Francis of Assisi- A Chronology of His Life



Preface

To the Reader:

This is a work in progress: the first draft of Teaching About Franciscan Values, a collection of materials for use in the classroom.

We hope these selections will serve as useful resources for teaching about Franciscan values and the Franciscan tradition in counes in different academic areas. This is not intended to be a book for one single course, but a set of varied readings from which you can choose one or more parts to insert into your overall course plan.

Each unit of material is preceded by a short introduction. The units can be used alone for individual classes, combined with other units in the collection, or used with materials from elsewhere which you might wish to add. We will only know how the selections here work if you try them out.

In creating this collection we have tried to represent different aspects of the Franciscan tradition and different expressions of the Franciscan vision. We have not tried to present a "canon" of Franciscan writings or a uniform interpretation of what it means to be Franciscan. Each of these selections is rather intended to serve as a point of entry into the larger reality of the Franciscan tradition, to provoke discussion and reflection, and increase a desire for further study and deeper understanding.

We welcome all of your comments and recommendations. Let us say again that this is a work in progress. We hope to improve it based on your responses.

This initial version of Teaching About Franciscan Values has been created as part of a project supported by an Institutional Renewal Grant from the Rhodes Consultations on the Future of the Church-Related College, funded by the Lilly Endowment.

The Editors

Professors at St. Francis College can access the actual documents by going to the shared drive on your computer and opening the file titled “Teaching About Franciscan Values”. We welcome any comments about how you used these materials in your class as well as students responses to the materials.

Introduction: Francis of Assisi and the Franciscan Tradition

Whether we speak of the Franciscan tradition, the Franciscan movement, Franciscanism, or Franciscan values, in each case we are using the name of the person who stands at the beginning of this tradition - St. Francis of Assisi. Who was he?

Francis of Assisi is the best known of all Christian saints after the Apostles. He was born in 1181 in Assisi in central Italy, the son of Pietro di Bernadone, a wealthy cloth merchant and his French wife, Pica. Francis was a leader of the revels of the youth of Assisi and though not a noble, longed to become a knight. When Assisi and the neighboring city of Perugia went to war in 1202 he became a soldier, was captured and imprisoned for almost a year. After a serious illness, he tried to join papal forces fighting against Frederick 11, but turned back because of a dream. By this time he was turning inwardly towards a different kind of "knighthood," the service of Lady Poverty. He spent much time in prayer and at the church of San Damiano heard a voice speak to him from the cross, "Go Francis, and repair my house, which you can see is in ruins." He was also changed by an encounter with a leper after he not only gave money to the man, but kissed him. He angered his father by selling cloth from the family business to pay for rebuilding of the church, and in 1206 renounced family ties and all possessions completely to lead the life of Jesus and his disciples as described in the Gospels. He began preaching repentance and conversion of life, rebuilding churches around Assisi, and caring for the poor and the sick, living on whatever people gave him.

By early in 1208 others had joined him, thus beginning the Franciscan order of brothers or Friars Minor, the First Order. In 1209 Pope Innocent HI, after some hesitation, gave verbal approval to the first or "primitive' Rule for the brothers which Francis had written. This Rule has been lost. In 1212 Clare Offreduccio, a young woman of noble family, was ordained as a nun and became head of the Second Order, that of sisters, called the Poor Clares. The Franciscan movement spread rapidly, and in time the Third Order, of householders called 'tertiaries," was also founded. In 1219 Francis fulfilled a long-held wish to preach among the Muslims when he traveled to Damietta in Egypt during the Fifth Crusade and met with the Sultan, Malik-al- Kamil. The Order was expanding to include thousands of friars and nuns not only in Italy but also in other countries, in many houses or communities. This made necessary a more elaborate Rule and an administration which did not depend directly on Francis, who could no longer deal personally with each of his many followers. The definitive Rule co-written by Francis with scholars and legal experts was approved by Pope Honorius III in 1223, superseding a version done in 1221. The requirement of absolute poverty cherished by Francis- permitting no possessions by friars or nuns, either individually or collectively, was already an issue of dispute.

Francis had committed himself totally to the imitation of Christ in his outer life, and in his inner life the object of his constant contemplation was the Passion, or Christ's suffering and death. In September 1224 while in prayer on Mount La Verna, he received in a vision the stigmata, or marks of the crucifixion, in his hands, feet and sides. These he tied to keep secret but the fact of his stigmata, the first ever known, was revealed at his death and added much to the widespread belief in his sanctity. He was seriously ill and almost blind in the last two years of his life- during this time he composed his most famous -utterance, "The Canticle of Brother Sun." He died in Assisi in 1226 and was canonized less than two years later by Pope Gregory IY, the former Cardinal Ugolino, his long time advisor and supporter. He left behind writings of about one hundred pages and the community he had founded. Clare outlived him by twenty-seven years and was canonized soon after her death in 1253.

The Franciscan orders became a major force in the centuries after the death of Francis, in spite of ongoing struggles between those who wanted only rigorous practice exactly like that of Francis and his first companions, and those who allowed a more moderate observance of the Rule. Six popes and almost one hundred saints of the Catholic Church have been Franciscans, while the Third Order has had far-reaching influence. Two of the most important philosopher-theologians of the Middle Ages, St. Bonaventure and the Blessed John Duns Scotus, were Franciscans. St. Bonaventure was also appointed head of the order of friars in 1257 when he was already regent theologian at the University of Paris. He attempted to unite the Order and also wrote two biographies of Francis.

Today one and a half million Franciscans live throughout the world in many different groups belonging to the three Orders - the Friars Minor, the Poor Clares and the Third Order. Franciscan institutions include colleges and universities, hospitals, missions serving the poor and marginalized, and organizations engaging in activities on behalf of peace and the environment.

Francis of Assisi- A Chronology of His Life

1181 Born in Assisi, Italy. Baptized Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone; renamed Francesco by father.

1199. Feudal system id destroyed in Assisi.

1202. War between Perugia and Assisi. Assisi’s army id defeated. Francis spends a year in prison in Perugia until ransomed by father.

1204. Francis sets out for war in Apulia but returns the next day after a spiritual experience.

1205. Inspiration at San Damiano: “Francis, rebuild my Church.” Disowned by his father for

selling father’s goods and giving to the poor.

1206. Serves victims of leprosy; assumes hermit’s habit; works to repair church of San Damiano.

1208 Hears gospel passage to leave everything to follow Jesus; changes habit to that of a barefoot preacher; first brothers join him.

1209. Francis writes brief Rule. Receives approval from Pope Innocent III.

1210. Possible beginning of Third Order (married people who want to follow Francis’ example).

1212 Receives St. Clare into Franciscan family.

1217 First mission of Friars beyond the Alps.

1219 First friar leave for Morocco where they are martyred by the Moors; Francis visits Sultan, leader of the Moors.

1220 Francis resigns leadership of friars. St. Anthony of Padua joins Order.

1223. Present First Order Rule approved by Pope Honorius III. Christmas crib at Greccio (Francis

Originated custom of a crib).

1224. Missionaries in England. Francis receives the stigmata at La Verna.

1225. Serious eye sickness leaves Francis almost blind. Composes “Canticle of Brother Sun.” Reconciles feuding Bishop and Mayor of Assisi.

1226. Francis dies at Portiuncula on October 3; buried on October 4.

1227. Pope Gregory IX canonizes Francis (declares him to be a saint).

1230 St. Francis’ body placed in new basilica, San Francesco, Assisi

Franciscanism: Some Educational Reflections

Owen Sadlier, O.S.F.

The founder of the Franciscan order, and patron of our college, St. Francis of Assisi was not disposed to regard formal education highly. Nevertheless, the early masters of the order saw on the spirit of its founder a profound educational understanding which could not be furthered without a distinctive form. The spirit of St. Francis finds complete expression in the first chapter of his Rule of 1223.

The Rule and life of the Friars Minor is this, namely, to observe the Holy Gospel Of our Lord Jesus Christ by living in obedience, without property, and in chastity.

Franciscanism is simply the literal observance of the Gospel; a way of life, not a theoretical construct; the love of God and neighbor in imitation of Christ. This life of love, however, calls for the harmonious exercise of one’s intellect and will, and the life of St. Francis itself was the most beautiful exemplar of this basic principle. He made his life after his conversion an icon of that harmony that can be achieved between the spiritual, intellectual, and practical elements of life. He saw God’s own image at work everywhere, and encouraged his followers to teach the world that creation is best understood as a mirror of its Creator. Thus, the Franciscan way of life, the literal imitation of the life of Christ, is conceived as a vital work of art, a love song to God, a canticle, expressing a joy and peace beyond understanding, and it is this spirit, this ecstatic centering in Christ, that can be regarded as the nerve of Franciscan education throughout the ages.

Among the early Franciscan masters, St. Bonaventure and John Duns Scotus develop the educational dimensions of Franciscanism thoroughly, and we can summarize their thought in four main points: first, the notion of wisdom; second, the primacy of the will over the intellect in character development; third, personalism, or the emphasis on the absolute worth of each individual; and, fourth, the Christocentric focus of all educational activities.

First, the Franciscan notion of wisdom (sapientia( is most clearly developed in the writings of St. Bonaventure, and it is succinctly expressed by one word which has a deep Franciscan resonance-transitus. Wisdom is a passing through all partial truths immanent in nature and human affairs to the transcendent ground of all truth [Col. 1:13-14]. Wisdom is, thus, a special kind of vision wherein parts are seen as participating in the whole which points to God. The opposite of wisdom, according to St. Bonaventure, is vanity [vanitas] which consists in the disproportionate attraction to partial truths. Therefore, any educational activity which has the acquisition of a partial truth for its own sake, or the development of intellectual power as its exclusive goal, is vanitas. Wisdom, then, can be attained when all partial truths are surpassed, and sanctity and knowledge have been harmonized. [St. Bonaventure, The Journey of the Mind to God, C. VII, 1].

Second, John Duns Scotus, agreeing with St. Bonaventure, emphasized the role the will plays in the quest for knowledge. For him, it is the will which guides the intellect through the maze of partial truths toward the ground of truth itself, toward the way, the truth, and the life which is God himself [John 14:6]. Thus, according to Scotus, the will embraces all intellectual powers; that is, it decides, or selects, what the intellect should know in order to arrive at the fullness of truth. Furthermore, it is important to note that Scotus refuses to draw too sharp a distinction between the intellect and will. He maintains that the will is rational by nature, and does not simply borrow reason from the intellect. As a power of a rational being, the will is formally rational: “Even if love alone remained, it would not be merely a necessary tendency like gravitation, but an operation worthy of intellectual nature. In fact, to be an operation, and not to be such an operation, is something that love does not derive from the intellect; rather, it is so in conjunction with the intellect.” [Opus Oxon. IV, d. 49, q., ex latere, n. 17].

Third, Franciscanism emphasizes the absolute worth of each individual, especially the poorest and weakest members of society. All men and women, rich and poor alike, were deprived of the life of grace by original sin. Christ, by His life, death and resurrection, restored the life of grace to all; restored all men and women to their status as children of god. Hence each person is priceless before God, and to each, God has assigned a definite part in the marvelous complexity of the whole. Each person is like a note in the canticle of creation; each note furnishing new and beautiful evidence of God’s glory and generosity. As Scotus puts it, “individuals as such are also willed by the first cause, not as ends – for God alone is the end – but as something ordered to the end. Hence God multiplied the individuals within the species in order to communicate His goodness and His beatitude.” [Opus Oxon., II d. 3, q. 7, n. 10].

Fourth, the centering of all cognitive and affective activity in Christ is regarded as the integral principle of Franciscan education. Learning and conduct are focused on living in imitation of Christ, for without this centering in Christ a person can never achieve true wisdom. St. Bonaventure expresses the educational essence of Franciscanism as an insight which sees the creation of all things in and through Christ, the modeling of all created things upon Christ, and the return of all created things to Christ [St. Bonaventure, On Retracing the Arts to Theology, #26].

What Does It Mean To Be Franciscan?

Elias Mallon, S. A.

What I would like to do is to put before you some reflections that have surfaced in my own life and my thinking over the past forty years. These are ideas that have to be worked out. Some of them are dead ends, some are passing lanes and dead ends, while others are areas that might be open to future development and could be looked at further. To speak of Franciscanism, or to speak even of Francis, is to speak about a very complex phenomenon.

Let me clear about one thing at the outset. I am a New Yorker and I hate pigeons. I have a back yard and I do not have a birdbath. That part of the phenomenon, let's bracket. For those of you who are into that, that's fine, but that is not where I am.

What I would prefer to do is look at Francis himself I remember in my seminary years I liked to annoy people by referring to him not as Saint Francis of Assisi but as Francis Bemardone. Francis is one of the first saints in the Roman Catholic Church to have a last name. Francis was bom in II 82 and died in 1226. This is the eleven and twelve hundreds, but things are beginning to happen in the world that are, in a sense, the beginning of the modern era. I want to look at Francis as someone who is responding to this.

The other thing we have to be very clear about is that Franciscanism is a derivative phenomenon. It is a second level phenomenon. Franciscanism is not the Gospel; Franciscanism is not a substitute for the Gospel. It is not a choice where you say, "Thank you, you can be a Christian but I'll be a Franciscan." Franciscanism is derivative of Christianity and it is derivative of the Gospel. It is Francis's way to try to live this primary phenomenon, namely the Gospel, as he understood it in his world.

I would like to look at several aspects of this, to stick with the world of Francis and to see how what he is doing is something different, different from Benedict or the founders of the monastic orders in the NEddle Ages. It is an interesting question whether Francis really wanted an order or if that was not a category which was canonically imposed on his movement.

A lot of things were going on, especially in Italy, at this time, and Francis is responding to them. For one thing, there is beginning to be a capitalist economy. In others words, you are starting to get trade and are moving from an agrarian based economy to a money based economy and Francis is responding to that. He is responding to a new awareness of money. It is not new in the sense that Francis is the first one to say, "Aha, I think we're using money," or that Giovanni so-and-so in Assisi says, "Hey, Let's make money" but within one hundred years on both sides of the birth of Francis in II 82, the world is beginning to shift and money is becoming an important phenomenon. And Francis realizes this.

There is another thing that is going on in the church and in the society of this particular period. This is somewhat controversial but I do want to see it in context. In I 1 73 a merchant named Waldo in Lyons in France begins a movement that later becomes the Waldenses. The Waldenses is a poverty reform movement, responding to the great wealth that is being accumulated as this new capitalist economy is developing, and responding also to the wealth of the upper clergy such as the archbishops, popes and the overall wealth of the Church. Have any of you read or seen In the Name of 7he Rose? In the movie there is that undertone of poverty and the question of whether the Church should be poor. For us this seems familiar but in those days it was really important. The Waldenses were a revolutionary movement who were known as The Poor of Lyons.

There was another group known as the Poor of Lombardy. These were people who would renounce possessions, who would live as beggars, and who when they begged would take only the amount that was necessary for the day. Within all of these movements there were even more extreme groups.

It is fascinating that several of these groups were the "Nudi" who practiced poverty the whole way - they did not even wear clothes. I do not know how often you can get away with wearing no clothes in Italy in the winter, but that was one of the things they did. What is interesting in the life of Francis is how often he is naked. When he leaves his father we are told that he gives his father all his clothes; in the iconography and in religious pictures you can see the bishop wrapping his coat around Francis. When Francis is tempted he is naked; some of the stories say that he is in snow and others say that he is in roses. When he is dying, in some of the hagiography he has to be stripped naked so that he can die poor. There are a great number of points of contact (and I want to keep it at that) between Francis and the reform movements that are going on around him at this particular time. Again remember, these are reform movements that are not only religious reform movements but are also social reform movements. It is not as if we are going to form a little religious group, and we are going to be poor and we are going to let the rich be rich and get as rich as they want and be as rich as they want. No, the reform movements are calling the rich to give up at least some of their riches. This is true especially of the reform movements that were directed towards ecclesiastical riches. They wanted church leaders to give up their riches and to lead what Waldo would call and Francis certainly would call a Gospel life. I think that what is interesting here is that Francis is very much in touch with what is going on in his world, whether it be the movement toward capitalism that is happening in southern Italy or the different responses to this phenomenon that are going on in Italy and southern Europe too.

Another thing that I think is interesting is that originally and basically the movement of Francis is a lay movement in that it is not a movement of clerics. I find this fascinating. I do not want to go into this very much, but you find a certain taming of Francis in later literature. We are told that Francis is a deacon, because in the story of the Christmas Crib it says that Francis read the Gospel at Mass. Because he read the Gospel at Mass, therefore he is a deacon so now he is a cleric. The Waldenses had a lot of trouble because they insisted on being a lay movement, and they got into trouble because lay people were not allowed to preach and the Waldenses insisted on preaching. That is where the conflict began. With Francis, while there are clerics - ordained people - that is not central. Unlike the Waldenses, Francis has a high regard for priests, but he is not setting up a group of clerics (I am using the term ecclesiastically). He is setting up a group of lay people. He even sets up a group of women, who are living together to give witness to what Francis sees as an attempt to live the Gospel in a new environment.

The other thing that is interesting and that underlines both this and what I have said earlier is that it is not a monastic movement. For Franciscans this can be a very important thing. The Franciscans originally referred to themselves as Conventualis, in other words, people who live in convents and moved around. One of the problems with the early radical Franciscans is that they went all over the place. Monks usually start off in a monastery, stay in the monastery ninety-nine percent of the time and die in that monastery. You have what is called the vow of stability, and that was the normal thing in the early Middle Ages. You certainly did not at that time have a whole lot of monks wandering around the countryside. With the Franciscan movement you did. Francis did not start a movement of monks who lived together in monasteries. Another thing is that in the monastic way of life singing the Divine Office, in other words singing the Psalms - the prayer of the church - is very important. That is one of the main things that monks do. In the stories about Francis he is not happy at all that his friars are getting books, but you cannot sing the Office unless you have books and lots of them. And so Francis did not really start a monastic movement.

Another thing that interests me is the habit. The garb that men and women wear in religious orders in the Roman Catholic Church is called the habit. I do not think that Francis actually designed a habit. If you look at the Mddle Ages and medieval clerical fashion the lines are pretty much set. For example, if you line up a Carmelite, an Augustinian, a Dominican, and a Trinitarian, the colors of the habit change but the basic design of the habit doesn't. You have a tunic, you have a long scapular, (you have a thing that I don't know what they call it and) you have a cape that goes over it. If you took a picture of most of the orders of the Middle Ages and removed the color, you could not tell one from the other because the cuts are pretty much the same. What Francis is doing is: put a tunic on, put a rope around it and put a hood on it to keep you warm. He is not following the ecclesiastical norms for what a habit has to look like, where you can add some accessories, or a symbol here or there, and you can change the color, but you keep to the basic design. Francis does not do that.

Another thing that is happening in the time of Francis is the tradition of the troubadours, the minstrels, or wandering singers and poets. Some of the nicest things to come out of the Franciscan tradition are the hymns and prayers of Francis. Another thing too is that Francis is not afraid of using feminine imagery, Sister Moon for example in The Canticle of the Creatures. This is a type of troubador imagery. Francis has got a whole lot of it.

Francis' attitude towards women shows the influence of the troubador, of the early Romantic period, in his relationship with Clare and Giacoma de Settesoli. Francis' attitude towards women is one of what might be called "troubador high respect."

Francis is someone who is seriously trying to integrate his world and his attempt to live the Gospel. That is something new. The monastic paradigm is that you leave the world, and Francis seems to be quite aware of that world in terms of emerging capitalism and all that that is going to bring with it. He seems aware of the different reform movements, which are not movements of priests but of lay people. He also seems aware of the troubador tradition. Again, these are just key words that should open up and move us into whole areas of discussion.

Lastly, there is the wondedul story of Francis's visit to the Sultan. He went with the Fifth Crusade to Damietta in Egypt and while there he met with the Sultan Malik al-Kamil. Francis obviously did not even know the word "pluralist" and it was not traditional, especially in those days, for Christianity and Islam to have pleasant encounters. It happened, but usually in places where there was a longer tradition of Christians and Muslims being together such as in the Middle East. But for the most part in Europe, Europeans and Muslims did not get together for dialogue. Nonetheless, in 1219 when Francis is in Damietta he is horrified by the Fifth Crusade, He is also a man of his time, so he does try to convert the Sultan but the discussion is done in a spirit of love. It is not done in the spirit of abusing the other person's faith. Francis does not go to abuse the faith of the Sultan but to speak of his own faith. While the Sultan does not become a Christian, of course, Francis does not leave a bad taste in his mouth either. The encounter is one of mutual respect. It is also an encounter that has an impact on Francis because in the early Rules, he says that if friars are to live in Muslim countries, they are to give witness through living the life of the Gospel and giving witness to love, and not by going in and attacking and deriding and belittling the faith of the people who are living there, which was normal.

When I use the word "pluralistic" it is not in the twentieth or twenty-first century sense, but what I would like to think is that Francis - the first saint with a last name - is the beginning of the modem world. What I think Franciscanism is, or can be, or what one form of it can be, is a way of responding to the world. It is not a call to pretend that we are back in the eleven hundreds; that is something I reject entirely. If I am going to run around like some primitive, to be honest, I would rather run around like Jesus than run around like Francis. And I am not going to do either one.

What Francis does is that he really takes the world that he lives in seriously. He sees that world, he is a part of that world, and he remains a part of that world, a world - and again I have to underline that - a world which we can no longer be a part of because that world is gone now. What he is doing is different because he is not fleeing his world. He is looking at it critically. He does not accept the emerging capitalism as an unalloyed good. But he is also accepting a great deal of the world. He is accepting the importance of the lay people, he is accepting the values of the troubador world and he is accepting that there are other faiths in the world. He is trying to integrate all this with the Gospel as he understands it.

In my thinking at this point, that is the genius of the Franciscan movement. I like that because "movement" is a very dynamic word. "Franciscanism" is not: there it is, let's all play that we are living in the thirteenth century although we are not. Rather it is an attempt to look at our world critically and to integrate its values into the tradition of the Gospel and to stand up against those things in our world - and each world has its own - which are demonic and dehumanizing.

Even though he talked to birds that was not the most important thing. I think that the most important thing, if you want a headline to it, is that Francis is the first saint with the last name.

This is a transcription of a talk given by Elias Mallon on April 20, 2001 at St. Francis College.

Introduction to The Canticle of Brother Sun

In the spring of 1225 Francis was gravely ill and had less than two years to live. He was nearly blind from an eye disease he may have gotten while in the Middle East. Other illnesses (possibly including a tubercular form of leprosy) afflicted his lungs and stomach. Clare brought him to the headquarters of the women's order at San Damiano and constructed a shelter for him in the garden of the convent. Here she and his companions cared for him, but he suffered greatly, almost unable to see, sleep or walk.

During a night in late spring, he received an inner assurance that his sufferings were nothing compared to the joy awaiting him in heaven. He was filled with joy and gratitude which he expressed in his most famous utterance, "The Canticle of Brother Sun," also called "The Canticle of the Creatures." It is a poem in the Umbrian dialect thought to be the first poem composed in Italian. Francis asked the friars to sing the Canticle among the people, and they did so to much acclaim. Two sections were later added to the first section. These are the parts beginning "All praise be yours, my Lord, through those who grant pardon" composed during a quarrel the Bishop and Mayor of Assisi, and the final lines beginning "All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death" written shortly before Francis died on October 3, 1226.

The importance and influence of the Canticle are well recognized. Its artistry as a poem in the original language is amply appreciated, and it is celebrated as one of the greatest expressions of praise and joy in any religion. It is also known more theologically for articulating a vision of the fraternal oneness of all creatures, in which Sun, Moon, the elements of Air, Water, Fire and Earth, and other creatures are addressed as "Brother" and "Sister." All are made by one Creator and in this are seen as members of one family. This vision, many agree, is original with Francis. It is something more specific than the "love of nature" so often attributed to him in rather general terms (see next section). It is indeed distinctively Franciscan. The popularity of the Canticle has widely communicated Francis's vision of the fraternal community of God's creatures and their personal interrelation, and the positive value he gives to the world. The text of the Canticle is followed here by the first creation story of Genesis, with which the Canticle strongly resonates, and Gerard Manly Hopkins's poem "Pied Beauty." The poetry of Hopkins, a Jesuit, was directly influenced by the Franciscan vision of creation, especially through the work of John Duns Scotus (see below).

The Canticle of Brother Sun

Most high, all-powerful, all good, Lord!

All praise is yours, all glory, all honour

And all blessing.

To you, alone, Most High, do they belong.

No mortal lips are worthy

To pronounce your name.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through all that you have made,

And first my lord Brother Sun,

Who brings the day; and light you give to us through him.

How beautiful is he, how radiant in all his splendour!

Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Moon and Stars;

In the heavens you have made them, bright

And precious and fair.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air,

And fair and stormy, all the weather’s moods,

By which you cherish all that you have made.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Water,

So useful, lowly, precious and pure.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Brother Fire,

Through whom you brighten up the night.

How beautiful is he, how gay! Full of power and strength.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Earth, our mother,

Who feeds us in her sovereignty and produces

Various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through those who grant pardon

For love of you; through those who endure

Sickness and trial.

Happy those who endure in peace,

By you, Most High, they will be crowned.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death,

From whose embrace no mortal can escape.

Woe to those who die in mortal sin!

Happy those she finds doing your will!

The second death can do no harm to them.

Praise and bless my Lord, and give him thanks,

And serve him with great humility.

Source: Hagib A. Marion, St. Francis of Assisi, Writings and Early Biographies: English Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of St. Francis, Franciscan Herald Press, Chicago Illinois, 1973

The Story of Creation as told in the Book of Genesis

Chapter One

1.In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth; 2. The earth was waste and void; darkness covered the abyss, and the spirit of God was stirring above the waters. 3. God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good. 4. God separated the light from the darkness, 5. Calling the light Day and the darkness Night. And there was evening and morning, the first day.

6.Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters to divide the waters.” And so it was. 7. God made the firmament, dividing the waters that were below the firmament from those that were above it. 8. God called the firmament Heaven. And there was evening and morning, the second day.

9. Then God said, “Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place and let the dry land appear.” And so it was. 10. God called the dry land Earth and the assembled waters Seas. And God saw that it was good. 11. Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth vegetation: seed- bearing plants and all kinds of fruit trees that bear fruit containing their seed.” And so it was. 12. The earth brought forth vegetation, every kind of seed-bearing plant and all kinds of trees that bear fruit containing their seed. God saw that it was good. 13. And there was evening and morning, the third day.

14. And God was said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate day from night; let them serve as signs and for the fixing of seasons, days and years; 15. Let them serve as lights in the firmament of the heavens to shed light upon the earth.” So it was. 16. God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day and the smaller one to rule the night, and he made the stars.17. God set them in the firmament of the heavens to shed light upon the earth, 18. To rule the day and the night and to separate the light from the darkness. God saw that it was good. 19. And there was evening and morning, the fourth day.

20. Then God said, “Let the waters abound with life, and above the earth let winged creatures fly below the firmament of the heavens.” And so it was. 21. God created the great sea monsters, all kinds of living sea monsters, all kinds of living, swimming creatures with which the waters abound and all kinds of winged birds. God saw that it was good, 22. And God blessed them saying, “Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the waters of the seas; and let the birds multiply on the earth.” 23. And there was evening and morning, the fifth day.

24. God said, “Let the earth bring forth all kinds of living creatures: cattle, crawling creatures and wild animals.” And so it was. 25. God made all kinds of wild beasts, every kind of cattle, and every kind of creatures crawling on the ground. And God saw that it was good. 26. God said, “Let us make mankind in our own image and likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle, over all the wild animals and every creature that crawls on the earth.” 27. God created man in his image. In the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them. 28. Then God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle and all animals that crawl on the earth.” 29. God also said, “See, I give you every seed bearing plant on the earth and every tree which has seed bearing fruit to be your food. 30. To every wild animal of the earth, to every bird of the air, and to every creature that crawls on the earth and has the breath of life, I give the green plants for food.” And so it was good. 31. God saw that all he had made was very good. And there was evening and morning, the sixth day.

Chapter Two

1. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all their array. 2. On the sixth day God finished the work he had been doing. And he rested on the seventh day from all the work he had done. 3. God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it he rested from all his work of creation.

Source: The Holy Bible, A Revision of the Challoner- Rheims Version. Edited by Catholic Scholars under the Patronage of the Episcopal Committee of the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Third Edition, Daughters of St. Paul, U.S.A., 1961.

This particular English translation of the Bible corresponds to the Latin with which Francis would have been familiar.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things-

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles in all stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh- firecoal chestnut- falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced- fold, fallow, and plough;

And all trades, their gear and tackle trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Francis and the Birds, or Why “The Environment”?

Francis with birds is by far the most familiar image of the saint, endlessly repeated in art and popular culture. Like the stigmata, it serves the purpose of distinguishing pictures or statues of Francis from those of any other saint who may also have a beard and wear a brown robe. The tradition of showing Francis with birds began soon after his death and continues today. Constant repetition in religious art, cards, statues, even birdbaths, has turned the image into what some feel is a sentimental cliché. Less familiar but also well known is the image of Francis with the wolf of Gubbio (see below). Somewhere between the convenient identifying mark of iconography (which says, "This is Francis of Assisi") and the over-familiar and sentimentalized is a truth about Francis that has real importance. In 1979 Pope John Paul H proclaimed Francis "the patron saint of the environment." His reputation is widespread as a spiritual figure affirming the value of the natural world. He is loved by environmentalists, who call upon his "creation spirituality" and even on occasion have their conferences in Assisi. On what does this reputation rest?

