Justified True Belief

(●) The cloth merchant’s son who gave away everything he owned, and became the most imitated Christian life after Christ’s. + Most people meet him first as a garden ornament. A small stone man in a brown robe, birds on his shoulders, standing in a flowerbed next to the hose reel. He is the patron saint of animals, the one you can buy at a nursery, and that is very nearly the whole of what a lot of Christians know about him. The man himself is considerably harder to keep on a shelf. He was a rich young Italian who liked good clothes and expensive parties, and who at about twenty-four stripped naked in front of his bishop and half his home town and handed his father the bundle. He then spent twenty years living on other people’s scraps, sleeping in huts and caves, kissing lepers, walking into a sultan’s camp in the middle of a crusade, and refusing on principle to own so much as a book. By the time he died at forty-four, thousands of men across Europe had left their trades to do the same thing. He is also a different kind of reason for believing. Arguments for the faith usually run through premises, one claim resting on the last until the conclusion has nowhere else to go. Francis ran through a life instead, and the argument he made that way is the one people find hardest to dismiss: that the Sermon on the Mount can actually be done, by an actual person, in public, for a lifetime. He wrote almost nothing, perhaps thirty short pieces in all, and of those only two scraps survive in his own handwriting. One of them is a piece of parchment kept at Assisi, praises of God on one side and, on the other, a blessing for a friar going through a dark stretch, written on a mountain in the last years of his life.

(●) c. 1181 AD: Born to a cloth merchant in a hill town, and spent his youth spending his father’s money. + Assisi sits on the western slope of Monte Subasio in Umbria, looking out over a wide green plain. Francis was born there in 1181 or 1182; the town kept no record that fixes the year, and the early lives do not agree. His father, Pietro di Bernardone, was a cloth merchant who travelled to the fairs of northern France to buy, and did well enough at it that his son never had to think about money. The name is a nickname that stuck. The early lives say his mother, Pica, had him baptised Giovanni, John, while his father was away on business; when Pietro came home he took to calling the boy Francesco, "the Frenchman," and no one ever called him anything else again. He grew up speaking some French, singing the songs of the troubadours, and paying for the evening when his friends went out. Thomas of Celano, who wrote the first life of him within three years of his death, says he was brought up carelessly, and that he outdid all his companions in vanity. He was not, by the standards of his town, a bad young man. He was generous, quick to laugh, popular, and hungry for the one thing his father’s money could not buy in twelfth-century Italy: a knighthood. Merchants were new money. Knights were somebody. That ambition is where the story turns.

(●) 1202 AD: A war with the next town put him in a Perugian prison, and he came out sick and unsure of everything. + In November 1202 Assisi went to war with Perugia, its larger neighbour ten miles away across the plain, and was badly beaten at Collestrada, the wooded hill above the Tiber crossing. Because Francis rode a horse and wore armour his captors took him for a nobleman, which was the difference between being killed on the field and being kept for ransom. He spent about a year in a Perugian cell before his father bought him out, and he came home so sick that it was months before he could get up again. Something in him did not recover with his body. Celano says he got up at last, took a stick, and walked out to look at the countryside he had always loved, and found that none of it moved him any more. That is the sort of detail a biographer does not invent. He tried once more for the life he had planned. In 1205 a nobleman was raising men for a campaign in Apulia, in the south, and Francis fitted himself out splendidly and rode off to win his spurs. He got about thirty miles, as far as Spoleto, and turned back. The early accounts say a voice in a dream asked him which it was better to serve, the master or the servant, and told him to go home and wait to be told what to do. Whatever happened in that inn, he came back to a town that thought he had lost his nerve, and he let them think it.

