The Legends of Saint Francis

Francis of Assisi: a man and a saint from the Middle Ages yet for some almost a contemporary. This development has been impressively illustrated by Patricia Appelbaum in her book St. Francis of America. Ever since Protestants discovered Francis in the second half of the nineteenth century in search of their pre-modern roots, he has served as a form of identification for generations of Christians from different denominations, and their enthusiasm has taken many different forms. In 1938, the magazine House & Garden featured an advertisement for a garden statue of the saint. A generation later, he became the “hippie saint” and patron of the 1967 “Summer of Love” in San Francisco, the city that bears his name. At the same time, another reason for his immense popularity arose: His view of nature gave solace and encouragement to those who feared ecological catastrophe. Pope Francis shared a similar outlook in his 2015 encyclical Laudato si’, in which the head of the Roman Catholic Church refers to his namesake when addressing his concerns about climate catastrophe.

Indeed, the title of this encyclical quotes a poem by the saint: “The Canticle of Brother Sun.” In this song and in many stories about him, we appreciate his close connection with nature. It is said that he spoke to the birds, and legend has it that in Gubbio he even tamed a wolf. He praised the sun, the moon, and the stars. He might be the saint for our time, but he is not of our time. He knew nothing about the climate catastrophe and the modern world that brought it about. And in fact, we don’t know all that much about him anyway. We rely mainly on the late collection of legends called the Fioretti (Little Flowers of St. Francis), in which we find, for example, the story of the wolf. For a long time it was thought that the Life of St. Francis by the Franciscan minister general Bonaventure was a kind of biography, and it has certainly shaped the way memory of him is preserved in both its long and short versions (Legenda maior and minor). It was also the basis of the famous frescoes that Giotto painted on the walls of the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi. The impression they make even today is overwhelming, combining as they do the aura of both the humanity and the holiness of Francis. But modern scholars have found it increasingly difficult to trust Bonaventure’s account since the Protestant historian Paul Sabatier raised in his Life of St. Francis of Assisi the explosive “Franciscan question,” a highly complex technical debate about the reliability of the early sources, which no biographer of Francis can ignore. It arises from the insight that the early biographies have always pursued a specific agenda. When Bonaventure led the Franciscan Order in a delicate period of its life, it is evident how he built on others’ works, as well as attempting to paint the image of the founder in such a way that his priorities could encompass the divergent Franciscan branches. His biography obviously did not serve primarily as a historical narrative about the life of Francis of Assisi, but instead served the needs of Bonaventure in his own social and political context.

But it is not only Bonaventure’s biography that we should approach with caution. Even before its composition, the Franciscan question had begun with the death of the saint, which marked the beginning of widespread devotion to him. Shortly after Francis’s death, Pope Gregory IX commissioned a biography of Francis by Thomas of Celano. This project would serve Gregory’s own fame, since he himself appeared as an incidental figure in the story. Before being elected pope, when he was still Cardinal Ugolino of Ostia, he had been the protector of the new order and had supported Francis of Assisi over an even longer period. Therefore it will come as no surprise that the splendor of Francis’s biography would also irradiate the glory of the one who had commissioned it. The author himself was not exactly someone from whom distance should be expected either, for it was assumed that medieval biographers would recount a life for readers to emulate. Celano was already a follower of Francis of Assisi during his lifetime and had been a superintendent of the Franciscan communities in the Rhineland since 1223. His work served to justify and propagate the veneration of the order’s founder, who was quickly canonized just two years after his death on October 3, 1226, and its composition was certainly intended to smooth out the process of leadership succession in the order. All this makes the oldest Life of Francis at least as much a document reflecting its author’s immediate needs as a testimony to the life it is intended to portray, expressing the tension so characteristic of the Franciscan question.

It is evident that the authors of the early sources depicting the life of Francis of Assisi had different intentions from those pursued by contemporary historians, for they were not seeking to compose a biography in the modern sense of the word; their goal was to present the legend of a saint. Medieval hagiography is not modern scholarship. This might make it more difficult to use the biographies for historical reconstructions, but research suggests that it is not impossible. Through the individual prayers and writings that Francis composed, we have a reasonably secure basis for understanding his spiritual concerns, but when biographers today refer to the less secure texts of the early Lives, they have to weigh carefully the evidence. How closely Celano’s text and the veneration of Francis were linked is shown by the fact that soon after his Life was written, he went on to write a work that has the word “legend” in its title: An Umbrian Choir Legend, though the English word “chancel,” referring to that architectural space of the church building where the clergy sit, might be a better translation than “choir,” which suggests a group of singers. Of course, legenda in Latin does not represent a statement about (doubtful) reliability as it might in today’s usage but means quite literally that the text was intended to be read; this short work was divided into nine readings. It was intended to respond to the new mandate from Benedict of Arezzo, head of the Franciscan province of Romania and Greece, that every brother should have the opportunity to read the abridged version of Francis’s life in his own breviary.