In the preceding section we have included The Canticle of Brother Sun, which is important in gaining an understanding of the relation Francis has to "nature." Here we present a few of the stories about Francis with birds and other animals, trying to get beyond the familiarity of the icon to a fresh appreciation of their meaning. What can we learn from looking anew at these stories? A special connection with animals is a common feature of the biographies of saints, but this fact does in itself not make such encounters fictitious or improbable. The different lives of Francis describe not only his ecstatic appreciation of the beauty of creation, but his "I-Thou" relation to the natural world and his love and compassion for all forms of life. He is spoken of as being "carried away," "ablaze" with joy and having a "fervent tenderness." And his sermon to the birds was no isolated incident. His recorded encounters with animals are many, and his love for them is said to be a striking feature of his character. When he spoke to birds and animals, addressing them as brother or sister, he not only expressed concern for their lives and well-being, but instructed them about the need to praise God and obey him.

Did Francis believe that birds are persons in some sense and can be "saved," that they have a destiny connected to their relationship to their Creator? While this may seem farfetched, it is biblically based. Francis knew well the Psalms which tell of beings in creation praising God, as well as the teachings of Jesus on the lilies of the field and the sparrow. When Francis saved doves from being sent to market and told them they would now "fulfill the commandment to multiply," he was referring to Genesis 1: 22 (see above) where in fact God does give this very commandment to birds and fish, thus indicating (from the biblical perspective) that they have a covenant with God even before humans have been created. 7he Canticle of Brother Sun bears out and reinforces the attitude of Francis we see here. Following are some of the primary sources relevant to these "environmental" values.

The Sermon to the Birds

While many were joining the brothers, as was said, the most blessed father Francis was making a trip through the Spoleto valley. He came to a certain place near Bevagna where a very great number of birds of various kinds had congregated, namely, doves, crows, and some others popularly called daws. When the most blessed servant of God, Francis, saw them, being a man of very great fervor and great tenderness toward lower and irrational creatures, he left his companions in the road and ran eagerly towards the birds. When he was close enough to them, seeing that they were waiting expectantly for him, he greeted them in his usual way. But, not a little surprised that the birds did not rise in flight, as they usually do, he was filled with great joy and humbly begged them to listen to the word of God. Among the many things he spoke to them were these words that he added: "My brothers, birds, you should praise your Creator very much and always love him; he gave you feathers to clothe you, wings too so that you can fly, and whatever else was necessary for you. God made you noble among his creatures, and he gave you a home in the purity of the air; though you never sow nor reap, he nevertheless protects you and governs you without any solicitude on your part." At these words, as Francis himself used to say and those too who were with him, the birds, rejoicing in a wonderful way according to their nature, began to stretch their midst, went on his way and returned, touching their heads and bodies with his tunic. Finally he blessed them, and then after he had made the sign of the cross over them, he gave them permission to fly away to some other place.

(Thomas of Celano states that after this, Francis made a practice of preaching to birds, animals and reptiles.)

Thomas of Celano, First Life Ch.21/58.

Worms and Bees

Toward little worms even he glowed with a very great love, for he had read this saying about the Savior. I am a worm, not a man Therefore he picked them up from the road and placed them in a safe place, lest they may be crushed by the feet of the passersby. What shall I say of the lower creatures, when he would see to it that the bees would be provided with honey in the winter, or the best wine, lest they should die from the cold?

Thomas of Celano, First Life Ch.29/80

Saving Fish

He was moved by the same tender affection toward fish too, which, when they were caught, and he had the chance, he threw them back in the water, commanding them to be careful lest they were caught again. Once when he was sitting in a boat near a port in the lake of Rieti, a certain fisherman, who had caught a big fish popularly called a tinca, offered it kindly to him. He accepted it joyfully and began to call it brother; then placed it in the water outside the boat, he began to devoutly bless the name of the Lord. And while he continued in prayer for some time, the fish played in the water beside the boat and did not go away from the place where it has been put until his prayer was finished and the holy man of God gave it permission to leave.

Thomas of Celano, First Life Ch. 21/61 page 280

How St. Francis Freed Some Doves and Made Nests for Them

A boy of the town of Siena caught a number of turtledoves in a snare, and he carrying them all alive to the market to sell them.

But St. Francis, who was always very kind and wonderfully compassionate, especially toward gentle animals and little birds, was stirred by love and pity on seeing the doves. And he said to the boy who was carrying the doves, "Good boy, please give me those doves so that such innocent birds, which in Holy scripture are symbols of pure, humble, and faithful souls, will not fall into the hands of cruel men who will kill them."

The boy was then inspired by God to give all the doves to St. Francis.

When the kind Father had gathered them to his bosom, he began to talk to them in a very gentle -way, saying: 'My simple, chaste and innocent Sister Doves, why did you let yourself get caught? I want to rescue you from death and make nests for you where you can lay your eggs and fulfill the Creator's commandment to multiply."

And St. Francis took them with him and made a nest for all of them.

And the doves settled in the nests made by St. Francis, and laid their eggs and reared their young right among the friars, and they increased in numbers. They were so tame and familiar with St. Francis and the other friars that they seemed to be like chickens that had always been raised by the friars.

Actus [Fioretti] Ch. 22

Source: St Francis of-Assisis: English Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of St. Francis. Edited by Marion A. Habig, Franciscan Press, Quincy, Illinois. 1991 [1973]

St. Bonaventure’s Comments on the Love Francis had for all Creatures

Compassion, as St. Paul said, is all-availing, and it filled the heart of Francis and penetratd in depths to such an extent that his whole life seemed to be governed by it. It was this which enabled him to return to the state of primeval innocence by restoring man’s harmony with the whole of creation.

The realization that everything comes from the same source filled Francis with greater affection than ever and he called even the most insignificant creatures his brothers and sisters because he knew they had the same origin as himself.

The fervor of St. Francis united him so closely to God that his heartfelt compassion was enlarged so as to embrace all those who shared the same gifts of nature and of grace as he. His tender love made him the brother of all creatures.

Major Life, Ch. 8 and 9

Source: St. Francis of Assisi: English Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of St. Francis. Edited by Marion A. Habig, Franciscan Press, Quincy, Illinois. 1991 [1973]

Dante

Dante Aligheri (1265-1321), one of the greatest poets of the West, lived less than a century after Francis and also in Italy. A native of Florence, he was a lay person involved in political life, but though not a priest he was learned in theology and philosophy. There is no indication that he was a Franciscan of the Third Order, but he was well acquainted with the Franciscans and the life of Francis. His masterpiece The Divine Comedy, written in Italian, narrates the journey of the Poet through the levels of Hell (The Inferno), Purgatory (The Purgatorio) and Heaven (The Paradiso) to a final beatific vision.

In the following selection from the Paradiso the Poet has encountered souls of the wise and learned as singing and dancing lights in two concentric rings in the fourth sphere of paradise, that of the Sun. In Cantos XI and XII in sections structured with exact symmetry, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), a Dominican, praises St. Francis of Assisi. Thus the saint who more than any other is identified with the power of the intellect pays tribute to the saint who supremely embodies love. Then St. Bonaventure, a Franciscan, praises St. Dominic (I 170-122 1). Dominic, a contemporary of Francis, was the founder of the Dominican Order or Order of Preachers. Bonaventure was known because of his mystical theology as "the Seraphic Doctor" (the Seraphs being the highest order of angels and most perfect in love). He celebrates Dominic who "became a mighty theologian," comparing him to a powerful torrent striking 'the barren fields of heresy." Thus a saint cultivating divine love pays homage to one who epitomizes wisdom. Dante has Aquinas and Bonaventure each close their praises of the two great spiritual heroes with criticisms of the present failings of the orders they founded.

It is Dante's purpose to affirm that the gifts of the two saints - the love of Francis and the wisdom of Dominic - are complementary. "We should not mention one without the other, since both did battle for a single cause, so let their fame shine gloriously as one." The missions of the two great Mendicant Orders they founded are both necessary to renew the Church "for both their labors serve a single end." No historical crisis or conflict between the two orders constitutes a presenting problem for Dante. Rather from within his own reflections, taking place in the beginning of the fourteenth century, Dante seeks to place the two saints within a comprehensive integrated picture of the universe and the history of the world - a picture and a narrative of salvation. He makes a powerful statement of the unity of Love and Knowledge serving one another.

From Dante's Paradiso

Translated by Mark Musa

CANTO XI. 28-139

The Providence that governs all the world

with wisdom so profound none of His Creatures

can ever hope to see into Its depths

in order that the Bride of that sweet Groom,

who crying loud esposed her with His blood,

might go to her Beloved more secure

within herself, more faithful to her Spouse,

ordained two noble princes to assist her

on either side, each serving as a guide.

One of these two shone with seraphic love,

the other through his wisdom was one earth

a splendor of cherubic radiance.

Now I shall speak of only one, for praise

of one, no matter which, is praise of both,

for both their labors served a single end.

Between the Topine and the stream that flows

down from that hill that blest Ubaldo chose,

a fertile slope hangs from a lofty mountain

which sends Prugia gusts of cold and heat

through Porta Sole, and behind it Gualdo

grieves with Nocera for their heavy yoke.

Born on this slope where steepness breaks the most,

a sun rose to the world as radiantly

as thus sun here does sometimes from the Ganges;

Thus, when this town is named for none call it

Ascesi, for the world would not suffice –

such more precise a word is Orient.

Only a few years after he had risen

Did his invigorating powers begin

To penetrate the earth with a new strength:

While still a youth he braved his father's wrath,

Because he loved a lady to whom all

Would bar the door as if to death itself.

Before the bishop's court et coram patre

He took this lady as his lawful wife;

From day to day he loved her more and more.

Bereft of her first spouse, despised, ignored

She waited eleven hundred years and more,

Living without a lover till he came,

Alone, though it was known that she was found

With Amyclas secure against the voice

Which had the power to terrify the world;

Alone, though known was her fierce constancy

That time she climbed the cross to be

With Christ, while Mary stayed below alone.

Enough of such allusions. In plain words

Take Francis, now, and Poverty to be

The lovers in the story I have told.

Their sweet accord, their faces spread with bliss,

The love, the mystery, their tender looks

Gave rise in others' hearts to holy thoughts;

The venerable Bernard was the first

To cast aside his shoes and run, and running

Toward such great peace, it seemed to him he lagged.

O unsuspected wealth! O fruitful good!

Giles throws his shows off, then Sylvester too –

They love the bride so much, they seek the groom.

And then this father, this good lord, set out

With his dear lady, and that family

that now was girded with the humble cord.

It mattered not that he was born the son

Of Benardone, nor did he feel shame

When people mocked him for shabbiness;

but he announced, the way a king might do,

his hard intent to Innocent who gave -

the seal establishing his holy order.

The souls who followed him in poverty

Grew more and more, and then this archimandrite –

Whose wonder-working life were better sung

by heaven's highest angels-saw his work

crowned once again, now by Honorius

through inspiration of the holy Spirit.

Then in the haughty presence of the Sultan,

urged by a burning thirst for the matyrdom,

he preached Christ and his blessed followers,

but, finding no one ripe for harvest there,

and loath to waste his labors, he returned

to reap a crop in the Italian fields;

then on bare rock between Arno and Tiber

he took upon himself Christ's holy wounds,

and for two years he wore this final seal.

When it pleased him who had ordained that soul

for such great good to call him to Himself,

rewarding him on high for lowliness,

he, to his brothers, as to rightful heirs,

commended his most deeply cherished lady,

commanding them to love her faithfully;

and in the lap of poverty he chose

to die, wanting no other bier-from there

that pristine soul returned to its own realm.

Think now what kind of man were fit to be

his fellow helsman on Saint Peter's boat,

keeping it straight on course in the high sea-

and such a steersman was our Patriarch;

and those who follow his command will see

the richness of the cargo in their hold.

But his own flak is growing greedy now

for richer food, and in their hungry search

they stray to alien pastures carelessly

the farther off his sheep go wandering

from him in all directions, the less milk

they bring back when they come back to the fold.

True, there are some who, fearing loss, will keep

close to their shepherd, but so few are these

it would not take much cloth to make their cowls.

Now, if my speech has not been too obscure,

and if you have been listening carefully,

and if you will recall my former words,

Your wish will have been satisfied in part,

For you will have seen how the tree is chipped

And why I made the qualifying statement:

‘where all may fatten if they do not stray.’

CANTO XII, 2

The very moment that the blessed flame

had come to speak its final word, the holy

millstone began revolving once again;

before it could complete its first full round

a second circle was enclosing it:

motion with motion, matching song with song-

song that in those sweet instruments surpassed

the best our Sirens or our Muses sing,

as source of light outshines what it reflects.

As two concentric arcs of equal hue,

are seen as they bend through the misty clouds

when Juno tells her handmaid to appear-

the outer from the inner one an echo,

like to the longing voice of her who love

consumed as morning sun consumes the dew-

and reassure the people here below

that by the covenant God made with Noah,

they have no need to fear another Flood-

even so those sempiternal roses wreathed

twin garlands round us as the outer one

was lovingly responding to the inner.

When dancing and sublime festivity

and all the singing, all the gleaming flames

(a loving jubilee of light with light),

with one accord, at the same instant, ceased

(as our two eyes respond to our will,

together have to open and to close),

then, from the heart of one of those new lights

there came a voice that drew me to itself

(I was the needle pointing to the star);

it spoke: "The love that makes me beautiful

moves me to speak about that other guide,

the cause of such high praise concerning mine.

We should not mention one without the other,

since both did battle for a single cause,

so let their fame shine gloriously as one.

The troops of Christ, rearmed at such great cost,

with tardy pace were following their standard,

fearful and few, divided in their ranks,

when the Emperor who reigns eternally,

of His own grace (for they were not deserving)

provided for his soldiers in their peril-

and, as you have been told, He sent His bride

two champions who through their words and deeds

helped reunite the scattered company.

Within that region where the sweet west wind

comes blowing, opening up the fresh new leaves

with which all Europe is about to bloom,

not far from where the waves break on the shore

behind which, when its longest course is done,

the sun, at times, will hide from every man,

lies Calaroga, fortune-favored town,

protected by the mighty shield that bears

two lions: one as subject, one as sovereign.

There the staunch lover of the Christian faith

was born into the world: God's holy athlete,

kind to his own and ruthless to his foes.

His mind, the instant God created it,

possessed extraordinary power; within

his mother's womb he made her prophesy.

The day that he was wed to Christian Faith

at the baptismal font, when each of them

promised the other mutual salvation,

the lady who had answered for him there

saw in a dream the marvelous rich fruit

that he and all his heirs were to produce,

and that he might be known for what he was,

a spirit sent from Heaven named the child

with his possessive, Whose alone he was:

Dominic he was named. I see in him

the husbandman, the one chosen by Christ

to help him in the garden of His Church.

Close servant and true messenger of Christ,

he made it manifest that his first love

was love for the first counsel given by Christ.

Often his nurse would find him out of bed,

awake and silent, lying on the ground,

as if to say, " For this end I was sent."

O father Felix, felicitously named!

O mother called Giovanna, 'grace of God!'

And these names truly mean what they express.

Not like those men who toil for worldly gain,

studying Thaddeus and the Ostian,

but for the love of the eternal bread,

he soon became a mighty theologian,

a diligent inspector of the vineyard,

where the vine withers if the keeper fails.

And from the See which once was so benign

to its deserving poor (but now corrupt

not in itself but in its occupant)

no right to pay out two or three for six,

nor first choice of some fat and vacant post,

nor decimas quae sunt pauperum Dei,

did he request, but just the right to fight

the sinful world for that true seed whence sprang

the four and twenty plants surrounding you.

Then, armed with doctrine and a zealous will

With apostolic sanction, he burst forth

-a mighty torrent gushing from on high;

sending its crushing force against the barren

thickets of heresy, and where they were

toughest, it stuck with greatest violence.

And from him many other streams branched off

to give their waters to the Catholic fields

so that its sapling might have greener life.

If such was one wheel of the chariot

that Holy Church used to defend herself

and conquer on the field of civil strife,

you cannot fail to see how excellent

the other must have been, about whom Thomas,

before I came, spoke with such courtesy.

But now the track made by the topmost part

of that great wheel's circumference is gone,

and there is only mold where once was crust

His family, which once walked straight ahead

in his own footprints, now are so turned round

they walk along by putting toe to heel.

Soon comes the harvest time and we shall see

how bad the tillage was; the tares will mourn

that access to the storehouse is denied.

I will admit that if you search our book

page after page you might find one that reads:

'I still am now what I have always been,'

but such cannot be said of those who come

from Acquasparta or Casal and read

our rule too loosely or too narrowly.

I am the living soul of Bonaventure

From Bagnoregio; temporal concerns

Always came last when I was in command.

Illuminate and Augustine are here,

they were the first of God's barefooted poor

who wore the cord to show they were His friends

.

Hugh of St. Victor is among them too,

with Peter Mangiador, and Peter of Spain

who in twelve books illumines men below,

Nathan the prophet, and the Patriarch

Chrysostom, Anslem, and Donatus who

devoted all his thought to the first art.

Rabanus, too, is here, and at my side

shines the Calabrian Abbott Joachim

who had received the gift of prophecy.

The glowing courtesy of Brother Thomas,

his modesty of words, have prompted me

to praise this paladin ad I have done

and moved this fellowship to join with me."

Source: Dante: 7he Divine Comedy, Volume 11. Paradise Translated by Mark Musa. New York: Penguin Books. 1986 (19841

John Duns Scotus

John Duns Scotus, or John Duns the Scot, is with St. Bonaventure and William of Ockham the most important philosopher-theologian of the Franciscan tradition, and a major thinker of the Middle Ages. Not much is known about his early life, but it is believed that he was born around 1266 and may have come from the Duns family or the town of Duns in Scotland. He entered a Franciscan covenant in 1277 and was ordained as a priest in 1291. He lectured at Cambridge and, around 1300, at Oxford. He was in Paris by 1302, and spent the last year of his life at the Franciscan study house in Cologne, Germany.

Although he died prematurely, he left a large body of work dealing with metaphysics, the theory of knowledge, ethics and specifically theological questions. Known as the Subtle Doctor, his writings are not always easy to understand. Indeed the word "dunce" became a term of insult during the Renaissance for followers of his who made things even more obscure than they had to be, but his admirers have been ardent. The American Philosopher Charles Saunders Pierce considered John Duns Scotus not only one of the greatest minds of the Middle Ages but also one of "the profoundest metaphysicians that ever lived," while the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called him unrivaled "be rival Italy or Greece." The connection of the thought of John Duns Scotus to the Franciscan tradition is being examined today, including its lineage not only from St. Bonaventure but from the teachings of Francis himself as expressed in The Canticle of Brother Sun and elsewhere.

The two readings on Duns Scotus given here both focus on a concept central to his - thought - haecceity or "'this-ness."' Allan B. Wolter, O.F.M., a leading Scotus scholar, explains this as "a unique property that can characterize one, and only one, subject" as a concrete individual. He adds that Scotus' doctrine of haecceity, applied to the human person, invests each individual as one wanted and loved by God, apart from any trait he shares with others or any contribution he could make to society." For Hopkins, some of whose poems on this theme are included here, insight into "this-ness" became the key to a spirituality that could apprehend God in or through each unique thing, created through the incarnate Word. Two poems by the American poet William Carlos Williams equally convey a sense of "this-ness" but in an entirely different style.

In their reflections below Owen Sadlier and Gerald Galgan suggest that the haecceity or "this-ness" of all things, as understood in the Franciscan tradition, has important implications for both art and science, since each particular thing as a manifestation of the divine is a fit object of contemplation and is worthy in itself of scientific investigation.

AESTHETICS AND ETHICS:

THE CONTEMPORARY SIGNIFICANCE

OF THE THOUGHT OF DUNS SCOTUS

Owen Sadlier, O.S.F

The subject of today's presentation is the relation of aesthetics to ethics in the thought of Duns Scotus, and I hope to offer some reflections on the extraordinarily close connection which Scotus sees between aesthetic experience and moral achievement. However, in keeping with the theme of the natural liberty of each person that is the essential feature of Scotus' moral thought, I propose to freely stretch out my reflections beyond philosophy, beyond the domain of the theoretical, in order to cast the light of Scotus' thought on music, poetry, and science, as well. Still, we must begin with Aristotle, who for Scotus, as well as Aquinas, is the Philosopher.

Toward the end of the Politics, in Book VM [1341b ff], Aristotle compares a well ordered city to a well conducted chorus. The wonder of aesthetic achievement is his icon of political perfection: a good city, like a good chorus, is an integral whole constituted by the harmony of its' parts. At the heart of Aristotle's political understanding the aesthetic has a formative role, and this, in turn, rests on an even more fundamental understanding, which is the indispensable role of the aesthetic, most especially music, in the moral formation of a person's soul. Aristotle says, "It is evident ... that music can render the character of the soul of a certain quality ... [for] ... music by nature belongs among the sweet and pleasant things. This explains why many thinkers connect the soul with harmony - some saying that it is a harmony, and others that it possesses the attribute of harmony." [1340b II - 1 9]. Indeed, for Aristotle, music is the most morally significant art because the soul is musical; that is, it is form and has a harmonic structure. For this reason, according to Aristotle, among the arts, music has a direct, unmediated, effect on the soul, turning it toward, or away from, the good [agathon] long before the power of reason [logos] emerges. Likewise, Duns Scotus uses medical imagery in his articulation of the nature of human moral goodness. Above all, he employs the auditory imagination as the means to tie the moral soul directly to God. In a truly Franciscan burst of enthusiasm, he goes so far as to compare the work of moral agents to a choral symphony performed for the delight of the divine audience [Lectura 1: 1 7 {Vatican ed}]. He even compares the structure of the soul to the strings of a harp in order to visually incarnate his understanding of moral activity. The strings are plucked, Scotus says, so as to produce, either, moral harmony or dissonance. When the moral playing is truly harmonic it is because each string of the soul is played in proper order, or because several strings are played simultaneously, as a chord. The character of the moral sound produced evokes delight in those who are playing and in those who are listening, and this delight is not a function of the individual notes, or actions, but of the order achieved; of the beautiful harmony of a finished moral composition.

In another version of this lecture, contained in the longer Ordinatio, Scotus again uses the image of musical delight to describe the relation of moral acts to love. The car of the soul listens, he says, and hears the morally good actions as a chord tuned to perfect pitch by the beautiful power of love. Indeed, moral acts, according to Scotus, always seem to be searching for the tuning voice, for the word, which gives them beauty and ultimate coherence. In a truly striking passage from Ordinatio 111, 37, Scotus employs the same notion to describe the relation of the moral laws of second table of the Decalogue [commandments 4 through 10] to the two "greatest" commandments, love of God and love of neighbor. The commandments of the second table of the Decalogue are likened to the strings of moral life which await the proper tuning which love alone can give.

So far, we can say that Aristotle and Duns Scotus agree on at least two fundamental issues: first that the aesthetic and the ethical are inseparable, and, second, that, music is substantially related to activity of the soul. Now, while keeping our focus on both of these, let us turn our attention in another direction, to another time, to Mozart, and the end of Act One of his greatest opera, The Magic Flute. In scene 17, we see Pamina and Papageno journeying through a dark and dangerous forest toward Sarastro's palace of wisdom. Suddenly, they are overtaken and captured by the evil wizard, Monostatos, and his bestial minions. Monostatos says to his couple, "...I've caught you ... Here with the steel and irons ... I'll teach you manners..." Just as they are about to be bound in chains, Papageno plays the magic bells given to him by the servant of the Queen of the Night, and Monostatos and his crew are instantly transformed from monstrous brutes into innocent, dancing children: 'Das klinget so herrlich, Das klinget so schon! [That sounds so glorious, that sounds so beautiful!] The power of the beautiful transfigures the morally ugly in the twinkling of an eye, in the tinkling of beautiful bells. And, in one of the most sublime duets of the entire opera, Pamina and Papageno sing a hymn in homage to the moral force at work in beautiful music:

If every honest man

could find little bells like that,

his enemy’ s enemies would then

vanish without trouble.

And without them he would live

in perfect harmony!

Only the harmony of friendship

relieves hardships;

without this sympathy

there is no happiness on earth.

Like Scotus, and Aristotle, Mozart understands that the moment of aesthetic encounter is always an invitation to moral achievement; that the being of the beautiful and the being of the good are, at last, one and the same. In The Magic Flute, the aesthetic [Papageno] is always the servant of the moral [Pamina], and the encounter with the harmony of music makes possible the achievement of the harmony of friendship. The consonance of the aesthetic and the moral is, in the words of the duet, that beautiful "sympathy"' without which there is no true happiness in this life.

The Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins [1844-1889], says in a letter to his friend, Coventry Patmore {24 September 1883] that there is nothing more beautiful in life than the absence of vanity in a person's character. If we were to conclude from this sentiment that Hopkins learned from Duns Scotus, we would be correct. Listen to this entry from Hopkins' journal, dated 4 August 1872: "After the examination we went for our holiday out to Douglas in the Isle of Man, Aug 3. At this time I had first begun to get hold of the copy of Scotus on the Sentences in the Baddley library and was flush with a new stroke of enthusiasm. It may come to nothing or it may be a mercy from God. But just when I took in any inscape of the sky or sea I thought of Scotus." The word "inscape" refers to that peculiar kind of insight which Hopkins associated with individual things, and it corresponds quite closely to Scotus' notion of "haecceitas"- the absolutely distinct character of each individual being; its "thisness."

Most of Hopkins' greatest poems can be read as homages to the Scotistic doctrine of "haecceitas": in God's Grandeur (perhaps his finest poem], Hopkins declares that the whole of creation is "charged" with the grandeur of God, and each thing in the world has "deep down' at its core "the dearest freshness." In Pied Beauty [see above], the speaker gives "glory" to God for all that his beauty "fathers-forth" - for all things "counter", "original", "spare', "strange', "fickle', "freckled", "swift", "slow", "sweet", "sour', "addazzle", or "dim." In the Windhover, the speaker allows the brute beauty of the lone falcon to open his soul to see that beauty which is "... a billion Times lovelier." For Hopkins, as for Scotus and Mozart, the moment of each aesthetic encounter is also an invitation to the most sublime moral achievement.

It is not surprising, then, given the spiritual understanding present in his poem, that moral living for Hopkins is understood in essential Scotistic terms: it is an awareness and imitation of divine generosity and selflessness, a realization of freedom accompanied with the joy of being related in a substantial way to the rest of creation. For Hopkins and Scotus, the individual is never alone, or separated. Rather, each person is on a journey back to God and is meant to join with every other person one encounters along the way. We are all pilgrims, making our way back home together. Moral living is life on the way with others, and it involves mutual support assistance, sacrifice, joy, and love. The way is sometimes hard, and the journey is difficult. Still, we are reminded that there is, at the heart of the world, a dearest freshness and beauty which embraces all. Taking the admonition of St. Francis to act always "as strangers and pilgrims", Scotus seems to conclude that the journey of our lives together is inseparable from its moral goal: certainty of arrival does not dispense with the need to appreciate beauty and act justly. Indeed, the very meaning of the journey depends on the beauty encountered and the justice achieved at each step along the way. Scotus, like Hopkins, sees this moral journey played out against the background of a world charged with the grandeur of God. This means that all good acts must also be beautiful, since goodness and beauty both require the context of ordered relationships, and the essence of order for Scotus is a profound harmony among the numberless beautiful parts which constitute the goodness whole of Creation. Scotus thinks of the beautiful along with the good because proportion and order are essential to both. We encounter ordered beauty everywhere, everyday, in others, most especially, and, around us in the simple, ordinary, things of daily living. Despite the smudge and smear of human toil and abuse, both Hopkins and Scotus maintain that all of nature, even in manifestations of terrifying power, is beautifully ordered. The god of Scotus and Hopkins is an artist, and the whole universe a work of art. Nothing exists for itself alone, rather, everything in this properly ordered world, somehow, declares the glory of God [Psalm 19]. The relation of aesthetics to ethics is, finally, the apprehension of beautiful harmonies.

Moving away for a moment from music and poetry to natural science, I encountered another version of the "apprehension of beautiful harmonies" recently while reading an extraordinary book entitled, Darwin's Black Box, by Michael J. Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University. Behe sets to demonstrate the presence, and operation, of what he calls "irreducibly complex systems" at the most fundamental levels of biological life. His analysis of the chemistry and biology of such things as human vision and the blood clotting are quite simply stunning, and the evidence he presents for the existence of intelligent design in the universe is overwhelming. Toward the end of the book, Behe describes his own research into such astonishing scientific structures in a way which resonates completely with the thought of Scotus and Hopkins; especially Hopkins' notion of "inescape." He describes his experience as a constant "horrendous and beautiful shock" as he probes the "black box" of complexity and mystery at the heart of each living cell [Darwin's Black Box, 252-253].

