Living the Gospel

Chapter 1: Roots

Hearing these words, the young man is filled with joy. ‘This is what I want,’ he cries out. ‘This is what I long for with all my heart.’ And immediately he begins to put into practice what he has heard. He takes off his shoes, lays aside his staff, keeps only one tunic, replaces his belt and purse with a length of rope. It is the latest and perhaps the most definitive turning point in the life of Francesco Bernardone. And it is one which in its immediate response to a word from God, and its desire to live the gospel literally, is very characteristic of the man who will become known as St Francis of Assisi.

In 1208 Francis was 26 years old, and this was the latest of a series of encounters with God which had gradually drawn him away from his life as the rich and spoilt son of an Assisi cloth merchant. His response to the gospel was in many ways new and fresh, reflecting the rapidly changing times in which he lived.

Francis’ early life as the son of Pietro Bernardone, a successful merchant, and his wife Pica, is in itself characteristic of the changing society of his times. He was born in the golden age of the merchants, and cloth merchants were foremost among those who were trading throughout Europe. Francis was baptized Giovanni (John) but was soon nicknamed Francesco, ‘the little Frenchman’, because of his father’s close trading links with that country.

The merchants settled in groups in places advantageous for their trade—near a port, or at a crossroads on the new network of roads which was springing up. Thus new towns and cities came into being, and old ones were revived, shifting the balance of both population and power from rural to urban areas. Initially the cities were still subject to the local feudal lord—an abbot, bishop or count—and their inhabitants still had to fulfil the obligations of the feudal system. The lord exacted taxes and tolls, gave permission to travel, settled disputes and meted out justice.

But this system was changing. In the towns, tradesmen, craftsmen, and merchants banded together into associations, or communes, which sought freedom, politically and economically, from the feudal overlords. This brought about not only the political and economic changes they sought, but also a major change in human relationships and in the way society worked. Feudal society was hierarchical, based on a vertical relationship between an inferior and a superior, which bound each person to the one over them. The new society of the urban centres was based on horizontal relationships, freely entered into, which bound each person to the group. The model relationship was that of brother, not of master and servant, overlord and vassal. Francis reflected this new ideal when he named the community he founded the Little or Lesser Brothers —in Latin the Fratres Minores.

As the feudal system broke down, the balance of power in society shifted. Francis, as a merchant’s son, was part of the newly prosperous urban class who were challenging the power of the traditional rural ruling classes, represented by the bishop and the lord of the manor. Of course inequality did not go away; in some ways it became more marked. But it was now based not on the accident of birth but on wealth in the form of land, possessions and, increasingly, money. In the cities, centres of consumption and trade, people began more and more to use coins, first of silver, and then of gold. Money increasingly replaced barter as the measure of value and the means of trade.

Politically, life was turbulent. Change did not happen without conflict and difficulty. In Assisi, as in most of the growing Italian cities, there was in-fighting between the landowners, who were the traditional feudal holders of power, and the emerging middle class. There were sporadic outbreaks of fighting with neighbouring cities. And always in the background were the tensions between the Emperor Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire and successive popes. On the world stage, Christians and Muslims fought over the Holy Land, with the Third Crusade launched in 1193, and the Fourth Crusade in 1202.

The Church too was in a period of change. The turning of the first millennium in 1000 had sparked off a process of reform, fuelled by a desire to return to the sources of the faith. First worked out in the Gregorian reform of the reign of Pope Gregory VII (1073–85), this continued with the four Lateran Councils of 1123, 1139, 1179 and 1215—the first general councils of the Church for some centuries. Their reforms were wide-ranging. They sought to free the Church from the domination of lay feudal power, so that bishops and abbots were elected by the Church and not by the feudal overlords. Clerical celibacy was imposed at the beginning of the 11th century. Peace-making initiatives were another expression of the zeal for reform.

The Fourth Lateran Council, convened in 1215 by Pope Innocent III, had a particular influence on Francis, coming as it did in the early days of his community. It gathered together in Rome 412 bishops and more than 800 abbots, priors and other heads of religious orders. Their chief concern was to respond to the growing power of Islam, especially in the Holy Land, and to the spread of heresy. They agreed 70 decrees covering most areas of church life—the life of the clergy, the sacraments, religious life and the work of mission.

