Of all the saints in Christendom (aside from the Blessed Virgin), there is none so well-known and perhaps as popular as St. Francis of Assisi. There is a real sense in which nearly everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike, knows something about St. Francis, even if it is as simple as ‘he was rich and he became poor’, or ‘he loved animals’, ‘he was a man of peace’. But while these simple understandings may be befitting of one who always referred to himself as ‘simple and unlettered’, they do not really do justice to one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of Christianity. Francis appeals to men and women of all faiths and none; his love of creation is rooted in a much more profound experiential understanding of the Divine than a simple eco-environmental reductionist caring for nature. His rejection of the wealth that was his inheritance and the power that came along with it has more meaning than a simple desire to ‘be poor’. Francis il pazzo, the ‘mad man’ as he was mockingly called, transcends religious and sectarian divides; he transcends the cultural divides and he transcends the doctrinal divides. Francis truly is a uomo universale – a universal man, or better yet a man of the universe. He is not only a man for all seasons, but a man for all ages, a man for all times, and a man for all cultures, a man for all those who seek to navigate the landscape of the world in peace and fraternity with all creation. And his meaning for our own age is very relevant.
Born in 1181/2 to a wealthy father who was a cloth merchant, his mother, the Lady Pica was French, perhaps from Languedoc or Provence. He was baptised John, the family name being Bernadone but his father, because of his love of all things French, nicknamed him ‘Francesco’, ‘Little Frenchman’ when he had returned from one of his many business trips to France. This nickname has become the name by which the world knows and loves him. And Francis himself grew up with a love of all things French, including its language which he could speak. In a real sense Francis bestrides two different worlds: born into a period when the feudal system was on the decline and the old land based and barter economy was giving way to business deals and economic structure based on coin, he also grew up in a period when those who were not nobles, the merchants, had begun to understand and indeed grasp the power that money brought them.
Times were changing socially, economically and culturally. Francis was also born into a time when there were great artistic and creative changes happening – most especially in the emergence of courtly love lyric poetry, particularly through the works of the Troubadours. This was also the time of the great romantic novellas, the tales of Charlemagne, the Song of Roland and the beginnings of the values and ideals of the newly emerged Chivalric tradition. And these creative arts fired Francis imagination, his heart and his poetic soul to the extent that while the true experience of the realities of knighthood did him serious damage, he never lost the ideals and referred to the friars as his knights of Christ.
It has always seemed to me that there is a phenomenal amount of creative talent in the Order today that does not get show cased. Perhaps it is time we had a Chapter of Mats where we do not discuss falling numbers, suppression of houses, suppression of Provinces, amalgamation of Provinces because of fewer friars, ailing friars, sick friars, how to be better friars, or read yet more documents on Franciscan this, that and the other and had instead a Chapter of Mats where Friar musicians, sculptors, painters, visual artists, poets, playwrights, singers, dancers all got together and celebrated our universal brotherhood with uplifting, positive, soul and heart enriching Spirit inspired life-giving creativity.
The world into which Francis was born and in which he grew up was a Heraclitan world: a world in flux and change, a world that was beginning to discover new things about itself. This was a world where men and women desired something new and something different, not only socially but also ecclesiastically. The power of the monasteries was at its height; the understanding of gospel living was couched in terms of the monastic vocation or the loose confederation of Cathedral canons.
As well as social and artistic change, there was a desire for change at a fundamental level of the meaning and purpose of Christian living. There was a desire for something new, radical and different in terms of gospel living. As Francis grew to be a young man there was change in the air that had an almost apocalyptic fervour and desire about it. But these matters would not touch Francis just yet. Along with his formal education (such as it was), he was trained as a merchant in his father’s shop. And apparently had good business acumen. And at the end of the working day he and the other young men of Assisi would amuse themselves in the town at night doing what the young men of Assisi did – drinking, singing, and having a good time.
But Francis was also ambitious for knighthood; the winning of glory on the battlefield, the winning of a coat of arms for the family, and the winning of a young lady’s hand. In other words, Francis in his younger years was an ordinary, dreaming young man with no ambitions save those of a good and secure life. However, all that would change in 1202 when he joined the Assisian militia in a war against the neighbouring city state of Perugia. The two armies met at Ponte San Giovanni at Collestrada. The Perugians were better armed, better equipped and better fighters. By the time the battle had ended, the Assisians had been massacred and the young Francis, gazing over the corpse and hewn limb littered field of battle, appalled at the horror of what he was seeing and what he had survived, was taken prisoner and held for ransom for over a year.