Perhaps it is fitting to close this presentation by citing a passage from the writings of St. Thomas on the relation of aesthetics to ethics. St. Thomas and Duns Scotus are often presented as philosophical opponents, and, while that may well be true with respect to other important questions, on the relation of the beautiful to the good, they seem to share a remarkable harmony of understanding. Let us permit say St. Thomas to have the last word:

The beautiful is the same as the good and they differ in aspect only. For since the good is what all seek, the notion of the good is that which calms the desire by being seen or known. Consequently, those senses which chiefly regard the beautiful are the most cognitive, viz. sight and hearing as ministering to reason,- for we speak of beautiful sights and beautiful sounds. But in reference to the objects of the other senses we do not use the expression "beautiful" for we do not speak of beautiful tastes and beautiful odors. Thus it is obvious that beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty; so that "good means that which simply pleases ... while the beautiful is something pleasant in the mere apprehension of it." [ST, I-R, Q. 27, a. 1]

For St. Thomas, beauty's homage to moral goodness is always the gift of insight and understanding. St. Thomas and Duns Scotus, Mozart, Hopkins, and Behe - Catolica: voices in a chorus, a choir, chanting the glory of God and the grandeur of a world charged through and through, deep down, and with an irreducibly complex truth, beauty, and goodness; a world inflamed with the shining sparks of God's love.

Source: This paper was written as part of the participation of St Francis College in the Rhodes Consultations on the Church-Related College in 1998-1999 and presented to the Faculty Colloquium of St. Francis College on November DA TE, 1998.

Submitted to

Conference on Christian Philosophy

at Franciscan University of Steubenville

September 17-18, 1999

Contemporary Philosophy and

the Franciscan Tradition

John Duns Scotus and Modern Science

I

The Path from St. Francis to Duns Scotus

Saint Francis of Assisi was neither a theologian nor a philosopher; he was not concerned to provide or question theoretical propositions about the meaning of life but only to “speak” in an event, to live life so intensely that it would be construed as a “statement” about what life means. It was the particular facts of the life of Jesus Christ that became exemplars for the life of Francis who called his contemporaries to a new exactitude and literalism in their imitation of Christ. With these “particulars” as his focus, Francis proposed a love of nature which emphasized its radical particularity. In this sense, he did “not want to see the wood for the trees,” in the words of Chesterton, but wanted “to see each tree as a separate and almost a sacred thing,” at the furthest remove from a “sentimental pantheism."[1] This can be seen in his poem, “The Canticle of Creatures,” when it is compared to Psalm 136 which is one of his sources of inspiration. Whereas the psalm breaks creation down into categories of things and speaks of things in terms of collections, Francis, with the exception of the stars, speaks of things as distinctive particulars.[2] Whereas the psalmist does not personally relate himself to the things of nature, Francis posits a family of creation composed of singular things, including himself. Whereas the psalter speaks of the universal and in the plural -- the Lord's bringing “forth the wind from his storehouses”[3] -- Francis speaks of the particular and in the singular – “Brother Wind.” Finally, there is the implied equality of the particular things of creation in Francis' poem. There seems to be no ranking of superior and inferior, and even the “Mother Earth” of ancient myth is addressed as “Sister.” Francis' perspective here is reflected in Aquinas' assertion that “the whole community of the universe is governed by the divine reason.”[4]

In order to account for these differences between the psalms and Francis' canticle, we must address not only God's Creation ex nihilo which, in one sense, is common to both the psalter and Francis, but the Incarnation as well. God redeems man by entering into the created world -- not simply by promulgating a teaching or a doctrine, but rather, “by the wrenching of one man's flesh and the spilling of his blood upon one particular square yard of ground, outside one particular city gate during three particular unrepeatable hours, which could have been measured on a clock.”[5] God's having taken on human nature in the singular historical person of Christ is the “scandal” of particularity for ancient philosophical consciousness, a scandal which alone enables Francis to praise God through the singularities of nature. And it is only in this light that “we see, retrospectively, what Creation itself fully means: that it is an act of sheer generosity, done not out of any need or imperfection, by the God who could be in undiminished goodness and greatness even if he had not created. The generosity of the Redemption sheds light on the generosity of Creation.”[6]

During the lifetime of Francis the center of learning began to shift from the old monastic schools to the new universities, and three decades after the death of Francis, St. Bonaventure, having attempted to harmonize Francis' evangelism and imitation of Christ and preaching by deed with the life of theological learning at the University of Paris, was elected Master General of the Franciscan Order. The words of St. Paul –“For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified”[7] -- led Bonaventure, in keeping with Francis' emptying himself of his own will without ceasing to be free and to be himself, to proclaim Christ as the medium omnium scientiarum -- the “center of all the sciences.”[8] It is with the invocation of Christ and of the intercession of Francis that Bonaventure commences and concludes his Itinerarium Mentis In Deum -- an account of the journey by which the human mind is raised to God. Here Bonaventure depicts a world in which particular created things are “words” that speak to us incessantly about their Creator in a way that is neither less significant than, nor radically different from, the Scriptures, gaining their intelligibility from the “Speech” of God which has become Incarnate in Christ. Christ is the utterly singular, unrepeatable, and free suffusion of the finite by the infinite, who discloses in himself that all the particular things of nature are vestigial Dei or “traces” of God in the world. Far from diluting the vision of St. Francis, Bonaventure translates it into a rational synthesis capable of being examined within the university. This synthesis is a theological reflection on the “foundation for the harmony of Creation” which “is for Bonaventure the unity of the Word” of God, whose “absolute simplicity expresses and represents the multiplicity of all possible things, and embraces all the varied characteristics of creation in their concreteness and indeed in their distinct selves.”[9]

This theological synthesis, centered In the Divine Word, constitutes the point of departure for the synthesis of the Franciscan philosopher, John Duns Scotus, not only at the University of Paris but at Oxford and Cambridge Universities as well. It was at Cambridge University, let us keep in mind, that modern science would eventually be given its classic formulation by Isaac Newton. At the center of the philosophical synthesis of Scotus is "the intelligibility of creation" focused into the “singular per se” which is “never just a member of a class, though it is that among other things.”[10] The perspective of Scotus is thus informed by the conviction that inquiry into the particular things of the natural world will reveal traces of the Divine and that all human work is an imitation in time of Infinite Creativity which is timeless. This transfiguration of the particular and the practical, in the Scotistic synthesis, entails that the Infinite cannot be imitated in the same way twice. The human individual knows the world as the author of a unique work within the world and as the finite presentation of a unique perspective on infinity.

For Scotus, the Incarnate Divine Word is an object of Faith, not Reason, but this Faith can be made an object of Reason. When it is, Scotus writes, the philosophical “intellect, the object of which is being, finds no repugnance in understanding infinite being,” for infinite being, ens infinitum, is that which is “most perfectly intelligible.”[11] This entails that infinity is that which “must needs be actually self existent,”[12] not a spatial magnitude, an extensive infinity, but an interior self-impartation, an intensive infinity, what Scotus calls “Infinitas intensiva,” the very “intensity of Being.”[13] In and as this infinite intensity, “Being itself is, and else that is in a qualified sense instantiates it. The different senses of ‘being’ are then, as it were, different modes of instantiation” or particularization, “of that which is one and the same.”[14] Intensive Infinity, therefore, is a “characteristic of a real being and not a being of the mind,” but the life of this being “which is the divine essence is necessarily intellectual,” and since what “is essentially the same as the divine essence is something extramentally actualized in God,” it follows, Scotus writes, that “intellectuality or the intellectual life” is something that “exists in God extramentally.”[15]

God is unrestrictedly, in other words, and this suggests that God is infinitely expressive of what it means to be God. Therefore, Scotus writes, “the intrinsic mode of anything intensively infinite is infinity itself, which intrinsically expresses a being or essence which lacks nothing and which exceeds everything finite beyond any determinate degree,” and this entails that “an intensively infinite being is something unique, incapable of being multiplied or replicated; it is not restricted but communicable; and it cannot be a component of something else.”[16] The term “Infinite” is thus meant to signify the “individuating” character of the Divine Being.[17] But since “what is ground for being is also ground for knowing,” it follows that “the Infinite, which in itself contains the entity of everything eminently, also contains in itself all knowability eminently.”[18] Consequently, although Reason cannot establish the truth of the object of Faith, it does show that if that object is true, then certain consequences necessarily follow. This is to say, in the words of Scotus, that if there is a “predication of human nature of the [Divine] Word,” it follows that “every positive entity our [human] nature contains is united to the [Divine] Word."[19]

Thus, "the ultimacy of the individual and its ultimate reconciliation with the universal” is “one of the effects of the Incarnation,” in the sense that “individuality is the final reality of form,” ultima realitas formae, as Scotus says -- that which “does not oppose form” but, rather, “perfects it.”[20] Individual things, therefore, are only imperfectly comprehended “under a universal aspect,” ratione universalis, since “they are not known according to all of the positive entity in them”[21] The form of the individual, forma individualis, consequently, is the ultimate degree of form, ultimus gradus formae, that is to say, the uncreated but creating intensive infinity of self-imparting individuation “which functions as the ontological fundament of individual unity”[22] for the created singular things of the world.

The contribution of Duns Scotus -- proceeding from the Incarnational theology of Bonaventure -- was to make explicit and to underwrite philosophically the declaration that the natural world, in its most seemingly inconsequential singularities, was possessed of a dignity commensurate with that of rational investigation. This presupposed that “there is no hierarchy of divine and non-divine elements within nature, for not even reason could be thought of as divine in the way it was for Greek philosophy, which thought of the divine as dwelling within nature side by side with the nondivine, and which took as its end the [contemplative] union of the divine element in man with the divine element in the cosmos.”[23]Working with the medieval scholastic conception of “scientia,” Scotus is effectively writing the preamble for the philosophical constitution of modern science, the body of which will be composed by Descartes.

II

The Path from Duns Scotus to Modern Science

The upshot of Duns Scotus’ philosophical synthesis was a shifting of the principle of Individuation away from Aquinas' reliance on the Aristotelian location of it in matter toward the locus of infinity itself. But infinity now came to be identified with the intensiveness or, interiority of Being as such. This entailed, for Scotus, that, particularity, although not fully knowable in the present human condition, is knowable as such, since it will be known in beatific union with God's infinity, where the human intellect will not be as dependent upon sense perception as it is in this life. The particular is now seen to have a unity through itself and a being proper to itself and in God this singularity characterizes his essence as such, whereas in the created individual, its particularity or this-ness, its “haecceity,” must be distinguished from its “common nature.” The consequence of this is that the singular things of created nature are particular in their existence and yet universal in relation to the human mind. Thus in keeping with St. Francis' articulation of the brotherhood and sisterhood of the singular things of nature -- which are themselves what Bonaventure would call “words” in that book written outwardly in nature which addresses the book written inwardly in the human mind -- Scotus treats scientific ideas as symbols or a kind of natural “sacrament” standing for and participating in the relation of the human mind to the universe as a community of beings.

Thus, as Charles Sanders Peirce remarks, for Scotus, the “universal only differs from the singular in the manner of its being conceived (formaliter) but not in the manner of its existence (realiter).[24] Facticity thus works itself into scientific ideas and scientific ideas work themselves into facticity. “Some ideas, the harder and more mechanical ones,” Peirce says, in keeping with Scotus, “actualize themselves first in the macrocosm, and the mind receives them by submitting to the teachings of nature. Other ideas, the more spiritual and moral ones, actualize themselves first in the human heart” and mind “and pass to the material world through the agency of man.”[25] Submission to the teachings of nature, for Scotus, is requisite for the efficacity of the agency of the human individual. This is a premodern conviction which is still operative in Scotus, and is reflected in his presentation of individuality as the perfection of forms inherent in nature. There is a substantial philosophical agreement, it seems to me, between the Dominican philosopher Thomas Aquinas and the Franciscan philosopher John Duns Scotus on the inherence of formal causality in nature. The reciprocal influence and the confluence of Dominicanism and Franciscanism, their unity in difference under one Faith, account for the shared conviction of Thomism and Scotism that the “forms of subject and predicate do not only belong to words and concepts” but to “the way things show up for us” -- that “the forms of logic” are “related to the forms of being and to the kinds of things into which being is articulated.”[26]

This agreement on the presence of formal causality in nature begins to unravel in the theological and philosophical writings of the Franciscan William of Ockham, educated at Oxford University, but never advancing beyond “inceptor” and denied a chair at the University. Ockham's writings show an extensive familiarity with the writings of Scotus but they also show a fundamental departure from Scotus' relating the great significance he affords individuality to the reality of “common natures.” As far as Ockham is concerned, then, given the unreality of the universal and the reality only of the singularly existent thing, there can be no universal ideas in the mind of God. God needs no universal ideas in order to know. “Ockham suppresses universals even in God,” as Etienne Gilson notes, and it could also be said that it is precisely “because there are no universal Ideas in God that there is no universality in things. The so- called Ideas are nothing but the very [singular or particular] things producible by God. God needs no Ideas in order to know; by the very fact that God is God, he knows all.”[27] Omnipotence thus becomes “less the measure of God's nature” than the measure of “the dependence of everything else upon God; so that what exists need not exist or can exist by a different mode, and what does not exist could exist.”[28] 0ckham's universe, therefore, “can hardly be regarded as in any sense organic” but only as one “in which there are no necessary intermediaries between, on the one hand, an infinitely free and omnipotent God, and, on the other, the things which he has created and which are utterly contingent upon him.”[29] The universal is no longer seen to be securely there, either in the world or beyond it.

A very un-Greek emphasis could now be put on the inherent singularity of the world, transformed from a realm of inherent forms and essences to a realm of imposed lawfulness -- no mere spatial totality but, rather, the relation between states of a spatial whole at different times of its existence. This emphasis entails the birth of modern mathematico-experimental science which, in the words of the American philosopher John Dewey, “no longer tries to find some fixed form or essence behind each process of change,” but, rather, “tries to break with apparent fixities and induce change,” for the realm of nature is now seen to be “something that has to be changed,” subjected to experiment “in order to be truly known.”[30] Modern science, however, is “not simply a continuation of the interrupted scientific movement of antiquity,” but is “something novel,” the conditions for which were “created by the later Middle Ages, having interests, presuppositions, and methods alien to the Greeks.”[31] What was essential for the development of modern science was the unity-in-difference of modern philosophical rationalism and empiricism which had its source in the unity-in-difference of Dominicanism and Franciscanism. What is decisive here, as the philosopher Max Scheler noted, is precisely what is “really new and unusual in St. Francis' emotional relationship to Nature,” namely, that “natural objects and processes take on an expressive significance of their own,” as particulars, as singulars, “without any parabolic,” that is, allegorical “reference to man or to human relationships generally.”[32]

It is thus highly significant that the founders of early modern science -- in their conviction that the astounding diversity of the particulars of the natural world, when subjected to an experimental method, lent themselves to organization by a mathematical system -- conceived of themselves as attempting to “think God's after Him.” They are influenced here by the Franciscan spirit of Bonaventure's theological account of an outward, inward, and upward journey of the human mind to God. Thus, Johann Kepler wrote that since “individuals, received inwardly through the senses, are foundations of universals; and indivisible and discrete unities” are the foundations “of numbers,”[33] it follows that the universal “numbers and magnitudes” must be “implanted in the mind of man" as a "reflection out of the mind of God,” and this itself is “one of the reasons to call man an image of God.”[34] The consequence, however, of Ockham's removal of universal ideas from the Divine Intellect is a radical emphasis on the Divine Will and omnipotence which tends to undermine Bonaventure's attempt to gain a rational understanding of Faith. The status of theology as a universal science, therefore, comes to be challenged so as to make room for the claims of a new experimental science of the particular things of nature. It seems, at this point, that what is gained in “scientific” status for the modern experimental-mathematical method is at the expense of what is lost in scientific status for theology.

In the seventeenth century, Descartes -- relying on the philosophical notion of intensive infinity and the philosophical emphasis on the Will provided by Scotus -- completes the metaphysical constitution of modern science, thereby assuring its ascendancy. The ascent, however, by which Bonaventure conceived the individual human mind to be raised by God to God, becomes, in Descartes, a descent from the particulars of nature into the inward particularity of the human ego or self. Human cognition now comes to be conceived in the way that medieval theology conceived angelic cognition -- each individual is a kind of species. Descartes attempts to talk only to himself, to address himself alone - meque solum alloquendo,[35] pro posing a new account of the human mind's journey, an itinerarium mentis in ipsum, a journey of the human mind into itself. The God scholastically addressed by Bonaventure. Aquinas, and Scotus, however, is still decisive for Descartes' even if Descartes seems to be exclusively concerned with demonstrating that God exists from the evidence of his own singular existence rather than with having his mind raised to God. Like Kepler, Descartes must attempt to “think God's thoughts after Him” if he is to ground metaphysically the scientific method by which we can “render ourselves, as it were, the masters and possessors of nature.”[36] But there is no way of ascent from the unanchored modern self. Reason is now exclusively productive and confined to the workplace of the world.

III

Conclusion – Reason and Faith

It is only in the late nineteenth century that the latent danger in Descartes' attempt to talk only to himself in philosophy, to journey only into himself, becomes fully visible. Bonaventure's ascent to God is now deemed unnecessary for the modern self, just as previously Scotus' “common natures” had been deemed unnecessary by Ockham for the significance of singular existence. Having vanquished the raising of the mind to God, having banished contemplation as the final end of philosophy, the modern scientific worldview now sees itself plagued by an erosion of its faith in reason itself -- in the very rationality that systematizes particulars. Thus, in Sigmund Freud, Descartes 'journey of the mind into itself serves only to disclose the irrational substratum of the ego or self. Freud attempts to subject this irrational substratum to the “rational” analysis of dreams, but he himself must admit that there can be no escape, no ascent, from modern selfhood, for the psychoanalytic science seems to teach contemporary man that “every cure must expose him to new illness.”[37] In Nietzsche, also the irrationality of existence, the endless swarm of particulars, is proclaimed, although he attempts to treat it in a rational way. Man becomes the prisoner of the systems he creates, like a spider, so to speak, in its web.

The tendency is thus to be trapped and lost in eternally recurring particulars, especially in the privileged and godlike singularity of the atomic ego and its will to power. Thus has Western man moved “from a near boundless confidence in his own powers, his spiritual potential, his capacity for certain knowledge, his mastery over nature, and his progressive destiny, to what often appeared to be a sharply opposite condition, a debilitating sense of metaphysical insignificance and personal futility, spiritual loss of faith, uncertainty in knowledge, a mutually destructive relationship with nature, and an intense insecurity concerning the human future. In the four centuries of modern man's existence, Bacon and Descartes had become Kafka and Beckett.”[38]

So it is that the wealth of things generated by the twentieth century surrogate for the theology of the Trinity, namely, mathematical rationality, physical science, and transformative technology, seems to be inexorably harnessed to the poverty of our replacement for Faith and Reason, namely, Feeling and Will. The strained harmonization of Romanticism and Utilitarianism only seems to Yield the traces of homelessness, alienation, fragmentation, and anomie. Freud himself once remarked that contemporary man has, “as it were, become a prosthetic God,” but “we will not forget,” he added parenthetically,” that present-day man does not feel happy in his God-like character.”[39] The demise of the Book, at the close of the twentieth century, seems to be following the arc of the fall of the Chalice. The sense of the “opaque silence of the page” of the book, as “the habitat, the nesting place, of the deeper Self,”[40] now seems to be retracing the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of that “Sea of Faith” once “at the full, and round earth's shore,”[41] which Matthew Arnold articulated over a century ago. Even the Inveterate deconstructionist, Jacques Derrida, concedes that the "idea of a book is the idea of a totality' and develops in the Middle Ages as “the encyclopedic protection of theology”[42]

But there is another and subtler side to this development. It is a dimension of modernity which may very well fall outside the shadow cast by the umbrella which is raised by the “dictatorship of insignificance”[43] and the “decadence of the emancipated will”[44] over what has now become our electronically mediated nominalism. The other side of modernity is evidenced in the “beautiful, bewildering diversity of nature,”[45] which has become more pronounced in contemporary physics and astronomy, however much they “have difficulty describing the desire that leads to an increasing cognition of beauty in their understanding of the system of the universe.”[46] These sciences now seek to come “near the initial singularity,” as they search for an “effect that was produced at the beginning of the universe but was insensitive to subsequent evolution.”[47] In the last decade, “a whole new population of galaxies has presented us with a unique window onto the evolution of galaxies and the distribution of matter in the universe,” and these previously undetected "low-surface-brightness galaxies" indicate that the process of galactic formation still remains a mystery.[48]

In the realm of biological information, we can indeed explain the general phenomena, but the “concrete content of biological information cannot be deduced from the laws of physics and chemistry,” and this sets the “fundamental limits of objective knowledge in biology,” namely, “the chance hypothesis is inherently incapable of proof, the teleological approach of disproof.”[49] This suggests to me that contemporary as astronomy and physics are facing the enigma of cosmic origin, and contemporary Biology is staring into teleology, however much any physicist or biologist rejects the theological and philosophical foundations of these notions. Whether we like it or not, the unfinished business of the harmony of Faith and Reason is waiting in the wings. Our physical sciences are implicitly working within the framework of Creation ex nihilo, and the vast array of data which they have marshaled cannot disprove purposiveness in the physical world. Scotus' notion that individuation at once builds on and perfects form -- in virtue of an intensive infinity which is perfectly intelligible and freely expressive of itself -- may yet have its day. Could it be that the late modern sciences are not only still implicitly working within the framework of the harmonization of Faith and Reason developed by the medieval Franciscans and Dominicans, but these sciences, perhaps unknown to the scientists themselves, are also filling that framework with information?

If this is the case, then Scotus' majestic attempt to explicate the relation between intensive infinity and singularity may be the wave which has yet to wash upon the shores of our cognition, occasioning, and maybe even engendering, a reappropriation of the relation between the Chalice and the Book in terms of a new and ongoing dialogue among the sciences, the arts, theology, and philosophy. And so from the one direction, the way of historical “development proceeds from an almost exclusive proclamation of God to a growing and accompanying proclamation of the creation. But from the other direction -- because in the growing consciousness of God and creation as separate, God recedes into an ever more sacred and veiled remoteness -- this same way of development bespeaks an evolution of the portrait of God from radiant comprehension to an ever more mysterious incomprehensibility. In other words, the visible receding of God which accompanies the growing proclamation of the individual existence of the creation signifies much more the growing cognition of the real God.”[50] The neighbor is now everywhere: infinity in a grain of sand, order, “vast and generative, not fought for against the entropic tides but freely available.”[51] “Generations of stars,” we now know, “were required to synthesize the elements essential to life.”[52] But this requires “formation and organization of and from within,” an organically “integrated, individuated, empowered and efficacious organization,”[53] which infinitely signifies the primal and unconditioned Divine Giving. The Infinity of Divine Generosity lies beneath the “form-preserving instability”[54] which runs through “the holiness of the particular.”[55]

What St. Francis of Assisi knew about this mystically and poetically, in lived deed and loved event, John Duns Scotus labored to articulate philosophically, and that articulation, I submit, is still unfinished and awaits the contribution of our labors in a new millennium. What is at issue here is a new integration in which we are called to be the guardians of metaphysics by virtue of an orientation to Being in its wholeness over against the impoverishment and one sidedness of a “metaphysics” which has forgotten Being.[56] Certainly the “bankruptcy of the past offers poor security for the solvency of the present,” but this holds true precisely because there is “no past except as it has been obscured and its influence re-established.”[57] In the final analysis, the very reality of history is the history of renewals.[58]

Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Windhover

To Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-

dom of daily light’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart is hiding

Stirred for a bird,- the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valor and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

God’s Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs-

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! Bright wings.

Poem 34

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each ticked string tells, each hung bell’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one and the same;

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves- goes itself; myself it speaks and spells’

Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is-

Christ- for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Poems by William Carlos Williams

Solstice

The river is full

The time is ripe

Give murderous thoughts rest

No leaves on the trees

A mild sun darkens

the frosty earth

Quietness reigns

No birds, no wind

The shortest day of the year

Is favorable

This is just to say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

Franciscans and Money

David Flood

Chapter Seven of the Franciscan movement’s basic document contains the simple proscription of money. Like the mustard seed, the proscription grew rapidly into a many-branched tree, in which later rule commentators twittered and constructed. Chapter Eight forbids any use of money. In clear principle and with much detail, including two exceptions, it banishes money from any function in Franciscan life.

We know that the basic document kept pace with the experience and reflection of Francis and his brothers. Yet we must express surprise when we see how a simple expression-two words at the end of a sentence-rapidly turned into a whole chapter. In the following argument, I submit that Chapter Eight of the Regula non bullata, the movement’s basic document in its 1221 edition, has a size and a place in accord with its meaning for the movement. Modern historians have never read the lines correctly for they have seen therein the peculiar practice of Franciscan poverty rather than a strong component of the movement’s economics. After familiarizing ourselves with the text (Part One), we will review some history (Part Two) which supplies the grounds for a socioeconomic interpretation of the chapter (Part Three). Francis and his brothers had struck their foe at a neuralgic point. They had every reason to shore up this specific rejection of Assisi’s economics as firmly as possible.

I The Text

The early Franciscans inserted a special position on money into their written program and added to it. By 1221 it had reached the following shape.

Our Lord commands in the gospel: Watch out and keep away from all malice and avarice. And: Do not let yourselves get caught up in the concerns of the world (or these times) and in the worries of this life.

I. And so no brother, wherever he is and withersoever he goes, should take or receive or have received in any way money or coin, whether for clothes or for books or as the price for any labor, or for any reason whatsoever-save when sick brothers clearly require it. For we should have no more use for money and coin than for stones and should consider them accordingly. And the devil is out to blind those who run after it or value it more than stones. Therefore, now that we have left all, we must see to it that we do not lose the kingdom of God for so little.

And should we come across coins in any place, we are to esteem them no more than dust which we trample underfoot, for “vanity of vanities and all is vanity.”

And if by chance, which God forbid, it should happen that a brother should gather and have money or coins, save only for sick brothers as mentioned above, all brothers treat him as a false brother and a thief and robber, as one with a purse, unless he truly repents.

II. And in no way may brothers receive or have received or seek or have sought money from a poor house, or coins for any houses or places. Nor are they to accompany anyone who seeks monies or coins for such places. All other work not in disaccord with our life the brothers can do for the places with God’s blessing. Still, brothers can seek alms for lepers in dire need. Let them be wary of money however. In like fashion they are to avoid traveling about the country in search of filthy funds.

Structure The statement on money opens with words from scripture. The passages serve as a wedge to get the chapter into the basic document. Chapter Sixteen of the same document have similar wedges. A number of Admonitions are constructed in the same way. The men know what they intend to do. They have discussed and decided the development and adaptation of their program. They cover their honest conclusions with Jesus’ words. In his name they “left all.” In his name they determine further the daily articulation of their commitment.

The chapter passes from the quotations to the ruling the word unde, and so. There follow two distinct applications, both of which deal with areas of the men’s daily routines. First of all, they are not to accept money as pay for labor or to get clothing or books (“And so no brother…”). Secondly, they are not to handle money or seek money for any of the service institutions where they work (“And in no way my brothers…”). Put briefly, they do not handle coins either in their interests (1) or in the interests of institutions (11). The first application is followed by the rationale (“For we should have no more…”). After the argument for the ruling come two cases, presented conditionally and drawn from experience (“And should we come across…” and “And if by any chance…”). Money seeps into and rots the best of causes. The second application addresses itself to the work the brothers do. It envisages the second major area of their lives where money can flatter their hands and blind their hearts.

The statement as a whole, however reworked in its many concrete details, has a clear structure which manifests its contents as a principled reflection of the young movement. In other words, a consciously rendered declaration of the common mind, Chapter Eight can bear close examination. It is very real, both in its proximity to Assisian life and a reflective process of Francis and his brothers.

Details. The men interpret scripture by adding to it. Malice and the cares of this world are not in Luke’s text. Of the two, malice is the stronger adjunct. Avarice is bad, and the men see fit to underline its social repercussions. For malice is directed at other people, whereas avarice focuses possessively on things.

The men make two exceptions to their general ruling. They admit using coin if a brother’s sickness or a leper’s hardship require it. The strange conjunction of the two deserves comment. It betrays more than a soft spot for lepers. It suggests that the brothers bore a special responsibility for the lepers and included them somehow in the scope of the early movement. Lepers were more family than social cases. We have abstracted and clarified our images of the early Franciscan years, given the absence of information on the daily rounds of the brothers. We look at those years both in terms of the order’s rapid co-optation by society and from our own membership in formal institutions. Such a passage as this, of which kind few remain, can alert us to our ignorance.

The brothers confess a solidarity here which contrasts sharply with the solidarity posited by the treaty of 1210, the Foundation of communal Assisi (edited once again in Assisi al tempo di san Francesco; see haversack IV, I). In that document, communal Assisi summoned all citizens to commit themselves to the city’s “honor and welfare and growth”. And it promised to defend “its men.” The movement’s social sensibility ran along lines which rejected and transcended the ceaseless socialization pursued by the system around them. Nor did the men take care of lepers. They served them. The constant repetition of Franciscan life as a servant life sought to drown out the commune’s daily instruction to pursue material gain and to use others for virtue.

The second application of the ruling says much about the work contexts of the movements early years. This does not come out clearly in the modern translations because the translators have visualized the serene spheres of spiritual poverty and not the confused comings and goings of workplaces when rendering these lines. Poorhouse they have translated as alms, to which the Latin word eleemosyna taken apart lends itself, though the context warns against such a rendering. The translators have difficulty with services, too, which means the job the brothers did to cover their needs and to keep busy and honest. Hugh of Digne has a passage in his rule commentary which pairs off well with the background to this concluding consideration of Chapter Eight. When explaining “observe the rule spiritually” (Chapter Ten, 1223 text; see Chapter Six, 1221 text), Hugh refers to the places where the early brothers were free to move on. Hugh’s historical information on the origins of the expression urges us to look more sharply at this very revealing passage than we tend to do.