The influence of these decrees can be seen in a number of the writings of Francis, as can the Pope’s call to priests and religious to adopt the tau (a T-shaped cross), as their logo. Tau, the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, is also the Hebrew word for ‘mark’. From Ezekiel’s vision (9:4), in which he is ordered to ‘put a mark’ on the forehead of the redeemed, it became a symbol of salvation, and is used as such by John in Revelation 7:3–4 and 22:4. Francis signed all his letters with it, and it has become the characteristically Franciscan form of the cross.

Part of the change in the Church was the establishment of new or reformed religious orders. The Carthusians and the Cistercians sought a return to the simplicity of the original Benedictine rule and a better balance between manual work and prayer. The canonical movement—groups of priests living in community, particularly those following an Augustinian rule—also moved to a new balance between active and contemplative life. Increasingly they chose to live in the growing towns, and combined community life with parish work. In all these new or reformed male orders, the lay brothers, those not ordained to the priesthood, played an increasing role. And outside the orders, old or new, more and more lay people sought a life in community, but not confined by traditional models of religious life or bound by the existing Rules.

One of the main manifestations of this desire among women centred on the Low Countries. Groups of women came together spontaneously to live lives of poverty, chastity and service to others, but without taking formal vows. They became known as Beguines. They lived modestly, in their own homes or in groups, valuing manual work and serving the poor, often in schools or hospitals which they founded and ran. They also preached and wrote, and this brought them into conflict with the Church.

The Church was nervous of these developments, and dealt badly with several groups, treating them as heretical when in fact they were not. One group which suffered in this way was the Waldensians.

The Waldensians were poor people of the French city of Lyons who, around 1170, in response to the preaching of a merchant, Peter Waldo, began to devote their lives to prayer and good works, reading the Bible, preaching and begging. They spread rapidly; trade and urbanization allowed not only money and goods but also ideas to circulate widely. Preaching played an important part in this spread of ideas. But in the medieval Church, permission to preach was given by the bishops, the successors of the apostles—and only to priests. No lay man, nor any woman, could claim this right. In 1184 Pope Lucius III excommunicated not only the Cathars, a genuinely heretical group, but also the Waldensians.

The turning points in Francis’ life happened in this context. His early years, as the favourite son of Pietro and Pica Bernardone, were spent in relative luxury. He was popular, a leader among the young men of Assisi, charming, witty and generous. Although the only pictures we have of him were painted after his death, we do have a verbal portrait, written by his first biographer, Thomas of Celano. Thomas joined the Franciscan Order while Francis was still alive, so it is reasonable to assume that he writes here from personal knowledge. Francis, he says, was quite short, with black eyes, hair and beard; he had a long face, with a straight nose and small, upright ears. His arms were short, but his hands and fingers slender and long. His voice was ‘strong, sweet, clear, and sonorous’.

The first setback in his life came at the age of 20, when, full of the romantic ideals of knighthood and chivalry, he rode off to battle against the neighbouring city of Perugia. Perugia won this battle, and Francis, along with many others from Assisi, was taken prisoner. A year’s imprisonment (ending when illness enabled his father to ransom him), and then a year’s convalescence, left Francis disconsolate and unsettled. For a time he worked in his father’s business again. But it was out of this time of difficulty and disappointment that he began to get an inkling of what God wanted
of him.

The first voice came in a dream. Francis, making another attempt to be a knight, was in Spoleto (a town about 35 km south of Assisi). In his dream he saw a castle, with a large room covered in shields, all of them belonging to Francis and his followers. His first understanding of the dream was mistaken—and he eagerly embraced what he saw as a prophecy of successful knighthood leading to glory. Then a voice asked him, ‘Francis, is it better to serve the Lord or the servant?’
‘The Lord, of course.’
‘Then why are you trying to turn your Lord into a servant?’

Francis recognized God’s voice and, like the boy Samuel in the temple, responded, ‘Lord, what do you want me to do?’

And the voice asked a hard thing. ‘Return to Assisi. There you will be shown what to do and come to understand this vision.’

