Francis of Assisi as a Catholic Saint

All the brothers must be Catholic
and live and speak in a Catholic Manner . . .

THE REGULA NON BULLATA

Introduction

Paul Sabatier published his landmark biography of St. Francis of Assisi in 1893.¹ Based on a careful study of the early legenda, many of them only rediscovered in modern times and some of those by the author himself, Sabatier's biography had a thesis to argue. In his estimation, Francis was a simple, Christ-intoxicated lay mystic who desired to live a life of evangelical simplicity, but his success in attracting disciples triggered the intervention of the institutional Church, which domesticated the movement into a religious order while clericalizing what was essentially a lay movement and putting it under strong canonical control. To paraphrase a well-known quip attributed to one of Sabatier's own teachers at the Sorbonne, Ernest Renan: Francis came preaching the Gospel, and we ended up with the Franciscan Order.

Sabatier was a serious scholar of history, but he was also heir to a Romantic impulse about Francis that already had well-established roots in the second half of the nineteenth century.² One could draw an admittedly irregular line that runs from Sabatier to the Catholic response in Johannes Jorgensen, to Herman Hesse's novel Peter Kamenzkind, to Nikos Kazantzakis's study of Francis, to films like Brother Sun/Sister Moon (depicting Francis as hippie), to those statues found in suburban garden centers in your local Kmart or Wal-Mart. What made his book important, however, is that Sabatier argued its thesis with the ammunition of solid scholarship in his favor as well as his excellent training in historiography. He also had a genteel antipathy to the perceived rigidity of modern Catholicism common to the liberal Protestant establishment of his day.

The Vatican was not amused by Sabatier's book. It paid him the dubious honor of placing the work on the Index of Prohibited Books scarcely a year after its publication. Despite that negative judgment, it is safe to say Sabatier framed a thesis that would influence scholarship on the saint for at least a century after its publication. That thesis can be reframed in the form of a question: To what degree was the vision of Francis undermined by ecclesiastical authority? The famous "Franciscan Question" would be front and center of Franciscan research for decades.³ That dispute should not surprise us since, as everyone knows, there were bitter disputes after the death of Francis as competing factions argued about the true intentions of the saint (especially over the practice of evangelical poverty). Still further, the early legends also had a polemical edge to them so apparent that in the middle of the century they were suppressed in favor of Bonaventure's Legenda Major, which became the normative account within the Franciscan Order itself.⁴ It was not until the early nineteenth century that other accounts were retrieved from obscure, mainly monastic, libraries in Europe. Sabatier himself contributed to the search for these sources.

It is not my aim, in this article, to trace out the complexities of this argument. It is a historical argument that bears just a tiny bit of similarity to scholarly discussions relative to the quest for the historical Jesus. My intention here is to do something a bit more modest. I wish to make three fundamental points: (1) to argue that Francis did not appear out of the blue without precedents as if he were a flower blooming in the desert of the medieval Church; (2) to argue that Francis was a perfectly orthodox medieval Catholic who had been deeply influenced by the reforms of the Fourth Lateran Council; and (3) to raise the question that if my second point is plausible, why then is St. Francis such a perennial point of reference not only for Catholics but by other Christians and non-Christians alike?

Francis: The Spiritual Antecedents

There are any number of pathbreaking books that frame an argument that sets the discussion long after the book has been adjudicated as wanting. Jacob Burckhardt's 1860's work Die Kultur...