A Teacher
Francis of Assisi
Radical poverty and love of all creation as the way to union with God
The transmission
Francis of Assisi (c. 1181-1226) was an Italian mystic, preacher, and founder of the Order of Friars Minor, the Franciscans, whose embrace of total poverty and joyful love of the created world reshaped Western Christian spirituality.
Born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone to a prosperous cloth merchant in Assisi, he abandoned his inheritance after a series of conversions in his early twenties, famously stripping off his garments before the bishop to renounce his father’s wealth, and gathered a small band of brothers around a life of evangelical poverty.
The fledgling community received papal approval in 1210, and within his lifetime the movement spread across Italy and beyond, accompanied by the founding of the Poor Clares with Clare of Assisi and a Third Order for laypeople.
Francis is remembered as a mystic of creation who saw the natural world as a mirror of God, addressing the elements and animals as brothers and sisters, a vision distilled in his vernacular poem the Canticle of the Creatures (Canticum Fratris Solis, 1224).
In September 1224, during a retreat on Mount La Verna, he is reported to have received the stigmata, the wounds of the crucified Christ, the first such account in Christian history. He died in 1226 and was canonized two years later in 1228.
His insistence that the self is found by being given away, that grace meets radical surrender, and that the whole cosmos praises its source, made him a touchstone for later contemplatives and a direct influence on the Franciscan mystical lineage.
What they gave
A spirituality of radical poverty: Francis made voluntary poverty, the literal renunciation of property and security, the heart of the Gospel life, founding an order whose identity was the imitation of a poor and humble Christ.
- Creation as sacred kin: In the Canticle of the Creatures he praised God through Brother Sun, Sister Moon, and the elements, articulating a vision of nature as a family of fellow creatures and an enduring root of Christian ecological spirituality.
- The stigmata and mystical identification: His reception of the stigmata on Mount La Verna in 1224 became the paradigm of mystical conformity to the suffering Christ, dramatizing the path of losing the self to find it.
- A lay and contemplative movement: Through the Friars Minor, the Poor Clares, and the Third Order he opened a contemplative, Gospel-centred path to friars, enclosed women, and ordinary laypeople alike.
In their words
The thing you are looking for is the one who is looking.
The line they stand in
Francis drew on the Gospels read with stark literalism, the example of Christ’s poverty and the desert and eremitical traditions of early Christianity, and the penitential currents of his own age. His vision in turn shaped the entire Franciscan school, including Bonaventure, who systematized Franciscan mystical theology, and Clare of Assisi, and it continues to inform modern contemplatives such as Richard Rohr and the wider creation-centred and contemplative-activist strands of Christianity.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- Canticle of the Creatures (Canticum Fratris Solis)1224
- The Rule of 1223 (Regula Bullata)1223
- The Testament1226