So Francis returned to Assisi, an humiliating turnaround. To his friends he would seem a knight who had fled the battlefield, the ultimate shame in chivalry. Francis spent the whole of the next year praying in a cave outside Assisi, living as a hermit, trying to come to terms with what God might be asking of him. It was not an easy or instant conversion, and he was not immediately given a blueprint for his whole future. God unfolded his plan for Francis one piece at a time.

The next encounter is the one which Francis himself always identified as the beginning of his conversion. On a road on the plain below Assisi, he saw in the distance a leper. He had always had a great fear of sufferers from this contagious disease and gone out of his way to avoid them. Celano tells us that Francis would only look at their houses from a safe distance of two miles, holding his nose with his hands. But now he was given the courage not only to remain on the road, not only to give the leper alms, but to embrace him. In some tellings of the story, the leper then vanished. Was he in fact Christ, coming to Francis in the form of the most needy and most despised? Whatever actually happened, it was a crucial turning point for Francis—his first moment of reaching out, of finding God in the poor, and somehow being enabled to overcome his fears. For a time he went to live with the lepers, serving them and bringing the good news of the gospel to them.

During this period he continued to spend much time in prayer, often in remote and semi-derelict churches. One of these was the small church of San Damiano, not far outside Assisi. While praying there one day in 1206, he seemed to hear the figure on the crucifix over the altar speak to him. ‘Francis,’ it said, ‘go and rebuild my Church, which as you see is falling down.’ It was the next piece of the jigsaw, and Francis as ever responded immediately and enthusiastically. He began to collect stones and to rebuild San Damiano. When he ran out of money, he took some cloth from his father’s shop, sold it, and offered the money to the priest at San Damiano, who prudently refused to accept it.

It was the final straw for his father. He dragged Francis to the bishop’s palace, and there, in front of the bishop and a crowd of curious onlookers, demanded that he renounce all his rights as his son, and return everything he had been given by his father. In a moment of dramatic symbolism, Francis stripped off his clothes and laid them at the feet of the bishop. ‘From now on,’ he said, ‘I will not call Pietro Bernardone my father, but only God, my Father in heaven.’ It was the final renunciation of his old life, and a rift with his father which seems never to have been repaired. The bishop, the representative of the Church, covered Francis with his cloak, and perhaps in this we can see the change of allegiance acted out. There was now no turning back for Francis.

In order to continue his work of rebuilding churches, he took to begging on the streets of Assisi. Many of the people thought he was mad and threw stones at him. Wandering through the woods one day, he was attacked by robbers and beaten up. For a time he worked as a kitchen hand at a nearby monastery, but was so badly treated that he was forced to leave. But despite these difficulties he continued to follow God’s call. When San Damiano had been repaired, he moved on to rebuild other churches, and it was while working on Santa Maria degli Angeli that he went to Mass on St Matthias Day and heard the Gospel reading which shaped the rest of his life.

In obedience to the message he had heard, ‘Proclaim the good news’ (Matthew 10:7), Francis now began to preach. Many mocked him, but some were intrigued and challenged by what he said. Within a year, first in ones and twos, then very rapidly in larger numbers, men came to join him. He had not begun with any intention of founding a community, but very soon found that he had one anyway. He saw this always as God’s work. In his ‘Testament’, written near the end of his life, he wrote, ‘After the Lord gave me brothers…’.

While the first men were joining Francis in what would become a community of brothers, a woman was also listening to him preach and hearing through his words God’s call to her. Chiara (Clare) Favarone, who in 1210 was 16 years old, twelve years younger than Francis, belonged to the other power group in the city—the nobility. Her family spent much time in exile from Assisi during Clare’s childhood, including two years in Perugia, while Francis was fighting on the other side of this particular conflict. Clare’s father Lord Favarone was a powerful noble, and her mother Ortolana a pious woman who loved to go on pilgrimages. The year before Clare’s birth, she had travelled as far as the Holy Land. The family lived in a grand house on the piazza near the cathedral of San Rufino, in the heart of Assisi.

Clare, the third of five children and the eldest daughter of the family, seems to have been marked out for holiness from an early age, unlike Francis. When Ortolana was pregnant with Clare, she was praying one day before the cross, asking God to help her in the dangers of childbirth. Then she heard a voice reassuring her and telling her that she would give birth to a light which would wonderfully light up the world. When her daughter was born, she named her Chiara, which means ‘light’.