(●) 1206 AD: He embraced a leper on the road, and then handed his father his clothes in the middle of the square. + Of everything that happened to him, there is exactly one turning point Francis tells in his own words, and it is not the one the paintings show. In the Testament, the short document he dictated in his last months to tell the brothers where their life had come from, he says that while he was in his sins the sight of lepers was bitter to him, that the Lord led him among them, that he showed them mercy, and that what had seemed bitter to him was changed into sweetness of body and soul. Leprosy in his century meant exile from ordinary life. A man with the disease lived outside the walls in a house kept for others like him, carried a clapper or a bell to warn of his approach on the road, and in many places was cut off from his parish by a formal rite that borrowed the words of a funeral. Nursing lepers counted as a work of mercy and there were hospitals below Assisi where it was done, so the dread was not universal. It was near total among young men of his own class, who rode wide of the road rather than come near. Francis got down off his horse and embraced one. Around the same time he took to praying in a half-ruined chapel below the town called San Damiano. The Legend of the Three Companions, written a generation later and given out as the memories of brothers who had known him, records that the painted crucifix there spoke to him: go and repair my house, which as you see is falling into ruin. He took it as a builder would take it, and started buying stone. To pay for the stone he loaded his father’s cloth on a horse, rode to the market at Foligno, and sold both. Pietro di Bernardone was not a villain for being furious. His son had stolen his stock and given the proceeds to a priest. He dragged Francis before Bishop Guido of Assisi to have him disinherited and the money returned, and in front of the whole town Francis handed back the money, took off his clothes, and gave those back too. The bishop covered him with his own cloak. He was about twenty-four, and from that morning he owned nothing.

(●) 1209 AD: A gospel read at Mass became a rule of life, and the pope approved it for the twelve men who called themselves the Friars Minor. + For two years he repaired chapels and begged his food, and one of the chapels he rebuilt was a tiny country church called the Portiuncula, the "little portion," which became the home of everything that followed. On the feast of Saint Matthias, traditionally dated 24 February 1208, he was at Mass there and heard the gospel passage in which Jesus sends the apostles out: no gold, no bag, no spare tunic, no staff, no sandals (Matthew 10:9–10). Celano says he asked the priest afterwards to explain the passage to him line by line, and then said that this was what he wanted, this was what he sought, this was what he longed to do with all his heart. He threw away his stick, his shoes, and his belt, and tied a rope round his waist. Men started turning up. Bernard of Quintavalle, a wealthy citizen of Assisi, was the first, and the story of how the two of them decided what to do next is worth having. Neither of them thought to sit down and draft a plan. The Legend of the Three Companions records that they went into the church of San Nicolò, had the priest open the missal three times, and took what they found. A missal is the book of texts read at Mass through the year, so opening it at random and obeying whatever the eye fell on was a way of asking God a question and expecting an answer that afternoon. The three answers they got were these: sell what you own and give it to the poor, take nothing for the journey, deny yourself and take up your cross. "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me" (Matthew 19:21). Bernard did exactly that in the square, with Francis handing out the money. By 1209 there were twelve of them, and twelve men in rags preaching in the streets was the kind of thing that got a movement condemned. So they walked to Rome. Innocent III, the most powerful pope of the Middle Ages, listened to a short rule made almost entirely of gospel verses and approved it by word of mouth, without a document. Celano’s second life, written some twenty years afterwards, reports that the pope had dreamed of a small poor man holding up the falling church of Saint John Lateran. They called themselves the Friars Minor, the lesser brothers, and Francis chose the name himself: whatever they were, they would not be anybody’s superiors.

(●) 1212 AD: An eighteen-year-old noblewoman ran away from her family to join him, and the movement grew a second branch. + Clare Offreduccio came from one of the noble families of Assisi, the class that had been on the other side of the town’s civil wars from merchants like the Bernardone. She was about eighteen, she had heard Francis preach in the cathedral during Lent, and on the night of Palm Sunday in 1212 she went out of her father’s house by a side door and walked down through the olive groves to the Portiuncula, where the brothers met her with torches. Francis cut off her hair. Her relatives came for her twice and she would not go. She was settled at San Damiano, the chapel where the crucifix had spoken, and the community that grew around her became the Poor Ladies, later the Poor Clares. She outlived Francis by twenty-seven years and spent them fighting popes and cardinals for the right to keep her sisters as poor as he had been, and she won: her own Rule was approved two days before she died, the first monastic rule known to have been written by a woman. The men’s side, meanwhile, was growing faster than anyone could manage. Brothers went out in pairs to Spain, France, Germany, and the Holy Land, and five of them were killed at Marrakesh in 1220, the order’s first martyrs. Then there were the people who wanted in and could not come. Ordinary married men and women with a shop to run and children at home had no way of walking off into the hills for good, and Francis wrote them a letter rather than turning them away. Out of it grew the lay Third Order, a rule of life for people who stayed in their houses and their trades and lived by the brothers’ spirit where they were. He never asked anyone to build an institution. One kept assembling itself around him anyway, and it would eventually become the thing he found hardest to carry.

