The course of Francis’s life hereafter must be understood in the context of his radical devotion to the poverty of Christ and to his sufferings on the cross: for Francis, the poor and the sick were (in the wording of The Assisi Compilation 114) “a mirror for us in which we should see and consider lovingly the poverty and weakness of our Lord Jesus Christ which he endured in His body for the salvation of the human race.” Possessions were a barrier between man and God. This indeed was the mission that Francis gave the Franciscan order in his First Rule (9): to abandon all worldly goods, abase the self, and serve the poor, trusting in the charity of others to provide for one’s daily needs.
“Alms are an inheritance and a right which is due to the poor because our Lord Jesus Christ acquired this inheritance for us.” He viewed even the unjust poor—for instance, robbers—as worthy of Christ’s mercy, and in emulating Christ, his companions were admonished to give everything they had to alleviate the distress of others. Hence it is that, even today, a postulant to the Franciscan Order is required to give away all of his or her worldly possessions before entering orders; Francis kept only breeches, robe, and cincture, gave everything else he had to give to the poor, and begged for his daily sustenance, when he embraced his religious life.
Poverty as a form of religious discipline was a problem for the church then, and it is difficult to overstate how critical an issue it would become for the Franciscan Orders. Both the religious and laypeople could and did criticize the church for its wealth and possessions, while the church hierarchy preferred that even monastic foundations have common possessions in the form of endowments for their maintenance, rather than depending on alms. The church vigorously suppressed groups that practiced extreme asceticism, like the Cath-ars and Waldensians, which it considered heretical, and which criticized it in turn for its materiality. On the other hand, how could the church restrain a genuine desire to live as Christ did himself? The genius of the movement that Francis originated lay in its adaptation of radical poverty to the rules and approval of the church. These early Franciscans were ardent supporters of the papacy and were granted the so-called privilege of poverty in return.
Poverty, however, would be more problematic for the women who followed Saint Francis under the future leadership of his beloved friend and protege, Clare di Favarone. Clare, born in Assisi in 1193 or 1194, was a nobleman’s daughter who ran away from her family and the comforts of her home before she was 20, to follow Saint Francis and establish a women’s foundation on his model; this became the Second Order of Franciscans, and later the Poor Clares. Clare idolized Francis, and she seems to have shared the gifts of sincere fervor and charisma that made Francis so magnetic a leader, besides showing remarkable maturity and skills of leadership. Before long, she attracted almost as many followers as Francis himself. The church did not permit women religious to beg for alms, however, and Clare and her followers were not initially allowed to adopt absolute poverty formally, despite their desire to; friars provided for them instead. Finally, the privilege of poverty was granted to her foundation as well, though there is debate about when this happened. Clare died in 1253; soon afterward, in 1255, the church canonized her. Her body is interred in the church dedicated to her, Santa Chiara of Assisi, not far distant from the Basilica di San Francesco.
Francis also adopted active bodily mortifications for himself, although he forbade the most extreme for his followers. He neglected his own health: “the love that filled his soul since his conversion to Christ was so ardent that, despite the prayers of his brothers and of many other men moved by compassion and pity, he did not trouble himself about taking care of his sicknesses” (Legend of the Three Companions 37). Francis’s mortifications of the flesh and
Fasting undoubtedly diminished the span of his life: “when he was exhumed in 1978 his skeleton bore the signs of osteoporosis and advanced if not fatal malnutrition.”8
Francis’s deep and direct experience of Christ’s sufferings reflects his profound mysticism. Mysticism, as a religious practice, involves a direct union of the soul with the Divine, which often occurs while the subject is in a trancelike state. Such a trancelike state might be induced by meditation and repetitive prayer, much the way transcendental meditation might be practiced today; it might also be produced by fasting and physical mortification, in some cases. Francis, of course, engaged in all of these activities, and whatever the cause, experienced many visions and dreams that influenced his own behavior and that of others. Thus Francis’s greatness (or perhaps wisdom) as a theologian, as a preacher, and as a teacher stemmed not from formal education or from a great intellect as we would define it today, but from genuine goodness and, as a mystic, a direct experience of God. But much of the aforesaid was still in the future for Francis and Clare, after Francis had founded an order, after he had met Clare, and after she had followed him.
World History
