I gave a short lecture in the God, Economy, and Poverty class at Vanderbilt yesterday. Here is the manuscript.
Most of us know about St. Francis of Assisi because of the little statues of him that occupy our gardens. He is usually standing in an unassuming posture, gently holding a bird, gazing at it lovingly. There are all sorts of stories about St Francis and animals, about how he cared for the smallest of them, how they loved him and followed him around while he ministered, about how he took the command at the end of the Gospel of Mark seriously: “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature.” In the Catholic Church, St. Francis is the patron saint of animals and the environment.
I want to suggest, however, that St. Francis’ love for animals, for the small and innocent creatures of the earth, which could easily be sentimentalized, is but one manifestation of a life totally given over to works of love for all who are small, all who are poor, all who lack possessions like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. I want to suggest that St. Francis surrounded himself with animals because he saw in them in them a vision of the poverty of God, a freedom for life not dependent on possessions, a freedom that lives by giving and receiving, rather than by possessing.
What this means and how it relates to our concerns in this class I hope to make clear in what follows.
1. Who was St. Francis?
St. Francis of Assisi was a Catholic friar who lived at the end of the eleventh century into the beginning of the twelfth century (1181/2—1226). He was the son of a wealthy Italian clothing merchant, and he founded the Franciscan Order of friars who are know for their commitment to voluntary poverty. He also assisted in founding the woman’s Order of St. Claire, and he founded a lay order called the Third Order of St. Francis.
As a youngster, St. Francis had a taste for a life of privilege, and hoped to make a living as a knight. For various reasons, he abandoned this path and committed himself instead to a life with and for the poor. Various stories are told about Francis’ conversion to a life of poverty. All of them involve in one way or another his encounter with Jesus’ calls in the Gospels to reject wealth and possessions and spend oneself on the poor. Francis’ conversion, moreover, was not simply an act of personal piety. Francis came to love the poor; he came to understand his life as inconceivable apart from a commitment to poverty. When asked if he would ever marry, he said that he had found a bride more lovely than any woman. Her name was “Lady Poverty.
So Francis spent his life organizing and re-organizing religious orders whose aim was to proclaim the Gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, by living a life beyond the quest for possessions and riches.
2. St. Francis’ Voluntary Begging
The hallmark of St. Francis’ commitment to life with and for the poor is the practice of voluntary begging. Voluntary begging, for Francis, is the act of intentionally and publically relying on the charity of others for the sake of one’s livelihood. Voluntary beggars in the Franciscan sense pursue begging not as a form self-flagellation or personal deprivation, but actually as a mode of the good life. For St. Francis, voluntary begging is not a personal or private decision to promote his own holiness; through his begging he is commending and proclaiming the possibility of a certain way of organizing public, social life. It is incredibly difficult for us with our moral and economic assumptions to get our minds around this, but let me try to help.
It is crucial to know the social and economic context of St. Francis’s life. He lived at the tail-end of the eleventh century and the beginning of the twelfth. In the eleventh century, Europe was experiencing the rapid emergence of a new money or market economy. As the international trade industry began to grow, one’s livelihood and wealth became increasingly divorced from land, heredity, tradition, custom, and even work. Economy became increasingly detached from these “on the ground” realities and was handed over instead to the self-regulating market, the ultimate goal of which was to produce not actual, material goods for human beings, but rather this ethereal thing we call “money.” Society and economics became increasingly detached from a moral vision, and were instead allowed to regulate themselves by way of the sheer pursuit of “money.”
We have to understand Francis’ act of voluntary begging as a subversion of this emerging money economy. Francis was acutely aware that a society based on the sheer pursuit of wealth as money is deeply de-human. In such a society people themselves become increasingly invisible, becoming simply means to the end of economic wealth. The poor especially become invisible. They become unthinkable in a money economy. We no longer have obligations to them. Francis’s practice of begging is a public act of binding himself to the poor in protest of this invisibility of the poor. Francis even instructed his friars to abhor the actual physical entity of money. They were not allowed to touch it. They were called instead to bind themselves out of love to their physical neighbors.
Yet voluntary begging, for Francis, is not simply an act of protest. It is a positive witness to the possibility that society can be organized around gift rather than possession and gain. Begging, for Francis, was not about getting money to establish oneself in a market economy. It was about subverting the entire logic of a market economy in favor of an economy of gift or grace. Francis did not beg for money; as I said he abhorred the stuff. He begged instead for the means with which to undertake loving life with others—food, clothes, tools for working, animals, etc. (there is wonderful story about St. Francis and a sheep that I can’t go into here). Voluntary begging, for Francis, is meant to instigate cycles of public, shared gift-giving. The goal of voluntary begging is not to denigrate work or exchange, but to set these practices within a context of generosity, gift, forgiveness, friendship, and freedom. What holds society together is not the raw pursuit of money, but loving attention to one’s neighbor, whoever they be.
There is a famous episode from Francis’ life: Having angered his father (the clothing merchant) by giving away the proceeds from a sale, Francis took off all his clothes in the public square and gave them to his father, who of course remained quite angry. Without needing to speak, to say a word, this public act called forth charity, as it is said that the bishop went to Francis and covered him with his own robe. Francis’ poverty here is about publically calling for the act of gift-giving, which alone constitutes the possibility of a humane society. (This, by the way, is the context for the statement, sometimes attributed to Francis, preach at all times, if necessary use words.)
3. Theological Vision
Let me conclude by asking, what theological vision underlies this way of acting in the world?
The meaning of life, Christians have always said in one way or another, is friendship with God. To be a creature is to be summoned to live the life of God, to become godlike, to be sanctified as some say, or as others say, to be deified. If we take St. Francis’ life of poverty as an icon of friendship with God, perhaps we can say the following, which is something I hinted at earlier. What makes God to be God is that God is poor. God has no possessions, because God is sheer life, sheer self-giving Love. To be God is to have life only in the act throwing Godself away in Love. God creates not to possess us, but to free us for friendship with God and each other. In Jesus we find God binding Godself to the poor, so that God can teach us all how to become poor, how to live without possessions, for the sake of life.
And so to become Godlike means to renounces one’s possessions for the sake of giving life to others. It does not mean that we condescend to the poor, hoping to bring them up to our more acceptable level simply by giving them possessions. It means that we bind ourselves to the poor, becoming poor ourselves, in order to discover what it means to live in the way of love.
This, I take it, is the witness of St. Francis.