(●) 1219 AD: In the middle of a crusade he walked across the lines to the sultan’s camp, and came back alive. + He had wanted to reach the Muslim world for years and kept failing to get there. A voyage toward Syria in 1212 ended in shipwreck on the Dalmatian coast. An attempt to walk to Morocco through Spain in 1213 or 1214 ended in illness. In 1219 he sailed for Egypt, where the armies of the Fifth Crusade were besieging Damietta in the Nile delta. What he found in the crusader camp appalled him. He told the leaders that the assault they were planning would fail, and on 29 August 1219 it failed, with heavy losses. Then he asked the papal legate, the pope’s own representative travelling with the army and the nearest thing the crusade had to a commanding voice, for permission to cross to the other side, and got a reluctant yes. He and a companion, Brother Illuminato, walked out toward the Muslim lines and were seized, beaten, and taken to the sultan, al-Malik al-Kamil, the nephew of Saladin. The best witness is not a Franciscan. Jacques de Vitry, the bishop of Acre, was in the crusader camp at the time and wrote about it within months: Francis preached to the Saracens for some days without much success, and the sultan, who had listened, sent him back to the Christian camp with reverence and in safety, asking to be prayed for. That is the whole of the contemporary record, and it is enough. Two men whose armies were killing each other talked for several days and parted with respect. Francis put the lesson into the rule he wrote two years later: brothers who go among the Saracens may live among them without arguing or quarrelling, simply being subject to them for God’s sake and letting it be known that they are Christians, and may preach openly when they see that it pleases God.

(●) 1223 AD: The pope sealed his Rule, and at Greccio he built the first Christmas crib. + He came home to an order of thousands and a job he could not do. In 1220 he resigned the leadership, telling the brothers that from now on he was dead to them, and put Peter Catanii in charge; when Peter died a few months later, Brother Elias took over. Francis kept the moral authority and gave up the administration, which is a rarer thing than it sounds and cost him more than he said. There was still the Rule to settle. The version he produced in 1221 was long, tender, and stitched together out of Scripture, and Rome would not seal it. The version approved by Honorius III on 29 November 1223, in the bull Solet annuere, is twelve short chapters and is still the rule the Franciscans live under today. A bull is a formal decree of the pope, named for the bulla, the lead seal that hung on a cord from the bottom of the parchment, and a rule that came back carrying one was no longer a proposal. It is shorter and more legal than what he wanted, and he signed it. A month later, at Christmas, he was at Greccio in the Rieti valley, and he did something no one had done before. He had a manger set up in a cave with hay in it, and an ox and an ass brought and stood beside it, and Mass said over the manger while the people of the hill towns came down with candles. Celano says Francis, who was a deacon and never a priest, ordained to read the gospel at Mass and to preach but not to say the Mass himself, sang the gospel and then preached about the child of Bethlehem, and that when he said the name he licked his lips as though he could taste it. Every Nativity scene in every church and living room since traces back to that night.

