Renovation of Spirituality: A Voegelinian Interpretation of Saint Francis of Assisi

Abstract

In the second volume of the History of Political Ideas, The Middle Ages to Aquinas Voegelin examines the figure of Saint Francis of Assisi (1181/1182-1226) and the revolutionary action that he exerted on the medieval political order. The study of the Saint is an essential part of the Voegelinian analysis of the Middle Ages, which becomes a metaphor of this historical period which, between the XII and XIII centuries, undergoes its complete development and at the same time glimpses its future crisis. From the XII century the political ideas of the Western world were no longer connected to the Roman-Christian categories. New political-religious forces enter the scene of the medieval christianitas, seeking recognition of their status: «the transcendental order of God was supplemented by an intramundane order of the forces filling the realm». Moreover, in the XIII century the first signs of the modern State, that was about to rise, become manifest. The combination of the sacerdotium (papacy) and the regnum (empire) was progressively weakening, due to the «crescendo of ideas incompatible with the structure of the sacrum imperium and symptomatic of immanent new evocations». The medieval equilibrium linking temporal power and spiritual power revealed its instability to a world where the social, the political and the religious elements, linked in a complex way, no longer recognized themselves in the empire and in the papacy.

The great movement of ideas during the XII century was a religious one with a twofold characteristic: it was popular and secular. Its source was in the social community and aimed, with indecision and hesitation, at stealing the sacred things from the hands of the clergy. From this perspective, a fracture between the ecclesiastical institution and evangelical Christianity dominated the public scene and expressed itself in the will to strengthen the church by restoring the primitive spiritual existence. The core of the religious reform was the monastic world which aimed at reaffirming discipline and purity in the clergy. This movement to renew the church risked disintegrating the clerical state and the medieval political order as well. As a matter of fact, the religious institution did not succeed in absorbing completely the transformation taking place in society. If the attempt to disrupt the religious world had been successful, it would have changed the government of the church once and for all.

Voegelin examines the narrow limit that separates reform from revolution, taking into consideration «the reforms that originated in the orders and the reforms that originated in the movements proper. The first type originated socially in the feudal and rural society; the second type originated in the town society. The two lines overlapped and finally merged in the thirteenth century». In this sense, it is especially enlightening that the history of the Franciscan order which, from its beginning to the first years of the XVI century, is characterized by a complex texture of intellectual creativity, human suffering and conflicts which reveal a winding road running parallel to the path undertaken by the Western Christianity. Thus, the history of the Franciscan Order is a paradigm with which to interpret the crisis of the Western world. In this context, according to Voegelin, some religious figures take on a decisive role, since they represent the spirit of the new age. Among them Saint Francis, the Saint of the Middle ages par excellence and the one who incarnates the Italian spirit of the XIII century, stands out.