The Misadventure of Francis of Assisi

Chapter 1: The Magic Circle of the Franciscan Question

21 Chapter 1 The Magic Circle of the Franciscan Question FRANCIS OF ASSISI HAS BEEN A SAINT since July 16, 1228. Perhaps the most famous, he is certainly the most problematic of the Catholic Church’s official saints. Much of our knowledge of him is filtered through sources of a certain type, which have very special rules of their own. These are the hagiographic sources, the legends. For a first approach to a saint, it seemed natural to me to start from the hagiography and to propose a first encounter with Francis through his legends . Start from the legends in order to get to know someone’s life: The idea, thus stated, immediately reveals the challenge behind such a search. Perhaps it would seem less paradoxical if put in medieval terms: Get to know someone’s life through the Vitae. In fact, since the mid-seventeenth century, since the Bollandists with their focus on critical hagiography, the use of legends in the service of history has grown increasingly refined. Application of the internal rules of the literary genre has shown that the facts narrated are relative. Investigation of the circumstances under which the legends were written has contextualized them. Legends from the same dossier have been critically compared with each other and with external documents. But, I would add, we are more aware of the fact that the medium of hagiography is itself an element in getting to know the people of that time who are considered saints, 22 THE MISADVENTURE OF FRANCIS OF ASSISI just as – mutatis mutandis – one essential element in our knowledge of Marilyn Monroe is the fact that her image comes to us through the medium of the movie screen. In short, the method of critical hagiography is more like the way archeology is done today, that is, using the method of stratigraphy. Take a simple case. The Vita of Radegonde was written right after her death by Venantius Fortunatus, who had known the saint well. This Vita was supplemented by another written by a companion, Baudonivia, who knew the abbess in a more everyday and intimate sort of way. We see at once that these two almost contemporary views, one masculine and the other feminine, are complementary. If Ildebert of Lavardin decided at the beginning of the eleventh century to rewrite the legend of the Merovingian saint, we can imagine that it will certainly provide interesting evidence as to how women’s holiness was perceived in the eleventh century. But we will learn nothing new about the historical Radegonde. Unfortunately, things are not so simple in the case of Francis, for in the century following his death at least twenty major legends were written about him. In almost all of them the authors could claim they were adding new elements as well as new insights into his character. According to a theme that would be developed at length by Bartholomew of Pisa at the end of the fourteenth century, this is the first, but essential “conformity ” between Christ and Francis. I am convinced that the presence of four evangelists to record the words and deeds of Christ is the most basic fact of our civilization because, unlike the single Book of the Muslims, it leads to relativity in the realm of the absolute. But I am also convinced that such a situation is never accidental. The unusual complexity of the hagiographic dossier on Francis is not a stroke of bad luck. The philological complexity of the legends reflects the multiple meanings of Francis’s actual experience . And this brings us to the Franciscan Question. Francis is the first author of the Franciscan Question. The Franciscan Question is not just an enjoyable little game played by scholars, like a curtain placed in front of the Poverello’s face. In itself it teaches something fundamental about Francis, 23 THE MAGIC CIRCLE OF THE FRANCISCAN QUESTION namely, that his experience and his message could not be reduced to a single voice. Also, we need to remember that, historically speaking, the Franciscan Question had two authors. One was Paul Sabatier, who wrote an important Life of St. Francis of Assisi published in 1894, before publishing the Mirror of Perfection in 1898. The other, more anecdotally, was Salvatore Minocchi, who got the idea to summarize the lively debates sparked by Sabatier’s research , in an article that appeared in 1902 in the Giornale storico della letteratura italiana. The...