Sometime
near the end of the twelfth century, a wealthy young man named Giovanni
Francesco di Bernardone came upon a shepherd driving his flock to
market. And apparently for the sheer joy of it — the extravagant
pleasure of saving those sheep from slaughter — the young man promptly
bought the entire flock, led the sheep out to open meadows, and set them
free.
This is the man everyone knows as St. Francis of Assisi (ca.
1182–1226) — namesake of the newly elected pope, a saint beloved
throughout the world, even by people who have nothing to do with the
Catholic Church. A figure of the High Middle Ages who has been called “the morning star of the Renaissance,”
he seems even now, almost eight centuries after his death, to radiate
all that is most liberal in our modern mood: the joy of nature (he is
the patron saint of ecology), the love of animals, a profound social
conscience, an endless compassion for the poor and downtrodden.
And yet, consider another story about this man. Later in life, in the
full flowering of his compassion, his followers came to ask him if they
should serve meat for Christmas, the feast of the Incarnation, and he
answered, “On a day like this, even the walls eat meat — and if they
cannot, then let them be spread with meat.” This too is St. Francis, and
in that image of meat smeared on the walls in exuberant joy at the
birth of Christ, he affirms what he recognized as the pattern and
purpose of creation, the drama of death and redemption.
Somehow St. Francis remains both universally admired and broadly
misunderstood. In his almost childlike cheerfulness and generosity, he
seems at times the most human of human beings: “the man of poverty, the
man of peace, the man who loves and protects creation,” as the new Pope
Francis has described him. But in the severity of his self-denial and
solitary vigils, St. Francis of Assisi also seems strangely discordant
with the modern culture he helped create — his life both familiar and
distant, genial and disquieting. It is as though he anticipated the
spiritual outlines of all that was to come: the great new possibilities
of the modern world and the dangers those possibilities would deliver.
Yet within these apparent contradictions may be a treasury of wisdom the
modern world urgently needs.
Love and the Natural Order
As the popular account of his conversion
is often given, the young Francis rode out one day on the plains of
Umbria in central Italy. He was well liked by his friends and well known
for his extravagant frivolity, but lately he had seemed somehow
changed. An illness had thwarted his plans of military glory, and he was
troubled by a series of vivid dreams. Along the way, he came across a
poor man begging by the side of the road, and drawing closer, he could
see that the man was a leper. Francis recoiled at the sight of this
wretched and repulsive body, for leprosy was as much a subject of dread
in medieval Europe as it had been in biblical times. In pity he tossed
the leper a coin and turned away — but then, in even deeper pity, he
turned back and embraced the man.
Some of Francis’s biographers (notably André Vauchez,
in his recent work) doubt the incident occurred in quite the way it is
commonly told, but Francis himself described similar encounters that
played a major part in his spiritual transformation: “When I was in sin,
it seemed very bitter to me to see lepers,” he wrote in his Testament,
but “the Lord led me among them and I did mercy to them. And in going
among them, what had seemed to me bitter was changed for me into
sweetness of soul and of body.” Freed from his disgust and fear to love
others as God loved him, Francis proceeded to give away everything he
owned and turned his life to the service of the sick and the downcast,
for the glory of the Lord. He took it as a matter of courtesy that he
should never be in the presence of anyone poorer than himself.
What followed from these early encounters with lepers would astonish
and awaken the world. Through the humble faith of Francis, as in the
parable of the mustard seed, the smallest and seemingly most
insignificant became the source-spring of an extraordinary
transformation and renewal. Others quickly followed him in what they
called “holy poverty,” including a wealthy magistrate named Bernard of
Quintavalle. (As the Franciscan biographer Efrem Trettel
observes, here for perhaps the only time in history the world witnessed
the spectacle of two beggars standing in a town square giving away gold
coins.) Soon hundreds and then thousands joined Francis, spreading
across Europe and beyond. Wearing only a tattered cloak and a rope belt
tied with three knots symbolizing the evangelical counsels of perfection
(poverty, chastity, and obedience), they walked the world like the
grace of God, enlivening faith, reconciliation, and hope, and stirring
the most ordinary lives to extraordinary exultation.
