position associated with humility.120 As we shall see, Francis similarly speaks of the Christ Child as “the poor King” when he preached as a deacon at Greccio. Francis’s fondness for courtly imagery, reflected in the passage above, is also seen in his comparison of the friars to minstrels and to the knights of the Round Table.121 As the greatest of knights, like Lancelot, Francis seems to live flamboyantly in a quasi-Arthurian world, ruled by Christ and Mary.122
Another anecdote about Francis sitting on the floor at Christmas is worth considering since it likewise suggests that the saint associated the Nativity with poverty and (to a lesser extent) humility. One Christmas the friars in Greccio were expecting a visit from a Minister of the Franciscan Order, and so set the table elegantly, presumably to show him honor. Francis, who was staying with these friars at that time, knocked at the door and asked for alms, disguised as a beggar, but he was immediately recognized by his fellow friars. After coming in and taking a dish of food, Francis sat on the floor, rather than at the table on the dais with the other brothers. Sighing, Francis explained his disappointment: “When I saw the table finely and elaborately prepared, I considered that this was not a table of poor religious, who go door-to-door [i.e., begging] each day. For more than other religious, we should follow the example of poverty and humility in all things.”123 This anecdote provides a glimpse into Francis’s response to Christ’s birth on the feast of Christmas itself, but his thoughts (to the extent that hagiography gives us access to them) seem to have been filled with the Nativity, and his actions shaped by his reflection on it, all the time.
As is well known, Francis’s biographers interpret his reception of the stigmata at La Verna in 1224, two years before his death, as the culmination of his perpetual efforts to imitate the crucified Savior during his life. Yet, if we read the sources carefully, it becomes clear that the saint strove to imitate Christ in the manger, as well as Jesus on the cross. Francis’s life as a friar began when he stripped himself publicly before the bishop of Assisi. Returning his fine clothing to his father, a wealthy cloth merchant, Francis informed him that his primary allegiance would henceforth be to his Father in heaven.124 In a rendering of this famous episode by the modern Italian printer Rolando Dominici (fig. 5), Francis is portrayed covered from the waist down with the bishop’s mantle, the way he is depicted in the fresco dedicated to this event in the Upper Church of San Francesco in Assisi. Dominici seems to suggest a source of inspiration for Francis at this crucial moment, by his placement of the half-swaddled baby Jesus lying practically on the ground in front of Francis.125 The implication that the young convert Francis was, as it were, swaddled like the poor naked Christ Child may seem novel, but it is actually rooted in the written sources. Recall that in Aelred’s De Jesu puero duodenni infancy signified spiritual conversion. Bonaventure echoes this idea in his spiritual treatise De quinque festivitatibus pueri Jesu, a short devotional text that, like Aelred’s treatise on the twelve-year-old Jesus, makes an extended analogy between the earliest events of Christ’s life, on the one hand, and the soul’s conversion and spiritual growth, on the other.126 A comparison between Francis at the beginning of his conversion and the infant Jesus is appropriate because, in his youth, the future saint experienced a spiritual rebirth, in which he embraced a sort of newness. Like a newborn, who has no clothing or other possessions, Francis divested himself of all material goods, even his underwear, when he severed his ties with his father and rejected his worldly ways.127 Thomas of Celano comments on the advantage Francis gained by taking off his clothes: “Now he wrestles naked with the naked”—a reference to the traditional idea of spiritual combat, as well as an allusion to the ancient practice of pankration (which involved wrestling in the nude).128 Thomas adds that now “only the wall of the flesh would separate [Francis] from the vision of God,” implying that clothing and other earthly goods are a hindrance to one who intensely seeks union with the divine.
Throughout his life as a friar, Francis—who, again, could have dressed in fine clothes in life, because of his social standing, but decisively opted not to, just as the Word himself chose poverty—insisted on having only one rough tunic, which he often shared or gave away when he saw a person in need.129 At his death, he ordered that he be laid naked on the “naked ground.” A connection between the saint’s nakedness at the beginning and end of his religious life is explicitly made by Bonaventure, whose vita of Francis became the official version for the Franciscan Order in 1266: “In all things he wished without hesitation to be conformed to Christ crucified who hung on the cross poor, suffering, and naked. Naked he lingered before the bishop at the beginning of his conversion; and, for this reason, at the end of his life, he wanted to leave this world naked.”130 In praising Francis’s nakedness, Bonaventure may have in mind the famous remark of Job (1:21; cf. Ecclesiastes 5:14) about his exiting from his mother’s womb naked and leaving the world in that state as well. Yet, by saying that Francis was naked “at the beginning” (of his life as a religious), Bonaventure may also have in mind the nearly naked Christ Child. The popular Franciscan-authored devotional text Meditationes vitae Christi (about which I will say more below) draws attention to Christ’s lack of clothing at his birth and at his death when it describes Mary wrapping the baby Jesus in her veil and later “girding him with her head covering,” when he was stripped completely naked at the Passion.131
Figure 5. The converted St. Francis stripped of clothes standing next to the baby Jesus lying on the ground. Print by Rolando Dominici (twenty-first century). By permission of the artist.
Bonaventure himself conflates Christ’s infancy with his Passion in a few places of his writings. For instance, in his De perfectione vitae ad sorores, he remarks that “from the first day of his life to his last, from the instant of birth to the instant of death, pain and sorrow were his companions. So he himself has said through the prophet: ‘I am afflicted and in agony from my youth’ (Ps. 87:16); and elsewhere: ‘I have been scourged all the day’ (Ps. 72:14), meaning all his life.”132 In his Vitis mystica, Bonaventure reiterates the idea that Jesus’ entire life was filled with suffering, when he explains that “the term ‘passion’ ” does not apply “to the one day only on which he died, but to the whole extent of his life.”133 He again cites Psalm 87:16 in support of this interpretation.134 In a later chapter, Bonaventure reflects on the idea that “the crucifixion of Jesus actually began at his birth,” explaining that it was not an accident that he was “born in a strange place, in mid-winter, in the depth of the night, outside the inn, of a Mother poor and humble. Although at this time there was no shedding of his blood, it did come about after only seven days had passed,” that is, at the Circumcision.135 Along similar lines, St. Anthony of Padua, in a sermon for the feast of the Circumcision, observed, “Christ’s whole life was in blood … Christ was blood-red at the beginning and at the end of his life.”136 In light of such passages, which presumably distill the spirituality of the order’s founder, I think it is fair to say that Francis of Assisi was thought to have imitated Christ in the sufferings he endured, not just at his Passion, but throughout his life—including its earliest moments. Indeed, all of Christ’s life entailed suffering that stemmed from poverty.
The centrality of Christ’s poverty to the Franciscan way of life is evident from the Regula non bullata, the Rule that Francis composed for his friars and that Pope Innocent III orally approved in 1209. When Francis says that the friars ought to “strive to follow the humility and poverty of our Lord Jesus Christ,” having nothing but food and clothing, he likely has in mind the Christ Child as well as the adult Jesus, who lived as an itinerant preacher content with bare necessities. Francis continues by telling the brothers not to be ashamed to beg, since Jesus himself was not ashamed to do so. “He was poor and a stranger and lived on alms—he, the Blessed Virgin, and his disciples.”137 A more nuanced presentation of Jesus as a mendicant (literally, “one who begs”) is found in the Franciscan Meditationes vitae Christi, in the chapter on the Holy Family’s return from Egypt. Here, the boy Jesus seems to accept alms with unease:
