Dante's Saint Francis: Poverty, Humility, and Simplicity

As servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance . . . as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything (2 Cor 6:4, 10).

Although Franciscans and Dominicans were historically at odds with each other, in terms of their theologies and their intellectual premises, Dante authorizes an intersection of voices in Paradiso 11 and 12 to highlight the fact that both orders “labored to a single end” and together maintained “the steadfast course of Peter’s bark upon the sea” (Par. 11.42, 120).[1] He thus fittingly employs a chiasmus to permit the interdependence of two differing perspectives by having a Franciscan tell the life of a Dominican and a Dominican tell the life of a Franciscan. While each life has much to offer, my main focus will be on the latter—Aquinas’s hagiography of Francis comprised of 75 lines or 25 tercets (Par. 11.43–117). More precisely, I will highlight the Franciscan spiritual ideals of poverty, humility, and simplicity found within the longest purely biographical sketch in the Commedia.

Francis’s hagiography begins with a geographical description of where he was born. We all know that Francis was born in Assisi, but Dante places him specifically in “Porta Sole,” which translates to “the gate of the sun.” “Porta Sole” sets up a commanding metaphor to triangulate the sun, Christ, and Francis in the next two tercets:

From this slope, where it interrupts
its steep descent, a sun rose on the world,
as from the Ganges our sun sometimes does.

Therefore, let anyone who would speak of this place
not say Ascesi, which would convey too little,
but call it Orient, to sound its proper worth (Par. 11.49–54).

Francis is called “the sun” in order to connect him directly to the heaven that provides heat and light to the universe. Just as Christ illuminates the cosmos, so too does Francis illuminate Christ’s teaching on the earth through his evangelical vision. Dante drives the point home by making a pun on Assisi. By using Ascesi, which means “I rise,” he situates the final line of the tercet that elucidates how Francis did more than just rise up from his youth in Assisi. Francis rises as the sun rises. Like the sun, he is the one who “orients” us, the one who can communicate to us how to find our way to Christ’s light of the world, because Francis provides a similar light “by the greatness of his virtuous power” (Par. 11.57). Overall, Francis epitomizes the meaning of the Heaven of the Sun, where the practitioners of the virtue of wisdom (sapientia) rather than knowledge (scientia) reside. Wisdom is an essential feature of the early Franciscans, and thus, this is the perfect platform for Dante to learn about Francis’s personality and life’s journey. Dante refers to Francis as the Seraphim of his order; or one of the “burning ones” who burn with the light of love (Par. 11.37). Because the Seraphim are pure light, they are able to communicate directly with God and illuminate others with their wisdom.

Dante uses the image of the sun, the symbol of divine generosity, as the image of Francis, who gave himself as Christ did to humanity in “a single act of His eternal Love” without expecting anything in return (Par. 7.33). A canto earlier, he explains a bit about how the sun works theologically, unlocking the inner life of the Godhead as love (Par. 10.1–6). For Dante, the divine revelation of the Trinity is that the Father and the Son gaze at each other and are conjoined by the breath of love. In this formulation, Dante is most likely summoning us to participate in the mysticism of Bernard of Clairvaux, who declared St. Gregory the Great’s axiom, amor ipse notitia est,[2] to be the guiding principle of the spiritual life.

The Trinity, for Dante, is a total gift that gives non-competitively to all without ever exhausting the power of the source. If the source of all thought and life is a generous gift from God, then our job is the basic, yet difficult, task of seeing creation as a gift and participating in that gift. Even so, Dante makes our participation more explicit by urging the reader to “raise your eyes” and look at the sun, for all of God’s mysteries can only be revealed to us by basking in his presence (Par. 10.7). The fact that Dante is able to withstand the sun’s rays longer than he did in Paradiso 1 shows us that his power of sight is growing stronger and stronger, and foreshadows that he will eventually be able to gaze deeper into the Divine Light in the Empyrean (Par. 33.112–114) that is much brighter than the sun and receive into his being the “Love that moves the sun and all the other stars” (Par. 33.145).