(●) 1224 – 1226 AD: The wounds of Christ opened in his hands and feet, and he died on the bare ground singing. + In August 1224 he went up Mount La Verna, a wooded crag in Tuscany given to the brothers by a local count, to keep a forty-day fast before the feast of Saint Michael. Around the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, on 14 September, the brothers with him said he saw a figure like a seraph, a six-winged angel, fixed to a cross, and that when the vision left him there were wounds in his hands, his feet, and his side. Marks like the wounds of the crucified Christ appearing on a living body are what later theology calls the stigmata, from the Greek word for a brand or a mark, and Francis is the first person in Christian history reported to have carried them. He hid them for the two years he had left, keeping his hands in his sleeves and wearing shoes, and only a few brothers saw. Brother Elias announced them to the whole order in the circular letter he sent out when Francis died, and Celano describes them in a life written for the pope within three years, when hundreds of men who had known Francis were still alive to object. It is the earliest and best-attested case of its kind, and Paul’s line to the Galatians has been read next to it ever since: "From now on let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus" (Galatians 6:17). The last two years were hard. He was nearly blind from an eye disease picked up in Egypt, and the physicians at Rieti cauterised his temples with a hot iron. At San Damiano in the spring of 1225, sick and unable to bear daylight, he composed the Canticle of the Creatures, the earliest surviving poem in Italian by a named author, and had the brothers sing it (T3). He added a verse about pardon later that year, to shame the bishop and the mayor of Assisi into ending a quarrel, and they made peace in the cloister while it was sung. He added the verse about Sister Death when he was told he was dying. He dictated his Testament, asked to be laid naked on the bare earth at the Portiuncula, and died there on the evening of 3 October 1226, aged about forty-four. Gregory IX declared him a saint on 16 July 1228, less than two years later, which is close to the fastest the church has ever moved.

What He Taught

(T1) Poverty is not misery but freedom: a man who owns nothing has nothing left to defend. + Think about what a suitcase does to a walk through a city. With one you are calculating: where to leave it, whether that street is safe, how far you can go before you have to come back for it. Without it you simply walk. Francis’ whole doctrine of poverty is that argument applied to a life, and he made it in an age when the church was one of the great landowners of Europe and abbeys held whole valleys. His brothers were mendicants, a word that was almost new in his century: members of a religious order who live by begging and by the work of their hands, holding no land, no rents, and no endowment, in contrast to monks, who withdrew from the world but whose houses could be extremely rich. The Rule of 1223 forbids the brothers to receive coin or money at all, whether by their own hands or through anyone acting for them. Celano’s second life records that when a brother picked up a coin a visitor had left at the Portiuncula, Francis made him carry it out in his mouth and lay it on a pile of ass’s dung, which is not the behaviour of a man making a fine spiritual distinction. Two things keep this from being mere self-denial. The first is that he thought of it as freedom rather than loss: a brother with nothing cannot be robbed, cannot be sued, cannot be bought, and has no reason to be afraid of anyone. The second is that he grounded it in the Incarnation and not in disgust with the world. Christ was rich and became poor (2 Corinthians 8:9), and the brothers were following him downward, not running away from things they thought dirty. Francis loved food, singing, sunlight, and good company, and he was famous for it. It is worth saying what he did not teach, because it is often assumed. He never held that every Christian must live this way. The letter he wrote to ordinary lay people, most of them married and running households, asks them to love God, forgive their enemies, receive the sacrament, and give alms. Voluntary poverty was the particular calling of the brothers, offered to the church as a sign, not laid on everyone as a law.

(Q) "The brothers shall appropriate nothing to themselves, neither a house, nor a place, nor anything; but as pilgrims and strangers in this world, in poverty and humility serving God, they shall confidently go seeking for alms." + Source: Francis of Assisi, Rule of 1223, chapter 6 (Ernest F. Henderson, Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, 1892). This is the sealed Rule, the legally binding one, and chapter 6 is the sentence the next century of Franciscan history would be fought over. The clause that follows it calls poverty a height that has made the brothers heirs and kings of the kingdom of heaven: poor in possessions, exalted in virtues (T1).

