family for his spiritual one. Francis clearly wanted to convey a sense of community, even family, with creation. There is a tension, then, in the poem between what I would describe as a vertical and a horizontal relationship with creation. The vertical relationship is typical of the medieval period and is expressed in how the elements (or plants, trees, and various animals) are useful to humanity. The horizontal is the more radical aspect and expresses the familial aspect of creation—humanity is no more or less a creature than anything else.
This tension is what unites the Canticle with other aspects of Francis’s relationship with nature. The horizontal relationship to nature is frequently expressed in stories of Francis and animals. The sermon to the birds, for instance, though problematic in its many versions, expresses this kinship, as do Francis’s encounters with other animals. At the same time, he did have his difficulties with animals—he saw mice as tools of the devil and called one companion Brother Fly as a rebuke to his laziness. Moreover, Francis was hardly a vegetarian and, somewhat unusually, allowed his brothers to eat meat. And while he frowned on the riding of horses by brothers, he did so not out of compassion for the animal, but because such actions did not befit the humility of the Friars Minor.31 Thus, Francis embraced the traditional vertical medieval view, but also incorporated a very personal, intense, and direct relationship with creation that stressed universality and community, where all things had their origin in God.
Francis’s concern for nature was, in the Middle Ages as it is today, one of his defining characteristics. Neslihan Şenocak has determined that Francis’s special relationship to the natural world was one of the few things many of the first couple of generations of brothers actually knew about their founder. Materials used to generate Francis’s life were not collected until 1244, and generally speaking the first brothers outside central Italy knew very little about Francis himself, outside his reputation for holiness.32 Yet one of the first brothers to reside at the nascent convent near the University of Paris, Julian of Speyer, was keen to point out Francis’s affinity for the created world:
What do you think he drank in of true knowledge, sweetness and grace in the sun, the moon, the stars and the firmament, in the elements and in their effects or embellishments? What, I ask, did he drink in when he contemplated the power, the wisdom and goodness of the Creator of all in all things? Surely, I do not think that it would be possible for any mortal to express this in words. Since he traced all things back to their one first beginning, he called every creature “brother,” and, in his own praises, continuously invited all creatures to praise their one common creator.33
Whether or not the Canticle was copied down or sung, it is at least clear that friars in the academic milieu of Paris were familiar with Francis’s special rapport with nature. It was likely, however, that most friars understood this to be a personal characteristic rather than part of the Franciscan identity—Francis’s own works seem to bolster this idea, since traditional Franciscan topics such as humility, obedience, and poverty are the cornerstones of his own writings. It is also significant that in Bonaventure’s legenda maior, which came to be the definitive life of Francis, Francis’s horizontal relationship with animals is subtly transformed into what Augustine Thompson has characterized as the prototypical “white magic” of the saints, where Francis commands nature as much as he finds fellowship in it.34 André Vauchez believes that much of this reinterpretation of Francis by Bonaventure was deliberate. Bonaventure was seeking to forestall the rending of his order by the pull between imitating Francis and serving the needs of the Church and the papacy.35 Bonaventure does not, however, impugn the importance of nature, and in fact comments on it frequently in his works. As a follower of Francis and a mystic himself, Bonaventure was deeply moved by Francis’s connection to the created world. And, as a theologian, Bonaventure linked the encounter with the world to more traditional avenues of thinking about the created universe.
Genesis and Natural Philosophy
The notion that the opening chapters of Genesis constituted a text of natural philosophy is recognizable at the beginning of the scholastic era. Masters of cathedral schools such as William of Conches and Thierry of Chartres considered the cosmology of Genesis from a philosophic standpoint. Peter Abelard, in his commentary on the Hexaemeron, to take another example, begins his gloss of Genesis 1:1 (In the beginning God created heaven and earth) by stating that this passage refers to the creation of the four elements, which are themselves the basis of all material created things.36 Written before the widespread dissemination of the Aristotelian corpus, Abelard’s discussion of Genesis relies on the Platonic cosmology discussed in Timaeus. For example, he considers heaven properly speaking to be composed of fire, rather than of a fifth, immiscible element, and later refers to these initially created elements as hyle, or prime matter.
While the discussion of heaven or aether as fire is cause for some mental gymnastics when discussing the separation of the waters (Gen 1:6), this in itself is a notable point. Rather than spiritualizing the text of Genesis to skip over what appears to be a plain contradiction to Plato’s cosmology, Abelard goes to great length to explain and synthesize.37 This is rather a common refrain in later Franciscan commentaries as well. Like Abelard, who relegates the spiritual value of Genesis to a brief passage at the outset of his work, Franciscan exegetes concentrate almost exclusively on the natural philosophic or cosmological implications of the six-day work. Abelard also understood Genesis as a jumping-off point for discussions of practical philosophic elements. Abelard does not discuss alchemy—the alchemical corpus translated and adapted from Muslim scholars were not yet fully diffused in Latin Christendom—but Abelard does connect the six-day work to the practice of astrology.38 This leap from biblical to philosophical is made natural by Abelard’s offhand comment that Moses, according to tradition the author of Genesis, learned astronomy among the Egyptians.39 The implication of such a comment is that Moses knew full well he was writing a philosophical text when he penned Genesis and intended it to be understood precisely in the way Abelard wrote about it.
Latin Christians inserted Genesis into discussions of alchemy almost as soon as they began to compose original treatises. In the 1257 Liber seceretorum alchimie, Constantine of Pisa (or the master who taught him) took pains to adapt the Neoplatonic heritage of alchemy to the manifest reality of the truth of Genesis.40 Though not a clerical author per se, Constantine is pressed to make Genesis present in his work. As the word of God, the book of Genesis presented an authoritative view of the world. This view in turn colonized and rewrought surviving Neoplatonic and Aristotelian theories.
Genesis, like any text, derived its meaning as much from the context in which it was read as from its content. Among Franciscan scholastics the Hexaemeron was certainly a font of spiritual wisdom, but such wisdom came from meditation on the nature of the material world described therein. Just as was the case in the meditations of Francis, spiritual value flowed from meditation on the material. The physics of creation was not an ancillary aspect of Genesis. Rather, the nature of the material world undergirded spiritual assumptions and religious truths. Assumptions about the physical composition of the world were imbricated with assumptions about God, and humanity’s relationship to Him. Neither the physical nor the spiritual could sidestep the other.
Bonaventure’s Book of the World
A century after Peter Abelard, Bonaventure approached the story of Genesis in a rather different manner in his Breviloquium. Bonaventure composed the Breviloquium the year (1257) he left his academic post at the University of Paris to take on the role of Minister General of the Franciscan Order. Unlike the Collationes in Hexaemeron, which approaches creation almost entirely symbolically, the Breviloquium addresses scripture as “partly plain speech, partly mystical (partim plana verba, partim mystica).”41 Like the Summa produced by Aquinas and other like texts spawned by Bonaventure’s contemporaries in the universities, Bonaventure idealized the Breviloquium as an introductory theological text that was, as Dominic Monti has said, a “coherent synthesis” of critical theological issues. Yet, as a text that
