Aesthetic Theology in the Franciscan Tradition

The Senses and the Experience of God in Art

Xavier Seubert, Oleg Bychkov, Xavier Seubert, Oleg Bychkov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000710861
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Religious Art

The book investigates the aesthetic theology embedded in the Franciscan artistic tradition. The novelty of the approach is in applying concepts gleaned from Franciscan textual sources to create a deeper understanding of how art in all its sensual forms was foundational to the Franciscan milieu. Chapters range from studies of statements about aesthetics and the arts in theological textual sources to examples of visual, auditory, and tactile arts communicating theological ideas found in texts. The essays cover not only European art and textual sources, but also Franciscan influences in the Americas found in both texts and artifacts.

1
Images of Gospel Life

The Letter Visualized

John V. Fleming

In 2013 the Franciscan Institute published a well-received collective volume—entitled Beyond the Text: Franciscan Art and the Construction of Religion—that was conspicuous both for the intrinsic interest and excellence of the expert contributions it contained and as an impressive evidence of an important increment in the Institute’s scholarly mission.¹ Long known for its scholarly editions of medieval Franciscan theological texts, both in their original Latin form and in modern English translations, the Institute announced, in publishing Beyond the Text, an important new emphasis on the visual art associated with the young Order. The broad topic is hardly new to medieval studies, but its serious pursuit by professional Franciscan textual scholars and theologians reflects a growing understanding of the breadth of the vast contributions in a variety of cultural fields unleashed by the mendicant revolution in the thirteenth century. Ordinarily scholars should avoid endorsing “quotations” lacking actual textual sources. Francis probably never actually said “Preach the Gospel, using words if necessary,” but he certainly could and perhaps should have. He had set out to live a life that was a perfect (meaning whole) imitation of Christ, and of that life actual teaching and preaching formed but one part. There is a very hard sentence near the end of the Testamentum, in a place where he is insisting that the brothers not gloss his words. “Let not the friars say, ‘This is another Rule’,” he wrote; “for it is recordatio, admonitio, exhortatio et meum testamentum.”² The hard word in this phrase is recordatio, just as the hard word in the first clause of the Rule of 1221, carried over to the Rule of 1223, was vita, in the phrase regula et vita. The agreed-upon English translation of recordatio seems to be “reminder,” but I do not believe that can be quite right. The French friars whose beautiful 1968 French edition of the Documents—the anthology on which Marion Habig’s indispensable English Omnibus of 1972 was based—rendered recordatio as un retour sur le passé, a phrase that justifies its awkwardness by so perfectly capturing the sense of exemplary imitation Francis sought to take from the Gospels. For Italian men whose own vernacular was still half Latin, the “returning to the heart” that was at the center of recordatio was, like vita itself, a poetic synonym of their vocation.

The appearance of a second volume of art historical studies, largely the fruit of a wide-ranging scholarly conference held in the fall of 2017, perhaps invites an attempt at some kind of synoptic or generalized characterization of Franciscan visual art as it developed in the two centuries following the Founder’s death in 1226 and continued to evolve and expand into the baroque period and beyond. Surely, if there is any such thing as an essential theory of Franciscan art, it is to be found in the writings of two great “exemplarists”: Francis himself, and Saint Bonaventure, the genius who took up the daunting task of interpreting the Gospel life of the Founder of his Order.

One must grant from the outset that an attempt to define a distinctive “Franciscan visual aesthetic” seems no more promising than other assays at a comprehensive characterization of “Franciscanism” or the “Franciscan spirit,” “ethos,” or “spiritual milieu” generally. Such attempts in general put too much weight on rather imprecise categories like “affective piety” or “feeling for nature,” and too little on concrete historical circumstances. The various ascetic institutions of medieval religious life do reflect a considerable variety of spiritual distinctiveness, some of it no doubt based in the particular personalities of religious founders or other remarkable individuals. It would seem inadequate, perhaps, to talk about the “spirit” of the Cistercian origins without considering the personal influence of Bernard; but Bernard appears within a moment that is like several other identifiable in the course of monastic history, when an appetite for reform and renewal was widespread. To the degree that all medieval ascetic movements reflected a conscious sense of the contemptus mundi, or “despite of the world,” it will behoove the historian to examine with some care the changing nature of that world which, in its very act of being rejected, partially defined the “spirit” of a new order. Religious reform has generally been of a conservative if not an actually reactionary nature. The three ascetic obligations enshrined in the traditional three vows—poverty, obedience, chastity—are common to all medieval religious life; but these obligations might express themselves differently under differing sociological conditions. The great institution of Benedictine monasticism sprang from a feudal world in which the principal contours of social relationship expressed themselves in articulated obligations of service and contractural protections. Under these circumstances we find the great Benedictine emphasis on the vow of obedience, and the social manifestation of an abbot as powerful within his house as an absolute monarch. Humility and sometimes heroic spiritual submission are the ethical staples of Mabillon’s great collection of “Benedictine” biographies. The “power struggle” at Bury Saint Edmunds, depicted in the Chronicle of Jocelyn de Brokeland, and made famous for modern historians by Carlyle’s Past and Present, might fairly be described as an “obedientiary epic.”