II Economic Background

Money functions within an economic system. If we speak about gold, we say: It shines, it looks good around your neck, it caps my molar. If we speak about money, we say: It can get us a dozen eggs and a case of beer, it gets less now than it did last year, it gravitates towards the rich and flees the poor, it functions by human direction and not by natural law. The early Franciscans talked about money and not about gold and silver in Chapter eight. They addressed themselves to a specific agency of Assisian economics. The shoved the chapter on money in between the initial economic practice of the movement (Chapter Seven) and the eventual justification and development of their economics (Chapter Nine). Given its place in the program, Chapter Eight has to do with the movement’s economic practice. They confronted a contrary economic system and banned a strong agent of that system from any function of their lives.

Different currencies circulated in Italy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. New currencies arose when the old ones no longer sufficed. Currencies tended to decrease in value. Many of Italy’s city-states set up their own mints, for money and politics go together. Or mints which had served the Holy Roman Empire continued to turnout coins for the commune. Not every commune had its mint. It used coins struck elsewhere. Lucca, Pavia, Siena, Ancona, Ravenna turned out coins. Though not a commune, not by any measure, yet with traditional pretensions to city liberties, Rome began turning out its coins around 1180. From 800 to 980, the Roman senate produced coins for the markets of Latium. From that moment to the end of the twelfth century, with the sudden decrease in value of the Luccian coins, a new currency imposed itself on Rome, the provesinus, from Provins in Champagne. Around 1180 the Roman senate produced its own coin, modeled on the provesinus and slightly below (four percent) its value. It was called the provesinus novus (new) as different from the provesinus vetus (old). The old provesinus soon became rare. People stored it. The senate used it to make the new. In spite of the slight difference in the intrinsic worth of the two coins, the old had a market worth thirty percent superior to the new. In 1208 Innocent III published a decree (Cum ex paucitate, August 5) which withdrew the old provesinus from the market. In effect, the old provesinus ceased circulating in Latinum by 1212-1213. By producing its own coin, Rome succeeded in reclaiming control over its regional markets. Around 1200 the papacy was in ascendance. Strong rule and money control go together.

The Roman coin emerged in a time of great confusion among the communal currencies of Italy. 1150-1180 were especially chaotic years for the monies. In a response to the confusion, and to offset the influence of a foreign con, Rome tried for additional control over its markets with its money policy. Other cities of middle and northern Italy acted similarly in the twelfth century. Currency values did not decrease regularly; the decrease constantly came up short for a period of stability when a new and firm coin entered the commercial world. Then it too slid into decline.

Money could not keep up with the good times. Its debasement resulted from broad economic development of central and northern Italy. The division of labor increased, increasing the use of coins as a means of payment. This increased the need for money. Yet the supply of precious metal could not match the demand. Among the possible solutions to the impasse, those who led and moved the social system chose to turn one coin into several maintaining for the new pieces of the original worth. All the mints of the period went this way. They turned out the coins of Lucca, Ravenna, Pavia, Siena, Ancona and other less active monetary systems in greater number and of less intrinsic value.

The adulteration did not happen to all the coin at the same time. In the Region which included Assisi, Pavian money circulated until the last quarter of the twelfth century, when it was driven by the Luccan money. Pavian coin remained firm when Luccan coin increased and multiplied. (Pavia, near Milan, was an old imperial site. Lucca lay down the Arno from Florence near the sea and was much more active commercially than Pavia). Currency games belonged to the commerce of economic expansion. Anyone who took and gave coin got caught up in the game. Of course, some played the game with knowledge, means, and influence which others did not possess. Such money games, then as well as now, have in-built cheating: the privileged players make the rules and referee the action.

We have a good example of people competing with each other over the differences in monies in a 1223 document from Sassovivo, near Assisi. The Benedictine monastery of Sassovivo and a client, Accursuro by name, went to court over the monetary terms of their agreement. The two parties had reached an accord on the rend to pay for use of the land. The time passed and rent time came. The monastery agreed that the original agreement specified the Pavian money. Accursuro maintained that Luccan coin had been understood. Although Accursuro had no case, everyone understood the ploy.

Currency variation explains what seems, at first glance, like a sharp rise in prices in early thirteenth century Assisi. A piece of land which cost one unit around 1180 cost seven times as much around 1210 and more than twice 1210’s price around 1225. Land rent rose, too, though not as sharply: they doubled between 1180 and 1210 and continued to rise in the 1220s. Certainly the worth of land was rising, given the general economic development. And such enfranchisement as occurred in Assisi in 1210 with the charter led to greater productivity and therefore an increased value on lands. Yet such considerations do not suffice to explain the rise in prices in Assisi, as well as elsewhere in middle Italy. The explanation is a monetary one. Money was buying less because of the rising percentage of base metal in the coin.

Debasement raised new problems. Come down money sufficed to pay business’ minor exchanges. Another money was needed to conduct major exchanges, the sale of land, say, or the sale of buildings, even though prices were stated in the figures of the working coin. A dual system developed very naturally, for all the old money did not disappear. Bad money drives out good money, Gresham’s Law puts it, indicating wheere the good money truly goes. (In strict usage, Gresham’s Law supposes only a slight difference in the worth of the currencies, such as in the case of provesinus vetus and provesinus novus in Rome. In fact, the new drove out the old.) Good money certainly withdraws from the quotations of daily pricing. In the early thirteenth century, Venetian coin, called big (grosso) money, was a favored currency of major transactions. In 1252 Florence and Genua produced pure gold coins for the big needs of their businesses. The other monies were called little (piccolo), in contrast to the Venetian. The terminology belonged to daily life in communal Assisi of Francis’ time. Big and little money (good and bad money) greased the gears of Assisi’s economic operations.

We can figure out who sat in the driver’s seat and who hauled the burden of imbalance as the monetary means sought to keep pace with economic reality. In a period of economic expansion, families of means and associations of importance saw to it that the accumulation of the economy’s attainments occurred in their favor. Many ordinary families had some means of production and consequently did not depend wholly on the market. On the other hand, salaried laborers took their wages in “little” money. A salary is a fixed compensation for services. Whenever incertitude and hesitation shook the means of exchange, the monetary development jerked further into debasement. At the end of the line, there where the wrinkles finally iron out, with no opportunity to duck or pass on the vilification of the system, the laborers bore the brunt of disequilibrium. In Assisi, in the early thirteenth century, they were paid in a coin the shadow of its former self. It got passed to them as substance and emerged as shadow when they went to market. Laborers knew they worked on others’ terms, as remains the case till unions, and it showed in their language for the money. They were paid little money. The two-tiered monetary systems, one coursing freely and the other closely guarded, made big money the arbiter of monetary value even as it gathered in the coffers of the secure and the powerful; and the system dispensed generously the little money to conduct daily and minor exchanges, both of goods and of services. In effect, little money camouflaged big money while it did its dirty work. The work was dirty, for the system bestowed its favor in a highly selective manner.

It is worth making two points before passing to the Franciscan connection. One, monetary realities fascinated the Assisians as they preoccupy people today. Today, a simple elderly woman knows where her money is coming from and she knows what it can and cannot do. She knows it practically. She is not up on the intricate debates about social security. She knows what day her check is due, how much it is and what she can expect to eat and wear in the time ahead. She has no desire to throw her feeble weight behind a sound income policy, in the interest of social justice and an end to inflation, because from her point of view it is hopeless. Economically she knows what she has to know. Beyond that is art. People in Assisi knew as much. They knew more, for public life did not have then the overwhelming complexity as it has now. When Innocent III was trying to withdraw a foreign coin to favor his own, he forbade people to weigh the old one; they were to turn it in for compensation. The people knew what was going on. They knew that they were scrambled for little money. They understood their position within the economic structure. They knew how they were dealt with by the monetary system. As a social entity, Assisi rested upon its economic practices as they depended heavily on properly pliable money. The Italian commune did itself in finally when the play with monies became outrageously unjust, instead of being normally unjust, as most people expect such things to be.

Two, Francis and his friends had a broader and more incisive knowledge economic matters and of the ways of money than did the run of Assisians. At least several of them-Francis himself, Bernard surely-had dealt in what was, for Assisi, high finance. The brother remained within the area of Assisi’s rule after they “left al to follow Jesus.” As a consequence, they used in a new and sharper way what they had already known about Assisi’s economic system. They no longer suffered the constraints of proper social behavior, whereby one manages to ignore truths with which one cannot deal- as today we do not confront the public neglect of cities and the ensuing injustice done the cities’economically weak populations, or the frightful injustices done small countries by American economic interests. Once quit of Assisi, the men could face fully the dark side of Assisian life. To the dark side belonged Assisi’s monetary habits, an important subsystem of the city’s organization. (To Assisi belonged a leper population as well, the existence of which we would hardly suspect if the lepers did not figure so unavoidably in Franciscan history.)The brothers’ knowledge quickened usefully when they accorded it a reflective role in their elaboration of a distinctive Franciscan economics.

Inevitably then, given their own system for covering their needs, Francis and his brothers soon worked out an explicit position on money. They had excluded it from the start (Chapter Seven, basic document). Yet, of course, it wiggled its way back into their lives in spite of its exclusion on principles. Assisi’s economic system sought complete control over all economic activity in its sphere, and had money as one of its choice tools of control. Consequently the early Franciscans worked out a statement on money and inserted it into their basic document. It has come down to us as Chapter Eight.

III Interpretation of Chapter Eight

In the statement Francis and his brothers exclude the dealings of money. They exclude the position in which the laborer is put when he accepts coins in exchange for his services. They exclude as well the encouragement given money by using it to get clothes and books. The ruling first arose, however, as Chapters Seven and Eight make clear, when brothers received compensation for their work. A man who took money for his work in Assisi assented to the economic system with its monetary practices and to a position of dependency and of unjust discrimination within it. The salaried were the ones who were picking up the slack of monetary disequilibrium. People knew that. They knew they could do nothing about it, too, save starve. As soon as they called the money piccolo, little, as against the grosso, big and still scrambled for it, they designated themselves as little and under control. They submitted to the terms of exchange and subsequently to the identification which the ruling cliques pushed on them through their monetary instrument. By taking little money for labor they acquiesced to social insignificance and not merely to a bad monetary deal. Yet what could they do?

Francis and his brothers did something about it. They did not accept the logic of system support and of discrimination into which the little money enticed them. They refused the communication which occurred on the occasion of monetary dealings. They admonished one another to be wary of slipping back into Assisi’s logic of avarice and evil, for they surrendered therewith the new logic of “the kingdom of heaven.” The wellsprings of the movement, of its commitment, logic, and hope lay in the rejection of all which Assisi represented, first phase in a life lived freely before god. When they called the money worth no more than stones, the exaggeration was slight. The money was debased. Yet by the constant instruction of the socioeconomic system, by the pressures which the important people in Assisi brought to bear, it was worth sweating and conniving for. The avarice and evil within the system conspired to blind the people who had to make do with it and who, as they themselves believed, had no choice anyway. The brothers urged one another to remain strong against seduction into the social lie about the coin’s significance.

Francis and his friend did not withdraw from the exchanges of labor for all that. They stayed in the almshouses and leprosaria, in the workshops and large households of Assisi, doing the services which brought them the necessities of life. In one of his essays on the sociology of religion, Max Weber explains the denial of the world intrinsic to a religious brotherhood’s proscription of money. Weber saw a clear contradiction between religion and rationality. As soon as a group sought union with God, Weber argued, the group abandoned the rational procedures of a social system. The difficulty lies in the Weber’s concept of world. The Franciscans rejected the real world as defined by Assisians. They rejected the lie and the injustice of little money, which Assisians accepted and clutched as real money. In asserting the services in which they were engaged, The Franciscans said a clear yes to the human function of their efforts. They not only did the work for lepers and Assisi’s other hardluckers. They did so without the distance of professional service; they got caught up in the lepers’ dramas, and in the face of others’ needs they readily abrogated their careful procedures. Francis and his friends were there. They just kept outside the malice, which was approved and institutionalized. Weber simply did not see the possibility of thorough alternatives.

To interpret Chapter Eight generally, we must recall the two contexts within which Francis and his brothers learned, formulated and carried out the injunction to see and avoid the malice of money. We have reported on one context when reporting on money in Assisi in the early thirteenth century. Communal Assisi, an ambitious city-state newly arrived at a redefinition of social reality (charter of 1210), intended to prosper economically. It depended on the monies which had evolved since the twelfth century to facilitate the exchange of a varied economy. Who challenged Assisian money challenged therewith Assisi as a socioeconomic system.

The other context is Franciscan economics. From the very start, the Franciscans elaborated their own way of covering their basic needs. This led to their ostracism from Assisi. (And it posed a harrowing question of meaning for Franciscans individually. They met and mastered the challenge of Chapter Nine). As they abided by the logic of their distinctive economics, they had to specify its implications when experience warned them of danger. A danger resided in the ceaseless solicitations of money. Assisi had to promote its identification of subject laborers and lesser folk who lived within the its pale, and money was a key instrument in the process. Far from being a neutral means of exchange, money involves the rules and interests of the validating social system. The Franciscans could not leave Assisi and still handle its coin. Chapter arose within context of Franciscan economics. It depends on Chapter Seven and got wedged in between Seven and Nine. The three chapters form the essential documentation on the economics of the early thirteenth century movement.

Given the real world in which Francis and his brothers lived and struggled, Chapter Eight matches a subsystem of Assisian economics with a subsystem of Franciscan economics. With regularity and for reasons, systematically that is, Francis and his brothers did not handle money. They acted this way within the ceaseless negotiation of personal and group identity which went on as they worked and lived on the hunk of earth Assisian called its own. They did not stand aside and sniff at the grubbiness of labor and its pay, for they worked in leprosaria and elsewhere for their living. They saw an evil system and indicted it. They sat at the table of historical conflict and handwrestled with the malice deep within any system where people live off people and say that is the way it has to be.

Source: Haversack: A Franciscan Review. Vol.4, No. 2. December, 1980

Response to “Franciscans and Money” by David Flood

Paddy Quick

I wonder whether the author of the article placed too much emphasis on the debasement of coinage and, more generally, monetary policy, rather than on the basic concept of money itself.

1. Opposition to the use of money as a means of exchange.

“Classic” feudal production relations specified the obligations of serfs in very concrete terms – the performance of labor (of hedging, ditch-clearing, harvesting, etc.) on the lord’s fields (his demesne), the handing over of specified items such as honey and eggs, on occasions which were similarly identified (the marriage of the lord’s son, the death of the head of a serf family…).

Young men and women were required to leave their parent’s household and become part of the household of their lords, there to perform the labor of “kitchen” gardening and household maintenance. The “charge” for milling of grain took the form of the physical withholding of a portion of the grain that the serfs took to the miller to be ground into (usable) flour.

The relationship between lord and serf could be seen in two ways. On the one hand, it was a relationship of exploitation. The wealth of the lords was the result of the labor of serfs, and the various and complicated ways in which their production was appropriated by their lords, could be seen as little more than ingenious mechanisms of theft. The wealth of the mighty few contrasted with the poverty of the powerless many, and St. Francis knew which side he was on!

On the other hand, feudal society was understood by its members as one of potentially harmonious relations between people in the stations to which they had been appointed/born. Injustice was conceived as a violation of this harmony. Thus the lord who did not provide for his serfs in times of hardship was unjust, but his everyday life of luxury was acceptable. It would be many centuries before we would see this order challenged, and I do not think that St. Francis was that far ahead of his time. The saintly path was one which carved out a space, within his society, for devotion to God. But St. Francis also confronted the material world in which he lived, and that was what made him a rebel.

Within the feudal framework, justice meant the establishment/re-establishment of harmony. The path forward lay in revision of the system of obligations that defined feudal society, and the poor sought their worldly salvation by appealing to a mythical past in which lords were just, rather than one in which there were no lords at all.

The growing use of money threatened this vision of justice. Money insinuates its way into relationships, it disrupts them. The seller obtains money from his transfer of goods to others. He is now “free” to use this money in any way he wishes. His transaction with the seller of the commodity he purchases is similarly a new and disconnected event. Where are the obligations, of the rich and poor alike, in this monetized process?

The intervention of money in this exchange of the products of human labor is profoundly disruptive. It seems to deny the system of responsibilities that lies, or should lie, at the core of human society. In accepting money for services performed (and I suspect that the passage quoted meant the receipt of money from the sale, not the purchase, of books and clothing) the recipient was thereby relieved of any responsibilities to receive specific services in return for his or her work. He could choose how to spend his money, using it, for example, for the purchase of commodities produced by unknown people and sold by merchants engaged in long-distance trade. To make a payment of money similarly disconnected the person who had purchased a good or service from the obligation to return that service in any specific person-to-person, form.

St. Francis’s exemption for lepers is understandable if put in this context. The infirm were unable to participate in this exchange of services, and their families were incapable of supporting adult dependents. The disaster of leprosy required the pooling of resources in any form possible. It was precisely the lack of definable responsibility, or more precisely, the inability of this system of personal responsibility to cope with tragedy on this scale, that necessitated the “anonymous” collection of resources in the form of money.

Money serves to break the personal connection between people. The physical form of money is unimportant. To today’s economists, it seems irrelevant whether a person sells the extra eggs she has produced and uses the money to purchase a milk pail or whether, instead, the egg producer and the maker of the milk pail simply agree to share what they have produced. Similarly it seems irrelevant whether the dependent producer, as a serf, performs two days of labor on his lord’s demesne in recognition of their respective ranks in this hierarchical society and the serf’s right to a small portion of land, or hands over money in the form of rent. In feudal society, the commutation of labor services into a monetary payment did not fundamentally change the relationship between lord and serf, but it did introduce a distance between the two. Much later, as capitalism developed, the transformation of this monetary payment into the capitalist form of rent would free the serf/peasant from obligation to lord at the same time as it freed the lord from any responsibility for the wellbeing of “his” people. But this was far in the future, and there is no agreement as to the role of money in this transition.

Did St. Francis oppose the substitution of monetary relations for personal obligations? This seems to me more likely than that he was merely concerned about the possible exploitative result of the debasement of coinage.

2. Opposition to money as a store of value.

There is a second aspect of money, which was also important. Money can be stored. St. Francis may have seen the significance of the passage: “Lay up for yourself from yourself treasures that moth cannot consume nor rust decay….”Goods can, of course, be stored. A full granary was a welcome protection against the threat of famine. But there is a limit to how much grain it makes sense to store. Rats will eventually eat it, and mold will consume it. The usefulness of gold lies in its freedom from decay. But for that very reason, its accumulation seems unlimited. St. Francis was far from the world of capitalism, where mindless growth and accumulation of capital dominate the entire economic system, but he was well aware of the dangers of the “miser,” the worshiper of wealth. I think he would have enjoyed the ways in which Karl Marx revealed the human labor that was hidden in this congealed form of value.

It is today’s people who make a fetish of money or capital, so it would be foolish to criticize the rebels of many centuries ago for a supposed failure to distinguish between the form of money and it social significance. If St. Francis spurned any contact with money, we must assume that he recognized its corrosive effects on the people of his society.

This response was written especially for this collection.

Caring for the Sick

Leprosy is a dreaded disease, also called Hansen's Disease, which deforms and eventually decays the body and is highly contagious. It still exists in the world, but is controllable in our culture. In thirteenth-century Assisi leprosy was the most feared of afflictions. To contain its spread, lepers were removed from society. They were outcasts, and were to be considered "dead." There were even religious rituals banning them Eom the community, to go to their deaths. Civil laws forbade lepers to come into proximity with anyone, even their own family members.

Francis, Clare and their early companions went to work among the lepers. This was a great conversion for the young Francis, who had had complete disgust and fear of lepers. But the drive to take risks for the sake of extending brotherhood and sisterhood to all, especially the most abandoned, prompted him to begin an organized service of tending to the lepers to attempt healing the physical, spiritual and social infirmities which they suffered.

A moving story from The Little F1owers of St. Francis tells of a man who was not only terribly ill with leprosy but also abused his caregivers verbally and physically. "[H]e not only attacked any of the friars who nursed him with foul language and shot insults at

them like arrows, but what was worse, he would also whip and wound them in various ways." He also blasphemed against God, Jesus and the Virgin Mary. The brothers refused to take care of him and decided to abandon him. At this Francis took over the man's care himself, "Saying, dear son, I will take care of you since you are not satisfied with the others." The man demanded, "I want you to wash me all over, because I smell so bad that I cannot stand it myself." As Francis washed him, the man's leprosy began to heal and he started to cry tears of release and repentance. Through the loving care of Francis he was cured body and soul and died soon afterwards in a holy state.

Some see importance in this piece of Franciscan history for those working today with persons with AIDS, the hungry or homeless, people in refugee camps, and victims of ethnic conflicts. Others see in it messages about our own system of health care in the United States and its inaccessibility to many. For others, it is a story of heroism and self- giving help to others, less dramatic but not unlike what we have witnessed in New York City since September 11, 2001.

‘The Lord Led Me Among Them’

William J. Short

Francis uses the word ‘sweetness’ for God: ‘You are all our sweetness’; God is ‘delectable and sweet’. 1 In the Testament, Francis talks about his first taste of this sweetness, a savouring of the presence of God:

While I was in sin, it seemed very bitter to me to see lepers. The Lord led me among them and I showed mercy to them. And when I left them that which seemed bitter to me was changed into sweetness of soul and body. 2

Arnaldo Fortini, the former mayor of Assisi, assembled dramatic evidence from city archives to document the life of people with leprosy during Francis’ lifetime. In those documents we learn that town officials, accompanied by a priest, went door to door at regular intervals to examine people of the town for signs of the disease. White blotches on the skin served as evidence that a person was infected. At that moment a whole life ended: the lebbroso had to leave family and home, possessions and security, to be ‘enclosed’ in the hospital of San Lazzaro dell’Arce, the leprosarium outside the town, on the plain below, near the old chapel of the Porziuncola. Dedicated to Saint Lazarus, this hospital’s name evoked both Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead (John 11) and Lazarus ‘the poor man’, ‘full of sores’ who wanted to eat the scraps that fell from the rich man’s table (Luke 16: 19-31).

Men and women with the infection, the infetti and infette, of every age and social rank, walked in a procession resembling a funeral cortege to their ‘resting place’ in the valley. The priest celebrated for them a type of funeral for the living in the hospital’s chapel, sprinkling them with dirt from the adjacent cemetery. He declared them ‘dead to the world’ while promising that God would be merciful to them, the Church would pray for them, and the charity of townspeople would support them (their properties were confiscated by the town and used as an endowment to support the hospital).

They had to wear a distinctive habit of ash-colored cloth, and warn others of their presence by sounding a wooden clapper like the one used in churches on Good Friday to replace the sound of bells. They could never touch food that was not placed in their own bowl; they could not draw water themselves from streams, wells or fountains; they could not even speak to others unless they first placed themselves down-wind from them. So great was the fear of contagion that a person with leprosy, discovered with in the city walls after curfew had sounded, could be killed on the spot with impunity. 3

Francis’ Experience of God Among Lepers

‘When I left them, that which seemed bitter to me was changed into sweetness of soul and body’: Francis was recalling at the end of his life events of twenty years earlier. He uses a word for God’s presence, ‘sweetness’, to describe being among the lepers and working for them. Why would he speak in this way? Francis experienced among them characteristics of God. In Jesus God gives up all ‘property’, even divine status, relying on alms and the care of others: in his birth among the poor, his life and travel among people considered of no account, in his suffering and dying, naked and shunned, even by close friends and relatives. The people with leprosy were ‘brother Christians’, special people, ‘bearing the meaning’ of who God is: the humble, poor Lover. This helps us to understand Francis’ words:

[The brothers] must rejoice when they live among people [who are considered to be] of little worth and who are looked down upon, among the poor and the powerless, the sick and the lepers, and the beggars by the wayside…[The Lord Jesus Christ] was a poor man and a transient and lived on alms, He and the Blessed Virgin and His disciples.4

To be among such people is to be in the community of Jesus, and among those by the wayside, those who had contracted leprosy were especially dear to him.

Service to the lepers was the first work of the brothers and leper houses provided a home for the friars. When he was travelling, Francis would visit lepers along the way: ‘He was riding on an ass when he had to pass through Borgo San Sepolcro…he wanted to rest at a certain house of lepers.’ 5

Following the Footsteps of Jesus

In his care for people with Hansen’s disease, Francis was following that example of Jesus that he knew from the gospel. Jesus calls others, after his wilderness retreat, to conversion, to repent, to change their lives. To show the effects of this turning to God Jesus does something specific: he heals people who are suffering from disease, both physical disease and sickness of spirit (Matthew 4:23-4). Later in the Gospel, Matthew says, ‘When he came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him, and a leper came to him,’ whom Jesus healed (Matthew 8:1-3)

The special role of people with leprosy appears in the exceptions that Francis makes where they are concerned, even in the Rule. Despite his strict prohibitions about receiving money, he makes special provisions for one group of people: the brothers ‘may accept money for urgent needs of the lepers’. 6He places in his list of the ‘companions of Jesus’ the sick, those who beg, and lepers, including them with the Lord Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the disciples among those who live by alms. The brothers should ‘rejoice’ to be in their company.

In his own writings Francis does not speak of the voice from the crucifix at San Damiano telling him to ‘rebuild the church.’ He never refers to the marks on his body (the stigmata), which others associated with his profound compassion for the sufferings of Christ. Rather Francis speaks about people with leprosy as the context for his conversion to the gospel way of life, the practical experience of ‘being with’, them, and serving them. Here he found the suffering members of Christ’s Body, and beginning with this experience he participated in the passion of Christ.

Penitents served in the leper hospital of Assisi already, so Francis ‘did mercy’ most likely in the midst of other brother and sister penitents who had taken on this service at the risk of contracting the disease themselves (a widespread fear at the time). To go ‘among the lepers’ meant exposing himself to risk, for the sake of others considered ‘dead to the world’. There may even be reasons to suggest that Francis’ multiple illnesses in later life may have derived from infection with the tubercular form of Hansen’s disease. And during his lifetime, or shortly thereafter, a place for the brothers who contracted the disease was established at San Lazzaro del Valloncello, outside Assisi.7

Leprosy in Early Franciscan Documents

In the first Life of Francis, Thomas of Celano recounts how Francis went ‘to be among the lepers, and lived with them’, ‘serving their every need out of the love of God’. He washed them, dressed their sores, ‘as he himself says in his Testament’.8 To return to his first fervor, even at the end of his life he wanted to return among the lepers.9

In the second collection of stories assembled by Thomas, some twenty years later, the emphasis has shifted to the miraculous. Rather than emphasizing the physical labor of working in a leper hospital, Thomas recounts the story of a single leper whom Francis meets on the plain below Assisi. This is the famous scene of Francis as he kisses the leper. After he has given him some money, along with a kiss, Francis mounts his horse. Looking around (‘though the plain lay open on every side’) he could see no sign of the leper.10

We may note here that care for people with Hansen’s disease was no longer a primary work of the brothers by the 1240s, when Thomas composed his second text. This may help us to understand the emphasis on a miraculous deed, rather than the practical, day-to-day contact with leprosy that characterized the early days of the movement.

By the 1260s, when Bonaventure composed his Major Life of Francis, the importance of caring for people with leprosy is further diminished. In describing the same scene, that of Francis’ encounter with the disappearing leper, Bonaventure casts the whole account in terms of an exercise in virtue. In order to fulfill his desire for perfection, and to become a ‘soldier of Christ’ (2 Timothy 2:3), Francis had first to ‘conquer himself’. For this reason, he kisses the leper after giving him money, after which he could see the leper nowhere.11

Memories of the ‘good old days’ of the early Franciscan movement are presented in the Legend of Perugia. This text, also called the Assisi Compilation, seems intent to offer an alternative to Bonaventure’s ‘official’ life of the founder. And here the roles of the lepers in the daily, lived experience of spirituality and contemplation among the brothers has an outstanding importance. As it describes life at Porziuncola, which Francis considered as a place for the contemplative life, people with leprosy seem to be quite at home. There, Brother James ‘sometimes brought several lepers to the Church of St. Mary’ from the leper hospital, since ‘in those days the brothers lived in leper-hospitals.12

These ‘Brother Christians’ (Francis’ name for people with the disease) participated in the life of Francis and the brothers in this prototype of the Franciscan hermitages: the brothers ‘preserved its holiness by praying there continually night and day and by observing silence there.’13 The tradition of Franciscan contemplation began in this precise historical context, outside the urban center, on the margins of society, among the despised and feared minority of ‘ Brother’ and ‘Sister Christians.’

