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Sunday
I continue to share literature-related lectures from our church’s Sunday Forum series, “Creating in God’s Image.” Since the Feast of St. Francis was this past Wednesday, we asked the Rev. Jim Pappas to talk about the saint and his thoughts about beauty. Jim says he began a deep relationship with the Franciscan tradition over thirty years ago while a college student at Quincy University. For the last several years he has been offering introductory classes in Franciscan spirituality through area parishes.
By the Rev. Jim Pappas
Altissimu, onnipotente bon Signore,
tue so’ le laude, la gloria e l’honore
et onne benedictione.
Ad te solo, Altissimu, se konfano
et nullu homo ene dignu te mentovare.
So begins the oldest work of literature in the Italian language with a known author (there is at least one anonymous love song that is older). We commonly know the poem as The Canticle of the Creatures or The Canticle of Brother Sun. The first seven stanzas were composed 799 years ago by a wandering preacher by the name of Francis as he suffered through an illness in a little shack outside of a convent below the Italian hill-town of Assisi. He would add the final stanzas over the next two years. Here is the entire Canticle in my own translation:
Most High, all-powerful good Lord,
yours are the praises, the glory, and the honor, and every blessing.
To You alone, Most High, do they belong,
and no person is worthy to speak Your name.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, with all your creatures,
especially Sir Brother Sun,
who is the day, and we are enlightened by him.
And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor:
of You, Most High, he bears the symbol.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, for Sister Moon and the stars:
in the sky you formed them bright and precious and beautiful.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, for Brother Wind
and for the air and the cloudy sky and the clear sky and every type of weather,
by which all Your creatures are sustained.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, for Sister Water,
which is very useful and humble and precious and chaste.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, for Brother Fire,
by which the night is illumined:
and he is beautiful and jovial and very robust and strong.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, for our sister Mother Earth,
which sustains and governs us,
and produces diverse fruits along with colorful flowers and herbs.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, for those who give pardon because of Your love
and endure infirmity and tribulation.
Blessed are those who endure in peace,
because of You, Most High, they will be crowned.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, by our Sister Bodily Death,
of which no living person can escape:
woe to those who will die in mortal sin;
blessed are those who will be found in Your most holy will,
because the second death will not harm them.
Praise and bless my Lord and give thanks,
and serve Him with great humility.
The Canticle was more than a poem. It was a song. We know from various sources that Francis and the first brothers sang it, including at the time of his death. Sadly, the original tune for the Canticle has been lost, so we cannot sing it exactly as Francis did. But the Canticle is still sung to many musical settings. We probably know it best in the paraphrase “All Creatures of Our God and King” set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
I start with the Canticle because any discussion about ideas like beauty or creativity in the Franciscan tradition has to start in the life and work of Francis himself. Francis was not a philosopher or a theologian. But he was a poet. And more importantly, he was a performer. He often referred to himself as the Jester of the Great King, and he called his brothers the Jongleurs, or Street Performers, of God. Francis and his first companions preached the Gospel through poetry, song, and dance. What is more, almost every aspect of Francis’s life can be taken as a kind of performance art. Because of this, any genuine Franciscan spirituality must include creativity, and its related concept of beauty, as core components.
To understand the Franciscan concepts of beauty and creativity, we need to situate ourselves at least a little in a medieval worldview. For us, the word beauty is an aesthetic term. And in the modern usage, it is a very subjective idea, summed up in the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We do not find it strange at all that what I find beautiful might be very different from what you find beautiful. And I think that even our philosophers have given up on trying to define the aesthetics of beauty in objective terms on which everyone can agree.
But eight hundred years ago, beauty was much more an ethical term than an aesthetic one. Guided by Platonic thought, beauty was easily defined in terms of ordered relationship, balance, and harmony. Following Augustine (and others) in placing these Platonic ideas into a Christian framework, theological discussions of beauty speak about such things as divine intent and design.
It was thought within this world view that beauty was a coolly logical concept about which there could be no differing opinion. Beauty could be established by means of logical argument, without any appeal to emotion or taste. Failure to appreciate beauty was a sign not of differing opinion, but of a disordered life brought about by sin. And within the Platonic ideals, human affections and desire of any kind are viewed at least with suspicion, if not outright hostility. The “desires” are part of fallen flesh, rather than Godlike spirit.