(T2) The gospel is not a text to be explained but a set of instructions to be carried out. + There is a difference between reading a recipe and cooking. Both are honest ways of engaging a recipe, but only one of them produces dinner, and Francis’ contribution to Christian thought is essentially the insistence that the gospel is the second kind of document. He had a specific target. A medieval theology student did not read Scripture bare; he read it with the gloss, the standard commentary written in the margins and between the lines of a manuscript, which told him what each verse had been taken to mean. The gloss was a good thing and a necessary one, and Francis, who was not a scholar and never pretended to be, was not attacking scholarship when he forbade his brothers to put a gloss on his Rule or on his words. He was attacking a particular use of it: the explanation that arrives to soften a command until it no longer requires anything. His Rule of 1223 opens by saying that the rule and life of the lesser brothers is to observe the holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, and he meant that as the whole of the content, not as a pious preface. This is also why he refused to claim any originality. Nobody taught him what to do, he says in the Testament, and no book gave him the idea. The Most High revealed it, and what was revealed was not a new doctrine but a way of taking an old one seriously. He was not, in the end, an enemy of learning, and the record is clear enough about it. When Anthony of Padua began teaching theology to the brothers, Francis wrote him a short letter of approval with one condition attached: do not extinguish the spirit of prayer. What he feared was not knowledge but a house full of learned men who no longer did anything. That fear was reasonable, and the way he tried to guard against it caused his order real trouble later.

(Q) "And when the Lord gave me some brothers, no one showed me what I ought to do, but the Most High Himself revealed to me that I should live according to the form of the holy Gospel." + Source: Francis of Assisi, Testament (Paschal Robinson, The Writings of Saint Francis of Assisi, 1906). Dictated in the last months of his life, when the order had grown past anything he could manage and he wanted the brothers to remember where it had come from. He had said the same thing more sharply a few lines earlier about the lepers, and he says it again a few lines later when he forbids anyone to gloss the Rule: as the Lord had given him to write it simply and purely, so they were to understand it simply and purely (T2).

(T3) Every creature is kin, because everything that exists has the same Father. + Farmers name their cows. People talk to their dogs, apologise to furniture they have bumped into, and thank a car that starts on a cold morning. There is a habit in us of treating the world as though it were populated rather than stocked, and most of the time we treat that habit as a charming mistake. Francis treated it as the truth, and worked out why. The Canticle of the Creatures, which he composed nearly blind in 1225, praises God through Brother Sun, Sister Moon and the stars, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire, and "our sister mother earth." The reasoning is in the grammar. He is not praising the sun; he is praising the Most High by way of the sun, and calling it brother because a thing made by your Father is family. Read that way it is a poem about creation in the plainest biblical sense, of a piece with the psalm that summons sun, moon, stars, sea creatures, weather, mountains, trees, animals, and kings alike to praise the Lord (Psalm 148:1–13). The distinction matters because the poem is regularly misread as pantheism, the belief that the world simply is God, so that a tree is a piece of divinity. Francis holds nothing of the sort. God is the Most High, the maker, addressed as another; the creatures are relatives, not fragments of deity. That is why he could preach to birds at Bevagna, as Celano reports he did, without any of his contemporaries thinking he had gone pagan. Some of the best-loved stories of this kind, the wolf of Gubbio above all, come from the Little Flowers, a Tuscan collection made about a century and a half after his death, and they are legend rather than record. The Canticle is his own, and it is stranger and better than the legends. There is a hard edge to it that the garden statues lose. If the sun is your brother, so is the leper, and so is the sultan; the same logic that gives you a family also takes away your right to treat anything in it as disposable. And the Canticle ends where the tenderness would rather not: with Sister Bodily Death, praised too, and no one exempt.

(Q) "Especially to my worshipful brother sun, / The which lights up the day, and through him dost Thou brightness give." + Source: Francis of Assisi, Canticle of the Sun (Paschal Robinson, The Writings of Saint Francis of Assisi, 1906). The Canticle is the earliest surviving poem in Italian by a named author, written in the Umbrian dialect rather than in Latin so that people who worked with their hands could sing it. He composed it at San Damiano in a hut of reeds, in constant pain and unable to bear light, which is worth holding in mind while reading the line about the sun. The closing verses praise God for those who pardon for love, and for "our sister, the bodily death, / From the which no living man can flee" (T3).

