Concept
Francis of Assisi
Overview
Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone (c. 1181 – 3 October 1226), known as Francis of Assisi, was an Italian mystic, poet and Catholic friar who founded the religious order of the Franciscans. Inspired to lead a Christian life of poverty, he became a beggar and an itinerant preacher.
One of the most venerated figures in Christianity, Francis was canonized by Pope Gregory IX on 16 July 1228. He is commonly portrayed wearing a brown habit with a rope tied around his waist, featuring three knots symbolizing the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience.
In 1219, Francis went to Egypt in an attempt to convert the sultan Al-Kamil and put an end to the conflict of the Fifth Crusade. In 1223, he arranged for the first live nativity scene as part of the annual Christmas celebration in Greccio. According to Christian tradition, Francis displayed stigmata resembling the wounds on the hands and feet of crucified Christ during the apparition of a seraphic angel in a religious ecstasy in 1224.
Francis is associated with patronage of animals and the environment. It became customary for churches to hold ceremonies blessing animals on his feast day of 4 October, which became World Animal Day. Francis was noted for his devotion to the Eucharist. Along with Catherine of Siena, Francis was designated patron saint of Italy. He is also the namesake of the city of San Francisco. The feast of Francis' stigmatization is 17 September.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
St. Ambrose, passing from the bar to the bishopric of Milan without being a deacon, and your Damasus, whom a schism made bishop of Rome, profited by this fatal success. They secured the destruction of the altar of Victory, which had been set up on the Capitol[48] nearly eight hundred years before--a monument of the courage of your ancestors, destined to maintain their valour in their descendants. The emblematic…
Voltaire, Toleration and other essays
Names Francis of Assisi.
His list of heroes and benefactors of mankind includes, not only every important name in the scientific movement, from Thales of Miletus to Fourier the mathematician and Blainville the biologist, and in the aesthetic from Homer to Manzoni, but the most illustrious names in the annals of the various religions and philosophies, and the really great politicians in all states of society.[20] Above all, he has the most…
John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism
Names Francis of Assisi.
It seems that Saint Francis of Assisi may have carried this method of using love to produce an inner feeling of happiness as far as anyone; what we are thus characterizing as one of the procedures by which the pleasure-principle fulfils itself has in fact been linked up in many ways with religion; the connection between them may lie in those remote fastnesses of the mind where the distinctions between the ego and…
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its discontents
Names Francis of Assisi.
Philosophers who discussed Francis of Assisi
Related ideas
- Fresco
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- G. K. Chesterton
- Holy Land
- Waldensians
- Jerusalem
- Pier Paolo Pasolini
- London
- Eastern Orthodoxy
- Bologna
- Poland
- Lutheranism
- Poznań
- Pope John Paul II
- Pope Paul VI
- Spanish language
- Los Angeles Times
- Siena
- Brill Publishers
- Venice
- Italians
- Apulia
- Pliny the Elder
- Leiden
Place in the tradition
Part of Mysticism.