The Conversion of St. Francis and the Writing of Christian Biography, 1228-1263

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the awakening of literary interest in human interiority and self-awareness² had an important but as yet little-studied effect on the literature of hagiographical biography.³ This was a literature that, from its late-antique origins, had been focused more on divine agency than on human agency; in it, as Theodor Wolpers has written, even though the saintly subject is “presented as an earthly being of natural contingency,” still “what is sought after in him, as he raises himself above the range of secondary causes into the causae primae, is ‘the effects of God’.”⁴

But with the newly increased attentiveness to inner life as a matter of interest in its own right, the “natural contingency” of biographical subjects began to loom larger in the view of their biographers. Divine agency, though still the sine qua non of hagiographical narrative, had to share the stage increasingly with human agency—a major development in the idea of Christian biography.

The sequence of early narratives of the “conversion” of Francis of Assisi—for present purposes understood as the formative events in Francis’s life that preceded the founding of the Franciscan brotherhood⁵--stands as a prominent case of this increased interest in human agency on the part of the biographers. These narratives give us, through comparison, a glimpse of what choices biographers made and what was at stake in making them. The first account of the conversion is the one that opens the Life of Francis⁶ written by Thomas of Celano in about 1228. Substantial revisions of that account then appeared in the interrelated works that we know as, respectively, the Anonymous of Perugia,⁷ the Legend of the Three Companions,⁸ and Thomas’s own Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul,⁹ all dating from the 1240s, and finally the subsequent revision in the official Major Legend¹⁰ by St. Bonaventure, completed in 1263.¹¹ All of these are among the sources for the life of Francis that have been the subject of more than a century of intense scholarly scrutiny, which has gone far toward clarifying their relation to each other and shown how they reflect the vigorous debate in their time within and beyond the Franciscan order, over the intentions and significance of the historical Francis.¹² Here I will argue that that, precisely in their attempts to present the historical Francis as the authors understood him, these texts show us another related though largely implicit debate, this one about the nature of hagiographical narrative itself, and by extension about any narrative of human formation.

It was Thomas’s initial account that set the terms. By placing the acts of God within Francis’s intimate experience in his early years, and accessing them only through Francis’s self-perceptions, Thomas of Celano located God’s effects within the very structure of the self. This is an approach that contrasts with hagiographical tradition prior to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in its radically exclusive attention to the subjectivity of the saint, but retains, even intensifies, a traditional hagiographical sense of the primacy of divine agency. The revisers of Thomas’s original narrative then, choosing against this configuration of divine and human, attempted more naturalistic depictions of the saint that made his behavior explicable in human terms, and construed the divine as a separate presence in the narrative to which the narrator has access, but which stands now in a sphere distinct from the saint’s self-contained human integrity. What was at stake here was thus how to represent Francis himself in narrative terms, but also more broadly how to narrate human experience itself in relation to what transcends it.

The Conversion Narrative in the “Life of Francis” by Thomas of Celano

The learned friar Thomas of Celano¹³ completed his Life of Francis sometime after 16 July, 1228, the date of the saint’s canonization, and probably before 25 February of the following year.¹⁴ It is a work remarkable for...