Reading: Francis of Assisi 1181-1226

Issue 42: St. Francis of Assisi

Snapshots of a Saint
Stories that reveal Francis's intense, complex personality.

Like all great people, Francis cannot be sufficiently “explained.” Writing about Francis can take us only so far in comprehending him. It is better sometimes to sit back and simply watch him in action. The following stories have been culled from the hundreds of events recorded in Francis’s early biographies.

To Kiss a Leper

One day while Francis was praying fervently to God, he received an answer: “O Francis, if you want to know my will, you must hate and despise all that which hitherto your body has loved and desired to possess. Once you begin to do this, all that formerly seemed sweet and pleasant to you will become bitter and unbearable, and instead, the things that formerly made you shudder will bring you great sweetness and content.” Francis was divinely comforted and greatly encouraged by these words.

Then one day, as he was riding near Assisi, he met a leper. He had always felt an overpowering horror of these sufferers, but making a great effort, he conquered his aversion, dismounted, and, in giving the leper a coin, kissed his hand. The leper then gave him the kiss of peace, after which Francis remounted his horse and rode on his way.

Some days later he took a large sum of money to the leper hospital, and gathering all the inmates together, he gave them alms, kissing each of their hands. Formerly he could neither touch or even look at lepers, but when he left them on that day, what had been so repugnant to him had really and truly been turned into something pleasant.

Indeed, his previous aversion to lepers had been so strong, that, besides being incapable of looking at them, he would not even approach the places where they lived. And if by chance he happened to pass anywhere near their dwellings or to see one of the lepers, even though he was moved to give them an alms through some intermediate person, he would nevertheless turn his face away and hold his nose. But, strengthened by God’s grace, he was enabled to obey the command and to love what he had hated and to abhor what he had hitherto wrongfully loved.

—Legend of the Three Companions

A Stone for a Pillow

Francis would not allow his resting place to be laid over with covers or garments when he received hospitality, but the bare ground received his bare limbs, with only a tunic between. When at times he refreshed his small body with sleep, he very often slept sitting up, and in no other position, using a piece of wood or a stone as a pillow.

When his appetite for something particular was aroused, as often happens, he seldom ate that thing afterward. Once, when in an infirmity he had eaten a little chicken, after he regained his strength of body he entered the city of Assisi, and when he had come to the gate of the city, he commanded a certain brother who was with him to tie a rope about his neck and to drag him in this way like a robber through the entire city and to shout in the voice of a herald, saying, “Behold the glutton who has grown fat on the meat of chickens, which he ate without you knowing about it.”

Many therefore ran to see so great a spectacle, and weeping together with great sighs, they said, “Woe to us miserable ones, whose whole life is spent in blood and who nourish our hearts and bodies with uncleanness and drunkenness.” And thus, pierced to the heart, they were moved to a better way of life by so great an example.

Often, when he was honored by all, he suffered the deepest sorrow, and rejecting the favor of men, he would see to it that he would be rebuked by someone. He would call some brother to him, saying to him, “In obedience, I say to you, revile me harshly and speak the truth against the lies of these others.” And when that brother, though unwilling, would say he was a boor, a hired servant, a worthless being, Francis, smiling and applauding very much, would reply, “May the Lord bless you, for you have spoken most truly; it is becoming that the son of Peter of Bernardone should hear such things.”

—Celano, First Life

Preaching to the Birds

When he was near Bevagna, he came to a spot where there was a huge flock of birds of various kinds. The moment he saw them, he ran to them and greeted them as if they understood, and they all turned towards him and waited for him. Those that had perched on the bushes bent their heads, when he came near, and looked at him in an extraordinary way.

He went straight up to them and appealed to them all to hear the word of God, saying, “My brothers, you have a great obligation to praise your Creator. He clothed you with feathers and gave you wings to fly, appointing the clear air as your home, and he looks after you without any effort on your part.” As he continued speaking to them like this, the birds showed their pleasure in a wonderful fashion; they stretched out their necks and flapped their wings, gazing at him with their beaks open.

In his spiritual enthusiasm, Francis walked among them, brushing them with his habit, and not one of them moved until he made the sign of the cross and gave them permission to go. Then they all flew away together with his blessing. His companions who were waiting on the road saw everything and when the saint rejoined them, in the purity and simplicity of his heart, he began to reproach himself for his negligence in never preaching to the birds before.

—Bonaventure, Major Life

Money and Dung

Francis, the true friend and imitator of Christ, utterly despised all things belonging to this world and hated money above all else. He always urged his brethren both by word and example to avoid it as they would the Devil. And he told the friars to have as little love and use for money as for dung.

