Today is the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan Order and patron saint of animals, merchants, and ecology. Born in Italy around 1181, Francis is one of the most venerated figures in the Church and continues to be admired by believers and non-believers around the world today.
In March 2013, when Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was introduced to the world for the first time as “Pope Francis,” it confirmed the fundamental importance of that humble Italian saint to our own age.
Indeed, understanding the fullness of Francis — a man left-leaning commentators champion for his “pantheist language, scruffy clothes and campaign for social justice” and to whom traditionalists look for his joyful asceticism and profound devotion to Christ — might help us resolve some of the tensions within the Church today and see the virtues of our society, as well as what we are missing.
To do so, we can look to the mutual admiration of St. Francis by two men whose supporters often find themselves on opposite sides of contemporary debates: G. K. Chesterton and Pope Francis.
Chesterton — who wrote in his biography of St. Francis that “at no stage of my pilgrimage has he ever seemed to me a stranger” — thought that there were three ways to write a sketch of St. Francis for the modern English reader.
The first:
To deal with this great and most amazing man as a figure in secular history and a model of social virtues… He may say (what is quite true) that St. Francis anticipated all that is most liberal and sympathetic in the modern mood; the love of nature; the love of animals; the sense of social compassion; the sense of the spiritual dangers of prosperity and even of property. All those things that nobody understood before Wordsworth were familiar to St. Francis. All those things that were first discovered by Tolstoy had been taken for granted by St. Francis. He could be presented, not only as a human but a humanitarian hero; indeed as the first hero of humanism . . . his ascetical theology can be ignored . . . his religion can be regarded as a superstition. . . . There would still be a great deal to be said about the man who tried to end the Crusades by talking to the Saracens or who interceded with the Emperor for the birds. . . . In short, he may try to tell the story of a saint without God.
The second:
He may go to the opposite extreme, and decide, as it were, to be defiantly devotional. He may make the theological enthusiasm as thoroughly the theme as it was the theme of the first Franciscans. He may treat religion as the real thing that it was to the real Francis of Assisi. He can find an austere joy, so to speak, in parading the paradoxes of asceticism and all the holy topsy-turvydom of humility. He can stamp the whole history with the Stigmata, record fasts like fights against a dragon. . . . In short he can produce . . . a study of St. Francis . . . unintelligible to any one who does not share his religion, perhaps only partly intelligible to any one who does not share his vocation. . . . The only difficulty about doing the thing in this way is that . . . it would really require a saint to write the life of a saint.
But both these ways, Chesterton suggests, are “impossible.”
Instead, he opts for the third way:
He may say to the modern English reader: ‘Here is an historical character which is admittedly attractive to many of us already, bits gaiety, its romantic imagination, its spiritual courtesy and camaraderie, but which also contains elements (evidently equally sincere and emphatic) which seem to you quite remote and repulsive. But after all, this man was a man and not half a dozen men. What seems inconsistency to you did not seem inconsistency to him . . . by approaching it in this way, we may at least get a glimmering of why the poet who praised his lord the sun, often hid himself in a dark cavern, of why the saint who was gentle with his Brother the Wolf [legend holds that Francis tamed a wolf that was terrorizing the Italian town of Gubbio] was so harsh to his Brother the Ass (as he nicknames his own body), of why the troubadour who said that love set his heart on fire separated himself from women.”
By taking this way, Chesterton suggests that people can avoid the failure of following “Francis with their praises until they [are] stopped by their prejudices.” Only when we set these prejudices aside can we realize:
That when [Francis] said from the first that he was a Troubadour of a newer and nobler romance, he was not using a mere metaphor, but understood himself much better than the scholars understand him. He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubadour. He was a lover of God and he was really and truly a lover of men; possibly a much rarer mystical vocation. A lover of men is very nearly the opposite of a philanthropist; indeed the pedantry of the Greek word carries something like a satire on itself. A philanthropist may be said to love anthropoids. But as St. Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ.
All the “riddles” of St. Francis, Chesterton goes on to say “would easily be resolved in the simplicity of any noble love; only this was so noble a love that nine men out of ten have hardly even heard of it.” He continues: “To this great mystic, his religion was not a thing like a theory but a thing like a love-affair.” Chesterton clearly admires this love of Francis, and here, he and the current pope concur. As Pope Francis put it in his controversial encyclical letter, Laudato Si’:
Just as happens when we fall in love with someone, whenever [Francis] would gaze at the sun, the moon or the smallest of animals, he burst into song, drawing all other creatures into his praise. He communed with all creation, even preaching to the flowers, inviting them ‘to praise the Lord, just as if they were endowed with reason.’ His response to the world around him was so much more than intellectual appreciation or economic calculus, for to him each and every creature was a sister united to him by bonds of affection. That is why he felt called to care for all that exists. . . . Such a conviction cannot be written off as naïve romanticism, for it affects the choices which determine our behaviour. If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs. By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously. The poverty and austerity of Saint Francis were no mere veneer of asceticism, but something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into an object simply to be used and controlled.
So, on this feast day, may we set our prejudices aside and be united in our admiration for St. Francis, praying for his intercession and following in his example.