much to popularize this view in Anglophone scholarship, but his argument has been undercut by his claims that Francis was a nature mystic, and by (to be frank) somewhat unfair readings of his work, which have overlooked much of the nuance of his discussion of embedded mysticism within the poem.18 Perhaps the best argument to be put forward recently for interpreting per as by or through has been made by the Italianist Brian Moloney. To be clear, Moloney favors a more ambiguous reading of the poem, but offers a fairly strong defense for why one could consider per as “by” instead of “for.”19 At the beginning of the poem, the speaker says that he is not worthy to say the name of God. If this is so, then it begs the question of who exactly is doing the praising. There is precedent here in Francis’s first Rule—one that was never papally approved—where he invokes Christ and the Holy Spirit to give thanks to God since he is not worthy to speak God’s name. This is, ultimately, an Augustinian claim, and not altogether new. Likewise, in Psalm 148, on which the Canticle is modeled, the Vulgate text uses the imperative mood to command creation to praise God. Perhaps most important, this interpretation is precisely what Francis’s immediate followers thought he meant. Both the compiler of the very early Assisi compilation—stories about Francis that were gathered to be used in his official Life—and no less a personage than Saint Bonaventure believed the Canticle was a paean by creation, not for it. Bonaventure went so far as to replace the preposition per with the much more straightforward da, to emphasize that praise was to be given by creation.
This latter reading of the Canticle, as I have mentioned, has been related to readings of the Canticle as an expression of Francis’s mysticism. Moloney points out a key passage from one of Celano’s lives of Francis that supports such a conclusion: “Often as he walked along a road, thinking and singing of Jesus, he would forget his destination and start inviting all the elements to praise Jesus.”20 Here we see a strong connection to the Canticle, where beginning in line 10 and running through line 22, the elements are specifically called on to praise their Creator. In the passage from I Celano, however, Francis’s prayers are Christocentric. This is fitting with much of what Francis has left us in his writings, where the Son is the principal person of the Trinity whom Francis engages, contemplates, and remembers. Yet, toward the end of his life, his writings shift from an emphasis on Christ to the Father, which fits the theme of the Canticle.21 In the Canticle it is the Father, the Lord, who is the principal object of praise.
We do need to be cautious, however, regarding Thomas’s description of Francis’s enraptured prayers as definitive. Thomas’s description of Francis could have drawn on traditional Augustinian and pseudo-Dionysian themes of mystical experience. In this formulation, one’s focus is so entirely upon God that he or she is alienated from earthly senses. In both the first and second life, when Thomas also describes Francis as spiritually absent from earth during some of his contemplations of God, he seems to portraying Francis in ways that fit with this tradition. It is not clear whether Francis knew of such descriptions, but Thomas presumably did. This is not to say that Francis was not lost in contemplation, but the hallmark of pseudo-Dionysian mysticism is alienation from the world, not its celebration.
Parallel descriptions in Bonaventure’s legenda maior are even more suspect, as Bonaventure’s own mystical works were deeply influenced by pseudo-Dionysius. Bonaventure clearly regarded alienation from the world as congruent with mystical union. Indeed, in the last chapter of his Journey of the Mind to God, Bonaventure explicitly cites Francis as having developed disaffection from the senses and the world to the point that he would have appeared outwardly dead (quasi exterius mortuus) while rapt in mystical contemplation (in excessu contemplationis).22 Though we will get to Bonaventure’s views on nature shortly, it can be said for the moment that Bonaventure agrees God is reflected in the creation—“Anyone who is not illuminated by the splendor of created things is blind,” he states. Alienation therefore is not the same as rejection: “Created things of every kind in this sensible world signify the invisible things of God, mainly because God is the origin of every creature, its exemplar and end.”23 Bonaventure considers contemplation of creation to be a lower rung of the ladder of mystical speculation, but a necessary one. If we are to consider the Canticle as a kind of mystical poem, or the result of mystical contemplation of God, the progression from contemplation of creation to celebration of God is much more direct and much shorter than Bonaventure’s intellectual scheme.24 I am not convinced that formal mysticism should be attached to the Canticle, but if it is, it speaks more to a kind of passionate, immediate experience of God in nature that is particular to Francis and an experience that needs to be appropriated or at least mediated by Bonaventure to fit within a more conventional understanding of mystical union.
I want to return now to the description of creation in the Canticle. In lines 10–22, Francis invokes the four elements—air/wind, fire, water, and earth—to praise God. Most scholars describe this passage as a depiction of the Aristotelian elements, but such a distinction implies a more philosophical stance than is likely present. Francis was not calling on the elements as a sort of proto-periodic table. The import of the four elements as building blocks of the universe was more foundational—more of a truism than anything else.25 Naming the elements does not necessarily imply philosophical contemplation of them. Modern analogies are hard to come by, but it is something like saying the earth is part of the solar system—a common fact most people assume to be true whether or not they know anything about astronomy.
Francis invokes these elements immediately after the heavenly bodies. From the twelfth century onward the view became prevalent that the heavenly bodies were not fiery bodies but rather concentrations of a fifth element—an unchangeable and perfect element fitting of heaven, whose luminosity was the result of relative density.26 If Francis was familiar with this view, which circulated during this period though not axiomatically like the rest of the four elements, then it could be possible that he saw nature in what was, in that time, a scientific manner. The evidence for such a view is rather tenuous. Some scholars believe Francis was familiar, through Brother Elias, with the basic tenets of alchemy, where many adherents did consider a fifth essence to be part and parcel of the created world.27 Evidence for Elias’s alchemical activity is sparse and indirect, however, and Francis certainly leaves no direct trace of such knowledge anywhere in his works.28 In any case, later friars themselves disagreed on the question of the fifth element. Bonaventure, in his thirteenth collation on the six days of creation, says that no one knows the truth about the substance of the heavenly bodies, though in earlier works, such as his Sentence Commentary and his Reduction of Arts to Theology, he assumes that “there are four elements and a fifth essence,” all of which can be grasped by human senses.29 Bonaventure’s contemporary Roger Bacon outlined in a variety of works an almost unquestioned assumption that the heavens were made of a fifth essence. This latter view seems to have won out (probably not thanks to Bacon), and by the early fourteenth century the biblical commentator Nicholas of Lyra can include it without justification in his discussion of creation.30
The logic of the Canticle, however, makes more sense if we consider it less as a philosophic statement on the universe than as a circular progression from the personal to the cosmic to the personal. After the initial laud given by the speaker of the poem come the heavens—the cosmos around the earth—and then the focus descends to the world itself (the four elements). The next verse is something of an anomaly. It was added later, and there is neither Sister nor Brother as its subject. Finally we move to Sister Death, the end of worldly things, who deserves a personal welcome from each of us. This is a difficult verse, since biblical sources frequently treat death as something to be conquered and hold that death is not the creation of God. It is important to remember, however, that Francis knew well he was close to death at the time of the composition of the Canticle and, I think, wanted to express that the nearness of death should not dampen one’s admiration for creation and for God. Thus, the last verses deal with human experience.
While the poem is far from a theological statement on creation, nevertheless a certain theology underpins it, namely the familial treatment of creation. Francis called members of his Order Brothers (and
