"Nobody has shown
me what I should do; but the Most High Himself has commanded me to live
according to the Gospels." Francis of Assisi accepted the accounts of
the life of Christ with the utmost naivete; he neither searched for an
allegorical meaning (as the theologians did), nor did he subordinate the
man Jesus to the divine principle of the _logos_ (in the manner of the
great mystics). To him the imitation of Christ meant a ministry of love;
he did not conceive religion as dogma and the political power of a
hierarchy, but as a state of the heart. This is a characteristic which
he shares with Eckhart, the great recreator of European religion,
although he was fundamentally alien to him. St. Francis never uttered a
single hostile word against tradition or the clergy; he never inveighed
against the corruption of morals and religious indifference, as other
reformers did; he exerted a reformatory influence solely by his life,
for he possessed the secret of the great love. During his whole life he
was averse to laying down rules for his followers, although continually
urged to do so by popes and bishops.
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