Jordan of Giano, in his Chronicle composed in the 1260s, makes frequent reference to the importance of lepers in the early fraternity. Their homes were places for meetings and lodging for the brothers. The identification of Francis’ followers with the lepers even went to what Jordan considered an extreme. He makes reference to the founding of a religious community for people with leprosy, while Francis was in the Middle East:

Brother John Conpella, after he had gathered together a large crowd of lepers, both men and women, withdrew from the Order and wanted to be the founder of a new Order. He wrote a Rule and presented himself with his followers before the Holy See to have it confirmed.14

Brother Jordan’s objection to Brother John’s initiative does not seem to arise from any question about sharing in the lives of lepers, but rather from John’s decision to leave the Order of the brothers and seek ‘letters from the Roman Curia’, which Francis explicitly forbade in his Testament.15

In 1223 or 1224, the first Chapter meeting of the brothers in Germany was held, ‘on the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Speyer at the leprosarium outside the walls’.16 Brother Jordan himself traveled with a group of brothers to begin a Franciscan settlement at Erfurt. They arrived in November, and ‘since it was winter and not a time for building’, the brothers stayed ‘in the house of a priest who was in charge of the lepers outside the walls.’17

As older brothers like Jordan looked back to the early years of their fraternity they remembered clearly that the context for much of their early experience of the origins of the Franciscan tradition was that of communities of people with leprosy. The gatherings of brothers, their places of prayer, their living quarters were with the lepers, their ‘Brother Christians’. But this was also a kind of nostalgia, looking back, in Jordan’s case, to a period forty years earlier. As the brothers exchanged working and living in leper hospices foe new types of ministry in larger urban churches, the early experiences gradually became an example of spiritual heroism to be admired, but not necessarily imitated.

The care for those suffering from leprosy was not, however, forgotten. Though the Lesser Brothers and Sisters of Penance expanded their role of caring for the sick in hospitals for lepers and others. Toward the close of the thirteenth century these Franciscan penitents, following the example of Francis himself, made their service of the sick a fundamental expression of Franciscan spirituality, seeing in their suffering the presence of Christ.

Source: Poverty and Joy- The Franciscan Tradition. William J. Short, O.F.M. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books,1999.

Peacemaking and Nonviolence

The legend of Francis and the wolf is a favorite among many Franciscans, and is frequently depicted in artwork about St. Francis. It is a story about conflict and peacemaking with the villain, the wolf of Gubbio. Peacemaking is highlighted among the characteristics of St. Francis, as we have often heard in the prayer “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,” which, by the way, St. Francis didn’t write. (His prayers did not include a “me” – only a “You”). But the “instrument of peace” designation does fit him and he is held in esteem across cultural and religious lines as a model of non-violent peacemaking.

Francis lived during the time of the Crusades. During the Fifth Crusade he journeyed to Damietta, Egypt where he crossed the Crusader lines to meet the Sultan and converse with him. He thought that face to face dialogue might avert fighting. Reportedly, he and the Sultan came to respect each other as brothers. The fight was not prevented, and the Crusaders stormed the city. However, the experience moved Francis deeply. When he returned to Italy he insisted that his lay followers in the tertiary Order of Penance refuse to take up arms. This prohibition was written into the first formal copy of their rule in 1221.

He instructed his friars to begin every encounter with a greeting of peace as they traveled about. This was an example of his following Jesus’ teachings literally. From his youthful desire to become a knight, he matured into a model of non-violence and peacemaking during a bellicose era.

Some believe that the story of the wolf of Gubbio, presented and explicated here by the Franciscan scholar Jean Francois Godet, is an allegorical account of Francis’ visit to the Sultan. In any case, he story of the wolf of Gubbio has his message and method of non-violent peacemaking at its heart.

More Than A Legend: The Wolf of Gubbio

Jean François Godet-Calogeras

There is a page in early Franciscan literature that fits perfectly the theme of nonviolence: the story of Francis and the wolf of Gubbio. Francis of Assisi has been for centuries universally known, admired and liked for his ability to speak to the birds and to befriend a wolf. Famous as they are, those stories are, nevertheless, usually considered just legends expressing Francis' kindness toward every creature, including fierce beasts. There is of course much more to them, and that is what we would like to offer Haversack's readers.

Where do we find the story of the wolf of Gubbio?

We have only two medieval documents reporting the story of the wolf of Gubbio, the Fioretti di san Francesco and the Actus beati Francisci et sociorum eius. In both documents our story is told in chapter 21.

The Fioretti are better known and have been translated many times in many languages. In English, they are the Little Flowers of Saint Francis. The Fioretti are a collection of beautiful stories about Francis in which the supernatural has been greatly emphasized. They were written, in Italian, by an anonymous Franciscan friar toward the end of the fourteenth century.

The Actus represent the main ancestor of the Fioretti. They date from the 1330s, when they were written in Latin by a certain Brother Ugolino in Central Italy.

Interestingly, none of the early biographies of Francis tell the story of Francis and the wolf of Gubbio, a city not too far from Assisi. Thomas of Celano, Bonaventure, and the Legend of Perugia relate how Francis freed the people of Greccio, a small town in the Rieti valley between Assisi and Rome, from a plague of wolves and hail. But, even though they mention the city of Gubbio on various occasions because several events of Francis' life happened there, they ignored the story of the wolf, deliberately or not.

Although the Actus and the Fioretti cannot be considered as early documents since they were written well over a hundred years after Francis' days, they depend on an oral tradition that does go back to Francis' companions. One can wonder, then, whether the first hagiographers had ever heard a story like the wolf of Gubbio, or for some reasons did not judge it worthy to be included in their work. That should not surprise us: nowadays old stories about Francis and Clare that were never put in writing can still be heard from Umbrian people.

(Bibliographic note. The Actus beati Francisci et sociorum eius were first published by the famous French Franciscan scholar Paul Sabatier in Paris in 1902. Since then more manuscripts have been discovered. A new edition, prepared by Jacques Cambell OFM, was published in Assisi in 1988. So far the Actus have never been translated into any modern language. The reference edition for the Fioretti is: I Fioretti di san Francesco e d'alquanti suoi santi compagni published by Benvenuto Bughetti OFM and Riccardo Pratesi OFM, Florence, 1959. The best known English translation was published by Raphael Brown and can be found in Saint Francis of Assisi. Omnibus of Sources. Chicago, 1973, p. 1267-1530.)

The story

Once upon a time when our holy father Francis was still alive happened in the city of Gubbio something wonderful and worth being frequently remembered... Here is the story, not strictly translated, but rather retold according to the Actus version.

The event took place around 1220. Francis happened to come to Gubbio (which was not unusual if we read the early documents) at a time when there was a conflict between the people of the city and a wolf. The wolf was so hungry that it would even venture near the town looking for something to eat. Some animals had already been devoured; some individuals had even perished. The people were in a state of siege. Terrorized, they would barely get out of the town.

The wolf is a fascinating creature, admired and feared at the same time. Throughout ages and cultures it has been a symbol of wildness, something that most people have a hard time with. That is probably why wolves have been - and still are - hunted with a sort of rage by men. The wolf is seen as a threat. For most people the relationship to the wolf is conflictual and competitive: the wolf has to be outdone. And the only way to outdo the wolf is to kill it. That perception is mostly irrational.

The people of Gubbio were not different: they were terrified and wanted to get rid of that wolf by killing it. But, even with their weapons they had not been successful.

Enter Francis. Because he is a disciple of Jesus and wants to live the Gospel, Francis is a peacemaker: "Blessed are those who work for peace! They will be known as God's children" (Mt 5:9). Francis feels for the people of Gubbio. So he decides to do something for them: he will meet the wolf. To do that, he has to go out, he has to leave the security the city is enjoying inside the walls. The people warn Francis not to do it because it is too dangerous, and because, of course, the wolf is mean and will kill him.

However, Francis is a very determined man who gets his strength not from weapons, but from his faith. He knows that we are all, human beings as well as animals, creatures of the same God. No need for weapons. Francis does not believe in weapons. He will meet the wolf as a creature meets another creature, keeping in mind the Creator.

So there goes Francis, with his companion - notice that Francis has always at least one companion with him: the Franciscan journey is a communal thing, not an ego trip. As always happens in such circumstances, the fearful people must see what is happening, expecting of course a confrontation, maybe some blood... They climb wherever they can, on the walls, on the roofs, on the trees, to see what is going to happen between the good Francis and the mean wolf.

They will not be disappointed. Francis and his companion have not been walking long outside the city when the wolf shows up running toward them, looking fierce with its mouth wide open. The brothers are not terrified. Francis simply makes a sign of the cross. The wolf slows down and closes its mouth. Then Francis addresses the wolf: "Come here, brother wolf, and on behalf of Christ I want you not to hurt me or my companion." The witnesses cannot believe it! The wolf comes and quietly lays down at Francis' feet, as gentle as a lamb.

"Brother wolf," says Francis, "you have been doing a lot of terrible and nasty things in this area; you have been ruthlessly killing and devouring God's creatures, not only animals, but even human beings made to God's image. Now the whole city is against you and wants you dead. But I want to make peace between you, brother wolf, and those people, so that from now on you do not hurt anybody anymore, and the people and their dogs stop hounding you down."

The wolf, moving its body, its tail, its ears, its head, clearly shows it totally agrees with Francis. So Francis goes on: "Brother wolf, since you agree with that peace, I promise you that I will have the people of that city pay attention to your needs for the rest of your life. For I realize that all the harm you did, you did it because you were awfully hungry. So, brother wolf, I will get you that favor, but I want you to promise me that from now on you will do no harm to anybody, animal or human being, ever again. Do you promise?"

Again, the wolf nods, showing its agreement. "Brother wolf," Francis says then, "I want you to give me a mark of your word, so that I can truly believe that you promise." And as Francis extends his hand, the wolf lifts its right paw and puts it gently in Francis' to give him the sign he was asking for. "Brother wolf," says Francis, "in the name of Jesus Christ, I now want you to come with me. Be not afraid, we are going to make that peace in the name of the Lord God."

Trusting Francis, the wolf follows him back to the city. The people who have been watching cannot believe it, of course. They quickly broadcast the news, and it does not take long before the whole town gathers together on public square where Francis and the wolf have arrived. Francis addresses the crowd inviting them to change the way they live. The fact that a single animal is able to spread such a huge and general terror is a sign that something is not right. "Listen, my dear friends," he tells them, "our brother wolf that you see here in front of you promised me and gave me a sign it wants to make peace with you. It will never hurt you anymore if you, in turn, promise to pay attention to its needs every day. And I can personally vouch that the wolf will steadfastly observe that peace agreement."

The people of Gubbio do not hesitate and promise to feed the wolf every day. Then in front of everybody Francis turns to the wolf and asks: "And you, brother wolf, do you also promise to observe that peace agreement and not to hurt anybody, animal or human being?" In answer to that, the wolf kneels, nods, and clearly indicates with motions of its body, tail and ears that it will observe the agreement. "Brother wolf," continues Francis, "as you gave me your word when we were out there, please show me again in the presence of those people that you truly promise and that I can trust you." Again the wolf lifts its right paw and puts it in Francis' hand.

The people are flabbergasted. They explode in joy. They thank Francis. They praise Jesus Christ who sent him. The peace between the wolf and the people of Gubbio is wonderful, a real miracle.

According to the tradition, the peace agreement was truly observed. The wolf never hurt anybody again. The people made sure it had always enough to eat. Even the dogs were friendly with it. After two years, the wolf died of old age and was regretted by all the people.

The story's meaning in Franciscan history

It would be difficult to interpret the silence of the thirteenth century documents since we do not know if their authors were aware of the story of Francis and the wolf in Gubbio. But we can see the meaning and the importance the story had for the authors of the Actus and the Fioretti. The latter has a particular taste for the wondrous, the marvelous, as is stated in the beginning of the text: "This book contains several little flowers, miracles and devout examples of Christ's glorious little poor, sir saint Francis, and of some of his holy companions." Through his legendary tales the author of the Fioretti wants to edify. History proved him successful. The Fioretti have carried Franciscan virtues throughout the ages.

Rather than focusing on miraculous aspects of events, the author of the Actus is more down-to-earth. When he tells his stories, it seems that he wants to teach models of action, guidelines of Franciscan behavior and attitudes in particular situations. That is probably why the Actus speak more to us in these days.

The story's meaning for us Franciscans and for justice and peace's friends

Should we take the story of the wolf of Gubbio as historical? Did it really happen? As it has been written? This is probably not the right approach. Let us remember that scientific and rational expression is not the one and only form of expression. It is rather modern and western. People in medieval Europe also had other ways of expression, using symbols, allegories, metaphors, parables and hyperboles to transmit a message.

The story of the wolf of Gubbio is the story of a conflict between two parties, in which Francis gets involved. Through the events and Francis' intervention, the author elaborates a whole theory of conflict resolution, or peacemaking. As Franciscans and friends of peace, we are deeply interested in such theory to inspire our own action.

The elements of Franciscan involvement in conflict resolution

Now that I have retold the story of Francis and the wolf, I would like to underline a few elements that I consider a typology of Franciscan involvement in conflict resolution or peacemaking.

Facing a conflict, we first need to reach out and get involved. After listening to the people of Gubbio and their complaint, Francis felt concerned, and decided to go and meet the other party. He refused to condemn and demonize the wolf before meeting it. The personal involvement is clear. Every conflict somewhat affects the whole of human kind because it affects the common good. Individualism is a delusion; we are journeying together in this world. We may not be responsible for the decisions the others make, but we are responsible for the interpersonal atmosphere and climate which may affect those decisions.

The second element is to be unarmed. Using weapons is violent, and violence cannot bring a real solution. Bearing weapons is a threat and calls for another threat in return. Weapons and violence are a spiral that simply needs to be stopped somewhere, some time, by someone. It is far from being easy. Nonviolence requires courage, strength and wisdom. It also requires community. Væ soli, woe is the lonely! We need companions. Francis went to meet the wolf without weapon, but with a companion.

The next element is to keep God in the center. Not to get some magic or supernatural power, but to remember that we are not on top, we are not in control, we do not own this world. We are part of a wonderful creation, and wonderfully called to take care of it, enjoy it and share it together with respect. That is the common good. It is not ours, it is for everyone of us.

The following element is a consequence of the previous one and is at the core of the Franciscan movement: we are all brothers and sisters, and we must deal with one another as such. Any creature, no matter what, deserves to be approached as brother or sister, that is, as someone we would hate to hurt or lose forever.

There is then place for what is deeply needed for true conflict resolution: forgiveness and reconciliation from both parties. Francis reconciled the wolf with the people of Gubbio after which he reconciled the people of Gubbio with the wolf. In a conflict there are no good and no bad ones; there are just parties that are apart for some reasons. There is a need for mutual forgiveness to get back on the common journey. There is a need for reconciliation to journey together again without fear and hatred.

There is also a need for a change, however, and this is the ultimate element in peacemaking. Conflicts arise mostly from unjust situations that need to be identified and corrected. Francis realized that the wolf's rage was coming from hunger. And yet the wolf had the right to eat as much as the people of Gubbio who had plenty. He convinced the people of Gubbio that it was just - hence in their interest also - to share their food with brother wolf. If we want to make peace, we must bring justice into the situation. Because we do not make peace, peace flows from justice. If we agree that Franciscans are by nature peacemakers, as are disciples of Christ and other people of good will, then we must admit that working for justice is never an option. If we want peace, we must work for justice.

Conclusion

Conflicts happen in all fields and at all levels. We should not be afraid of them. We should not deny them. But do we learn how to deal with them? We can wonder what the million Franciscans around the world have to say to the "wolves" and to the "people" today. The story of Francis and the wolf of Gubbio offers us both inspiration and lesson.

THE ISSUE OF IMMIGRATION

A STUDY BY

HOLY NAME PROVINCE

PART I

State of the Issue of Immigration

Introduction and Problem Statement

The U.S. has a long history as the destination of refuge and welcome to newcomers. These newcomers may have been fleeing tyranny and oppression, searching for a better life, or just wanting a new adventure. Whatever the reason, America, though sometimes begrudgingly, has been the site of now hope and a new life. In fact it can be undeniably stated that the modem U.S. is a nation made strong through its various phases of immigration Unfortunately, as has happened in times past, a wave of anti-immigration sentiment has manifest itself, particularly since the late 1980's. This sentiment, fueled by the perceptions of "current residents" who feel sometimes rightly but most of time wrongfully threatened by the newcomers, has created a situation where immigrants face ever-higher walls to integration and assimilation into the U.S. society. The new immigrants to the U.S. face large legal economic, social and cultural barriers that make it increasingly difficult to add their gifts to the U.S. society. As members of the Catholic Church, and particularly as sharers of the Franciscan tradition, which places a high value on hospitality, this is unacceptable. As U.S. residents, rather living in the U.S. for many or a few generations, this is shortsighted and not in cm own long-term best interest. For the U.S. to continue to be a strong and vibrant nation, it will need to have a sensible immigration policy that works to eliminate the barriers to integration and assimilation.

This statement is designed to continue this conversation from a Christian and Franciscan perspective. The third in a series of statements from the Holy Name Province, it is hoped that a renewed and forward thinking dialogue, with subsequent action, can grow from our faith to bring about the transformative action needed for a better world. You are encouraged to take part in this conversation with openness to the Spirit and the hope of clearer action.

Immigration is and has been Good for the U.S.

The modem U.S. is a nation built through immigration. Less than one percent of the U.S. population can trace their roots in U.S. territory back to the time before Columbus. According to recent U.S. Census figures, (9.5 percent) nearly 1 out of 10 U.S. residents are foreign-born. During the 1990s, the nation's foreign-born population increased nearly four times as fast as that of the native-born population. Overall, there are more than 26 million foreign-born residents out of a total population of 270 million people in the United States. The largest groups are Hispanics and Asian-Pacific Islanders. The number of foreign-born Hispanics grew 34 percent from mid-1990 through mid-1998, to 10.7 million from 8 million. Among Asian and Pacific Islanders, the increase was 6.4 million from 4.6 million in the same period. Foreign-born Asians outnumber native-born Asian Americans, 6.4 million to 4.1 million. The biggest percentage increase of the foreign-born population in the 1990’s was Blacks, whose numbers grew by more than 40 percents to 2.4 million from 1.7 million. During this same time period, the foreign-born population grew by 27.1 percent, nearly four times the 7.1 percent increase in the native population, which increased to 245.1 million from 228.9 million. All of these increases are nearly at the same level to previous times of significant immigration. Thus, it is hard to make a case that there are "too many immigrants coming to the U.S.," at last by historical standards. In fact, the 1998 percentage of ten-percent of the U.S. population as foreign-born is actually less than from the period from 1870 to 1920 when the foreign-born population made up fifteen-percent of the total population.

Immigrants and immigration work to make the United States a healthier and more vibrant nation. They help to keep the level of employment growing. They provide valuable technical and scientific skills. They provide valuable future workers who will help to keep Social Security and Medicare solvent. They provide fresh ideas and bring cultural diversity to the U.S. In any number of ways, newcomers are adding to the life in the U.S., yet they face a number of obstacles and impediments to their integration and assimilation.

Problems and Challenges Faced by Immigrants

Newcomers have always faced a challenge in coming to the U.S. The very process of moving to a new land where you may not have personal contacts, speak the language, or understand the customs is always disconcerting. In past U.S. history, this difficulty also persisted. However, in recent years the barriers and challenges have become higher through a number of factors. Historically, as immigrant communities arrived, in particular from Southern and Eastern Europe, there was an established group of persons who helped in the integration process through mutual aid societies and in particular with the help of the Roman Catholic Church. Currently, there are fewer support networks able to aid newcomers, and the Church is also not as able to fill the gap, though it does work in this effort. With the earlier waves of European immigration, newcomers brought their priests, religious and other support services with them. The majority of the current set of newcomers are arriving from Latin America, Asia, and Africa where the Church is not nearly as established and subsequently unable to send as much of their support. This leaves more for the established Church in the U.S. to do, itself facing a changing dynamic with fewer priests and religious. New strategies and plans are needed to approach the current situation. However, the Church cannot shirk from this responsibility, for not only are these people in need, but also the vast majority of these newcomers are members of the Roman Catholic Church itself. This will be discussed in more detail in the next section.

In addition to the lack of a support network, the result of historical and societal changes, newcomers face a number of other barriers to integration and assimilation into U.S. society. For instance, a greater number of immigrants than was historically the case are split from families in the process of immigration. One member of the family is coming to the U.S. with the intent of establishing themselves and having their family come in due time, However, because of economics and changing legalities mom often than not their family is not allowed into the U.S. One of the largest barriers to integration is families that are split, as ones loyalty and presence is never fully in the U.S., if their family is also not here. Economic issues are another impediment. The majority of immigrants, those not coming with established technical skills, find employment at entry-level jobs, this not new. However, with the current legal and attitudinal resentment towards immigrants, newcomers are forced to endure a greater number of abuses and do not feel that they have any legal recourse. Some unscrupulous employers have cheated and injured several people, thus developing resentments, distrust, and an inability to establish an economic base for integration and assimilation. There are of course language barriers to newcomers as well. Where as historically there were the support networks and communities that allowed newcomers the time to be able to learn English, or at least work while their children learned, these networks as mentioned above do not exist to the same degree. Thus, newcomers are expected to learn English more quickly than was historically so. In addition, without the support networks, people have a more difficult time even finding places to learn English. Obviously English is an important piece to being able to be integrated and assimilated into U.S. society.

All of these barriers and impediments to newcomers more fully joining the U.S. society have been made worse with the passing of recent Federal legislation, in particular, the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The law's major focus was to deter illegal immigration through increased personnel and technological and monetary resources. The law has had a detrimental effect on all immigrants both legal and undocumented. A few examples of the negative results of the law are:

Low-level immigration officials have sent refugees back to their persecutors.

Families have been kept apart by arbitrary income requirements, while others are forced to endure separation for up to 10 years because of status violations,

Families have been torn apart as legal immigrants who had a minor brush with the law decades ago were locked up and/or deported.

There has been a significant increase in the number of persons, including women and children, suffering injury and death along the U.S.-Mexico border as the enforcement has been stepped up.

This law and other anti-immigration sentiment have made it more difficult for newcomers to add their valuable and necessary contribution to the American life. Yet, despite this, people continue to come. We need to ask ourselves, why?

Why Immigrants Come to the U.S.

There are any number of reasons why people currently and historically conic to the U.S. They come to unite their immediate and extended family. They come as refugees from political, social, or religious oppression. They come for economic opportunities and the promise of a more stable economy, as they find that their countries of origin do not have an economy where they can make a living. All of these factors are not all that different than in previous phases of U.S. immigration. The only major difference is that in many cases, the reason for the negative home economy is Western and U.S. trade and foreign policies. With the current levels of global trade, and the corresponding trade support structure, smaller, less-industrialized nations are at a distinct disadvantage. This leads to greater inequality in wealth and income and increases the necessity for migration towards better potential opportunities. As we will see in Part 3- "Action" one of the ways of approaching immigration must be looking at solving long-term economic inequality worldwide.

What Are We Called to Do?

So as we look at the current situation we are faced with the question, what should we as persons of faith do? The U.S. Catholic Bishops, looked at the current context and recently released a statement entitled, Welcoming the Stranger Among Us: Unity in Diversity, (November 2000). In their reflection, they call "all members of the Church ... to prepare themselves to receive the newcomers with a genuine spirit of welcome." They explore a number of ways for this to occur, which will be discussed later, but they do state unequivocally that "We reject the anti-immigrant stance that has become popular in different parts of our country, and the nativism, ethnocentricity, and racism that continue to reassert themselves in our communities." It is in this spirit that we too must enter into deeper understanding of how to develop welcoming communities living the Franciscan spirit of hospitality to its fullest.

The next section of this document explores the theological and spiritual foundations for why we must take such a stance of welcoming. This then builds in the final section, which outlines and offers various action possibilities for our local Churches to make their own. In the end, each of us can be a significant part of the solution to the current challenges faced by the newcomers to the U.S. With these faith-filled efforts we can be a part of the story of America where we help to integrate and assimilate the new immigrants into U.S. society, just as many of our ancestors did as well.

Questions for Reflection

1. What has been your experience with immigration and/or with persons who are immigrants?

2. How prevalent is immigration in your area? Please share examples.

3. Do you think that immigration is overall positive or negative for the U.S.? Why?

4. Are there other barriers, not mentioned, to immigrants being able to more fully join U.S. society?

5. The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act is considered harsh and unfair by many immigrant advocate groups. How should we as members of the Holy Name Province and the American Catholic Church respond to what appears to be unjust legislation?

Resources for Further Study

The National Immigration Forum has a number of resources and background information on immigration and a particular set of resources looking at integration and assimilation. .

To engage in new activities and to become aware of the world in new ways. Immigrants also are building their own churches and introducing new faith practices that compete with or directly influence the religious practices of the native born. Thus, understanding the religious practices and institutions of U.S. immigrants is becoming increasingly important to the understanding of U.S. religious practices and institutions more generally.

According to their 1999 document entitled Faithful Citizenship: Civic Responsibility for a New Millennium, the U.S. bishops have a rationale for the Christian engagement of immigrants. They claim that:

The gospel mandate to love our neighbor and welcome the stranger leads the Church to care for grants, both documented and undocumented. We seek basic protections for immigrants, including due process rights, access to public benefits, and fair naturalization and legalization opportunities. We oppose efforts to stem migration that do not effectively address its root causes and permit the continuation of the political social and economic inequities that cause it.

On November 15, 20M the U.S. Bishops issued the document entitled Welcoming the Stranger Among Us: Unity In Diversity. This document notes the challenges that U.S. Catholics find in the diversity of languages and forms of worship shared by new immigrants and calls all people to respond with openness and a welcoming spa. In the document the U.S. Bishops state:

As Catholics we are called to take concrete measures to overcome the misunderstanding, ignorance, competition, and fear that stand in the way of genuinely welcoming the stranger in our midst and enjoying the communion that is our destiny as Children of God. The path to conversion, communion and solidarity leads to a daily vision of the Lord present and active in the world, especially in the poor, in the stranger, and in the migrant and refugee. Those most in need draw the members of the Church out of their unawareness to a conversion of heart through which they are able to offer a genuine and suitable welcome, to share together as brothers and sisters at the same table, and to work side by side to improve the quality of life for society's most vulnerable members. How are we to respond to this call?

I

B. Biblical Perspective

The Roman Catholic Church is a leading advocate for the rights of immigrants and refugees. The Church bases its advocacy role on its biblical heritage. Many papal documents concerning immigration often refer to key passages in both the Old and New Testaments for spiritual edification.

a. The Pentateuch

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

There are key veins in the Pentateuch which reveal three of its great collections of law: The Book of the Covenant, The Deuteronomistic Code, and the Priestly Texts. They speak deeply of the Israelites' own experiences of being "strangers and aliens" and "captives and migrants" at various times throughout their history.

You will not molest or oppress aliens, for you yourselves were once aliens in the land of Egypt ... You will not oppress the stranger, you know the heart of a stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Exodus 22.-20; 23:9)

When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong... He shall be to you as the native among you and you shall love him as yourself. (Leviticus 19-33-34)

For the Lord, your God ... executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and befriends the alien, feeding and clothing him. So, you too must befriend the alien, for you were once aliens yourselves. (Deuteronomy 10: 1 7-19)

You must not 4iftinge the rights of the foreigner or the orphan. (Deuteronomy 24:17)

Accursed be anyone who violates the rights of the foreigner, the orphan and the widow. (Deuteronomy 27:19)

The motivation included in the wording of these directives is two-pronged. The first is the reminder that God cares for the foreigner as a parent would care for a member of his or her family. Second, the Israelites are asked to reflect on their community experiences and memory of being a minority whose daily destiny was dominated by others. For both reasons, the goal is clear: learn to love the alien residing among, you the way you love yourself and those closest to you.

b. The Exodus Story (Exodus 1:8-2:24; 5:1-23; 12:1-40).

The contemporary application of the Exodus story is that these once-degraded aliens had a one true God that really loved them and wanted them to survive as a people. The God of the Patriarchs not only saved the children of Israel from slavery, but in linking their rescue with the Sinai Covenant (Ex 19-24; 32-34), reinforced the trajectory leading back to the promises to Abraham and Sarah and leading forward to a meaningful national future. The Sinai Covenant was the covenant between God and Israel as a people in which they accept the obligations of the law and in return God promises fidelity, protection, and deliverance from slavery. The celebration of Passover was instituted to keep these connections alive. The Exodus experience (Passover and Sinai Covenant) guided and sustained the people of Israel as they migrated back to their promised homeland and became a nation. For Catholics, the Exodus story also underscores two cornerstones of our social teaching regarding immigrants: (1) the value of keeping family members united, and (2) the right of all who are cut off from their place, of origin to preserve their culture and its historical roots.

In the Old Testament, Egypt was the place of oppression for the Israelites. In the New Testament, Egypt is seen as the place of refuge when the Holy Family, Jesus, Mary and Joseph flee Bethlehem in order to avoid the edict of King Herod to kill the first-born. (Matthew 2:13-21 and Luke 2:4). Although the infancy narratives do not mention the terms exile, asylum, refugee, displaced or undocumented, it is not hard to fill in the missing details. The Holy Family indeed had a well-founded fear of persecution based on their race, religion, nationality membership in a particular social group and perhaps their political opinion if they had one.

c. The New Testament

Then the King will say to those at his right hand, "Come, O blessed of my Father .... For I was a stranger and you welcomed me' . . . . Then the righteous will answer him, "Lord, when did we see you as a stranger and welcome you?'... And the King will answer them: 'Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me." (Matthew 25-34-40)

This is the best-known passage in the New Testament regarding immigrants. This passage demonstrates that Jesus retained and reinforced the injunctions from the Old Testament about treating strangers kindly by including them under the protective mantle of his own identity. The disciple is eager to learn about the love of others besides our own ethnic or national backgrounds. Those who close the door to strangers in this life are destined to become outcasts themselves in the next.