In this way, the brothers were regularly able to hold before their eyes the life of the founder of the order, which Celano summarized for this purpose using his previously written Life as his guide. Of course, such texts were used not only for individual purposes but also for the common liturgy. We have an impression of this from the chronicle of Thomas of Eccleston about the beginnings of the Franciscans in England. For the year 1235 he reports, “Brother Augustine . . . related publicly in the convent at London that he had been in Assisi for the feast of St Francis and that Pope Gregory was there; when the pope went up to preach, the brothers chanted: ‘This one the saint chose as his father, when he ruled over a lesser church,’ and the pope smiled.” Indeed, he did have a reason to smile, because the person elected as Pope Gregory had been Francis’s spiritual father, the former Cardinal Ugolino. The song the brothers sang came from the Office of St. Francis, which the former French court music director Julian of Speyer had composed in the early 1230s. Now he served the Friars Minor instead of the king of France, and not just as a musician. Around the same time as he wrote the Office, he also wrote a biography of the founder of the order, largely using Celano’s work as his template.

Celano continued to be active as a writer himself. Thanks to the research of Jacques Dalarun, we discovered just a few years back that Celano wrote another, even shorter version of his Life, and though the find itself is significant, Celano’s so-called Second Life from the early 1240s is even more important. At the General Chapter of the Franciscans on October 4, 1244, the general of the order, Crescentius of Jesi, who served in that role from 1244 to 1247, called for the collection of “signs and wonders of our blessed Father Francis,” whereupon Celano received a new commission from the general, asking that it be “set down in writing for the consolation of those living and for a remembrance for those to come.” Again, for today’s historiography, the question remains of how to deal with the resulting text. Crescentius’s call to collect memories may at first glance raise the hope that the Second Life will contain new insights, and that is of course possible. But almost twenty years after the death of the saint, the narrative traditions were likely to have changed and grown. Perhaps memories had faded, but more likely just the opposite had happened, and they had become brighter. It had become increasingly obvious in the meantime that the memories concerned not just a young fellow citizen but now a revered and venerable saint. In addition, Crescentius’s appeal clearly had the aim of calming the turmoil in which the order was embroiled, given the dispute about Francis’s legacy and the growing expectation of an imminent apocalyptic event. Celano’s commemorative commission served not to clarify the past but to provide orientation in the present. In extended sections of the work, his Second Life reads almost like a commentary on the validity of the Franciscan rule and how it was to be implemented. The consolation of contemporaries focused on the concrete impact it could have on the internal peace of the order. In short, one does not have to approach this Life overly critically, but one does have to use it cautiously. The “veil of remembrance” is likely to have settled over some things here too, and the very real political intentions of the order would have colored the way other events were presented.

Unfortunately, this disclaimer also applies to another work connected with Crescentius’s appeal. This, strictly speaking, consists of two documents that have been handed down together. The first is a letter from three of the founder’s companions, Leo, Rufino, and Angelo, in which they announce that, following Crescentius’s lead, they want to collect stories of miracles and signs of Francis’s holy life, not in the sense of a detailed legend but like “a few flowers from a lovely meadow.” This letter has been handed down in the manuscripts together with a second text, which offers a comprehensive biography. If the two belong together—and the tradition clearly speaks for it—then in some respects this would be the most authentic report about Francis, written by people who were close to him from the beginning. But even this is not so simple. Leonhard Lehmann, himself a Capuchin member of the Franciscan tradition and an outstanding expert on the problems of the sources, aptly summarized the difficulties of the Legend of the Three Companions: “Whether it is complete or ‘mangled’ . . . ; whether or not it belongs to the letter signed by the Three Companions, Leo, Rufino, and Angelo, written in Greccio on August 11, 1246; whether the three mentioned are really the authors or not; whether the work was completed by August 11, 1246, or was supplemented later; whether it was only written in the 1360s or even at the beginning of the fourteenth century.”

