The Last Christian
McCauley, Michael F
The most popular saint THE LAST CHRISTIAN A BIOGRAPHY OF FRANCIS OF ASSISI Adolf H611 Doubleday, $12.95, 278 pp. Michael F. McCauley No saint is as popular as Francis of Assisi. Rembrandt,...
...What someone with conviction could do then has now become an anachronism...
...Admittedly, few can imitate this sort of life...
...As a matter of fact, almost one hundred years after Francis's death, the first radical Franciscans who rigorously adhered to his ideal of poverty were burned at the stake in Marseilles...
...This time, Francis actually did give in to the "organizers...
...Throughout The Last Christian, Holl resolutely refuses to see Francis "through the eyes of clerical functionaries...
...Lenin is said to have died with Francis's name on his lips...
...Rembrandt, though personally alienated by devotion to saints, painted him...
...Obstinately, Francis contended with his bourgeois ego - for twenty years, up until his death...
...He simply could not fit into the institutional church...
...Pope Gregory IX -as Cardinal Ugolino, he had been Francis's protector and Vatican connection- yielded to popular demand and canonized Francis only two years after his death...
...Officially, "it was heresy, the Pope declared for all time, to assert that Christ and the Apostles had no personal or collective property...
...Yes, his memory has often been sentimentalized by insipid holy-card artists and banalized by backyard birdbaths...
...He died near Assisi, almost blind, totally exhausted, and widely revered as a saint...
...Francis emerges as a fool (his own word)-"the sort of man who takes the powerful of this world by the arm, as a child might, to tell them the truth-with a force that stuns them to silence...
...Conflicts and hostilities threatened the solidarity of his companions who by this time numbered in the thousands...
...Before long he had several companions, and eventually secured papal approval for his brotherhood (fellowship, society, alliance-religio in medieval Latin...
...REVIEWERS DENNIS O'BRIEN is president of Bucknell University and the author of Hegel on Reason and History (University of Chicago Press...
...Francis's consciousness of his individual identity made him what he was and at the same time caused him much grief...
...Nevertheless, in a way that can be compared only with Jesus, Francis has remained a haunting figure...
...During that time he experienced sudden illuminations and "overpowering certitude...
...Holl points out that the same Gregory IX also codified the Inquisition's procedures against heretics (1223...
...Somehow Francis awakens in us a kind of pain that draws us to him...
...Jack Kerouac selected him as the patron of the Beat generation...
...After Francis, no one ever took Jesus with such stubborn literalness...
...we sense his presence in us as one of the repressed longings of our bourgeois existence, and as the memory of a debt that has never been paid...
...For Holl, the explanation for this attraction is that Francis "is a part of us all...
...Now, the often-controversial Austrian theologian Adolf H611 argues quite convincingly that Francis was the "last Christian" to seriously try to live out the Gospel mandate of total, voluntary poverty...
...Holl sees Francis struggling with the "loneliness of bourgeois existence...
...At twenty-six, he began preaching about the need for repentance...
...In his mid-twenties, he had publicly dissociated himself from his father and taken to living on charity...
...But underlying these remarkably contradictory qualities, Francis consistently refused to play games or give ground...
...He rejected the establishment of a rule in favor of simplicity - "the Lord wanted me to be his simpleton...
...Thomas More Association...
...He named a deputy and retired to a lonely, out-of-the-way mountain...
...MICHAEL F. McCAULEY is the author of A Contemporary Meditation on Doubting...
...Still, in his obscure and undramatic way, Francis has spoken to the numberless common people who over the course of the centuries have felt strangely captivated by him...
...And Sir Kenneth Clark hailed Francis, despite his complete lack of theological training, as Europe's greatest religious genius...
...He had a crazy stubbornness, denying himself all personal possessions except "a pair of drawers, a hooded robe, and a rope around his belly.'' Even these meager items of clothing he all too often gave away to those in greater need...
...ABIGAIL McCarthy writes a regular column for Commonweal...
...But Francis found peace only at the end, in the form of a final, shattering denial of his body - the stigmata...
...These two moves-a "two-pronged bureaucratic operation" Holl calls it - granted the people a blessed wonder-worker for their quiet veneration, but reserved the interpretation of his teaching to the proper church officials...
...In short, he ambitiously practiced the science of social climbing-downward...
...Chesterton called him "the world's one sincere democrat," and the "first hero of humanism...
...Despite the official hagiographic pieties and even Holl's pseudo-socialist rhetoric, we still follow after this madman saint, hoping that the wolf who threatens to devour us, like the wolf that threatened the citizens of Gubbio.may yet be tamed...
...On the rare occasions when he spoke of himself, he always used the diminutive, calling himself "your little brother Francis...
...In this way, Holl maintains, "the authorities managed to neu-tralize the 'dangerous' elements in Francis's personality...
...Francis, after all, was a strange individual: an obedient rebel, an earnest clown, an unworldly activist, an asceti-cal master of the arts of life, a restless wise man, a convivial penitent, a humble authoritarian...
...In effect, Francis was "retroactively declared a heretic...
...Arnold Toynbee compared him not only to Jesus, but also to Buddha...
...After ten years of wandering - he visited the Holy Land, among other places-he returned home to face a crisis...
...Although Francis would seem to be among the world's losers-a pre-modern person who decisively rejected "modern times"'-he has not fallen into oblivion...
...In fact Holl considers Francis neither a saint nor a heretic,' 'Gregory IX notwithstanding...
...Of course, Francis's cult, of "Lady Poverty" could not realistically survive him...
...He steadfastly refused, until he could hold out no longer, the institutionalizing of his brothers into a religious order...
...In comparison with the popes and emperors of his time, the forty-four years of his life (1182-1226) were uneventful, almost hidden, provincial...
...Her books include Private Faces, Public Places and Circles: A Washington Story (Doubleday...
Vol. 109 • January 1982 • No. 1
