Francis of Assisi

The plaster Francis in a thousand gardens stands with a bird on his hand and a gentle look, the patron of birdbaths. The real one stripped off his clothes in the main square of Assisi, handed them to his father, and walked away naked to marry poverty. He invented the Christmas crib and argued a wolf into a truce. He sang to the sun as his brother, and he was the first person in recorded history to bleed from the five wounds of the cross. The birdbath is the smallest true thing about him.

The rich boy who stripped naked

Francis was born around 1181 as Giovanni, the son of Pietro di Bernardone, a rich cloth merchant of Assisi, and he grew up with money to burn. He dreamed of knighthood, rode out to a local war, and spent a year in a Perugian prison, and a long illness after it, which turned something in him. He began giving his father’s cloth and coin away to the poor and to ruined churches. In the crumbling chapel of San Damiano he heard the painted crucifix tell him, “Francis, rebuild my church,” and took it literally at first, selling his father’s goods to buy stones.

His father dragged him before the bishop of Assisi to force him to give the money back and drop his inheritance. Francis did more than that. In front of the whole town he took off every stitch of the clothing his father had paid for, laid it at Pietro’s feet with the coins on top, and said that from now on he had only one father, the one in heaven. The bishop covered him with a cloak. From that day Francis owned nothing.

Lady Poverty

What he built out of that nakedness was an order. Men began to follow him, drawn by the sight of a rich man’s son living as the poorest of the poor, and in 1209 he took a small band to Rome, where Pope Innocent III gave grudging approval to a rule of life built on complete poverty. They called themselves the Friars Minor, the lesser brothers. They owned nothing, and they preached in the streets and begged for their bread. A young noblewoman of Assisi, Clare, ran away to join him and founded the women’s branch, the Poor Clares.

Poverty was the whole of it for Francis, courted like a bride he called Lady Poverty. The irony arrived fast. Within a lifetime or two the order that owned nothing had become one of the largest and richest institutions in Europe, and the question of whether Franciscans could own anything at all tore the movement in two and drew the popes into decades of argument. The man who wanted only to have nothing became the founder of a corporation of tens of thousands.

Brother Sun and Brother Wolf

The animal stories are the ones everyone keeps, and they carry more theology than the sentimental versions let on. Francis preached to a field of birds, telling them to praise the God who clothed and fed them, and they are said to have stayed to listen. In the town of Gubbio, a wolf was killing livestock and people until Francis walked out to meet it, called it Brother Wolf, and brokered a peace by which the town fed the animal and the animal killed no more. That tale comes from the later Little Flowers rather than the earliest Lives, so it sits closer to legend than to record, yet it says exactly what he meant.

He put the idea into a poem near the end of his life, the Canticle of the Sun, one of the first works of literature in the Italian language. In it he praises God through Brother Sun and Sister Moon, Brother Wind and Sister Water, and finally Sister Death, treating the whole of creation, and his own dying, as family. This is the root of everything the garden statues flatten. It went further than a fondness for animals. He held that the sun and a wolf, a leper and death itself, were all his kin under one maker, which is why Pope John Paul II made him the patron of ecology in 1979, and why his day is still kept with the blessing of animals. His nearest companion in this compendium is Gallus of the Steinach, the hermit who shared his fire with a bear; the two of them belong to the old current of saints who made peace with the beasts instead of conquering them.

The wounds

The strangest chapter is the last. In September 1224, on the mountain of La Verna, Francis was deep in a fast and a vision of a six-winged seraph fixed to a cross when, his companions later swore, the marks of the crucifixion opened on his own body: nails of dark flesh through his hands and feet, a wound in his side that bled. He hid them as well as he could for the two years he had left. When he died, the friars who washed the body reported the five wounds plainly, and Thomas of Celano and Bonaventure both set them down.

Francis is the first person in recorded history said to have carried the stigmata. Every later stigmatic, and there have been many, stands in a line that begins with him. What happened on La Verna has been argued over ever since, by the devout and the doubtful, and this compendium is not going to settle in a paragraph a question eight hundred years of study has left open. The honest report is the one his brothers gave: the man came down off the mountain marked, and lived out his short remainder in pain and in song.

He died on the bare ground, at his own request, on the evening of October 3, 1226. Two years later Pope Gregory IX declared him a saint. The friars raised a vast basilica over the poorest man in Assisi, and painters covered its walls with his life, and eight centuries on a pope took his name because there was no higher thing in the calendar to reach for than the beggar of Assisi.

In the compendium

Francis is the case of a radical filed down into a decoration. The garden ornament is a man who used his own clothing as an argument and came down a mountain bleeding from wounds no one could explain. Strip the birdbath sentimentality away and what stands there is a harder and stranger figure, the merchant’s son who owned nothing, who called death his sister and wore the marks of the cross on his living skin. The line he holds in this wing is the one this whole project is drawn to: the exact place where the documented life of a real man runs into something the record can only describe and not explain.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Thomas of Celano, Vita Prima (First Life of Saint Francis, 1228-1229) and Vita Secunda (c. 1247)
• Bonaventure, Legenda Maior (1263), the official Life
• Francis of Assisi, Canticle of the Sun (Laudes Creaturarum, c. 1225)
• The Little Flowers of Saint Francis (Fioretti, 14th century), the Wolf of Gubbio
• Gregory IX, bull Mira circa nos (1228), the canonization