(T4) God’s chosen direction is downward: a feeding trough, a cross, a piece of bread. + Ask most people to picture divine power and you get height: thrones, thunder, a voice from a mountain. Francis kept looking in the opposite direction, and he built his devotion around three places where he thought God had gone as low as it is possible to go. The first is the manger. The crib he set up at Greccio in 1223 was an argument in hay: the Lord of the world arrived as a baby in a feed trough in a stable, which is roughly what it would mean today to be born in a car park behind a service station. The second is the cross, and here the crucifix that spoke to him at San Damiano set the pattern for a whole tradition of Franciscan devotion to the suffering of Christ. Scripture gives the shape of the movement he was tracing: Christ "emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men" (Philippians 2:7). The third is the altar, and this is where his contemporaries found him most intense. He wrote to the whole order about the moment of the Mass, telling the brothers that heaven should exult and the whole world tremble when Christ the Son of the living God is on the altar in the hands of a priest, and calling it a sublime humility that the Lord of the universe hides himself under a morsel of bread. He revered priests for this reason alone, and said in his Testament that he would go to them even if they persecuted him, because they handle the body of Christ. Christians have argued since the sixteenth century about how Christ is present in the bread, and Francis is not a party to that argument; it had not been framed, and he would not have recognised the terms. What he is saying is something Christians who differ on the mechanics can hear together. If the astonishing thing about the manger is that God would come that low, then the astonishing thing about the bread is that he has not stopped coming that low. Everything Francis did with his own life, the rags, the begging, the refusal of any rank, was an attempt to travel in the same direction as the God he was watching.

(Q) "O admirable height and stupendous condescension! O humble sublimity! O sublime humility! that the Lord of the universe, God and the Son of God, so humbles Himself that for our salvation He hides Himself under a morsel of bread." + Source: Francis of Assisi, Letter to All the Friars (Paschal Robinson, The Writings of Saint Francis of Assisi, 1906). Written late in his life, when he was too ill to travel to the brothers and had to send words instead. The sentence just before it tells the whole world to tremble and heaven to exult at the same moment, which is the pairing he cannot get over: the highest thing there is, doing the lowest thing there is (T4).

(Q) "The Lord Himself led me amongst them and I showed mercy to them. And when I left them, that which had seemed to me bitter was changed for me into sweetness of body and soul." + Source: Francis of Assisi, Testament (Paschal Robinson, The Writings of Saint Francis of Assisi, 1906). The lepers, in the sentence with which he begins the account of his own conversion. He does not mention the crucifix, the vision at Spoleto, or the scene with his father; asked at the end of his life where it had all started, he pointed to the people he had been most afraid of touching. Everything the church later made of him grew out of that one line.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) Rome took him in at the moment it was condemning people who were saying much the same thing. + To see what Innocent III did in 1209, you have to know what was happening around him. The twelfth century had produced a wave of movements built on apostolic poverty: laymen who read the Gospels, noticed that the apostles owned nothing and preached anyway, and set out to copy them. Peter Waldo of Lyons had done exactly that in the 1170s, sold everything, and started preaching, and by 1184 the Waldensians were under formal condemnation, mostly over the question of who is allowed to preach. Southern France was full of Cathars who thought the material world evil. Poverty movements were the destabilising force of the age, and the standard response was suppression. Into all of that walked a barefoot man from Assisi asking permission to live the gospel, and Innocent said yes. He required obedience, and he had the brothers tonsured, given the shaved crown of the head that marked a man as a cleric under the church’s authority rather than a preacher acting on his own outside it, so that what they said in the street would have standing. Then he let them go. Six years later the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 was legislating for the whole church about preaching and pastoral care, and the men best placed to carry out its programme were friars. The results were immediate and enormous. Brothers went out in pairs to every province of Europe, and the chapter meetings at the Portiuncula, the assemblies where the whole order came together, drew crowds the early sources measure in thousands. The Dominicans, founded on a parallel plan in 1216, grew alongside them. The energy that might have gone into sects went into the church instead, and when Francis died the machinery of canonisation moved faster than it has for almost anyone since: nineteen years after Innocent’s verbal approval, and less than two after his death, Gregory IX declared him a saint at Assisi on 16 July 1228.

