FRANCIS, OF Assist, founder of the 'Franciscan order, and a saint of the Roman Catholic church, was one of the most extraordinary men of his age, and merits a detailed notice, as illustrating in his career all the most remarkable characteristics of the religious life of the middle age. He was born in 1182, of the family called Bernardini, at Assisi, where his father was engaged in trade. His baptismal name was John; but from his familiarity with the Romance, or language of the troubadours, in his youth, he acquired the name of Il Francesco (" The little Frenchman"). In his early years, he was remarkable for his love of gayety and ostentatious prodigality; but even then his bounty to the poor was one of the largest sources of his wastefulness. He engaged eagerly in exercises of chivalry and of arms; and in one of the petty feuds of the time, he was taken prisoner, and detained for a year in captivity at Perugia. An illness which lie there contracted turned his thoughts from earth; and although he again engaged in military pursuits, a second illness at Spoleto decided his career for life. He now resolved to fulfill literally the counsels of the gospel, and he especially devoted himself to poverty, which, in the mystic language thenceforth familiar to him, he desig nated as " his bride." Under an impulse which he received while listening to a sermon, he took a vow never to refuse alms to a beggar. He made a pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Peter at Rome, and there offered to God all that he possessed on earth. On his return to Assisi, lie exchanged his clothes with a poor mendicant; and disregarding all remonstrance and ridicule, he ever afterwards continued to wear the meanest attire. He gave to a priest who was rebuilding a ruined church the price of his horse, which lie sold for the purpose, and even sought to appropriate to the same use the moneys of his father, which, however, the priest refused to accept. To avoid his father's anger, he took refuge in a cave, in which he spent a month in solitary prayer, and from which he returned more than ever confirmed in his enthusiasm. His father, having in vain confined him in a dark room of his own house, cited him before the magistrates, and, on F.'s declining all civil jurisdiction in such a case, before the bishop, in order to compel him to renounce his inheritance. F. abandoned all, even to the very clothes he wore, and then declared that "till now he had been the son of Bernardini, but that henceforth he had but one Father, Him that is in heaven." Thenceforth, no humilia tion was too low for F. ; he begged at the gates of monasteries; he discharged the most menial offices; he served the lepers in the hospital at Gubbio in their most revolting necessities, and with the most tender assiduity. He worked with his own hands at the building of the church of St. Damian, and at that of Sta Maria degli Angeli, which he afterwards called his " Portiuncula," or " little inheritance;" and as the last act of self spoliation, and the final acceptance of the gift of poverty, he threw aside his wallet, his staff, and his shoes, and arrayed himself in a single brown tunic, of coarse woolen cloth, girt with a hempen cord. This was in his 26th year, in 1208. His enthusiasm by degrees excited emulation. Two of his fellow-townsmen, Bernard Quintavalle and Peter Cattano, were his first associates. They were followed, although slowly, by others; and it was not till 1210 that, his brotherhood having now increased to 11 in number, he drew up for them a rule, selected in the true spirit of religious enthusiasm, by thrice opening at random the gospels upon the altar, and taking the passages thus indicated as the basis of the young institute. (Milman's -Latin Christianity iv. 264.) The new brethren repaired to Rome, where their rule was approved (though at first only vied rocs) by pope Innocent III. in 1210. The two following years were spent by the brotherhood in preaching and exhorting the people through the rural districts of their native and the adjoining provinces; and F. himself returned to Assisi in 1212, at which time he finally settled the simple constitution of his order, the church of Sta Maria degli Angeli being assigned to them as their home. In common with the older forms of
monastic life, the Franciscan institute is founded on the three vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience; but of these the second was, in the eyes of F., the first in importance and in spiritual efficacy. In other orders, the practice of poverty consisted in the mere negation of riches. With F., it was an active and positive principle. In other orders, although the individuals could not possess, it was lawful for the community to hold property in common. F. repudiated all idea of property, alike for his order and for its members; he even disclaimed for them the property in those things which they retained for personal use—the clothes which they wore, the cord with which they were girded, the very breviary from which they chanted the divine office. The very impos sibility, to human seeming, of these vows, was their strength. Lumbers crowded to the standard of Francis. He told them off in parties to different provinces of Italy. Five of the brotherhood repaired to Morocco to preach to the Moors, and, as the first martyrs of the order, fell victims to their holy daring. Success removed all the hesita tion with which the institute at first was regarded, and in 1216, the order was solemnly approved by pope Innocent. From this date it increased with extraordinary rapidity. At the first general assembly, held in 1219, 5,000 members were present; 500 more were claimants for admission. F. himself inaugurated the future missionary character of his brotherhood by going (1223) to the east, and preaching the gospel in the presence of the sultan himself; but the only fruit of his mission was a promise from the sultan of more indulgent treatment for the Christian captives, ancl, for the Franciscan order, the privilege which they have since enjoyed, as guardians of the church of the Holy Sepulcher. It is after his return to Italy that his biographers place the celebrated legend, which, to friends or to enemies, has so long been a subject of veneration or of ridicule—his receiving, while in an ecstasy of prayer, the marks (stigmata) upon his own person of the wounds of our Divine Redeemer. The scene of this event is laid on Monte Alverno, a place still sacred in the traditions of the order; and the date is Sept. 17, 1224. Two years later, St. F. died, Oct. 4, 1226. On the approach of his last hour, he requested that he should be carried upon a bier to the church, where he had himself placed on the bare ground, thus realizing in his own death the most literal extreme of the doctrine which he had made in life the basis of his system. He was canonized by pope Gregory IX. in 1228.
The works of St. F. (folio, Pedeponti, 1739) consist of letters, sermons, ascetic trea tises, proverbs, moral apothegms, and hymns. The latter are among the earliest metri cal specimens of the Italian language. They are• exceedingly simple, and full of the tenderest expressions of the love of God. His prose is often more poetical than his poetry itself, abounding in allegory and poetical personification. Few writers have ever turned the love and admiration of external nature to a purpose so beautifully devotional. " Of all the saints," says dean Milman, " St. Francis was the most blameless and gentle." No saint, it may be added, has been the subject of more exaggerated panegyric from the writers of his order; and one of the works in his praise—a parallel between St. F. and our divine Redeemer—is disowned by the Roman Catholic community as a most reprehensible exaggeration, the fruit of an affectionate, but most misdirected zeal for the memory of the founder of the Franciscan order.
See the Bollandist, Acta Sanctorum, Oct. 4; St. Bonaventure's Life of St. Francis, with Wadding's notes; Helyot, Hist. des O•dres 1?eligieux, tom. vii. ; Butler's Lines of Saints, Oct. 4; Milman's Latin, Christianity, vol. iv. ; Gieseler's Church History, vol. iii.; Hase's Plane von Assisi; Mrs. Oliphant's P. of Assisi (1871).