The Perceived Conflict between Inspiration and Institution

At the outset, it is worth remembering that the way modern historians usually study and teach the history of a religious order presents a barrier to understanding the true relationship between an institution and the story of its foundation. Historical thinking often privileges chronology of events, rather than chronology of the composition of sources. Modern histories of religious orders invariably begin with the founder, with that inevitable first chapter on Francis of Assisi or Dominic of Guzman.Footnote ³ To construct the image of the saint accurately, a historian gathers all the information currently available to her by skimming the hagiographical vitae for their historical truth content.Footnote ⁴ When the writings of the founder are extant, they are placed on a pedestal and deemed the most accurate source of all.Footnote ⁵ At this point, the scene is already set. An image of the founder is erected at the beginning, one considered as the most faithful to the actual, and as the embodiment of the initial inspiration. The reader is enlisted for the historian's journey. From this point, successive chapters recounting the development of the order are read in the light of that first chapter, in the light of the acts and intentions of the founder. As pages are turned, with each new statute, each new direction or hint of a new mentality, the historian feels compelled to establish for themselves and the reader whether that novelty is compatible with the original vision of the founder. Similarly, as they inform the readers dutifully of each new source concerning the life of the founder emerging in the medieval period, there seems to be an urgent necessity to establish the trustworthiness of that source, based on the degree to which its content agrees with the historian's depiction of the founder as revealed in the first chapter.Footnote ⁶

The historian's understanding of the history of a religious order with its neat chronological progression from inspiration to institution has no parallel in the experience of the medieval friar. No medieval Franciscan had access to the entire corpus of Francis's writings, as his writings, with the exception of the Rule and the Testament, did not circulate in the friaries, nor were they bound together in a single volume in the way they are available to today's historian in the modern editions.Footnote ⁷ The great majority of friars joined the order in lands far from Umbria, and their access to oral testimonies would also be limited. What Francis meant to these friars is difficult to establish, other than that he was the author of the Rule which they professed, and that his holiness had been formally sanctioned by the papacy. In fact, in the fellow mendicant order of Dominicans, Dominic himself was not initially an inspirational figure. When he died in 1221, the friars were not particularly interested in preserving his memory. During the twelve years until his canonization in 1233, he was largely ignored and forgotten by the Dominican friars, a fact that has been pointed out by historians of the order. The only work in this period containing information about Dominic was written in 1232–3 by Jordan of Saxony, the second master general of the order, and is titled Little Book on the Beginning of the Order of Friars Preachers. Footnote ⁸ The story of the foundation of the order was regarded more as a collective undertaking, rather than one about Dominic acting as founder. This narrative changed dramatically upon his canonization in 1233, and within twenty-five years of his canonization four legendae had been composed on St Dominic.Footnote ⁹

Both Dominic and Francis left us very little that originated from their pens, and what we have are mostly letters or texts of a theological or devotional nature. Even when we have access to the original writings of the founding saint, these represent what the order chose to protect, circulate and preserve. We, as modern scholars, have no direct access to those oral testimonies, or to the words and deeds of founder saints that have not been created, controlled or mitigated by the institution itself. Their lives were always written after their death. Thus, whatever is left to posterity concerning the founder is, in the majority of cases, only that which those at the helm of those institutions wanted people to know about that particular individual, whom they presented to the world as the inspiration behind their institution.

It is therefore rather surprising when historians sometimes point to a clash or conflict between the founder's ideals and the institution itself. This was, for example, the narrative arc of Paul Sabatier's famous book La Vie de Saint François, first published in 1893.Footnote ¹⁰ This book fundamentally changed the perception of Franciscan history, and has made such a powerful impact that even to this day its main argument remains influential: namely, that Francis was a truly Jesus-like, incorruptible revolutionary who wished to reform a rich and corrupt church, but whose movement was hijacked by a spiritually compromised papacy and by the intellectuals who became Franciscans. Collaborating with each other, in Sabatier's reading, the papacy and the administrators of the order suppressed the true memory of Francis to quash any dissent within the order, as they slowly transformed the Franciscan movement into a tool for the ecclesiastical power and machinery.Footnote ¹¹

