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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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].
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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
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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
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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
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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 alKamil. 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.
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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
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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
13
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
14
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-
15
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
16
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
17
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
18
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
19
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
20
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
21
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
22
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 seaand 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 songsong that in those sweet instruments surpassed
the best our Sirens or our Muses sing,
as source of light outshines what it reflects.
23
As two concentric arcs of equal hue,
are seen as they bend through the misty clouds
when Juno tells her handmaid to appearthe outer from the inner one an echo,
like to the longing voice of her who love
consumed as morning sun consumes the dewand reassure the people here below
that by the covenant God made with Noah,
they have no need to fear another Floodeven 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 periland, as you have been told, He sent His bride
two champions who through their words and deeds
24
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."
25
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,
26
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
27
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
28
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
29
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!
30
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:
31
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,
32
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
1
G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi [1924] (Garden City, N.Y.: Double-day, Image Books, 1957), pp.
87, 86.
33
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
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.
”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.
4
7
8
Corinthians 2: 2, King James Version.
Paul Vignaux, Philosophy in the Middle Ages, translated by E.C. Hall (London: Burns & Oates, 1959),
p. 107.
34
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
Leonard J. Bowman, ‘Bonaventure and the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins,’ in S. Bonaventura, 12741974. 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.
9
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.
35
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,
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
36
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.”23Working 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
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.
37
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
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.
38
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,
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.
39
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
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.
40
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
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.
41
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
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.
42
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
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. 652656.
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.
43
Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Windhover
To Christ Our Lord
I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom 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.
44
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, springsBecause 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 isChrist- 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
Give murderous thoughts rest
The river is full
The time is ripe
No leaves on the trees
A mild sun darkens
45
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 manybranched 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.
46
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.
46
47
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
47
48
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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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‘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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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?"
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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
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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
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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.
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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 mid1990 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 fifteenpercent 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.
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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
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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
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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.
http://www.immigrafionforum.org/.
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
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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
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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 72
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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
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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
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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
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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?
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G. Resources for Further Study
There are a number of resources listed on the Holy Name Province website:
http://www.hnp.org/
The U.S. Catholic Bishops have a number of resources and all the statements mentioned above.
http://www.nccbuscc.org/
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
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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 nativeborn 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
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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
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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.
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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. http://www.immigrationforum.org/
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. http://www.hnp.org/.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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‘ 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.
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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
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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,
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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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