All of this forms a vision of life in stark contrast to the
aspirations of our own age, our technological moment defined perhaps
most of all by the interplay of freedom, pride, and peril. Nowhere is
this more evident than in our advancing comprehension and control of
living nature. Biotechnology is more than a set of ingenious processes
and products. It is also a conceptual and ethical outlook grounded in
ideas about the source and significance of the natural world, an outlook
informed by philosophical assumptions about progress and human destiny.
The traditional role of medicine, for example, has been to cure
disease and alleviate suffering, to restore and sustain the patient to a
natural level of functioning and wellbeing. The medical arts were in
the service of a wider reverence and respect for the order of the
created world: “the physician is only nature’s assistant,” as the Roman
healer Galen explained.
But now, armed with the powers of biotechnology, medicine has found a
new paradigm, one of liberation: technological transformation in the
quest for happiness and human perfection. Slowly but steadily the role
of medicine has been extended, driven by our appetites and ambitions, to
encompass dimensions of life not previously considered matters of
health, with the effect of altering and revising the very frame of
nature. Increasingly, we expect from medicine not just freedom from
disease but freedom from all that is unattractive, imperfect, or just
inconvenient. More recent proposals, of a still more ambitious scope,
include projects for the conquest of aging, neurological fusion of
humans and machines, and fundamental genetic revision and guided
evolution — for transhumans, posthumans, and technosapiens.
The danger is immediately evident. Imagined ideals, untethered from a
comprehensive and coherent moral frame, set the course. And desire,
deracinated from its natural origins where pleasure and higher purpose
are inextricably bound, provides the motive force. In the absence of any
concept of cosmic order, where the material and the moral flow forth
from a single creative source, all of living nature becomes mere matter
and information to be reshuffled and reassigned for projects of the
human will.
Yet, notwithstanding these concerns, it is clear that this is not a
simple issue. What understanding of nature and human purpose can guide
us? Disorder, disease, and death are woven into the very fabric of life.
And medicine itself is an intervention over and against the underlying
anguish that permeates the natural world. It is our species’ strength,
and moral imperative, to aspire to a fuller flourishing of life. Francis
was well aware of these realities, for he suffered deeply from bodily
ills for which he sought medical care — but ultimately, in affectionate
acceptance, he called these burdens “his sisters.”
For Francis, the answer lay, not in escape from the desperations of
natural life, but in a transformation in his spiritual understanding of
the interwoven meaning of suffering and love. He came to see that the
whole of creation, and each of its varied creatures in their distinct
strengths and struggles, reflected and revealed the perfection of the
Creator. If all things are from one Father, then all are kin and worthy
of solicitude and appreciation. It was not nature in the abstract that
he loved but every differentiated being in its particularity and
individuality. Likewise, he loved not humanity in the abstract so much
as individual human beings. He described this love as courtesy, a
tender affection and concern for others as precious and unique, as
creatures beloved of God; and his courtesy was born not of magnanimity
or largesse (with their implicit sense of superiority) but of genuine
humility of heart. He became the “little brother” (the Order of Friars
Minor is the official name of his followers), placing himself in a
position of neediness before others. Not so much a giver of gifts as a
“giver of giving,” Francis provided the invitation to give by putting
himself in circumstances that drew forth the generosity of others — and
with it, their self-respect.
As he treated his fellow human beings so he treated all of his fellow creatures. His great canticle Laudes Creaturarum speaks of sun, moon, and water as brothers and sisters. According to his disciple and first biographer
Thomas of Celano, “Even towards little worms he glowed with exceeding
love,” and “used to pick them up in the way and put them in a safe
place, that they might not be crushed by the feet of passersby.” This
was not mere sentimentality but a gratitude grounded in an intimate
awareness of the dependency of life. Indeed, on his deathbed he extended
his canticle of creation with the words, “Be praised, my Lord, through
our Sister Bodily Death, from whose embrace no living person can
escape.” How, within the creation of an omnipotent and beneficent God,
there can be both suffering and love remains a mystery. But clearly for
Francis, that creation was simultaneously material and spiritual —
sacramental through and through.