In the preface to his book, Sabatier laid out the heart of his argument:

A similar conspiratorial trend can also be observed in studies on the history of the Dominican Order. Akin to the charges levelled by Sabatier against the medieval Franciscan establishment, in 1997 Vladimir Koudelka argued that ‘the historical image of Dominic was distorted soon after his death and adapted, especially by Dominicans, to suit current trends of fashion’.Footnote ¹³ This interpretation assumes that there are two images of Dominic. One is the image of him before his death that, according to Koudelka, is the true image, and the other his posthumous image that has been distorted. But how do we access Dominic's image before his death, let alone know that it is the true image, when we have only two formal letters written by Dominic himself, with the rest of the evidence comprising episcopal and papal charters and bulls?

Going back to Sabatier's words about the priest being the antithesis of the saint, the fault-line that renders such a statement problematic is Sabatier's failure to recognize that there are no saints without priests sitting down writing their lives, collecting their miracles and preparing thick dossiers of canonization to be sent to the Roman Curia. Of course there were local cults that sprang up amidst the people, and the writing of the saint's life in most cases followed the formation of a local cult, but those lives written by the clergy nevertheless preserved the eccentricities of the saint, and his extraordinary (in many ways supernatural) actions; it is through those texts that subsequent generations, including modern historians, learned about the saint. If, as Sabatier says, the saint appears to be the antithesis of the priest, it is because the priest described him so. If nothing in the saint's apparel proclaimed his mission, it is because the priest told us that the saint's clothing was plain and simple. Moreover, the priests not only wrote the lives of the saints, they also preserved, copied and circulated those texts; they extracted and used them in their sermons to the faithful, and in the readings at the refectory and chapterhouse. The truth is that educated medieval churchmen were not afraid to create hagiographical discourses that could be in blatant contradiction to what was actually happening in institutional practice.

Let us turn to the Franciscan evidence. The medieval Order of Friars Minor produced no less than four lives of Francis within fifty years of his death. The first three were all written by the same friar, Thomas of Celano. The First Life (Vita Prima) was commissioned by Pope Gregory IX for the purpose of Francis's canonization. The second life, which was discovered by Jacques Dalarun in 2014, was written at the instigation of the second general minister of the order, Brother Elias.Footnote ¹⁴ The third, known as Vita Secunda, was commissioned by the general chapter of the order in 1244 and completed in 1246–7. A fourth life known as Legenda Maior was written by the great Franciscan theologian Bonaventure of Bagnoregio while he was minister general of the order, after having been commissioned by the general chapter. These are the so-called official lives of Francis. Then there are the unofficial lives, those which Sabatier thought to reflect the true Francis: these are Anonymous of Perugia, Legend of the Three Companions and Assisi Compilation, which are believed to have been authored by Francis's immediate companions.Footnote ¹⁵ However, the first two of these draw heavily on the first and second lives by Celano, while the third life by Celano draws on the Legend of the Three Companions. Accordingly, there are many anecdotes common to the official and unofficial lives and, as they borrow heavily from one another, in many instances it is almost impossible to say who has borrowed from whom. In fact, the question of authorship and date of composition of the unofficial lives has been termed ‘the Franciscan Question’ and has occupied considerable scholarly energy.Footnote ¹⁶

Since Sabatier's work, it has been a running contention in Franciscan historiography that the unofficial and official lives describe Francis differently, with some scholars, such as Sabatier, believing that the latter distorted his image to conform to the order's contemporary position and vision. In fact, we need not look at the unofficial lives to see how Francis's image differed from what the institution had become. Celano's Second Life includes several instances where the contrast between the saint and the contemporary institution is made quite explicit. By the time this work was written, in 1246, the order had already gone through a significant transformation with regard to learning. Schools had been established in many friaries and friars were being trained in theology; moreover, the entire administration of the order was chosen from among educated men. The order's 1239 constitutions even included a clause stating that no ignorant, illiterate person was to be accepted to the novitiate. Nonetheless, Thomas of Celano wrote about Francis:

