namely how it came to be,” writes Bonaventure, “we must comprehend that it was produced in six days, such that in the beginning before any day, God created heaven and earth.”3 There is no substantive divide, then, between the natural order of things and the medieval notion of creation.
The link between God and nature is something of a truism for medieval writers. Franciscans, however, beginning with Francis himself, did not limit themselves to a kind of standard preamble of nature’s ontological link to God before engaging in Aristotelian speculation. Nature was not a neutral philosophical category. Instead, Franciscans developed sacral ideas of creation. Their philosophical discussions of the natural world were not just inflected by Christian religion, but aimed at understanding the role of the created world in salvation. At times mystical, at times manifestly Aristotelian, Franciscans’ ruminations on the universe probed the nature of God’s relationship to humankind and the human relationship to the rest of the cosmos.
Much scholarly discussion, in the Middle Ages as well as lately, has focused on the rigors of Franciscan poverty and humility, and the ensuing divisions fomented by various interpretations of Francis’s commands and practices.4 For all its ascetic tendencies, however, Franciscan piety was not fueled by mistrust of the material world. Franciscans certainly drew—as did most of the religious of the Middle Ages—on the eremitical tradition handed down from the desert fathers, but the poverty and spiritual discipline practiced by the friars should not be mistaken for dualism or a fundamental suspicion of material things. Sin, argued Francis, was a result of the will, not a result of merely inhabiting the world.5 Hence Franciscans, like other orders of friars, eschewed the rhetoric and practice of enclosure and engaged with society and the world around them. Even more telling, Francis’s own writings focused more on traditional Christian practices of material piety, such as care and reverence for the Eucharist, than they did on poverty, so often seen as central to the Franciscan ideal.6
This Franciscan focus on the natural world and material aspects of Christian practice also emerged in the context of the Church’s conflict with heretics, both real and imagined. While the facticity and prevalence of heretics has been the subject of scholarly debate for decades, that the Church perceived a threat is not in doubt.7 Especially, though not exclusively, Cathars offered alternative theologies of the material world that repudiated its essential goodness. Christians were no strangers to the notions that the physical body presented a hurdle to salvation and that the world possessed a myriad of dangers and temptations, but the promised Resurrection provided a final exclamation point to the idea that God had created people and the world as fundamentally good. Saint Francis himself stressed that the root of sin was found in the human heart—a flaw of the postlapsarian individual, rather than of the postlapsarian world. Cathars, however, believed that the physical world was a mistake, created by the Devil or a flawed demiurge and hence inextricably linked to sin. Only the shedding of the material world offered salvation. The evil of the body and the material world was not limited to sexual sins, but to materiality more generally. Cathar perfecti, the “Good men” and “Good women” who made up the supposed Cathar prelacy, had to refrain as much as possible from dirtying themselves with the physical world. Hence they refrained—at least nominally—from sex, eating meat or other “products of coition” (this left fish as a possible meal, since they were thought to be generated spontaneously from flowing water), as well as other more standard sins. Any deviation from this path resulted in the loss of their saved status.8
Again, whether or not Cathars actually practiced or preached dogmatically rigid dualism, it was the clear understanding of the Catholic Church that they did. The anti-material doctrine and austere lives of Cathar perfecti resonated with the eremetical traditions of Christianity only recently revived in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. And, regardless of how many perfecti may have been wandering the Languedoc, the Rhineland, or northern Italy, their spare frames and poor mien offered an implicit critique of the Latin Church. The Franciscans, much like the Dominicans, were in the vanguard of opposition to these heretical ideas, and it is in the context of such an imagined battleground that Franciscan spirituality and exhortation arose. Proving the essential goodness of creation, especially via preaching, was a key strategy in reinforcing orthodoxy.9 Therefore, didactic material on nature produced by the Order—everything from Francis’s own teachings and poetry, to the legends of his life, to encyclopedia entries—was at some level apologetic. Yet, none of this was simply rhetoric either. Rather, it is more accurate to say that the teaching of the Church on the inherent goodness of creation resonated deeply with Francis and his followers.
What follows is a deeper exploration of Franciscan views on the cosmos. The sacral orientation of Franciscan writing on nature is a crucial context for understanding Franciscan alchemical writing, serving as a link between alchemy as found in the Franciscan encyclopedias and the seemingly more radical speculation of Joachite-inspired alchemists, such as John of Rupescissa and Roger Bacon. Indeed, the latter writers, while long considered central to the development of medieval alchemy, have frequently been seen as outliers among their Order, thanks to their alchemical speculation. The discussion that follows demonstrates that while alchemy might have been a marginal practice, it is deeply tied to broader currents of Franciscan intellectual life and, as importantly, sheds some light on more mainstream Franciscan considerations of the material world.
The Natural and the Mystical: Francis and Bonaventure
The identity of no religious order was so tightly intertwined with the life of its founder as that of the Friars Minor. Christendom’s greatest saint—no other held the title of alter Christus—Francis held an undeniable sway over the Franciscan imagination both before and after his death. The standard set by Francis’s humility, poverty, and charity was likely an impossible one to live up to collectively. And, as debates over the role of the friars regarding adherence to apostolic poverty and involvement in elite learned culture evolved over the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, interpretations of the life and teachings of Francis were fraught with apologetic intent. Therefore, while the various lives of Francis include a rather substantial amount of material on the saint’s relationship to nature, it is best to begin with Francis’s own writings. For, in spite of Francis’s reputation as a lover and friend of nature, only one authentic work of his on this topic survives: the Canticle of Brother Sun.
The Canticle is likely the earliest Italian poem to survive into the present day, and scholars have long noted with little controversy that it draws much of its structure from Christian liturgy. Its structure and call to prayer strongly resemble Psalm 148, the Laudate, which Francis, like other religious, recited every morning.10 There are questions about how much Francis may have been influenced by troubadour poetry, but he did mean the Canticle to be sung by Franciscans as troubadours of Christ. Indeed, its first public performance appears to have facilitated a rapprochement of the feuding secular and clerical factions in Assisi.11 Leaving aside questions of what influenced Francis stylistically, let us take a look at the Canticle itself. It is relatively short, so I have quoted it here in full.12
Altissimu, onnipotente, bon Signore,
Tue so’ laude, la gloria e l’honore et onne benedizione.
Ad Te solo, Altissimo, se konfane,
et nullu homo ène dignu Te mentovare.
5
Laudato si, mi’ Signore, cum tutte le Tue creature,
Spezialmente messor lo frate Sole,
lo qual è iorno, et allumini noi per lui.
Et ellu è bellu e radiante cum grande splendore:
de Te, Altissimo, porta significazione.
10
Laudato si’,