The perfect example for Francis’s spiritual vision is his poem “Canticle of Brother Sun,” which Dante would have known and could have been directly referencing with his metaphor of Francis as the sun. The “Canticle” is a joyful celebration of God’s creation as the aforementioned generous “gift.” It is a prayer that praises Christ, the highest manifestation of the sacramental principle, in all his connections to the sacramental quality of Nature. The prayer recovers the harmony that governed the universe at Creation, which, in its fullness and splendor, is identified by the Book of Genesis as the Garden of Eden. Francis goes through the sun, the moon, the wind, the water, but, significantly, describes Sir Brother Sun as “a symbol of You, God most High.”[3] The sun “who makes the day, and illumines us by his light” matches God’s first utterance, “Let there be light,” on the first day (Gen. 1:3).[4] The sun rightfully merits a privileged position in Francis’s prayer, since the sun’s function in Nature resembles that of God in creation, as nourishment for all life. Without the sun there is no life, and hence no truth. The sun is our very way and truth and life.

Francis’s hagiography now turns to the vow of poverty that governs Francis’s entire converted life. His conversion in 1206 at the age of twenty-four is portrayed as a wedding ceremony with Lady Poverty, which, of course, defies and upsets his rich father, Pietro Bernardone (Par. 11.89), who witnesses Francis’s actions as rejection of his own position in society:

For, still a youth, he fought against his father’s wish
for the favor of a lady to whom, as to death,
no one unlocks the door with gladness,

And before his spiritual court [and in his father’s presence]
he joined himself to her and, from then on,
each passing day, he loved her more.

She, bereft of her first husband scorned and unknown
one thousand and one hundred years and more,
remained without a suitor until he came.

But, lest I make my meaning dark, 
let it be understood, in all that I have said,
that these two lovers are Francis and Poverty (Par. 11.58–66, 73–75).

Dante so intimately unites Francis with Lady Poverty, because Dante thinks that Francis was the one who has heard the cry of Lady Poverty more clearly than any other since the death of her first husband, Christ. A case in point is that he places Francis beside John the Baptist, the original Christian ascetic, in the Celestial Rose (Par. 32.31–36). Francis takes Jesus’s commands in his Sermon on the Mount with the utmost seriousness, so much so that he completely gives his life to the Father. According to Bonaventure’s The Life of Saint Francis, Francis renounces his inheritance—and his clothes—as he appears naked in front of the bishop of Assisi, where his father had dragged him over a monetary dispute. In that meeting, he is reported to have proclaimed, “Until now I have called you my father on earth, but from now on I can confidently say ‘Our Father, who art in heaven’ in whom I have stored all my treasure, and on whom I have placed all my trust and hope.”[5] Poverty is the fundamental condition at the root of Dante’s admiration for Francis. Stripped of material riches, the humble and simple life of Francis puts to work a profound truth that hearkens back to Augustine’s Confessions: “My weight is my love; and I am carried by this weight, wherever I am carried” (13.9.10).[6] “This weight” functions as the governing soteriological principle of the Commedia, for a man is eternally what he loves and what he does (Inf. 6.85–87).

Francis’s ideals of poverty, humility, and simplicity stem from two scriptural passages in particular. The first passage is Matthew 10:7–14, where the Evangelist recounts the mission of the twelve Apostles sent into the world to prepare the people for Jesus’s teaching. Jesus demands of his disciples the arduous task of strictly observing those ideals:

As you go, proclaim the good news: The kingdom of heaven has come near. Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment. Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff; for the laborers deserve their food. Whatever town or village you enter, find out who in it is worthy, and stay there until you leave. As you enter the house, greet it. If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town.