One day, a layman happened to enter Saint Mary of the Portiuncula to pray and laid some money near the cross as an offering. When he had left, one of the friars unthinkingly picked it up and placed it on a window ledge. But when this was reported to blessed Francis, this friar, realizing himself detected, at once hastened to ask forgiveness, and falling to the ground, offered himself for punishment.

The holy Father reproved him and took him severely to task for touching the money. And he ordered him to take the money from the window in his mouth, carry it outside the friary, and lay it on a heap of ass’s dung.

When this friar readily obeyed this order, all who saw or heard were filled with the greatest fear, and thenceforward despised money as ass’s dung.

—Mirror of Perfection

Demolishing a Building

At this period, the friars had only a single poor cell thatched with straw, with walls of wattle and daub.

So when the time drew near for the general chapter [meeting of friars], which was held each year at Saint Mary of the Portiuncula, the people of Assisi, realizing that the friars were increasing in number daily, and that all of them assembled there each year, held a meeting. And within a few days, with great haste and zeal, they erected a large building of stone and mortar while blessed Francis was absent and knew nothing of it.

When he returned from one of the provinces and arrived for the chapter, he was astonished at the house built there. And he was afraid that the sight of the house might make other friars build similar large houses in the places where they lived or were to live, and he desired this place to remain the example and pattern for all other houses of the Order. So before the chapter ended he climbed onto the roof of the house and told other friars to climb up with him. And with their help, he began to throw to the ground the tiles with which the house was roofed, intending to destroy it to the very foundations.

But some men-at-arms of Assisi were present to protect the place from the great crowd of sightseers who had gathered to watch the chapter of the friars. And when they saw that blessed Francis and other friars intended to destroy the house, they went up to him at once and said, “Brother, this house belongs to the Commune [district] of Assisi, and we are here to represent the Commune. We forbid you to destroy our house.”

When he heard this, blessed Francis said to them, “If the house is yours, I will not touch it.” And forthwith he and the other friars came down.

—Mirror of Perfection

Perfect Joy

One day at Saint Mary, Saint Francis called Brother Leo and said, “Brother Leo, write this down.”

He answered, “I’m ready.”

“Write what true joy is,” he said. “A messenger comes and says that all the masters of theology in Paris have joined the Order—write: that is not true joy. Or all the prelates beyond the mountains— archbishops and bishops, or the King of France and the King of England—write: that is not true joy. Or that my friars have gone to the unbelievers and have converted all of them to the faith; or that I have so much grace from God that I heal the sick and I perform many miracles. I tell you that true joy is not in all those things.”

“But what is true joy?”

“I am returning from Perugia, and I am coming here at night, in the dark. It is winter time and wet and muddy and so cold that icicles form at the edges of my habit and keep striking my legs, and blood flows from such wounds. And I come to the gate, all covered with mud and cold and ice, and after I have knocked and called for a long time, a friar comes and asks, ‘Who are you?’ I answer, ‘Brother Francis.’

And he says, ‘Go away. This is not a decent time to be going about. You can’t come in.’

“And when I insist again, he replies, ‘Go away. You are a simple and uneducated fellow. From now on don’t stay with us anymore. We are so many and so important that we don’t need you.’

“But I still stand at the gate and say, ‘For the love of God, let me come in tonight.’ And he answers, ‘I won’t. Go to the Crosiers’ Place [another monastery] and ask there.’

“I tell you that if I kept patience and was not upset—that is true joy and true virtue and salvation of the soul.”

—14th century Latin manuscript

The Case for Downward Mobility

By William S. Stafford

Why did Francis insist that his followers live in absolute poverty?

Francis was the son of a cloth merchant, yet after his conversion he wore a miserable, threadbare patched tunic.

When his father begged Assisi’s bishop to stop his crazy son from giving away family property, Francis stood in front of the bishop and stripped himself naked to proclaim that he had no father but God.

In the surging profit economy of northern Italy, Francis told a Franciscan brother who had accepted a coin to shove it into a dunghill with his lips.

Crucial events in Francis’s relationship with Jesus Christ turned on poverty. He was enamored with the poverty modeled by Christ and the disciples, and he insisted his followers live in radical poverty. Why?

Poor Jesus

Francis was not a systematic theologian articulating an explicit, developed doctrine of poverty. He preferred acting out the truth to stating it in bald words. Still, his Admonitions (a collection of directives to his friars), and the Earlier and Later Rules (guides for his Order), offer material for an outline of his “gospel of Jesus’ poverty.”

