Francis of Assisi and the Feminine - Franciscan Institute Publications

10 FRANCIS OF ASSISI AND THE FEMININE
Historians exercise their craft. They historicize. There are
many forgotten figures we would like to resurrect from history,
from the obscurity of the times in which they have
been set. Efforts must be made to retrieve Francis, the wanderer,
brother to the wind. However, a web has been woven
and wafted, into an ever-tighter net. From out of time, Francis
of Assisi, son of Pietro di Bernardone who was born in
1181 and died on October 3, 1226, returns to time. He fills
his times completely, always holding center stage.
The entire Middle Ages are subsumed in Francis, or such
will be the impression of the readers who become immersed
in Franciscan sources. The more they delve into them, the
more plentiful materials they will find, concentrated in the
writings and legends, to build the man from Assisi into a representative
of his time and period. Medieval life with its
landscapes of wild solitude, unchanging rusticity and bustling
cities, and its social order comprising merchant classes
and ambitious aristocracy, self-satisfied wealth alongside absolute
poverty, clerics and laity, literate and illiterate. In the
life of Francis, the quintessential medieval man, we find the
paradoxes of the period, for which he instinctively found
the synthesis – unparalleled conformity to the gospel message.
He was a herald of the future from the Reformation to
today’s struggle against poverty, which can be compared
with 13th century misery. We find ourselves new and willing
victims of the extraordinary Franciscan propaganda,
which has celebrated ever more resolutely the conformity of
the Poverello “to the poor, naked, suffering crucified Christ,
suspended on the cross.” 1 Francis is not a-historical but
rather trans-historical because of his capacity to encapsulate
and assume humanity and human history. In what appears
like a contradiction: the uniqueness of Francis is found in
his similarity; his identity in being identical.
Like Christ his model, captured initially in the writings
of the four evangelists before becoming the center of widely
conflicting interpretations, there are many different interpretations
of Francis. This is evident in the Franciscan
sources themselves, which, since the first century of the Or-