A radical saint

He wore a filthy tunic, with a piece of rope as a belt, and no shoes.  While preaching, he often would dance, weep, make animal sounds, strip to his underwear, or play the zither.  His black eyes sparkled.  Many people regarded him as mad, or dangerous.  They threw dirt at him.  Women locked themselves in their houses.

After the Virgin Mary, St. Francis of Assisi is today the most popular of Christian saints.  So claims a recent six-page New Yorker review,¹ discussing two books that analyze Francis's life.  That claim may well be accurate.

We all know that St. Francis's life has been frequently sentimentalized (look at the statue by the birdbath in your neighbor's back yard), and we all know that the saint was, in actuality, a strong man and fairly sophisticated.  But the New Yorker review reminds us just how eccentric Francis was, how unsettling his example was for those who met him, and how distorted his message became even while he was still alive.

Francis was a popular and rambunctious teenager; he was no scholar.  He gladly went off to war with neighboring Perugia, dressed nattily and riding a good horse.  He was quickly captured, and spent a year as a P.O.W., during which time his conversion apparently began.  He had an oft-recounted dispute with his parents: he renounced his inheritance, stripped off all his clothes, and walked away naked from his family, never to be reunited with them.  Traditional family values were not uppermost among his concerns.

He began working with lepers, and it was while so engaged that his conversion became complete.  He gathered a dozen like-spirited men about him, and these "friars" lived together in absolute poverty.  They owned nothing.  They slept on the ground. They were allowed to receive food for a day's work, but no money, and were to save nothing for the following day.  Although his original followers deferred to his leadership, there was no formal heirarchy among friars.  They were to love all of creation, including their enemies and including the wealthy who opposed them.

The New Yorker review points out that all of these strict rules had exceptions.  He proposed the rules to help his followers guide themselves in living Christian lives.  But the friars did not live for the sake of the rules.  Francis tended to be permissive. He was not a militant leader; he was no Ignatius of Loyola.  He had, says the review,"an extreme natural sweetness.  He was courteous, genial, extroverted -- he was fun, a quality not always found in saints -- and he laid it upon the brothers, as a duty, to be cheerful."

As the order grew in size, and during Francis's frequent absences,later members took advantage of his permissiveness.  Absolute poverty was both unpleasant and often impractical, if not impossible.  The papacy took increasing note of the order's popularity and began taking control, bringing the friars' practices increasingly into line with the rules -- less obsessed with poverty -- followed by other religious orders, such as the Dominicans.  Papal support of the Franciscans deflected criticism that the Church opposed any organization composed primarily of laymen, and also deflected attention from the embarrassing wealth of the heirarchy.

As the order slipped away from Francis's original concept, Francis turned its leadership over to another member.  Francis grew increasingly ill, as well as emotionally upset by the changes in his order.  The New Yorker review suggests that Francis can be viewed as an exemplar of the "inconvenient elder" -- the guy whose ideas get the whole thing going, but who is too impractical to make it work in the long term.  We have only to look at some of our own start-up corporations to see analogies in our own time.

Ultimately, St. Francis received the "stigmata" -- the review notes that most modern biographies prefer not to attempt a natural explanation for this occurrence -- which provided him some final sense of validation as his life neared its end.  He died in "horrible pain" from his illnesses, and in some spiritual distress.

The story of Francis's life related by these scholarly biographies is not the popular, pretty story of the childlike saint talking to the birds and animals -- or at least it moves far beyond that story.  It's a story of inspiration, striving, some success, eventual fears of failure, and the sense of a man who lived long enough to see his ideals distorted and misused.  But it's also a very human story, one that represents the experience of virtually anyone who has ever strived to bring the world to a higher level of civilization.  I suspect that Karl Marx, had he lived to observe the formation and development of the Soviet Union, would have had similar thoughts and feelings.

Francis of Assisi was truly a saint with a radical vision of humanity.  As one of the books under review expresses it, Francis's example "constitutes proof that Christianity, at least once, has been lived by a human being in all its radicality within the context of a historical life."²
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¹Joan Acocella, Rich Man, Poor Man (New Yorker, Jan. 14, 2013)
²André Vauchez, Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint