After Jesus and Saint Paul, no figure in the history of Christianity fascinates as much as Francis of Assisi. Believers and non-believers alike are attracted to his simplicity, his humility, his joy-filled exuberance, his poverty and his love of creation. In the world of imaginative creativity, more books have been written and more films made about his life than any other figure in Christianity. Artists as diverse in style as Giotto, Cimabue, Caravaggio, El Greco, Marc Chagall have all used the life of Saint Francis as inspiration for some of the great works of medieval and modern art. Poets such as Dante, Matthew Arnold, Francis Thompson, Manley Hopkins, Galway Kinnell, Ann Wroe, Seamus Heaney have all written poems about Francis or have been inspired by him. Songs, orchestral suites, cantatas, sequences have all been composed about Saint Francis.
Novels, plays, stories have also taken him either as the subject of their content or again been inspired by his life, indeed, even Richmal Compton, the author of the Just William stories (supposedly for children but enjoyed more by adults!) has a William story entitled, William Leads a Better Life. A wonderful story in which William, having discovered that the Outlaws (his ‘gang’ comprising of Ginger, Douglas and Henry, and I would argue Jumbles, his mongrel dog) have been learning about Saint Francis, immediately decides to emulate him and dressing himself in his father’s dressing gown with a cord around it, and his slippers (he had no sandals) and calling themselves the ‘Williamcans’ (William, of course, is the leader), proceeds to sell his father’s possessions to raise money to give to ‘the poor’. There then follows a wonderful sequence on ‘Brother Inkwell’, and a very funny attempt to preach to the animals in the form of a very uncooperative goat.
Francis also features in popular entertainment media: he is referenced in The Simpsons at least three times (the Duff Beer Book of Records designates him ‘the most boring saint in the world!’); when Homer decides to stop going to church he is shown walking in his garden in his brown dressing gown while the birds flock around him singing – the visual reference to St Francis is clear; then when Homer becomes an informant for ‘Feds’ against Fat Tony(the Don of the Springfield Mafia) and is ‘made’, the picture of the saint they use is St Francis (well it has Moe’s likeness but cartoons are cartoons!). The US TV crime series Justified featured a reference to Francis between Walter Coggins (Boyd Crowder) and Timothy Olyphant (US Marshal Raylan Givens) when Boyd, a criminal, makes a reference to St Francis, Raylan asks ‘Is he the one with the birds?’; the Australian TV series Miss Fisher Mysteries makes a stunning visual reference to him in the form of a page from a manuscript that is scattered over a university lawn; the US TV series Madame Secretary makes numerous references to Saint Francis and sometimes in quite profound ways (the US Secretary of State’s husband, Dr Henry McCord – played by the actor Tim Daley – is a religious scholar and an authority on Saint Francis). In one scene where one of his children is anxious about her university application, Dr McCord says to her, ‘I will have a word with Saint Francis, he owes me one!’
Then, of course, there is the world famous ‘Peace Prayer’ Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace, today known as the ‘Prayer of Saint Francis,’ which was not written by Francis. It first appeared during the First World War. It was found written on the observe of a holy card of Saint Francis, which was found in a Norman Almanac. The prayer bore no name; but in the English speaking world, on account of this holy card, it came to be called the Peace Prayer of Saint Francis. The prayer has been used by Popes, presidents, politicians (Lenin is reputed to have said that had he had ten Saint Francises the Russian Revolution would have been effected without a drop of blood), and saints (John Paul II, Mother Teresa); and most infamously by a hard right-wing British Prime Minister in 1979.
It is referenced in the US TV series Deadwood and was even featured in the trailers for the original Rambo! While some argue that Francis would never have written such a prayer given its ‘I’ and ‘Me’, others say that even if it is not his words, it at least encapsulates his spirit. Whatever way we understand the origins or significance of this prayer, and regardless of the fact that Francis never penned it, its statements on light, hope, pardon and joy will ensure that it is forever the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi. Francis touches something deep within the human soul and the human experience that sometimes only art, music and poetry can elicit from us.
Pope Francis took the opening words of the Canticle of the Creatures, ‘Laudato Si’, as the title for his Encyclical letter on the current environmental and climate crisis. Before that, in Lynn White’s famous essay ‘The Roots of Our Ecological Crisis’, he proposed Saint Francis as the solution to that crisis. Why should this be?
Normally we hear of rags-to-riches stories, in the case of Francis it is riches-to-rags. This was a young man who seemingly had everything he could possibly wish for: a good life, secure, wealthy, indulgent parents, the respect of his peers, roguish good looks and a carefree joie de vivre. But this privileged background did not immunise him against the brute realities of the world. His experience of war, imprisonment, sickness and their aftermath (today what we refer to as PTSD), profoundly changed him from a once devil-may-care young man to an isolated, alienated figure among his peers. Life and its insistence on the real transformed Francis took him down other paths that are associated with him. Two stand out: his preaching to the birds and the story of the Wolf of Gubbio, the latter the most famous of all and subject to many interpretations (from the lycanthropic to the Jungian, the Taming the Wolf Institute, a conflict resolution group, is named after this incident and Sarah McHugh’s poem, ‘The Wolf of Gubbio’ captures this story quite powerfully). Francis undoubtedly ‘loved nature’ but his ‘love’ was much more profound and pragmatic than the sometimes saccharine presentations made today of his love of the natural world.
