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 same poverty he made the center of his life became, within a few years of his death, a legal and theological problem the church would argue over for a century — and the life that was meant to be a literal copy of the gospel was, almost at once, re-copied into hagiography.

The outline of the life

The outline is firm. The son of Pietro di Bernardone, a prosperous dealer in cloth, he passed an ordinary youth of some affluence in Assisi, a hill town in Umbria — fashionable, generous, drawn to the songs of the French troubadours his mother had brought a taste for. He went to a local war: in 1202 Assisi fought neighboring Perugia, was beaten at the bridge of Collestrada, and the young Francis was taken prisoner and held for roughly a year before his father ransomed him. A long illness followed, and then a slower undoing — a failed second attempt at a military career, a turning toward solitude and prayer, a growing estrangement from the world of trade he had been born to inherit.

The break with his father was public and absolute. In 1206, called before Guido, the bishop of Assisi, to answer for money he had taken from his father’s stock, Francis is reported to have stripped off his clothes in the open and handed them back, renouncing his inheritance and declaring that he had now only a Father in heaven; the bishop covered him with a cloak. The gesture set the key for everything after. What followed was a life organized around literal imitation of the gospel — preaching, manual work, begging, the rebuilding with his own hands of ruined churches around the town, and above all the care of lepers, whose company he had once found unbearable and now sought out. The kissing of a leper, in the early accounts, is the hinge on which his conversion turns: the thing most repellent embraced as the body of Christ.

By about 1209 a handful of companions had gathered, and Francis went to Rome to seek the approval of Pope Innocent III for a brief rule drawn almost entirely from gospel sentences about leaving all and following. The approval was oral and provisional — a tolerated experiment rather than a chartered order — but it gave the brotherhood standing. They called themselves the lesser brothers, the fratres minores, and lived by begging and by the work of their hands, owning nothing in common or apart. The movement grew with a speed that quickly outran its founder’s wish to keep it small, poor, and simple; by the early 1220s there were thousands of friars, scattered far beyond Italy, and the loose fellowship of the early years could no longer govern itself by example alone. A revised written rule, the Regula bullata, was approved by Pope Honorius III on 29 November 1223 — a shorter, more juridical text than Francis wanted, the document of an order rather than a band.

The few authentic writings

His own writings are few and plain, and modern scholarship has worked hard to separate them from the great tide of legend that gathered after him. The authentic corpus — fixed in its modern critical form by the German Franciscan Kajetan Esser, whose Opuscula sancti patris Francisci Assisiensis (1976, revised 1978) underlies all serious editions since — runs to a short Earlier and Later Rule, a Testament dictated near death, a set of Admonitions, several letters, prayers and praises, and the vernacular poetry. It is a small shelf, and almost none of it is theology in the academic sense. Francis was not a schoolman; the systematized contemplative ascent that the order’s thought would become belongs to Bonaventure, and the sharp scholastic divergences that followed to Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. What Francis left was not a system but a manner.

The center of the writings is the Canticle of the Creatures — the Cantico di frate Sole, the Canticle of Brother Sun — composed near the end of his life, in 1224 or 1225, much of it at San Damiano while he lay ill and nearly blind in a small cell. It is one of the earliest surviving poems in the Italian vernacular, written not in the Latin of the schools but in the Umbrian speech of the people, and it carries the whole of his vision in its grammar. It praises God through and for the creatures, addressing them as kin: Brother Sun, who gives the day and bears the likeness of his maker; Sister Moon and the stars; Brother Wind and the weather; Sister Water, humble and precious and chaste; Brother Fire, by whom the night is lit; and Mother Earth, who sustains and governs and brings forth fruit. A later stanza, added near the end, blesses those who forgive and endure; the final verses welcome Sister Bodily Death, from whom no living thing escapes. Every created thing, in the poem, is a kin and a sign — the world read not as raw material but as a household of brothers and sisters under one Father. Beside the Canticle stand the Rule, the Testament, the Admonitions, and the praises: the documentary Francis, plain-spoken and exact.

Against this stands the legendary Francis of later devotion — preaching a sermon to the birds, taming the wolf of Gubbio, conversing with creatures as a gentle saint of nature. These episodes come mostly from the Fioretti, the Little Flowers of Saint Francis, an anonymous Tuscan compilation of the late fourteenth century drawn from the earlier Latin Actus beati Francisci et sociorum eius. They are luminous, much-loved, and late — written more than a century and a half after his death — and scholarship reads them as devotional literature rather than record: the spiritual meaning of the man rendered as story, not a transcript of what happened. The distinction matters, because the Francis who is patron of ecology was built largely from these tales; the Francis of the Canticle reaches the same place by a harder road, through the discipline of seeing every thing as a creature and a kin.

