Donald Spoto Discusses His New Book About

ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI

SOURCE: Weekend Edition - Sunday (22 December 2002;
Copyright © 2002 National Public Radio, Inc. All rights reserved.)

Liane Hansen: Francesco Bernardone was born in 1182, the son of a wealthy businessman. Two years after his death in 1226, he was canonized, a saint, St. Francis of Assisi. Since then, he has been the subject of countless biographies and histories. The latest story of his life has been written by Donald Spoto. It's called Reluctant Saint, and Donald Spoto joins us in New York. Thanks so much for coming in.

Donald Spoto: It's a pleasure. Thank you.

Hansen: First of all, why have there been so many biographies about him? You said something like 40 years ago there were something like 1,500 biographies of him.

Spoto: The short answer, and the most direct answer to your question, is that an enormous, wonderful cache of new material has become available to us, archives and documents about the times in which Francis lived and the situations and events in which he was deeply involved and the education he had, limited though it was, and his medical condition, the illnesses that he endured, and his meeting with - the first meeting in history that Francis had with the leader of the Muslim world at the height of the Fifth Crusade. So all this new material which clarifies so very much for us really encouraged me to - I was going to say put pen to paper but I suppose I should say put fingers to the keyboard.

Hansen: In the press material that came with the book, there's a sentence--it's sort of amusing. It says, `In "Reluctant Saint," Spoto takes St. Francis out of the birdbath.' I'm sure we all have an image in our mind of a young gaunt ascetic-looking man in a drab brown robe with a rope around his waist and with his hands out and birds landing on them. But how much of that is real and how much of that is myth?

Spoto: Well, the gaunt ascetic prayerful poor man is absolutely correct. I mean, he gave up his legacy, his inheritance and his opportunity to take over a very lucrative family business. St. Francis preaching to the birds is the earliest representation we have of him in frescoes and paintings from the 50 to 80 years after his death. It's very interesting to note that we have no images of Francis preaching to people. Why? Because for the medieval Italian viewer of these frescoes, the birds represented people. Each classification and species of birds represented an area of working-class people and this was the astonishing thing about Francis of Assisi. He didn't preach just to the converted. He preached to the poor, the disenfranchised. He had contact with lepers and the outcasts. He embraced all those who were impolite, those who lived on the margins of society. The birds represented all those people. And that's why we have these marvelous images of Francis preaching to the birds. We should not think of him as a kind of medieval Uncle Remus going around singing "Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah" while bluebirds, you know, float around his head.

Hansen: His message was different from the way preaching was done. The preaching at the time was, `You will be punished for your sins.' And his message was one of mercy.

Spoto: Yes, it was. It was one of mercy and compassion. Francis was unique in not talking about hellfire and damnation. He invited people gently to consider that whatever their station in life, that there was indeed a merciful God whose love for them he hoped they might sense in the nursing of them by his own friars. It's important to keep in mind in this regard that Francis of Assisi never wanted to become a priest. He never did become a priest or a cleric. And he had no intention of founding a religious order. What happened was that by simple virtue of his charismatic personality and his magnificent character, that attracted a number of followers - some of them lawyers, some of them physicians, some of them university professors--who saw the wisdom and the beauty and the serenity that seemed to radiate from him, and they wanted to share that same kind of purpose and serenity and inner peace, and they found it in giving up excess, in giving up luxury, in giving up all pretense to power and devoting themselves to the needs of the marginalized in society.

Hansen: Tell us now the tale of this extraordinary meeting in 1219 between Francis of Assisi and the Muslim Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil. He is the nephew of Saladin, the very famous ruler, and he was the same age as Francis and they had a meeting of the minds which you almost wish could happen today. I mean, there were so many interesting parallels to the news of the day and this meeting of Francis with the sultan in 1219 during a Crusade.

Spoto: I'm so glad you bring this up because to me it's the single most relevant aspect of this book. Here was Francis of Assisi sickened by the Crusades, by the excess of commerce. The Crusades were not about faith. The Crusades were about trade. The butchery, the savagery being enacted on both sides, the Muslim world and the Christian world, calling each other infidels, and he took ship and went to Egypt where, as you say, the sultan, who was in charge of the Muslim forces in the Fifth Crusade, had his camp and his headquarters. And he was prepared to be seized and beheaded on the spot. Everybody said, "You won't come back alive."

He met the sultan and was shocked to find that here was a highly civilized, deeply prayerful man with a profound faith in one god, which, of course, is the center of the Muslim faith, and he found a man as sickened by war as he was. However, the interesting thing is here that neither Francis nor al-Malik al-Kamil could prevail. Neither of them could convince--on the one side, all the forces in the Middle East, and on the other side, the forces of the Roman emperor and of the pope, to lay down their arms. They believed that a lasting peace could be accomplished by a savage war. The parallels are astonishing, but I think what is important is that here was the first time in history when there was what we might call an ecumenical meeting between a Western Christian and a Muslim leader and they parted deep friends and deeply distressed by the failure of their own influence to persuade the forces of war to lay down their arms and find a better way of dealing with their differences.

Hansen: Donald Spoto, you have degrees in theology; you've taught New Testament studies. You've written The Hidden Jesus, a biography of Jesus Christ. You have also written biographies and books about Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Onassis and Princess Diana and Elizabeth Taylor and Tennessee Williams and Alfred Hitchcock. As a biographer, is your approach different when you approach someone like Francis of Assisi as compared to someone like - What? - Elizabeth Taylor?

Spoto: No, it's more difficult. But a life is a life. And I have not the right, as a biographer, and as a historian--I have not the right to make presumptions. All the more, in fact, when I approach the life of someone like Francis who has literally altered the course of Western history. I believed that years ago in writing about some of the most creative artists of our time, Alfred Hitchcock, Tennessee Williams, that these were significant voices whose lives intersected with the common life in a major way and they have altered our aesthetic and dramatic and entertainment lives. In turning now, in the last several years, as I trudge through my 60s, in turning to a book on Jesus, and on Francis of Assisi and my work in progress, which is going to be a history of prayer throughout the ages in all religious traditions, I'm really sort of coming home. I'm taking my academic background as a theologian and my years of teaching in that field and I hope trying to continue the conversation as a writer with my reading public about matters that are of signal importance in these difficult and parlous times in which we live.

Hansen: Historian and biographer Donald Spoto. His new book is called Reluctant Saint: The Life of St. Francis of Assisi. He joined us from our New York bureau.