I will always remember the occasion in high school when I first encountered a massive red book about Francis of Assisi in my public library. According to the copyright page it was titled St. Francis of Assisi: Writings and Early Biographies: English Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of St. Francis. A mouthful! But the spine—thick as a brick—read simply, “St. Francis of Assisi Omnibus of Sources.” Omnibus. I had to investigate to find out just exactly what that meant.
The volume weighed at least a few pounds, with nearly 2,000 pages. I’d never seen a book so large. But having recently read my first biography of St. Francis and immediately fallen in love with the life and charism of such an unusual follower of Christ, I grabbed the Omnibus from the shelf. Opening the front cover, I saw that it was published by Franciscan Herald Press—what a perfect name for a publisher of such a book—and on reading the foreword, I was enthralled. Everything that anyone would ever want to know about Francis was apparently inside. Even the strawberry red cover, a design detail perfectly suiting the early 1970s when it was first published, appealed. Checking the Omnibus out with my library card, I took it home and read studiously for two weeks the first few hundred pages. I have no memory of whether I actually finished reading the book (I seriously doubt it, in fact), but I’m certain that I made a dent, and the enthusiasm for studying the early Franciscan movement was born in me.
Despite the unlikelihood of reading the 2,000-page Omnibus all the way through, it is a challenge to find a copy of that classic work in any of its early editions in which the binding is not seriously cracked. In other words, people really read the book and, in publishing terms, it was a “hit.” Since that time, there has been no shortage of new books on Francis. Still the world’s most popular saint, the stories of his life inspire more people than one can imagine. Since the Omnibus, there have been numerous other scholarly renditions of the early biographical writings about him, most notably the now essential three-volume Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, published in 1999–2001.1 And yet I find that as scholars and serious students have more resources than ever at their disposal, we also live in a time when fewer and fewer everyday, nonspecialist, spiritually attuned people interested in Francis actually turn to his own words in order to discover him. Most people with an interest in the little poor man (il poverello) from Umbria have little firsthand knowledge of his own writings. Sometimes, in fact, they do not realize that he wrote anything at all.
There are many great biographies of St. Francis and those are usually read instead. I have always been most partial to Paul Sabatier’s, which I reedited and published more than a decade ago under the title The Road to Assisi: The Essential Biography of St. Francis (2003). There are several other excellent ones, too. For instance, I recommend Julien Green’s beautifully written God’s Fool: The Life and Times of Francis of Assisi, translated from the French (1985), and Francis of Assisi: A Revolutionary Life by Adrian House (2001) is also very good. For a more scholarly treatment, you might turn to the slim, recent, and authoritative Francis of Assisi: A New Biography, by the medieval historian Augustine Thompson, OP (2012), and the highly acclaimed Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint by French scholar Andre Vauchez, recently translated into English (2012). And on the hagiographical side of things, for the most charming collection of tales about the life of St. Francis, you can’t do better than Brother Ugolino’s The Little Flowers of Saint Francis (various editions).
Despite all of these great lives of the Poverello, I still wish that people would turn to Francis’s own words first, or at least more often. Even his first biographers—the thirteenth-century writers Thomas of Celano, St. Bonaventure, and the first editors of The Little Flowers—rarely quoted from his writings. So it surprises many people to discover that Francis wrote numerous letters, religious poems and songs (laude), and a few very important treatises and “rules” for religious life.
Nevertheless, Francis was not a man of many words. He was not a scholarly saint like Augustine or Thomas Aquinas. He was never a famous orator-saint like John Chrysostom. In fact, it is impossible to imagine Francis sitting in a library or with a pen in his hand. Francis wasn’t even what you might call intellectually curious, like the saints Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Ávila, both of whom wrote a great deal, studied and pondered ideas, and, as a result of their writings, left us with many biographical details about their lives. Some have even accused Francis of being anti-intellectual, and for good reasons: he often warned his brothers against owning books and excessive reading. He counseled his brothers again and again to study only if they could do so without it ruining their spiritual lives. And yet he wrote.
