San Francesco, il barbaro di Dio

The 800th anniversary of St Francis’s death has given rise to a plethora of book publications. Historians, journalists and writers have tackled this fascinating subject matter (his youth spent amidst wealth and trade, his rejection of all earthly possessions, the Franciscan Order, his work of evangelisation, religious poetry), but in most cases a paradoxical normalisation of sainthood has emerged: a tamed and docile St Francis, a figure somewhat distorted to appear perfectly contemporary. This is obviously not a matter of diminishing the power of the Franciscan message in a society that feels a strong need for it, but rather a question of philological consistency – a fundamental return to the origins which, by confronting the harsh realities of the mystery of St Francis, can truly restore his voice. It is therefore urgent to return to 1981, to the opening address that Giovanni Testori delivered at the conference ‘Francis of Assisi in History’, in order to draw closer to the most authentic and radical form of the Franciscan experience and to the account of the Saint’s gentle impetuosity, which, in these fiery pages, becomes a denunciation of an increasingly secularised society that has decisively severed its relationship with God. Testori, who, following the death of his mother in 1977, returned to the Catholic faith with renewed conviction, bases his text (in this edition edited by Giuseppe Frangi) on the writings of Francis and those around him; it is precisely this closeness to concrete testimonies and to the ‘fertility of the Word’ that safeguards the saint from abstraction. These pages recount the key moments in the life of St Francis (the rejection of worldly goods, what Testori calls ‘withdrawal from the world’, his closeness to lepers and the moving kiss he bestowed upon one of them, the final event of the stigmata, ‘one of the last, humbly enormous cornerstones of the Franciscan experience’); and Testori engages in dialogue with his letters, his poems, the fiery verses of Jacopone da Todi and contemporary sources in a head-to-head engagement that gradually pieces together the fragments of a deeply moving mosaic. What Testori calls “Franciscan fabulism” has lightened the weight of the ultimate questions concerning the Saint’s existence, but thanks to Testori’s unvarnished and philologically accurate reading, these questions regain their full power through the interplay “between reality and Truth that the saint of Assisi realised through the cross of poverty”. In this way, readers can draw closer to the life of St Francis and to the very heart of his entire experience: the realisation that ‘the only possible way to listen to the Word lies in the attempt to embody it, to make it known for what it is: the structure, the reason, the form and the salvation of reality’. (Matteo Moca)

Giovanni Testori
, "San Francesco, il barbaro di Dio
", Il Saggiatore, 110 pp., 14 euros