The second passage is Matthew 19:21, where Jesus responds to the rich young man’s presumption that he is fit for heaven: “if you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” In Francis’s eyes, Jesus seems to accentuate his previous point with this parable. Moreover, Dante needs to be better than the rich young man if he has any chance of completing his journey of spiritual perfection. First and foremost, he needs Francis’s poverty and simplicity to continually teach him humility because pride is his besetting sin, as he recognizes in Purgatory on the Terrace of Envy.

In the foundation of Francis’s Order, we see the implications of Christ and his Apostles not having ownership of land or material goods, either personally or communally. Before Francis, no one had asserted a vow of this magnitude within an Order in the Church. His decision was predicated on the fact that the apostolic life was nomadic. In other words, Christ and his Apostles were dependent upon others for their necessities: food, drink, clothing, and shelter. Francis codified his understanding of the apostolic life in chapter 6 of the final Rule of 1223, when he declared that the Friars were “to take nothing as their own, whether it be a house, or a place, or anything at all” and to “serve the Lord in poverty and lowliness.”[7] Dante properly notes the foundation of the Franciscan Order, when the first three disciples joined Francis after removing their shoes (Par. 11.79–87). This is why Dante has Francis’s great predecessor Peter Damian, who supported freeing the Church of simony during the eleventh-century Gregorian reform, tell the pilgrim that the mark of the apostolic tradition was when Peter and Paul came “lean and barefoot, receiving their food at any doorway” (Par. 21.127–129).

Dante internalizes Franciscan spirituality in his insistence that Francis uniquely restored the ideals of poverty, humility, and simplicity through his reenactment of Christ’s life. Moreover, if we refer to Lady Poverty’s being deprived of her first husband (Christ) for over 1100 years, since the Apostles died, then Francis’s union with Lady Poverty may be said to mirror Dante’s long-awaited reunion with Beatrice in Purgatorio 30. Dante’s moment of conversion, viewed in this light, can be seen as a movement towards Francis’s ideals. In this respect, the reed of Humility, an allusion to Christ’s humiliation during his Passion taken from Matthew 27:29–31, with which Virgil girds Dante to begin his journey through Purgatory (Purg. 1.133–136), proves to be unexpectedly significant because “each [Franciscan was] girt with the same humble cord” (Par. 11.87). Since the use of a cord rather than a belt was a distinctive feature of Franciscan dress, mentioned in the Rule of 1221 and 1223, as well as in Francis’s Testament of 1226, could it be Dante’s true Franciscan “cord” (Inf. 16.106–114)? After all, the Franciscan Guido da Montefeltro ascribes to the cord the meaning of the apostolic life: “the cord that used to make its wearers lean” like the Apostles, anticipating Peter Damian’s promulgation in Paradiso 21 (Inf. 27.93).

Following the description of Francis’s marriage to Lady Poverty, Francis’s hagiography naturally moves to the approval of the Rule of 1210 by Pope Innocent III and the confirmation of the Franciscan Order in 1223 by Pope Honorius III (Par. 11.91–99). Through these acts of institutionalization, Francis and his followers officially occupy a position between the world and Heaven. This new Order represents a potential Utopia, a general vision about what the Christian life ought to be. Francis chose radical poverty in imitation of Christ who “came into this world as a poor man.”[8] At heart, when “the Word of God chose to descend,” Jesus, the Second Person of the Trinity, could have been born anywhere and lived in luxury and comfort (Par. 7.30). And yet, God chose to be born in a stable and spend his first night in human form sleeping in a manger. Worldly power was, in fact, the very temptation that Christ rejected in the desert. Put simply, Francis chose what God chose. Above all, Francis, in his poverty, humility, and simplicity chooses to be completely obedient to Christ, which renders him absolutely free. He is liberated from all the materialistic values of world, especially wealth and riches. In this manner, Francis embodies the condition that Dante hopes to achieve. For Dante, Francis’s ideals engender the wisdom of spiritual riches. Many Franciscans came to understand them as really a description of the human condition to begin with. We are all spiritually impoverished, born flawed and deprived, so in a way Francis embraces his truest form of being: worldly poverty mixed with utter humility and simplicity.

