St. Francis of Assisi and his hagiographers, Thomas of Celano and St. Bonaventure, construct an image of sanctity that draws from urban ascetic traditions and practices that go back to the earliest centuries of desert monasticism. When I use the term “asceticism,” I mean it in its most primitive definition as a withdrawal from the world in order to “fight” (from the Greek word askesis, meaning fight) one’s passions and the demons one may encounter in the process, both inner and outer. The term came to mean more than simply “fighting,” and took on connotations of athletic training. The earliest desert solitaries left the cities not for the purpose of escaping, but for the purpose of engaging in spiritual struggle, training their souls and bodies in the way of bodily privation for the purpose of attaining perfection and uniting themselves to God. In the first three centuries of Christianity, this form of spiritual engagement was closely identified with martyrdom. The Christian martyr was one who bore witness (martyrios is Greek for “witness”) to his or her faith by training themselves to push back against their fear of torture, and die for Christ, imitating him in his passion. After Constantine lifted the proscriptions against Christianity, bringing an end to the persecutions, the martyr motif was continued, but this time in the form of ascetic struggle. Christian solitaries like St. Anthony went to the deserts of Egypt and Palestine to engage in fights with demons and, through this form of struggle and self-purification, to seek union with God. It is in this vein that Bishop Kallistos Ware speaks of an ascetic as one who “fights demons and finds God.” The early experiences of the Desert Ascetics, those monastic pioneers that filled the deserts of Egypt and Palestine between the fourth and sixth centuries, tell a tale of deprivation, withdrawal, and at the same time, intense spiritual engagement with the world, the flesh and the devil, all for the purpose of disengaging from the “world” and uniting themselves to God. Although Francis's holy career postdates those of the classic desert fathers by some nine centuries and although he spent his life in the cities of Italy rather than the deserts of Egypt, his sense of his own sanctity, as well that ascribed to him by his hagiographers Thomas of Celano and St. Bonaventure, is consistent with that of the desert fathers. In fact it culminates a long tradition of the urbanization of asceticism, i.e. the practice of creating one’s own spiritual desert in the middle of a city, and doing battle with vices, such as avarice, that are typically associated with urban life.
My purpose in undertaking this project is to bring scholarly balance to the field of Francis studies. I believe that scholars like Lester Little have overemphasized the uniqueness of Francis's experiment in holy living. By considering Francis's religiosity within the context of the thirteenth-century commercial revolution, Little has overstated the mendicant-monastic divide without appreciating how much Francis and his early biographers took their religious cues from the original monastic traditions of the desert. It is my intention to illustrate Francis's debt to the tradition of monastic asceticism, highlighting his proper place, not as a religious novelty, but an ascetic, firmly ensconced in ancient monastic thought and practice.
With this purpose in mind, I find it useful to distinguish between two scholarly approaches to the history of sanctity. One might be called the “historical-sociological” approach, whose goal it is to tease out the socio-economic and religious context within which the saint is operating. Historians like Andre Vauchez and Lester Little typify this take on the history of sanctity. The other approach, which might be called “hagiographical-literary,” focuses more on the construction of saints in light of previous hagiographic models. Hippolyte Delehaye and Thomas Heffernan are good examples of this way of studying saints. It is my sense that scholars of the "historical-sociological" ilk have dominated recent studies of Francis and that it is time to correct their conclusions by applying more of a "hagiographical-literary" approach to the saint. Specifically the urban ascetic tradition provides an important lens through which one can appreciate the project in which St. Francis and his hagiographers are engaged without having to buy into Little's thesis about the uniqueness of Francis's response to his urban environment. My contention is that while the Western European context may indeed offer some unique contextual elements, the spirituality that it fostered had already been developing in conjunction with urban ascetic movements that had grown out of the desert experience in the late antique Greek half of Christendom. Whatever uniqueness there might have been in the urban spiritualities of Italy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it is tempered by an already palpable urban ascetic spirituality worked out in the Desert Fathers.
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