Enter Francis. As I have already mentioned, Francis and his first companions are notable because their preaching was not the cool logical arguments of the scholars but was full of music and drama and performance. Franciscan preaching was an appeal to the affections. The Franciscan approach to God depends deeply upon desire – both ours and God’s. Human persons are called into a personal, emotional experience of God, which by necessity extends into a personal, emotional experience of creation.
In the cool Platonic world view, beauty is certainly one of God’s qualities. But in the emotive Franciscan approach, Beauty becomes a possible name for God! Rather than beauty being a sort of tangential effect within creation, it becomes an absolute essential. If God is Beauty Itself, then it follows that that which God has made must be beautiful. Just as musical compositions show us the composer, just as paintings show us the painter, just as poems show us the poet, so creation shows us the Creator. God’s fingerprints–or in the Franciscan parlance of that time, God’s footprints–are to be found everywhere.
In the one hundred twenty-fourth chapter of Thomas of Celano’s second account of the life of Francis, the provocatively titled Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul, we see this idea laid out:
This happy traveler
hurrying to leave the world
as the exile of pilgrimage,
was helped, and not just a little,
by what is in the world
Toward the princes of darkness,
he certainly used it as a field of battle.
Toward God, however, he used it
as the clearest mirror of goodness.
In art
he praises the Artist;
whatever he discovers in creatures
he guides to the Creator.
He rejoices in all the works of the Lord’s hands,
and through their delightful display
he gazes on their life-giving reason and cause.
In beautiful things he discerns Beauty Itself;
All good things cry out to him:
“The One who made us is the Best.”
Following the footprints imprinted on the creatures,
he follows his Beloved everywhere;
out of them all he makes for himself a ladder
by which he might reach the Throne.
He embraces all things
with an intensity of unheard devotion,
speaking to them about the Lord
and exhorting them to praise Him.
Note that in speaking about the life of Francis, Celano does not shy away from the word desire. Rather than treating desire as categorically defective, Franciscans see desire as part of what it is to be created beings. Francis longs for, desires God, a God who is apprehended under the name of Beauty. It is this beautiful God that appeals to, even inflames, Francis’ desires.
As I have said, Francis was not a theologian. Francis was God’s lover, a poet-preacher who desperately wanted to draw others into this love affair with the Creator. His friend Clare was denied the opportunity to be a preacher and street performer for God. But she was no less an adherent and proponent of this new approach to relationship with God. Stuck within the walls of the cloister at San Damiano, she spent her time in silence contemplating the Beautiful One to whom her life was drawn. She stares into the Beauty of God and sees her own beauty reflected back. In her Fourth Letter to Agnes of Prague, she writes:
Happy, indeed is she
to whom it is given to share in this sacred banquet
so that she might cling with all her heart
to Him
Whose beauty all the blessed hosts of heaven unceasingly admire
Whose affection excites
Whose contemplation refreshes,
Whose kindness fulfills,
Whose delight refreshes,
Whose remembrance delightfully shines,
By Whose fragrance the dead are revived,
Whose glorious vision will bless all the citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem:
which, since it is the splendor of eternal glory,
is the brilliance of eternal light
and the mirror without blemish.
Gaze upon that mirror each day and continually study your face within it, that you may adorn yourself within and without with beautiful robes.
Like Francis, Clare was not primarily a theologian. But she was a contemplative. First enclosure, and then years of illness that kept her bedridden, left her with time to reflect upon the beautiful God who calls us into relationship. She quite literally lived with the cross from which Francis heard Christ’s call to discipleship. And gazing into it day after day, she learned the methodology that would make Franciscan theology possible. Her affective approach to contemplation – gaze, consider, contemplate, imitate – would make it possible for others to follow in the way that she and Francis set out to live. Franciscan friar and poet Murray Bodo captures the essence of Clare beautifully in his poem, “St. Clare Dies at Her Mirror, August 11, 1253”:
I’ve lived in the labyrinth, love its scrubbed walls,
doors whose thresholds lead to the brass basin, worn
where a Sister’s foot soaks warm in my laving hand.
Portals here billow into linen albs, their shadows
arching into gates through which the Saracen horses pound
toward their own retreat; the blinding ciborium whirls
warriors, spins our lacing bobbins. Winter roofbeams
groan their vows beneath God’s weight, His rough beard
scratches the eaves like a storm of olive branches.