After his release he fell into an emotional and psychological depression. Life no longer had the same savour for him; he became quieter, more introspective, more isolated. He no longer took part in the revels he engaged in before his war experience. He began to spend his time in the hills around Assisi walking, thinking, and reflecting. The one who went to war was not the one who came back; these were two different people. PTSD had changed John Baptist ‘Francesco’ Bernadone. The romance of the knightly tales had lost their attraction in the reality. Francis begins to do strange things: he feeds beggars, he gives alms, on one occasion he even spent a day as a beggar in Rome. It is around this time in his life that three important things happen to him.
The first is the famous story of the embracing of the leper recorded by his major biographers, Thomas of Celano and Bonaventure, (the story is also narrated in the ancient sources known as the Legend of the Three Companions, the Mirror of Perfection). These writings tell us that Francis was always afraid of lepers and repulsed by them and would ride miles out of his way to avoid them. Yet, one day while riding in the hills around Assisi, seeing a leper, he dismounted his horse, went to the leper and embraced him then gave him alms.
The second takes place in the little ruined church of San Damiano where, while praying before the crucifix there, Francis heard the voice of the image of Christ say to him, ‘Francis, go and repair my Church, for can you not see, it is falling down’. Thinking this to mean the actual physical structure of the church of San Damiano he began to rebuild it with his own hands.
The third thing happens to him when he sells cloth which belonged to his father, gives the money away and is brought before the bishop by his father who wanted his money back. Usually a case such as this would have been settled in a civil court, but Francis had declared himself a penitent and thus it came to the bishop.
It was during this meeting before the bishop with his father, Pietro Bernadone, that Francis stripped naked, handed everything he owned back to his father and said, ‘From now on I have but one Father who is in heaven’. The rest, as they say, is history (and that included the Bernadone name). John Baptist ‘Francesco’ Bernadone now becomes simply Francesco d ‘Assisi.
I think we need to revisit some aspects of this story for Pietro Bernadone was, is, and ever will be (along with Elias of Cortona) the bête noir of the Francis story unless we set aside judgementalism and replace it with empathy for a parent who had lost their child. Pietro may well have wanted his money back but that was just a ‘peg’, as they say, on which to hang his real hat – which was getting his son back. To believe and accept on the basis of Celano or the other early sources (even given medieval hagiographic hyperbole) that Pietro is motivated solely by financial greed and not paternal love for a favoured child he saw fall apart physically, emotionally, and psychologically before his eyes (at least as he saw it), and not attempt to save him, is to lose a part of our soul. We are, all of us, after all, sons and daughters of parents who would have done anything for us had we been in such dire circumstances as those in which Pietro saw Francis.
These three moments come after his experience of war, his embryonic understanding that life has more to it that than superficialities or personal ambition; that wealth and power are ultimately illusory and when misused they are destructive. Francis leaves that value system behind and embraces a new one – that of an itinerant penitent. His experience of war and its effect on him, his acceptance of his society’s outcasts (the lepers), his vision in San Damiano and his stripping before the bishop are all stages in a life of conversion to the gospel that never ended.
As time moved on Francis began to attract followers, others who were desirous of the kind of life that he was living. As I mentioned above, there was a desire in ordinary Christians for something new and radical. Many groups and movements had come before Francis: the Friars of the Sack, the Crutched Friars, and the Waldensians. Men and women formed themselves into groups to live a gospel life based on common ownership and preaching. Unfortunately, many of these groups began to attack the Church and fell into to heterodoxy. And the Church moved swiftly against them. But Francis understood that if his new way of being was to have any validity, it would have to be approved by the Church.
In April 1209 he set off for Rome with some of his companions and it was there that he received verbal approval for his forma vitae (pattern of life, i.e. rule) which was probably no more than some simple phrases from the gospels. Despite the initial hesitation of Innocent III and other Cardinals present, the Pope gave Francis verbal approval of his way of life following the intercession on Francis’ behalf by Cardinal John of St Paul who suggested that if Francis’ simple request (to live the gospel) was not granted, then it would be tantamount to saying gospel perfection was not possible for anyone. This would effectively render Christian discipleship meaningless.