Francis saw the constituents of nature and experienced them as his brothers and sisters because they had been created by the one Father. His logic was simple: if God was the Creator and Father of all, then all that was created was his brother and sister. He is the saint of the democracy of all creation. For Saint Francis of Assisi Brother Sun and Sister Moon and Brother Wolf and Sister Water and Brother Fire were not just ‘titles’ of respect for them, they were designations of relationship. And there was tenderness and gentleness and acceptance of Francis by these brothers and sisters with whom he shared the world in which he lived. And they trusted him and shared their brother/sisterhood with him because he wanted nothing from them, it was a mutual sine proprio relationship
The writings of Saint Francis abound with the rhythms of the poetic imagination, as for example The Praises of God, The Salutation of the Virtues. However, of all the writings that Francis penned with his profound poetic imagination none captures his heart, soul and vision, and indeed, the heart and soul of millions of others, more than his poem-song-prayer, variously called The Canticle of Creation; The Canticle of All the Creatures; The Canticle of the Creatures, The Canticle of the Sun. Whatever way we name it, they are the most sublime words that ever came from his pen and his heart.
Poetic and dramatic gestures were part and parcel of Francis’ life; when, for example, he went to the Church of Saint Nicholas with some of his early companions and had the gospel pages turned opened three times, each time he heard the Synoptic versions of the same injunction from Jesus: anyone who would be a follower of mine must renounce himself, take up his cross and follow me. To do this no haversack was needed, no money in the purse, no staff. It was a command to abandon oneself in one’s life of discipleship to the providence of God and Francis, having heard, acted on it immediately. When he heard the Matthean version of the Apostolic Commissioning read at the Portiuncula in the early stages of his conversion, he acted immediately crying: ‘This is what I have sought. This is what I long for with all my heart.’ He leaves aside his sandals, removes his leather hermit’s belt from his tunic and substitutes it with a piece of cord.
The poetic and dramatic response was dynamic, but well attuned with and to the poetic temperament of his age. This was the time of the troubadours and trouvères; the time of the chivalric tales of Charlemagne and Roland; the time of the tales of Arthur and the Round Table; the time of romance and courtly love. The great artistic tradition which we know as Troubadour flourished between c.1100–1300. Francis was born into, grew up in and died during this poetic, music and creative tradition’s greatest moment. We know that Francis could speak French, his mother was French and his Father had given him the affectionate nickname ‘Francesco’ (Little Frenchman) because of his love of all things French. Celano, his first biographer, tells us that when he wished to sing, ‘he sang in French’. He imitated the way in which medieval musical instruments were played, possibly by the troubadours whom he may have heard or seen. Again Celano tells us:
Often he would pick up he would pick up two sticks and laying one across his forearm would draw the other across it as if playing a rebec (1Cel 127).
And this while he sang in French, the language of poetry during the Middle Ages, it was the tales of the symbol of Christian knighthood, Roland, in the Song of Roland and of Christian knightly kingship, Charlemagne in the Chansons de Gestes (Song of the Deeds) and the attitudes and glories of knighthood magnified in the courtly tales, that inspired him to wish to be a knight. He called his early followers ‘knights of Christ’. His was already a mind and heart that was poetic and creative, and these influences shaped and honed it even further and fired his romantic spirit. The Canticle of the Creatures, then, flowed from not just a mystical heart that had come to a reconciliation with itself and the creation of which it was so vibrant a part, it also came from the soul of an intuitive poet who, while not able to express the depth of his thought in the traditional theological way, did so in the way only poets can: he allowed his heart to burst through with the word of God which he could see and hear speaking to him in creation. He brought those poetic and musical influences from early days to bear upon it and created imagery, symbols, signs and poetry with astute rhymes and rhythms, which later would be the forefather of Manley Hopkins’ ‘sprung rhythm’. And he set the Canticle to music because his biographers tell us he had the ‘Canticle … set to music and taught the friars to sing it’ (LP 43). They sang it before the Bishop and the Mayor of Assisi when they were involved in a dispute, and after hearing it they reconciled their differences; they sang it at the Portiuncula church as Francis lay dying on 3 October 1226 because this is what Francis asked them to do (SP 101). His soul winged its way on poetry to the heaven he had so often poeticised about in his life.
It was the first poem in the native dialect of Umbria and it would inspire Dante. It is a poem-song-prayer that still evokes magic and wonder today, especially in the area of environmental concerns. It is a poem about the earth, about the heavens, about the universe but above all it is a poem about the one who created it and who brought it together in Sir Brother Sun, who is the great poetic symbol of Christ at the centre of a redeemed and reconciled cosmos that praises and glorifies its maker in its very existence through fraternal mutuality.
The Canticle is all the more extraordinary when it is remembered that most of it he wrote in 1226 when he was blind, in great physical distress through sickness, in agony from the Stigmata he had received at La Verna in September 1224, and near his own death (LP 43). But though physical eyes could no longer see the colour, shape, form and splendour of what he wished to sing about, the poet’s eye could, and what it saw it painted with the sublimity of poetic words. Francis: Artist as a Dying Poet, to paraphrase James Joyce. So, there is a sense in which it is right and fitting that men and women throughout the centuries should take to the stage, take up their pens, their musical instruments, their paint and oils, or film cameras, and speak of Francis’ life and try to understand it in a way different from the academic scholars.
This work is crucial for us to understand Francis and his life project but not all of us can gain access to the learned tomes. But all of us can gain access to poetry, music, art and drama, because all of us reach out to these creative and imaginative mysteries with our soul and not only our minds. And therein lies the genius of Francis of Assisi: that he can bring together different men and women, of all faiths and of none, the unlearned and the clever, the wise and the simple, the brilliant and the mundane, the genius and the dullard, the scholar and the poet, the musician and the dramatist, the theologian and philosopher, and each of them in their own way, using their own skill and talent, will once again seek to say something about this remarkable, inspiring man who was all at once sinner, saint, and poet.
Taken from Essays on the Spirituality of St Francis of Assisi by Séamus Mulholland OFM