Although there are no other passages that refer strictly to immigrants in the New Testament, a broad interpretation, can be given for the passage in the Gospel of John about Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. (John 4:4-42) Jesus also praises the cured leper who came back after the other nine cured lepers did not. The returnee was a Samaritan and a foreigner. (Luke 17:11-19) Both of these passages demonstrate the need to welcome the "strangers" A good Scriptural application would be to refer to the Greek word xenos, which means a "foreigner." The preacher can not only refer to contemporary xenophobia as "fear of the foreigner" (phobia - fear, xenos = foreigner) in sociological terms but also link it to our biblical heritage. We must not fm the "foreigner," rather we must welcome her, as did Jesus.

C. Theological Perspective and Principles

There are four themes that arise out of the Catholic social thought and theological tradition that relate to immigrants and migration.

1. The theme of the Kingdom of God is significantly related to migration issues. The Kingdom is central to the preaching and person of Jesus, who embraces all, especially the lowly, W makes them part of it. The Kingdom is still the driving force of the People of God today. As a result, the pilgrim church deeply reflects the unity created by the Holy Spirit from the diversity of peoples and cultures which is an earthly foretaste of the heavenly Kingdom If we are to be a part of building " Kingdom, all must be welcomed to it.

2. The first principle of Catholic social teaching is the affirmation of the dignity of the human person, created in the image of God, capable of knowing mid loving the Creator, and entrusted with a stewardship of the earth. Social by nature, persons must relate to one another, or they cannot develop their potential. The Church has the right and duty as an "expert in humanity" (Gaudium Et Spes, 43) to speak out on migration issues. People are on the move whether in search of work, to improve lives or to escape war, fear or persecution. The Church cannot be silent on this sign of the times.

3. Migration as a sign of the times belongs theologically to salvation history. The underlying reality of the Church is that it is a pilgrim people who have sanctifying grace. This grace transforms the Church when its members embrace their poverty as wayfarers in a passing world. Those who are refugees and "forced migrants" can also sense the presence of Jesus in the least of their sisters and brothers. When Christian communities are tempted to withdraw from these realities, migration is a call to conversion and a new solidarity with the pilgrim condition.

4. Migrants are part of the human family and therefore deserve hospitality. Theologians and pastoral ministers in the southwestern region of the United States have developed a theology of the border between Mexico and the United States. The U.S. uses the name border to describe the imaginary line of demarcation. In Spanish, the word is frontera ("frontier').’Frontier' has a different connotation than border," whereas the latter is static, the former pushed the limits of possibility. Our early western explorers were called frontiersmen. They pushed the limits of possibility. If we called our sisters and brothers coming from south of the Rio Grande River "frontier people," would we treat them with a greater sense of hospitality? All people are entitled to push the limits of possibility for a better life.

Migration, then, is part of God's plan for the growth of the human family in unity. Migration then becomes part of the itinerary of human development, a kind of osmosis of cultural, social and political, values. Behind it are positive factors such as interest in other cultures, a sense of solidarity and of the dignity of the human person, and an extension of networks of international cooperation. This points positively to the movement of greater cultural unity and universal fraternity.

The symbol for this vision is Pentecost, and its opposite is the Tower of Babel. God rebuilds the unity, of the human race using migration as a meeting with the Lord and with others. In Pentecost, cultural pluralism is no more a reason for confusion and opposition. It means an ethic of encounter for the construction of a new humanity. In Pentecost, the nation of the migrant is respected and revered. Pentecost means the unity of peoples around faith in the one Christ, who came to gather the lost children of God. Because of God's love for every human being in Christ there can be no discrimination. By favoring mutual knowledge among people, migration attests to the unity of the human family. The new heavens and the new earth will be the first of all in the heads of women and men united in God. Solutions to the problems of human mobility will come when the human spirit is dominated by the firm convictions that all are sisters and brothers and that love is the most powerful force for transforming self and society.

D. Franciscan Tradition

The Roman Catholic Church in the United States does not promote an open border policy. It respects the laws of the nation while at the same time, is skeptical of certain procedures which implement immigration policy. The clear majority of undocumented persons are Roman Catholics from Mexico and Latin America. At least a plurality of legal immigrants who enter the U.S. each year is Roman Catholic. Of the nearly one million people who enter the U.S. each year, legally or illegally, the vast majority are Roman Catholic. How do we welcome them in our parishes, our service churches, our campus ministries, our schools, those under our guidance as chaplains and other ministries? We begin with our living tradition of Franciscan hospitality.

In June, 1995, the Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation Directorate of Holy Name Province issued a document on Solidarity, which bears relevance for us considering the implications of immigration within our ministries. Within that document was an inspiring overview of how Francis of Assisi had a vision of solidarity for his brothers and those that they served:

Francis of Assisi was a man who saw his profound relationship with all of creation and all God's creatures. It was left to Francis to remind his contemporaries of the dignity of the despised leper, of the humanity of the hated Muslims and the value of the feared wolf. Francis preached his message not only by word but also by example. He lived as if every creature was a brother or sister and every creature was deserving of his care and concern. The good of all and of each was his responsibility. His was a vision of the community of creation, united by the fact of our creatureliness and the reality of a loving Creator.

While the Franciscan sources do not speak of immigration directly, there are many examples of Francis' welcoming attitude toward the "stranger." Two particular stories highlight Francis' missionary spirit his openness to other cultures, and the unity and diversity within the Order itself. A classic story from the early biographies of Francis is his missionary travels to Syria and his visit with the Sultan of Egypt (I Celano #57; Legenda Major M #7-9; Fioreffi #24). While the Christian world saw the Saracens (Muslims) as enemies, Francis saw them as sisters and brothers. While Francis' mission to the Sultan might be seen as a failed conversion attempt, Francis clearly was victorious in his acceptance and appreciation for someone of another culture and faith. Francis not only tried to evangelize the Saracens but also in a sense was evangelized by them and returned to Assisi with a deep respect for them. The same mutual appreciation can be seen on the pan of the Sultan. St Bonaventure writes:

For the Sultan perceiving in the man of God a fervor of spirit and a courage that had to be admired willingly listened to him and invited him to stay longer with him. Seeing that the holy man so completely despised worldly possessions, the Sultan was overflowing with admiration, and developed an even greater respect for him. (LM IX 8)

Within the Order itself Francis saw the values of unity and diversity increased rapidly. A lesser-known excerpt from the live of Francis describes his vision of the Order attracting men from various cultures (I Celano 27). As the Order began to grow and attract men from outside of Italy, Francis had this vision:

'I saw a great multitude of people coming to us, wishing to live with us in the habit of a holy way of life and in the rule of blessed religion. I seemed to see highways filled with this multitude gathering in this region from nearly every nation. Frenchmen are coming, Spaniards are hurrying, Germans and Englishmen are running, and a huge crowd speaking other languages is rapidly approaching."

When the brothers heard this, they were filled with wholesome joy, either because of the grace which the Lord God had conferred on His holy one, or because they eagerly thirsted for the profit of their neighbors.

E. Practical Theology - Now do we Respond?

The same Franciscan hospitality and spirit of openness was part of the Franciscan presence in the New World. In the course of its history, the Church came face to face with the issue of cultural diversity on many occasions. It had to ask time and time again the question "What does this mean?" Its response to that question throughout the ages has determined some of the most dramatic moments of its secular journey. Among them was the presence of the religious orders (notably Franciscan and Dominican) with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World. If you look at the front door of the United States Capitol Building in Washington D.C., you will see a mural depicting Franciscan friars accompanying Columbus on his second voyage. Since then, indigenous peoples immigrants and Franciscans have had their presence felt in the New World, particularly the United States of America.

We are called as members of the Franciscan family - religious, ordained, or lay - to live in the spirit of Francis by offering hospitality to the newcomer and be in solidarity with their struggle to become ever more active members of U.S. society. If one looks at the seven states where most legal immigrants live, four are within Holy Name Province: New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Florida. If you look where the undocumented live, three states am represented in Holy Name Province: Now York, New Jersey and Florida. Both legal immigrants and the undocumented are represented in other parts of the Province.

What are we doing and how are we preparing ourselves to serve the newly-arrived and the stranger in our midst?

Remembering the image of "Unity In Diversity,' we are reminded that our Christian faith, Catholic social teaching, biblical traditions, and Franciscan history call us to receive newcomers with a spirit of openness and hospitality. In the U.S. Bishop's document Welcoming the Stranger Among Us, they remind us of the great success and example of the Encuentro 2000 gathering for the Jubilee Year held in Los Angeles in July 2000.

One successful model of unity in diversity was Encuentro 2000: Many Faces in God's House, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops' celebration for the Jubilee Year. In the materials prior to the celebration, Encuentro 2000 offered a discussion method called the 'mutual invitation process" which maximizes intercultural participation. In the celebration itself, Encuentro 2000 was an experience of the exuberance and vitality, the profound faith and devotional life of the participants Encuentro 2000 also demonstrated that communion in a multicultural Church is a true possibility for the new millennium.

The Bishops leave us with the call to see each other as sister and brother, to care for the poor, the outcast and the stranger, to recognize and celebrate our differences as true gifts, and to live in unity and diversity.

Immigrant communities give ample witness to what it is to be Church - in their desire to worship as a people, in their faith, in their solidarity with one another and with the weakest among them in their devotion and their faithfulness to the Church of their ancestors. For the Church in the United States to walk in solidarity with newcomers to our country is to live out our catholicity as a Church. The Church of the twenty-first century will be, as it has always been a Church of many cultures, languages and traditions, yet simultaneously one, as God is one-Father, Son, and Holy Spirit-unity in diversity.

F. Questions for Discussion

1. How does our Catholic social teaching reach agreement with current U.S. immigration law? How does it differ?

2. How can we make the transition from being a multicultural Church to an intercultural Church in the United States? In other words, how can we change from being the Tower of Babel to the New Pentecost?

3. The history of this nation appears to be a history of immigrants. How do we welcome the newcomers in our respective ministries?

4. A considerable number of legal and undocumented persons are baptized Roman Catholics. How is the Catholic moment for re-evangelization to occur in the U.S.?

5. What do you believe God, through scripture and Catholic theology, is inviting us to do as a local ministry with regards to immigration?

G. Resources for Further Study

There are a number of resources listed on the Holy Name Province website:

The U.S. Catholic Bishops have a number of resources and all the statements mentioned above.

Part III

Moving Faith to Action

The efforts to welcome newcomers and enable them to integrate and assimilate into U.S. society, calls for a number of actions. The Roman Catholic Church approaches the issue of immigration with both long-term and short-term responses.

Long Term Approach - A More Equitable World

One of the major causes for world immigration and migration is the search for work that will enable persons to care for their family. Often the economic and employment possibilities in their homelands do not offer much hope. The Church strongly believes that if there is a more equitable distribution of wealth and income in the world, the chances are more likely that people from developing nations would be able to stay in their homeland rather than depart for an industrialized nation like the U.S. This is what most immigrants would prefer. In this way, we can take our cue from what Pope John Paul II writes:

It is necessary to break down the barriers and monopolies which leave so many

countries on the margin of development and to provide all individuals and nations with the basic conditions which will enable them to share in development. (Centesimus Annus, 1993)

If the Holy Father's advice can be followed it is more likely that the incidence of immigration and migration will decrease.

Shorter-Term Approach-Hospitality to the Stranger

The first stance in our local ministries must be to offer hospitality to newcomers whether they are documented or not. Hospitality should be our first response in the process of helping the newcomer become integrated and assimilated into U.S. society. Even though the Church does not encourage undocumented immigration we cannot forget the Biblical mandate to welcome and comfort the stranger in our midst. Catholic Charities and other church-related social service agencies are virtually overwhelmed and do not have sufficient resources to meet the needs of all who come to their dean whatever their race, color or creed. We need to add our local communities to this effort by providing hospitality through building a sense of community, and the offering of food, shelter and assistance in finding gainful employment. How do we offer this hospitality that will welcome and allow integration and assimilation?

Language is power. What linguistic skills are we employing to communicate with the newcomers in our ministries? Not just the friars but the laity as well. The leading ministerial languages besides English are Spanish, French (for French-speaking Haitians, Africans and Vietnamese), Portuguese, Korean, Vietnamese, and a number of languages representing Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. If a friar cannot communicate in a language which represents a sizable number of members in our communities, then we can turn to our Partners in Ministry by training and guiding lay leaders to be the spokespersons for that particular community.

Two Interrelated Communities. We must appreciate that them are two grieving communities in the ministries that are welcoming immigrants. The first are the "long-termers" who are grieving over the seeming loss of a parish in what it used to be. The second are the newcomers who are grieving over the loss of their countries of origin and trying to adapt to a new nation, a new language, a new culture and a now set of rules in society. How do we reconcile both of them? We must find ways to bridge this "gap" and realize we are building one renewed church for all of us, one that reflects the richness of the "many faces of God." In essence this is the core of assimilation as both the newcomers and the long-termers will be changed by the experience. Integration and assimilation is a two-way street.

Building Leadership in the Newcomer Community. According to recent studies, 30% of those ordained to the priesthood last year were foreign-born. About 25% of those who took solemn vows last year were also foreign-born. Since 10% of the country is foreign-born, the Church is getting more than its fair share of candidates for religious life and the priesthood. We need to spend time with youth and young adults in order to cultivate a religious or priestly vocation. The permanent diaconate is another approach to invite immigrants to join the formal roles of leadership in the Church. When people are able to share in leadership, they are no longer "outsiders," rather; they share the opportunities and responsibilities of making the ministry strong and vibrant.

In our local communities there are at least four areas that build from our stance of hospitality, integration and assimilation, in which we should respond.

1. Local Social Analysis and Faith Reflection

Our local ministry communities are intimately related to issues of immigration. Immigration and migration have an impact on nearly every aspect of the U.S. society. However, many native-born Americans are often unaware of the large extent of this involvement and relationship.

It is necessary to look closely at our communities and see the contribution that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, are making to their vibrancy and health. They are working in the offices, the hospitals, the construction trades and the farms, among other employment opportunities. They own businesses that offer a variety of products and services all of which make life in our cities and towns more interesting and fuller with greater choice and diversity. We see the multiple ways that our parish is being built through new music, ritual and enlivening ideas. As we look closer we begin to realize that the "they" really are an integral part of the "us" who constitute our efforts to establish and build community.

This "seeing" is done through social analysis and faith reflection about what is going on in our communities. This is where we methodically and systematically observe, analyze and take to prayer and reflection the circumstances and situations in our local areas. The goal of this is to gain an understanding of what is really happening and why it is occurring. We want to know the causes and intensity of the barriers to integration and assimilation. We also do not want to miss the opportunities that might be present. Through social analysis and faith reflection we can come to a point of knowing where our actions will have the best impact for social transformation. Thus, we are empowered to do what will truly move us towards solutions.

2. Direct Service

Many immigrants and newcomers arrive with a number of basic physical needs. Often they will have the immediate need for food, shelter, clothing, medical care, etc. As local ministries we are often best placed to help care for these needs, always remembering to do it in a way that will safeguard the person’s intrinsic human dignity. Once we have helped to address these immediate needs, we can move to a deeper level of direct service designed to enable immigrants to join the larger life of the community.

This expanded type of direct service can take a number of forms which will often be pointed to out of the process of social analysis and faith reflection mentioned above. Many times, immigrants might be eligible for health, education or other training services. We can help people know these opportunities. Further, we can help provide ways of supporting people with the often arduous process of obtaining documents or becoming citizens. Other ways we can help is through the hosting or teaching of ESL (English as a Second Language) courses. Most immigrants want to learn English and we can help make this an easier process. There are numerous ways in which to offer support including union or community organizing, child and adult care or various types of support groups. The key is that we find numerous ways to support the newcomers to our ministries.

3. Education of Our Ministry Communities

If we are to effectively move to action, we must insure that our local ministries are informed about the issues of immigration and the barriers that they face in U.S. society. This falls into a couple of areas. First we must ask ourselves, "What are we educating ourselves about?"

We need to share the truth about immigration in the U.S., working to eliminate false perceptions that pervade U.S. society and lead to anti-immigrant sentiment. We need to work through issues of racial inequality that often are at the root of these wrong perceptions and beliefs regarding immigrants. We need to understand the necessity of hospitality and how that grows from our faith. Finally, we must understand the situation with regards to immigration in our local areas. This will be built out of our social analysis and faith reflection mentioned above. Once we start developing the "what" of our community of education, we must address the "how."

There are a number of ways that we can educate ourselves and build up our faith in working to bring transformation to the situation of immigration. It can be done through the Eucharistic liturgy in the songs that we sing, the intercessions we pray, and other ways that build hospitality in this central experience of our faith. We can educate through homilies where the scriptural tradition can be tied to the Eucharistic and prayer life of our community. We can invite speakers or have other forms where experts can come and help us to develop understanding. We can make sure that our regular religious education and faith formation includes immigration and other social issues in their curriculum. There are any numbers of ways. Each of our ministries has received a listing of available education resources and aids that can assist you in planning education opportunities.

If we become a faith-filled, informed community, we can be sure to have a community that will have the will and ability to be persons that help to bring transformation and offer sincere hospitality.

4. Advocacy

Advocacy is an integral part of any complete Christian response to an injustice in our world. Governmental decisions and structures play a significant role in contributing to the ground on which injustice occur. We will always offer direct help when we cm but we also want to make the need for our assistance unnecessary by working to remove the causes of injustice. This is the role of advocacy.

At the time of this writing, the needed focus for our advocacy action is not clear in the specifics as Congress and the new Presidential Administration are still developing their strategies. Nonetheless, there are at least four unresolved issues from the previous Congress and Administration that will need attention, as well as some issues that President Bush raised in the campaign last year. (1) Continuation of efforts to remove the harshest and most punitive elements of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. (2) Reform of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). (3) The family immigration system weds further improvements to be better at uniting families. (4) Improvements are needed in the U.S.'s relationship to Mexico in particular boarder issues. These issues will likely need advocacy action and support in the not-to-distant future. In the spring of 2002 there will be advocacy needed around the reauthorization of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF/welfare). This legislation was particularly punative to immigrant families in need of assistance and will offer opportunities for us to help shape a better society.

In order to be prepared for advocacy action, we need to be doing a few things right now. First, preparing our spirits and hearts through prayer, worship, and study so that we can be open to the Spirit's guidance and strength. Without our faith to support us, advocacy is even more difficult to sustain. Second, developing our understanding and knowledge of the issue so that when we can act, it will be as informed citizens. Third, developing the analysis and assessment of the local impact and reality of immigration. This will enable us to make the case for action based upon local impact. Fourth, finding out who our elected officials are, and what has been their stance on immigration issues. Contacting them and specifically inquiring about their record and plans can do this. Finally, finding out who in our local communities is interested in taking a more active leadership role with regards to immigration advocacy. If we have done our homework in these five areas, once the issues arise in the more specifics of Congress and the President's Administration, then we can take effective and quick action to help shape public policy and make the shape of the world a better place.

The goal of all our action, be it social analysis, direct service, education, or advocacy, must be guided with the hope and vision of social transformation. We will welcome all newcomers with hospitality and love. We will work to change the world in order that all people might have the opportunity to live full and dignified lives, no matter where they live or come from. Our Christian and Franciscan spirit can settle for no less.

Questions for Discussion

1. How would you assess your ministry's level of response in serving and advocating for and with persons who are immigrants?

2. Since many of our ministries are becoming increasingly multicultural, how do we reach out to different language groups regarding worship services? How do we reach out to different ethnic groups so they can feet at home?

3. Does your ministry have an active social action committee to write letters to elected officials who can amend the 1996 law? Can this committee help provide adult education talks to enlighten Catholics about immigration issues?

4. Many newly-arrived peoples are targeted by evangelical and Pentecostal groups for proselytism. How does the local community bring forth re-evangelization to the newcomers in their placements?

5. Is there a particular action to which you feel drawn to do?

Resources for Further Study

The National Immigration Forum has up-to-date legislative advocacy and action announcements.

The Holy Name Province has secured the efforts of Russell Testa to help all of our ministries better animate their efforts at Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation. If you would like to discuss options and plans with him, he may be reached at 202-541-5245 or at testa@wtu.edu.

Immigration advocacy and other action resources can be found on the Holy Name Province website. .

Work with the United Nations by Franciscans International

The United Nations system and its collaborating groups include not only its Member States which meet in the General Assembly and its large specialized agencies such as the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) or the World Health Organization (WHO) but also many affiliated organizations. Thousands of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOS) which have been accorded participatory roles with regard to the UN structure since its founding in 1945. They support, implement and also seek to influence the work of the UN. NGOs may have a range of concerns or may be highly specialized. They represent every imaginable constituency and interest and are found throughout the world wherever "civil society" is permitted to flourish. They are valuable to the UN as a way of reaching local communities and issue-oriented organizations which have a wealth of expert knowledge. Participation by NGOs with the UN may be through 1. sharing expertise and information; 2. collaborating in U.N. projects and service, or 3. a consultative role in establishing goals, programs and policies.

Franciscans International is a Non-Governmental Organization affiliated to the United Nations with international offices in New York and Geneva, and regional offices in several countries. It was founded in DATE it represents all the Franciscan groups around the world -- Institutes of Brothers, Sisters, clerics or seculars -- found on every continent. The total of their members’ number is over a million and a half. These members participate in the first two ways listed above, and the staff of Franciscans International participates in the third way, consultation. St. Francis College has a college chapter of Franciscans International.

We have included here three statements by Franciscans International on food security, presented to the World Food Summit in Rome in 1996, a more general statement on global issues prepared for the International Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, and a statement presented to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva in 2000 "in collaboration with the Dominicans' on human rights violations in Mexico. In studying these statements we can ask, in what sense are they "Franciscan? Their drafters present them in the name of Francis and Clare. Franciscans International, like most NGOS, works closely with other NGOs to advocate concerning issues of concern. Often it forms partnerships with some of the many Catholic (but not Franciscan) NGOS. What values do we find expressed in these statements and their recommendations? How do they manifest a Franciscan presence in the international arena of the UN and all its programs?

Raynata’s Paper

St. Francis of Assisi commonly referred to as God’s Troubadour, dedicated his life to the service of God, both his actions and words, driven by the love and the passion that he had for him. Prior to his conversion, the young saint aspired to be a noble knight, whose ideals were defined by the troubadour spirit and courtly love. Honor and chivalry were dominant themes during that period, when young Francis partook in and adhered to the rules of that ‘worldly’ society, in pursuit of vainglory. After his conversion, St. Francis followed a strict and rigid lifestyle in his desire to imitate Christ that is sometimes viewed as fundamentalist and excessive in nature. However, for Francis, who followed this path out of love, the burden was light as well as necessary.

In his devotion to Christ, St. Francis embraced Lady Poverty with all she had to offer and his love for her grew stronger as the days went by. His definition and concept of love is crucial in understanding his lifestyle, which was basically his relationship with his beloved. These ideas were heavily influenced by the ideals and concepts of courtly love that were introduced to him during his childhood by his mother, and later developed in his youth with the aid of his peers.

These courtly traditions will be explored, in an attempt to understand the saint’s original concept of love and to determine whether or not these ideas were maintained after his conversion and applied in his relationship with his beloved. Towards this end, the troubadour spirit and courtly notions of love will be examined as portrayed by medieval epic poetry and troubadour songs. Its introduction into St. Francis’ childhood and its influence during his youth will then be explored, and finally the impact of the courtly tradition on his post-conversion life will be demonstrated. This will be pursued in order to compare his ideals of love, both prior to and after his conversion, showing that it was the concept remained the same even though he rejected the lance for the bible.

Love, a common theme found throughout medieval literature, was portrayed as an ideal of perfection. This emotion was viewed at that time as the primary emotion from which all others emerged, and as such was crucial in defining a person’s humanity in that feudalistic society. Living within this society, where war was common place characterized by horrific and gruesome actions, love was used to balance the barbaric nature and actions of knights. A knight matured by love’s hand, could no longer be viewed as a hired an assassin for his lord, but was transformed into a complexed individual, whose character now contained a depth which was caused by the wealth of emotions that he experienced.

This idea was stated by a young troubadour by the name of Bernart de Ventadorn whose philosophy of love was: ‘That man is dead who does not feel in his heart the sweet savor of love’ (Jameson 54). This philosophy was not unique to Bernart, but was popular during medieval times. A knight regardless of how brave and exceptional he performed at his job could never fully participate or be a full member of the courtly society unless he truly understood love by experiencing the emotion. This notion was expressed by Guilhem IX Duke of Aquitaine, who sang: ‘And take him for a peasant who doesn’t understand it,’ in his song Campanho, farai un vers tot covinen (Rosenberg 37:2.1).

Love gave birth to the rainbow of different emotions and brought with it a range of social virtues, which included generosity, mercifulness, kindness, chivalry, humility, goodness, knowledge and piety just to name a few. When a person acquired such virtues, it did not stay stagnant, but a multiplier effect occurred where the virtue in itself brings forth other worthy and ennobling characteristics in a knight. This was passed down by the emperor of Greece to his son Alexander in one of the romances entitled Cliges written by Chrétien de Troyes: ‘By herself generosity makes a man worthy, and this cannot be accomplished through rank, courtesy, knowledge, nobility, possessions, strength, chivalry, valor, lordship, beauty, or anything else.’ (de Troyes 89).

Instructions on the social codes of conduct, values and conventions, were to be found while court was in session through the use of poetry, songs, stories and epics. This information was passed down through poets and troubadours verbally, while court was in session and was preserved through their writings. These literary works were, for the most part commissioned by the King or Queen of the court, and they acted as instruction guides to the appropriate and suitable social behavior of a courtly knight.

Troubadours were dedicated to their art which was and outward expression of the inner turmoil they were experiencing at any particular point in time. To convey the severity and depth of his trials, the troubadour tended to exemplify the object of his affection (who was perfect both in beauty and in manners) and the struggles he endured to attain perfection in order to be completely united with his love. In pursuit of a perfect ideal, the troubadours were constantly practicing and studying their skills, being living examples of their art, and were described as ‘consciously superb masters of showmanship’ (Fleming 50).

Troubadours, born entertainers, had to convey a wide range of emotions that their audience could relate to and, thus, were constantly developing their talent and skills. They usually incorporated their environment and different seasons - which their audience was well acquainted with - in their songs to describe their love, their situation and their sentiment. For example, spring, the season that brings new life to flora, was often used in 12th century troubadour songs to represent the beginnings of a new love affair, whereas, winter - which was cold and bitter - is used to signal turmoil or the end of a love affair.

One such troubadour was Guilhem IX Duke of Aquitaine, VII count of Poitiers who was probably not the original troubadour, but was certainly the earliest known by later generations. His songs spoke about the benefits derived from love and its costs, characterized by predicaments which were paid for by suffering. Guilhem described love as tender and beautiful, when at first it begins to grow, probably because of its novelty, but as it blossoms, it’s intricate and complex nature is revealed as stated in the poem Ab la dolchor del temps novel (Rosenberg 36:1.1-3.6):

With the sweetness of the new season

The woods burgeon, and the birds

Sing, each in their language

According to the verse of a new song:

Then it is fitting that a man draw near

To that which he most desires.

From the source of my greatest good and beauty

I see neither messenger not letter,

So that I neither sleep nor laugh,

Nor do I dare go forward

Until I am sure, concerning the outcome,

Whether it is such as I ask for.

Our love is like

The hawthorn branch

Which clings trembling on the tree

At night, in the rain and ice,

Until the next day, when the sun spreads out

Through the green leaves and the branches.

Here the writer realized that love was not as simple as falling in love and living joyously ever after, but there were some barriers on this path. These barriers came in the form of separation of lovers as shown in the above except, or a dilemma of two uncompromising lovers as in Campanho, farai un vers tot covinen (Rosenberg 37), or simply due to circumstance beyond one’s control as stated in Farai un vers de dreit nien (Rosenberg, 38).

The key as Guilhem pointed out was endurance, patience unending hope and following the rules. These rules were not easily and willing grasped, and the person who did not understand them was to be taken for an uneducated person whose social standing in court was that of a peasant. The lack of the understanding of these rules translated into a lack of nobility. In the sixth stanza of Pus vezem de novelh florir (Rosenberg 41:6.1-6.6), he described some of the social responsibility coming out of love:

Obedience must he guarantee

To many people, he who wishes to love,

And it behooves him to know how to accomplish

Gracious deeds

And to refrain, at court, from speaking

Like a peasant.

Social codes of conduct, responsibilities and values are embedded into his poems which acted as a ‘know how to guide’ for the members of the court, and relayed some ideals of courtly love.

Further instructions and examples of courtly love were found in epic poems that told stories about young lovers - one of which was knight and the other a lady of noble background. These epics described the attributes and the behavior of the couples, where a greater emphasis was placed on the male, who was the one that had to qualify for the position of the perfect courtly lover.

The three most common characteristics given to the lady was firstly, her all encompassing beauty, secondly, her perfect mannerisms which allowed her to adapt and act perfectly in any situation she was placed and thirdly, her ability to change her moods for which she was never criticized. These characteristics, especially the last were well developed in Chrétien’s portrayal of Queen Guinevere’s behavior towards Lancelot in the tale entitled The Knight Of The Cart (de Troyes 170-256) She adopted an appearance of anger and refused to hold an audience with her lover after he defeated Meleagant in battle to free her. Then at their very next meeting, she believed he died, she all but leaped in his arms as she could hardly contain the joy see felt by placing her eyes upon him. Guinevere’s contrasting nature was yet again displayed later in the poem when she commanded Lancelot to do his worst in a tournament, then she reversed her orders the very next day. Lancelot, being the perfect knight, always obeyed his will to that of his beloved.

