Mags Gargan
Author Jon M. Sweeney tells Mags Gargan about how St Francis’ legacy was almost destroyed by his best friend
One of the first of many surprises when Pope Francis was elected head of the Church was that he chose the name Francis, after St Francis of Assisi, because he was “the man of poverty, the man of peace, the man who loves and protects creation”. Taking that name alone was a sign of what to expect from his pontificate.
But what do we really know of St Francis, beyond the brown habit and the images of him with animals? Many of us have inherited our impression of St Francis from Franco Zeffirelli’s 1972 film Brother Sun, Sister Moon or from Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel Saint Francis (1962).
This “hippy ideal” of the romantic pacifist is too one-dimensional to be fair to the real Francis and his legacy, according to historian and award-winning author Jon M. Sweeney, who relates an untold aspect to Francis’ life in his new book The Enthusiast. The subheading of the book is “How the best friend of Francis of Assisi almost destroyed what he started” and while it relates the story of St Francis’ friendship with Elias of Cortona, the man who helped him build the Franciscan movement, it is really a biography of the saint himself.
Seventh book
This is the author’s seventh book about St Francis, and he says it will be his last, as “I don’t know what else I would have left to say”. However, he is quick to say he would never presume to say he knows who the real St Francis was.
“I can’t say that I know the real Francis, and I’m not sure if anyone can say that, but I wanted to write this book because I am quite sure that the real Francis is not just the hippy who looked with longing at his past life, or made goo goo eyes at Clare and all those sorts of things that Brother Sun, Sister Moon showed us,” he says.
“Some of that is true I suppose. I think we inherited that Francis, and the Kazantzakis novel also had a big impact on me, even though it came out in the 1960s, and it told a similar story of Francis. But I wanted to tell this story because I think the real Francis has to include his struggles, his pain, his sadness and if you only tell the sort of ‘loving everyone’, ‘embracing everyone’, ‘fun-loving’ Francis then you miss a big piece of the story because there is a significant way in which at the end of his life he watched his own movement steer away. There was some sadness at the end of his life and a lot of it revolved around Elias, which is why I wanted to tell this story.”
Elias of Cortona was one of St Francis’ closest friends. He was born in a suburb of Assisi and the two grew up together, with Elias becoming part of the first group of men to join Francis is his new spiritual movement. Elias was his friend, follower and confidante, and later became his vicar and the leader of the Franciscans.
Blending history and biography, Sweeney’s book reveals how Francis and Elias rebuilt churches, aided lepers and entertained as “God’s troubadours” to the delight of the ordinary people who had grown tired of a remote and turbulent Church. At the height of their spiritual renaissance, however, Elias became a traitor to the ideals of the order to many of the other friars. After Francis’ premature death, the movement fractured. Scorned by most of the Franciscan leadership, Elias followed a path that would leave him a lonely, broken man.
Beware the enthusiast, the author warns. The people who believe they’re called to turn the spirit and idealism of a religious founder into institutions. Where Francis taught poverty, Elias began building churches, convents, and schools. When Francis insisted on humility, Elias began to live like a cardinal.
Lavish basilica
After Francis’ death Elias insisted on building a lavish basilica, which Francis would not have approved of, in memory of his friend and he secretly buried Francis’ body under the high altar. His undoing was rooted in his attempts to honour his old friend.
“Elias is the enthusiast,” Jon explains. “An enthusiast in the tradition is always a fervent or earnest disciple. He was so close to Francis that he names Elias his vicar. But then something goes awry at some point after that. Elias is leading the order in ways that are disappointing to Francis and yet he can’t bear to say anything negative to Elias, because he is his old friend. But others are already noticing that something is going on. After Francis death, it really goes bad, in a whole variety of ways, which is what much of the book is about.”
Oscar Wilde once said, “Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography”. However, Jon does not think that Elias was a Judas figure. “That would be too simple of a story,” he says. “He isn’t a traitor, he is an enthusiast, so you have to look at the story in more complexity.”
When asked what went wrong, Jon says it probably came down to power. “Elias thought he could build upon what Francis had started, I think that is also what an enthusiast does. ‘I’m going to make this even better than Francis thought it could be’. For instance, I’m going to make this place that was dear to Francis, this little town of Assisi – the place where he wanted to die and most of the dramatic moments of his life played out – I’m going to make this place special above all others, a place of pilgrimage for the future, by building this basilica, which was Elias’ big project immediately after Francis’ death.
Violence
“So yes, I think it was power. He did a lot of bad things, including violence and immoral behaviour, some of them creating a split in the order itself. He was then deposed by the Pope and aligned himself with the Emperor who had already been excommunicated by the Pope and so then Elias was excommunicated. It became an awful situation. So his motivations were varied; power and lust, but also what I would call righteous motivations.”
