The World of Medieval Monasticism by Gert Melville

Author:Gert Melville
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liturgical Press
Published: 2016-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Legacy of Francis

In order to understand the normative impact of this way of life on future developments—which sometimes took on an obsessive quality, but which seemed to establish an unbreakable bond between Francis and every member of the Order—it is essential to gain deeper access to this extraordinary personality. Francis’s own words, and the interpretations they inspired, are the best means to that end.

Apart from the texts of his rules, Francis left little writing behind. Charismatic figures typically do not write; they speak and act and thus require evangelists who seek to immortalize their legacy. Francis found many such figures—from those among his own followers to the authors of what would become official biographies, whose differentiated ways of crafting legend and different ways of representation often give some access to the real, historical Francis and not just to his image. Yet Francis himself also wrote a text that revealed the mission to which he felt God had called him and the path he saw to fulfilling it. A few months before his death he looked back on his life and wrote his spiritual Testament.23 It is helpful here to fill in the bare chronological outline of his biography with the essentials of this text.

A key sentence in this work reads, “After the Lord had given me some brothers, no one showed me what I had to do. But the Most High himself revealed to me that I should live according to the pattern of the Holy Gospel.”24 So Francis explains that he found himself directly tasked by God to follow the Gospel and to live it out along with his disciples. The consequences were dramatic, since to accept that task meant in the strict sense to follow Christ in every way—in his poverty, his humility and self-denial, his suffering and repentance for the sins of humankind, his obedience to the Father, and his love for people, his preaching and homelessness.25 In a word, it meant to take on the image of Christ (Christiformis).26 Here was the core of Francis’s entire way of life, and here alone was the calling he sought to pass along—both to his followers as a model for a particular way of life and to all humankind around the world as something that could give their life direction and possibility.

Already in the lifetime of Francis and, as we will see, after his death as well, the strictness with which he upheld the imitation of Christ was not uncontested. So, according to the surviving sources, the cardinal of Saint Paul had emphasized this point when he first introduced Francis to the pope and cardinals: “I have found a most perfect man, who wishes to live according to the form of the holy Gospel and to observe evangelical perfection in all things. I believe that the Lord wants through him to reform the faith of the Holy Church throughout the world.”27 But when, in the wake of Francis’s appearance, certain reservations arose among some of the cardinals over

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