There are references
in the New Testament to unmarried men and women who
served the local communities in special ways. Later, this celibate tradition continued
as some Christians went into the deserts of Egypt and Syria to live their commitment
in solitude. These men and women were variously called "hermits," "anchorites" and
"The Desert Fathers." In the wilderness, they found a peace and tranquillity that was
conducive to prayer, contemplation and reflection. Saint Anthony (d.350) said that, in
creation, he could read the word of God.
Demonic powers also
resided in the desert. The anchorites saw their presence in
the wilderness as a process of re-creating an earthly paradise, of re-establishing the
dominion over all life that existed before the Fall. The stories of encounters with wild
animals illustrated their spiritual power. The monk Florentius had a bear as
companion. The animals taught the hermits what was poisonous.
Their spirituality
was to encounter a strange territory and move from conflict to
harmony, to merge the natural with the supernatural until the two were
indistinguishable. This spirituality influenced Celtic spirituality where the theme of
voyage or pilgrimage provided a heightened awareness of the natural environment.
Celtic spirituality, in turn, influenced Saint Francis of Assisi.
The Franciscan view
of nature flows out of the nature mysticism of their founder,
Saint Francis of Assisi. As Western civilization entered the Middle Ages, a new
prosperity created capitalism and a middle class. There was also a universal call for
reform within the Catholic Church. A significant mode of that reform came in the
person of Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) and his founding of the Franciscan
Order. The order was approved by edict of Pope Innocent III on April 16, 1209.
With the Benedictines,
very little is known about the personality of Saint Benedict. It is
his written rule that has shaped the order. With Francis, his personality and charism
dominate and it was hard to capture in a written rule. The Franciscans became the
first of a different type of order. They are friars and mendicants, not monks. Like the
monks, they have a distinctive habit (robe) and chant the psalms and canticles of the
Bible in common. But unlike the monks, they have a strong emphasis on apostolic
work, on preaching and serving people in a variety of ways. They move easily from
place to place and are not bound to a particular monastery.
Francis' father was
a wealthy cloth merchant who also bought up small farms and
expelled the tenants. Francis reacted dramatically to his father's life style and
attitude. He saw power, prestige and possessions as leading to violence and so he
embraced humility, poverty and the cross. Much of his life was spent alone in nature
like the Desert Fathers and the Celtic hermits. In this liminal position, he had a direct
and mystical experience of God in creation.
There is a charming
fresco by Giotto in the Basilica at Assisi. Here, Francis is seen
preaching to birds. The famous incident illustrates the Saint's sense of the
interdependence he saw in creation, an interdependence that called for respect and
obedience. The birds praise God with their song. They each have autonomous worth
and beauty and yet are brothers and sisters performing their divinely allotted function.
The birds respect Francis because he is also a servant of God. Their response
encouraged him to sustain his new perspective and they encourage him to carry his
preaching to people. By implicitly humanizing creation through affective links, Francis
made it easier for others to share his bond with creation. It was Francis and the early
Franciscans who introduced the use of the crèche, the manger scenes that
dramatize the Christmas event.
The legend of the wolf
of Gubbio tells of a hungry wolf that was terrorizing a town.
Francis went out and preached to the wolf and then preached penance and peace to
the villagers. He was thus able to convince the people that the wolf was simply
hungry and needed food. He forged a covenant wherein the people agreed to respect
the wolf and provide him with food.
Like the monks before
him, the psalms and canticles from the Bible shaped Francis'
expressions. But unique to Francis, is the influence of the songs and lyrics of the
troubadours. The troubadours were wandering musicians who composed and sang
love songs. Here, Francis spiritualizes the mistral's interplay of natural setting and
human experience, an interplay that elicits love and joy. Francis embraced and
expressed the chivalric values of beneficent magnanimity and deference to all.
Like the ascetics before
him, Francis also saw nature as allegorical. He had a
particular affection for worms because there is a passage in the New Testament
where Christ says, "I am a worm and no man." So Francis would carefully pick
worms up off the road and place them in safer places. He saw Christ in the worms.
The sun is like God because it is beautiful in itself and it gives light.
The clearest illustration
of the Franciscan view of creation can be found in Francis'
Canticle to Creation. The hymn praises the four elements; fire, air, water, and earth,
which were seen as the components of all life forms. In the Canticle, he expresses
the intrinsic goodness of the created world, the interdependence of all life, and his
passion for beauty and peace. Because we call God "Father," creation becomes our
brothers and sisters. He calls for a fraternal model, rather than a model of
stewardship. We are to be detached from creatures in order not to possess them.
He goes so far, at times, to say that we should even obey animals. The Franciscans
were a dynamic argument against the Cathars; a heretical group at the time who
held that "the spiritual" had been created by a beneficent divine power and the natural
world by an evil one.
Francis forbade his
followers to cut down a whole tree. Part needed to be left intact
so that new sprouts could bud. Until recently, a Franciscan needed permission from
the provincial before cutting down a tree. Francis spent the last years of his life in the
wilderness.
The saint of Assisi
fulfills Arne Naess' definition of a deep ecologist because he
emphasized the diversity and intrinsic value of creation and because he addresses
the reform of behaviors that threaten to destroy entire ecosystems. On Easter
Sunday, 1980, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Saint Francis of Assisi the patron saint
of ecology, following the suggestion 13 years earlier by Lynn White, Jr. in his seminal
article in Science.
Today, Franciscan men
and women continue their founder's work by focusing on the
changes of hearts and minds needed to live in balance. Franciscan Keith Warner
trained in geography and worked for a reforestation cooperative in the Pacific
Northwest that planted over 600,000 trees. He is on the steering committee of the
California Sustainable Agriculture Working Group and has lobbied with The Religious
Campaign for Forest Conservation. Warner also campaigns against what he calls
"Birdbath Franciscanism," a superficial and romantic view of Francis depicted in
flower garden statuary. He sees his founder as much more ecologically radical.
Father Richard Rohr,
also a Franciscan, founded and is director of The Center for
Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The center's aim is to seek a
balanced life by bringing together the worlds of spirituality, psychology, social action
and environmental concerns.
Former Franciscan Leonardo
Boff is a Brazilian and a major figure of liberation
theology. In Ecology and Liberation (1995) and Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor
(1997), he brings together poverty, ecological degradation and liberation. For Boff, the
fate of the rain forest and the fate of Amazonian Indians are inseparably linked.
Franciscan sisters
run Michaela Farm in Oldenburg, Indiana, where their aim is to
seek and teach skills in organic food production and foster a simple lifestyle in
harmony with the earth. Sister Rita Wienken has similar objectives with her
Franciscan Earth Literacy Action Center on 500 acres in Tiffin, Ohio.
