Flesh & St. Francis: Embodying an Asceticism of Joyful Kinship

Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical *Laudato Si’* reignited theological attention to conversations in *deep incarnation,* ecotheology, and Franciscan spirituality. In the face of the environmental crisis, calls for ascetic renunciation and divestment imply that solutions to the crisis reside in spiritualities of self-discipline and mastery. Yet, *Laudato Si’*s account of St. Francis of Assisi’s spirituality of asceticism suggests that the logic of self-mastery is tied to the mastery of others insofar as both involve displacing or diminishment. My paper contrasts an asceticism of mastery and necrophilia with an asceticism of kinship and joy in order to illuminate how St. Francis’s cosmic spirituality is oriented toward communal and ecological wholeness. Francis’s asceticism of kinship culminates in joyful healing and praise. To offer an account of St. Francis’s asceticism of kinship I explore *touch*points between *Laudato Si’*, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of sight and “flesh,” and Bonaventure’s cosmic Christology.

In *The Life of St. Francis,* Bonaventure describes Francis’s ascetic body as a seal, the tablets of the decalogue, brand-marks, a cornerstone of the New Jerusalem, a mirror of holiness. Francis is “imprinted” and “engraved.” Through his reception of the stigmata, Francis’s body literally and spiritually illuminates the malleability of the ascetic body. Yet, the plastic potential of the ascetic body carries risk—the risk of self-mastery and mortification that diminishes and de-forms. My paper begins by offering an account of this asceticism of mastery. A recent study of Bonaventure’s theology by Robert Glenn Davis (*The Weight of Love*), depicts the un-forming potential of extreme asceticism. Davis describes Francis’s conformity to Christ with the macabre image of an “obedient corpse.” According to Davis, Francis’s soul and body are divested and dispossessed, rendered inert in order to be transformed into Christ’s body. I argue that as “corpse,” Francis’s body is erased. His asceticism is characterized not only by mastery and renunciation, but annihilation. I briefly consider connections between Francis as “corpse” and Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous critique of asceticism: a mastery that is a “will to nothingness–an aversion to life” and a “concealed will to death” (*On the Genealogy of Morals*; *The Gay Science*). In its obfuscation of life, an asceticism of mastery, I argue, collapses into necrophilia. 

In the next section of my paper, I contrast an asceticism of mastery with an asceticism of kinship. Responding to the environmental crisis, Pope Francis claims that “the poverty and austerity of Saint Francis were no mere veneer of asceticism, but something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into an object simply to be used and controlled.” For Francis “each and every creature was a sister united to him by bonds of affection.” Distinguishing between false and true asceticism, *Laudato Si’*s illuminates how self-mastery can give way to the mastery of the other. In contrast to an asceticism of mastery, Francis joyfully receives the other, rendering both Francis and creation visible, intimately known. 

To examine Francis’s asceticism of kinship I turn to Bonaventure’s account of Francis’s encounter with a leper. The medieval leper was segregated from society through ceremonies which mimicked the rite for the dying or a service for the dead. Francis once repulsed by the sight of lepers is drawn not only to see but kiss the leprous man. Attentive to the role of sight and touch in Francis’s conversion, I take cues from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of the “reversibility of the flesh” to describe Francis’s “intercorporeality.” In seeing and kissing the leper, Francis acknowledges his own body, as embedded in the world and thus visible and touchable by the other. The formation of Francis’s asceticism hinges not his ability to master but receive. Insofar as Francis’s asceticism of kinship opposes self-mastery Francis’s asceticism is not self-constructed but co-formed through such acts of seeing and touching. Following the shared kiss, Bonaventure relays that when Francis looks again the leper has disappeared. The visibility/invisibility of the leper reveals a greater visibility: in seeing and kissing the leper, Francis has seen and kissed Christ. Francis’s initial disgust at the sight of lepers reveals that he saw death—a corpse—where there is life. The leper, regarded by society as a living corpse, is instead a site of transfiguration. Through encounters with the bodies of lepers, the poor, sparrows, and flowers, Francis’s ascetic body is tethered to what Merleau-Ponty describes as the “flesh of the world.” Francis’s asceticism, I argue, is not the diminishing or collapsing of flesh, but a recognition of its expansiveness. 

I conclude by reflecting on Francis’s stigmata and its relation to the joyful healing of all flesh. Francis is wounded not by self-mastery but ecstatic joy which tethers his body to the wounds of creation and the wounds of Christ. Francis’s asceticism of kinship culminates in the stigmata as he is rendered *alter Christus.* Bonaventure’s cosmic Christology emphasizes the incarnation as the beginning and end of Christ’s reconciling work. So too “deep incarnation” theologians such as Niels Henrik Gregersen, Elizabeth Johnson, and Celia Deane-Drummond elucidate that in becoming flesh, Christ’s body is extended in solidarity and unity with all biological life. Francis’s body incorporates the sacred wounds such that the stigmata becomes not only an extension of Francis’s living body, but Francis’s body becomes an extension of Christ’s own body. Francis’s wounded flesh, I argue, is a site of cosmic joy and reconciliation. To illustrate the cosmic reconciling and healing imaged through Francis’s stigmatization, I invoke Bonaventure’s account of several miracles which occur after Francis receives the stigmata. Cattle and sheep are healed from a plague, a crop-damaging hailstorm ceases, a man cold from the elements is warmed. Each environmental miracle illuminates the “intercorporeality” of Christic *flesh* as Francis’s transfigured flesh extends healing to the flesh of creation. Francis’s asceticism does not lead to necrophilia, but the joyful flourishing of life. In receiving the stigmata, Francis becomes a site of holes, wholeness, and healing as he images an asceticism of kinship and the cosmic reconciliation of all of creation to Christ.