Flogging Brother Ass
We’re coming up on the feast of St. Francis of Assisi (Oct. 4), and he is an easy saint to love—provided you are careful not to understand him. His story is full of romance, charm, and warmth. He was tender to wild animals—even wolves—and preached to little birds. He cared about the poor enough to join them, and organized a band of other well-meaning social workers devoted to serving them. Think of a genial, retired professor who has devoted his afternoons to saving wetlands and his weekends to Habitat for Humanity. Except that this “green” activist inspired painters such as Giotto to paint exquisite frescos on the roofs of magnificent Renaissance churches, and countless brilliant writers to recount his life and works. At the height of the 60s counterculture, Francis was portrayed as a proto-hippie in Brother Sun, Sister Moon, a flower child who embraced the God we find in every leaf and bumble bee, to the warbling strains of folk hymns by Donovan. Soup kitchens and homeless shelters around the world have worked in Francis’ name for centuries, and priests of his order are renowned as easygoing, gentle confessors. One of his spiritual sons, Fr. Mychal Judge, died on Sept. 11—crushed by the rubble of the World Trade Center as he gave last rites to dying firemen. What’s not to like?
But be careful. However appetizing the figure of Francis may seem, like a dish of authentic Mexican food, you have to eat around the peppers. As G.K. Chesterton pointed out in his life of the saint, it was chock-full of disturbingly other-worldly elements unsuited to the modern American palate. When he famously renounced the wealth of his grasping capitalist father, stripping naked in the square before the bishop and clergy, Francis was not, we fear, striking a blow for nudity and naturalism. The truth is more disturbing: He was casting off the world, not as evil in itself but as a distraction. To us, this makes no sense at all—but there it is in the story, and there’s no sense in Photoshopping it out.
Francis subjected himself and his followers to a poverty that appalled their fellow beggars, fasting frequently and sleeping on dirt (when perfectly good piles of filthy straw were available), taking all too literally Christ’s eerie injunction, “Sell all you have, give it to the poor, and come follow me.” When it comes to sex, Francis didn’t just give up playing the field and settle down with a life partner; he embraced total celibacy, and scourged his own flesh to remind it of its place. Naming his body “Brother Ass,” he treated it as harshly as Italian peasants did their donkeys—rolling in snow or patches of thorns when tempted by lusty Italian maidens he saw along the road. (We can only imagine what they thought.) Inspired by his youth as a troubadour love poet who searched for an invisible, unattainable “lady love,” Francis fixed his affections on “Lady Poverty,” and tried his best to die of love for her—since she seemed to him the closest companion of Christ. To show his approval of all these undertakings, Jesus conferred the same stigmata (wounds) he bore on the cross to Francis—making him the very first saint documented as enjoying this painful privilege. One of the last things Francis did was to write a will forbidding his friars to accumulate possessions, build themselves elaborate churches, or try to introduce loopholes into his austere way of life. Of course, as soon as he died, that was precisely what they began to do.
But however comparatively corrupt one branch of the Franciscan order became, another would always spring up to reclaim its founder’s original divine madness; even today, a band of men called the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal sleep on pallets on a gymnasium floor in the South Bronx, running a parish and releasing Catholic rap albums with songs like “The Zipper Zone,” preaching innocence and freedom from care to youths whom society has sloughed off like so much dead black skin. You can see the same friars on Saturday mornings, kneeling in silence and praying, eyes downcast, outside abortion clinics around New York. What rational motive could drive young men to throw their lives on such a bonfire? I don’t pretend to know. I admire them, of course. But I wish they’d stand over there, on the other side of the church basement. I’m trying to get to the donut table.
