The Rule of Saint Francis

Chapter 10 The Rule of Saint Francis

Holly J. Grieco

1 Introduction

Writing from the Benedictine monastery at Subiaco sometime in the 1320s, the dissident Franciscan Angelo Clareno composed a commentary on the Francis- can rule. A few years later, he wrote a chronicle of the history of the Friars Mi- nor organized around a series of seven tribulations he believed the order had experienced.1 In the account, Angelo fashioned his vision of the Franciscan order from his own experiences and read that vision back into Francis’s own day.2 Although Angelo can hardly be mistaken for an impartial narrator, from him we can gain a sense of some of the challenges facing the friars in the first quarter of the fourteenth century as well as the ideals one Franciscan dissident embraced as a vision of the Franciscan life and charism, expressed formally through the Franciscan rule.3 Drawing heavily on early Franciscan sources, at the end of the prologue to his Chronicle or History of the Seven Tribulations of the Order of Brothers Minor, Angelo wrote:

Francis called this Rule the tree of life, the fruit of wisdom, the fountain of paradise, the ark of salvation, the ladder ascending into heaven, the pact of the eternal covenant, the gospel of the kingdom and the ‘brief sentence that the Lord pronounced on the earth’ with his disciples. Through this Rule Francis taught the friars that they could find true rest for their souls and bodies, experience the blessed sweetness of the pleas- ant burden and mild yoke of Christ, and find a weight that would carry them up to the heavens.4

1 Angelo Clareno, A Chronicle or History of the Seven Tribulations of the Order of Brothers Minor, ed. and trans. David Burr and E. Randolph Daniel (St. Bonaventure: 2005), ii. 2 A Chronicle, ed. and trans. Burr and Daniel, iv; Early Commentaries of the Rule of the Friars Minor, ed. and trans. David Burr, vol. 3 (St. Bonaventure: 2014) x–xi, xiv–xvi. 3 David Burr has written on Angelo’s (un)reliability as a narrator in “John xxii and the Spiritu- als: Is Angelo Clareno Telling the Truth?,” Franciscan Studies 63 (2005): 271–287. 4 Angelo Clareno, Liber chronicarum sive tribulationum Ordinis Minorum, ed. Giovanni Boccali, Pubblicazioni della Biblioteca Francescana Chiesa Nuova–Assisi 8 (Assisi: 1998), 383; A Chron- icle, ed. and trans. Burr and Daniel, 28. This passage has parallels in a number of other texts. See the Compilatio Assisiensis 36, in Fontes Franciscani, ed. Enrico Menestò and Stefano

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Angelo’s metaphors make a critical statement about the rule and its func- tion as an instrument of salvation for the friars. In Angelo’s words, Francis de- clared the rule the “Tree of Life,” a metaphor used to describe the cross, which, because of Christ’s gruesome death, became the instrument that restored hu- mankind to its prelapsarian relationship with God, bringing salvation to the world by remedying the sins of the first parents in Paradise. Angelo perhaps intended to demonstrate the divine purpose behind the Franciscan rule and to establish a foil for the calamities he would go on to recount in his Chronicle. Establishing further the connection between Christ and the rule, in the first Tribulation Angelo depicted Christ claiming author- ship of the rule in the presence of Francis, Brother Elias, and the minister general:

This is my servant Francis, whom I have chosen and in whom I have placed my spirit, and I have ordered him to do what he has done, and to write the Rule which he wrote; and the life and the Rule that he wrote is mine. It is from me and not from him. Whoever hears him, hears me; and he who spurns him spurns me.5

Angelo borrowed language found in the Assisi Compilation, from passages also known as the Verba sancti Francisci from the Scripta Leonis.6 Angelo’s Christ as- serts a bold claim: not only did he author the rule, but Christ also had imbued Francis with his own spirit. Rejection of Francis constituted rejection of Christ himself. In the earlier Franciscan sources, such a passage might have been a reflection upon how quickly the evangelical purity of Francis’s movement

Brufani, Testi 2 (Assisi: 1995); 1509–1510; Assisi Compilation 36, in Francis of Assisi: Early Docu- ments, ed. and trans. Regis J. Armstrong et al., vol. 2 (New York: 1999), 146. There are also reso- nances with Speculum perfectionis 76, in Fontes, ed. Menestò and Brufani, 1974–1975; A Mirror of the Perfection of the Status of a Lesser Brother 76, in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, ed. and trans. Regis J. Armstrong et al., vol. 3 (New York: 2001), 323. William J. Short quotes the corresponding passage from Thomas of Celano, Vita secunda sancti Francisci, 208, which like- ly relied upon the so-called Leo sources in the Assisi Compilation, in the introduction to The Writings of Francis of Assisi: Rules, Testament and Admonitions, ed. Michael W. Blastic et al., Studies in Early Franciscan Sources 2 (St. Bonaventure: 2011), 17. For a section-by-section anal- ysis of the Regula non bullata [hereafter RnB] and the Regula bullata [hereafter RB], Short’s chapter is indispensable. See Thomas of Celano, Vita secunda sancti Francisci [hereafter 2 Cel] 208, in Fontes, ed. Menestò and Brufani, 623; Francis, ed. and trans. Armstrong et al., vol. 2, 381. 5 Liber chronicarum, ed. Boccali, 404–407, 397; A Chronicle, ed. and trans. Burr and Daniel, 58. 6 Assisi Compilation 17, in Fontes, ed. Menestò and Brufani, 1495–1496; Francis, ed. and trans. Armstrong et al., vol. 2, 131–132; Verba sancti Francisci, in The Writings of Leo, Rufino, and An- gelo, Companions of Saint Francis, ed. and trans. Rosalind B. Brooke (Oxford: 1910; repr. 2003), 284–287.