Gospel Living: St. Francis of Assisi Yesterday and Today

Chapter 7. Knowledge which Leads to Love

The Franciscan Spirit Through the Ages / 217 CHAPTER 7 KNOWLEDGE WHICH LEADS TO LOVE St. Francis distrusted that ignorant and vain knowledge which does not lead to love of God and neighbor. But he wanted his friars to possess a deep knowledge of God's Word so that they could communicate it to both believers and unbelievers. He himself evinces, in his writings, his sayings and his attitudes, an intimate knowledge of the Bible and an understanding of the human heart that far outstrip the pedantic learning of some teachers. He studied directly, through contemplation, the teachings of Christ and the Holy Spirit and attended to the teachings of the Church. In this way his faith was sustained, clarified and nourished. The sons of Francis who have devoted themselves to learning over the centuries of the Order's long history continued to cultivate, in their schools and in their books, this seed sown by Francis. Like Francis, every Franciscan absorbs in his or her vision of the harmonious universe all the goodness that a creative and redemptive Providence has placed there. For the true Franciscan the quest for knowledge goes hand in hand with the quest for poverty and detachment, because genuine knowledge of the things of God and of the human mystery demands a heart free from all covetousness and from every need that is not God. For St. Bonaventure (d. 1274), as for Luke Wadding (d. 1657) or for a modern Franciscan theologian, the celebration of theology leads all knowledge back to knowledge of God. It culminates in adoration, contemplation of the one who is the heart of all knowledge because He is the center of all creation, Jesus Christ. Knowledge, contemplation and love tend to merge into one, and Franciscan intellectual work, just like apostolic or social work, is inseparable from Franciscan spirituality. This is why it is hard sometimes to decide whether a particular work by a Franciscan is "oratorical," "theological" or "spiritual"; intellectual work is often conceived in prayer and produced for the apostolate. 218 / Willibrord C. VanDijk, O.F.M. Cap. Knowledge of God a. Anthony of Padua From Francis' own time, his spirituality has naturally led the friars to pursue studies. The first one who distinguished himself in intellectual endeavor was St. Anthony, who was born in Lisbon and died in Padua in 1231. He had first studied with the canons of St. Augustine, and his thought, permeated by Augustinian theology, found Franciscanism thoroughly congenial. For him love of nature worked together with abstract reasoning to enhance human understanding of God's Word. His sermons are a source from which we can learn wisdom in faith, a source, that is, from which we can learn spirituality. b. The Universities It was during the very lifetime of Francis that the first universities opened where the Friars Minor could study theology according to the newly established scholastic method. Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge, then Paris and Magdeburg—all began before 1230. The friars studied under the same living conditions they had known at Assisi: the same poverty, the same zeal for God, for the Church and for human beings. Franciscan contemplation was lived in a university setting, and the works born of that contemplation combined the precision of theological thought with the simplicity of a gaze totally suffused with faith. This contemplation produced the meditations on the life of Christ, which lay at the heart of the renewal of religious art, and the fascinating booklet on The Mystical Marriage of Francis with Lady Poverty and the Book of Conformities. Sustained reflection on the Mystery of Christ led inexorably to deeper doctrinal reflection and toward the doctrinal formulations later achieved by John Duns Scotus (d. 1308) on the primary reason for the Incarnation of God's Son. Mystical intuition and rational deduction joined forces to express the insight that God, wanting a human being who could love him infinitely as the Persons of the Trinity love one another, willed the Incarnation of one of those persons in a human nature. The Son's becoming man in the body of the Blessed Virgin Mary is thus the masterpiece of creation, the supreme praise of the Father. Christ is the sole priest and the sole sacrificial victim who could win forgiveness for humans; in a word, The Franciscan Spirit Through the Ages / 219 as Francis himself put it, Christ "alone satisfies [God] in everything " (RegNB 23:5). John...