£11.99
Foreshadowing Laudato si’ by forty years, this book has now become a timeless classic. Eric Doyle OFM’s plea to love and respect creation because it has its own intrinsic worth retains its urgency for Mother Earth today. Using the Canticle of Brother Sun as his point of departure he demonstrates how belief in the universal brotherhood and sisterhood of creation can help us to create a better world. In doing so he presents the Christocentric Franciscan vision of creation as a vast unity full of mystery and wonder and introduces the reader to a world comprised of a network of cosmic, personal and spiritual relationships. The vision, both attractive and challenging, demands, in Eric Doyle’s words, a ‘mighty change of heart’ from humanity. These words of wisdom can help to steer us in the direction of humility, gratitude and peace, so necessary if we are to live in harmony with creation and not destroy it.
Paperback. First published 1980. Sixth Edition 281 pages. Published April 2023.
As a small business we rely on word of mouth recommendations to assist others in their choice of books. Please consider leaving a review of any of our books and so help us in our mission to promote books on Franciscan theology and spirituality. Thank you.
In order to leave a review you will need to log in to your account and go to the product page where you can click on the review tab to leave your comments
Doyle articulates his firmly held conviction, rooted in his insightful understanding of the Franciscan tradition, that there exists among all of creation a profound relationship resulting from a common origin in God. This fundamental relatedness is an even more compelling challenge now as the global community struggles with tensions between nations and ethnic groups and the fatal repercussions of ecological abuse. This book offers an urgently needed spiritual vision of relationships as it speaks to the longings of the human heart for a more harmonious way of being together, of respecting, trusting, and loving one another.
Written in 1980, this book has a timely and uncanny prescience. Deeply perturbed by the ecological crisis since the 1960s, Doyle first delivered these reflections on The Canticle of Brother Sun on the Feast of St Francis 1965. As an expression of the unity of creation in which all creatures are a brotherhood or sisterhood in Christ, Doyle is concerned here with the Canticle ‘chiefly as a cosmic hymn and what it has to teach us in respect of the ecological crisis’. He demonstrates how the authentic Christian attitude to nature is exemplified par excellence in St Francis, an attitude which respects the intrinsic worth of every ‘thing’ in the universe, and which may arguably be the only solution to saving our Sister Mother Earth.
You must be logged in to post a review.
| Weight | 1 kg |
|---|
D. H. Farmer, Emeritus Reader in History at Reading University –
Fr Eric Doyle’s book reflects his wide range of interests and many-sided learning. The blurb emphasises that it is written for ecologists, conservationists, and ‘those who love creation and are concerned about the future of the earth’.
There are many passages of considerable depth which will bring spiritual profit. Fr Doyle does not make the mistake of speaking only in the language of the ecologist. He writes as a theologian, who unites in his equipment exact knowledge of the sources for the life of St Francis, a sincere admiration for St Bonaventure, unusually wide reading of modern thinkers and a realisation of the value of contemplation.
Here we find a summary of the life of Francis and an extended study of the Canticle of the Sun. Not a literary study, but one which includes modern scientific knowledge of sun, moon, weather, water, fire and earth in a theological dialogue of value to the intelligent general reader. Nor are the insights of Jungian psychology lacking. Even more important are passages on the problems of suffering, on the Eucharist, on poverty and on the evils of consumerism.
This is emphatically a book not to be exhausted at one reading, but one to which the reader can keep on returning.
Few, if any, Catholic writer of present-day England could have written this book.
D. H. Farmer
Emeritus Reader in History at Reading University
The Tablet, 15 November 1980, p. 1123.
Neville Ward, Author and Methodist Minister –
Mystical Vision
Fr Eric Doyle has set out not to write another life of St Francis or an appraisal of the Canticle of Brother Sun, but to expound St Francis’ vision of the created order as full of mystery and wonder, a ‘mighty sum of things forever speaking’, and a network of relationships.
‘My one purpose … has been to attempt to show how belief in the universal brotherhood [and sisterhood] can help us to create a better world. The reader will not be surprised therefore to find no literary study of the Canticle in these pages. I have taken it as a piece of poetry expressing a mystical vision. That was my point of departure.’
Fr Doyle sees agreement between much of the teaching of St Francis and the principles on which the United Nations Organisation is based. He has dedicated his book to UNO and UNESCO.