Hubris and Humility
St. Francis’s attentive and appreciative
disposition toward the multiplicity of natural forms, even the tiniest
and seemingly insignificant, expresses an understanding of the universe
as an ordered and intricately interrelated whole. This perspective on
the natural world as a unity established and sustained within a
structure of governing principle and overarching purpose, as opposed to
the perverse and capricious inclinations of the gods of antiquity,
contributed to crucial conceptual foundations for the birth of empirical
science. It is not an accident that Roger Bacon, the thirteenth-century
naturalist often called the father of the experimental method, was a
Franciscan friar.
Moreover, this Franciscan frame of mind suggests limits on our modern
project of biotechnology. Recognition of the fragile interdependence of
living nature urges us to be cautious — lest we disrupt the basic
balance of being and thereby drain the created order of its beauty,
vitality, spiritual significance, and moral meaning. We have no license
for an attitude of arrogance as masters and possessors of nature. Plants
and animals may be used, not as mere raw materials, but with
tenderness, compassion, and genuine gratitude. Genetically engineered featherless chickens for cheaper pot pies and leaner pigs with severe arthritis are a violation of basic kindness and courtesy — of the concern that Francis extended to even the lowliest of creatures.
It is clear that biomedical technology has moved away from its noble
and compassionate origins, pulled and persuaded by more immediate
desires and images of personal fulfillment. Within the constraints of
the natural world, desires provide directions that motivate and empower
purposeful action. Now, in our technological era, they have increasingly
become ends in themselves — an imperative of indulgence, with all the
disproportions and dangers that implies.
It is not difficult to see where this will go in the absence of a
higher and more compelling ideal. First, the easy satisfaction of our
most infantile and shallow desires, a voluntary trivialization and
enfeeblement of soul. Then, an uninhibited technological exploration of
the aesthetics of the self. We are already somewhat familiar with these
degraded manipulations of natural desire in the personal and social
tragedy of substance abuse, but it seems likely that our advancing
knowledge of neurophysiology and neuropharmacology will deliver
temptations far more difficult to resist.
Equally troubling are the direct social dangers, the pervasive and
open-ended competition with others, where biotechnology is deployed in
the service of vanity and pride, or simply the unbridled quest for
position or power. Building on the principled justifications already
established in the practice of cosmetic surgery, we will seek better babies, more beautiful bodies, and superior performance.
Finally, and most disturbingly, there is at least the possibility
that the powers of biotechnology will be deployed by the state in a
coercive program of social engineering — all in the name of building a
better world. Already we have examples of mandatory genetic screening and forced abortion, and one only need remember what was done in the name of “racial hygiene.”
It has been said that people who worship health will not remain
healthy, but in the depths of our desires we have always dreamed of
something even beyond health. The witness of human history testifies
that when we elevate our natural inclinations to the level of a guide,
when we move along the gradient of desire, we tend toward disproportion
and even perversion — desires become tyrants. And now, in our age, such
disproportions and dangers are dramatically magnified by our
biotechnology.
In light of all this, one can sense a wisdom in the severity and
self-denial that were, for Francis, inseparable from the source of his
joy. He had rediscovered an ancient truth in the inversion of desire,
not as a negation of being but as a positive passion. In the image of
the Lord, he emptied himself and received all things back renewed,
purified, and restored in their divine glory. In his humility and
self-surrender, Francis became more fully human, more free from
temptation and fear, and more free for the fullness of love. Indeed, if G. K. Chesterton is correct,
Francis’s severity of self-denial is most rightly understood as
romance, a special dedication and devotion freely and joyfully given. In
the heroic mode of medieval chivalry, it was for “Lady Poverty” that he
lay down his life.
Suffering and Redemption
Francis’s life of poverty suggests
something far more than just a technique to balance the seduction of the
senses and the errors of emotion. Rather, it points to a spiritual
anthropology that stands as a corrective to the naïve naturalism that is
increasingly employed to describe the human person. Francis understood
that spiritual unity with a divine source and significance is essential
for the fullness of human life and our capacity for genuine altruistic
love. From an evolutionary perspective, acts of altruism are usually
described as a naturally grounded mechanism for sustaining social
solidarity. And generally, within such accounts, the notion of divine
love is considered a mere functional fiction, a projection of the
idealizing imagination. In this sense, the heroic acts of Francis on
behalf of Lady Poverty can be explained away as nothing but a
sublimation of natural inclination. The experience of history, however,
is that self-giving love is an indispensable dimension of human
flourishing and even human survival. Genuine altruism is the crucial
element necessary to sustain shared community and personal peace. And
when it is absent, we find conflict without conciliation, bitterness
without forgiveness, and misfortune without mercy.