Francis was at all times ‘catholic’ both in his faith and his vision of the world. For him, the universe was a panoply of wonder; for him it was a ‘sacramental’ world, a world in which everything spoke of and made present God. His experience of God was that of ‘Father’ and he understood it like this because he experienced it like this. The whole of creation was his brother and sister. Brother Sun and Sister Moon, Sister Birds, and Brother Wolf were not ‘titles’ that Francis used to name these creatures, they were brother and sister because that was how he experienced them. He saw and experienced himself in a fraternal relationship with them under the one Fatherhood of God. He saw and experienced them as having their own uniqueness, as having their own life, as being sacred and filled with meaning because they, like him, were children of the Creator God.
Francis’ love of nature, therefore, does not make him a ‘nature mystic’; rather, if we are going to tag him (which I think is actually impossible because Francis defies definition) he is a ‘nature sacramentalist’. For him the whole of creation was a sign of the holy, a means of grace, and it showed forth the presence of God. Francis’ love for nature was a means of expression of his ardent love of God and creation, itself an expression God’s ardent love-qua-love. He experienced all this as being held together by ‘Friar Christ’, the One born in humility to the humble Virgin; the One who left the glory and splendour of his Godhead behind and came to us as a frail, vulnerable infant in need of care, attention, and love. The same One who later would draw the universe to the Father through his redeeming passion, death and resurrection. For Francis of Assisi the universe with all its diversity was a ‘playpen’ in which he could experience with unbounded joy the democracy of all creation, equal in their rights and intrinsic value before their Creator.
The meaning of Francis of Assisi for today goes beyond a love and care for creation which is so important to contemporary ecologists, environmental activists and Franciscan theology and spirituality. In the famous story of the meeting between Francis and the Sultan during the battle of Damietta in 1218, Francis can teach us how we are to approach men and women of other faiths in a spirit or welcoming, warm fraternity rather than contentious faith division.
In the story of the Wolf of Gubbio, Francis can teach us how the rights of all of creation, human and non-human, are to be respected and guaranteed and protected. In his rejection of wealth and property Francis can teach us about what is truly valuable in and to the human condition. And in the fact that he was as happy in the company of the powerful Pope, bishops, cardinals and counts and nobility, as he was with the poor, the outcast and the disenfranchised and powerless; he can teach us what the true meaning of ‘class-less’ and ‘non-elitist’ is.
The attraction of Francis of Assisi is that at the surface level there is nothing to attract us to him. At the surface level, he had everything and threw it all away so that he could embrace nothing. From a wealthy, landed and burgeoning powerful merchant family and everything that went with it, he donned the garments of a beggar, lived off scraps and had no place that he could call his own. And yet this is his very attraction.
There is a joyous, spontaneous daring in what appears to us to be utter foolishness. Our world may admire Francis but it will never really understand him. To our world, so bent on its own pursuit of power and wealth, the life of Francis of Assisi is a curiosity that may, on the one hand inspire us, and on the other hand elicit from us scorn and derision.
And yet, and yet… Francis of Assisi still continues to fascinate and his story continues to be told and retold and written about and sung about and poeticised about, and painted about, and sculpted about and dramatised about. Our world stands on the very brink of ruin: we are surrounded each day on every side by yet more stories of war, division, religious fundamentalism; the very air we breathe is under threat through global warming and climate change; whole species of animals and plants daily disappear, sections of polar ice caps melt, floods, drought, humanity’s blind pursuit of its own wellbeing does not bespeak of a mutual fraternal or sororal attitude of covenantal care for our brothers and sisters, human and non-human. It literally is the ‘dominion’ over the whole of creation in a shocking and atheistic and quite deliberate misunderstanding and gross misinterpretation of what God meant in Genesis 1:26.
But Francis of Assisi is still an inspiring sign to us even today: that men and women can come together across the social, cultural, and religious divide in the democracy of all creation, discuss differences and agree to work together, not just for the benefit of humanity but for the whole of creation gathered as brother and sister under the one Fatherhood of God at whose centre is the Risen Christ, its Redeemer and its Lord, through whom the entirety of creation came to be and is sustained by the dynamic, creative power of the Spirit.
Indeed, nearly eight hundred years after the death of Francis of Assisi, the world is not such a different place but Francis of Assisi, reckless, headstrong, joyous, sad, ebullient, depressive, spontaneous, reflective, tortured, simple, humble, and explosive still continues to cause wonder and awe at a life lived so freely in a world given to him so freely and in which he rejoiced so freely. The words attributed to him in October 1226 still ring out to us today: ‘I have done what was mine to do, may Christ now teach you what is yours to do.’ This is both the invitation and challenge of Francis of Assisi.
by Séamus Mulholland OFM