Volker Leppin. Francis of Assisi: The Life of a Restless Saint. Yale University Press, 2025. $30.00. 296 pp.
A few years ago, endeavoring to escape the pressures of our university town, my wife and I fled for a long weekend in a little cabin in the woods of New Hampshire. We thought we were all alone, until the darkness fell and the squeaking and skittering began. A mouse, or mice (they use darkness to conceal their numbers) was on the prowl for any crumbs left unguarded. The morning light revealed this particular mouse had a taste for chocolate bars and the requisite courage to eat through several layers of aluminum foil to gain them.
The initial revulsion of my lizard-brain gave way to a more enlightened—dare I say holy —acquiescence to this unsolicited companionship. This mouse, too, was God’s creature. By driving 200 miles from my home into the woods, I had transgressed his habitation far more egregiously than he had transgressed mine. Brother Mouse (as St. Francis of Assisi might have named him) had done me no wrong, after all. I had a surfeit of chocolate bars and believe strongly in the universal destination of goods. One God created us both and will return both our bodies to dust one day. I prayed for Brother Mouse that afternoon—to thank the Lord for providing his needs through my own, albeit non-consensual, largesse. “The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season,” as I am told.
I also prayed that he would make his way, without our intervention, to finding his food elsewhere, far from us and our cabin. The next night was far quieter. God had answered the prayer of Francis upon my lips. I awoke full of happy thoughts of piety, sanctity, and the harmony of humanity with nature that Francis had embodied and promised.
Heavenly visions of the suckling child playing safely by the hole of the asp and weaned children putting their hands into the cave of the viper persisted until I went to replace the overflow bucket for the water draining from our sink. There I discovered the recently drowned (or was it baptized?) body of Brother Mouse, who had pursued his food scraps into the bucket and now stood before the judgment seat of God. That afternoon I dumped the bucket and Brother Mouse in the woods, where he would nourish the body of Brother Eagle or Brother Snake until all our bodies are returned to their original owners in the general resurrection.
Perhaps St. Francis was the wrong saint for me to invoke. That little beggar from Assisi was a controversial one. The Thomists insist that Brother Mouse, not having a rational soul, is not a good candidate for the kind of preaching Francis was said to have bestowed lavishly upon the local fauna. Entire academic careers have been made by laying the Ills of Modernity at the feet of the order that Francis founded. Those ills include a preference for the will over the intellect, for univocity over analogy, for the consent of the governed over the divine right of monarchs, for poverty over the naturalness of property rights.
Theologian John Milbank wrote that “The idea that modernity is essentially Franciscan seems unlikely, but more and more appears to be true in remarkably many ways—as to economics and politics in both theory and practice, as to both realism and utopianism, as to philosophy, theology, and religious practice.”
Ideas have consequences. Thus the ideas of Francis’s followers like Duns Scotus (who had the temerity to disagree with Thomas about the nature of analogy), and William of Ockham (who was said to believe so much in God’s absolute power that he laid the foundation for modern totalitarianism while writing a treatise arguing that the pope was too tyrannical) must be placed happily in subjection to those of Thomas, who solved theology. So in the Apostolic Letter Alma Parens in honor of the 700th anniversary of the birth of John Duns Scotus, Pope Paul VI wrote: “Besides the principal and magnificent temple, which is of Saint Thomas Aquinas, there are others, among which, although different from it in style and size, is that splendid temple which John Duns Scotus, with his ardent and contemplative genius, based on solid foundations and built up with daring pinnacles pointing toward heaven.”
Franciscans have slain their thousands, but Dominicans their ten thousands.
But Francis’s most ardent followers also thought he was an epochal figure in the history of redemption. Joachim of Fiore’s theology of redemptive history gave an interpretive lens that allowed later followers of Francis to see his life as the dawning of a new era of the Holy Spirit. More recently, in his Francis of Assisi: The Life of a Restless Saint, Yale Divinity School professor Volker Leppin claims that Francis is “the most popular saint in the United States.”
