A Quest for the Historical Saint Francis

churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/a-quest-for-the-historical-saint-francis/

Nearly everyone has heard of Francis of Assisi, and it is certain

that, after the Blessed Virgin Mary, he is the most popular of
Catholic saints. His statue decorates many gardens and lawns, even
those of non-Christians, and the Dalai Lama has offered him as a
model for Buddhist monks. There is no question that Francis is an
icon. The first non-European pope chosen in over 1200 years, a
Jesuit at that, broke an almost equally ancient tradition when he
choose a name that was not that of any previous pope. What did he
choose to be called? Pope Francis.

Francis is a saint whose story has been told repeatedly. Yet, I, a

member of the Dominican Order, never had much interest in,
much less devotion to, the “Little Poor Man” of Assisi. That I would
write his biography seemed, at least to me, highly improbable.

The universal online library catalog (OCLC), lists no fewer than

238 biographies of Francis published or republished in the last ten
years alone, nearly twenty-five titles a year. Can anything new
really be said about a man so well known, the subject of so many
biographies? And how on Earth did I end up writing one? Before I
found myself doing research on Francis's life, I did not think much
remained to be said about St. Francis. By the time I finished that
research, I had met a man that no one seemed to know, and I had
been changed.

The Francis I encountered was quite different from those of the

earlier biographies I had read. Even now, after writing a, by
academic standards, best-selling biography, Francis of Assisi: The
Life, I believe that much more remains to be discovered about this
remarkable man and that, when found, it will both delight and
challenge us today. In my portrait of Francis, which first came out
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in 2012, I sought to uncover the historical man hidden behind
centuries of legends and appropriations. I found that I had to chart
a way through the mass of stories, anecdotes, reports, writings, and
interpretations that, from his own time to our century, confused
and distorted our vision of the saint.

While writing my biography, I was forced to ask a series of

questions about our early evidence for Francis. First, who wrote
the text? Was it Francis, someone who knew him, or someone who
just heard about him? Oddly, many modern popular biographies, I
found, favor hearsay stories over Francis's own writings. Next,
when was the document written? Within a few decades of his death
in September of 1226, reports and stories about the saint
underwent transformations that adapted them to new and
developing concerns of the authors and audiences. Much
elaboration and rewriting went on, and some stories about Francis
were simply invented out of whole cloth.

Often these inventions involved miracle stories. These reports had

to be evaluated with special care, not because I do not think
miracles happen, but because Francis was a canonized saint, and
for medieval people, adding more miracles to his “biography” was
not fraud, but an act of homage and piety. The famous Wolf of
Gubbio failed that test. It is impossible to prove that that
peacemaking incident, in which Francis tamed a wolf who was
terrorizing a small town, never happened; perhaps it did.

But as we have it, the tale was only written down a hundred years
after his death, too late to accept without additional confirmation,
which does not exist. To find the man behind the legends, I had to
set aside such late reports, charming as they may be. On the other
hand, I could not recount Francis's life without acknowledging the
perception of miraculous power that surrounded his person after
he became a “living saint” in his later years, and my biography
included plenty of those reports. I also became more and more
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skeptical of any story in which the man Francis was made the
mouthpiece, decades after his death, for a party involved in some
debate within his own Franciscan Order, especially those about the
practice of poverty, something that we now know was not a topic of
great debate until at least thirty years after the saint's death.

My reading of the sources for Francis forced me to diverge from

the usual story. The Francis I came to know proved a more
complex and personally conflicted man than the saint of the
legends. Nevertheless, this Francis became for me an amazing and
holy man. I found a man who could not be assimilated to some
preconceived idea of “holiness,” especially if it suggested that a
“saint” never has crises of faith, is never angry or depressed, never
passes judgments, and never becomes frustrated with himself or
others. My Francis's very humanity made him—for me and for
many readers of my biography—more impressive and challenging
than the saint who embodied that (impossible) kind of holiness.

But I would also emphasize that my “historical Francis” is no more

the “real Francis” than the Francis of the legends and popular
biographies. He is “historical” insofar as the picture I paint is the
result of historical method, not theological reflection or pious
edification. That said, I do think that the Francis I discovered is
closer to the man known by his thirteenth-century contemporaries
than the figure we find in the modern biographies. And I do hope
that my portrait reveals a Francis that will provide stimulus for
new theological reflection and richer Christian piety.

