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35 Franciscan Studies 63 (2005) SO WHAT IS A FRANCISCAN? CONSTITUTING THE FRANCISCAN SUBJECT “Et odio habeamus corpus nostrum cum suis vitiis et peccatis, quia carnaliter vivendo vult nobis auferre amorem Domini nostri Iesu Christi et vitam aeternam et se ipsum cum omnibus perdere in infernum .” This line comes from Chapter XXII in the Early Rule.1 As some historians propose, Francis is addressing his brothers in 1219 before setting out for the Orient. You might ask why I read you the line in Latin. I read it to you in Latin because I do not think you want to hear it in English. It is not a line popular with teachers of Franciscan spirituality . It makes students of Franciscan spirituality uneasy. So by forced readings we have been taught, if indirectly, to pass rapidly here when perusing the early writings. In editorial work, when collating manuscripts , an editor will come across disagreement among the manuscripts . (That is why he is collating them.) A major disagreement sharpens the editor’s senses, for behind it lies a story. By figuring out the story, the editor ends up understanding better the different scribes as well as the text, advancing the critical worth of the eventual edition. We have something similar here. Why are we wary of the sentence I quoted in Latin? Why do we want to elide something Francis said? Where lies our problem? The fact that we have a problem with these words of Francis already makes them interesting, more interesting still if we ascribe them, as I do, a central role in early Franciscan life. So: now that you have been forewarned, here is the line in English: “And let us hate our body with its vices and sins, for by living carnally it 1 I use the collection of Franciscan sources edited by L. Garcia Aragon, Summa Franciscana vel Sancti Francisci et Sanctae Clarae Assisiensium Opuscula, Biographiae et Documenta. Murcia, 1993. Hereafter Summa Franciscana. Here: Summa Franciscana, 68. – I thank Michael Blastic (The Franciscan Institute) for his critical reading of the text, which helped me remove a few of its weaknesses. DAVID FLOOD 36 wants to take from us the love of our Lord Jesus Christ and eternal life and cast itself with everyone into hell.” We come across this rule of life regularly in the early Franciscan writings. It belongs to any summary of that life. It receives a very forceful expression in the Message of Recall and Encouragement.2 “We must not be wise and prudent according to the flesh. Rather, we must be simple, humble, and pure. And let us revile our bodies and look on them with contempt, for by our own fault we are all cheap and smelly, fetid and wormy, as the Lord says through the prophet: I am a worm and no man, the scorn of men, an outcast of the people. We should never aspire to be over others. Rather, we should be servants, subject to every human creature for God.” Francis addressed that text to a wide audience of men and women, an audience he and his companions had acquired by their life and words. Consequently Francis offers it as a basic Christian rule. Anyone who wishes to engage life at Jesus’ side has to despise his or her body (habere corpus despectum). At the end of The Salutation of the Virtues the brothers glory in this sense of themselves . We are examining an instruction central to Franciscan life. We can fix the first time the early Franciscans reached the conclusion that they had to hate their bodies. The context in which they reached that conclusion and then formulated it helps us determine what they meant and why they considered the determination important . We first encounter the ruling in Chapter Seventeen of the Early Rule.3 This portion of the Early Rule followed on the experience of the brothers as they “went about the world,” in the words of Chapter Fourteen. Francis and his companions worked, as Chapter Seven in the Early Rule prescribed. Work as they understood it gave them a sure and independent place among the people of their day. Able to take care of themselves, sensitive...

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