Francis of Assisi

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Francis of Assisi was an Italian friar, born about 1181 or 1182, who abandoned the wealth of a cloth merchant’s household to live in deliberate poverty, and who founded the order of mendicant brothers that still bears his name. He is among the most thoroughly documented figures of the medieval West, and among the most disputed, because almost everything written about him within a generation of his death in 1226 was written by men with a stake in what his movement was to become.

The outline of the life is firm. The son of Pietro di Bernardone, he passed an ordinary youth of some affluence, went to a local war, was captured, and after a long illness underwent a conversion that estranged him from his father. The break was public and absolute: tradition holds that he stripped off his clothes in the square at Assisi and gave them back, renouncing his inheritance. What followed was a life organized around literal imitation of the gospel — preaching, manual work, begging, the care of lepers — and a refusal of property so strict that it would strain the order he left behind almost as soon as he was gone.

His own writings are few and plain. The Canticle of the Creatures, composed near the end of his life, addresses sun, moon, wind, water, fire, and death as brother and sister; it is one of the earliest poems in the Italian vernacular, and it carries the whole of his theology in its grammar — every created thing a kin and a sign. Beside it stand a short Rule, some letters, and praises. The elaborate Francis of later devotion — preaching to birds, taming the wolf of Gubbio — comes mostly from the Fioretti and other compilations written long after, and scholarship reads these as devotional literature rather than record.

The episode on which his cult turned is the stigmata. His companions reported that, in 1224, during a retreat on Monte La Verna, the marks of Christ’s wounds appeared on his body; he is the first person for whom such a claim was made, and the church took it as a seal of his conformity to Christ. Believers held, and hold, that the wounds were a literal grace; the report is what the sources say, and what later belief built upon. He was canonized in 1228, two years after his death, by a pope who had known him.

The order he founded splintered almost immediately over the question he had lived by — whether his poverty was a precept binding on all, or a counsel for the few — and the argument ran for centuries. What he meant by it remained harder to institutionalize than to admire. He is now patron of Italy and, by a later naming, of ecology; the man behind the patronage wanted only to own nothing and to belong to everything.

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