CELEBRATE: Looked at in its historical context, Francis’ movement can be seen as a vigorous reaction against the effects of the newfound wealth of the Renaissance. As trade recovered after the Black Plague, new products flooded the market from the East (“globalization” anyone?) and the merchant classes got terrifically rich. They left the poor behind—as wretched as ever, in the midst of sudden prosperity. If you’d like to participate in Francis’ spirit in a tiny way—and which of us aspires to much more than that?—why not keep him in mind the next time you go out shopping. As you get to the check-out counter, put just one item back. If every American would do this once a week, it would cut consumer spending, depress the economy, and bring on the sort of poverty that would make St. Francis smile. OR: The next time you go out to eat, don’t supersize that meal. In fact, don’t eat it—take the time and forethought to cook at home. As an extra penance, do something really radical: Gather every family member in the same room around a table to eat at the same time. I know it will hurt. Offer it up.
Excerpted from The Bad Catholic’s Guide to Good Living.
Comments
Hey John Z,
What a coincidence. As I’m reading your article
from an internet cafe in Java, I have in my sack
a book “The Great Mortality” by John Kelly, about
the Black Death. Just an hour ago over lunch I
was reading his description of medieval hygeine:
“St Francis of Assisi, who considered God’s water
too precious to squander, was another infrequent
bather....another useful phrase in the fourteenth
century French-English dictionary was, “Hi, the
fleas bite me so!”
On an unrelated (or perhaps related) note, the
Muslims I’ve been meeting here in Java make more
intellectual sense and have more moral clarity
than most of the Western Cultural Marxists who
occasionally infect this beautiful island.
Who are the real friends of Christendom?
Cultural Marxists who believe in cultural determinism
(as fanatically as Lenin believed in economic
determinism), or those among the Muslims who
at least believe in mutual tolerance (and yes they
really are out there) while AGREEING with us that
there is some universal standard of morality?
I’ll have more to write about that in a coming
article here when I get back to Oz. Meanwhile,
make note that the Javanese Muslims love The Simpsons, and
and Osama Bin Laden is, far, far away from THAT
indeed.
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Like a lot of saints, Francis may have carried some things too far in one direction or another. Even as a newborn in temporarily over-crowded Bethlehem, Christ did not sleep in dirt. As the only child of a skilled craftsman, he probably enjoyed a middle to upper middle class standard of living growing up - by the standards of the time, which basically means minus the technological amenities of the last couple of centuries. As an adult, he had well-off friends who provided him with food, probably lodging, and even a tomb.
I think the timing is a bit wrong for Francis to be reacting against the Renaissance. He was pre-Renaissance and pre-plague. But I’m all in favor of cutting back consumer spending and giving to the poor. A country which has enough wealth to buy an endless stream of electronic toys and wage wars all over the world has way more wealth than is good for it. Better to give it up before God sends someone to rub our faces in the dirt.
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Yeah, and Millhouse gets Stigamta in one episode and he and Bart thrill to the blood oozing down his arm on hte playground. Thank you MR. Ball: I always thought Rupert Murdoch and the Harvard Lampooners who write “THe Simpsons” were Cultural Marxists, but now I realize they are actually Assisian in spirit just like MR. Balls’ Muslim friends.
Come to think of it, Mr. Ball is like our own Tom Friedman who I slo wrongly assumed was a Cultural Marxist. “The Simpsons” equals moral fratenity is as groundbreaking a thesis as “you can’t have McDonalds without Mcdeonnlell Douglas”
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One must make allowances for St. Francis lack of hygiene
since there was no germ theory then, no one had invented
the microscope, much less seen a bacteria.
But the upshot was that too many Franciscans ended up
killing their patients and infecting the healthy by
their habit of tending the sick and then giving communiong
without washing their hands first.
The Middle Ages knew bathhouses, but they were being
gradually closed because they gave occasion to sin (men
and women meeting naked there). The Plague, instead of
bringing in more sanitation, brought less, as people
gave up the sin of bathing as penance.
It took until the nineteenth century and the discovery
of germs to convince people that cleanliness is next
to godliness. In the meantimes nuns were supposed to be
holy because they bathed and changed their underwear once
a week, or every ten days (they were merely filthy).