Clare was a serious child, and from an early age cared for the poor and needy. She put aside the food she was given and sent it to the poor. She refused many offers of marriage to prestigious and wealthy men. Increasingly she was captivated by the preaching of the cloth merchant’s son. Despite the difficulties for a young unmarried woman of meeting any man outside her own household, she managed to meet and talk with Francis secretly, accompanied only by a friend, Bona. Francis’ vision kindled her own, and she determined to join him.

On Palm Sunday 1212, she went to the cathedral and, in what seems to have been a pre-arranged signal, did not go up with the rest of the congregation to receive her blessed palm. Instead the bishop came to her where she sat and gave her the palm. That night she left her parents’ house secretly to join Francis. It was a brave and extraordinary thing to do, putting her beyond the pale of her class and bringing shame on her family. In some stories this is emphasized by the detail that she left by a door which was normally only opened when someone died. On the natural level, this demonstrates her determination, in opening the blocked-up door. But it contains also the symbolism of dying to her former life. And this symbolism is strengthened by her leaving at the beginning of Holy Week, as the Church turned its attention to Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection.

After leaving the house, Clare was met by Francis and a few brothers. In the small chapel of the Portiuncula at St Mary of the Angels, where the brothers had a house, she exchanged her beautiful dress for a simple habit, laid aside her jewellery, and Francis himself cut her hair. She had already sold her dowry, and part of that of her sister Beatrice, and given the proceeds to the poor. Kneeling before Francis, she made a vow of obedience to him. The brothers then took her to a house of Benedictine nuns, San Paolo delle Abbadesse, one of the richest monasteries in the area.

Here Clare stayed for a few weeks, carrying out menial domestic tasks. Her family, aghast at the scandalous thing she had done, sent armed men, led by her uncle Monaldo, the head of the family, to bring her home. For several days they tried to persuade, threaten or force her to come home. Finally, when her parents tried to drag her out, Clare seized the altar cloth and uncovered her head, showing her shorn hair. This was a sign that her choice was irrevocable, and her uncle and his men returned home empty-handed.

But worse was to follow. Sixteen days after Clare left home, her younger sister, Catherine, followed her. Clare had by now moved from San Paolo to the community of women living at Sant’ Angelo in Panzo, on the slopes of Mount Subasio. Again the men came to fetch home a wayward daughter. This time they managed to lay hold of Catherine and were in fact carrying her off, when Clare prayed, and Catherine became so heavy that they could not lift her. Once again, they retired defeated.

Catherine too was received by Francis, who cut her hair and gave her the name of Agnes. The fledgling community now needed a home of its own. Francis had prophesied when rebuilding San Damiano that one day it would be the home of a community of sisters, and now he took Clare and Agnes there and established them in the first monastery of Poor Clares, so named because of their emphasis on poverty.

As men had come to join Francis, so women came to join Clare, including eventually her own mother, her youngest sister Beatrice, two of her nieces, other members of her family, and women from some of the noblest families in Assisi.

So while Francis and his brothers tramped first the roads of Italy, then other parts of Europe and, before Francis’ death, also North Africa, where the first Franciscan martyrs died in Morocco, Clare and her sisters stayed in their convent in Assisi and prayed. But their hiddenness made them no less central to the Franciscan vision.

Although they saw little of each other, there was a strong relationship between Francis and Clare, and at several turning points of his life, when he was unsure of his next steps, he asked her advice. In sickness he returned to San Damiano and was cared for by Clare and the sisters. After Francis’ death in 1226, Clare lived on for another 27 years, and she was the most tenacious of all his followers in preserving Francis’ vision, and especially his commitment to poverty, from all that threatened it.

Clare’s community, too, grew beyond the confines of Assisi and of Italy. By the time of her death in 1253, there were more than 150 communities which followed her way of life. The majority were in Italy, southern France and Spain, but they were also found as far east as Prague, and as far west as Bruges.

Both Francis and Clare sought the recognition of the Church for their new communities, and both wrote Rules as part of this process, which are one of our primary sources for their vision. Given the similarity in many respects of their way of life to that of the Waldensians, recently excommunicated as heretics, it was a wise precaution.

