Paradox of Poverty: Francis of Assisi and John of the Cross (review)

Scheuring,Lyn M. Falzon, Paradox of Poverty: Francis of Assisi and John of the Cross. (Quincy, Illinois: Franciscan Press. 2001. Pp. vi, 161. $18.95 paperback.)

This work attempts to demonstrate some commonality of inspiration to the practice of poverty of both Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint John of the Cross, an inspiration that flows from their belief that poverty of spirit must accompany all and any forms of material poverty chosen to follow more perfectly Jesus Christ, the one who "became poor that... [we] might be rich" (2 Cor. 8:9).

Lyn Falzon Scheuring devotes personal efforts to achieve that interplay by work among the poor of New York City. Here she sets out Francis's exemplification of this important truth, housed in excerpts taken from Saint Bonaventure, Francis's "official" biographer. She then draws parallel lessons from the writings of Saint John of the Cross. She works out a synthesis in the final two chapters of the volume.

This thesis-become-published book carries with it the oftentimes unavoidable characteristics of rewrites. Intensely focused on a limited, monographic topic—two great saints and their notions of poverty—its argumentation depends predominantly on research tools used by the author at a particular time, the time she composed the dissertation (defended for a Ph.D. degree in theology at Fordham University). The opening footnote says texts were "substituted" from a "revised" edition (1999) of the Omnibus of Franciscan sources titled Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, Volume 1 for quotations in Paradox of Poverty. All the same, entries of the bibliography of the Franciscan portion of the author's exposition reach far back in time. This is the case, too, for the Discalced Carmelite literature found there. Her appreciation of the historical context of Saint John of the Cross's ideas would have benefited from use of the important encyclopedic work God Speaks in the Night: The Life, Times, and Teaching of St. John of the Cross, reissued for distribution in the United States in 2001, but available already in time for the fourth centenary of the saint's death in Kieran Kavanaugh's 1991 translation.