Yet, even if we accept the idea that the self-giving spirit of
Francis drew its sustaining power from a divine source, we still face a
dilemma. However much we may wish to simplify and sanitize the story of
St. Francis, an honest reading of the historical record brings us face
to face with dimensions of his spirituality that are remote and
disquieting to the modern mind. The same man that greeted the glory of
the dawn sought out the silence and solitude of the cave, and the same
hands that stretched out in joyous welcome to the little birds, bore,
according to the testimony of his companions, the very marks of the
wounds of Christ. Indeed, Francis had prayed that he would know the pain
of the passion of his Lord, in order to comprehend more fully the depth
and meaning of God’s love. This was no mere moderation or rebalancing
of desire; the spiritual transformation in the life of Francis was a
radical realignment — a recognition that the whole of the present
disposition of creation, in both its beauty and its suffering, is an
unfolding story of sacrifice and redemption.
This acknowledgment of the centrality of suffering in the order of
the natural world does bear a certain superficial similarity to the
picture given by evolutionary theory. Yet in the absence of a coherent
spiritual cosmology, it is not hard to recognize the deep source of the
pessimism and cynicism of our scientific age. The evolutionary panorama
presents the spectacle of unspeakable suffering that is inseparably
woven into the entire fabric of predation and natural catastrophe. A
comprehensive account of the world must reckon with the problem such
suffering poses for any notion of transcendent goodness.
Francis faced this issue by recognizing a sacred order of creation in
which there is a hierarchy of sacrifice, one in which life is sustained
by life — and ultimately, by the willing offering of life in the image
of God’s love. But which of these visions of the source and meaning of
life is true? Which account are we to believe? Torn between the private
lures and longings of self-will and the aspirations of the religious
ideal, the fundamental question arises, “In whose image are we made?” In
the seventeenth century, Pascal would warn that those who sought God
apart from Christ, who went no further than nature, would fall into
atheism. The natural world, with its strife and struggle, poses a
question that it cannot answer: How can there be both suffering and
love?
Yet with this question the deepest meaning of the material world is
opened to understanding. All of creation, and its evolutionary ascent to
mind and moral awareness, may be recognized as a kind of living
language in an epic tale of the deepest spiritual significance. Through
the eyes of faith, the entire cosmic order of time and space and
material being may be seen as an arena for the revelation of Love, for
the creation of a creature capable of ascending to an apprehension of
its Creator; but more profoundly, for the reaching down, the
compassionate condescension of Love Himself.
There within the human form with its capacity for genuine
understanding and empathy, moral truth was revealed in matter; the true
Image of God was borne within a body. In the face of Jesus was made
evident the face of Love, and most specifically in His suffering on the
Cross. Those who looked upon Him felt His pain, yet recognized His
righteousness and knew the injustice of His plight; His was the
ultimate, defining act of altruism.
In this the transcendent was revealed in and through the immanent;
nature and God were reconciled, and the cosmos was restored to its
intelligibility. The fullness of Love was revealed in human form. In
that moment of human history, the entirety of creation was lifted to
another level of meaning. The evolutionary struggle, the seeming
futility of suffering and sacrifice and death itself, was raised to the
possibility of participation in a higher order of being. In the drama of
death and redemptive love — as in both the story of his rescuing the
flock of sheep and the story of his urging his followers to smear the
walls with meat in celebration of the Incarnation — Francis saw the
ultimate design and purpose of creation.
Christian faith is a faith in the God whose nature is Love — an
affirmation that reaches beyond all suffering to the ultimate goodness
of life. It is here that, while decisively denying the pessimism,
cynicism, and amoral implications of a purely naturalistic psychology,
Christianity may at once affirm the reality and positive significance of
the material world and its evolutionary process. In the emergence of
moral nature and the capacity for genuine spiritual understanding,
humanity, as the culmination of creation, is called into communion with
the very life of God, the life of Love.
Torn and tattered, frail and needy, but joyful in the freedom of
love, Francis of Assisi provides a startling juxtaposition to the
ambitions and appetites driving our images of perfection in this age of
biotechnology.