Tocqueville looked to the Puritan township as the truest and most important founding of America. From there developed the American traditions of bounded liberty, commercial Republicanism, and the incoherent blend of avaricious commerce and religious abhorrence of the wealth that commerce so regularly produced. But perhaps we can speak of a Franciscan founding of America as well. The Californian city that bears his name was founded by Mexicans on June 29, 1776, five days before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Franciscans were among the Roman Catholics who settled St. Augustine, Florida, with Columbus in 1493. They began their ministry in the American southwest well before those lands became America. Redwoods and sequoias, spare deserts and looming canyons are far better topographies for Franciscan nature mysticism than the rolling hills of Assisi. The bohemians and the hippies, the environmentalists and the egalitarians are all varieties of secular Franciscans.
The historical Francis, like Augustine before him, attracts modern attention because he seems so much like one of us. The “poor son of a rich man,” he was morally incensed by the nascent commercial society taking form around him—a society busy deforming the souls of nobles into merchants and of knights into lovers of lucre, even while it attached a new stigma to poverty, and heaped opprobrium on those unable or unwilling to avail themselves of the riches so lavishly on offer.
Francis rebelled from the home of his merchant father with a band of friends and adopted a more natural way of life. The little band’s self-regard was so great that they thought they could pose a moral challenge to the entire society around them: “The fellowship that was drawn to Francis was increasingly egalitarian, characterized by a religious vision to combine forms of ascetic living with a call of repentance to society at large.”
But just like the dream of SoCal bohemians living at peace and harmony with nature around the city that bears Francis’s name gave way to Silicon Valley data centers that now consume entire lakes and rivers of freshwater, so the fraternal band of Francis eventually gave way to the Franciscan Order, whose administration and hierarchy revised Francis’s original egalitarian vision. Revolutionaries and reformers are rarely the ones suited to turn hippies into The Establishment.
St. Francis’s position as theological inspiration for the contemporary environmental movement was secured forever by the first environmental encyclical in Christian history, Laudato Si, which takes its name from Francis of Assisi’s famous Canticle of the Sun. Its author and promulgator was the first pontiff to take the name Francis.
Pope Francis died on the very day I received in the mail Leppin’s biography of his namesake. Translated into English by Rhys S. Bezzant, Principal of Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia (disclosure: Rhys is a close personal friend), the book undertakes three separate projects. First, to reconstruct the historical life of Francis insofar as the extant sources allow us. Second, to distinguish the Francis of history from the Assisi of faith. And third, to chart the reception of both Francises into the modern world. Leppin claims the book is “a biography, and yet at the same time it is a book about the difficulties of writing a biography, and specifically a biography of Francis of Assisi.”
The difficulties arise because so many of the earliest sources about Francis are hagiographies that take the miraculous as an indubitable fact of history. Leppin frequently breaks the narrative flow of the book to digress upon what we can and cannot reliably know about Francis’s life. These interruptions are the necessary price for this critical historiography, but they do occasionally make for a bumpy reading experience, as fact checking interrupts the narrative.
Of most concern for Leppin’s fact-checking are those early moments in Francis’s life that foreshadow his later life too neatly. His youth is filled with mystical and mysterious moments when Francis turns from commerce to poverty, from the merchant life to the mendicant life. The historical drama seems just a bit too polished here. Yet Leppin is worried too that total debunking fits altogether too neatly into modern skepticism: “For the earliest followers of Francis, all these stories were true, and they could be regarded as true because they fit well into a premodern worldview. Simply to write them off or to define them in unacceptably modern ways doesn’t help us to get to know Francis—instead it forces him to lie on a Procrustean bed of our own making.”
Leppin’s solution is to present evidence and conjecture on both sides of each major moment’s credibility, then offer his own judgment on weighing that evidence. In cases where he judges some miracle a fabrication or embellishment from later hagiography, he shows why those hagiographies would have been interested in such claims, even as his methodology insists that “the most interesting clues for understanding Francis’s life come when the details work against the grain of the hagiographic narrative.”