To Francis the Gospels made it utterly clear that the only way to know God was through Jesus. And the Jesus Francis knew was humble:

“Why do you not recognize the truth and believe in the Son of God? See, daily he humbles himself as when he came from the royal throne into the womb of the Virgin; daily he comes to us in a humble form; daily he comes down from the bosom of the Father upon the altar in the hands of the priest” (Admonitions I:15–18).

Jesus was the one who emptied himself of status and glory and came as one who was humble and poor. Francis saw Jesus as coming in humility whether as a poor preacher or through a piece of bread (in Communion). Status and glory went with wealth; the high and the mighty were always the rich. But the crucified Jesus was lowly, weak, and therefore poor.

Those whom Jesus called to repent of the world’s way and to follow his “footprints” to eternal life had to be humble like him, renouncing the pride of station and power. That meant renouncing possessions above all. When Francis stood in front of the bishop of Assisi and stripped off his father’s clothing, it was a symbolic renunciation of his birth family’s whole life, a round of godless getting and spending.

Relinquishing the Will

Ever since the Fall, humans had claimed to possess things for themselves alone. Francis was particularly harsh about any form of “appropriation”: arrogating to oneself what is God’s:

“The Lord said to Adam: Eat of every tree; do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He was able to eat of every tree of paradise, since he did not sin, as long as he did not go against obedience. For the person eats of the tree of the knowledge of good who appropriates to himself his own will and thus exalts himself over the good things which the Lord says and does in him; and thus … what he eats becomes for him the fruit of the knowledge of evil” (Admonitions II:14; emphasis added).

Glorying in your thoughts and deeds or lording it over brothers and sisters or owning property—all alike were acts of appropriation. They blocked out God and neighbor in favor of self. They did precisely what Jesus had not done. They flew in the face of the reality that God alone was Lord.

That reality, Francis constantly reminded his hearers, God would enforce at the Last Judgment. Thus Jesus’ call to repentance was a call to turn from appropriation to poverty:

“The Lord says in the Gospel: ‘He who does not renounce everything he possesses cannot be my disciple,’ and ‘He who wishes to save his life must lose it’ ” (Luke 14:33, 9:24; Admonitions III:1).

Concrete Acts

Anyone who decided to join Francis had to give away all possessions to the poor and live as the poorest of the poor.

Francis knew that some people who sincerely wanted to follow Jesus on the way of poverty could not lawfully do so. Bishops had no right to renounce the incomes and prerogatives of their sees; married people could not break up their households and vow poverty and celibacy without a spouse’s permission. For such people, Francis said, the spiritual desire to do so was enough. He supported the Franciscan “Third Order,” which permitted people to follow a rule of simplicity and devotion to Jesus while remaining in callings they were not free to abandon.

Yet all through his life, he insisted on literal poverty whenever possible. Concrete, life-changing acts were more pungent for Francis than feelings or abstract principles:

“Woe to that religious [friar] who does not keep in his heart the good things the Lord reveals to him and who does not manifest them to others by his actions, but rather seeks to make such good things known by his words. He thereby receives his reward, while those who listen to him carry away but little fruit” (Admonitions XXI:23; emphasis added).

Joyful Poverty

Following Jesus’ poverty inevitably brought suffering, which Francis accepted as self-mortification. His last years were suffused with darkness and pain, culminating in his receiving the stigmata of the Crucified (wounds in his hands, feet, and side). Yet these years also brought blessing and joy:

“Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God. The truly pure of heart are those who despise the things of earth and seek the things of heaven, and who never cease to adore and behold the Lord God living and true with a pure heart and soul” (Admonitions XVI:12).

Those who were truly poor, and who thus did not appropriate honor or glory to themselves, were the only ones who could freely give honor and glory to God. Francis’s praise of God erupted at all times, even at the times of greatest darkness, as the Canticle of Brother Sun makes plain. The Earlier Rule, a list of demanding exhortations to the freedom of holy poverty, appropriately concludes with an ecstatic hymn:

Let all of us
wherever we are
in every place
at every hour
at every time of day
everyday and continually
believe truly and humbly
and keep in [our] heart
and love, honor, adore, serve
praise and bless
glorify and exalt
magnify and give thanks to
the most high and supreme eternal God
Trinity and Unity
the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Creator of all
Savior of all who believe in Him
and hope in Him
and love Him
Who is
without beginning and without end unchangeable, invisible,
indescribable, ineffable
incomprehensible, unfathomable,
blessed, worthy of praise,
glorious, exalted on high, sublime most high, gentle, lovable,
delectable and totally desirable
above all else forever.
Amen.

Dr. William S. Stafford is professor of church history at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia. He is author of Domesticating the Clergy: The Inception of the Reformation in Strasburg, 1522–1524 (Scholar's Press, 1994).