Francis first wrote a Rule in 1209, in the early days of his brotherhood. It has not survived, but is thought to have been very short and simple, less a legislative document than a vision of the gospel life. Francis himself travelled to Rome with his first brothers to present this Rule to the Pope, Innocent III, and to seek the approval of the Church.

The Pope listened carefully to Francis as he explained the way of life of the brothers, and asked him to return the next day for his decision. That night Innocent III had a vivid dream. He saw the church of St John Lateran, then the mother church of all Christendom, beginning to lean and then to topple to the ground. Just as it was about to crash down, a small beggar rushed out of the shadows and supported the church on his shoulder. Waking, the Pope recognized the beggar as Francis. The next day he embraced Francis warmly and gave his approval to the new community. It was a further fulfilment of Francis’ own vision at San Damiano, another sign that he was indeed called to do great things for God.

A later Rule written by Francis (rather confusingly known as the Early Rule) has survived, though it was never approved by the Church. Approval was given to a final Rule, the Later Rule, in 1223.

Clare had rather more trouble in obtaining the authority of the Church for the Rule she wrote. She fell foul of a decree of the Fourth Lateran Council which had forbidden any new Rules for religious communities, and had to make do for some time with a basically Benedictine Rule, which did not provide for the intense poverty to which she was committed. She was the first woman to write a Rule for her own community, and her strength of character is demonstrated in her perseverance in seeking its approval. In fact it was only finally authorized by the Pope two days before Clare’s death in 1253.

While the Rules and other writings by Francis and Clare are important sources for their spirituality, the stories about them are equally valuable. Neither of them wrote much—in the collected writings, just over 200 pages contains all that is known, and this includes introductions and commentary. But each, writings and stories, can shed light on the other. In the writings we have their own voices; in the stories, the voices of those who knew them, recollections of their actions, and reflections on their lives by those who followed them.

Sometimes the writings have obviously been influenced by the need to be accepted by some official body—the Rules in particular were written in order to be authorized by the Church, and compromises may have been necessary to achieve this end. The stories, on the other hand, especially those which have come down from contemporaries, give us eye-witness accounts from those who walked the roads of Italy with Francis, heard him preach and saw him at prayer, and from those who lived with Clare at San Damiano, some of them for many years. They shed a different light, which contributes to a more rounded picture.

Of course the stories have also been influenced by their context, especially by the fact that both Francis and Clare were canonized (recognized as saints) very shortly after their deaths. The stories were inevitably increasingly influenced by official expectations of what saints were like, and by the desire of their followers to present their founders in the best possible light.

The important role of context in interpretation is not strange to readers of the Bible. The biblical narrative is always rooted in particular times and places. Unlike many of the other faiths of the ancient world which sought to transcend history—seeing time as a spiral or circle, and this world as a place from which to escape into a timeless realm—for Jews and Christians, history is sacred, and this world is the place of God’s encounters with his people. God chooses a particular people, the Jews, in one small part of the ancient world, and the Bible is in its essence the story of his engagement with them, of their response or lack of it, their faithfulness or faithlessness.

Francis and Clare had a passionate response to the world around them, finding God at work in their time and place, but we do not need to be 13th-century Italians to learn from them or to find in them a way to draw nearer to God in our time and place. In prayer and meditation on the Bible, we can perhaps see ourselves in Adam and Eve in the garden, in Moses’ encounter with God in the burning bush, in the crowd listening to Jesus on the Mount, in those seeking healing from him, in the disciples meeting the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus. So as we come to know Francis and Clare, we can find ourselves listening to Francis preaching, walking the roads of Italy with the early brothers, or at prayer with Clare in San Damiano.

The different ways in which we know about Francis and Clare are echoed in the many different ways in which the Bible tells us of God. In poetry, in history, in laws, we catch different glimpses of God at work with his chosen people. But stories are at the heart of the book. Ask most people what they know of the Bible and it will be stories—Adam and Eve walking in the garden with God, David and Goliath, the children of Israel crossing the Red Sea, Noah and the ark, the stories of Jesus’ life, his birth, his passion, his resurrection appearances, and the stories he told—of the good Samaritan, the prodigal son, the sower going out to sow, the merchant finding the pearl of great price. In both the Bible and in the lives of Francis and Clare, it is the stories which bring the vision to life.