The book follows the great trail of images in the Canticle of Brother Sun and considers the various meanings and concerns that they suggest to the author’s marvellously responsive and educated imagination. The great achievements of science and technology, the ecological crisis, with superiority of value and meaning over mere utility and manipulation, the problem of suffering, educational aims, and many other themes implied in a religious philosophy of nature, are illuminated in this fascinating and happy book.
It is, however, not an easy book. The author’s style drifts between the brilliant, the crepuscular and the dark, between the traditionally dogmatic and the ‘de Chardin speculative’. So many themes of interest and importance are handled that it is inevitable that some flagging readers will wish the author had not taken them on such an extended and varied exploration.
All, however, will be grateful for being in the presence of such a lively and devout mind, for its many memorable judgments, and not least for the twentieth-century expression of the Franciscan vision in the author’s concluding ‘Song of Sister Energy’.
+Neville Ward
Author, Methodist Minister, Chaplain London University
Church Times, 28 Nov. 1980, p. v.
Stephen R. L. Clark, Emeritus Professor of Glasgow, Liverpool and Durham Universities –
Father Eric Doyle, a Franciscan priest, dedicates this meditation on St Francis Canticle of Brother Sun to the UN, in the hope that UNESCO will accept the Universal Declaration of Animal Rights — a document requiring a minimal adherence to the principle that non-human animals should not be caused distress or denied their natural lives without some strong necessity. He differs from some other recent advocates of ‘animal liberation’ in allowing weight to the present value even of apparently non-sentient elements of the natural universe. The whole natural order is a co-operating network of spirits, and Father Doyle even takes St Francis’ concern for fire seriously, following tradition in explaining how the saint felt no pain while his temples were being cauterised because ‘the fire returned his love’. St Francis’ non-violence even towards the water in which he had washed seems at times to approximate to the Jain ideal, but rests (so Father Doyle persuasively contends) on an orthodox Christian reverence for all creation as it embodies the Creator’s glory.
After a brief account of St Francis’ life, Father Doyle turns to meditating on the Incarnation (treated in Scotist manner as the original end of all creation), the sun, moon and stars, the weather, water, fire (including nuclear energy), the eventual destiny of the material order, forgiveness, evil and sin. He draws extensively on current knowledge of the material order, and of the ecological and political problems which perturb this generation. All these elements of our situation under God he seeks to understand in the light of St Francis’ love for all created being, his appreciation of the inwardness of things. At times he writes with deep emotion of the wonder (and the anguish) he feels at the spectacle of the starry heavens or the agony of animal life. At times he deals carefully with such errors as Francis Schaeffer’s attempt to prove St Francis guilty of a heretical pantheism. Almost always he moves through emotion and scholarship alike to some illuminating point about our position in the world: ‘If we allow them, our Sisters the Stars can help us to come through true humility to our own splendid, but relative greatness.’
Father Doyle’s book is a welcome reinforcement for the forces which are now seeking to remind Christians (and those of other religious traditions) of the duties they owe to the non-human world, of the importance of recognising value in the creation. Without a rediscovered sense of the sacred we look likely to demolish the only world in which we can live, and to degrade even the human spirit.
I recommend this book.
Stephen R. L. Clark, Emeritus Professor of Glasgow, Liverpool and Durham Universities
Scottish Journal of Theology 36.3 (1983): 422–423.
Sr Miriam, Catholic Herald –
All Great and Small and Dignified
Fr Eric Doyle, a Franciscan, and therefore eminently capable of interpreting his spiritual father to our disillusioned, tormented, violent, frustrated, yet so often well-intentioned world, sums up in this sensitive, thoughtful, constructive and realistic study of the Canticle of Brother Sun the life and vision of St Francis of Assisi in the word ‘poverty’.
The poverty he means is certainly not the destitution of the Third World which is evil, and to relieve which is one of the purposes of this book, but the blessed and joyful poverty of the Gospel, offered to all, of which St Francis was and remains the enduring and God-sent example. He was not born poor, nor did he have poverty thrust upon him. Of his own free choice, by grace and with a singleness of purpose perhaps unparalleled in the lives of the saints, he achieved, out of love of Christ our Brother and God our Father, this total detachment which became for him, and which can become likewise for all, ‘an affirmation of the being and dignity of every creature’.
