It’s a peculiar symptom of where we’re at—caught between phases of consciousness, between the ruins of one world and the unknown shape of the next—to be seeing two things at the same time. Or to be seeing the same thing in two ways simultaneously. Stuck in the transition, we’re condemned to a species of double vision: cross-eyed, as it were, in the cross-fade. And sometimes, sometimes, this can be quite useful. When you meet a guy, for example, like Francis of Assisi.
Genius or crackpot? Both. Sensuous embracer of life or self-mortifying freak? Both. Exhibitionist or recluse? Anarchist or company man? Runaway rich kid or true voice of the rejected? Both, both, and both. And when God spoke to him in 1206, his voice issuing from a crucifix and saying, “Francis, do you not see that my house is falling into ruin? Go, therefore, and repair the house,” did God mean the dilapidated, bat-flitted, holes-in-the-roof church in which Francis, at that moment, happened to be kneeling? Or did he mean the whole of medieval Christendom? He meant, of course—are you getting the idea?—both.
Volker Leppin’s Francis of Assisi, newly translated from the German by Rhys S. Bezzant, is subtitled The Life of a Restless Saint, and the restlessness of the subject is shared by the author. His book, Leppin writes, “does not present itself as a biography in the classic sense.” Which is not to suggest that Leppin, a professor of historical theology at Yale, has written some kind of jazzy meta-book. But Francis of Assisi does have double vision, maneuvering constantly between hagiography and history, legend and fact, heaven and Earth, miracles and—what’s the opposite of miracles? Leppin comes not to debunk but rather to discover in what fashion those early, physics-defying accounts of Francis, the tales told within the blast radius of his actual presence, might be understood as true.
Francis was born around 1181, in Assisi in central Italy, the son of a well-to-do merchant named Pietro di Bernardone. After that, the story gets hazy. Some versions would have him quite a nicely behaved youth; in others, the more fun ones, he’s a profligate, a sybarite, a tearaway. Seeking honors on the battlefield, he signs up for one of the endless local town-on-town skirmishes, only to be swiftly captured and imprisoned. When he gets out, a year or so later, the changes begin: conversion.
Francis tears off his fancy clothes; he kisses lepers; he starts begging. It’s all a bit unbalanced. He turns his back on privilege and plunges madly downward. (Perhaps this is the point in the story at which Francis—were he trying something similar today, here in America—would find himself scooped up by psychiatry and institutionalized, or at the very least heavily medicated, at the behest of his family maybe, or he’d go rattling unattended into the tunnels of the justice system.)
Desperate to impoverish himself, he tries to donate a large amount of his father’s money to a local church; the priest, afraid of Bernardone Sr., refuses it, whereupon Francis—the anti-alchemist, King Midas in reverse, turning gold back to base metal—casts the money scornfully aside, “valuing it,” as Saint Bonaventure wrote in his 13th-century Life of Saint Francis, “no more than dust that is trodden under foot.”
But gradually, via great humiliations, a stint in a cave, and a complete rupture with his father, these lungings and impetuosities resolve themselves into the properly achieved Franciscan humor, a kind of continual outrageous sanctity. Francis becomes Francis, and he begins to attract followers. What he’s doing is pretty straightforward. He’s living—actually living—by the words of Jesus: Love your neighbor, give it all away, praise God, and don’t worry about tomorrow.
Pretty straightforward, and a head-on challenge to the world. It is no longer enough, for example, to give alms to the lepers and walk off feeling pious: Now, like Francis and his brothers, you have to accompany the lepers. You have to stand with them in what Leppin calls “the world of the excluded,” of the lowest in society, which in the cosmic reversal effected by the Gospels turns out to be the highest place on Earth.
To get in touch with the miraculous Francis, the folkloric Francis, read the Fioretti, or The Little Flowers of St. Francis, a 14th-century collection of tales about the saint and his friars. It’s a beautiful book. Here we find Francis “raising his face to heaven” like a solar panel, taming wolves and preaching to the birds and subsisting for weeks on half a loaf of bread to “cast the venom of vainglory from him.” We see him healing a leper, and then, when that leper dies (“of another infirmity”) a couple of weeks later, encountering the man’s heaven-bound soul whooshing past him in a wood.
We see him—in a typically self-condemning mood, regarding himself as the vilest of sinners and the basest of men—earnestly instruct Brother Leo to tell him, “Truly thou dost merit the deepest hell.” And Leo tries to say it—he tries his best—but when he opens his mouth, what comes bulbing out instead, Jim Carrey–style, is, “God will perform so many good works through thee that thou shalt go to paradise.” Francis, peeved, renews the effort, enjoining Leo this time to tell him, “Verily thou art worthy of being numbered among the accursed.” Again Leo assents, but the words that come through him, rebelliously, are, “O Friar Francis, God will do in such wise that among the blessed thou shalt be singularly blessed.” And repeat. It has the rhythm of an SNL sketch. We also meet the amazing, more-Francis-than-Francis Brother Juniper, a figure of such affronting innocence that Francis himself, when he’s wrangling a particularly tenacious demon, simply has to mention Juniper’s name to make the demon flee.
G. K. Chesterton wrote very beautifully about Francis. For him, the saint’s jangling polarities resolve themselves quite naturally if we imagine him as a lover: Francis was in love with God, so he did all the crazy zigzag things that lovers do. The feats, the ecstasies, the prostrations and abnegations. And he loved the Church too. “Francis,” Leppin notes, “certainly did not engage in any polemic against the clergy.” It never occurred to him to question directly the institutions and practices of Catholicism: The polemic, so to speak, was himself. The story goes that when he went to Rome to get Pope Innocent III’s blessing, and Innocent said something waspish about him looking like a swineherd, Francis left the papal court, found a couple of pigs in the street, rolled around companionably in their pig-mess, and then came back.
Did that really happen? Does it matter? A story like that, we need it to be true. And right now we need Saint Francis. Now that kindness is countercultural, we need his extremes of wild charity to pull us back toward it. And we need his asceticism: His self-denial, his merry disdain of health and comfort and security, is a rebuke to our self-care. There are no safe spaces, and no guarantees—the only stability is the bottomlessness of divine love. The trapdoor held open by grace. So we take the hand of Francis, and down we go.
This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “The Wild Charity of Saint Francis.”
The post The Wild Charity of Saint Francis appeared first on The Atlantic.