I’ve embraced the labyrinth, the basin’s womb become
a mirror for seeing around corners; looked into, it’s
the crucifix that spoke to Francis, Christ’s wounded,
bent face now a lucid window onto my own riddle
recumbent on the stone pillow. On the roof God hops,
sparks in a gossip of sparrows. Small, brown, winged,
my soul flits through death’s dark mirror, into light.
It ultimately falls to those who come after Francis and Clare to sort out what this spiritual approach means for the world of theology. At least at first, it did not mean completely upending the apple cart of Platonic thought. The first university theologians among the Franciscans, men like Alexander of Hales and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, were thoroughly Platonic in their world view.
Beauty remains an ethical concept, as illustrated by this statement from Bonaventure’s Lectures on the Six Days of Creation: “Justice makes beautiful that which had been deformed.” It remains a given that nothing can be beautiful unless it is as God designs it. Human sin deforms beauty. Repentance and justice restore it. But what does change for Franciscan thinkers is the approach. Theology under the Franciscans becomes an affective enterprise, and not merely a logical one. And Beauty as a core aspect of God’s personal identity helps to drive this.
Bonaventure places our experience of beauty at the beginning of all spiritual work. Each human person in relationship with God is drawn into that relationship by first emotionally experiencing beauty in art and creation. While the intellect is certainly not excluded from the process of entering into deeper relationship with God, it cannot be the beginning. God is apprehended first in the wordless emotive space of experiencing creative beauty. And in the deepening relationship, the created beauty is transcended not by words, but by the eventual apprehension of uncreated Beauty.
We find this idea expressed not only in the works theology, but in art as well. Dante’s Divine Comedy follows this model of affective journey. And it is no wonder, for Dante was himself a Franciscan tertiary, a member of the so-called Third Order movement that Francis designed for those who couldn’t live the absolutely radical life of the friars or of Clare’s Poor Ladies, but who still wanted to live out the Franciscan way as best as they could. We can see this Franciscan ideal of journey into transcendent beauty illustrated well in the final verses of Canto XXXIII of The Paradiso (trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow):
O how all speech is feeble and falls short
Of my conceit, and this to what I saw
Is such, ’tis not enough to call it little!
O Light Eterne, sole in thyself that dwellest,
Sole knowest thyself, and, known unto thyself
And knowing, lovest and smilest on thyself!
That circulation, which being thus conceived
Appeared in thee as a reflected light,
When somewhat contemplated by mine eyes,
Within itself, of its own very colour
Seemed to me painted with our effigy,
Wherefore my sight was all absorbed therein.
As the geometrician, who endeavours
To square the circle, and discovers not,
By taking thought, the principle he wants,
Even such was I at that new apparition;
I wished to see how the image to the circle
Conformed itself, and how it there finds place;
But my own wings were not enough for this,
Had it not been that then my mind there smote
A flash of lightning, wherein came its wish.
Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy:
But now was turning my desire and will,
Even as a wheel that equally is moved,
The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.
If Bonaventure and others like him open the door to a new theological approach, it will fall to the greatest Franciscan thinker, John Duns Scotus, to completely change the direction. Like the Dominican thinker Thomas Aquinas before him, Scotus was an Aristotelian rather than a Platonist. And doing theology under a completely different world view required new approaches and new terminology.
Without delving too deeply into all of this, I want to point out three of Scotus’ innovations. Two of the ideas are so radical that Scotus actually had to invent words for them. And all three strike me as completely natural progressions from the approach begun by Francis and Clare, and also as the radical shifts necessary to enable our contemporary theological and creative reception of the Franciscan tradition.
The first idea is what Scotus termed haecceitas. We would translate that as this-ness. It means the particularity of any individual, whether it be a person, or a leaf, or a stone. Under traditional Platonic thought, what was important about individual persons was that they participated in a larger category of Personhood. But under Scotus’ idea of this-ness, what is important about individual persons is their individuality. Each created thing is so beloved of God that God pays special attention to the differentiating details.