The male lover on the other hand, worshiped and adored his beloved, as she represented everything that was good and perfect in his eyes, and she was the standard by which he too could have achieved perfection by becoming one with her. Love acted as an elevator which brought him up to her standard of perfection, whose doors could only be open by her assent and acknowledgment of his love. She, being the perfect creature, meant that she was pure and uncorrupted and her potential lover had to prove himself worthy of her love. The attempt on his part to purify himself to be united with her, and actively participate in his ideal of perfection - that driving force called love - was the factor that made him noble.

Love, therefore contained the power to convert. An officer of the court, without ever experiencing love would have always operated like a machine simply executing tasks for his lord, but, after he has known love and like Pinocchio went from wood into a real boy because of the use of his heart. Love converted him from an officer of the court into a noble knight.

The transformation process of love acted as a rite of passage that young lads had to go through that defined their journey into manhood. Nature - usually the woods - in all of its wild beauty was usually the back drop for this journey, where they encountered evil elements and emerged triumphant. This trend was Beroul’s found in the Romance of Tristan, where the young lovers, Tristan and Yseult were forced to brave the elements while in hiding from King Mark. While in the woods the lovers underwent many hardships which they endured for the sake of their love. Within this story, the author portrays love, not only as a primary emotion, but as the victor in the battle between the head and the heart.

This was demonstrated by the Tristan’s dog - Husdant - who was able to overcome his fundamental natural instinct to bark, due to his love for his master. If this was possible for a creature who operated and made decisions based purely on instinct, is it not then the more ‘natural’ thing to follow the course mapped out by the heart, as opposed to following the mind which is a creation of the norms and standards of a given culture?

Tristan and Yseult lived in a world of love which was pure, good and above all, beyond the reach of the ‘real’ world which imposed restrictions that made their love wrong. To everyone around, it appeared as though she was an evil adulteress and he, a betrayer of his uncle, lord and king. However, in love’s eyes, he was her true husband and she, his true wife, as two hearts became one. The lovers were eventually evicted from their garden of love and had to return to society where rules were imposed upon then and resulted in them being physically separated. At the end of the tale, despite the fact that Tristan was tricked into death, by being made to believe that love deserted him and Yseult upon discovering him, died in his arms. It was impossible for half of a heart to sustain life and the lovers were united in death.

This rite of passage into manhood does not always end tragically for the lovers involved. The poem entitled Cliges (87-169), a romance written by Chrétien de Troyes, had a plot very similar to The Romance of Tristan. Cliges fell in love with his uncle’s bride - Fenice, who felt the same towards him, with neither of the two knowing each others’ feelings. In this tale, as in many other tales, the lady who is the object of the young knight’s desire, act as a catalyst for his journey into manhood.

His journey started with him setting off to Britain to King Arthur’s court to acquire honor, partly because his love for Fenice brought him no joy, for she belonged to his uncle, the king. He then entered the world of King Arthur and his noble knights at the tender age of fifteen for the sake of his deceased father, a battle won by his head. During this period of his initiation, he proved himself to be one of the best knights at the court, undefeated in battle. His achievements in battle were not sufficient to satisfy him as it was not the path that his heart wanted to pursue. Therefore he eagerly set out to return to his homeland to ‘behold the lady who had seized and stolen his heart’ (de Troyes, pp 149).

The next stage of his initiation was won by his heart and leads him to reveal his feelings to his beloved, when she inquired about any loves in his life:

.“Lady” he said, “I was in love there, though not in love with someone form there. Like bark without timber, my body was without heart in Britain. Since I left Germany, I have not known what became of my heart, except that it followed you. My heart was here, and my body there. I was not away from Greece, for my heart had come there. For that reason I have come back here. Yet my heart does not come or return and I cannot draw it back to me. I certainly do not wish to do this, nor am I able” (de Troyes 150).

In this stage of his journey, not only did he realize that his heart was no longer his, but belonged to Fenice, but also because of this love for her, he found the courage to overcome his fear of her rejection. She in turn also revealed that she is deeply in love with him.

As his journey in love developed, the lovers devised a plan for them to be together, without Fenice having to become an adulteress as Yseult was viewed in her romance with Tristan. Initially their plan worked, but eventually they were found and their love was put to the test. Cliges rose to the occasion and pulled out all the stops, prepared to do battle against his father’s brother on a large scale for the sake of his love. At the end of his journey his love was rewarded and he became emperor with Fenice as his empress.

The medieval conception of love was materialized by the troubadour spirit and characterized by courtly love as found in the epic poetry and troubadour songs at that time. However, these tales contained elements of deception and adultery that could have easily been abused by members of the court under the guise of love. Shortcuts to the ‘joys’ of love were motivated by lust and was known as false amour. Marcabru, a 12th century troubadour abhorred false love and false lovers who did not adhere to concepts of fin ‘amour - true love - which was the ideals of courtly love. This idea was a common theme in his songs, as his concept of love seemed to be pure, untainted and was the nucleus from which all other emotions emerged, but over the course of time society’s standards slackened and this good thing became tainted.

Those persons who were caught under the influence of false love became like a fly trapped in a web spun from the pleasures of lust. In this web there was no escape from the spider - false love - sucked the life force out of its victim. The person that fell into this trap will always fall prey to false amour as Marcabru expresses in his song Bel m’es quan son li fruich madur (Rosenberg 46:5.1-6.8).

It will be difficult for the fool to change his nature,

And never relapse into folly,

And for the foolish woman not to act immoderately

A bad tree (comes) from a bad shoot,

And the fruit of a bad thought

Reverts to the worst kind of evil,

There where Joy holds no power.

Friendship of strange attachments

False, of the lineage of Cain

Which places its practitioners in an unhappy state

Because it fears neither shame or blame,

With its sweetness lures them away from true love

And places the fool in such perplexity

That he would not remain with those

Who would give him the whole of France.

Love, therefore, was an uncompromising ideal that knights should be all striving towards in the service of their beloved.

St. Francis was exposed to this concept of love as a child, and always desired to be a knight and troubadour that he eventually achieved. The saint’s conversion was the death of ‘material’ Francesco, and the birth of ‘spiritual’ St. Francis which was accomplished through the vehicle of love. His concept of love stayed the same but it was now dressed in a simple cross shaped habit instead of a knight’s shining armor.

Like a true knight destined to love, St. Francis’ entire life was a journey whose destination was unity with God achieved by courting and marrying Lady Poverty, his one true love. This journey began in 1182 when the grandson of the Count of Boulement (Goudge 14) was born and christened Giovanni in the absence of his father Pietro Bernadone. However, upon Pietro’s return, he renamed his son Francesco - the little Frenchman - and it stuck. Pietro was engaged in one of the most lucrative and successful businesses at that time as a cloth merchant and was therefore a very wealthy peasant.

Similar to the saying ‘The hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world’ was true in Francesco’s case, where during his formative years, prior to his entering school , the boy’ education came mainly from his mother, Pica. She taught him French - her native tongue, and the language that her son used whenever he was deeply moved (Goudge 35) - and music, the medium he used throughout his life to express his feelings, inspirations and prayers - like a true troubadour - as seen by his composition entitled The Canticle of Brother Sun. Pica introduced notions of chivalry and courtly love, as she told her Francesco Greek and Roman legends, the adventures of King Arthur’s Knights and recited from the Chansons de Geste to him (House16). She also taught him manners, which he felt strongly about even after his conversion, where discourtesy still had the power to disturb him as seen in his encounter with a peasant and his donkey in the cowshed (Goudge 100). Pica also encouraged Francesco to pray both before he went to bed and in the little church of San Damiano on their walks where the two would go (Goudge 19). Pica planted the seed of prayer in her first born son which blossomed and became the corner stone in the foundation of the saint’s life, which he lived in the spirit.

Throughout his youth, Francesco held legends of chivalry and courtly love close to his heart and displayed them openly in his antics to win Pietro’s love (House 17) and to ascend as leader and prince among his friends, which included youths of noble birth. At first glance it was difficult to ascertain that Francesco was not of noble birth due to his behavior passed down to him by Lady Pica and his noble attire, a result of Pietro’s wealth. He led his peers in the streets of Assisi singing songs of troubadours and pursuing his courtly notions of amour.

During his youthful life up to the age of twenty four, Francesco fancied himself an apprentice of a troubadour and a chivalrous knight. Being a troubadour in training, Francesco enjoyed the pleasures of youth which he made available to him, such as sex and alcohol to name couple. Following his desire to become a knight, the young saint excelled in hunting and was able to dip his foot into the sea of the aristocratic world. His three sponsors into that world included Pietro’s wealth, Lady Pica’s knowledge of courtly and noble customs and the generosity of Tancredi di Ugone (House 28). Tancredi di Ugone owned a farm which he granted Francesco access to where he was able to take part in the life of leisure that the nobles pursued by participating in their courtly games such as jousting, fencing, wrestling and horsemanship, just to name a few ( House 28).

At the young age of fifteen - the same age at which Cliges set out to King Arthur’s court - Francesco embarked upon a journey to Champagne, to attend the cloth fair, which was the King Arthur’s court of the then cloth industry. According to Adrian House (pp 34), twenty years prior to the young saint’s first visit to Champagne, Marie, Countess of Champagne commissioned Chrétien de Troyes to write epic poetry concerning Arthurian knights, which resulted in six romances. These epics surrounded courtly love and knighthood and became very popular throughout the European continent. Even if there was a slight possibility that Francesco was ignorant of these tales, that situation would have been rectified during his visit to the birth place of the romances. At the fair, Francesco would have had the opportunity to witness the true troubadour spirit and courtly knights as opposed to its likeness that Assisi provided.

A few short years after his first experience of Champagne, Francesco got the opportunity in 1202 to finally fulfill his life long dream of becoming a knight. Though he was never officially a knight, with the help of Pietro’s purse and his training in cavalry (House 42), he was able to act out the role of knight, dressed in full armor in the Battle of Collestrada. Unfortunately for this knight his side lost the battle and Francesco was imprisoned for one year.

After his release, Francesco returned to his parents’ house where they realized that it was more than just his health that took a turn for the worst. His behavior as a spend thrift and constant frolicking in the streets accelerated in his pursuit of vainglory and it was achieved as he was formally elected as the ‘Lord of the Revels’ (House 51). Thus far Francesco knew what it was to be a troubadour and he experienced life as a knight. He was yet to experience that one quality that could achieve what his wealth could not and make him noble. This quality was love.

One night while frolicking in the streets with his friends, Francesco lagged behind because love chose that moment to present herself to him. When his companions teased him and asked if love was the cause of his delay he answered in the affirmative. ‘Yes,’ said Francis, ‘I am in love with a bride nobler and richer and fairer than you have ever seen’ (Goudge 31). This was one of his first encounters that he had with fin ‘amour and his much sorted after love - Lady Poverty - for whom he had been waiting for all of his life. This encounter with his love shook him to his core and according to Goudge, the saint later revealed that during the encounter ‘Had I been pricked with knives all over at once I could not have moved from the spot’(Goudge 31).

Like a true lover dedicated to his lady, as depicted in The Knight of the Cart, where Lancelot obediently followed his beloved’s commands concerning his performance at the tournament, so too, did Francesco follow the bidding of his love, Lady Poverty. It was reported that he increased his efforts in his service to the poor by providing them with more generous sums of money and he also fed them. By doing these acts, he ensured that his lady did not go hungry. Once while in Rome, Francesco for the love of God did what he knew his beloved demanded of him when he had nothing to give to a beggar. He transformed himself into a beggar and went into the streets of Rome and begged for alms in french, much in the same way Tristan transformed himself into a leper at his lover’s command.

Not long after this incident, Francesco again stepped up to do what his lady demanded of him, which was something that his will, would have objected to. He had a morbid fear of lepers and his biographers tells of incidences where he would turn his face away whenever one of the offending creatures stepped into his view, as gave them alms through an intermediary person. The young saint was repulsed by their rotting flesh and their open wounds and abhorred the thought of coming into any sort of physical contact with them. However, being the knight that he was, he obeyed his beloved’s request and by the grace of God alone, he was able to personally place alms into a leaper’s hand, kiss his rotting flesh and then embraced him. The leper was an aspect of poverty and by doing this Francesco proved that he loved every aspect of her. Francesco rode off with joy in his heart being his reward for love os Guilhem puts it in his song Pus vezem de novelh florir (de Troyes 40:2.5-2.6)

It gives great joy to the one who maintains

The rules.

Not only did Francesco maintain a life dedicated to poverty, but he also led a life dedicated to prayer. In the spring of 1206, he stopped at San Damiano, the same church that Pica took him to pray as a child (Goudge, pp 19) and again he prayed. He looked at the crucifix hanging above the alter, and while praying, he heard a voice speaking to him and was convinced that it was the voice of God, speaking to him from the crucifix. House reported the encounter in this manner: ‘Francis, don’t you see that my house has collapsed? Go and repair it for me.’ ‘Yes lord, I will, most willingly,’ Francis replied (House 64).

This is known thought out history as St. Francis’ conversion which was driven by love, and converted him from troubadour and knight of the material world to troubadour and knight of God. At this point, Francesco’s submission of his will to God’s was complete, characterized by his total obedience and surrender to his love, then turned bride - Lady Poverty.

She, bereav’d

Of her first husband, slighted and obscure,

Thousand and hundred years and more, remain’d

Without a single suitor, till he came.

Nor aught avail’d, that, with Amyclas, she

Was found unmoved at rumor of his voice,

Who shook the world: nor aught her constant boldness

Whereby with Christ she mounted on the cross,

When Mary stay’d Beneath. But not to deal

Thus closely with thee longer, take at large

The lovers’ titles - Poverty and Francis.

Dante, Div. Commedia, Paradise, Canto XL (Felder pp 91)

St. Francis immediately set out to do as the Lord asked of him and sold some of Pietro’s merchandise to sponsor his rebuilding churches, which Pietro did not take too kindly to. He demanded his money back, but father and son did not see eye to eye on this matter and neither of the two was willing to compromise and the matter was eventually resolved in the court of Bishop Guido. In the end for the acquisition of a few coins, Pietro exchanged and lost his first born male child and St. Francis emancipated himself from his father’s hold. St. Francis was free to do as the Lord asked of him, because he severed all ties to the material world - which included his family - and served one master.

Three restored churches later, the saint started to question whether his instruction from God was to be taken literally, and he turned to prayer to find his answer. One day while St. Francis served at a mass at Santa Maria degli Angeli, his mission was revealed to him in the assigned gospel reading of that day.

‘ And as ye go, preach, saying The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give. Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves: for the workman is worthy of his meat. And into whatsoever city or town you shall enter, enquire who in it is worthy; and there abide till ye go thence. And when ye come into an house, salute it. And if the house be worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if it be not worthy, let your peace return to you . . . Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves.’ (Gouge 62).

Like a true knight who embarked upon his journey to achieve unity with his beloved, so too did St. Francis start upon his rite of passage to make himself worth of Lady Poverty to achieve unity with God. Unlike Chrétien’s knights who dressed themselves in shining armor for their journeys, the saint dressed himself in a habit cut like a capital T to represent the cross and adorned it with a length of rope that he wore around his waist and instead of a lance, shield and sword, his powerful weapon was the words of God.

St. Francis embarked upon a life completely dedicated to the love and service of the Lord by following the example God gave man through his son Jesus Christ and by following his written words. He placed a higher value in actually living the way Christ did rather than simply recounting how he lived his life, which the saint considered the true imitation of the Lord as he explained in his Admonitions (Francis of Assisi 29 VI:3). He came to understand that it was necessary to reject everything in the material world to accomplish this task.

To love God, for the meant total submission of to God’s will, because if man submitted to his own will, he was in fact rejecting God to do as he pleased. This implied that his will was superior to God’s which made him accountable to himself alone, and thus, he appropriated the title of master unto himself. To do this would be ludicrous, because self will in and of itself did not make itself, but was made by God, who brought himself into being and thus contained the true and original will. Why then would man choose to follow self will, which was a copy, instead of submitting his will to the true will, which is God’s will. Therefore when man values his will more than that of the creator, it is like following a mirage in the desert. It appears to be real and good when in fact it is an illusion. ‘Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help. His breath returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.’ (Psalm 146, 3:4).

A reading of the Admonitions reveals that for St. Francis, surrendering and obeying God’s will was to truly love God which could only be done, by rejecting the material world and living in the spirit world - as ‘it is the Spirit that gives life; the flesh does not offer anything (Jn 6:64)’ (Francis of Assisi 26 I:6). The spirit world was a world where man loved God above all other things and sees God in every aspect of his life. St. Francis’s life was a prayer to the Lord, where he understood himself as a median for the Lord to carry out his work, so that anything the saint achieved was not done by him, but in fact, was achieved by God through him. On the other hand, in the material world, man only understood himself as defined by his possessions - instead of God’s possession - and thus, the more things he possessed, the greater he believed himself to be.

Thus, for St. Francis the way to achieving unity with the Lord was through poverty, where man rejected being a slave of his material objects the home of his treasures. Poverty was the state where man eradicated all barriers that kept him from loving God with his entire heart and soul, which included family members and friends who lived in the material world. As the saint pointed out in the Admonitions (Francis of Assisi 31 XII:1) ‘the flesh is always opposed to every good’ , the will of material family members and friends will clash with that of God’s and the flesh will choose the family’s desire, thus rejecting of God. Whereas, the person that lived in the spirit when faced with the same choice will choose God’s desire and thus makes it necessary to reject material family and friends of the flesh.

The same holds true for love accepts nothing less as portrayed in the epic poem The Knight of the Cart, when Lancelot hesitated to enter the cart in pursuit of his love. This showed that he contemplated how ever so slightly the consequences of his being in the cart as dictated by the general society. A small part of him still ascribed to the norms of the social world which would have been detrimental to his beloved had he not gone into the cart, which showed that he had not completely submitted to his love as a true courtly lover should. This is found in Guilhem puts it in his song Pus vezem de novelh florir (Rosenberg 41)

‘never will a man be entirely true

To love if he does not submit to it,’

Love was all encompassing and demanding which Lancelot learned this the hard way as his hesitation cost him dearly.

Poverty of a financial nature, for St. Francis, was not enough by itself, but must be accompanied by poverty of spirit when serving the Lord. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs (Mt 5:3)’ (Francis of Assisi 32 XIV:1). In other words those who were not poor or humble in spirit were prideful in spirit and loved themselves more than they loved the Lord, even if they were economically deprived. St. Francis knew that his beloved - Lady Poverty - was comprised of these two aspects, that is, in her outward appearance and in her soul which he loved her for and he thought her noble, beautiful and wise. The troubadour and knight in him saw her as the embodiment of all his ideals in serving the Lord and dedicated his life to loving her - his wife - by constantly striving to achieve the state of perfection that she was. This was the troubadour spirit which made him a noble knight in God’s court.

At a first glance, the life that the saint led in a state of constant poverty, begging for alms, putting ash into his scraps of food, rejection of money in any form, way or fashion and disregard for his physical body among other things, may appear to be extreme. The same holds true for the life he expected his brothers to live, ‘ If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven’ (Matthew19:21), ‘Take nothing for you journey’ (Luke 9:3) and ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself’ Matthew 16:24) (House 79) and as expressed in The Later Rule (Francis of Assisi 136-145). For St. Francis his approach to a life of poverty was crucial, although it may appear fundamentalist in nature to the material eye. It was the only way he saw fit to stay true to the uncompromising love he had for Lady Poverty.

St. Francis, like Marcabru realized how easy it was to slip from love into lust or from desires of the spirit to the desires of flesh. It was very easy to go from one desire to the next, for example, receiving money for alms could quickly turn to the desire to save for tomorrow, and the inherent nature of the flesh can turn the alms into possessions, which leads to vainglory, also called pride - the original sin. Therefore, as the saint realized, the road to selfish desire and thus rejection of God was a gradual process which originated in ‘harmless’ pleasures, and as such, he thought it better to stay clear of such things by following those pure practices of a strict nature, in the pursuit of his beloved.

In the song entitled ‘Dirai vos senes duptansa’ (Rosenberg 47) Marcabru sing of the same concept of a good and pure thing - love- turned sour -lust- by the abuse of the pleasures of love. He laments that people practiced false love under the name of fin ‘amour, by partaking in love’s harvest without ever having planted a seed. He, like St. Francis believed in maintaining the ridged standards or in other words the ideals in its concentrated form as opposed to a watered down version with additives, which changes it into something else.

St. Francis described perfect joy as perfect poverty, which is perfect poverty of spirit and wealth, in his tale of True and Perfect Joy (Francis of Assisi 165-167). The true and perfect joy emanated from the fact that, the one who achieved real humility and thus true poverty of spirit, in the face defeat, achieves salvations of the soul, which result in being reunited with the Lord and entails the rejection the material world. This is analogous, to the Joy of the Court found in Chrétien’s tale of Erec and Enide. The joy could have only be restored to the court in the face of defeat which resulted in King Evrain’s nephew humbling himself to Erec which and rejecting the beautiful garden (the mirage that is the material world) which was his only means of being reunited with the court. Therefore, similar to true and prefect joy, Chrétien’s joy entailed defeat, rejection and humility on the journey home.

No tale of any knight would be complete any without souvenir of his struggles, during his journey to prove himself worthy for his love, which was usually evidenced in battle wounds. Each of Chrétien’s courtly knights sustained wounds during their rite of incitation, and thus was only fitting that God’s greatest troubadour and knight succumbed to this fate out of love. St. Francis’ pure and perfect love for Lady Poverty, in the service of God manifested itself in the stigmata. It is reported that the saint received the five wounds of Christ after the ‘vision and message of a seraph,’ ‘when his soul was afire with love’ (House 258). Unlike the knights in the romances of Chrétien whose wounds healed, St. Francis; sustained his wounds (which can be viewed as a physical representation of the passion he felt for God) until his death two short years later in 1226. This marked the endo of his journey from manhood into sainthood where he was able to achieve unity with God. He was forever marked as God’s knight.

Chretien de Troyes along with other medieval poets and troubadours wrote fictional epic tales of the perfect knight. St. Francis of Assisi was the perfect troubadour, as he lived his life as the living example of what he preached that was complete surrender to God through the love of by embracing poverty. He spent forty-four years on this earth, the prior half in the material world and the latter half, in the spirit world, where he resided in the arms of his beloved. In the material world, he aspired to become noble in the form of troubadour - which is seen in his actions as Prince of the Revels - and also in the form of a knight, dressed in knight’s clothing going off to battle. However, it was only by the power of love was he able to accomplish his childhood aspirations, in the highest court that exist, that is, God’s court. His conception of love was heavily influenced by courtly traditions and the troubadour spirit that the learnt in his youth, which became the life force that sustained him during his rite of passage in proving himself worth of Lady Poverty. St. Francis stayed true to Lady Poverty for the love of God, in whose court he is the greatest knight, and is known throughout history and will forever be known as God’s Troubadour.

Francis of Assisi: The Patron Saint of the Protestant Reformation

Andrew Fisher

Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk and professor of theology in the small town of Wittenberg, disagreed with the Catholic Church. He began the Protestant Reformation, causing division among believers from his time until the present. Although his actions were revolutionary, it would be a mistake to think that this man was a liberal rebel rouser looking to re-invent or revolutionize the Church’s belief system. He was not a radical theologian. He was not espousing ideas about God that were new and foreign to the Catholic Church. If anything, he was perhaps too traditional and conservative. Luther was calling the Church back to an earlier time, a time in which the thought of Augustine reigned.

St Augustine of Hippo lived in the fourth and fifth centuries after the birth of Christ. His thought was extremely influential in church doctrine, and was strong enough to make an indelible impression on St. Francis of Assisi in the twelfth century. St. Thomas Aquinas did not merge the thought of Aristotle with church doctrine until a hundred years later, around the middle of the thirteenth century. According to Stephen Brown, an Aquinas scholar at Boston College, the introduction of Aristotle challenged “Augustine’s vision” (Brown xi).

Aquinas’ thought became predominant in theology, leaving Augustine in the background. Luther lived in the sixteenth century, long after the shift from Augustine to Aquinas. He started as an Augustinian monk and later became a doctor of theology, and his teaching was sympathetic to Augustine and opposed to Aquinas. As a doctor of theology, Luther held the same status in terms of his role as an educator as Aquinas did when he was teaching three hundred years earlier. He therefore felt that he should be able to “refuse or reject, according to (his) own judgment, the mere opinions of Saint Thomas, Bonaventura, or other scholastics or canonists, which are maintained without text and proof” (Gritsch 20).

Luther believed that the Catholic Church’s ultimate authority lie in the Scriptures, not in the opinions of men. This belief is rooted in Catholic tradition. St. Thomas Aquinas himself held that “the truth of faith is contained in Holy Scripture” (Brown 60). According to Thomas, summaries and commentaries of the faith are made only because “to gather the truth of faith from Holy Scripture, one needs long study and practice; and these are unattainable by all those who require to know the truth of faith, men of whom have no time for study, being busy with other affairs.” Thomas maintained that the summary or commentary “was no addition to Holy Scripture, but something derived from it” (61). St. Thomas Aquinas therefore asserted that all authority comes from Scripture; he and Luther would have agreed on this point.

Luther, however, through his study of Scripture, came to an understanding of the religious experience that was very different from Aquinas’ conception. This came mostly from Aquinas’ emphasis on Aristotle, and Luther’s desire to move to an earlier, Augustinian way of interpreting Scripture. The leader of the Protestant Reformation was therefore not anti-Catholic in his theology. He was opposed to Aquinas’ teachings, but he was not opposed to Catholicism in the broad sense.

This paper will deal with Luther’s theological similarities with Saint Francis of Assisi, who was also heavily influenced by Augustine. At the time of Luther, the Catholic Church, following Aquinas, put an emphasis on the intellect and the reasonableness of Christianity. Luther and Francis, following Augustine, focused on the will and the need for submission to God. Luther and Francis both mistrusted the intellect and the power of reason, because they thought it could lead to a love of knowledge about God instead of a love of God Himself.

This wariness towards the intellect was caused by their belief that man is corrupted by original sin, and is constantly open to the temptation of pride. In turn, their view of the nature of man led them both to the conclusion that the only way man can do good is through the work of God, which brought them to the idea that one enters a into a relationship with God through submission, not good works. Finally, they both believed that the Christian experience is fundamentally about the relationship between the believer and God, not about the relationship between the believer and the church.

These ideas- that reason cannot be fully trusted, that salvation is by faith alone, and that the individual experience with God should be emphasized while the societal experience of church practice de-emphasized, were three of the main points of discord between Luther and his Church leaders. These ideas were rooted in tradition; they are right in line with the thought of Augustine and Francis. Luther did have theological differences with the church, but they were based on his disagreement with Aquinas and Aristotle.

Both Francis and Luther fell madly in love with God, and they noticed perversions of this love all around them. They spoke out against this perverted or false love, because they wanted everyone to know of the way to find true love. They spoke out against it because they could not help themselves; they were in love, and like true lovers, they fought for their cause at all costs.

So the first part of this paper will deal with the similarities in the theologies of Francis and Luther through the influence that Augustine had on both of them. The second part will show how they were both spokesmen and defenders of the love they found through this similar understanding of God.

Francis and Luther believed that people have a major problem with pride. Augustine held that “the origin of our evil will is pride” (Dyson 19); human beings have a desire to exalt themselves to the level of God, and this is what makes them sinful. In The Admonitions, Francis goes so far as to say that this pride, which keeps man from wanting to obey God, is so overwhelming that “every creature under heaven serves and acknowledges and obeys its Creator in its own way better than (man does)” (Fahy 80).

Luther held that pride is so strong that man cannot do any good by his own power. In his book, The Bondage of the Will, Luther writes that “nothing but evil is thought of or imagined by man throughout his life. The nature of his wickedness is described (in Scripture) as not doing, and not being able to do, any differently” (Johnston 145); if absent from God, people only want what is bad, because of their evil will. This may seem like a radical view of the nature of man, but he was very much in line with Augustine and Francis. Augustine believed that people “have no good which does not come from God” and that “mortals cannot live righteously and piously unless the will itself is liberated by the grace of God from the servitude to sin into which it has fallen” (Burleigh 103, 104).

They all held that man cannot escape himself and his pride, and that the only way for him to do good is through the power of God. They were very affected by passages from the Bible like the one from the third chapter of the book of Romans where Paul writes that “there is none who does good, no, not even one” (3:12). Francis quotes Romans 3:12 in The Admonitions when he speaks about how God “is the only source of every good” (Fahy 82).

Both Francis and Luther believed that there is no good in man outside of what God does through him. They believed that human beings do not want the good; they are running after what is bad because of their pride. Francis, the caring, gentle Saint who was, is, and should be respected and honored by the Catholic Church, wrote about the depravity of man and his utter dependence on God hundreds of years before Martin Luther was born.

Luther, Francis, and Augustine all agreed that the way to overcome this sin which blocks man from loving God is not through doing good deeds. This is the logical conclusion to their position on the nature of man; if good only comes from God, then it does not make sense to say that people are able to do good things independent of God in order to make themselves right with Him.

In The Confessions, Augustine does not place a great deal of emphasis on the exteriors of the Christian life such as the church practices; these are important only insofar as they help the Christian to become closer to God. Dr. Shirley Paolini found that his “point of view is almost always inner-directed” and he gives “an account of his spiritual life rather than ‘his outward deeds’” (Paolini 29).