For such a person—focused more on the active than the contemplative or intellectual life—Francis wrote only when a good occasion called for it. One scholar has recently explained this well:
The Poor Man of Assisi, who was lacking in literary skill, did not behave like an author, nor did he give himself over to it with any confidence. He was writing only to deliver a message, but he attached to it the highest importance, inspired as he was by the certitude that the words he was writing or dictating were not from him, or not only from him, to the extent that it was God himself who had inspired them in him.2
This new collection of Francis’s writings was created in order to fill a gap. Francis of Assisi in His Own Words is intended to be a nonthreatening entry into Francis’s thought and spirit, by presenting his own words clearly and succinctly. As a result, the book you have in your hands contains only a fraction of what my old Omnibus contained, only the most essential writings of Francis himself. It also contains only those texts that we know with a good amount of certainty were written by the saint.3
He began life as Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone and his biography is so familiar that to recount it here seems almost unnecessary. Very briefly, Francis was born in Assisi in 1181, raised in what we would today call an upper-middle-class home. His father, Pietro di Bernardone, traveled back and forth to northern France foar his business as a successful cloth merchant. Francis helped in his father’s shop and may have also seen some of the world, traveling with Pietro abroad as a boy.
As a young man of twenty-one, Francis went off to war against Perugia, as all of the young men were supposed to do to defend their city, only to end up a prisoner. Two years later, he set off to battle once more, but he returned the following day, making it only as far as Spoleto and having seen a vision. Francis proved either to be inept at soldiering or he deserted, or both.
He was a merry young man and loved a good party. But in his young twenties, as his conversion began to take hold, Francis repented of sins of pride, luxury, and selfishness in very public fashion, which only served to embarrass his respectable father further. Francis then stole from his father to give to the poor and Pietro imprisoned him in the basement of their home, hoping that his son would snap out of it. When his father had to go away on business, Francis’s mother (about whom we know precious little) freed him, and Francis quickly returned to San Damiano, the somewhat remote church in Assisi that he had grown to love.
He first heard the voice of God at San Damiano in 1206, telling him to “Go and rebuild my Church.” Soon thereafter, Francis became a mendicant, a deliberately poor wandering preacher of salvation, and slowly but surely gathered followers, almost by accident. He focused on preaching the good news to people, explaining to them how they could find more joy in their lives, and he helped the sick, caring even for lepers, who in those days were literally cast out of the community and forbidden to come in contact with other people. Francis would wash their bodies and spend time with them.
In the spring of 1209, Francis and eleven companions walked to Rome, Francis with a copy of his new Rule in hand (see pages 17–41 below), to ask Pope Innocent III for a blessing. Over the next fifteen years, Francis traveled to Dalmatia, Spain, France, the ancient city of Acre in the northern Galilee region, and Damietta, Egypt, where he later famously met with the Sultan. Probably in the year 1220 or 1221, Francis resigned as spiritual leader of his own order and another friar was appointed vicar. By the end of his life he watched with a measure of sadness as the order grew beyond the boundaries of his original, most simple intentions (see “The Testament” on pages 95–101 below).
He was considered a saint throughout Europe even before his death on October 3, 1226. As he was dying, we know that people were trying to grab pieces of his clothing, because in their worldview—where proximity to a saint meant a little more holiness in one’s life—they literally wanted a piece of him. To this day, he is the world’s most popular saint in churches, books, paintings, and every other imaginable representation.
Curiously, we never see Francis smile in paintings, which is unfortunate because according to his biographers he was one of the most joyous of men. He was the leader of a band of brethren who called themselves “God’s jugglers” as they worked, played, sweated, and laughed with men in the fields and towns before they ever preached to them. This sunny disposition also showed itself in the ways Francis located God in some startlingly “new” places according to the thirteenth-century worldview: not just in church, or in men and women who were trying to be faithful, but in lepers and outcasts, ravenous wolves, fish and birds, the sun and the moon, even bodily pain and death. This is a man who rolled in the snow, who stripped naked in order to demonstrate to his father how joyfully he had renounced ownership of things, and who preached in his underwear to show humility. Still, we never see him smile and that’s a shame. Blame it on the iconographers—the artists and painters who have rendered St. Francis’s image since his death in 1226.