That means that beauty shifts away from some definition that can be objectively designed by category and into something that must be more subjectively apprehended, because beauty is now entirely tied up with individual integrity. Beauty can still be marred by sin, but even this can no longer be easily described by simple category. And restoration to beauty is more about drawing an individual back to their true self. We see this idea illustrated wonderfully in Galway Kinnell’s poem, “Saint Francis and the Sow”:
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
The second idea that Scotus gives us is that the Incarnation is not a result of humanity’s fall from grace due to sin, but rather that it is a foregone conclusion of the creation. God’s interest in the individual integrity of each bit of creation, God’s deep appreciation of the beauty of that creation, God’s desire for close relationship with it, means that from the moment God decided to create us, God also planned to become one of us and share in our entire experience. Episcopal priest and theologian Marilyn McCord Adams once described this as “incarnation anyway.” Just as our beauty is a reflection or footprint of God’s Beauty, so too our desire for God is a reflection or footprint of God’s desire for us.
The final idea that I want to mention is what Scotus calls univocity. By this, he means that when we use a word to talk about both God and people, or God and the creation, we mean the same thing by that word. God’s beauty and our beauty are the same kind of thing, not different categories. The only difference is that our experience of what it means to be beautiful can be marred by sin. But restoration to our divinely created beauty is not to some fuzzy shadow of true beauty. Rather, the true beauty of creation, whether human or animal or plant or mineral, is the beauty of God.
No poet better embodies all of these ideas from Scotus than the Irish Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. And that makes sense, since Scotus was the focus of Hopkins’ scholarly work. I think that all of these ideas are perfectly captured in Hopkins’ poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
Despite having a deep intellectual tradition embodied by the likes of Bonaventure and Scotus, for most of us in the Franciscan tradition, the point is still about trying to walk in the way marked out by Francis and Clare and their first companions. And that means approaching life with a creative apprehension of beauty, both of the created and of the Creator.
I therefore would like to bring us around to looking at a couple of specific instances from life of Francis and see how artists can use these Franciscan ideas of beauty to illuminate life, both Francis’ and ours. And while we could certainly make forays into music or the visual arts as a part of this, I hope that you will forgive me for sticking with poetry for our artistic models.
The first instance from the life of Francis that I would like us to examine is Francis’ encounter with lepers. That might seem an odd place to go to talk about beauty. But Francis did not learn to see the beauty of creation by looking at birds and flowers and then extend that to people. Rather, Francis first learned to see beauty by approaching that which he feared. In his Testament he tells us:
The Lord gave me, Brother Francis, thus to begin doing penance in this way: for when I was in sin, it seemed too bitter for me to see lepers. And the Lord Himself led me among them and I showed mercy to them. And when I left them, what had seemed bitter to me was turned into sweetness of soul and body. And afterwards I delayed a little and left the world.
This incident of Francis’ first encounter as he just described is set forth in the fourth chapter of The Legend of the Three Companions:
One day he was riding his horse near Assisi, when he met a leper. And, even though he usually shuddered at lepers, he made himself dismount, and gave him a coin, kissing his hand as he did so. After he accepted a kiss of peace from him, Francis remounted and continued on his way.
After a few days, he moved to a hospice of lepers, taking with him a large sum of money. Calling them all together, as he kissed the hand of each, he gave them alms. When he left there, what before had been bitter, that is, to see and touch lepers, was turned into sweetness.
Now let us now see how a poet tells the story and see if we can notice the Franciscan ideal of beauty at work. Here is David Citino’s “Francis Meets a Leper”:
He heard the bell toll, erratic
in a palsied hand, and smelled
the goatish scent before he saw
the figure moving in mist on the road
to Assisi, a traveler gloved and shod,
as was the law, to hide the sores,
a man’s inhumanity, missing fingers
and toes, and tried to unmask the face,
slack muscles showing nothing
but astonishment, lower lids keeping
eyes open always to our providential decay,
flesh soft and thick as rotten wood.
Francis saw in bleary eyes, near to him
as his mother’s as she loved him,
a brother, then someone dearer, wrapped
as he’d seen others in his father’s cloth
that first had profited English shepherds
and the weavers of Ghent, a skin
bleached white as bone, a flower blazing
in snow, so close to perfection it could
only decay. Francis did the only thing
he could, sun rising high enough now
to burn away the mist. He unwrapped
the face, studying lineaments fashioned
by a master’s hand, image and likeness
of the death that beautifies all living.
He closed his eyes and kissed.