The author also says the vast expanse of the order was a temptation for Elias because he could see a great potential in its popularity. But it was also the size of the Franciscan Order, which saved it from the brink of being destroyed by Elias.
“The order was very large by the time Elias was doing the things that could have almost destroyed it and if it hadn’t been so large, meaning tens of thousands, then I think he could have done much more damage. But the order had grown enormously and that must have been part of what went to Elias’ head. Look at the potential that we have here. And this is without any organisation or education or even building churches or schools, because Francis didn’t want any of that. So Elias must have thought to himself what potential this could have if we really turn it into a religious order, the way religious orders are supposed to be formed.”
We don’t actually know a lot about Elias’ life between Francis’ conversion and his death. Most of what we know is about his leading the order in the last several years of Francis’ life and what he did after his death, which has to be taken with a grain of salt “because it comes through the filter of those Franciscans who felt very wronged by Elias’ behaviour”.
“We don’t have Elias’ diary or his writings, other than one letter,” Jon says. “There are a few places where I have to make some assumptions, because there are some things that we don’t know for sure. I have to make some educated guesses because there are some gaps in the narrative.
“Some of what we know of what Francis would have felt about it all, we know from his closest friends – who were furious and disenfranchised by Elias’ actions – because they have left us some accounts of their displeasure.”
It was his familiarity with the sources that are available which inspired Jon to write the book and because he felt it was a story that needed to be told.
“I knew that no one had specially set out to tell this story in a popular way. I thought that Francis is so appealing, so important and interesting to people, that it was important to flesh out his life in this way by retelling it,” Jon says.
“The book is really a new biography of Francis himself, but told through the lens of this most important relationship and as a result you get a whole different picture of who Francis was. I don’t debunk the Francis that we all love, but I add this conflict, this difficult relationship and a lot about what happened to the order and how Francis probably would have felt about it.”
Converted
When Jon first began writing about St Francis he was an active Protestant. He had two books on Francis published before he converted to Catholicism in 2009, on the feast of St Francis.
He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan and is married with three children. His wife is a rabbi and they keep a Jewish home.
Jon says he is not sure if Francis influenced his conversion or if his conversion has driven his interest in Francis more.
“For many years as a writer and someone giving retreats, I would talk about what Fr Andrew Greally [renowned American sociologist and author] called the Catholic imagination. I would talk about how I was raised a Protestant, with a very Protestant mind, but then I am very drawn to the Catholic imagination. I would look at people in the church and say I love how you think, I wish I could see the world the way that you do. Gradually I started to have a more Catholic understanding and a lot of that came along with my own writing. They fed each other but I’m not sure which came first.”
Attraction
He says it was his attraction to reformers that first led his interest in researching the life of St Francis.
“I have always been attracted to reformers – those who believe in ideals or try to return things to their ideals, and Francis of course is one of those. And he was such an extraordinary person. He was an extraordinary Christian, but also an extraordinary human being in many ways – the preaching to birds and negotiating with wolves, and all that sort of thing. Even if just some of them are true and not just legends – and I’m sure some of them must be true – then he was just extraordinary and special,” Jon says.
“On a more practical level, going back to my college days, I was a medieval history major, so I was very interested in the time period back then, and I think that was because I always saw it as a period in history that unified Christians of all backgrounds. It is the period of time before all the splits came into the Church so I always found that appealing. The more often one could go back to those figures or those stories and retell them or re-imagine them, I thought, the better.”
Jon thinks the fact that the Pope took the name Francis has inspired a whole new interest in the saint and one small part of the inspiration behind his book was “a tiny hidden agenda” to warn people about enthusiasts overriding the work of Pope Francis.
“There is this whole renewed interest in Francis of Assisi because of Pope Francis. I was writing books about St Francis many years before Pope Francis became Pope Francis, so I have seen the before and the after, and there is a different interest now in understanding who Francis of Assisi was,” he says.
“There are many ways in which we are seeing that charism relived and the teachings refashioned. One of the reasons I wanted to tell this story in The Enthusiast is, in a subtle way, because I want to say I hope we don’t do to what Pope Francis is trying to accomplish, what people like Elias did in those early years to what St Francis was trying to accomplish.
“I’m very drawn to reformers, we need them always. I’m very drawn to the ideals and returning to the ideals and it’s easy to let pragmatism erase all of the good steps we can take in the direction that someone like Pope Francis is taking us.”
The Enthusiast (ISBN-13: 9781594716010) by Jon M. Sweeney is published by Ave Maria Press in the US and distributed by Alban Books in Europe (£12.99).