The Wild Charity of Saint Francis

The guide we need, now that kindness is countercultural

- By James Parker

It's a peculiar symptom of where we're at-caught between phases of consciousness, between the ruins of one world and the unknown shape of the next-to be seeing two things at the same time. Or to be seeing the same thing in two ways simultaneously. Stuck in the transition, we're condemned to a species of double vision: cross-eyed, as it were, in the cross-fade. And sometimes, sometimes, this can be quite useful. When you meet a guy, for example, like Francis of Assisi.

Genius or crackpot? Both. Sensuous embracer of life or self-mortifying freak? Both. Exhibitionist or recluse? Anarchist or company man? Runaway rich kid or true voice of the rejected? Both, both, and both. And when God spoke to him in 1206, his voice issuing from a crucifix and saying, "Francis, do you not see that my house is falling into ruin? Go, therefore, and repair the house," did God mean the dilapidated, bat-flitted, holes-in-the-roof church in which Francis, at that moment, happened to be kneeling? Or did he mean the whole of medieval Christendom? He meant, of course-are you getting the idea? both.

Volker Leppin's Francis of Assisi, newly translated from the German by Rhys S. Bezzant, is subtitled The Life of a Restless Saint, and the restlessness of the subject is shared by the author. His book, Leppin writes, "does not present itself as a biography in the classic sense." Which is not to suggest that Leppin, a professor of historical theology at Yale, has written some kind of jazzy meta-book. But Francis of Assisi does have double vision, maneuvering constantly between hagiography and history, legend and fact, heaven and Earth, miracles and-what's the opposite of miracles? Leppin comes not to debunk but rather to discover in what fashion those early, physics-defying accounts of Francis, the tales told within the blast radius of his actual presence, might be understood as true.