And again:

Though Thomas is quick to point out that Francis did not dislike the study of Scripture, these passages are quite condemnatory of books and the pursuit of learning. If a friar was a preacher before he joined the order, let him preach, but those who were not should not strive to become one, Francis says. But, as the order at the time was specifically training friars to become preachers, why include such a paragraph? One might propose that such statements might represent a personal intervention on the part of Thomas himself, but as Mary Carruthers reminds us authority only half belongs to the author, while the other half is the creation of the society or community that values the work.Footnote ¹⁹ The authority of Thomas's composition was bestowed on it by the general chapter as the representative body of the Franciscan community. If the general chapter of the order had seen a contradiction between the institutional practice and Francis's stand on books, studying and preaching as expressed by Thomas, they surely could have altered those words, or deleted them altogether.

Consequently, an important question for the historian is why a religious order chose to describe its founding saint in contradiction with institutional practice; so differently, in fact, that centuries later historians like Sabatier peering over these records could point to that difference and blame the institution for not being like its saint. If we, so removed from that age, can perceive in our minds the difference between a Francis with his patched habit, no property and living solely on alms, and the rich institutional church personified by the silk garments of popes and cardinals, or between an uneducated Francis and the eloquent friars holding chairs of theology at Paris and running the order, that difference must have been much more apparent to medieval men and women. Thus, we must question why the order behaved as it did, championing an image that would create such a rift. Why write and circulate the story of Francis's life, and declare him a saint with the greatest urgency? Why risk being blamed for abandoning the ideals of Francis?

Whilst this contradiction might appear problematic to the secularized modern historian, the medieval intelligentsia might have a different opinion. In the mental world of the medieval churchman, the apparent conflict, while real, does not necessarily mean that the institution fell short of what it set out to do, or failed in fulfilling the founder's inspiration. One does not need to reconcile the inspiration and the institution, because the inspiration is divine and the institution is worldly; it is therefore expected and normal that they will differ in their methods of operation, but not in what they try to achieve. The contrast is in their means, but not in their ends.

In Christian theology, the divine often stands in stark contrast to what is worldly. According to Scripture, God works in mysterious ways; that is to say, we in this world recognize the divine, because the divine is unexpected and supernatural. The Christian divine realm is based on an inversion of all customary social value judgements, hence ‘blessed are the poor’ and ‘the last shall be first’. It is where a man born in a stable becomes the king; where virgins give birth; where ‘a poor, little, contemptible, ignorant’ man, as the bishop of Terni described Francis of Assisi to the eager crowds at the town square, becomes one of the greatest saints. This contrast underpinned the hagiographical literature, as in many saints’ lives, with the declaration of the saints’ earthly status as noble, of wealthy families or learned is followed immediately by their voluntary self-abasement and humility as evidence of their holiness. The saints’ subscription to an inversion of social values then becomes the true sign of their belonging to the divine realm.Footnote ²⁰ The hagiographical tradition, going back to Gregory of Tours, depicted the saint as one who lived simultaneously in both divine and earthly realms.Footnote ²¹

Those who were at the helm of medieval ecclesiastical institutions understood and seemingly accepted this inevitable difference between the divine model and its earthly embodiment. An institution associated with a saint imitates the ends of the deeds of the saint, but not the specific ways in which the saint operated. Accordingly, an institution should also be providing the worldly means and tools, the infrastructure, with which those virtues can be imitated and acquired.

Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, the minister general of the Franciscan Order from 1257–74, and one of its most important theologians, preached about Francis of Assisi on his feast day to the student friars at Paris in 1255:

It has been often suggested that the main function of hagiographical literature is to provide a role model for the faithful. However, here, by inserting the comment, ‘in that, he is more to be praised and wondered at than imitated’, Bonaventure invites his audience to a different kind of engagement with Francis as saint. We are to recognize Francis's extraordinary wisdom, but cannot hope to acquire it the way he or St Paul did, that is, directly from God.Footnote ²³ That particular gift of Francis had belonged to the realm of the divine, and as Bonaventure says, Francis's disciples will have to be taught by ‘human’ teachers. In fact, the Franciscan administration in the years between 1230 and 1260 worked quite diligently to achieve this particular end, establishing a school network in the order to teach the friars doctrinal wisdom.

If saints embody the inspiration, their special status as those who belonged to the divine realm creates a distinct gap between them and the institutions they inspired, as the latter firmly belongs to the earthly realm. This made the relationship between the founder and the order, between inspiration and institution, much more complex than linear thinking about the saint as a model.

The Saint as the Sign of Divine Approval for the Order

If an important function of a saint's life is to educate the reader in virtues or vices, another and perhaps more important one is to demonstrate in the strongest possible terms the holiness of the saint. We are well aware that most of the saints’ lives are accompanied by an account of their miracles, which may be woven into the main narrative of a saint's life, or may, as in the case of the lives of both Francis and Dominic, be recounted in a separate section on miracles. There is certainly more than one reason for these miracle stories to be attached to the lives. One is, of course, the case for canonization: without miracles, particularly post-mortem ones, no one can be canonized. For those lives which were intended not for the Roman Curia but for a different audience, such as the friars themselves or external critics of the order, there is another purpose. In the case of a religious institution, the miracles and the sanctity of its founder are simultaneously the proof of the order's claim to holiness and of the divine approval it enjoys. For Bonaventure, Francis's stigmata were not merely a sure sign of Francis's sanctity but also the strongest proof that his movement was divinely approved, since, by the time he had received the stigmata in 1224, the order was already well developed. Thus, Bonaventure preached to his fellow friars:

This last sentence explains very well why friars sought to control the image of Francis. Bonaventure was preaching this sermon in October 1255, in the midst of the first great tribulation that would lead to the long secular-mendicant dispute in the University of Paris. As Bonaventure was preaching these words, a group of the secular masters was on its way from Paris to Rome to secure a condemnation of a work by a Franciscan friar, Introduction to the Everlasting Gospel by Gerard of Borgo San Donnino. This apocalyptic work claimed the friars as the new saviours, exalting the status of the friars to the top of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. From the events that followed, it can be deduced that there must already have been much discussion in Parisian circles of Gerard's work and of the friars’ status in the church. Five months after Bonaventure's sermon to the friars, the secular master William St Amour, who headed the effort to condemn Gerard's work, published a long think-piece On the Dangers of the Last Days, in which he called into question the legitimacy of the mendicant movement as a whole.Footnote ²⁵ What was also implicitly being called into question by William and other like-minded secular masters was the sanctity of Francis and of his Rule, adopted by the friars.

Sabatier has argued that Bonaventure's Legenda Maior focused disproportionately on Francis's miracles and God-given powers at the expense of the story of the real man himself who had to face many tragedies.Footnote ²⁶ Following him, other historians have also assumed that Bonaventure, as a representative of the order's administrative body, and later a cardinal bishop, had distorted Francis's image, while the Spiritual discourse remained loyal to the true Francis.Footnote ²⁷ However, Bonaventure's focus on Francis's miracles and in particular his stigmata should be understood within the polemical context of the times. One might think that the fact of Francis's canonization in 1228 would have quashed such disputes as those described above even before they started, but it did not. There was a renewed need to defend the Franciscan life and to rebrand it as an extension of the sanctity of Francis, which was much more important than his everyday actions or tribulations. By demonstrating forcefully to the world that their founder was among the divine collegium of saints, the friars would position themselves far more securely within the religious universe.

