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ST. BERNARDINE, THE MORAL TEACHER I F WE would appreciate St. Bernardine as the Moral Teacher, we must see him in action. We must rub shoulders with one of his Italian audi­ ences, like that which thronged the Piazza of Santa Croce in Florence on April 9, 1424. In the center of the square there was a great wooden structure, the "Devil’s Castle.” Heaped up within it and dangling from its pillars and towers were all the instruments of sin surrendered by the repentant populace. "There were more than four hundred gaming tables,” the old chronicler tells us, "several baskets full of dice, more than four thousand sets of playing cards old and new.”1 The women, too, had brought their false hair, rouge, perfumes, garlands, high-heeled shoes, mirrors, "and all their other abom­ inations.” The Church and Piazza of Santa Croce were packed with several thousand townspeople and country people, both men and women. Bernardine was within the Church, preaching on those who stone Christ by their sins. "Love Hunted and Persecuted” was his theme.2 Either the sermon or the sight of the "Devil’s Castle” produced such a commotion among the audience that it was impossible for the preacher to proceed beyond his first point. There was no time, comments the chronicler,3to speak of the other four stones which strike Christ. The tumult and the noise was tremendous. Bernardine stopped preaching. Coming forth into the Piazza with a procession of many friars, he gave the order to set fire to the castle. You never saw such a beautiful fire [adds the chronicler]. The flames leaped high into the air to the utter confusion of the devil, and to the glory and honor of our Lord Jesus Christ.. . . I will not speak of the cries which seemed like thunder, or of the tender weeping which manifested great devotion. Similar scenes took place at Perugia, Casale, Viterbo, Orvieto, and Siena.4 At Perugia in 1425, besides the gambling devices and vanities, such a heap of charms and spells and good luck pieces were brought that two castles were made. A large banner was made, on which was painted the image of Satan, the Lord of the Castle, the inventor and patron of these occasions of sin. The banner was placed on the top of one of the castles, and when this castle was set on fire, the force of the flames lifted it so high into the sky that it almost disappeared from sight. "And when his pride could go no higher, he fell from that height and landed on a house in the Piazza of Perugia.”5 1. MS. in Bibliotheca Riccardiana (Florence), n. 1264, f. 92 va., cited by Salvatore Tosti, O. F. M., "Di Alcuni Codici delle Prediche di S. Bernardino da Siena,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum (AFH), X II (1919), 189. 2. "L’Amore Cacciato e Perseguitato.” This must have been a sermon very similar to the one entitled "De Amore Fugiente,” Sermo X X X III of the Paduan series. Cf. $aneti Bernardini Senensis Ordinis Minorum Opera Quae Extant Omnia.. .in Quatuor Homos distincta, ed. Petrus Rodulphius, Senogalliensis Episcopus (Venetiisapud Juntas, 1591) IV, 151-157. This work will be cited hereafter as Opera Omnia. 3. Tosti, loc. cit. 4. Dionisio Pacetti, O. F. M., "La Predicazione di S. Bernardino da Siena a Perugia e ad Assisi,” Collectanea Franciscana, IX (1939), 518. 5. La Francescana o Specchio de l’Ordine Minore, ed. Nicola Cavanna, 2 vols. (Olschki, Firenze, 1931) II, 375. 341 342 FRANCISCAN STUDIES Although Bernardine’s Sermones Latini contain treatises in Moral Theol­ ogy which reveal him as a scholar, a theologian, a sociologist, as a moral teacher he had as his primary aim, not to write books, but to destroy sin. He was always a preacher, never a professor. He wanted action. He thought and wrote as a preacher. The materials with which a student of Bernardine deals are sermons. It is all but impossible to separate his moral teaching from its mode of presentation. It is almost doing violence to the subject to attempt to treat his thought as one might discuss the doctrine of St. Bonaventure or of...

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