As an academic, I came to Francis as an outsider. As a historian, I

was new to the contentious and often bitter world of scholarly
controversy over the historical Francis. Especially for his modern
followers, the Franciscan friars, nuns, sisters, and lay tertiaries,
how one imagines Francis and his concerns has powerful,

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sometimes highly divisive, implications for living one's life today. I
have no personal stake in those internal Franciscan debates. As we
Americans colloquially say, I don't have a dog in that fight.

But my encounter did challenge me religiously. Although I wrote

principally as a historian, I am also a Catholic Christian, a priest,
and a member of the Order of Preachers, the Dominicans, who are
often considered the twin of Francis's own Friars Minor. As I
hinted above, I never had much devotion to Saint Francis, and I
always found it mildly amusing that we Dominicans refer to him as
“Our Holy Father Francis,” using a title, “Father,” which he went
out of his way to avoid. As I worked on my biography, my respect
for Francis and for his vision increased, and he captured my
affection and admiration. I hope my book will speak to modern
people, believers and unbelievers alike, and that the Francis I have
come to know will have something to say to them today.

My biography is intended for all readers who are interested in the

saint. Some might even be scholars, who have spent years studying
the Middle Ages, the Order of Friars Minor, or its founder. If they
want to, they can hear about the debates, the medieval sources,
and how I decided to interpret them. They will be especially
interested in the second half of the book, in which I explain the
scholarly controversies and the complexity of the sources.

Most readers who pick up my biography will, I suspect, simply

want to hear something about the “Little Poor Man” himself. If the
readers are in their sixties, as I am, they may have been introduced
to Francis by Franco Zefferelli's film, Brother Sun, Sister Moon,
the last and perhaps greatest monument in a line of romantic
reinterpretations going back over a hundred years. In this
tradition, Francis was a free spirit, a wild religious genius, a kind of
medieval hippie, misunderstood and then exploited by the
“Medieval Church.” Or perhaps they came to know him as the man
who spoke to animals, a nature mystic, an ecologist, a pacifist, a
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feminist, a “voice for our time.” Some will come wondering just
who is this eight-hundred-year-old saint that our pope chose for his
patron. In fact, for some, he might be no more than the little
plaster man on the birdbath, that most charming and non-
threatening of holy men.

Like Jesus, Francis belongs to everyone, so everyone, or almost

everyone, has his or her own Francis. And this is probably the way
it has to be. In years of university teaching, I have often been
astounded at how unhappy students can be when they encounter a
Francis different from the one they expected. Oddly enough, the
most painful moment usually comes when they discover that
Francis did not write the “Peace Prayer of St. Francis”—a popular
hymn best known by its opening words “Make me a channel of
your peace,” and sung to a tune by Sebastian Temple. Many are
quite shocked to find that this song is not identical to Francis's
“Canticle of Brother Sun,” from which Zefferelli took the name of
his movie. The “Peace Prayer” is modern and anonymous,
originally written in French, and dates to about 1912, when it was
published in a minor French spiritual magazine. Noble as its
sentiments are, Francis could not have written such a piece,
focused as it is on the self, with its constant repetition of the
pronouns “I” and “me,” the words “God” and “Jesus” never
appearing once. We all have our own “Francis.”

As a historian, I usually avoid suggesting what the past might

mean for modern readers. But since the intensity of my encounter
with him forces me to say something about what I have learned
from Francis and how he challenged me, I will list a few things he
has taught me as a Catholic Christian. I am sure he will teach
others something different, so these reflections are purely my own.

First, he taught me that the love of God remakes the soul. Doing
good to others does follow from this, but Francis’s message is not
primarily about doing good to others. Francis was more about
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being than doing. And the “others” whom the Christian serves are
to be loved for themselves, no matter how unlovable, not because
we can fix them by our good works.

Secondly, rather than a call to accomplish any mission, program,

or vision, to live the Christian life as Francis did demands a change
in one’s perception of God and creation. Above all, it has nothing
to do with success, personal or corporate, which always eluded
Francis.

Thirdly, true freedom of spirit, indeed true Christian freedom,

comes from obedience, not personal autonomy. And, as Francis
showed many times in his actions, that obedience cannot be an
abstraction, but must involve concrete submission to another.

Freedom means becoming a “slave of all.” Finally—and I hope this

subverts everything I have just written—Francis taught me that are
no ready and clear roads to true Christian holiness.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay comes from the

“Introduction” (with slight revisions) of Francis of Assisi: The Life,
by Augustine Thompson, O.P. Copyright (c) 2013 by Cornell
University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University
Press. Our special thanks also goes out to Fr. Thompson for his
help.

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