There are thousands of paintings of Francis but you might say there is a “top three” list in the history of art. First would have to be the fresco on the wall of the chapel of St. Gregory in the Sacro Speco (“sacred grotto”) in Subiaco, a city in the province of Rome. The Subiaco grotto was made famous centuries earlier by St. Benedict of Nursia, who retreated there and founded the Benedictine order within its walls. St. Francis’s fresco can be seen just to the right of the entrance to the cave and is inscribed as painted during the second year of the pontificate of Pope Gregory IX. That dates the painting to late 1228 or early 1229, making it the earliest surviving image we have of Francis. Many scholars assume that the man you see in that fresco should be as close a depiction as we will ever have of the real Francis. He is wearing the rough habit of his order, a knotted cord about his waist, his hands are pre-stigmata, and he’s barefoot. You will meet that Francis, most of all, in the letters included in this volume.
Second would be Cimabue’s famous portrait that hangs in the right transept of the Lower Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi. The Francis you see there appears shorter, swarthier, than the man we see at Sacro Speco. He is showing his stigmatized hands to the painter with downcast, humble eyes. Some biographers prefer this image as the most faithful of the early ones precisely because it seems to show a less idealized man. This feels like the Francis we know from his praises—in this volume, from his “Praises to the Blessed Virgin Mary” and “Praises of the Christian Virtues” (see pages 49–53 below).
And third among the most important paintings of Francis is the one that is most often reproduced: Giotto’s famous fresco, also from San Francesco in Assisi, depicting The Preaching to the Birds. This is scene fifteen in the narrative cycle located around the nave of the Upper Basilica. You’ve probably seen it on postcards, coffee mugs, holy medals, in books, films, and on your hotel and tour brochure if you ever visited any town in Umbria. Each of the images from the famous fresco cycles at San Francesco—just like similar cycles in other Franciscan basilicas throughout Italy—depict the notable scenes from the biographies of Francis. Like any good storytelling of a saint, they show Francis on his way of conversion toward heaven. We never find Francis writing about this scene, or almost any other from his life, in these writings. The one exception is “The Testament,” on pages 95–101 below.
There are many other popular images of Francis hanging in museums all over the world. Francisco de Zurbarán’s famous Saint Francis in Meditation in the National Gallery in London is one example. The severe ascetic of the saint that you see there comes through often in these writings. The seventeenth-century Spanish Catholic painter shows a kneeling friar in closet-like solitude, well cowled, his mouth agape speaking to God, holding a skull in contemplation of death. This is a dark, stark, arresting image, far removed from the juggling and joyous side of Francis—but it too is true to who he was. Zurbarán’s countryman El Greco painted similar scenes.
When you actually read Francis’s writings, you will meet the sometimes severe saint of El Greco, the joyous friend of all creatures seen in the frescos of the Basilica in Assisi, as well as the solitary man of prayer we meet in the image on the wall of Sacro Speco. All of these are “the real Brother Francis.”
You will find nineteen different texts in this collection of Francis’s writings. Each is most likely from the mind or pen of the saint. Often Francis dictated his words to others, but in some instances, such as short letters, he wrote them himself.
These selections were all written over a period of twenty years, from 1206 to 1226, the year in which Francis died. They are arranged here in approximate chronological order, and each is prefaced with an editorial explanation of its setting, purpose, and place in the canon. The translations are my own; I aimed for smooth readability while remaining faithful to the tone and spirit of the originals, and compared my work against that of several others. Francis’s quotations from Scripture are rendered using the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, unless otherwise indicated. I furnish citations for Scripture quotations in the margins.
1 Please refer to “For Further Reading” for full bibliographical information on every book mentioned here in the text and cited in the footnotes.
2 Vauchez, Francis of Assisi, 250.
3 Even so, there are only two extant manuscripts with Francis’s own handwriting, and the earliest copy of some of the writings included in this volume are only as old as the sixteenth century.