Francis’s hagiography concludes with the famous story of his stigmata—the body becoming a sign. Dante intertwines that story with the story of Francis’s going and preaching to the Sultan Malik al-Kamil of Egypt during the Fifth Crusade (Par. 11.100–108). Early sources attest that Francis was looking for martyrdom in their meeting. Apparently, as a child he saw crusader crosses in a dream and thought that he was supposed to die a crusader’s death. But instead of becoming a martyr in the soldier sense, Francis became one in a Christological sense. Upon his return to Italy, he received on his body the very wounds of Christ. His receiving the “final seal” from Christ is the ultimate evidence of Francis’s intimate union with Christ exemplified by his Christ-like life (Par. 11.107). The leader of the rigorist Italian Spiritual Franciscans Ubertino da Casale and the more moderate Bonaventure who became known as the “second founder” of the Franciscan Order shared a powerful interpretation of the stigmata. It marked Francis as the sixth Angel of the Apocalypse (Rev. 9:13–15) and as “another Christ” (alter Christus) sent providentially to convert the world. Likewise, we are called to read the stigmata as a document written and published by God, to learn from it how to be wise, that is, how to imitate Christ’s poverty, humility and simplicity. In so doing, we will join the harvest that Francis sowed in the “Italian fields” (Par. 11.105).

This call to holiness, however, seems to be at odds with the institutional Church’s failure to imitate Christ as Francis did. According to the enigmatic prophecy at the conclusion of Purgatorio, Beatrice speaks of “a Five Hundred and Ten and Five, sent by God [who] shall slay the thieving wench and the giant sinning there beside her” (Purg. 33.43–45). The prophecy supports the main thrust of Dante’s diatribe in Inferno 19 against Pope Nicholas III (and all other simoniac popes)—that the Church must be cleaned of its avarice and returned to its apostolic state if it is to flourish. Alluding to the fact that the calling of the Apostolate of Peter in Matthew 4:18–22 and 16:24 was done without a monetary exchange, Dante asks Nicholas to reflect upon his avaricious decisions that brought the world to grief: “Please tell me, how much treasure did our Lord insist on from Saint Peter before He gave the keys to his keeping? . . . Your avarice afflicts the world, trampling down the good and raising up the wicked” (Inf. 19. 90–92, 104–105). Indeed, Dante envisions a plethora of clerics, cardinals, and popes “in whom avarice achieves its excess” are damned (Inf. 7.46–48).

Could Dante’s conception of a purified Church derive from Francis’s ideals of poverty, humility, and simplicity? If we attempt to speculate, we can recall Saint Peter endorsing Dante’s faith centered on “the true instruction of the Gospel” (Par. 24.142–154). And if we look further, we can peer into Saint Peter’s and Folco’s prophecies as counterparts to that endorsement. Folco conveys to Dante that the greediness of the Roman Curia, who “has made a wolf out of its shepherd,” can only be cured with a return to the message of the Gospel (Par. 9.127–142). More forcefully, after describing Satan’s delight in the “blood and filth” now seeping from the “sewer” of Rome under the corrupt pontificate of Boniface VIII, Saint Peter warns Dante that the popes of the first three centuries of the Church’s life were truer to Christ’s mission than the popes of Dante’s day: “the Bride of Christ was not nurtured with my blood—nor that of Linus and of Cletus—to serve the cause of gaining gold” (Par. 27.22–27, 40–45). It must be of great import that these prophecies demanding strict adherence to the Gospel as the only way to end the Church’s adultery occur after Beatrice catalogues the corruption of the Church in amassing vast wealth since the reign of Charlemagne (Purg. 32.136–147). By associating Francis’s hagiography with prophecies about the purification of the Church, Dante forever ties Franciscan spirituality and the arc of Christian salvation history together.