for gold.” He knew the spiritual dangers of possessions, for he was a rich man’s son and had enjoyed the material pleasures of life in his early youth. St. Francis reduced his worldly necessities to a minimum and his Third Order was known as the Order of Penance, to enable the average man to take part in his mission without giving up his home and normal routine, for, to St. Francis, “the crumbs were as precious as the loaves.” “He possessed nothing, and having nothing, gathered all things to himself.” Gandhiji’s God was the God of the poor–‘Daridranarayan.’ He identified himself with the poorest and the most miserable of humanity and tried to alleviate their sufferings. Neither of them believed in laying up for themselves treasures on earth. Cheerfulness in asceticism and the joy of non-possession were common to both. St. Francis had gone a long way from the gloomy severity of St. Paul. To quote Chesterton again, “There was so much about him of the spirit of the morning, so much that was curiously young and clean, that even what was bad in him was good. As it was said of others that the light in their body was darkness, so it may be said of this luminous spirit that the very shadows in his soul were of light. Evil itself could not come to him save in the form of a forbidden good; and he could only be tempted by a sacrament.”

Gandhiji always called himself a ‘practical idealist’–not a theoretician. He did not believe in ideas which he could not put into practice nor live in his own life. Every truth had to be lived out. To St. Francis also, the spiritual life had to be ‘lived,’ not just ‘believed in’. He was a man of action, not a dreamer. “To and do something was one of the driving demands of his nature.” “His life was a triumphant vindication of the truth of Christian ethics.” He put Christianity into practice and by his shining example proved the reality and the truth of the life of Jesus. He had a passion for martyrdom, not out of personal vanity, but to come as near as possible to the example of Jesus. There is hardly a Christian in this century who has lived so near to Christ or led a life so inspired and guided by the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount as Gandhiji.

Of both St. Francis and Gandhiji it may unhesitatingly be said that they left the world a much better place than they found it,–the world is the richer for their having lived. In moving prose, Chesterton describes how St. Francis changed the whole aspect of nature with his beautiful presence: how the birds and the trees and the flowers–the stars, water, and fire–returned to their primeval grace and innocence. “All these things are as if newly created, awaiting new names, from one who shall come to name them. They await a new reconciliation with man, but they are already capable of being reconciled. Man has stripped from his soul the last rag of the cult of nature and can now return to nature.” In no less beautiful and noble words, Jawaharlal Nehru has paid this tribute to his Master: “Great men and eminent men have monuments in marble set up for them, but this man of divine fire managed in his life-time to become enmeshed in millions and millions of hearts so that all of us became somewhat of the stuff that he was made of, though to an infinitely lesser degree...In ages to come, centuries and maybe millenniums after us, people will think of this generation when this man of God trod the earth and will think of us who, however small, could also follow his path and probably tread on that holy ground where his feet had been.”

Both lived before their times and both reached their highest grandeur after death. Both welcomed death as a friend, as a way to a higher life. Both brought into existence a new outlook, a new awakening, a new way of life; and, however few the disciples or however inadequate the comprehension by the multitude of the significance of their personalities, the beauty of their lives has filled one and all with love and reverence, so that they both serve as beacon-lights to mankind and supreme examples, of the triumph of the spirit that conquers all.