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4 Origins of the Canon THE STRUCTURAL SYMBOLISM of “The Canticle of Brother Sun,” combined with its unembellished rhetoric,epitomizes Francis of Assisi’s desire to return to the uncontaminated first stage of creation.Theologically, a return to the beginning implies the radical idea of bringing back the state of humanity depicted in the biblical myth of creation, when man and woman were nude and had not yet undergone temptation and Fall; their relation to each other and to nature remained harmonious and flawless .The poetics of the “Canticle” proposes a view of pre-Fall creation as depicted in the Book of Genesis.1 More than a utopian recovery of uncorrupted nature, the poem urges perception of a natural world re-created through the fundamental salvation achieved by redemption.The Franciscan Psalm recovers the purity of nature,not in its mythical stage,but within the history of salvation.2 In the“Canticle,”Francis revisits nature,describing its beauty,its sacramentality , and its harmony. In his purified vision, creation speaks of God as it spoke to human beings at the initial stages of salvation history in Genesis —or, rather, before salvation was even a necessity.The “Canticle” can be interpreted not only thematically but also rhetorically as a revisiting of the natural world in light of Christian redemption. Despite the numerous critical perspectives from which the poem can be viewed (as prayer, as first poem of the Italian literary canon, as song of thankfulness), its thematic stress remains on nature and on nature’s status as God’s creation.The pervasive presence of nature is a reminder of the creation myth in the Book of Genesis, the biblical text that centers on cosmogony. Creatures punctuate“The Canticle of Brother Sun,”also known as the “Canticum creaturarum” (“The Canticle of Creatures”).3 The text insists on their origin in and dependence on God.All creatures owe their existence to God, regardless of their material, ethereal, or simply conceptual presence in the world: sun, moon, wind, earth, fire, water, death, and the people-who-forgive are the creatures evoked.Their subordination to God represents the creature-Creator relationship that shapes the poem’s theological background.The all-encompassing structure of the “Canticle ” attempts to include every substantial element that exists in the universe , thereby bringing to mind the cosmogonic account in the first few chapters of Genesis.The parallel with Genesis includes both the thematization of nature and the concept of origins. Francis revisits the mythical account of universal origins at the beginning of Genesis with his own praiseful rendering,in the lyrical genre,of the created world after redemption .4 At times the Franciscan poem appears simply to gloss the Bible. In some sense, any text of the Judeo-Christian tradition that revisits creation makes direct or indirect reference to the Book of Genesis (1–2:4a and 2:4b–3:24).The intertextual link to Genesis makes the “Canticle” a derivative piece that must be read in conjunction with the biblical hypertext .5 The “Canticle” mentions a few selected creatures in order to magnify the aesthetic beauty and crucial function of all creation.Although in synthetic, concise form, the cosmogony of Genesis is all there; the “Canticle”glosses it to highlight the goodness and beauty of all creatures. The general tone of the Franciscan Psalm is that of a commentary on the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis. If Francis’s inspirational, or simply genealogical, source is the first portion of Genesis, the canonical, philologically accredited sources of the Franciscan Psalm are found in two other biblical texts, Psalm 148 and the Psalm of the ThreeYoung Men in the Furnace, also known as the Psalm of Daniel (Dan. 3:52–90).6 Both texts are lyrical, prayerful, praising compositions ,and both have a litanic scansion obtained through frequent repetition of a refrain:“Praise”in Psalm 148 and“Bless”in the Psalm of Daniel. A textual comparison of the “Canticle” with its two canonical sources indicates several fundamental stylistic and thematic differences and highlights the peculiarly Franciscan characteristics of Francis’s poem—the first poem of the Italian poetic canon and the first hymn of the liturgical canon in the Italian vernacular.7 The first striking quality of the “Canticle” in comparison to its two canonical sources is its concisiveness. Briefer in the number of its lines in comparison to the Psalm of Daniel (thirty-three lines,or fourteen verses, are but a fraction of the eighty-seven lines, or...

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