Nevertheless, Bonaventure borrowed heavily from Thomas of Celano's lives of Francis. He had good reason to do so as Thomas was evidently a gifted hagiographer, who had absorbed well the norms of this genre. Scholars who have studied Celano's lives of Francis have found that they contain elements from the Life of Martin of Tours, Gregory the Great's Life of St Benedict (among his Dialogues), and the Life of Bernard of Clairvaux (begun by William of St Thierry and completed by Geoffrey of Auxerre), as well as Athanasius's life of St Anthony of Egypt.Footnote ²⁸ This heavy borrowing from other saints’ lives should come as no surprise to the student of hagiography. As Heffernan has stated succinctly: ‘For sacred biographers, there existed a veritable thesaurus of established approved actions which they could employ in their texts. The repetition of actions taken from Scripture or from earlier saints’ lives (often this practice extended to appropriating the exact language) ensured the authenticity of the subject's sanctity.’Footnote ²⁹ Francis was to be followed, not because of who he really was as a human being, but because he had been taught and sent by God, and no suspicion could be shed on Francis's Rule if it could be demonstrated beyond doubt that he was indeed one of the saints of the church.

Nevertheless, it is to a degree understandable that Bonaventure's biography has garnered special – or perhaps sceptical is a better word – attention in Franciscan historiography, and there is good reason for that. It was the general chapter of Narbonne in 1260 that commissioned Bonaventure to write a new life of Francis, and Bonaventure was at that time the minister general of the order presiding over that chapter. He completed the Legenda Maior in three years and presented it to the general chapter of 1263, when it was decided that all previous lives of Francis written by Thomas of Celano should be removed from the friaries and replaced by the Legenda written by Bonaventure. This, of course, immediately begs the question of why this was done. Why were friars not allowed to keep Celano's lives, which had been approved by previous general chapters? After all, as has been seen above, Bonaventure draws heavily on Celano, and it would therefore be a stretch to say that the two works are all that different in terms of content. Indeed, the modern critical editions of the Legenda Maior demonstrate that Bonaventure had genuinely sought out all the testimonies on the life of Francis. He made extensive use not only of the official lives but also of the other extant testimonies, such as the Legend of the Three Companions and the Assisi Compilation.Footnote ³⁰

What Bonaventure does differently from Thomas of Celano is to keep direct citations from Francis to a minimum, choosing rather to paraphrase and tending to add passages at the end of each anecdote which draw a moral or spiritual lesson. For example, in chapter 11 of the Legenda, Bonaventure tells a story of how a wicked canon becomes crippled. This canon comes to Francis for healing, but Francis warns him that if he falls back into sin, God's wrath will be upon him. And indeed, once Francis has removed his ailment, the canon returns to his wicked ways. As a result, shortly thereafter, he dies when a room collapses. At the end of the narration of the story, Bonaventure adds a short commentary: ‘Therefore, by a just judgment of God, the last state of that man became worse than the first because of his vice of ingratitude and his contempt for God. Since gratitude must be shown for forgiveness received, an offense repeated doubles displeasure.’ Such examples, in which a tale about Francis ends with a moral lesson expounded by Bonaventure, abound in the Legenda Maior. In fact, it might be pertinent to call Bonaventure's work a glossa ordinaria to Thomas of Celano's vitae of Francis. Such a reframing of Bonaventure's work can indeed explain why the Franciscan Order wanted to remove the texts of Thomas of Celano. This was not so much an erasure of Thomas's work, since much of its content has been repeated in Bonaventure's life, but rather a means of conveying a particular moral message portrayed on the basis of Francis's words and deeds. As such, Bonaventure's work can be regarded as a mechanism of control, but this is certainly inherent in the nature of all medieval glossae, insofar as any commentary on a text is essentially an attempt to mix its meaning in accordance with the commentator's ideological framework. If the Bible, accepted as the most perfect of all inspirational and authoritative texts, could not be read in the schools without a commentary or gloss, how much more was there a need to read other inspirational religious texts such as hagiographical vitae with a similar aid. It is not hard to imagine that a scholastic theologian such as Bonaventure would look at the paragraph from Thomas which quotes Francis as saying ‘books are useless’ and interpret that in a completely different way. We can imagine him thinking that Francis could not possibly mean here any book, but only those books which do not in any way contribute to our knowledge or love of God, such as a book on medicine or magic that has no bearing on salvation. After all, the Bible itself is a book, so it is impossible that Francis meant all books. For Bonaventure then, just as the gospels needed the commentary of theologians, Francis's vitae also needed exposition, lest friars derive contradictory meanings from passages or proceed to understand it literally.

