TRINITY · 8 AUGUST & TRINITY · 4 OCTOBER Friars & Confessors · Founders of the Mendicant Orders
Francis of Assisi & Dominic of Osma
Friars & Confessors · Founders of the Mendicant Orders · d. 1226 & 1221
Francis — FRAN-sis · Assisi — ah-SEE-see · Poverello — pov-er-EL-oh · Dominic — DOM-in-ik · Osma — OZ-ma · Languedoc — LANG-eh-dok · Cathars — KATH-arz · stigmata — stig-MAH-ta · La Verna — la VER-na
O God, who didst call thy servants Francis and Dominic by different roads to serve one Gospel; Grant that thy Church may always hold together the poverty that frees and the learning that illumines, knowing that the Word made poor and the Word made wisdom are one and the same Lord; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
They met once, these two, in Rome in 1215 or thereabouts — Francis the merchant’s son from Assisi (ah-SEE-see) who had stripped off his clothes in the public square and given them back to his father, Dominic the canon of Osma (OZ-ma) who had sold his books to feed the poor during a famine — and recognised in each other, across all the differences of temperament and method, the same vocation and the same Lord. They embraced and parted, and the two orders they founded — the Friars Minor and the Order of Preachers — became together the most transformative religious movement of the thirteenth century, carrying the Gospel into the cities and roads and market squares of Europe with an energy the cloistered monasticism of the previous century could not have achieved. The mendicant revolution was not a rejection of the monastic tradition but its next necessary form: if Benedict Biscop’s monasteries had preserved learning through the dark ages, and Bernard’s Cistercians had reformed the monastic life from within, Francis and Dominic now took the whole accumulated treasury of the tradition out through the monastery gates and into the streets where the people actually lived.
Francis was the son of a wealthy cloth merchant, and his conversion was as dramatic as Paul’s: a voice from the crucifix at the ruined chapel of San Damiano saying rebuild my church, which Francis understood literally before he understood it spiritually; the embrace of a leper on the road outside Assisi, which turned his life entirely around; the stripping before the bishop in the public square, returning his clothes to his father and declaring that his only father henceforth was God. He gathered companions, lived in absolute poverty, preached to birds and wolves and sultans with the same untroubled conviction that they were all equally capable of receiving the Gospel, and on the mountain of La Verna (la VER-na) in 1224 received the stigmata (stig-MAH-ta) — the wounds of Christ in his own body — the first recorded case in Christian history. His Canticle of the Creatures, dictated when he was nearly blind, is the first great poem in the Italian language and one of the most astonishing documents in the history of Christian spirituality: Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire, Sister Death — all praised as manifestations of the God who made them. He is the most Christ-like figure since the Apostles, and his feast on 4 October falls in the green Trinity-tide of ordinary faithfulness, which is where he belongs — not in the drama of Easter or the austerity of Lent but in the ordinary world that he transformed simply by inhabiting it completely.
Dominic was formed by a different crisis. Travelling through the Languedoc (LANG-eh-dok) in 1203, he encountered the Cathar (KATH-ar) heresy in full flower — a dualist movement that denied the goodness of the material world and had won a substantial following precisely because the Catholic clergy of the region was visibly corrupt and well-fed while the Cathar perfecti lived with an austerity that the people respected. Dominic understood immediately that heresy of this kind is answered not by crusade — though the disastrous Albigensian Crusade would come anyway — but by orthodox preachers who could match the Cathars’ learning and outdo their poverty. He spent a decade travelling and preaching before founding the Order of Preachers in 1215, the same year he met Francis in Rome. His order was from the beginning an order of scholars: its members were required to study theology before they could preach, and the schools of the Dominicans became the intellectual engine of the thirteenth-century Church, producing in the next generation Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, and Meister Eckhart. Dominic himself died in 1221, four years before Francis, worn out by travelling and fasting and unceasing prayer. He left behind him an order, a method, and a principle: that truth, carefully learned and humbly preached, is the most powerful weapon the Church possesses.
The contrast between Francis and Dominic runs deep but resolves into unity. Francis comes to poverty from wealth, to simplicity from luxury, and his spirituality is rooted in the senses — in the body, in nature, in the concrete particular beauty of created things. Dominic comes to poverty from the austere asceticism of the canonical life, and his spirituality is rooted in the intellect — in scripture, in theology, in the ordered argument that dismantles error and constructs truth. Francis gives the Church its heart; Dominic gives it its mind. Yet both are servants of the same Word made poor: the Christ who owned nothing and taught everything, who had nowhere to lay his head and was the wisdom of God incarnate. Their two feasts fall eight weeks apart in Trinity-tide — Dominic on 8 August, Francis on 4 October — the Friar Preacher and the Poverello (pov-er-EL-oh) holding the long green season between them, two expressions of a single evangelical simplicity that the comfortable Church of the thirteenth century needed as urgently as the comfortable Church of every century since has needed it still.
O Almighty God, who by thy servants Francis and Dominic didst renew the face of thy Church and bring the Gospel into the streets of the world; Grant that we, like Francis, may love all thy creatures as the gift of thy love, and like Dominic, may speak thy truth with learning and with boldness; that thy Church may be as poor in spirit and as rich in wisdom as the Lord she serves; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.