The etymology of the word feudal, though somewhat uncertain, reveals the word’s economic, even monetary origins. It derives from a Germanic root cognate with Romance cattle/chattles regarded as property and by extension as accumulated wealth. The European world of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which saw the ratification of the four major Orders of mendicant friars, was one in which economic historians have seen the harbingers of a primitive “capitalism.” That is, a money economy was steadily developing, and with it the beginnings of the international banking system required by merchants. Social historians have convincingly related the new fraternal emphasis on “evangelical” poverty with this evolution of economic history.³ Francis’s father was a textile merchant whose activities, in modern terms, would seem to fall between those of a travelling salesman and an international entrepreneur. Stores of valuable cloth would have ranked high among his assets of moveable property. In one of the most famous episodes of Franciscan biography, and among those most famously remembered by Giotto, the young Francis stripped himself of his father’s cloth to put on his Father’s rags. This was a polysemous gesture, no doubt; but we see it not primarily as a drama of filial transgression against conventional filial obedience but as an iconographic emblem of the election of voluntary poverty. Usury, sometimes more colorfully described by moralists as “the fornication of the coins,” became an important topic of Franciscan homiletic teaching, appearing frequently in Franciscan literature and not infrequently as thematic allusion in the visual arts. In a book that fluttered the dovecotes of Giotto studies, a cultural historian has tried to dismiss the “economic” theme from the program of the Arena Chapel in Padua, but it seems to me impossible to banish it.⁴

Of course religious founders and reformers had at best an ambivalent attitude toward novelty and innovation. The first Franciscans were enthusiastic about the novelty of the miracle of the stigmata, but at the same time insistent that the content of their newly authorized “evangelical” life as documented in their rule was anything but new. Their claim was that Francis had renewed or recaptured something very old—the ascetic life of the primitive Church—and indeed the actual teachings of Jesus. Indeed the problem of the new and the old in mendicant life would be an important topic in the controversial literature attendant upon the friars’ virtual take-over of the theological faculties of the universities, especially at Paris.

Just as one constant of the ideal of individual sanctity was the idea of the “imitation of Christ,” the constant of more comprehensive Church reform, an important element of which was the unceasing reappraisal of the forms of monastic life, was the idea of the “imitation of the Apostles.” When Francis thought of a legislative rule, he thought of the immediate words that Jesus had used in commissioning his own followers, of taking nothing with them for the journey, of travelling two by two, of greeting the householders they visited with a word of peace, and of eating what was put before them. From the very start, too, he imagined an ecclesiological role for the friars that from one point of view must seem grandiose. Thus the Chapter General was to meet at Pentecost, the “birthday of the Church” and the occasion of its reception of the plenary charisms.

In addition to biblical texts, certain classics of early ascetic literature provided the later Middle Ages with the verbal and pictorial imagery of primitive religious life within the Church. Particularly important texts included the Vita Antonii of Athanasius (translated into Latin by Evagrius), the widely disseminated Apophthegmata patrum, and the “high literature” of Jerome’s fanciful eremitic biographies. The desert fathers supported themselves by the labor of their own hands, the preferred trade being that of basket weavers. The question of monk-workers versus monk-beggers, which had a history in early ascetic debates, was naturally renewed by the friars’ mendicancy, and features largely in later medieval popular literature. Thus when in the late fourteenth century Chaucer through a brilliantly constructed soliloquy has his vile Pardoner reveal the depths of his carnality he does so by alluding to a hagio-graphic commonplace:

I wol nat do no labour with myne handes,

Ne makes baskettes and lyve therby,

By cause I wol nat beggen ydelly

I wol noon of the apostles countrefete.⁵

The eremitic basket makers had their apostolic model in the apostle Paul himself, who earned his money by practicing the ars scenofactoria, or tent making (Acts 18:3). In his great seventeenth-century scriptural commentary, Cornelius a Lapide shows how, with regard to Francis, Bonaventure would connect the theme of tent dwelling to the idea of pilgrimage.⁶

That the mental iconography of the ascetic theoreticians was primarily exegetical in nature is obvious and important, for a self-conscious rereading of the Bible, and especially the Gospels, provides the basis for the most ancient Western ecclesiology, for the powerful “evangelical” dimension of the humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and for major Protestant theologians beginning with Luther. In the twentieth century the influential German Lutheran Gerhard Ebeling, along with other proponents among the so-called hermeneutical theologians, popularized the idea that all of Church history could be accounted for in “evangelical” terms—meaning in terms of a process of ceaseless reinterpretation and reevaluation of Gospel life. That Francis’s vision of religious life was both so biblical and so pictorial—that is, framed in mental visual images—suggests that his “aesthetic” (should he ever have formulated so abstract a concept) was necessarily hermeneutical. Among the ways in which Franciscan art was harmonious with the Franciscan vita, their common foundation in enacted scriptural interpretation is conspicuous.⁷

The sources for our understanding of medieval Christian pictorial iconography are overwhelmingly literary. The founders of the great Index of Christian Art (recently renamed the Index of Medieval Art) from the beginning recognized the primacy of biblical inspiration in medieval pictorial representations, both in its original system of classification of documents and in the carefully chosen small library gathered together for the convenience of iconographers. So far as manuscripts are concerned, illustrated bibles, office books, and other explicitly “religious” compilations are the principal thesaurus of pictorial iconography; and in the category of the “other books,” hagiographies loom large. In terms of larger paintings, sculpture, stained glass, and a wide variety of emblematic representations, the source is of course houses of worship themselves. Under these circumstances it is not improper to consider medieval Christian pictorial art largely to be a branch of scriptural exegesis. Certainly much Franciscan art is just that. This essay will attempt to trace the origins of the “Franciscan aesthetic” to the bedrock of all exegesis: the literal sense.

Just as there is a considerable variety in the intellectual quality, ambition, and “originality” of scriptural commentary, so also can one characterize the visual representations drawn directly from the biblical text, or very often from what theologians had long since written about the theological text. All pictorial images come with some responsibility of signification, an obligation to “represent” the things of which they are images; but medieval biblical art very often has the additional responsibility of invoking exegetical ideas so closely associated with those things as to be inseparab...