(†) He changed how Christians picture Christ, and left behind a school of theology that starts from love. + Three habits of Christian devotion trace back to him and to the brothers he left behind, and the first of them comes out of a cardboard box in millions of houses every December. The Nativity scene is his, from the night at Greccio. The second is harder to notice, because it is simply how Christians now picture Jesus: the close attention to his suffering humanity, the wounds and the tears rather than the enthroned ruler, is Franciscan, and it moved out of the friaries into the painting of Cimabue and Giotto, whose frescoes in the basilica at Assisi taught Europe what Francis had looked like and, more importantly, what a crucifixion should look like. The third is the Stations of the Cross, the sequence of scenes from Christ’s road to Calvary that congregations walk and pray around the walls of a church in Lent. That one took its shape long after his death, among friars who were given custody of the holy places in Jerusalem in 1342 and who brought the walk back to churches at home. He also, without meaning to, founded a school. Within two generations the Franciscans held chairs at Paris and Oxford, the two great schools of theology in Europe, and their theology has a family resemblance that goes back to him: it starts from love and the will rather than from intellect. Bonaventure, the order’s greatest theologian and the minister general who ran it, went up La Verna to pray and came down with The Journey of the Mind into God, a book in which the six wings of the seraph Francis saw become the six stages of the soul’s ascent. John Duns Scotus argued that God would have become man even if no one had ever sinned, because the Incarnation is the point of creation and not merely its repair, which is Francis’ instinct turned into metaphysics. William of Ockham came out of the same house. No single tradition has managed to keep him to itself. Dante gives the praise of Francis in the Paradiso to Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican, and calls him a sun rising over the world. The modern rediscovery of him was launched in 1893 by Paul Sabatier, a French Protestant pastor, whose life of Francis was a bestseller across Europe. G. K. Chesterton wrote his in 1923. He is quoted with equal warmth by Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Baptists, and people who are not sure what they believe, which is a rare thing to be able to say about a thirteenth-century friar, and it is worth asking why. The answer is probably that he did not argue for anything. He simply did it, in front of witnesses, for twenty years.

(†) Where his own record invites criticism: the rule he would not let anyone bend, and the body he treated as an enemy. + Two things in the primary sources belong on the other side of the ledger, and both are his own doing rather than anyone else’s. - The Testament. In his last months he dictated a document ordering the brothers to keep it alongside the Rule, read it aloud at every chapter, and put no gloss on either. The instinct is understandable and the effect was cruel. He had learned a way of life with eleven companions and was now legislating for many thousands of men in a dozen countries, most of whom he had never met, and he left them a text that forbade the interpretation that any large body eventually needs. He knew, when he resigned the leadership in 1220, that he could not run what the order had become; he still bound it, four years later, in a way that assumed he could see every case it would ever face. Gregory IX ruled in 1230, in the bull Quo elongati, that the Testament did not bind, on the ground that Francis had no power to legislate for his successors. Whatever one thinks of that ruling, the problem it was solving was one Francis had made. - The body. He called his own body Brother Ass and used it accordingly: fasts that went past anything the Rule asked, sleeping on stone, going barefoot in winter, and a regime of illness and treatment that helped leave him blind before forty-four. Celano’s second life records that near the end he turned to the worn-out thing, told it to rejoice, and asked its pardon, saying he would gladly do now whatever it asked. He was right to ask, and Scripture had said so already: practices of this kind "have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh" (Colossians 2:23). The man who insisted the sun was his brother was harsher to the one creature he had actual charge of than to anything else in the world. On the matters Christians would later divide over, the Mass, the honours paid to Mary, obedience to the papacy, he held what his own century held, and nothing in his writings suggests he had considered the alternatives. Reading a thirteenth-century friar as a partisan in a sixteenth-century quarrel gets his measure wrong in both directions. Both entries come from his own words and his own biographers.