Saint of Authority and the Saint of the Spirit: Paul Sabatier's Vie de S. François D'Assise

Abstract

Men may glorify as discoveries some insignificant trifles that supply little or no evidence and bestow name of new documents on late accounts of doubtful authenticity, but there is nothing further to be known concerning St. Frances, and ... Bollandists, Chalippe and Papini, writing ore than a century ago, knew as much, more or less, concerning St. Francis, no new fact, episode, or saying had been added to his life. MGR. FALOCI (1902) The criticism of Franciscan origins is still in its infancy. PAUL SABATIER (1901) The divide separating two mentalities represented in epigraph runs like a fault line through later nineteenth century Roman Catholicism. On many theological fronts -- biblical studies, apologetics, ecclesiastical history -- proponents of traditional positions who considered everything of fundamental importance to have been said were confronted by expansions of critical methods who saw themselves mapping out little-explored territory. The traditional hagiography was not exempt; it too faced a critical revisionism characterized by methods and a mentality informed by historical criticism. The often oppositional relations between traditionalists and progressives formed part of context for Catholic reception of a nonCatholic's biography of St. Francis of Assisi. In November of 1893 Paul Sabatier (1858-1928) published at his own expense his Vie de S. Francois d'Assise.(1) Its author was an unknown; he had published nothing previously in Franciscan studies. Yet book enjoyed an almost instant success; by following March biography was translated into English and German. It received sufficient notice from Vatican to be placed on Index of Prohibited Books and from French Academy to be awarded crown of honor. Even those most opposed to its portrait of Francis acknowledged its influence.(2) Both popularity and influential character of Sabatier's biography invited comparison with another biography published three decades earlier: Ernest Renan's Vie de Jesus (1863).(3) It too was prefaced by a critical study of sources and like Sabatier's effort was suffused with a romanticism that permeated portrait of its principal subject. While a number of factors have been adduced to account or success of Sabatier's Vie de S. Francois,(4) two that it shares with Renan's Vie de Jesus are worth closer consideration here. On one level, Sabatier's liberal Protestantism appeared more palatable to Catholics than did Renan's overt rationalism. The former's critical conclusions were less extreme, treatment of his subject more respectful by comparison. But if application of method was more restrained, spirit which informed method was no more acceptable. On another level, their criticism converged; it naturalized miraculous and ultimately rationalized supernatural. To Catholic traditionalists historical criticism appeared to be a means of recreating Jesus or Francis into critic's own image and likeness. The Lives produced by such critics were less biographical representations of their subjects than presentations of a thesis. As such they took on character of novels -- fictionalized renderings more indebted to authorial imagination than to historical reality. In short, Sabatier, like Renan, had produced a roman-a-these. Or, more properly, given reactions to influenced conclusions of criticism, a roman-a-hypothse.(5) The spirit which traditionalists detected in these works and which made them uneasy was only partly rooted in historical criticism. That spirit also reenacted a romanticism which contributed to Franciscan revival and was a factor in popularity of both Renan's and Sabatier's Lives. As C. N. L. Brooke has observed, the nineteenth-century romantics found (or thought they found) a man after their own heart, a lover of mankind, a lover of animals, an apostle of liberty -- a libel romantic in thirteenth century. …