The stigmata at La Verna

The episode on which his cult turned is the stigmata. His companions reported that in September 1224, during a retreat on the mountain of La Verna in the Tuscan Apennines, near the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, Francis saw a vision of a six-winged seraph fixed to a cross, and that when it withdrew the marks of Christ’s wounds — in the hands, the feet, and the side — appeared on his own body. The oldest account is that of Thomas of Celano, the friar commissioned by Pope Gregory IX to write the first official life. Francis is the first person for whom such a claim was made; the word stigmata, from Paul’s letter to the Galatians, took on its later meaning largely from him. The church took the marks as a seal of his conformity to Jesus Christ — the final and bodily form of the imitation he had pursued since the day in the square — and the whole architecture of his shrine at Assisi was later built to make that conformity visible and venerable. Believers held, and hold, that the wounds were a literal grace given to a living man; the report is what the earliest sources say, and what the devotion of centuries built upon.

He died on 3 October 1226, lying on the bare ground as he had asked, having the Canticle and a psalm sung over him. He was canonized on 16 July 1228 — less than two years later, an extraordinary speed — by Gregory IX, the cardinal Hugolino who had been the order’s protector and Francis’s friend, and who laid the foundation stone of the great basilica at Assisi the following day. The formal recognition of sainthood, the canonization, set the seal of the institution on a life that had begun by refusing the institution’s goods.

Poverty as the unresolved question

The order he founded splintered almost immediately over the very thing he had lived by. He had meant poverty literally and absolutely — no property held in common, no money handled, no security stored against tomorrow — and he had written that conviction into his Testament with the force of a binding command. But an order of thousands, with houses in cities and a place in the universities, could not survive on the terms of a handful of beggars in a leper hospice. The question was whether his poverty was a precept, binding on all who took the habit, or a counsel, an ideal that the few might reach and the many approach. Within four years of his death, Gregory IX, in the bull Quo elongati (1230), ruled that the Testament did not legally bind the friars and devised the fiction by which the order could use goods whose ownership was vested in the papacy — so that the brothers might be poor in fact while needing nothing in law.

From that compromise the long fracture ran. One wing, the rigorists later called the Spirituals, held to the strict letter, refining it into the doctrine of usus pauper, the bare or poor use of even what was permitted; the other, the Conventuals, accepted the moderated common life of study and settled houses. The quarrel drew in apocalyptic expectation — the most radical Spirituals read the coming of an age of the Spirit out of the prophecies later gathered under Joachimite apocalypticism — and hardened into a contest the popes finally resolved against the rigorists, formally dividing the order in 1517. What Francis meant by poverty proved harder to institutionalize than to admire; the argument over a dead man’s clothes outlasted everyone who had known him.

The medieval frame

Francis stands at a particular seam in the Middle Ages. Behind him lay the long tradition of monasticism — the enclosed, propertied, stable communities of monks who fled the world to a cloister — and the still older asceticism of the desert, the renunciation of the body’s comforts for the soul’s sake. Francis inherited the ascetic impulse and inverted the monastic form. His brothers were not enclosed but mobile; they did not flee the towns but walked into them; they held nothing, not even the corporate property a monastery needed to endure. The mendicant friar — the begging brother who owned nothing and went everywhere — was a genuinely new figure in the religious life of the West, and it answered the new world of the medieval city as the old monastery, rooted to its land, could not. The same century produced the friar and the university; Francis’s order would soon fill the second with men who lived by the first.

He is now patron of Italy, named so by Pope Pius XII in 1939 alongside Catherine of Siena, and patron of ecology, named so by Pope John Paul II in 1979 for the vision of the Canticle. The naming fixed in office what the poem had already done in language: it made him the saint of the created world. But the title points back to something simpler and more severe than nature-mysticism. The man behind the patronage wanted only to own nothing and to belong to everything.

Texts and scholarship

The standard critical edition of the authentic writings is Kajetan Esser’s Opuscula sancti patris Francisci Assisiensis (Grottaferrata: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1976; rev. 1978), built from ninety-seven manuscripts and anchored on the mid-thirteenth-century Codex 338 of the Biblioteca Comunale of Assisi. The indispensable English working corpus is the three-volume Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, edited by Regis J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne Hellmann, and William J. Short (New City Press, 1999–2001), which gathers in translation both Francis’s own writings and the hagiographic sources, with the text and apparatus of the early lives indexed online at the Franciscan Tradition project. The earliest narrative source remains Thomas of Celano’s Vita prima Sancti Francisci, commissioned by Gregory IX at the canonization and completed in 1229; the long-lost shorter life by Celano, the Vita brevior, was rediscovered and edited by Jacques Dalarun only in 2015, a reminder that the documentary base is still moving.

The poverty controversy and the Spiritual movement are treated at length in Malcolm D. Lambert’s Franciscan Poverty (1961; rev. 1998) and David Burr’s The Spiritual Franciscans (2001), and the theology of usus pauper in studies of Peter John Olivi such as the analysis in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2018). For the life and the historiography, André Vauchez’s Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint (Yale, 2012) and Augustine Thompson’s Francis of Assisi: A New Biography (Cornell, 2012) are the current standards, the latter explicitly setting the firm documentary outline against the later legendary accretion. The 1905 English edition of the writings by Paschal Robinson — among the first to present the authentic corpus to English readers — remains available in full and is of historical interest for the modern recovery of the documentary Francis.

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