It's always uphill to Jerusalem...I mean Assisi

I made an admittedly unexpected pilgrimage to the city of peace this weekend.  I hopped on the train with a certain determination to witness the glorious grandeur of that far and distant dome that our tour guide pointed out just a week ago during our whirl wind tour of Assisi.  Legend has it that this is the church that Saint Francis found in ruins and rebuilt.  The original is of course very small, no bigger than a class room I take Italian in daily.  And yet the precious appeal of the place was astronomical.  Saint Francis of Assisi was indeed not a part of the Renaissance dates as we have listed them, between 1350-1600.  But I wonder how much of his influence and this locale end up embodying many of the Renaissance themes.  The humanism present in much of Francis' theology is also present in the legends surrounding him, his disciples, and their times.  I realize that many people will find my opinions here disagreeable, because these peoples have been canonized and the prowess of saints will always supersede those of regular humans.  This is a valid point but their acts took place while they were still humans here on earth (if one will allow me to employ my rudimentary understanding of sainthood) so that those things enacted by Saint Francis and his contemporaries very well embody the humanism they purported.  Saint Francis was granted a tiny and dilapidated church in the middle of a wooded area off of Assisi and he rebuilt it on his own!  The amazing structure is a thing worthy of note.  The fact that the legend focuses on one man's ability to rebuild a church, and perhaps his capability to rebuild, reclaim, and reform the crumbling church of Christ signifies a rather Humanist understanding of his capabilities.

Much adornment has been laced upon the structure over the decades in a fashion that truly evinces the significance of this site to Franciscan fanatics.  Though much has been added to the structure, including frescoes, inside and out, as well as a miniature medieval belfry, the simplicity and stoutness of the tiny structure truly flaunts the potency of Saint Francis' message.  As Marco informed us, Saint Francis' elevated view of nature's equivalence to humanity, that in some sense we are all one in the same relative family, led to a humanistic revolution that permits access into a brand new world of reborn humanism.  One of the aforementioned frescoes is as follows:

This imagery is at the front of the tiny chapel, the Porziuncola, and as beautiful as it is, rightly reflects many of the artistic endeavors that would later be perfected in higher Renaissance times. Constructed several hundred years after Francis' death, Prete Illario da Viterbo crafted this in 1393, near the beginning of the Renaissance and though it still carries some of the characteristics of its past predecessors, it is unique in that the stacking of the angels is intentionally more realistic as if these angels were more bound by real life gravity instead of just randomly arranged in convenient patterns around the Lord and Madonna.

We also witness a great implicit humanism at the hand (feet and side, ha!) of Francis' stigmatic blessing.  As portrayed by Giotto, the scene draws a direct connection between the conventionally seen Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, whom those with a higher Christology might deem God himself embodied here on earth is passing his afflictions on to Saint Francis, as yet a mere mortal.  The capability of a human to so greatly reflect not only a god but the God in Jesus is something beyond what many humanists would be willing to say about humanities capabilities in general.  Included with this notion of humanism is Francis' grandiose capability to live on means most humans would collapse under.  The portrayal of Saint Francis as one whom poverty and hunger cannot afflict, but rather as something he embraces, pushes the limits of humanity to something we perhaps have not seen before.

But what really hit me last Saturday is the sort of understanding of Assisi's other name: the city of Peace. Of all the great respects and admirations I have for Saint Francis, I laud his broad admonishments towards peace.  Loving brothers and sisters over and against the fighting that cleft in twain so many locales through out Europe for centuries.  His policies towards obedience, chastity, and poverty are the gateways to unifying and achieving this transformational kind of peace.  To do just a bit of elaboration on my point here:  it is through being poor, avoiding unnecessary ornamentation, (chaste), and obedient to other in loving them as your family that you are capable to escape the torturous world that is war and hatred.  In something altogether ground breaking, it seems that Saint Francis' interaction with "San Chiara" (Saint Claire) also shows a sort of inventive new way to understand humanity and witness the fact that a woman is indeed capable of goodness at the same level as a man.  In many regards this motion is witness to Francis' Creativity in enacting a vivid and potent Historical self consciousness that lingers even to this day, thank God, to inspire me!

Secular and Individualistic, I think Saint Francis and his order or not.  But without their Creative sense of world comprehension as well as loving humanism, the world of the Renaissance may not have been.