Francis of Assisi is one of the greatest human beings ever to have existed and certainly the greatest saint. His vows of poverty and chastity, his contempt for wealth and property, his courage and fortitude put him on a par with many other saints, but what distinguishes Francis is his seemingly effortless goodness, his love of all living things and his poetic insight. Unlike most saints, he was more interested in the happiness of others than his own salvation. He never criticised the wicked nor patronised his inferiors. Thomas of Celano, his first biographer, accurately remarked that he was not just a saint among saints but, parodoxically, indistinguishable externally from the sinners. In his writings Francis combines the pantheism of Walt Whitman and Blake with the sun-worship of Akhenaton, as in the great Canticle of the Sun. If ever a man deserved the over-used title "genius", it was this son of a rich merchant in Umbria.
Adrian House is concerned with both the historical figure and the legend - the inspiration for the Italian Renaissance and the great schools of Italian painting, the centre of a cult (Assisi is the fourth centre of Christian Pilgrimage, after Rome, Jerusalem and Santiago de Compostella), and latterly the patron saint of ecology. House's approach is affectionate though not entirely uncritical. He makes no great claim to scholarship, and the story of Francis's life as recounted here contains no surprises. The main fault in the book is that he takes a lot of Jungian dogma as gospel, which sometimes produces unintentionally risible results. Althought House has a tendency towards fauxnaivete, I think his most important judgements are sound. St Clare certainly does deserve a more important place in Francis's story than she is often given; Francis was pro-woman and saw a real place for women in a Church that has often masked misogyny with mariolatry. And, as House says, it is likely that there is more naturalistic truth in the famous stories of Francis and the birds and animals than is assumed by those who read into them purely a symbolic or allegorical significance.
The great tragedy of Francis's life was that his emphasis on poverty and distaste for private property and permanent houses or friaries was reversed after his life, but perhaps his most remarkable achievement was to persuade Innocent III to recognise the Franciscans in the first place; after all, this was an era when criticism of the Church for worldliness was dangerous, as Innocent's bloody suppression of the Albigensian heresy showed. It was clear that Francis had either miraculous powers of personal magnetism or superlative gifts as a politician to deal successfully with so many hostile or suspicious cardinals and prelates. He won over Cardinal Ugolino, who as Gregory IX became a close friend, but even Gregory betrayed Francis's dream after his death, when, in his bull Quo Elongati, he allowed the Franciscans to evade their founder's rule and become rich and fat holders of property and benefices. As House, comparing Gregory with Francis and Clare, rightly says: "His paramount loyalty was to the Church of Rome established in dogma, theirs to the Kingdom of Christ revealed in the Gospels."
If the fate of the Franciscan order after his death was Francis's great tragedy, his central paradox when alive was his suspicion of books and learning, on the ground that they engendered the sin of intellectual pride. This seems baffling not just in the light of the wide learning evinced by Francis in his own writings but also in terms of the intellectual profile of the Franciscan movement. The greatest names in philosophical thought in the first half of the 13th century (Aquinas came later) were all Franciscan: Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham. But this is presumably a case of the mark of beauty being in the touch that's wrong, for surely no one can dispute Ernest Renan's judgement: "After Jesus, Francis of Assisi has been the only perfect Christian",
Frank McLynn is a critic and author.