Francis of Assisi and His "Canticle of Brother Sun" Reassessed

B. Moloney

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137306968
• eBook ISBN: 9781137361691
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria europea

Bringing the skills of a literary historian to the subject, Brian Moloney considers the genesis of Saint Francis of Assisi's Canticle of Brother Sun to show how it works as a carefully composed work of art. The study examines the saint's life and times, the structure of the poem, the features of its style, and the range of its possible meanings.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

In his fairly short life—he lived from 1181 (probably) to 1226—Francis of Assisi wrote relatively little, but he taught, preached, and lived so influentially, so charismatically, that his voice still speaks to us across the centuries, addressing our concerns. On the Sunday closest to his feast day, October 4, numerous church services are held at which countless animals are blessed. Every Christmas, the crib scenes in our churches reproduce, usually in miniature, a scene which Francis created on a scale true to life by bringing into a cave at Greccio in Umbria in 1223 a real crib and real animals, with mass said at an improvised altar over the manger, to bring home to the congregation the poverty and humility of the Incarnation, in which the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Francis therefore is associated in people’s minds with nature, with the natural world. We all know that he preached to the birds, although we may not all know why he did that or what message he had for them. Partial knowledge sometimes leads to an unfortunately sentimentalized view of Francis, with twee statuettes of him next to the birdbath with a pair of pigeons perched on his shoulders. However, we may also know that he is the patron saint of ecology, which in our carbon emission conscious age may strike a deeper, more serious chord than “St. Francis of the bird bath.” In November 1978, the British National Farmers’ Union and the Country Landowners’ Association appealed to their members to leave small parcels of land specifically for their contribution to landscape or wildlife, while the generality of the countryside was to be used to provide food and timber (Doyle 1997, 75). The British government recently began to pay farmers to leave uncultivated strips in their fields as a way of combating the effects of industrialized methods of farming, helping threatened species to survive. One of Francis’s earliest biographers, Thomas of Celano, reports that Francis urged all those who cultivated the land to leave uncultivated strips so that wild grasses and flowers could grow there.

It would be comforting to think that someone in the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural affairs was a Franciscan or had been reading the early lives of St. Francis, but I suspect that the Umbrian saint and the secretary of state for the environment had different motives for advocating the same policy. Francis was not a modern conservationist; he simply wanted wild flowers and grasses to proclaim God’s praises: “He commands the gardener to leave the edges of the garden undisturbed, so that in their season the green of herbs and the beauty of flowers may proclaim the beautiful father of all” (II, 354; III, 366).

Francis, in fact, never talked or wrote about nature, the environment, or ecology. The words represent concepts he knew nothing about. He talked only of creation—God’s creation—and of creatures—God’s creatures, in the sense of created beings and things, the results of God’s mighty creative acts as described in the book of Genesis. And he took very seriously the statement made four times in Genesis 1, that “God saw that it was good,” culminating in verse 31: “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” Thomas of Celano writes in The Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul:

He rejoices in all the works of the Lord’s hands,

and through their delightful display

he gazes on their life-giving reason and cause.

In beautiful things he discerns beauty itself;

all good things cry out to him:

“The one who made us is the Best.” (II, 353)

The goodness and beauty of creation are for Francis an expression of the goodness and beauty of the creator. It was therefore natural that he should ensure that his canticle of praise was also a thing of beauty. Franciscan scholarship has naturally and very profitably tended to analyze the canticle’s meaning in the context of Franciscan spirituality. The aim of this book, however, which is organized thematically, is to consider the genesis of the “Canticle of Brother Sun,” to analyze the features that contribute to its beauty and ensure that it is effective as a carefully crafted work of art, and to then relate it to both Francis’s spirituality and to the various contexts—social and cultural—in which he lived out that spirituality.

Francis lived before the age of Kepler, Galileo, and Copernicus. It was still possible for him to read the biblical narratives of creation and to accept them as literally true accounts of actual events. He would have taken for granted that God was—in the opening words of the Nicene creed—“Creator of heaven and earth.” There would simply have been for him no acceptable alternative explanation of the origin of the universe as he understood it and, in particular, life on earth. Creation’s appropriate response, Francis believed, was to praise its creator for his generous love. His marvelous “Canticle of the Creatures,” which deserves our attention as the first great poem to be written in Italian, begins,

Most high, most powerful, good Lord,

Praise, glory and honor, and all blessings are yours.

