The aforesaid passage about Francis, which comes from Thomas of Celano’s Vita secunda (1245–47), contains the claim that Francis’s favorite feast was Christmas; it is this aspect of the saint’s piety that I will consider first. By affirming that the Nativity of the child Jesus “was the Feast of Feasts,” Francis (as he is presented by Thomas) gives the impression that he considers Christmas more important than Easter, the feast of Christ’s Resurrection, traditionally regarded as the climax of the liturgical year. In a sermon aimed at preparing Christians for the upcoming fast of Lent, Pope Leo the Great (d. 461) enunciates the common idea that Christmas is subordinate to Easter when he says: “we well know that the Paschal Mystery is the chief [of festivals], and the calendar of the whole year disposes us to enter into it properly and worthily.”114 Francis, I suspect, would have agreed with this idea; nonetheless, he sees the two feasts as inextricably linked and chooses to place rhetorical emphasis on the feast that commemorates the beginning of Christ’s life. In The Assisi Compilation (1244–60), an early Franciscan collection of stories about the saint, we are given Francis’s reason for holding Christmas in such high esteem: “although the Lord may have accomplished our salvation in his other solemnities, nevertheless, once he was born to us … it was certain that we would be saved.”115 In this passage, Francis cites part of Isaiah 9:6 (“For a child [parvulus] is born to us, and a son is given to us”). For Francis, this verse, which became the Introit for the Third Mass of Christmas, encapsulates the idea that the Son of God was born in order to be offered to God as a sacrifice that would redeem humankind. Francis seems to have been quite enthusiastic about this surprising and paradoxical mystery at the root of Christianity. Hence the verse occurs in the Office for the Passion that Francis himself composed, specifically, as the antiphon for the Vespers that were to be used from the Nativity to Epiphany: “This is the day the Lord has made / let us rejoice and be glad in it (Ps. 117:24). / For the Most Holy Child has been given to us (Isa. 9:6) / and has been born for us on the way [i.e., to Bethlehem] / and placed in a manger / because he did not have a place in the inn.”116 These verses express joy on account of the Father’s gift of the Son, who already begins to suffer at his Nativity, because of the lowly conditions in which Mary gave birth to her child. For Francis, then, the feast of Christmas commemorates the beginning of grace and points forward to Passiontide and, beyond it, to Easter; thus, the two main feasts of the liturgical year celebrate one and the same divine plan for the redemption. This explains why, at Christmas, Francis is not simply optimistic and merry, but confident of salvation and filled with profound joy. According to Thomas of Celano, the saint told his friars that they should eat meat if Christmas occurred on a Friday; he wanted “even the walls to eat meat on that day” or “at least be rubbed with grease!” He also desired that the poor be fed by the rich, and that oxen and asses be given extra hay. In addition, he wished to beseech the Emperor to issue a decree that wheat and grain be thrown on the roads for “our sisters the larks.”117
Yet joy was not the only emotion Francis experienced at Christmas. In the same chapter from the Vita secunda, Thomas goes on to recount how Francis was filled with compassion when he considered the circumstances of the Nativity: “He could not recall without tears the great want surrounding the little, poor Virgin (paupercula Virgo) on that day. One day when he was sitting down to dinner a brother mentioned the poverty of the Virgin, and reflected on the want of Christ her Son. No sooner had he heard this than he got up from the table, groaning with sobs of pain, and bathed in tears ate the rest of his bread on the naked ground. He used to say this must be a royal virtue, since it shone so remarkably in a King and Queen.”118 As is clear from such courtly language, Francis regards the paupercula Mary and her infant son as the ultimate royalty.119 The influential Franciscan theologian and Minister General Bonaventure (d. 1274) likewise emphasized the poverty that Christ embraced: “Christ was poor at his birth, poor during the course of his life, and poor at his death. In order to make poverty lovable to the world, he chose a most poor Mother.” For Francis, Christ’s wilful embrace of poverty required a radical response. Thus, in the anecdote mentioned above, he thinks it inappropriate for one who is Mary and Jesus’ subject (namely himself) to enjoy greater comfort than they, and so sits on the ground, a 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