Our 29th entry in project #EuropeanBios is a short, sweet biography of Saint Francis of Assisi, an unassuming, modest but extremely charismatic man whose determination to be of service to others meant he kept ending up in charge, a paradox that tortured him.
As with several of my subjects I went in knowing absolutely zilch about Francis, so let's cover the basics: Francis founded the Franciscans, a set of three related orders of monks and nuns of the Catholic church. Assisi is the town where he was born and lived most of his life.
I look for connections between my bio subjects. Born in Italy in 1181, 20 years after Genghis Khan and in the middle of the crusades, Francis had no contact with the mongols and his closest connection to the crusaders is meeting Saladin's nephew one time. https://twitter.com/seldo/status/1281072053534113793
Growing up his family was rich, his father a successful silk merchant and his mother a noblewoman. He was a flamboyant and soft-hearted youth, known for regular partying and being extremely generous with money, both to his friends and to beggars down on their luck.
This seems to have changed after Francis fought in a local battle of Assisi against the neighboring town of Perugia. Assisi lost and Francis was captured, and thereafter exhibited many symptoms consistent with somebody with PTSD including depression and flashbacks to violence.
After being ransomed back to his parents, his heart was no longer in partying and he exhibited many symptoms of PTSD and untreated mental illness in general. He abandoned his budding career in his father's business and seems to have turned to religion for solace.
He became interested in renouncing worldly possessions and living in what he considered to be a holy state of poverty, a "penitent". Against his parents' wishes he renounced his inheritance and lived off charity while helping lepers and performing manual labor for the church.
Apparently when he spoke about his choices he was very persuasive, because a pair of other local men, Bernard and Peter, arrived to join him in this lifestyle. This was the first of what was going to be a pattern: he had acquired followers, but what to do with them?
Francis' whole deal was that he wanted to be of service to others and renounce all authority, to be below all others, without possessions or luxuries. But these guys wanted his advice on how to live their lives, which placed him above them. He didn't want this at all.
So he did what he would do many more times: he punted to a higher authority. This came in the form of asking a local priest to open the bible at random three times and read passages, and these three randomly selected sentences would provide guidance on what they should do.
This random-bible-reading, called a Sortes Biblicae, was not really Christian in nature and dated from at least Roman times, when the city of Rome would randomly open the Sibylline books, a collection of random Greek prophecies, to help guide the city in times of crisis.
The three randomly selected passages were about following the word of god very closely and also, conveniently, about giving up your worldly possessions, which Francis wanted to do anyway. On this extremely arbitrary basis was his religious order founded and lasts to today.
But initially it was very far from being any kind of order, in fact it was notably disorderly. Francis allowed anyone to show up and join as long as he didn't have to tell them what to do, so his followers sort of self-organized and roughly followed his example, helping others.
The order was a lot less strict than other orders, which probably helped its popularity. They didn't have any training requirements or apprenticeship, and you could eat meat whenever you wanted. They didn't even start referring to themselves as an order until much later.
To Francis' great surprise and increasing exasperation this turned out to be very popular, and more followers showed up and people started donating plots of land and buildings to the order. This required an increasing amount of administration and management, which Francis hated.
It's hard to understate the degree to which Francis was self-defeating here. All he wanted to do was chill, enjoy nature, watch birds, help the sick, maybe help repair a church building or two. But his example was so inspirational he found himself in charge of hundreds of people.
Francis was VERY into nature. He loved wandering the forests, watching animals, especially birds. He once spent a week listening to a cricket (he declared it was the same cricket each time) for hours every morning. All of this was god's nature revealed to him.
Francis' fascination with and joy in nature is very reminiscent of another religious figure I've covered, Hildegard of Bingen, though there's no evidence they knew about each other. Turns out hippies have been hippies forever. https://twitter.com/seldo/status/1277328781435301888
Francis repeatedly attempted to delegate all authority to people better at administration than he was. This would usually work for a little while, but people good at administration naturally tend to create power structures around themselves to help them do it, and he hated those.
So it was a repeated paradox of his life that even though he kept giving up all authority he would occasionally have to wield supreme authority to tell whoever he'd put in charge to reform some aspect of the order that was too hierarchical or materialistic for his taste.
The order accumulated authority, getting official approval (again much to Francis' surprise) from the Pope. Things continued with one person officially in charge and Francis officially powerless, but everyone knowing that if Francis said to change something everyone would.
Francis again tried to throw his authority away, this time by heading to the middle east to preach and (he hoped) be martyred in the attempt. This is where he met Saladin's nephew and also acquired a number of chronic diseases that would eventually end his life by the age of 45.
But his sojourn in the middle east didn't kill him and instead he returned to Italy even more famous than before. People began crediting him with various miracles and declaring him a local, unofficial saint, something that also happened to Hildegard and was pretty common.
Getting older and sicker, Francis eventually recognized that he couldn't be around forever to reset the Franciscans back to his standards of selflessness and poverty, so he composed a "Rule", a document that spelled out how the order should be run, which he repeatedly revised.
His various illnesses (it's unclear what he had) progressed and his devotion to going without authority or special treatment clashed endlessly with his need for medical care. He kept throwing away his blankets and refusing special food because these were too luxurious for him.
Eventually he died and was almost immediately canonized by Pope Gregory IX, who as it happened was a Franciscan himself: he had been one of the guys Francis had formerly put in charge of the order, and had now risen to be in charge of the whole Catholic church.
In terms of legacy Francis left behind an order that had spread world-wide and involved thousands of people and to this day continues to attract men and women to a life of poverty and service. This would, I reiterate, be extremely annoying to Francis if he knew.
A final point: the Catholic church, of which the Franciscans are part, is an evil and corrupt institution that has repeatedly and vigorously protected child molesters from consequences for their crimes and nobody should support it. Find god in your own way; Francis would approve.
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