After nearly two decades of retirement I can hardly talk about a “professional life,” but I found myself in an odd position this week. I have involved myself in two public events of at least a semi-educational nature. The fancier of the two, in fact, indeed will be seriously scholarly. I have agreed, with pleasure, to give a “Work in Progress” seminar to the faculty group of medievalists at Princeton. It will take place a few hours after mounting this post, actually, and will deal with the fifteenth-century French poet François Villon. This obligation will explain why I have mentioned Villon in my essays a couple of times in the recent months . A topic once raised in one’s mind has a tendency to stay there until resolved in some way or other. But other things have also been on my mind. Topics to which I devoted a lot of time years ago were the cultural impact of the Franciscan Order on the cultural life of late medieval Europe and the colonial evangelization of Spanish and Franciscan missionaries in the “New World,” including parts of our own country, in the wake of the Iberian voyages of discovery beginning at the end of the fifteenth century.
This interest was for me intensified when in 1992 I was one of the co-curators of a major exhibition at the Library of Congress: “1492, An Ongoing Voyage”. The invitation to undertake that task was nearly inexplicable, but I undertook it as an educational opportunity in several different senses. I can only hope that that exhibition, which got good reviews, was at least as partially enlightening to its many visitors as it was to its curators, or at least to this one. The Columbus of my boyhood, to the extent that I was aware of him, was a much admired figure. In 1893 the Columbian Exposition in Chicago—basically a world’s fair designed to showcase the dynamism and artistic, industrial, and political ebullience of a muscle-flexing United States of America—had presented Christopher Columbus in heroic terms. The fifteenth-century Catholic Italian mariner was more of an ingenious and resourceful Connecticut Yankee type. Samuel Eliot Morrison, Harvard Ph. D., and a popular historian, himself a reserve admiral in the United States Navy won a Pulitzer Prize in 1942 for his biography of Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, a book still in print and still being read eighty years later. This book is not hagiographic, but it certainly is admiring and still admired. Morrison, who I thought probably ought to know, clearly regarded Columbus as one hell of a sailor. Which he was. But by 1992, the historical tide had turned, so to speak. In some important historical circles attitudes toward what in my youth was universally called “the discovery of America” had changed radically. Just because benighted Europeans didn’t know anything about the rich cultures of the Guarini, the Incas, the Mayans, the Aztecs and so many other inhabitants of the Americas didn’t mean they needed discovering. From this perspective the mildest accurate term for what happened was encounter, but better ones would be invasion, conquest, oppression, colonization, and of course genocide.
Such meager credentials as I had for the assignment derived from my study of late medieval apocalyptic thought, much of it stimulated by Franciscan friars. These are the same credentials that allowed me to accept an invitation from the organizers of the adult education program at my parish church to offer an adult forum before the Sunday Eucharist, on the topic of Saint Francis of Assisi.
Changing attitudes about Columbus should alert us to the reality that no historical personage, whatever good press he or she has in the past enjoyed, is immune from the trashing of “revisionist” history. The late Christopher Hitchens, a man I much admired, cancelled the much admired Mother Teresa, so there’s no telling. Still, I think that Francis of Assisi ought to be safe at least for the time being. He is not merely the all-star historical saint of the Christian churches. He has “crossover appeal” to the spiritually indifferent and even the positively irreligious on account of his legendary gentleness, low-carbon (bare)foot print, and above all, his love of animals. He used to address them with the titles of “brother” and “sister”, as though they were fellow-members of his religious order. This was part of a radical egalitarianism in his personality that could not be constrained even by the rigorous hierarchies of medieval society. Among the famous episodes in Franciscan history is the report that Francis once delivered a sermon to the birds. (We have all heard sermons that are for the birds, so why not?) His disciple Anthony of Padua—who actually came from Lisbon, a major maritime center—specialized in preaching to the fish.
In many churches, Catholic and Protestant alike, there has emerged a popular homage to Francis, celebrated around his feast day (October 4), called the “Blessing of the Animals”. It is exactly what it sounds like. Animals—mainly household pets in our suburban contexts—are brought before the altar to receive a sacerdotal blessing. Having constrained animals present at a eucharistic celebration does invite certain possible risks, but I have not yet seen a real disaster. The adult owners of the pets are sometimes slightly awkward and tentative during the procedure, but youngsters seem uniformly enthusiastic. And, obviously, they are the ones who count here. Let the little children come unto me. In fact, on Sunday a few small children, not wanting to be left out but not actually owning pets, presented the priest with stuffed animals. Dramatic showmanship was a marked feature of Francis’s personality. He was the first to popularize the Christmas creche. According to a still influential book by O. B. Hardison (Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages) the whole of the Eucharist is mimetic and dramatic. In any event, this is what the week has held for me thus far.