Given current contentious debates among researchers in the field, one cannot avoid using the Legend of the Three Companions with the same caution as all the other sources, even if one traces it back to Leo and Francis’s two other friends. It has great merit nonetheless. The fact that it contains information beyond Celano’s account is undisputed, but it is still the case that it was written twenty years after the death of Francis. Even friends can suffer from failures of memory or embellish things too much. Indeed, friends in particular may tend to emphasize the strengths of their former companion more than a sober observer would in a biographical description. In short, the Franciscan question remains open, and every biographer must deal with it anew.

This also applies to another exciting source, which may have been composed before 1241, within Gregory IX’s lifetime: the records of the so-called Anonymus Perusinus, who can probably be identified as John of Perugia and who seems to have collected stories about Francis. This long-lost and little-noticed text belongs to a series of early testimonies that lead us close to the phase of personal recollections of Francis himself. Perhaps, as Lehmann suspects, it even served as a model for the Legend of the Three Companions, or at least as a helpful resource. If so, however, it also sheds light on what counts as memory: If the Three Companions themselves (assuming they were the authors of the legend that bears their name) used a template, they didn’t rely on their memory alone. The report by John of Perugia does not lead us out of the thicket but rather deeper into it.

In brief, much has been written about the life of Francis, and yet not much can be assumed as certain. The little that can be recounted we might summarize in this way: The son of a merchant, born around 1181 or 1182, he turned to those who were sick and abandoned in his hometown of Assisi, and thus set himself apart from the merchant class from which he came. He revolted more and more against his parents’ wealth, urging them to live in apostolic imitation of Christ instead. Already during his lifetime, but even more so after his death, he became a symbol of poverty, and was nicknamed the poverello. And yet, unlike many who had walked the apostolic path before him, he was able to remain at peace with the Church. Although he did not want to join any traditional religious order, he founded a brotherhood and managed to have it recognized in 1209 by Pope Innocent III, one of the most powerful popes of the Middle Ages. His community flourished, gradually found its legal basis as a mendicant order, and spread throughout Europe. Many of the younger generation seem to have joined this movement, perhaps representing the counterculture of the age, just as hippies of the twentieth century again demonstrated great affection for Francis. In any case, he seems to have given expression to the mood of his time. His journey to Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil in 1219–1220 shows how wide his own imagination could venture, though we don’t know a great deal about the encounter—we should be satisfied that it took place at all. In the period following his journey, Francis became increasingly burdened by the success of his movement. In 1220, he resigned from the leadership of the order and seems to have withdrawn more and more into solitude. Emaciated and plagued by illness, he died in 1226.

Of course, there are some episodes in Francis’s life about which we do know more, propelling further detailed discussion, especially the question of whether he experienced the miracle of stigmatization in 1224. But perhaps more important still is what we can learn about his inner biography, his spirituality, and ultimately the life of his soul, which is more reliably substantiated by the sources. After all, in some writings—not least the aforementioned “Canticle of Brother Sun”—his own hand has been preserved. They provide important clues for reconstructing his journey of faith. We also have an extremely important text from his own hand relating his autobiography, which he deliberately composed as part of his legacy. Shortly before his death in 1226 he wrote his so-called Testament, a text that combines—albeit very briefly—a review of his life and an interpretation of the present state of his order along with admonitions to the brothers. The autobiographical parts in it are pointed and demonstrate a clear set of priorities. Francis names a few episodes and shortens them, making clear that what is true generally about people’s memories can also apply to autobiographical fragments. The way we remember our own life and the way we want our own life to be remembered shift. In concrete terms, this means that Francis did not write the Testament merely to assemble memories but to present his own life as a model for his contemporary community of brothers. Such intent can stain memories. The Testament is undoubtedly the most important testimony to Francis’s story, but due to its succinctness and its purpose, it unfortunately does not offer the decisive solution to the problems of a biography of Francis of Assisi.

Whoever honors Francis in their writing must be aware that knowledge can only be fragmentary. And yet we cannot avoid using the fragments and putting them together. From the many fragments there emerges a story that, like all stories about Francis’s life, remains a gamble, and that has its surest basis where the preserved original texts by his hand contain something about Francis himself and the depths of his soul, always looking and searching for God. If you look at the intense faith in Christ and love of the Bible that can be seen through it, he might have approved a confession of the fragmentary nature of life on this earth in the words of the apostle Paul: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.”

This essay is adapted from Francis of Assisi: The Life of a Restless Saint (Yale University Press, January 2025, translated by Rhys S. Bezzant and reproduced by permission).