For all three of these men, the spiritual life is distinct from outward deeds; they are of course connected, but deeds are simply a natural outgrowth of a spiritual life. A person leading a life guided by the Spirit of God will definitely want to do good deeds, but they are a manifestation of the love of God within that person; they are not the requirement for attaining a relationship with Him.

For Francis, the path to overcoming pride is in the boasting “of our humiliations and in taking up daily the holy cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Fahy 81). That one principle of humility is what kept Francis in a relationship with God; it was not specific, external deeds, but an internal way of approaching life. For Francis, the way to defeat sin is to deny the self, and to submit to God.

Luther was even more specific about the means to a relationship with God. Vilmos Vajta, a Lutheran scholar, noted Luther’s assertion that man’s “faith does not rest on outward things. It is an inward trust in the redeeming work of Christ” (Vajta 172). For Luther, the Christian enters into a relationship with God through faith, and the good works naturally flow from that relationship; the relationship is not earned through the good works. In their introduction to Luther’s The Bondage of the Will, O.R. Johnston and J.I. Packer write that

Luther, believing that any kind of effort or contribution man may attempt to make towards his own salvation is works-righteousness, and therefore under condemnation, preferred the thorough-going exegesis of Augustine, who magnifies the grace of God. If the person is changed, then- and only then- will the good works follow (Johnston 25).

He believed that even an attempt to follow God, if it is done on man’s power alone, only serves to encourage pride. Thus, the only way to God is through an offering up of one’s self.

Both Francis and Luther put all of the emphasis on submission to God, not on good deeds. A relationship with God, which brings forth good deeds from the believer, is entered into through a denial of the self and a surrendering to God.

They put the emphasis on the will and the love that perfects it, not on intellectual understanding. Both men believed that if too much of a stress is put on reason, man is made vulnerable to the temptation of pride. Thus, combining intellectualism with religion can usher sin into the religious experience. Francis, in The Admonitions, warns against the spiritual death that can result from the love of knowledge:

A man has been killed by the letter when he wants to know quotations only so that people will think he is very learned and he can make money to give to his relatives and friends. A religious has been killed by the letter when he has no desire to follow the spirit of Sacred Scripture, but wants to know what it says only so that he can explain it to others. On the other hand, those have received life from the spirit of Sacred Scripture who… do not allow their knowledge to become a source of self-complacency. (Fahy 81).

Francis did not think his brothers should own books or go to universities. He was very wary of the love of knowledge because of its ability to replace the love of God.

Luther was also suspicious of too heavy an emphasis on the mind independent from God. Johnston and Packer point out that Luther believed that the “ideal of rational autonomy and self-sufficiency in theology… is blasphemous in principle, because it seeks to snatch from God a knowledge of Himself which is not His gift, but man’s achievement… thus it would feed man’s pride.” Luther calls reason the “Devil’s whore” because of this ability it has to lead “men away from the Divine Christ, and from Scripture” (Johnston 46). Although he spoke in much stronger language, Luther was in line with Francis’ thinking. Both men thought that reason could seduce a person and draw him away from God.

The position these men held on the intellect was not the church’s position during the time of Luther. Jacques Barzun claims that the popes during this time were “Humanists by taste if not by works” (54) and that “good Christian Humanists were moral beings of the conventional sort, but their trained minds wanted something more: a metaphysics that would reformulate or at least parallel in classical terms the Catholic theology” (55). The Catholic Church believed in the power of reason independent of God.

The move away from the idea that understanding can only come from God has its most solid foundation in the teachings of Aquinas. For Aquinas, no special illumination is required for the attainment of knowledge. The Thomistic intellect has the capacity for producing truth by itself and not merely receiving it; it can both abstract and judge. That view of the mind is in opposition to the Augustinian understanding of the powers of reason. For Augustine, the intellect can only judge if it is illuminated, and it cannot abstract knowledge. Knowledge depends completely upon Divine illumination for Augustine (Mourant 18).

Aquinas believed in the strength and independence of reason. Of course, a point comes when reason is not sufficient, and faith has to complete the relationship between God and man, but man can get very far on the power of his own intellect. For Augustine, man’s reason is totally dependent on God, so that he is not at all autonomous; he must submit to God completely in order to truly know anything.

Luther’s fear that the thought of Aquinas could open up man to the temptation to become prideful and rely on the strength of his own wisdom is not unfounded. Thomas believed that the human being is in many ways autonomous, and could live a fairly good life independent of God. For Augustine, God must not only complete man but He must breathe life into him. He held that man is dead spiritually because of his devotion to himself, and the only chance for life and true thinking is through the offering up of his whole self to God. For Aquinas, good can come out of people independent of God, for Augustine, Luther, and Francis, any good that comes out of people is totally dependent upon God.

So people have this condition called original sin which means they are only concerned with building up their own pride, and this leads one to believe that a person can only enter a relationship with God through a submission of this pride. For Francis and Luther, this submission was done individually.

Both Francis and Luther held that worship is fundamentally subjective. A person may worship God along with a group of fellow believers, but he is still worshiping essentially by himself. No one can worship God through another person; although there is a collective experience, the group is made up of individuals personally communing with the Almighty. If the experience is not subjective, if the mind ever leaves the Divine, at that point the worshiping has ceased.

Thus, for Luther and Francis, the human being is in a personal conversation with God, and no one can put an order or structure to that experience. The structure of the church is of course important, and once a group of people who all want to believe the same thing grows to a large enough number, organization becomes essential. What the church believes should be distinguished from what it does not believe, but Luther and Francis maintained that the adherence to and study of these principles are subordinate and secondary to the spontaneous experience of worship with the Creator. All of the rules and the traditions of the church are only there to guide the believer to this subjective experience.

This way of thinking about worship was passed down to both of them through the teachings of Augustine. With the writing of The Confessions, Augustine was making the claim that the Christian experience is an inward one, between the believer and God. “The theme of a journey to God in Augustine takes on the form of an interior search for God” (Paolini 28).

This inward experience is for everyone, not just special Christians such as the clergy. Augustine was writing to pagans, Christians, and heretics alike, and he hoped that it would help to convert non-Christians or fallen Christians (Paolini 30). He was talking about a direct link to the creator. He spoke to God without mediation, and he thought that everyone could do the same.

Francis spent a great amount of time praying to God directly. He communed with God in a personal way and he was constantly striving to maintain a direct link with Him. In his conversion story, he tells about how in the midst of his prayer, Christ spoke to him through the cross (House 64). God reached out and spoke directly to this man who had not taken any vows nor had been recognized in any way by the church.

Francis did not believe that it was only the special, chosen ones like himself who were to strive for this personal relationship with God. According to the Franciscan Brother Placid Hermann, when Francis preached to his brothers about how they should live, he contended that “their following of Christ was not to be something purely external. It was to be an imitation of Christ that would lead to a total transformation interiorly, a complete submission of the spirit of the flesh to the spirit of Christ, a seraphic love of him” (Fahy 10). For Francis, this interior transformation is at the heart of living a Christian life.

Francis also had a Third Order, which included “penitent men and women, married and single, from every level of society, (who) remained in the world but took vows which bound them to the same ends of love, service and peace as his other two” (House 147). The fact that he extended his group to include lay people shows that he did not believe that the interior experience with God that he espoused was restricted to those who were set apart as brothers or members of the clergy. Francis believed that an intimate communion with God is possible and essential for any true believer.

Therefore, the direct relationship to God that Luther spoke about was not a new idea. The reason it seemed so foreign to the people in Luther’s time was because they had set up all kinds of ways to get to God without really getting to God. Society had become so Christian that people who were not believers wanted some way to convince themselves and others that they were in fact believers. Being a Christian was merely a social norm-it did not mean too much. According to Barzun, the Church was full of “gluttonous monks in affluent abbeys, absentee bishops, priests with concubines” (11). Not only that, but “the meaning of the roles had been lost. The priest, instead of being a teacher, was ignorant; the monk, instead of helping to save the world by his piety, was an idle profiteer; the bishop, instead of supervising the care of souls in his diocese was a politician and businessman… the system was rotten” (11). So they set up a huge, complicated network of mediations to God. In a sense, they seemed to be attempting to create a buffer between themselves and God in order to assuage their guilt.

Luther, inspired by people like Francis and Augustine, rejected this system of mediations. He wanted to push aside the buffer to get to the intimate relationship with God that both Augustine and Francis had experienced and had promised was possible for true believers. Most of all, he based his conviction upon the Scripture, which maintains that the Christian’s mediator is Christ Himself; it is Christ, as the “great high priest,” who goes before God the Father on the believer’s behalf (Hebrews 4:14-5:10).

For both Francis and Luther, all the practices of the church exist simply to edify the subjective experience of worship. Any believer who goes from one church practice to another without any attempt to commune personally with God is not worshiping God; rather, he is a member of an organization.

Martin Luther and Francis of Assisi both believed they had found true love through this personal, intimate relationship with God. They had both fallen madly in love, and could not help but tell people about it. They also saw a perversion of this true love being promulgated in each of their social spheres, and they spoke out against it. Each man’s life was about enhancing his love relationship, and about teaching others to distinguish between perverted or false love and true love. They both wanted all to experience the sweetness of the love they had discovered, without any impurities.

The false love with which they were concerned was different for each man, and this was a result of their very dissimilar social settings. Luther lived in an ecclesiastical and academic environment, and Francis lived among the lay people.

Luther was a doctor of theology, so his life was centered on the teachings of the church. The false love that he saw dealt with church doctrine; he was concerned with faulty theologies. According to Packer and Johnston, Luther “held that doctrines were essential to, and constitutive of, the Christian religion” (Johnston 43). For Luther, in order to experience true love with God, one must have a correct doctrine; so he made every attempt to tell people about what he believed the correct doctrine is.

The main points of conflict between Luther and the church officials had to do with two things that Francis and Luther both believed, namely that good works do not bring salvation, and that worship is fundamentally a subjective experience. Luther maintained that the believer must, by faith, enter into a personal, intimate relationship with God to truly worship Him. Many other teachers claimed that the love of God is earned through good deeds done through the church. Luther was terribly opposed to this, maintaining that God gives His love freely.

Many people thought about their relationship to God in financial terms; the sinner would do a good deed, and God would mark off a part of his debt. Gerhard Forde, a professor at the Luther Theological Seminary, writes that Luther wanted to get away from “the idea that God must be paid” (Forde 36). Luther held that man can never pay off his debt to God, and that the only way to become right with Him is through trusting in the resurrection of Christ. For Luther, the resurrection is the conquering of death by Christ; one must put his or her trust in that spiritual victory in order to be united with God.

For Luther, Christ made a loving relationship with God possible. Many people of his day considered God to be something like an impersonal tax collector, with no hope for an intimate communication. Luther saw Him as a bridegroom and as his great high priest; He was the love of his life, and that part of the Trinity that makes personal communion with the Divine possible.

For Luther, the doctrine of salvation by faith independent of works was an essential doctrine to understand. He believed that in order to be in an intimate love relationship with God, the Christian must be free from the law in the eyes of God. “This liberty must not be seen as a liberty from God or from his works. Only as man partakes in Christ and his works can he be free. His liberty is through, not from the gospel, and commensurate to his bondage under the same” (Vajta 172). It is through his bondage to God that the believer receives liberty from the law. Much the same way a lover submits to his beloved, the believer must submit fully to God.

Luther had thus found a way to be free before God, no longer miserable about his sin, but confident that God loved Him and forgave him. He believed that this “light he had gained from the Scriptures forced him to live by and preach the truth which he had found” (Johnston 22). Luther felt an obligation to make everyone aware of the way to find true love.

Francis dealt with a different kind of false love, but he was just as fervent in his defense of what he believed to be true love. Francis was the son of a wealthy merchant, and because of the increasing power of wealth, was able to socialize with the nobility of Assisi. He even became a knight, and became steeped in all of the courtly traditions, especially the tradition of the Troubadours (House 28).

The Troubadours were knights who sang of the love between a man and a woman. This love was sometimes unattainable, sometimes adulterous, and on rare occasions within wedlock; it often caused problems such as deceitfulness and even murder. But no matter what the circumstances, the love was seen as pure and true, and as the ultimate good in life and the justification for any wrong-doing that might come from it. The Troubadours exalted the romantic feelings between a man and a woman, and they believed that it was in this earthly relationship that they could find true love. Francis disagreed, and he attempted to point them in another direction.

Francis and Luther were both fighting to maintain what they believed was the only way to enter into the most satisfying and perfect romance. Noticing again the influence of Augustine on these men, he held that “the surrender to God is like the surrender of the lover to his mistress” (Paolini 35). For Francis, Luther, and Augustine, the relationship between God and man is sensual, not dry and intellectual; it is shrouded in mystery and passion, and every fiber of the Christian’s being cries out to be united with the Lord, who is the perfect lover. Thus, for these three men, the romantic love that a man and a woman experience is merely a taste of what love between the Christian and God is like.

The Troubadours flipped everything around, and secularized Augustine’s view. The world is no longer dominated by God, but by Love, and this new ruler Love exalts the romance between a man and a woman to the highest good. They also took the Augustinian notion of a person’s relationship to God and brought it into the world as the model for a romance between a man and a woman.

In Cliges, a medieval romance by the Troubadour Chrétien de Troyes, Love is a character in the story, and He has control over the other people. Love does what He wishes when He wishes. And, although Alexander and Soredamor are in agony over the love that they feel, “His treatment of them was right and just” (Staines 93). Love is autonomous, but He seems to be concerned with justice and righteousness, much like God. Love’s goodness is not always apparent to those feeling the effects of His actions, much like God.

Adding to this notion that the romances turn Love into God, the two lovers in Cliges, who are deeply suffering because of their love, have long monologues which are very similar to the Psalms in the Bible. All of these speeches deal with the speaker’s struggles with love. One such moment shows Alexander laboring to understand Love:

Love has brought this sickness on me. Then can Love do harm? Is he not kind and nobly born? I once thought that there was nothing but good in Love, yet I have discovered him to be very wicked… What shall I do? Shall I draw back? I think that wise, though I don’t know how to do it. If Love chastises and threatens me in order to teach and instruct me, am I to scorn my master? He who scorns his master is a fool. I ought to keep and retain the teachings and instructions love gives me. They might bring me great happiness (95).

Here Alexander is struggling to understand his master. He finds himself in a new world of passion and desire for Soredamor, and he longs to understand the creator of this world.

The lovers in these medieval stories leave the world created by God and enter the world created by Love. In his introduction to The Romance of Tristan, Alan S. Fedrick searches for the reason why God seems to condone the adulterous and often times deceitful actions of Tristan and Yseut. “For it is clear that God either connived at the lover’s illicit passion or in some sense considered them innocent” (20). The answer lies in the fact that they are no longer in the world created by the God of the Bible, but in the world created by Love. C.S. Lewis, an expert on medieval literature, says that one of the characteristics of the romantic love expressed by the Troubadours is that it is a “Religion of Love” (Lewis 2). For the Troubadours, Love creates a new kind of religion, wherein the lovers actions are justified by the love they have for one another. When God is Love, the only responsibility one has is to his or her beloved.

Chrétien’s The Knight of the Cart is a good example of the way in which Augustine influenced the Troubadours’ conception of romance. In this story, Lancelot must humble himself in order to be united with Guinevere. He has to get into the cart, which is a total humiliation for anyone. He must deny himself in order to be with his beloved. The main concern of the Christian, for Augustine, is the denial of the self and the humility which comes from that denial. The Christian must humble himself and “get in the cart” every single day in order to be in an intimate relationship with God.

Finally, in the opening of The Knight With The Lion, Chrétien speaks of Love having disciples, and he draws a parallel to Christ when he says that “now, alas, there are very few disciples; nearly all have deserted him so that Love is held in disrepute” (Staines 257). The people listening to Chrétien, who were familiar with Christianity, would probably notice the allusion to the disciples’ abandonment of Christ when he was crucified. Thus, the reader or listener draws a connection between Love and Christ. For Chrétien, Love is the true savior and redeemer of the world.

These medieval Troubadours brought the concept of a personal, passionate love down to earth. Augustine taught that this kind of love could only be found in God, that He brings satisfaction to the one who desires love and comfort. Troubadours like William of Aquitaine, Beroul, and Chrétien de Troyes made the claim that God was not really sufficient. What human beings needed was that same sort of intense, personal love, but between each other. Augustine’s eyes were heavenward, whereas the Troubadours and the people of the court had their gaze focused on the people around them, searching for the human relationship that could surpass any bond with God.

Francis ran with a fast crowd, and he got his fill of earthly romance (House 26). He went the opposite way of the Troubadours, though, in that he found the earthly romance unsatisfying and the love of God to be the source of ultimate satisfaction. As a knight and a troubadour searching for love in this world, his notions of romance did not take him far enough; he longed for more.

For Francis, the romantic ideal of a perfect, intimate love that he and most noble men at the time strove for came to complete fruition in God. The intimate, personal experience of the love of God made complete sense to Francis because he had been influenced by a tradition that was based on Augustine’s conceptions of a relationship with God. Francis was looking for a love that would last forever, for the perfection of romantic love. He found it in God. Once he discovered this, the sweetness and the beauty of the experience made him abandon all thoughts of love on earth and turned his eyes forever heavenward.

The Troubadours had taken Augustine’s conception of true love and secularized it, because they felt that it was unsatisfying in its focus on the transcendent. The world was filled with religion and promises of a passionate experience with the Creator, and many people found these promises to be empty. No sensations of closeness to the Divine were felt, and so they began to look elsewhere for true love. They believed they found it in the relationship between a man and a woman, and so they promulgated the idea that only a love between human beings brought about true fulfillment.

Francis thought that those who believed that the highest kind of love could be found on earth were seeking after a perverted, or false form of love. He spoke out against the false love of the Troubadours by becoming a different kind of Troubadour, singing about the love that transcends the earth. His muse was the Lord God in Heaven, and he sang about his desire to be united with his Creator. For Francis the only truly satisfying love comes from a relationship with that thing that is outside of the world, not from someone within it. He therefore gave up everything he owned and began to commune with the Lord.

His way of life was a protestation against false love. The way he lived shouted out the assertion that all material things and relations here on earth are ultimately meaningless, and that the only truly important thing is to know and love the Lord God in Heaven. He did not stop with just actions, either. He preached, and his preaching called everyone to give up their false loves and to come and experience the great love of the Divine. The manner in which he lived and the words he spoke convicted everyone around him that he had something special. Some wanted what he had, others had respect for him, and still others believed he was crazy. Francis made waves and spoke out in unabashed defense of his true love.

Francis and Luther were both staunch supporters of their understandings of the way to true fulfillment, which were surprisingly similar. Ironically, St. Francis of Assisi probably had more in common theologically with Luther than he did with Luther’s opponents. It should be clear, through these similarities, that Luther was not a radical revolutionary bent on the destruction of the Catholic Church; he wanted to make reforms.

Not many people will argue with the notion that he was correct in his attack on the sale of indulgences and other such abuses in the church. But most will maintain that this attack on abuses soon became an attack on the theology of the church. This is not entirely true. While he was against the dominant theology of the church during his time, he was not against Catholic theology. Luther was not proposing revolutionary ideas; he wanted to go back to a tradition that long preceded Aquinas and his weaving of Aristotle into church doctrine.

Aquinas’ theology was more revolutionary than Luther’s. Thomas totally transformed the church with the merging of the philosophy of Athens with the theology of Jerusalem. Augustine was influenced by Plotinus, who was a neo-Platonist, and Augustine himself was perhaps the last of the great classical philosophers. But once he became a Christian, Augustine maintained that his reason was completely powerless without divine illumination. Aquinas introduced a sense of the independent power of reason to the Catholic Church. Luther thought this was a mistake, and he wanted to go back to the notion of an utter submission to God that he found in Augustine.

So most people believe that Luther’s attack on the church abuses was correct, and it has been made clear that his theology was in line with at least two of the greatest Catholic Saints. Why then did the Catholic Church act so harshly against him?

The unfortunate truth of the matter is that many of the leaders of the Catholic Church had long been corrupted by power. Francis and Luther both saw this. Francis spoke out against it by living a life that convicted those who witnessed it. But this is easily ignored by those who do not wish to be convicted, and he did not bring any disgrace to the church and its leaders. Luther was not so easily ignored. He was a doctor of theology, and he spoke out against the corruption by teaching and preaching that the leaders were wrong. He forced everyone to listen, even those who did not wish to hear him. He spoke against the leaders of the church, and called them to reform; this necessarily brought disgrace upon them.

The leaders of the church therefore had to confront this bold theologian who was causing them problems. Sadly, they were not the most humble or charitable people, and they reacted rather harshly. At the very beginning of the affair Luther was considered an enemy. The reformer who wanted everyone to know of the true love of God was charged with heresy right away, and soon he was threatened with excommunication. When he refused to recant the things he had written and preached, the church leaders sentenced him to eternal damnation and totally separated themselves from the blasphemous heretic (Sproul 122-127). Thus, the break that could never be bonded was made, and the Church was divided (even more).

Luther was not perfect. He had a terrible temper and he said and did things that only served to agitate an already bad situation. That being said, he was first and foremost concerned with repairing his beloved Catholic (or Universal) Church, not destroying it. He wanted to correct the abuses in the institution, and he wanted to bring its theology back under the care of Augustine.

The whole situation would surely have turned out better if everyone had tried to emulate St. Francis. If Luther and the leaders of the church had approached the matter in the same spirit of humility that was embodied in this little man from Assisi, perhaps the church would not have suffered from further division... at that time anyway.

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Chicago: Franciscan Herald P, 1964.

Fedrick, Alan S., trans. Beroul- The Romance of Tristan. London: Penguin Books, 1970.

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[1] G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi [1924] (Garden City, N.Y.: Double-day, Image Books, 1957), pp. 87, 86.

[2] Murray Bodo, Francis: The Journey and the Dream (Cincinnati: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1972). pp. 147-149.

[3] Psalm 135: 7, Revised Standard Version.

[4] ”Treatise on Law,” Summa Theologica, Prima Secunda, Qu. XCI, a. I in Ethical Theories: A Book of Readings, Second Edition with Revisions, Edited by A.I. Melden (Englewood Cliffs N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), p. 193

[5] Dom Gregory Dix, Jew and Greek: A Study in the Primitive Church (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1953), p. 5.

[6] Robert Sokolowski, Eucharistic Presence: A Study in the Theology of Disclosure (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994), p. 216.

[7] Corinthians 2: 2, King James Version.

[8] Paul Vignaux, Philosophy in the Middle Ages, translated by E.C. Hall (London: Burns & Oates, 1959), p. 107.

[9] Leonard J. Bowman, ‘Bonaventure and the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins,’ in S. Bonaventura, 1274-1974. Volume Three, Proprietas Littennia (Roma: Collegio S. Bonaventura, Grottaferrata, 1973). p. 559.

[10] Louis Mackey, 'Singular and Universal: A Franciscan Perspective,' Franciscan Studies, Volume 39, Annual XVII, 1979, p. 159.

[11] The De Primo Principio of John Duns Scotus, A Revised Text and a Translation by Evan Roche, O.F.M. (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: The Franciscan Institute; Louvain, Belgium-. E. Nauwelaerts, 1949), p. 123.

[12] Duns Scotus, 'On the Existence of God,' in Medieval Philosophy: From St. Augustine to Nicholas of Cusa, edited by John F. Wippel and Allan B. Wolter, O.F.M. (New York: The Free Press, Macmillan, London: Collier Macmillan, 1969), p. 409.

[13] Francis J. Catania, 'John Duns Scotus on 'Ens Infinitum',' The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Volume LXVII, No. 1, Winter 1993, pp. 40, 54.

[14]Hywel Thomas, 'Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Duns Scotus,' Religious Studies, Volume 24, Number 3, September 1988, p. 361.

[15] John Duns Scotus, God and Creatures: The Quodlibetal Questions, translated by Felix Alluntis, O.F.M. and Allan B. Wolter, O.F.M. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 15 1975). Question One, 11, 13, pp. 16, 18.

[16] Ibid., Question Five, 4, 7. pp. 111- 1 12. 114

[17] Francis J. Catania, 'John Duns Scotus on 'Ens Infinitum'," The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Volume LXVII, No. 1, Winter 1993, pp. 43-44.

[18] John Duns Scotus, God and Creatures: The Quodlibetal Questions, translated by Felix Alluntis, O.F.M. and Allan B. Wolter, O.F.M. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), Question Five, I 1, p. II 8.

[19] Ibid., Question Nineteen, 25, 18, pp. 442, 433.

[20] -10 Louis Mackey, 'Singular and Universal: A Franciscan Perspective," Franciscan Studies, Volume 39, Annual XVII, 1979, pp. 158, 154.

[21] John Duns Scotus, A Treatise on God as Pint Principle, A Latin Text and English Translation of the De Primo Principio, Second Edition, revised with a commentary, by Alan B. Wolter, O.F.M. (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1966), 4.50, pp. 106, 107

[22] Timothy B. Noone, 'Individuation in Scotus.' The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Volume LXIX. No. 4. Autumn 1995, p. 538.

[23] Gerald J. Galgan, 'Reinterpreting the Middle Ages," The Political Science Reviewer, Volume XIV, Fall 1984, p. 34. See Michael B. Foster, Mystery and Philosophy (London: SCM Press, 1957), pp. 9 1, 87, 90, 34.

[24]Charles Sanders Peirce, Review 118711 of Fraser's Berkeley, in Edward C. Moore, Max H. Fisch, et al. (eds.), The Writings of Charles S. Peirce, Volume Two, 1867-1871 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 473.

[25] Arthur W. Burk, editor, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volume Two (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 149.

[26] Robert Sokolowski, “Formal and Material Causality in Science," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Annual ACPA Proceedings, Volume LXIX, 'The Recovery of Form,' 1995, p. 66.

[27] Etienne Gilson. History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Random House, 1955). p. 498.

[28] Gordon Leff, William of Ockham: The Metamorphosis of Scholastic Discourse (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975), p. 467.

[29] Francis Oakley, 'Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science: The Rise of the Concept of the Laws of Nature,' Church History, Vol. 30, 196 1, p. 442.

[30] John Dewey, Reconstruction In Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press. 1957), pp. II 3. 116

[31] Lynn White, Jr., 'Natural Science and Naturalistic Art in the Middle Ages,' in Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays by Lynn White, Jr. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 24.

[32] Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, edited by Werener Stark (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954), p. 89.

[33] Johann Kepler, Epitome of Copernican Astronomy, IV-V, in Milton Munitz (ed.), Theories of the Universe: From Babylonian Myth to Modern Science (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957), p. 200.

[34] Max Caspar, Kepler, translated by Doris Hellman (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1954). p. 93.

[35] Rene Descartes, Meditationes de Prima Phflosophia: Meditationes Metaphysique, edited by Genevieve Rodis-Lewis (Paris: Vrin. 1963), pp. 34-35.

[36] Rene Descartes, Discours de la methade -- Discourse on the Method, A Bilingual Edition, edited and translated by George Heffernan (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), Part Six, p. 87.

[37] Philip Rieff. Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Garden City, N.Y.: Double-day. Anchor Books. 196 1). p. 392.

[38] Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View (New York: Harmony Books.1991). pp. 393-394.

[39] Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, translated by James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1962), pp. 38, 39.

[40] Sven Birkerts, 'The Fate of the Book,' Antioch Review, Volume 54, Number 3, Summer 1996, p. 270.

[41] Matthew Arnold, 'Dover Beach,' in Immortal Poems of the English Language, edited by Oscar Williams (New York: Washington Square Press, Inc., 1960), pp. 428-429.

[42] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 18.

[43] Federico Fellini, quoted by Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Toward A Postmodern Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). P. 320

[44] Stanley Rosen, The question of Being.- A Reversal of Heidegger (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 31 S

[45] Richard P. Binzel, "Pluto,' in Understanding Space, Scientific American Inc., 1996, p. 79.

[46] Paul A. Olson, The Journey to Wisdom: Self-Education in Patristic and Medieval Literature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 167.

[47] Jonathan J. Halliwell, 'Quantum Cosmology and the Creation of the Universe' in Understanding Space, Scientific American, Inc., 1996, pp. 103, 105.

[48] Gregory D. Bothun, 'The Ghostlier Galaxies,' Scientific American, Volume 276, Number 2, February 1997. pp. 61, 60, 58.

[49] Bernd-Olaf Kuppers, Information and the Origin of Life, translated by Paul Wooley (Cambridge, Mass. - MIT Press, 1990), pp. 177, 106.

[50] P. Erich Przywara, S.J., Polarity: A German Catholic’s Interpretation of Religion, translated by A.C. Bouquet (London: Oxford University Press, Humphrey Milford, 1935),

[51] Stuart Kauffman, At Rome In the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self- Organization and Comple3dty (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 25.

[52] Louise B. Young, The Unfinished Universe (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 56.

[53] Leon R. Kass, M.D., The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature (New York: The Free Press, Macmillan Inc.. 1994), pp. 29, 41 [emphasis supplied].

[54] Thomas Mann quoted by Ralph Harper, On Presence (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1991), p. 103.

[55]George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), P. 106

[56] Cf. Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of The Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Volume Five, The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age, translated by Oliver Davies, Andrew Louth, Brian McNeil, C.R.V., John Saward, and Row-an Williams (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), pp. 652- 656.

[57] John William Miller, 'Afterword: The Ahistortic and the Historic,' in Jose Ortega y Gasset, History as a System and Other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History, trans. Helene Weyl, William C. Atkinson, and Eleanor Clark (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1962), pp. 255, 243.

[58] Norman 0. Brown, Love's Body (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), p. 203.

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