[Altissimu, onnipotente, bon Signore,

Tue so’ le laude, la gloria e l’honore et onne benedizione.]

The word ‘praise’, as noun or verb, occurs ten times in the thirty-three lines of the poem. If the last two lines of the poem are sung as a refrain between the verses, as they often are, then praise occurs twenty-one times. Another occasion on which Francis considered praise to be the appropriate response is the forgiveness of sin. The early lives record that Francis required penitent brothers to say the Lord’s Prayer and the “Praises of God” (III, 244–45).

Twenty-first-century Christians still respond to Francis’s outpouring of praise, but some of the images of him in the early writings present a picture that we may find less attractive. He quarreled publicly with his father and seems not to have sought a reconciliation, asking instead a local beggar to act as his father and bless him when the latter, meeting his errant son in the streets of Assisi, swore at him (II, 82). He sprinkled ashes on his food to prevent himself enjoying it too much, much to the annoyance of the friar acting as cook. He could in fact be difficult to work and live with, even, to a modern reader, appearing ungrateful and ungracious at times. Rosalind Brooke cites as an example of this the occasion on which the brothers at Santa Maria della Porziuncola decorated with ferns and branches a cell that Francis often used, in order to make it resemble as far as possible one of those wilderness retreat places of which he was so fond. Then, in conversation, one of the friars referred to it as Francis’s cell. “‘Because you said it is mine’, blessed Francis said, ‘someone else will stay in it from now on: I will not’” (Brooke 2006, 18–19). But the passage is cited in the Mirror of Perfection of the Status of a Lesser Brother not as an instance of ungraciousness but as an admirable example of Francis’s unremitting quest for Christ-likeness: “We who were with him often heard him repeat the passage: Foxes have dens and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (III, 262).

So what kind of a man was he before his conversion and what kind of a saint did he become, that he could, suffering great pain and aware that his death was approaching, write such a joyful paean of praise and thanksgiving? Chapters 2 and 3 will attempt to answer those questions in the belief that the “Canticle” is deeply rooted in Francis’s personal experience and that our appreciation of it is greatly increased by our understanding of that experience. The “Canticle” is an enraptured song of praise and a fervent prayer; it most certainly is not a theological statement. But underlying the enraptured song is a theology of praise which we would do well to understand if we are to grasp the poem’s several possible meanings. Chapter 4 will look at the language of the “Canticle” in the light of the development of the Italian language, which was then only just coming into being, of Francis’s Latin liturgical sources and his French culture. On the interpretation of the simple word ‘per’ (does it mean for, by, or through?) depends our view of Francis’s theology of praise and the meanings of the poem. Much scholarship has been devoted to reducing the canticle to a single meaning, but I shall propose that it is capable of holding several possible meanings and can therefore be read in several different ‘keys’, as it were. I offer two possible translations of the Italian text, which readers may compare with each other and the original. Chapter 5 will consider the form of the “Canticle,” based on the psalms and canticles of the liturgy, and its thematic structure. These chapters necessarily involve some discussion of the canticle in Italian, but this need not be a great problem for the non-Italianist. T. S. Eliot recounts that as an undergraduate at Harvard, he followed a course on Dante’s Divine Comedy in Italian, for admission to which students were required to know only a very little Italian. Eliot says that he had at the time only “a traveller’s smattering of Italian” but, armed with the Italian text and a fairly literal English translation, he worked his way through the trilogy from the “dark wood” of Inferno I to the beatific vision of Paradiso XXXIII. Francis’s canticle is much shorter than Dante’s epic and, with a facing translation, it is very accessible.

In November 1979 Francis was proclaimed patron saint of ecologists. One hopes that he was given a suitable job description, as the term ‘ecology’ was not one he would ever have used. In chapter 6, we consider Francis’s nature mysticism and its expression in the “Canticle.”

We live in a society that has become accustomed to what the British poet Philip Larkin called in Wants “the costly aversion of the eyes from death” (Larkin 2003, 52). This was not the case in the Middle Ages, when life could be nasty, brutish, and short (or, as an American friend put it, “nasty, British and short”). Francis sees death as bringing terror to the unrepentant sinner, but as one of God’s gifts to the believer. He sees “Sister Death” as being with him as he lies dying; God can thus be praised for and by her as much as he can for and by the other elements of his creation. In chapter 7 we examine the very unorthodox figure of Sister Death in Francis’s thought and poetry.