It was in seeing the beauty of God in the leper that Francis began to be able to apprehend the beauty of God—first in himself, then in all of the people around him, and finally in all of creation. But as it is Francis’ love of the non-human parts of the created order that so often leads folks to him today, I want to pay attention to at least one of those stories as well. Here is the beloved account of Francis preaching to the birds from the twenty-first chapter of Thomas of Celano’s Life of Saint Francis:
Francis reached a place near Bevagna, in which a great multitude of birds of different types gathered, including doves, crows, and jackdaws. When Francis saw them, he ran swiftly toward them, leaving his companions on the road. He was a man of great fervor, feeling much sweetness and tenderness even toward lesser, irrational creatures. When he was already very close, seeing that they awaited him, he greeted them in his usual way. He was quite surprised, however, because the birds did not take flight, as they usually do. Filled with great joy, he humbly requested that they listen to the word of God.
Among many other things, he said to them: “My brother birds, you should greatly praise your Creator, and love him always. He gave you feathers to wear, wings to fly, and whatever you need. God made you noble among His creatures and gave you a home in the purity of the air, so that, though you never sow nor reap, He nevertheless protects and governs you without your least care.” At these words, the birds rejoiced in a wonderful way according to their nature. They stretched their necks, spread their wings, opened their beaks, and looked at him. He passed through their midst, coming and going, touching their heads and bodies with his tunic. Then he blessed them, and having made the sign of the cross, gave them permission to fly off to another place.
After the birds had listened so reverently to the word of God, Francis began to accuse himself of negligence because he had not preached to them before. From that day on, he carefully exhorted all birds, all animals, all reptiles, and also insensible creatures, to praise and love the Creator.
Again, let us see what poets can do with this story. This time I have selected two approaches. The first is Seamus Heaney’s “Saint Francis and the Birds”:
When Francis preached love to the birds
They listened, fluttered, throttled up
Into the blue like a flock of words
Released for fun from his holy lips.
Then wheeled back, whirred about his head,
Pirouetted on brothers’ capes.
Danced on the wing, for sheer joy played
And sang, like images took flight.
Which was the best poem Francis made,
His argument true, his tone light.
And the second is a selection from Marilyn Nelson’s The Life of a Saint: after Giotto:
IV. The Saint Preaches
The saint has come back to town.
Everyone comes out.
His father’s old retainers
whisper how he’s changed.
He says he has a mistress now,
that his pride kisses the ground.
He seems so strange.
He carries his hunger
in a wooden bowl.
Some say they see his mistress,
that she’s old
and wears rags. He says
he’s been praying for years.
When he limps
through the streets
he leaves red footprints
for the rain to eat.
He looks as wild as the Baptist,
everyone says, but they hang around
anyway when he starts to preach.
He’s talking to something beyond them,
it seems, no, something so close
they’d forgotten to notice,
like their own good stink
or the beauty of kitchens.
When he opens his arms they think
birds fly out like coins.
He speaks a language they understand
but can’t speak.
It sounds to them like singing,
like the melody of the wind
in the gray olive trees.
They hang around all day
and when they go home
it seems better,
as if they’d discovered salt.
They forget the dark
they’re afraid of
and remember all night long
how the saint opened his wings
among the gathering birds,
how he opened his beak,
how he sang.
And so we end where we began, with Francis the poet singing the song of divine beauty. Francis would want us to always continue to diligently search out Beauty. He even now urges us to desire it, to give ourselves over to an all-consuming relationship with the God who is Beauty Itself, the God who desires us so much that being with us and sharing our entire experience has always been a part of the divine plan. And Francis would have us not just to seek this Beauty for ourselves, but to creatively share it so that others may know Beauty as well.
Finally, as the final stanza of the Canticle reminds us, Francis reminds us that nothing, not even death itself, can ultimately separate us from the Beauty by whom and for whom we are made.
Acknowledgements: I am indebted to Mary Beth Ingham, Rejoicing in the Works of the Lord: Beauty in the Franciscan Tradition (Franciscan Heritage Series, vol. 6) for the material on the pre-Franciscan medieval outlook on beauty, as well as the material which appears later on Bonaventure and Scotus. I never directly quote her work, but this lecture would be impossible without it. I have also drawn on Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, Volume II: The Founder (eds. Regis J. Armstrong et. al.) and Francis and Clare in Poetry: An anthology (eds. Janet McCann and David Craig).