The Complexity of an ‘Origins’ Narrative

In his influential work, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe, Hayden White famously argued that writing history is at the same time the construction of an artificial narrative story with a beginning and an end.Footnote ³¹ Historical narratives have a plot to support a particular argument or a moralistic purpose. This latter would also be determined by the ideological framework in which the historian operates, whether liberal, devoutly religious or Marxist. When we examine the history of a medieval religious institution with respect to its presupposed inspiration, we are dealing with a double layer of narrative construction. On one hand, we have the medieval friars constructing a narrative about their founder written in a medieval Christian ideological framework. Bonaventure, as an official representative of his order, unmistakably provides us with what White would call a Romantic plot, that is, a plot where ‘the hero transcends the world of experience, gains victory over it’ and achieves self-liberation and redemption.Footnote ³² Answering the question of how friars reconcile Francis's lack of education with the focus on education in the order, Bonaventure wrote: ‘I confess before God, that this is what has made me love the way of life of St Francis: that it is like both the beginning and the perfection of the Church, which first started from fishermen and afterwards advanced to the most renowned and skilful doctors.’Footnote ³³ Thus Francis's earthly journey is a story of triumph, and his order shares the same historical arc: its story too is triumphant.

On the other hand, we have modern historians operating in diverse ideological frameworks (Protestant, Catholic or non-religious), who read these hagiographical accounts and come up with an alternative story featuring a variety of plots, such a ‘satirical’ plot in the dramatic world of Sabatier, whereby Francis's movement passes through many tribulations chronicled by the likes of Angelo Clareno and in part falls a victim to grand ecclesiastical politics. The ‘satirical’ plot chronicles the tribulations of the hero and his inability to fulfil what he sets out to do, beaten by the forces of nature.Footnote ³⁴ Sabatier's is a tortured Francis, doubtless himself a saint, who nevertheless failed to reform the church or even his own order, and died a bitter death.

By constructing the plot as such, Sabatier has no hesitation in seeing a chronological arc beginning with Francis and proceeding with the Franciscans. Having also written prior to the publication of Herbert Grundmann's Religious Movements of the Middle Ages, Sabatier largely ignored the influence on Francis of twelfth-century evangelical movements, which are now acknowledged to be the true forerunners of the mendicant orders.Footnote ³⁵ In a recent article, Augustine Thompson, one of the most recent biographers of St Francis of Assisi, has shown how much the Franciscan movement as whole, considering its early aspects of mendicancy, manual labour, penance and evangelical preaching, was in debt to religious figures who preceded Francis.Footnote ³⁶

If we are to accept White's theory of emplotment, what or whom we usually consider a historical ‘inspiration’ is a necessary invention to provide an augural beginning to a narrative of progression. At times, an institution might have difficulty in locating an inspirational beginning, a foundational moment, in its history. It might choose to ascribe its beginning to a collective enterprise rather than to a single individual. However, in the particular case of a medieval religious order such as the Franciscans, it made a lot of sense to locate the inspiration in the person of Francis alone, who had already been declared a saint in 1228. His holiness having been sanctioned by the highest ecclesiastical authority, Francis was the perfect founder to serve as a means of legitimation and glorification of an institution that had its true origins in the twelfth-century evangelical movements.