Franciscans and the Elixir of Life. Zachary A. Matus
glory, and honor, and all blessings are yours.
To you alone, most high, do they belong,
And no man is worthy is to speak your name.
5
Praise be to you, my Lord, and to all your creation,
Especially Sir Brother Sun,
Who is our day, and you give us light through him.
And he is beautiful, shining with great splendor.
From you, most high, he takes his meaning.
10
Praise be to you, my Lord, from Sister Moon and the stars:
In the heavens you have formed them, shining and precious and beautiful.
Praise be to you, my Lord, from Brother Wind,
And from the air and cloud and calm and all weathers,
Through which you give your creatures nourishment.
15
Praise be to you, my Lord, from Sister Water,
Who is so useful and humble and precious and chaste.
Praise be to you, my Lord, from Brother Fire,
Through whom you lighten our night:
And he is handsome and merry and vigorous and strong.
20
Praise be to you, my Lord, from our sister Mother Earth,
Who nourishes and sustains us,
And brings forth her various fruits, with many-colored flowers and grasses.
Praise be to you, my Lord, from those who forgive for love of you,
Bearing illness and tribulation.
25
Blessed are those who bear them in peace,
For by you, most high, will they be crowned.
Praise be to you, my Lord, from our Sister bodily Death,
From which no living man can escape:
Woe to those who die in mortal sin:
Blessed are those whom she shall find doing your most holy will,
For the second death shall not harm them.
30
Praise and bless my Lord, and give him thanks
And may you serve him with great humility.
The central debate over the meaning of the poem—a debate that reaches back to the Middle Ages—is how to interpret the Italian per first found in line 10: “Laudato si, mi signore, per sora luna e le stelle.” The issue is that the term per can be translated as either “for” or “by,” depending on whether one reads the term as closer to the Latin propter or the French par.13 So, one could read this line as either commanding that God be praised for his creations, Sister Moon and the stars or, more controversially, by duly anthropomorphized celestial bodies. One could also see per as meaning through. There are pros and cons to each translation, and it is fully possible that Francis may have intended the passage to be somewhat ambiguous. After all, his use of the Umbrian dialect rather than Latin is quite deliberate. Though Francis’s works are few and usually brief, only one other piece, a Canticle composed for the Poor Clares the same year (1225), is in Italian, or, more properly speaking, the Umbrian dialect. The rest of his writings are in Latin.14
The issue of how to translate per bears on more than just linguistics. It lends weight to various interpretive arguments. If we take what I would consider to be the narrow reading of per as “for,” then the theme of the Canticle is rather simple—a praise to God for creation. This more conservative reading has been favored to varying degrees by Thomas Nairn, O.F.M, Andre Vauchez, and Augustine Thompson, O.P.15 These scholars emphasize this reading as fitting the Middle Ages and as an important corrective to earlier scholarly claims that Francis expressed a kind of pantheism in the poem. Written while Francis was dying and nearly blind, the poem stresses the goodness of creation and humankind’s duty to praise God for such a gift.16 Michael Blastic likens the poem, appropriately, I think, to a sermon, and Vauchez has called it a Mass for the world.17 The argument in favor of this conservative translation is that the Canticle’s simplicity should be considered not a slight to Francis’s work, but rather a sign of its depth and power.
Other readers have favored, however, reading per as “by,” which significantly alters the meaning of the poem. Roger Sorrell in the 1980s did much to popularize this view in Anglophone scholarship, but his argument has been undercut by his claims that Francis was a nature mystic, and by (to be frank) somewhat unfair readings of his work, which have overlooked much of the nuance of his discussion of embedded mysticism within the poem.18 Perhaps the best argument to be put forward recently for interpreting per as by or through has been made by the Italianist Brian Moloney. To be clear, Moloney favors a more ambiguous reading of the poem, but offers a fairly strong defense for why one could consider per as “by” instead of “for.”19 At the beginning of the poem, the speaker says that he is not worthy to say the name of God. If this is so, then it begs the question of who exactly is doing the praising. There is precedent here in Francis’s first Rule—one that was never papally approved—where he invokes Christ and the Holy Spirit to give thanks to God since he is not worthy to speak God’s name. This is, ultimately, an Augustinian claim, and not altogether new. Likewise, in Psalm 148, on which the Canticle is modeled, the Vulgate text uses the imperative mood to command creation to praise God. Perhaps most important, this interpretation is precisely what Francis’s immediate followers thought he meant. Both the compiler of the very early Assisi compilation—stories about Francis that were gathered to be used in his official Life—and no less a personage than Saint Bonaventure believed the Canticle was a paean by creation, not for it. Bonaventure went so far as to replace the preposition per with the much more straightforward da, to emphasize that praise was to be given by creation.
This latter reading of the Canticle, as I have mentioned, has been related to readings of the Canticle as an expression of Francis’s mysticism. Moloney points out a key passage from one of Celano’s lives of Francis that supports such a conclusion: “Often as he walked along a road, thinking and singing of Jesus, he would forget his destination and start inviting all the elements to praise Jesus.”20 Here we see a strong connection to the Canticle, where beginning in line 10 and running through line 22, the elements are specifically called on to praise their Creator. In the passage from I Celano, however, Francis’s prayers are Christocentric. This is fitting with much of what Francis has left us in his writings, where the Son is the principal person of the Trinity whom Francis engages, contemplates, and remembers. Yet, toward the end of his life, his writings shift from an emphasis on Christ to the Father, which fits the theme of the Canticle.21 In the Canticle it is the Father, the Lord, who is the principal object of praise.
We do need to be cautious, however, regarding Thomas’s description of Francis’s enraptured prayers as definitive. Thomas’s description of Francis could have drawn on traditional Augustinian and pseudo-Dionysian themes of mystical experience. In this formulation, one’s focus is so entirely upon God that he or she is alienated from earthly senses. In both the first and second life, when Thomas also describes Francis as spiritually absent from earth during some of his contemplations of God, he seems to portraying Francis in ways that fit with this tradition. It is not clear whether Francis knew of such descriptions, but Thomas presumably did. This is not to say that Francis was not lost in contemplation, but the hallmark of pseudo-Dionysian mysticism is alienation from the world, not its celebration.
Parallel descriptions in Bonaventure’s legenda maior are even more suspect, as Bonaventure’s own mystical works were deeply influenced by pseudo-Dionysius. Bonaventure clearly regarded alienation from the world as congruent with