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It is obvious that the saint was a confused and wayward soul. There is no other explanation for it. We must not be too harsh on the nuns becuase their changing underwears every month or so. We must remember that the religion which has seen us born and grown, arose out of the sand flies and desert scorpions of the middle east, where filth,mite ridden, rodent infested, muck, dirt and sludge were ( and probably are even today) the patent marks of a community of humans. Can anyone one dispute the lousy and unhygenic condition of life of any of the religious zealot ?
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I hope god inhabits every living thing. I chased down a possum last week at work(they are really slow) and I would have sworn he gave me a look of submission. Don’t be silly. Animals don’t have feelings. My expectation is that god also inhabits every non-living thing. The ground I walk on, the leaves I brush against. I hope I haven’t grown superior to the christian jihadists.
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If you’d like to participate in Francis’ spirit in a tiny way – also excoriate his greatest hater, the Florentine bureaucrat and inventor of that Behemoth and Leviathan, The State. I mean of course Machiavelli. The great unmentioned presence in all of ol’ Nick’s work – Il Principe, Discorsi, Mandragola, Dell’arte della guerra – is Francis, as Buonaparte is the mentioned presence in Burckhardt’s Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien . The least of The Florentine’s mistakes was to assume that Francis’ way to be a Christian would be the only way. It isn’t.
Machiavelli and his camp followers – Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Gibbon, Marx, assorted nationalists – are to be judged by their fruits. Francis’ fruits are sweeter. Mr Zmirak rightly observes, among those fruits, the work of Simone Martini, Cimabue, and Giotto in Medieval Assisi, and the work of Benedict Groeschel in the Bronx.
Remaining is the question, Was the Renaissance, on ballance, “progress”, or as Burckhardt thought “regress”? The only mistake of Francis’ world, it would seem, is not having read the work of another ardent Catholic, Professor Doctor Louis Jean Pasteur of the École Normale Supérieure, and of Professor Doktor Robert Koch of the Universität Berlin.
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@Sid
I did not blame Francis on the lack of knowledge of
germ theory (I am not so stupid as to indulge in
anachornism), only to regret that the belief that bathing
was “sinful” spread out, because it had dire
consequences (and it need not have been, all it needed
was some ceremony of “daily purification” or such). The
problem was not to become apparent until the nineteenth
century - both Catholic and Protestan Europe were
extremely filthy… consider that one highly prized
erotic activity as mutual delousing.
Of course, once the germ theory became known, and people
started finding offensive the perspiration odor, then
the nuns’ behavior, which had not been that different from
the population at large until then, became one more
arrow in the quiver of anti-catholicism. Society
changed around them, and they did not change fast enough
for it, which made it more difficult to spread their
message.
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Kirt Higdon, if I could, a minor point re your excellent post: It is “Francis’ movement,” obviously not the 13th century saint, reacting against the Renaissance.
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The Church has room for many vocations and not all are called to a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience. This is both history and common sense. Without us procreators and producers there would be no Church. So, we welcome all to the fold, the St.Francises as well as the Constantines.
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I guess I got on the hygiene kick because of banked-up
resentment about an outlook that insisted in “modesty”
in dress, which meant taht you should cover up your arms
and legs even in very hot, humid days, and who were
quite willing to label you a bad person if you wanted
to cool off by letting perspiration evaporate naturally
insted of getting trapped in “modest” garments where it
could stink to high heaven.
I never could swallow the equeation virtue=filth.
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“As the only child of a skilled craftsman, he probably enjoyed a middle to upper middle class standard of living growing up -”
Jesus wasn’t an only child.
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“Jesus wasn’t an only child.” - Ed Roberts
The teachings of the Catholic Church preclude Jesus having any brothers or sisters born of Mary. What then of the “brothers and sisters” of the Scriptures. One theory is that they were cousins as the general term brothers and sisters was used of cousins as well in that time in Aramaic. Another theory is that Joseph was a widower with children by a prior marriage at the time of his marriage to Mary. In the latter case, Jesus would not have been an only child.
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