The case of the camel that passed through the eye

of a needle

Christopher Howse

FRANCIS OF ASSISI by Adrian House Chatto, £20, pp. 336 Francis of Assisi was always taking his clothes off. At the age of 24, having sold a horse and some stock belonging to his father, a merchant, to pay for the restora- tion of a dilapidated chapel, Francis agreed to appear before the local bishop for judg- ment. The verdict was that Francis should return the price of the goods. Francis went one better by laying at his father's feet not only the money but also his cloak, tunic and drawers. 'In the future,' he declared, naked before the onlookers, 'I will only acknowledge our Father who is in heaven.'

Having been given a rough tunic by the bishop, Francis trudged off through the wintry hills of Umbria, only to meet a band of robbers. 'I am the herald of the Great King,' he told them. They found no money on him, so beat him, stripped him and threw him into a ditch full of snow.

Ten years later, when his holy brother- hood of poor men was attracting recruits like iron-filings to a magnet, Francis was in Perugia on the day his supporter Pope Innocent III happened to die there. The Pope's body was lying in state in the cathe- dral, where, overnight, it was robbed of its rich vestments by thieves. Francis, accord- ing to a slightly later source (Thomas of Eccleston, an Englishman) took off his own habit to clothe the dead Pope's nakedness.

Another 10 years on, aged 44, Francis lay dying, blind and sick, on the earthen floor of a cell at the Porziuncola (the chapel and grounds given him just after his conversion by friendly Benedictine monks). He took his clothes off and lay there, hiding with one hand not his nakedness but the Christ- like stigma wound in his side. One of his followers ordered him, under obedience, to allow a tunic to be put on him, but Francis directed that after his death his corpse should be put naked on the ground again 'for as long as it takes a man to walk a mile'.

Much could be made of this appetite for nakedness. Certainly there were good precedents. In the Old Testament, Job said, 'Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD,' In the New Testament, Jesus himself was stripped of his clothes and died on the cross with nothing.

I mention this odd business of nakedness as an example of the peculiarity of Fran- cis's way of life. It has often been said that Francis more obviously resembled Jesus Christ in his behaviour than any other saint. It is hard to think this is true. Francis was a troubadour, a rich man's son, who was suddenly converted, rebuilt churches with his own hands, ate with lepers, begged daily for his food, held no money, preached to birds, wrote poetry, went off to convert the Muslim ruler of Egypt, but avoided martyrdom, dying peacefully of sickness in middle age. None of that was how Jesus lived at all, nor was it like most saints, before or after.

It is surprising that Adrian House admires Francis. Clearly he approves of his loving character, but he thinks it 'unneces- sary to share his faith to appreciate his soaring achievements'. In this book House has gone so far as to have 'omitted the mir- acles in the two official lives', as if these were like the chapter on the fall of the rupee.

House is annoying beyond measure. The tone is that of a history of Western thought according to Terry Major-Ball. He finds the climax of Dante's Divine Comedy, for example, 'uncannily similar to the view pro- pounded by some of the world's leading physicists in a television series Universe, produced in 1999'.

Bathos is a speciality. Just as the reader is settling into a bit of narrative about Francis, he gets stuff like this thrown at him:

At Southampton General Hospital, Dr Alan Watkins has been following up research in the United States on the heart's physical sen- sitivity to many of our feelings. A generator of electricity more powerful than the brain, it can trigger the release of secretions in our saliva related to these emotions.

House does not like the 'dogma' of the 'Roman Church', and is of the opinion that Francis's

regular contemplation of the anguished and crucified figure of Christ left him haunted by guilt and often in tears — a frame of mind that may have indirectly damaged his immune system.

Indeed it might. Moreover, 'the symbolism of the crucifixion becomes morbid if exag- gerated'. So much for the phenomenon of the stigmata, let alone Francis's motives for hearing Mass.

House is full of ideas — about the effect of easily available coinage on the incidence of prostitution, about the proto-capitalism of the merchants of Assisi, about the perni- cious habit of preaching sermons in Latin (which he seems to think almost universal before Francis), about 'the shape of the early Jewish crucifix' (whatever that is meant to be), about the hated 'Germans' (his usual label for the forces of the Holy Roman Empire).

Of things about which one does know, the version that House gives is such that it is impossible to believe him on anything one does not know about. He declares, 'I am no scholar.' But the trouble is that his weirder statements — including a grave slur on Thomas Aquinas — are provided with such vague sources as to be uncheck- able.

All this is a pity, for he has an easy style, an appreciation of the Umbrian country- side, and a genuine liking for Francis. But his book is like those snacks with labels that proclaim they are '95 per cent fat- free'. That means they are 5 per cent fat. House could be called 95 per cent non- sense-free. If you swallow the lot, you have to put up with the other 5 per cent.