Why is this this beatitude of the poor so important? First of all because in it is glimpsed what the mystics call the poverty, self-emptying and humility of the Blessed Trinity itself. Then because the spirit of poverty, forbidding love ever to become a desire for possession, liberates from anxiety, fear, suspicion and opens the heart to wonder, that childlike quality which sees into the depths of every creature, and there finds, in the common origin which makes all creatures brothers and sisters, the self-revelation of God.
The perception of this universal brotherhood [and sisterhood] brings about an ever deepening love of Creator and creature, thus completing the cyclic pattern initiated by Love. In other words poverty, based on humility, detachment and charity, the three virtues without which, according to Saint Teresa of Avila, there can be no true prayer, is truth; nor can one without prayer, which achieves our true relationship with God, perceive the network of cosmic, personal and spiritual relationships to which humanity belongs.
St Francis composed this sublime prayer of praise, the Canticle of Brother Sun, at the end of his life when sick and nearly blind.
He had achieved the purpose for which he had been created — to have God-like ‘dominion’ over all creatures, that is, to love them, to use them for the glory of God, and serve them — and through them to render thanks.
Sr Miriam
Catholic Herald, November 1980.
Howard Docherty, OFM –
Song of Saint Francis
Father Eric’s book is not a study of the literary importance of the Canticle. His first chapter is a beautifully compressed essay on the life and work of Francis. This might usefully be read by all the would-be writers on the subject, especially with regard to the personality and strength of character of St Clare. We might then be spared further celluloid and juvenile versions of the relationship between the two saints.
The greater part of the work is a detailed study of the Canticle, section by section, using it as a launching pad to project a cosmic theology, beginning with Francis and through to later Franciscan theologians: and at the same time relating a line of thought and piety to current concerns about ecology and conserving of the gifts of creation. The reading that has gone into the making of this book is wide: quotations range from St Bonaventure and John Duns Scotus, from specialised articles and learned journals, through Carl Jung to The Wind in the Willows. Most importantly there is an extended analysis linking the work of Teilhard de Chardin to that of Scotus, in whom the Jesuit scientist felt he had found a great master in the Middle Ages and to whose thought he could relate his own findings and speculations.
The book makes a timely appearance as celebrations begin next year to mark the eighth centenary in 1982 of St Francis’ birth. It is not a cosy and comfortable little study of his message: there is much that is a challenge to the use we might be making of the power of a scientific knowledge that can put people on another planet. It makes demands and lists obligations.
A thoughtful book for people who want to find the depths in St Francis.
Howard Docherty, OFM
The Universe, 7 November1980, p.14.
Victoria Masterpaul, OSF –
BOOK REVIEW FOR THE NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER
I offer the readers of National Catholic Reporter a book that, although not new, is, for me, like the person to whom it is dedicated, timeless and magnetic, thus compelling the reader to pull it from the shelf repeatedly. St Francis and the Song of Brotherhood and Sisterhood by the late Eric Doyle OFM, was published originally in 1980 by George, Allen and Unwin, London.
I am convinced that this classic is as much about the author, a vibrant light in the Franciscan world, as it is about Francis of Assisi and his Canticle of Brother Sun. Doyle, an English friar, became beloved by many summer session theology students at St Bonaventure University, New York. Inimitably gifted, thoroughly human and irrepressibly witty, Doyle was a man far ahead of his time. His treatment of issues in ecology, liberation theology, ecumenism and feminism in an erudite, yet humane manner bespeaks this loudly and clearly.
The Introduction presents a wonderfully unique overview of Francis’ life, of his relationship with Clare, and Francis’ utter lack of self-righteousness. Interestingly enough, Chapter 11 on ‘The Mystery of Death’ describes vividly the author’s two recurrent mental pictures, in wakefulness, which had considerable influence on his own understanding of death. Eric Doyle died within four years of the date of publication, and like St Francis, he was in his mid-forties at the time of his death.
In the first line of the Preface, Doyle states that ‘this book is about a singer and his song’. As a woman grateful to be a follower of Francis and Clare, I submit this review as an expression of heartfelt thanks to my former teacher, and as an attempt to keep Francis of Assisi’s, as well as Eric Doyle’s, songs sung!
Victoria Masterpaul, OSF
National Catholic Reporter, 28 September 1999.