But is this so very different from debunking? Skeptical moderns have no difficulty claiming that stories crop up around charismatic figures in attempts to consolidate the movements inspired by those figures. Leppin’s method might be called post-skeptical; he never claims that a miraculous event did not take place because miracles are impossible, but neither is he willing to say that the better part of the historical evidence favors the miraculous.
There are other prominent examples of the latter method. N.T. Wright made a career for decades arguing that the balance of secular, historical evidence suggests that Jesus miraculously rose again on the third day. More recently, Carlos Eire argued in They Flew that the weight of secular historical evidence lies with the interpretation that medieval mystics did occasionally possess—or fall victim to—powers of levitation and bilocation. Perhaps the historical sources available to Eire and Wright are simply more reliable and determinative than those available for the study of Francis. Or perhaps Leppin intends to make a more chastened historical judgment, neither dismissing the miraculous as per se impossible, nor using the historical evidence to argue for the credibility of those miracles.
The Procrustean Francis is one major target of Leppin’s biography. If Francis was a proto-environmentalist, Leppin wants us to know he was one who ate meat. If he was a lover of peace, he was also one who told the Muslims to repent and change their religion. If he was a nature mystic, he was one who believed mysticism was compatible with preaching about the dangers of eternal hellfire. Like all people, Francis is a jumble of incongruity. Leppin claims “it is just not possible to reconcile the tender poet of The Canticle of Brother Sun with the man who damned those who believed wrongly about the Lord’s Supper. The fragmentary evidence that we have isn’t easily knit together to create a picture of the whole.” Too-clean biographies, of which hagiography is one species, are all in the genre of fiction.
Yet even a debunker can admit that Francis was a kind of medieval Most Interesting Man in the World. Of dubious paternity even during his lifetime, Francis rebelled against a merchant father who may have missed his presumptive son’s baptism because he was away on a business trip. When Francis fled his father’s love of profit into a nearby cave, his father found him, had him declared insane, and locked him in a dark cellar. He began proceedings to exile his son but was prevented from doing so, because the court considered Francis a cleric and therefore beyond their jurisdiction. To placate his father, Francis handed over to him all his remaining money, finery, and clothing and appeared before his bishop naked. In his 20s, he acted as a soldier and was held as a POW for a year, acquiring a chronic illness.
After receiving a mysterious vision from God telling him to rebuild the church, Francis set about the process of physically rebuilding dilapidated church buildings, before realizing the non-literal meaning of God’s command. During this time he began to beg. Only subsequently did he encounter Christ’s counsels of perfection, which gave meaning and interpretation to the decisions he already made.
He accompanied eleven of his followers and friends to Rome to receive official papal recognition of his new order. He displayed his theological and ecclesiastical finesse (not to mention ease in the papal court) in acquiring papal approval for his movement at the same time that the pope’s armies violently suppressed other reform movements, like the Waldensians and the Cathars. He then travelled to the Middle East, where he met with crusaders and tried (unsuccessfully) to evangelize the Sultan in 1219. As he aged and received the stigmata, he appeared to his followers ever more an alter Christus, another Christ. He died breaking bread and giving it to his followers, imitating the eucharistic rites that he, unordained, was not allowed to observe.
In his study on the philosophical significance of moral saints, the recently-departed philosopher Robert Merrihew Adams saw Francis as an exemplar of the strange, alluring joy that belongs only to the morally and spiritually serious: “Saints may not enjoy all the same things as other people, and perhaps a few of them have been melancholy; but an exceptional capacity for joy is more characteristic of them. (For all of his asceticism, one thinks again of St. Francis). There are joys (and not minor ones) that only saints can know. And as for attractiveness, the people we think of first as saints were plainly people who were intensely interesting to almost everyone who had anything to do with them, and immensely attractive to at least a large proportion of those people.” The labors of Leppin and Bezzant afford the opportunity for another generation to fall anew under the sway of the interesting, and perhaps even joyful, Francis of Assisi.