Francis’s silences were significant. One characteristic of his life and work is that he seems not to have taught or preached in negative fashion against heresies. He must, however, have been well informed about the Cathar sect in particular, and much in his thought and writings can be construed as implying an answer to Cathar dualist doctrines. This issue is studied in chapter 8, along with other aspects of the cultural contexts within which Francis composed the “Canticle,” and against which the poem may profitably be read by those who wish to understand it historically.

We see in chapter 2 that as a young man Francis aspired to become a knight and, in chapter 3, that he renounced this ambition when he became a mendicant friar. His brothers in the order, however, became his “knights of the Round Table.” Chapter 9 examines how the culture of knighthood and chivalry continued to play an important part in Francis’s thought and how his knightly ambitions were lived out. The culture of chivalry, with its emphasis on courtesy and liberality or generosity, permeates the “Canticle.”

Chapter 10 is cast in the form of a line by line commentary on the “Canticle,” elucidating points of form and style, as well as listing analogous passages in Francis’s other works, and biblical allusions. Readers may choose either to read it through or to refer to it when necessary in the course of their reading.

In these theme-based chapters I aim to present a close reading of the text of the “Canticle,” which is both accessible and set firmly in the historical and cultural contexts in which Francis lived and wrote. Chapters 2 and 3 will be biographical in their approach. Here, we encounter a problem. Our knowledge and understanding of Francis’s life are based on the early writings known as the legendae or legends. The word legenda in this context, from the Latin verb legere, means simply something to be read, usually aloud in the course of the offices regularly recited by the Lesser Brothers.

The writing of saints’ lives, or hagiography, brings us into contact with what is in effect a specialized literary genre with its own conventions, which are not those of biography in the modern sense. Francis lived his short life from 1181 or 82 to 1226. Within two years of his death he was canonized by his friend and advisor Hugolino, now Pope Gregory IX, and work had begun on the great Basilica dedicated to him in Assisi. Before that, of course, the call had gone out for evidence to support his canonization—stories of his holy life and accounts of miracles wrought by him during his lifetime, or through his intercession after his death, or with the help of relics associated with him. Both written and oral testimonies were used. There was no shortage of such material. The first account of Francis’s life was Thomas of Celano’s Life of St. Francis, written between 1228 and 1229, often referred to as his First Life. It was undoubtedly shaped in part by the legendae with which the scholarly Thomas was already familiar—Sulpicius Severus’s life of St. Martin of Tours, Bernard of Clairvaux’s life of St. Malachy, sometimes even taking incidents over from these lives and making them relate to Francis—with the inevitable result that his Francis to some extent fits into established and recognizable patterns of sanctity. Francis is described as doing things saints were known or expected to do. But Thomas also knew Francis personally and heard at least some of the episodes he relates from the saint himself: in addition, he interviewed other brothers who had been with Francis in the early days of the order.

How reliable are these early sources, which present us with “the major inconvenience of being for the most part indifferent to chronology” (Vauchez 2012, 187). They were written primarily “not to reconstruct events in an accurate and chronicle-like manner, but rather to state their significance,” as Fumagalli puts it (Fumagalli 2005, 22), to edify spiritually and present a model of holiness, rather than to inform (Prinzivalli 2001, 253–54). How do we, as it were, get behind the legendae and find out what Francis was like in his daily life, particularly before his conversion, given that what little we do know about his early life is, as it were, read forward as evidence of his future sanctity?

One answer to this problem is to trace episodes back to their earliest sources, back from the official or semiofficial legendae to their sources, as far as they can be identified, in accounts by men who knew Francis personally, who can vouch for the authenticity of what they write by saying, “We who were with him” [nos qui cum eo ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Francis of Assisi: A Man of His Time
• 3. Pain and Praise: The Composition of the “Canticle”
• 4. Words and Meanings
• 5. The Form and Structure of the “Canticle”
• 6. Francis’s Mysticism and the “Canticle”
• 7. “My Sister Death”
• 8. The “Canticle” and Its Contexts
• 9. The “Knight of Christ”: Christian Chivalry in the “Canticle”
• 10. A Commentary on the “Canticle”
• 11. Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Further Reading
• Index