SALVATION(ISBN=9780375708831) 英文原版 下载 mobi 免费 pdf 百度网盘 epub 2025 在线 电子书

　　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.

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

　　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.

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　　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.

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书籍介绍

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.