Il libro di benigni e il santo impresentabile by Giovanni Testori

Roberto Benigni said that, if St Francis were alive today, ‘everyone would have wanted to take a selfie with him’. ‘Beautiful’, ‘pure’, ‘magnificent’, ‘cultured’, ‘extremely intelligent’, ‘wise’. But also: “the first pacifist in history”, “the first feminist” of humanity, “the first environmentalist” on the planet – in short, the first in everything that today deserves to be held in the highest regard. Yesterday on Rai Uno and, from tomorrow, in bookshops published by Einaudi, the saint that Benigni portrays in Francesco. The canticle is of a saint ahead of his time, who shaped the sentiments of modern man; a saint who, rather than contradicting the world, proclaims that ‘another world is possible’; a friar who perfumes, colours and brightens the world. A saint whom one cannot help but like. With no mystery and no danger, who could be so mad, misfit or antisocial as to reject him?

Here it is: it is against this ‘saccharine, cloying little image’ that Giovanni Testori lashes out in a 1981 essay, now published by Il Saggiatore in San Francesco, il barbaro di Dio, edited by Giuseppe Frangi – the most unexpected volume amongst the many books published to mark the 800th anniversary of Francis’s death. A great writer, playwright and critic, who died in 1993, Testori could certainly not have known either the play or Roberto Benigni’s book, but he knew perfectly well the tradition from which Benigni draws to compose his portrait of Francis, and he regards it as a “betrayal perpetrated upon the body and soul of the great, rock-solid, humble, absolute, stocky, tormented and inevitable Saint of Assisi”.

Testori’s Francesco, unlike Benigni’s, is a repulsive saint, one who stinks, an unpresentable saint who ate from the same bowl as lepers, kissed their sores, wallowed in pig dung – a man whom, were we to encounter him on the pavement, we would not only think nothing of taking a selfie, but would immediately cross the road to avoid even brushing past him. “He wore a filthy robe; his appearance was wretched, his face devoid of beauty.” This is how Tommaso Da Spalato described him in 1266, and Testori notes: “Let us bear in mind this lack of beauty; for, immediately after his death, Francis’s body and face will, on the contrary, appear to everyone to be most beautiful.”

“St Francis,” said Benigni, “would have been an excellent leader of the Campo Largo,” because “he would have brought everyone together without the need for primaries.” The remark plays on Francis’s democratic and pro-poor ethos. This is because Beppe Grillo founded the Five Star Movement on 4 October, St Francis’s day, and Italian socialist tradition regards him as a forerunner of the labour movement. Even though St Francis loved poverty in itself, as a ‘state of lack’ in which one can encounter the fullness of God, writes Testori, not as a condition from which to emancipate people through welfare or a universal basic income. ‘Poverty as a desire and as the sole condition for truly and freely being human.’ This is what was most shocking about Francis, and what still shocks us today.

How such an unpalatable man could be so deeply loved is the true mystery of his sanctity. A man who had nothing of that ‘little image we allowed to flutter above and around us’, writes Testori, whilst in reality he was ‘more lion and bull than lamb; or lamb and victim, inasmuch as he was lion, rock and bull’.

Driven by a dramatic and carnal faith, Testori was opposed to the idea of reducing the sacred scriptures and the lives of the saints to mere academic study, fodder for historians and philologists. For him, Francis was the Word made flesh, an imitation of Christ, an example and model of Christian life. He would probably have looked favourably upon Benigni’s physical presence, upon his ability to bring the boldest words to life through his hammy gestures. But as for everything else, one cannot help but notice just how brilliant, telegenic and fashionable Benigni’s St Francis is, and how, by contrast, the one who had so unsettled Testori is so surly, difficult and impossible. A saint whom today’s world would easily find repugnant.